#395

Guess the point of inflection has come, and the truth of the matter has become clear to me at last: I have simply been dreading the end of civilization. Indeed, I have essentially been immature about it, but I'll cut myself some slack. The calculus around the end of the world and the feelings I'm able and obliged to have about that math had changed since last I came to terms with it, and instead of dealing with it, I just stewed and panicked and chainsmoked. Having a house and a spouse and two cats to watch out for instead of just myself is a lot more complicated and I didn't want to deal with it. 

But I'm done with that. WWIII, crossing the climate threshold, the collapse of the United States, nuclear holocaust, whatever. Yeerks and replicants and shadow government plants could be all around me and poised to strike, for all I care. For all that it matters. Demons writhing out of the gound like Hellboy. It is what it is. It changes nothing. I can only be myself and do what I'm able to bring about some measure of relief. Continually returning to the public library for more Star Wars books, for example. 

Just gotta roll with the punches. Just gotta keep breathing and do your best. It's like Aragorn tells Éomer: shit don't shuffle, right-and-wrong-wise, based on how scary the times got. Just gotta do what you gotta do.

*

Man, it's crazy to feel even reasonably, cautiously calm. For the first time in months! Wow.

*

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a manifesto to write. Then, back to the manifold solaces of fiction.

--JL

#394

Positivity! 

Ugh.

So part of the big issue is that I find mindfulness shit, positivity, good-vibe talk a raft of utter nonsense. The mind rebels. That's just a natural reaction, like a hedgehog curling up into a ball. 

Happiness is real. Joy, jouissance, contentment--though transitory, real. The world is certainly full of vibrations, some pleasant, some painful. That other stuff up there makes no sense at all, and even the stuff in the first part of the paragraph is often mishandled, misrepresented, and used as a bludgeon.

But who cares! You gotta try to look on the bright side, because that's where the light is, etc. 

*

Aku. Soku. Zan.

Despair is an evil. That, if nothing else about evil, is true.

But in having overcome it, there is the greatest triumph in life, which would not be without that which had to be vanquished. For hope is meaningless without despair. Faith is nothing without the darkness that only faith can lighten.

*

We must seek relief in these paradoxes, rather than allow ourselves to be tormented.

As they say, the only way out is through.

*

Another part ofthe big issue is that I can see where my relating to the world went wrong, and how the dysfunction is operating on my spirit to make me ill, and the way my mind contributes to and exacerbates the problem, because it is without guidance, and there is nothing more dangerous to itself than a machine without guidance or whose guidance is compromised. 

In short, I am struggling to be in the world as-it-is, strangled as I am by my attachments to the world as I want it. A beautiful but nonexistent phantasy, which my current transfixation in an I-I mode of relating with the world serves only to pain and paralyze me, preventing me from relating with the You of the infinite, the I-You relation which is being-in-the-world and being-with-the-world.

That Martin Buber has some useful thoughts, boy, I tell ya. I'm out here trying, Marty.

*

Why not, as I sometimes say. Since I bring it up, these things I'm reading, perhaps we are long overdue for a list of books I have read. It's been a long time, but I have played a HUGE amount of videos game instead of reading consistently, so perhaps it won't be all that onerous.

You will notice an increase in Star Wars books. Watching Star Wars, all the Star Wars, every bit of Star Wars I can look at, has also taken up a lot of time. The books are relatively recently read; I've been relying on the electronic hearth quite a lot, as I say.

Anyhow. As typical, presented in no particular order.

Star Wars: [Alphabet Squadron, by Alex Freed; Thrawn Ascendancy (Book I: Chaos Rising), by Timothy Zahn; Phasma, by Delilah S. Dawson; new] [Young Jedi Knights: Heirs of the Force; Shadow Academy; The Lost Ones; Lightsabers; Jedi Under Siege; by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta (reread)]

Peanuts: As You Like it, Charlie Brown; Peanuts 2000; Play Ball, Snoopy!; What Makes You Think You're Happy?; The Wonderful World of Peanuts; Peanuts Treasury; Peanuts I: 1952-1955; by Charles M. Schulz (reread)

Calvin and Hobbes: Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons; Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat; There's Treasure Everywhere; The Complete Calvin and Hobbes Book Two; by Bill Watterson (reread)

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

I and Thou, by Martin Buber, translated and introduced by Walter Kaufmann

Shadow Life, written by Hiromi Goto, drawn by Ann Xiu

*

It can be assumed that if I mentioned a book I've forgotten to list here, I finished it. Also I read a bunch of 19th century short stories by various peeps I don't feel the need to list out. Also large chunks out of various textbooks.

*

Ok. Better. We're struggling towards it. We're approaching some kind of thing here. We are alive, and we are crawling towards Jerusalem.

--JL

#393

393 is an incredible number. Don't even have to explain how cool it is probably. In honor of the graceful mathematics inherent in this integer, my goal for today is to reach deep, deep within, grasp with all the strength I have and try and draw forth something that skews positive. Today I must ignore the prancing demons and rapacious dragons that work hard and smart every day to make the world a grindhouse of misery.

*

Jesus Christ, it's fucking difficult. It even hurts. I cannot raise sword or spear and slay these shadows, and typing furiously is the next-best thing. To say nothing, to try and think about something else these days generates a feeling reminiscent of my flesh being eaten by parasitic worms. I assume. It's the flesh of my spirit, which knows a universe of pain my body can only approximate.

That cuts both ways, though. What we mean when we say joy is transcendent is that it forgets the body, as the spirit is illuminated and warmed by a more complete light than exists in the material world.

Sunlight on the skin is just a game mechanic. Light radiating unto the spirit is real, the real thing. 

To paraphrase Master Yoda: luminous beings are we, not these crude vestments.

*

It is true that rain falls on the just and the unjust. It follows that light shines on them with that same universal impassivity. What can we learn from this? That the universe is not concerned with fair portions or what we think of as justice. There is a higher justice corresponding to a larger picture, to more complete datasets, subject to a wisdom we cannot comprehend, limited as we are by current hardware.

*

What has always struck me ever since I was a child, which so profoundly bothered the nuns and priests I discussed it with, was how in the world human beings can pretend to know the mind of God, if God is God. They would reply that Jesus was man and God, and the word of God was made manifest through him and through his chosen disciple Peter, but I knew enough to know that a bunch of dudes decided that at a meeting, basically, hundreds of years after the fact, and the question stood. They would tell me that I was being  bad boy, that these questions and arguments were heretical and trended towards atheism, and I would reply--directly in some cases, to myself  that Jesus did the same thing with the elders and if Jesus asked difficult questions of his masters, it was my duty to emulate the act. For are we not to imitate Christ in all ways? And therefore, why do we possess and luxuriate and earn and spend while there are slums full of poor people not ten miles from this chapel? Shouldn't we all be as poor as the poorest of us? Shouldn't we spurn the gross material and seek the end of man's dominance over his fellow man? Doesn't almost everything in this book you say is the word of God contradict how we choose to live our lives, admonish us to act upon the very things we ignore, push us to be better than the mere Word and enter into an Act? Isn't God beyond language, beyond morals, beyond history, beyond the future? Isn't the infinite inifinite? If it isn't, how can it be God? And if it is, how can we act this way, as though we were not God, and everyone we meet is not God, and the world we live in is not God? Because we act as though God is dead, even as you force me to pray and sing at him in chapel. But who is this God you make me sing at? Some old man? Just a dude making rules and telling only certain other dudes? A zombie, a corpse's voice from beyond the grave, a mannequin? One that watches only me, and only I have to feel bad and watch my step, only me and the other little people who really care, and lets people who don't care do whatever they want, including wage wars and raise empires and buy and sell human beings? In the name of the Lord? Because if in our ignorance we fuck up our lives literal eternity will be unimaginable torment? Impossible. Impossible. Horrifying on so many levels.

Apparently not. This accumulation did indeed build and resolve in a long stretch of atheism before a return to facing the infinite. All that time since childhood, all that time since then: I still don't get it.

*

Preceding is why I'm never surprised when kids are about fifty times smarter than grownups. Some kids are already grownups when they're kids, and they're the only kind of stupid kid, because they have learned quickly to act like they have all the answers. At least most kids still know enough to ask the right questions, while grownups have trained themselves to be satisfied with easy answers. And that satisfaction, that complacency, is what Jesus was trying to disrupt with his most oblique parables and radical pronouncements. And it is what I encountered in so many of the priests and nuns of my childhood--behind an implacable, enameled wall of starched certainty, which was an insult to the spirit of inquiry they professed to inculcate. 

I do not get along with those who have left childhood behind them as a cast-off thing of little if any present significance or value in general or particular. I am still a child. I hope to remain a child, and fight constantly to preserve myself. Children have a right to be children and be as children are, which is, frankly, quite a huge, frightening, and complex endeavor. A journey fraught with peril. 

There is absolutely no advantage whatsoever in modifying yourself to be a grownup. Grownups have ruined everything. I suspected this as I asked my childhood questions, and everything I've seen and learned confirms it. There is very little defense for the world they have built; the worthwhile bits exist in spite of the main event, and the main event constantly tries to eliminate or pervert them.

*

Damn, did it again. Let's try again tomorrow or sometime, whenever. 

--JL

#392

Besides embracing the apocalypse with open arms, here's some other unpopular things I get to say, as my own boss and editor:

--Cops are gangs. Gangs of pigs. Orwellian pigs. They used to be on a leash, but they're going rogue, starting to bite the feeding hand. And why not? They've been fed too richly for too long, their fangs are long and sharp, their muscles taut, and they feel threatened.

--Congresspeople are gangs of crime lords. Pig crime lords. Orwellian pig crime lords that let slavery and starvation and injustice run rampant for an extra nickel and a steady spotlight.

corollary: if you disagree with one or both of these statements, it is because:

a) you are a bootlicking, ass-in-the-air simp. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, but that part of it just turns you on and makes your cornhole greasy. You flex and relax it; enticingly, you hope: trying your damnedest to tempt Daddy into penetrating you with gusto, like you matter at least that much.

b) you benefit directly from their criminal activities from below (related to [a]) or are lying because you are taking advantage of or helping to maintain the situation from above.

c) you are literally a child. Life is a cartoon. Mommy and Daddy know everything, and would never, ever lie to you.

*

It's not useful to think about this situation with more nuance. Usually I would not say that. I don't think there's many situations at all in this universe which I would say that about. 

However, if you live in America, to moderate your thinking on this matter is legitimately unsafe and contributes to the steady erosion of liberty and worse, hope.

We have been trained to believe crumbs falling from the mouths of our oppressors are whole meals; that what have been told is progress is commesurate with what we have been trained to think of as the temporary inconvenience of the necessities which preclude progress. But those necessities are a lie. There is no harmony between progress and oppression. There is only oppression and appeasement. 

Appeasement is not the same as freedom or justice. Appeasement is that which dulls our appetite for the real thing. The more you accept appeasement, the more satisfied you are, and the less you need your imagination, your thirst for a better world, your dazzling hopes. 

*

Fact of the matter is that since the inception of this nation, a few people--some locally, some in Great Britain--have manipulated the bulk of the land's wealth and resources to prop up empires whose material gains are vast and directed towards those few, while the many, the hundreds of millions, have been treated as livestock, as pawns, fucked with and rearranged and bred for convenience and obedience, and given only what they need to support the enterprise through their labor and consumption. But that has always been unsustainable, a word they cannot seem to grasp the definition of, and the house of cards is teetering. 

Who do I blame for the Civil War? The North, the South, Congress, slaveholders, abolitionists, expansionists? Folks, the people to blame most squarely lived in Great Britain. From precolonial efforts through the war and beyond, British interests have played a startlingly vital yet quiet role. We ground out that bloodiest of farces because slavery was unsustainable in the extreme right from the offing, but the British ensured that the practice continued to be profitable for those poor fucking idiots who thought they were cultured, superior, and that human beings could be owned. They thought this because they were themselves owned, though they could not have seen it that way and let their worldviews remain intact. Southern plantation owners, their lavish homes filled with British manufacturing, were an unsustainable class, and a designed one. The British knew and laughed into their sleeves, themselves outlawing slavery while buying up everything the American South could offer them. Their pawns did not know, were not in on the joke, to the extent they would fight a suicidal war to maintain that status quo. For freedom! From other Americans, the true opressors! 

Hm. HM. The particulars aren't quite right, but something about this situation seems applicable to the current moment.

*

All this to say when it's martial law up in this piece and the only difference between what the warlords and marauders will do to you and what the "leaders" and "protectors" will do is the uniform and the justification, you may remember reading this, though you will not be able to look it up.

Wouldn't help you anyway.

What is to be done? I don't fuckin know at all, man. Worse than useless.

*

Thinking lately about how this blog is a shitty product, because you never know if I'm going to uplift you or bring you down; make a joke, or fart in your face. Who needs that as part of their day? Who would want to show up regularly for that? Terrible. Also I am prone, as in the above, to rail and rant and offer exactly no solutions. Well, I have sometimes, but not all that often. Normally it's all shit and no shovel. Universal basic income, healthcare, sustenance, and shelter is an incredible shovel though, and I've made the case often, so there is that.

Also I have made my books terrible physical items just because I've fucked it all up. No explanation. Just a lot of bad decisions about how to turn my words into products. My ideas turn to dross in my hands, and those who help me must throw their hands up in despair.

Indeed, that is the crux of the issue. The words are ok, I stand by them even if they're not my best combos. But the products themselves are not reliable or of sufficient quality to be worthwhile or worth cash; precious, precious time and money. And critical wherewithal, because why should you give a shit? I give no concrete reasons. 

*

Big fail energy. Well, it's all factually pointless. What solace I have found in that judicious flash of insight, which led me to tell the truth as simply as possible right in the masthead.

Anyway, I'm literally a child. Life is a cartoon. Disregard everything you read here. I'm not Mom or Dad and you don't need to trust me one iota.

--JL

#391

Personally, I'm pumped for the apocalypse, because if it is adequately timed (looking good so far) it will absolve me from the weighty and multitudinous responsibilities tied into making this perverted, upside-down fuckery of a world into a better place. That'll be over with and thank God. 

While uncomfortable and certain to place me in situations which will force me to leave all accrued humanity and dignity in the trash, the end of the world will bring with it very tantalizing freedoms: from the concept of employability, from mortgages, interest, insurance, post-cash economies--from every other gray, soul-poisoning idea this George Orwell/Phil K. Dick Unworld that I hate so fucking much has ruined our lives with, stitched together as it has been by droves of psychopathic pedophiles and shameless rapists.

All that horseshit, I pray, will be torn from the face of our honest Earth like a caul, its putrescent, vile distortions and pusillanimous demands shattered like a funhouse mirror.

Basically, in my dream apocalypse everything that makes me want to blow my brains out will be gone, to be replaced by the brutal reality of few simple goals.

So whatever. Fuck the world. You're one of the fuckers that doesn't give a shit because you're safe? Kill it dead. Do it! 

Just pray I don't survive, because what I will do to you when a society of manners is not there as a mitigating field of expectations and commitments is something that I cannot write down. I haven't even thought of it yet. Right now, it's literally unthinkable.

But when the time comes, I'll know.

*

I would personally prefer to make the world we have a better place. That is childish, I suppose. A thought for the nineteen-nineties. 

Better will have to come after. The people who thought themselves fit to call the shots in our time dropped the ball in a way I wouldn't have expected a drunken chimpanzee to fuck it up. I mean what a bunch of fucking brain surgeons. I look around at these idiots in their suits and pantsuits with their hair combed and their cufflinks and their tall tall buildings and I want to cry and cry, these idiot bivalves, these maladroits, seriously considering themselves better than us. 

Telling me what's good for me as they drip venom into the very living soil. As they set fire to the atmosphere. As they enslave and lie and torture and set off bombs and call for our support. Our fucking support! They take money out of our pockets with one hand, and they ask for more with the other, all sitting above us on a pile of gold. 

Absolutely incredible.

--JL

#390

Things have never been better! That's a joke, and also a fact, which is a second joke. Morbid, though. That doesn't stop it from being funny. The truth can be funny twice over plus in a cosmic way, and still be depressing. But only from our limited, corporeal perspectives. The mighty laughter that powers the universe is grasped by the full punchline, and that's funnier than anything. Certainly that voice must weep, and rage at the dying of the light. But this joke can be infinitely told, and remain infinitely funny and infinitely sad. 

So it all just is. It is what it is cuz it isn't what it ain't, and that's the first and last truth you can tell.

*

Time to get a drink of water. Celebrate with me, dear reader, that I can remember such things, and perhaps act on them, occupied as I am with the needless burdens of an idiotic Atlas.

--JL

#389

Three and eight add up to eleven, and eight and nine add up to seventeen, which makes this post one of those special ones numerically. Special only to me, but then, this is my blog. All three digits add up to twenty, which is also nice. 

*

Drew a comic yesterday, sort of. I did a little sketch. Depression Comix 2024? Look out for a new variety of content from your preferred jackass typist.

*

Workmen will swarm over my household this month. It costs so much. Life is so incalculably difficult to get through. I cannot escape the mindset that I am endebting myself to make this house more livable and good and valuable to us only to have it razed to the ground by civil war or the blast from a nuclear detonation or ordnance of similar force.

Well, fuck it. Whatever the fuck anyway.

--JL