#427

Ah, the final day of April, and what an April it has been. Balm upon an agonized and fevered brow.

Looking back at the early April posts and even moreso the pre-April posts, it is like seeing shadows gathering around a dying beast in a thicket as the evening purples into twilight. I am looking upon something that is in its death throes, that can feel the blood welling up its throat from a rupture deep inside, and I feel empathy, but no true communion. Darkness gathers there, but I am under the sun.

That's the crazy part: already it is as looking upon some one not-I, some-thing other and benighted which claws at the earth in fear and agony. That person was me, and I am that person--but drawn on the diorama of a far-flung past, in the midst of a horrible but now-complete transmogrification. Relating differently, wildly differently, doing different things and living a completely different life.

And we do not remember fear or pain as clearly as we should. Our over-clever mechanisms protect us too well, and we forget what it is to truly suffer. Thus, all the time and depravity we spend and allow for in the pursuit of our most barbed and poisoned pleasures. All the ways we won't protect ourselves from our abscesses and chasms.

A blee blah bloo! Whoop-de-doo. I feel better, yet find a way to feel bad and doubtful about that. Excellent. High-level stuff, here. 

*

We must be as we are. Honest, if we can manage it. Doing our best. 

And yes, if we are honest, we must say: sometimes you have to suffer terribly in order to become the next you.

--JL

#426

It was a little weird because it's been awhile and I'm older now, but with time also came a certain self-assurance and determination as I salvaged some pretty excellent trash from the curb:

• partially rusted metal trash can with partially rusted lid
• some rusty and some ok lengths of broken chain
• a satellite dish and its supporting arm,
• seemingly barely used DVD player
• universal remote
• a metal box fan seemingly from the fifties or somesuch, haven't investigated yet
• long plastic tube attachment for a leaf blower

Add all that to the couple of toaster ovens and dead DVD players I already happened to have on hand, and we have the base materials for some interesting play. Must finish disassembling my old laptops soon as well.

Think we need some fresh filing cabinets in the house. Hafta look! It's trash season. Gotta tool around downtown and around the apartment complex dumpsters and see what the students leave scattered about this year. Filing cabinets are long odds, but not impossible. 

*

Gotta go to the library today. Gotta spackle some kitchen wall, wait and sand, do a little brushwork in there before bedtime. Gotta paint some other shit too, probably. Once I'm done painting there's kitchen cabinets to powersand. One last class at school. Work. 

Life, life, life. Putting gas in the car and making coffee. Taking a big shit and feeding the cats. Scraping at the floor with a wet rag to fix my paint spills basically with elbow grease. Happily wielding scissors and brushes and shovels as I listen to beautiful songs, meditating on dead and distant friends.

Treasuring the peace of these days. May it last.

*

Ok cool so off to honor these halcyon days baby

--JL

#425

Thinking about the potential inherent in combining cellulose and proteins, as well as cellulose and polymers. Thinking about frames and armatures in wire and rebar and pvc pipe. Thinking about ways of draping, of enfleshing these armatures with all kinds of cellulose/polymer/protein/pigment combinations, and encasing those new bodies in different combos of protective chemical formulas. Wooden sculptures, with meat and scales of fabric and glass! Sculptures made from destroyed kitchen equipment and broken chunks of discarded masonry! 

These are old dreams, these dreams of living paint-spattered, gluing fried motherboards to shattered porcelain and nailing sheet metal to plywood, spray-painting and englittering the whole deal. I used to draw and paint and smash stuff together almost as much as I used to write, but time and circumstances narrowed the frame till I was basically a writer that doodles with unusual fervor. 

No more! I've talked about reclaiming these parts of myself and let it fade. Not again. Shit is about to get insane up in here. 

Praise be! Rejoice! Rejoice! We give way before a mighty immanence!

*

Cutting and tearing up these New Yorkers is a real trip, man. I hate some of these articles and ideas so fucking much. Some of these images and jokes are so fucking deadass stupid. I don't like being made to feel that way, but hey. It is what it is. I feel what I feel. 

Lots of usable stuff, though. And each issue represents a great quantity of papier-mâché and collage background/filler, not to mention plenty of good images and photos. Usable. Practical. High-yield. That's what's important about this magazine. Very upscale garbage, something to be grateful for.

*

Right on, people of Earth. Hell yes, fellow Terrans. More painting to do today. But first, some videos game. Been on my feet being productive almost the whole time since four this morning. The good schedule. I think I'll do one of those crazy person protests if they don't repeal daylight savings time this time. We need to leave it here. I need it to be over. The nightmare cannot continue.

Ok peace

--JL

#424

Ezra and I are in a flurry of Spring production, remixing and repurposing the living and working spaces of the household as we paint lintels and repaint walls and fix holes and shit. I'm about to primer up a big old chunk of the living room walls, baseboards, etc. Did some patches over emergency areas where lead paint had become exposed by the bubbling and peeling of a bad paint job. It falls to me to roll up my sleeves and shake the rust from my painting techniques and senses, coinciding with my own rekindled desire to get seriously into representative media. 

Our stockpile of artistically omnviorous materials grows every day. Soon we will have the kind of silo acting as optimal springboard to carefree, confident explorations in the production of collage, sculpture, craft, and design projects of any description that suits our whim. Having enough stuff to go ditty-balls bachoingo is important and experiencing that necessity galvanizing; I am not only saving portions of my own trash and recycling that I haven't given myself permission to in a long time, but actively salvaging from the street and the flotsam of my peers.

Dudes, yes, I think I can say it. I feel better than I have since the advent of autumn last year. 

Dang. That was rough. Thank god for feeling like this now, even if it's bad again tomorrow or the next week. It's good enough to feel ok and mean it.

Whew!

Also, hey. 424. What a fucking classing crop of numbers we've had lately here on Factually Pointless, thanks to the natural progression of positive whole integers. 

--JL

#423

Sometimes, when a heavy investment in art is necessary--the timing is right, the preconditions are met, many flow states are achieved, but it takes time and creates a certain distance--you have to ignore your cats more than you usually do. That doesn't go over especially well. They're the original mass shareholders and predatory board members. They don't give two fucks about your aspirations. It's kind of funny. Good thing they're so tiny.

*

What a depressing bunch of thoughts I had about corporate environments and what price does to value. Ugh. Ouch. 

Well, people have to eat. And this world would not be this world without all the kinds there are filling and describing it.

*

Daily rephrasing of long-held global folk wisdom achieved! On to rest of these bold spring days. 

--JL

#422

Four-two-two. Four two two. Man, that's fuckin great. That's so fuckin awesome. What a number. A four and two twos. Just a parent and a pair of twins. Just a big child and two parents. 4=2+2. 

*

The dude that lives up on the near corner of my street is his own man, and I respect that. He's out with his crazity-ass biting dogs in the public park opposite his house. They are not on their leashes and he is using the "scream at the dog" method of keeping them under a semblance of control. 

Kind of suboptimal in my view, but like, I ain't gonna yell at the guy--I mean, the dogs are loose. I ain't goin' near there! I guess that's the point. For right now, that real estate is his in every way that matters, which is something of a breach of the public trust. 

Couple of city utilities trucks rolled up kind of in formation, looking for eyeball confirmation I guess, then rolled away without fully stopping. Should I expect law enforcement next? Probably. 

I would like to formally assert that I never contact law enforcement. In the wildest, most apocalyptic scenario I can imagine, I might, if it occured to me and fit the situation, call the local sherriff, because he used to be my wrestling coach. If he loses the upcoming election, I wouldn't even do that.

Anyway the situation--and I recognize that it is a situation, with like scared people and my own sense of justice and fair use somewhat bruised--isn't legally a problem unless it actually causes harm beyond fear, in my view. If I were taking a walk and came upon a different corner where this was happening without warning, I can see becoming quite frightened because the possibility of being mauled or simply terrified and then laughed at--

WHOA. I interrupt this bulletin from the ground to let you know that even closer to the ground, I just pinched my knee-skin and pushed off a perfectly healed scab, fully intact in one glorious perfect flawless moment, that scab-coming-off feeling so pure and unadulterated, baby, yeah--good god damn.

Anyway, wow. Um. Yes. That would not be great, but I would not be harmed. In my own estimation. If the dog takes a piece of me, or like mauls a child, then it's a different conversation.

I'm not scared of dogs, and I'm not scared of his dogs, even though he and his family kind of all implied that I really should be last time I was near all of them at once and not exercising proper caution. They got 'em tied to the park fence now, not that anyone would be wise to go near anyhow. I mean, do you want to toddle up to the playground so bad you'll walk past a dude screaming at three jumping, barking, pitbullish dogs? I dunno, maybe you don't care, maybe you know 'em, maybe you decide fuck it. 

With all the rest of the related and merely corollary yelling and cussing that's happening, my corner is not a tranquil Thursday breeze today, is what I'm getting at. But I ain't care. 

Lived in too many neighborhoods where nothing fucking ever happens, not for ten damn ass years. That out there seems fine, and whatever.  It could have been safer and calmer, but it reached an equilibrium and a peace, with the dogs quiet and wagging and everybody chill. Too chill? It's a free country, man. Abide. 

That out there is the texture and occurrence that is supposed to define life, not interrupt it. 

Dang, three of the dogs got loose. I must shake my head. 

Man, that scab came off iconic, people. Phew. God planned that moment out my entire life. Wow.

*

Live, up-to-the-minute stuff! Wow. Stupid. They got the hoop up on the street and they're shooting some baskets now. I'm still just up here approximately one hundred feet away and up fifteen more feet, typing and looking up information and planning art projects and writing projects and not checking my email enough.

Have a happy Thursday! Keep your wits about you, though. You never know when they might be called upon.

--JL

#421

It bears saying every now and again, lest I seem forgetful or inured: this wartime shit hurts my heart. All this war everywhere and more to come, and the pain of it is in every single day. It is terrible watching hatred consume people and the havoc of retribution. 

Man, I hate that people have to suffer and die on this nonsensical, farcical, line-in-the-sand, get-me-mine-and-fuck-you bullshit. Hate the vile vibration that possesses them to strike out rather than seek peace.

But I guess they have to. I guess we have to. 

Human is as human does.

*

Dunno. Fuckin read a lot of history, fuckin lotta war and hate and anti-semitism every other thread of ghastly twisted ever-unspooling racism and genocide and conquest and theft and punishment and torture and every kind of sexual violence imaginable plus the dark everyday shit and the serial killers and the negligence of every kind which can even lead to stuff like mass poisonings and preventable catastrophes and finally, the rape and strangulation of the natural world, which continues apace. 

What the fuck, people? I am beginning to doubt a few sculptures and some sheet music were worth the trouble!

No, I must imagine that the good and happy times that people have managed to have in spite of the great machinations of rulers and the bloody paths that history must carve, despite the appetites of the wicked and insatiable and harmed, are in a balance. That process, awful as it is, creates the space for a more refined process.

Given time. Time always seems short. Must remember that.

*

Primacy must be established always! Primates! We are primates! 

Disgusting.

*

Per yesterday's quest: found a table, but not a card table. It cost money, and there was only the one. So! Nobody has to do anything. Nobody ever did, really.

*

Ok. Gotta do a lotta stuff, man. Gotta clean things and fix things and make more art. Making more art is very very important to me right now. 

Coping mechanisms, eh?

--JL

#420

Hoho! Wow! Post four hundred and twenty! Get the fuck out, that's so fuckin stupid.

Weed! It's what's for breakfast! It's what's for before breakfast.

*

Gah, how this world spins! And it keeps on spinnin'. Not to mention the movement itself--so fast! So fuckin' fast! 

You've never known what it is to be travelling thirty kilometers a fuckin second. Except you always are.

*

I'd like to find a card table today. If I could find two, that would be a dream come true. The third part of this dream is that both tables cost no money. Can you simply imagine? How about this: if I go out today and find what I'm looking for, the reader must reconsider their position of the existence of the unseen (faeries, yokai, etc.) if that position has not been reconsidered in some time. I expect research and open-minded meditation.

Of course I will too! I'm doing it right now. I take an open mind fuckin serious. 

That usually means I've got like twenty paradoxes shoved up my ass, rendering me immobile. But it's better than being too damn sure of myself, amirite boys? I know that much.

*

So what? What about it? 

All anyone can do is take in the data available to our singular perspectives and build our individual worlds with it. The world we build is related to the world as it is, but it is not that world. No one holds that world in their mind. They can't. It isn't like that. No one can understand the world, let alone the universe. No matter what we discover about it, how much of it we reveal and represent and are, we cannot understand even our own neighborhoods completely. We do not even know our friends, our families, or ourselves.

We are worlds too complex, vast, and unmappable for that. Plus, it is infinite, all the way out and all the way in, all the way up and all the way down, all the way around in every way that can be found. Infinite you, infinite me, infinite infinities embedded in infinity.

Hey, man. All we can do is the best with what we got. Can't blame anyone. That's what it means to be equally guilty before one another and before all that is, and that is the key to the letting go: to freedom. 

*

PEACE

--JL

#419

Man, there is no pain at all like going through a box of keepsakes from past lives. It is the spiritual equivalent of what I imagine it is like to be fatally shot several times in the torso and limbs--a series of hammer blows so powerful they are numbing, followed by pain unlike anything that has ever spread through your system, the pain of pulverized bones and shredded organs, before a dizziness and lightness of being washes over you and you are gazing into an absence from which there is no return.

Except the spirit does not die, so you can open the box and feel it all again over and over again, lord knows how many times before death claims you.

Hey! Good morning! Happy Monday, as some say with their tongues in their cheeks and too-bright eyes.

*

The sky is a pure, sheer blue. It is a kindness on the vision, but I was reading about how the ocean waves areosolize more PFAS than like, human activity at this point, and how far the heat this year exceeds our frail projections--I mean, everyone should have seen this coming. A pot has fire under it for a long time. For a long time, nothing happens. Then you can kind of see some movement. Then it's like, okay, it's gonna boil, but it's not boiling. Suddenly, ferociously, it's rolling. Why did we think it would look any different? So I'm basically struggling with feelings of "there was hard evidence as far back as the 1960's that were were going to destroy this planet and every year it piled up and piled up as the little bubbles started floating up from the bottom of the pot, and now here we are. Decades before I was born you assholes knew and you did nothing. You delved deeper, greedier! You doubled and tripled down! You went all in and now the rest of the world needs to go all in, four billion more motherfuckers need a washer-dryer combo and a big TV! And still you scream for more power to fuel your twisted, useless dreams, to forge ever more numinous empires at the expense of all we hold dear! You are burning coal in West Virginia to power data centers in Virginia! What? What in the hell? Who are you people? Can't you see? Wake the fuck up!"

You can't change the past, of course, and there is no profit in indulging in resentment and bitterness about chances missed and etc. So it goes. And you can't stop a fool from swinging their pickaxe and spending their money how they like. Fuck it! Why get mad about it? Why even worry that your small life and its efforts are in no way an offset for these coked-out maniacs?

Sky is a pure, sheer blue. For now. For today. Focus on that. It'll be what it'll be, as it has been what it has been, for it is what it is and that's all it can be,

Trying to breathe more. Breathe better. Haven't hit my skill ceiling there. Anywhere, I hope.

*

Perhaps it is important to lift as much as you can, nice and early in the morning, and let it go. It is painful, but just putting your head down and one foot in front of the other seems to me tro be the way we got into and stay in this messy soup. 

We must give meaning and purpose to our lives ourselves, of our own volition, using our own materials and drives. An easy to thing to forget and leave in the hands of others, who would have us as their pawns.

Gonna make art out of trash today. Pretty excited. 

--JL

#418

Just realized that if I'd ever written just three more posts, I would have been able to put up the four hundred and twentieth post on April 20th! What a brass ring to miss by so little. 

Ah, well. No regrets. I like yesterday's post a lot, and it's got the number 17 in it. That is more than enough. We must accept the hits and misses of this life with equanimity and say yes to them joyfully.

*

Believe I'll take a light Sunday. No useful thoughts chase themselves around my skull, no great fire rises in my breast as yet. If they do, I can jot them for tomorrow, or use them elsewhere.

I'll try and sign off with some style, at least.

*

Peace the motherfucker out, you living souls, you seething apertures in the flesh of the universe, caught in the roiling churn of life in a body! Peace, peace, I say!

Crush the cup of peace, kin. Do it in the face of fear and laugh triumphant.

--JL

#417

A furtive guilt nags at me when I consider how much I enjoy extremely hot weather. It leaps to the fore when I read about how drought is driving millions and millions of people into food-insecure and unsafe conditions. How much food got thrown in the fucking garbage last year? 

As a matter of fact, it gives me decent guilt just to be typing when I know there are people running from gangs and cartels and inexorably advancing armies, that they don't get to keep their houses, that they don't have money for shit and nowhere to buy it, and here I stand. Even if I only have five dollars in my wallet and debt and whatever the fuck else, it's not fair. It's not fair that I should look upon a peaceful, well-feed street of housed and clothed people, because it is literally at the expense of others. It is built upon their backs. It is provided by a system that relies on creating and sustaining conditions of inequality. 

Do I sould like a child when I say that it's not fair?

Good.

My instinct has always been this, and never deviated: none of us should sit easy while there exist those with less than us. I was born on a capital city located just barely north of the Equator--the global south, what was once known as the third world. A democracy, but an unstable one after a string of dictators. There, I lived way up in a tall building while hundreds of thousands of children not ten miles away lived in a carpet of hovels; slums like nothing that exists north of the Rio Grande. Now it's dictators again. I live up here in the U.S., now, first world par excellence, first world with a raging erection and a finger in every pie on the planet--and we might have ourselves a dictator soon. 

Life, huh! It is nothing but a fucking joke.

Anyway.

When something is not fair, we can't just shrug. I knew it was simply not fair, simply inexcusable, that I lived in a building while other kids had to live in slums. I was not wrong. I still feel that way. Children are correct. Things being fair and equitable--it's not some childish thing, some unrealistic pipe dream. That they are not, after all this having of civilization, all these vast piles of wealth circulating the planet and accumulating in vaults, always more, ever growing, and poverty only ever grows with it?

It is not fair.

*

We act like bad things happening far away are only happening because the people there deserve it for not making economies and governments as strong as ours. But we had fuck-all to do with how strong our government and economy is. Getting born in some shithole--as we like to say--instead of America is your own damn fault, we think, because we ourselves did nothing to deserve getting born here. And so we protect ourselves with "well, what do you want me to do about it?" Because after all, we may be lucky, but we're not in charge, and we didn't make the world, and it's all very complicated anyway, and you're bothering me and you should fuck off because I don't like thinking about it actually.

Honestly, I just need you to not be cool with it. That's enough for me. Because making up justifications and deluding yourself on purpose about the actual costs of your lifestyle and the actual ramifications of what your government does with or without your consent is the path not only to this sated, distracted, rationalizing life of self-compromise and consumption and complicity, but to actual secret police shit, actual gulag and torture shit, actual sitting in an office signing documents that authorize things like Final Solutions. I am saying that there comes a point where you're not just a citizen anymore, because you don't live in a state anymore. Something else is happening, and you didn't want to notice, and a very important choice was made for you when you weren't paying attention. 

When you go from a republic to a dictatorship, there are those whose positions do not change that much. It is a condition of class, but also a condition of attitude. It is a condition of the required complicity for a transfer of power that is legitimate not in fact but after the fact. All you have to do to put your seal of approval on it is to keep going to work, keep going for opportunities whose cost is not discussed up front, keep acting like what you do is justifiable because you deserve to have what you have.

But it isn't. And I'm telling you now it is because it is a sin to have while others want. And it is that sin that has driven climate change and fascism and the attitude that industry justifies anything in the name of industry, that profit is the sacrament which washes us clean, and the comforts of our earthly rewards are proof of our righteousness.

But they aren't. 

And frankly, blessedly, it is factual that all you have to do is not be cool with it. Because if you're not cool with it, you have a chance to at least stay awake and keep your eye out. And when the opportunity comes to make a difference, the difference you are suited to make, you'll see the opening. You'll know.

*

Anyway, it was too cold to ride my bike yesterday. I need it to be hotter. That's why I was guilty.

Easy enough for me to go all the way with guilt that I do it most days. Today, I brought you along for the ride.  

What can be done? What is that difference that we should seek to make, and how to make it, and how to know the moment, the opening, the chance?

Well, I've been thinking about it for a long time. Hopefully I've made progress. You'll be the first to know if I figure anything out.

All I know for sure is that hope is what is needed above all. Keep your hopes alive, burning bright, daring, free.

--JL

#416

Part of the whole picture of smoking--inhaling smoke produced from the controlled burning of plant matter--is aesthetic and neurochemical and psychological. So like, smoking being actually bad for you and a problem and everything, for you personally, is factual because using something as a crutch to get through the days of your life prevents some forms of growth, so it takes away from you, and because hurting your body causes problems which take away from you and can even lead to the breakdown of your body and be the cause of your shuffling off. 

It is also bad for society, some say. That's not compelling in two ways:

1. I don't have to give a fuck about society and what allegedly I "cost" it. Fuck that. My interaction with society is an obligation under durance vile which I suffer owing to my attachments to individuals in my monkeysphere and because of the overwhelming, unjust, despicable and unforgivable powers that society wields in self-service. Nothing in the world is as bullshit and fucked up as human society. It does everything it possibly can to make slaves and corspes out of everything on the planet and the rock itself. Only by waging constant war are human beings able to slow the process by which society eats reality alive, leaving not even a husk. I don't owe society shit, jack, larry, fuck, or ass: it takes what it wants from me by force and against my consent, forcing its wickedly attained boons upon me and soiling me with complicity thereby. If you look me in the eye and tell me it's my responsibility to protect society and its "healthcare" systems by costing those systems less money by taking care of my lungs for everybody's sake--I mean, you understand that society put the cigarettes in my hands, right? 

This brings me to:

2. Indeed, it happens to be a mark and even one of the pillars of civilization. Getting drunk off rotten fruit and burning plants in a cave only to discover that these plants are seriously chill, maaaan--that's the key to human consciousness itself. Who knows if we'd ever have bothered to build a building were it not for the feelings and desires awakened by these discoveries and the wish to refine and develop them. Visions from the beyond and the breakdown of inhibition--society may hate it, but these lie at its foundations.

Conclusion: it might be weird when you think about it, it may be a tradeoff when it comes to good health, and it definitely has its price in every way you can interpret the phrase--but it is natural. Just as it is natural for society to sustain the contradiction that enables it to exist by making it something antisocial.

It is natural for all things to be in a balance of good and evil, chaos and order, light and dark. 

Much that is natural is contradictory, paradoxical, metaphorical.

*

Looking at obscure unplublished philosophers on the self.Gutenberg portal to try and decide if I want to give up the idea of commercial publishing altogether and join those ranks wholeheartedly. Most things were in cyrillic or hindi alphabets, honestly.

The first one in English was...I dunno if I want to give this oxygen by specific naming. They were Laws according to the Murphy format, except these seemed written by observing dudes like Elon Musk and Benito Mussolini and other playground-style superasshole ignoramuses whose force of personality, animal instincts, and flair for verbally manipulating bullshit into platforms saw them rise to power and influence. The laws appear to be a body of referential extramoral tenets to justify any and all selfish and hyper-self-preservative psychological norms and behaviors. The screen laid over these is that they seek to emphasize both negative and positive atttudes for interpretation and action--a neutrosophist logic.

A product of low self-esteem? A joke? An honest and, frankly, defensible philosophical arrangement, especially as it admits its own sophistry? Even though I personally bristle and rebel against every word I read, I kind of like it. This is a weird place. The other stuff I'm finding is weird too.

Might be going for this, folks. Looks like they take poetry and fiction and everything else.

Well, look. I'm not a teenager anymore, and at this time in my life their shit grinds my nerves. But the Red Hot Chili Peppers did say to give it away. While it is generally best to take any advice coming from Anthony Kiedis with, oh, a boulder of salt, broadly attending to the spirit of this exhortation is defensible and probably even correct. Factually Pointless is free and clear of ads and so it shall remain as long as the platform allows; why should the rest of my work be any different? 

Might I create confusion by publishing through amazon and also GutProj and also some other plans I'm refining to seed my writing, like a paper-and-ink version of Johnny Appleseed or a geocache Banksy? Do I make my old Ghost Hands Crew fancy a reality? 

Who cares. Let history sort it out or forget it entirely. It doesn't matter about me or anything except the work. However many ways I can try ensure the survival, propagation, and memory of the work, the more it may have a chance to illuminate and entertain more people, such as it can. That's the only point. Nothing has anything to do with whatever gain it may or may not bring me personally.

Updates forthcoming, I guess. 

*

Maybe I'll ride my bike today. See how my elbow feels about it.

Ok peace

--JL

#415

Pretty fuckin blank today, boys. The last couple days have been a hell of a lot and there's still more to come. Plus I slept like all of two hours last night, there were a lot of problems. 

What's pertinent? Fuckin...I dunno. I'm very close to finalizing a real track order on a few of the playlists I've been tweaking for the past...long time. The neighborhood of a full year or perhaps longer.

Got my rock collection, my stuffed dinosaurs, and a variety of other keepsakes, art bits, little gleaming things, and a few artifacts of power arrayed on my remaining office bookshelf. The visual and aural media corner is coming along nicely. Haven't organized the bookpiles properly, haven't fixed up the circling bookshelf or the inset bookshelves--oh! Part of it all was that I had to tear out the main fixed bookshelf in front of the window when the windows got did. House feels way better, by the way, with insulation in the crawlspace and windows from this century. Feels like I haven't mentioned that.

Finally, haven't thought of a shelving solution that pleases me yet, though now that I'm typing I recall there exist extremely thin metal sheets that can be affixed to the wall and support several books. There's an avenue of inquiry among all these haven'ts.

Cool. Cool. Good enough? Do I have more, or am I triggering dry? 

Feels like I should have more of a reward for your time. More of an endorphin payload, right? Hm.

*

Fuck it. I'm hungry. Gonna snack. Maybe I'll take a nap.

Fuckit! 

Haha.

--JL

#414

Uh-oh! Number four one four! Kind of cool-looking. Yeah.

*

Did so much stuff yesterday, dear reader. Too many things. My body is sore and my mind mainly eager to simply settle into itself and read books.

Dug a little firepit. Raked a bunch, mowed, whacked at tussocks with a tool I don't know the name of but which functions as a scythe and chopper by looking a little like a crooked golf putter with a dull serrated blade instead of a club end.

Also a bunch of emotional and psychic labor. All of it was good, a good day. Then I did not sleep well. Ho-hum.

*

Here's a dope thing: the way I've rearranged my office, the desk, still set up so I can use my laptop standing, is closer to the window, and I can type without pants on. Well, I guess I always could. But now the breeze is particularly refreshing, and it feels less likely that someone could somehow work it so they could achieve a view of my private splendor. 

Sure, I'm about 99.7% certain no one at street level or at any second-story window could personally get the angle to snap a juicy blackmail pic or the fuel for a deepfake--but we live at the dawn of the drone age, already beset by silent, hovering probe droids equipped with cameras exponentially superior to the human eye and getting better all the time.

But yeah, man. Picture me standing here, buckass naked, typing delightedly like Percy Aldridge Grainger writing shitty pastorals. This detail about him is apocryphal, but compelling and relatable. That was one weird dude.

I would also like to dress as an improvised jester at times.

My old high school band directors were into him for some reason--the reason basically has to be that they were freaks. 

One could tell when the main director's wife was on her period because like clockwork, once a month for about a week, he would become unbearable. He could be an asshole any time, but that shit hit different. The man's libido was clearly a clockwork-type mechanism which did not handle service interruptions well. If you fucked up in front of him when the times were lean, it could be much more unpleasant than any teenager should have to tolerate. The day after he could get laid again, he was a man wreathed in smiles and good humor. Shit was uncanny. My theory was largely rejected by my peers, but I remain compelled by the evidence of my observations.

Certain that he and his assistant director (at the time) had traveled to Grainger's crazy-ass museum and oohed and ahhed over the BDSM gear the man handcrafted. Gotta admit, incorporating a conductor's baton into a homemade riding crop is DIY move that hefts panache.

Guess ole Percy fucked his mom? Well, it's no less than I expect from anyone who believes in Nordic superiority. His compositions are also not good to my way of thinking, and I hated playing them. 

*

ANYWAY today is not a day I can devote to quietude and literature. Finally offered a job, and I have to go hand in paperwork to make sure I get it. It is seasonal part-time work for which I will make just one dollar more than half of what I used to. But it's something, and right now, the way things have been, it feels like a miracle. I will endeavor to be kept on as a permanent hire, and seek promotion.

Gotta get ready immediately, in fact. Then, a laundry list of duties follows in short order. Off I go.

Hope you liked Percy Aldridge Grainger Day here on Factually Pointless. That was fucking weird.

--JL

p.s. I don't mean to kinkshame the BDSM community here. Or anyone whose lives have been affected by incest. It's not like anyone yelled at me, but I do spend some time thinking about the things I say after the fact, and I realize that trying to be funny comes at somewhat of a price in damn near every instance.

#413

Amazing how it is possible to recall but not retrieve states of bliss.

Hovering each day for hours between acceptance and rejection of the incredible agonies that assail me, borne low by doubt and fear. Despair and suspicion press against my flanks, and though I have the energy to cast my eyes skyward and scramble, clamber, and otherwise massively exert myself to reach higher ground, I wonder if it is even worth it, and merely crouch and breathe and flex my claws.

The problem is not avoiding self-destruction. It is refraining from detonation, from blowing up your whole life, walking away hands shoved deep into your last pair of pockets without looking back at the explosion and never building another again--for the sake of self-preservation. It is in staving off true imitation of Christ, of Buddha, of the homeless philosophers of the wandering age, decisions which take you away from family and love and ownership and safety. Is that for the best?

Crouching and breathing and flexing my claws. Unable to decide if I am a base coward unwilling to take the leap or if patience will bear fruit, if compromise really is the higher duty.

Hm. Is it all right to stay crucified, your flesh feeding and blood slaking the thirst of everyone that seems to need a piece of you just to get through their day? Or can you just get down off that tree and walk away in pursuit of ascension?

I don't fucking know. 

--JL

#412

Going hard with collecting rocks, yes. This basically involves theft. Almost everything does, so it's all about who has the most muscle to back up their justifications and rationalizations. I live in the modern empire that proves this par excellence, having learned its lessons well from its mother colony. Each of its citizens is an expert at excoriating the part of the empire they don't like and protecting the part that they do. None of them affect the smooth function of the whole machine, which runs as designed, year in, year out, feeding its masters.

I put a rock in my pocket. Maybe it "belonged" at the edge of someone's garden, or was "part of a parking lot". Maybe I prise it out of hardening mud in a yard or field which does not belong to me, or take it from the thousands of rocks a construction company put at the side of a huge square brick warehouse-style building as opposed to grass or woodchips. Maybe the rock was on some woodchips. This can often be the case.

In taking the rock, I am taking something that does not belong to me. But I do not recognize that it belongs to the person that would assert that claim. I'd return it, or give it to some third more legally backed "owner" if asked, or told to. Why not? Then I'd steal it back, plus two more. Something to occupy my time. 

Who gives a fuck? Some Swiss piece of shit that works for a bank and is seen as a productive and moral member of his nation and community is counting the money that making arrangements to transport one million slaves across six borders netted him. It is more money than I would accept as recompense for saving the world. I have a rock in my pocket. He has that. The world keeps on spinning.

Only God can do the math. So it goes.

*

What am I doing with these rocks? Building an illegal castle? Art project? A boon to "my own" "property"?

No. Just havem. Just gottem. Just put them on shelves, or generally around. Look at them and think about fractals, about time, about our miraculous planet. Hold them in my hand, feel their texture and weight, consider their molecular composition, their structure, their relative hardnesses and densities. They're rocks. I'm me. We are in the same world, made of the same stuff. I consider this, in the time I have before I die.

 

--JL

#411

With civil war bearing down upon us, we dutifully trudge to the cineplex en masse and consume a movie entitled Civil War. 

Well, if that isn't just too fucking perfect and complete.

Have heard that this film asserts that journalism is our only hope. Jesus, can that be true? It plunges into my stomach like a depth charge how unequivocally fucked we are if so. Unless the thesis of the movie is that a nontrivial percentage of the citizen body should transform themselves into a renegade verifiable information supply chain, here in the times of the tail wagging the dog openly and without artifice. Guess I should watch it and see. One should not talk too much about what one don't know.

Just wanted to point out in that first paragraph how utterly, completely steeped in Modern Americanism this situation is. We wouldn't believe it was possible or even desirable to go to the moon until Walt Disney said it was ok. It's just how we are. 

People don't need porn to fuck nasty, but movies tell us how to act nonetheless. Art reflects life, which can only reflect art. Indeed, I have met many people who seemingly constructed their identities and based their speech patterns on a loose mix of perennial and recently perused films. I myself borrow from fiction in these ways--it's only human. But it is always possible to be a little too human. 

*

Lately I have been seized in philosophical and ethical paroxysms that can only be called fits or perhaps fevers of anarchy. Never have I perceived more clearly its allure as a basis for action. 

Because why should we hew and cling to this stability we have enjoyed? To nurse at its teat is to drink a black poison, and all our choices are tainted by our demanding the ability to pay good money for our best lives while existing as the justification and topsoil for corporate and political vines which strangle and destroy our human dignity and the life of our planet. We aid and abet it no matter how much we make noises of outrage or legally protest or whatever, because we are convinced we can have our cake and eat it too and guess what, fucks? The cake is a lie. Always has been.

If we want to enjoy our nice sunny days, it might serve everyone better if we did it without having governments and companies that are literally Ahriman. There is no better way of illustrating it. Maybe we'd get sick and die a little more, maybe there won't be a whole eleven billion of us. Maybe that's ok.

I don't fuckin know, though. I didn't make this world. I don't get to decide these things, or know if my feelings are right. I get stressed out and fight response just from seeing and hearing this motherfucker down the street from me run a gas lawnmower. I can't set policy. I'd collapse every economy on the planet in under a week and many hundreds of millions of people would die. Is that worth saving the world? I don't know. I'm not likely to find out.

Too paranoid to ever make a difference in any way, shape, or form, you see. Can't trust anyone far enough to throw them, let alone enough to coordinate anything. How can I commit to action under conditions which have driven groups of people to act inhumanely since time immemorial? It's a guaranteed way to compromise your ethics, and then, you have to keep going. If you find yourself fighting a war, you have already lost more than half the fight, and the rest is seeing how quickly you can put an end to it or get out of it or die for it--how grave the loss and how compromised you will be before the end.

Plus ultimately I am more interested in expanding my rock collection and playing video games than I am in actually holding myself or anyobody else accountable for anything.

There's your moral high ground. Like all other systems that tempt a human being towards irrational and irretrievable actions which help no one, anarchy is not lucid or explicative. It cannot feed or clothe you. It will not help you make decisions that are more moral or efficient or superior in any way than choice-paths supplied by any other ideologies, systems, worldviews, or hybrids or adaptations derived from existing sets. 

It's all just a lattice we set in front of our eyes in order to try and see an incomprehensible infinite vastness as limited and quanitifiable. All our mistakes start there, because it isn't.

Action is absurdity. The sacred infinite cares not. We are dust motes falling chaotically through time; fixed points on tesselations; fractals made of fractals made of fractals all the way down and all the way out.  

*

Have a nice day? 

Fuck that guy mowing his lawn. Seriously. I hate people acting like anything we've done this past century is something we can just keep on blithely doing till the sun falls down. We need to change everything. Why the fuck are people building houses? Stop it! We have to stop! Stop mining shit, stop making new shit, stop fueling evil tech with massive energy costs! Goddamn it, this other fucking bitch just started in with an even bigger, louder lawnmower! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

--JL

#410

Tempted to write one of those meta-posts that involve writing about the diffuse sensation of having to look around for something to write about. Ah, there we go.

Focusing on a topic may be difficult owing to how moving stuff around and making deep structural changes in how both the house and my office are laid out and arranged and used has left my books scrambled and disarranged, which makes me feel like my mind is in a dyadic state with this wavelength. Not necessarily scrambled and disarranged, but two other adjectives, which would be different adjectives if the original adjectives were modified.

*

What is the maximum number of adjectives a phenomenon can be said to support, or contain, or reflect, or embody, or whatever? 

Thank you, pointless, idle curiosity. You have plagued my waking hours and denied me sleep since I was a toddler, but perhaps I have never in my life known true boredom. Who knows!

*

It strikes me that what I call boredom is not precisely definition one as far as most people are concerned--as in, the problem is that there is nothing to do or that I am not drawn to my usual activities or new ones. Boredom, to me, is the oppressive sensation that I can't only do exactly what I want to do for uninterrupted stretches of timelessness. Boredom is the imposition of the knowledge that eventually I will be forced to stop what I'm doing in order to do something else I'd rather not do, rather than simply be involved infinitely in what I'm doing till I'm good and ready to stop and then do the next thing I want to do, and thus feeling unable to turn my mind or hand to anything in the interim, as well as a sense of being put upon. So I just sit there, frustrated, executive function arrested till I can find the key.

Maybe there is a better word, perhaps in German, for this feeling. 

Precognausea. I made it up. It's not quite right, but it's also useful in that it describes another of my strange mental habits, which is thinking through any given choice until every option looks bad to me because I have mapped out sufficient negative possibilities that inaction is prefferable. I do this quite a lot. It may be an activity designed to justify a certain laziness in my character, but more pointedly I think it is yet another method I employ in doing only what I want to do, not necessarily what has to get done. 

Thinking of the veritable blizzard of paperwork I've left undone till it was irrelevant in this lifetime. I'm basically smirking, I find. Ah, I just chuckled. Shameless.

"I should do that right now," I say, perhaps even out loud, and next second, I'm working on a short story and getting into some reading after that. Smash cut to three weeks later, thinking "Shoulda done that shit. I should do that and this other shit now," and next second, I am doing pushups before washing the dishes before I play some video games. It's not about my attention span--whatever I do instead, I'll probably do for hours at a time--it's that critical wherewithal required to do a made-up task for unrewarding reasons.

"Actually, why the fuck should I? Fucking bold of you to ask, when you think about it." Some of us are born or have been indelibly marked with the curse of lighting up with this avenue of inquiry, I guess. I don't want to think it. It is a synaptic function as natural and unavoidable as any other flash of brain lightning.

--JL

#409

Been raining for a couple days now. At first it was heavy enough to up the waters a bit, show some deep puddle on most street, but that subsided. The grass and top bit of the topsoil are still saturated to inunadation point but it doesn't seem to be rising beyond that or spilling or anything that I can see yet.

Sometimes we get some pretty fun and ultimately mostly harmless flooding. Property damage might happen but never in my memory have we ever had to, in this county, huddle on rooftops or prove that our ingenuity is the equal of our ancestor's through the jury-rigging of imromptu watercraft solutions. The backyard at one of the old places flooded pretty good, you could float an empty kiddy pool around.

It can sure fuck up traffic sometimes, though. Once I had to drive my company's shitty little Ford Fiesta (which to my taste drove like Ford wanted to make a car inspired by a potato chip made out of plastic. I drove with that car struggling in my wake, if you know what I mean) around the edge of a puddle so massive I was still displacing about a foot of water in the center and the water had to be six inches up the door on my side. The electronics in that car were literally never the same again.

*

Drinking at a bar in thirty years you might meet a fifty-five year old man, scrungid, rufulous, reeking and maladroit, who will fix on you and slur something along the lines of 

"I fuggin help'd mikka fuggin chatbot so gud 't shruptid th'CONmee! FAGGOT!"

I won't be in that bar, God willing and the devil be kept back. I guess that's my main thought. Hopefully I won't be floating in a tube, getting my oxygen and electrolytes and proteins and acids through a saline suspension in my lungs and bloodstream, dreaming an infinite dream. Haha, who says I'm not? But, Matrix or no Matrix, it's important not to drink.

That fucking movie will never stop memeing in my face and at my nutsack. I need to constantly work on a more mature acceptance of that. How many people have been tricked into taking a blue or red pill which both contained the same dangerous cocktail of chemicals before having their lives ruined? Who knows. It's a grim possibility. 

Anyhow, sympathy is my main feeling, I guess. We're all just doing the best we can with the best information available that we are able to stumble upon and interpret. We are all therefore guilty before one another. It's simple to say and hear but difficult to understand and remember that understanding and take it into every moment of life. 

It happens to be true: reading The Brothers Karamazov just the once will not do. Pardons if I've said it before, but that is a worthy meme, worth an occasional repeat. 

*

We must have mercy. If we cannot have mercy, we must try to at least go towards mercy. 

Matrix or no Matrix, you know? 

--JL

#408

Today I may play my trumpet. Sometimes I feel bad for owning like a ripped-out chunk of the planet, heated and smashed and stretched and alloyed with other chunks and molded and wrought and finished, and having undergone this torture to take on a silly-looking shape made for the sole purpose of creating a range of sounds as ephemeral as thoughts just to glorify kings or whatever, and remains a vibrant mechanism for much jackanapery in human activity.

Another way of looking at it is that I am in possession of something on the order of a physical miracle, a triumph of ludic engineering, life-ages of the Earth in the making, containing infinite potential, by and for the grace of God. 

Guess it's appropriate enough to keep hold of both, and blow some of my vox through it from time to time, and let it be apologia and hymn in one.

--JL

#407

Mentioned it as part of my routine before today, but Wikipedia's front page is always so good, so nearly exactly what an actual page of real news and piquant selections of data should optimally be, that I'd like to recommend it again. The last couple days have been particularly flavorful. It's been five years since we got pictures of the black hole! How time screams by us at the speed of time. That's why I check many different wiki sites at several different times of the day, every day. It may amount to community lore, but I care about that very deeply for its own sake and plus, I think your chances of looking at facts are pretty good despite occasions some people just making up huge chunks of Russian history and geography and posting on main and it's up for years.

*

As I've intimated, awhile ago I went to the library. Well, a bunch of times lately; I refer now to the second visit of this recent cluster. Got the second season of One-Punch Man, which I think delivered at a pretty advanced level considering a whole different studio was attempting to reach an insanely high bar, but no, it did not shatter the very firmaments as did season one. It's kind of funny: they made it pretty much perfectly, just not as beautiful or powerful simply because of the nature of the part of the story they had to cover. Would the original studio have succumbed to sophomore slump and done something similar if not practically identical? Entirely possible, seen it before, and I would place that idle bet for no stakes on this occasion. But I didn't even come here to write about any of that. 

The other DVD I got was Pokémon the Movie 2000: The Power of One (also known as Pokémon the Movie 2000 or even Pokémon 2000; in the original Japanese [a different movie, as I understand it--guess we had to change everything to make a dub in order to make sure our powerful, erect American values do not become diluted with a sense of community or interdependence. Well, they didn't manage to fuck 'em up too bad] as Pocket Monsters the Movie- Mirage Pokémon Lugia's Explosive Birth--and last, most officially, and easily greatest, Revelation Lugia) which was--except for the suboptimal addition of Chosen One tropes and the apparently mandatory and always-especially-stupid-in-children's-media Straight People Shit--every iota as incredible as it was when I was eleven years old. The first three Pokémon movies changed and defined my life in many ways, and it may be that aesthetically and philosophically, M02 is the tallest of those three foundational peaks. What a movie. What beauty and power. The music! The fucking music! 

Ah, I wept and wept. A priceless treasure, a perfect homecoming.

*

Something important I don't think I've gone over: I don't have to respect jealousy just becuase I don't experience it and most people do. I suppose it is only natural, but jealous people have tried to make me feel like I'm somehow the problem for not comprehending their bullshit.  I'm not saying it makes me more or less morally sensitive, I'm not saying it to put myself above people--it's just how I am, and if it were up to me almost nothing would be a big deal. But everything is such a huge screaming deal. So many of us taking actual pride in poorly formed attachment, building legal and moral codes and whole societies around weaponized trauma.

For me, the experience is compersion. When my friends and lovers are getting and experencing love from other sources, I feel gladness and vicarious satisfaction, even further, a kind of triumph--more love in the world is better than less, more knowledge and more intimacy between more people is a beautiful thing that makes the world better and closer and more real, more love for those I love is a bliss and a victory over hatred and bad feeling. More love for me, too, is better; I reject moral formulas that assert it is my duty to be monogamous. Why should I? For the sake of keeping property disputes legally tenable? Because it's somehow better than being free? Fuck you. If that were true and tenable, you would not note that every single culture that has ever owned shit and used marriage is fucking obssessed, fucking consumed with the narratives and consequences of adultery. 

It is easy to recognize that it would be painful to "lose" someone to another lover if I felt that I possessed them, if I set up my psychic and spiritual life to the degree that I need another person to focus their life and resources (including the lion's share of their attention and all their possessions, etc.) on me, personally, like I'm the be-all-end-all, but it's hard to retain my empathy when it seems clear to me that maybe hewing to such a position would be my own fault because it is just fucking stupid. That's not how my marriage is set up, and here's a groundbreaking concept: you can set up your own marriage however you want it. Handcuffs are available; don't use them myself, but if you choose to, don't act surprised when they chafe and demand escape.

Maybe you should never in a million years think you can own another person to any degree. Maybe that's what's fucked up around here, not the idea that love is bad when it doesn't look how you want it to look. Because that is your problem, not mine, and even though you have no right to make it my problem, it often is. 

All right, it's coming out of me, can't help it: fuck you jealousy-having motherfuckers. I'm so tired of dancing around you and your petty little fucking terrors. Fuck you. Stick your courage to wherever you can make it stay and understand that no one owns anything, that ownership is a lie, that everything is a gift and everything is rented and to imagine that you possess something is to lose it in that moment.

The story of Krishna and the milkmaids. Look it up. 

Finally, if you are monogamous, and jealous, and happy, or angry at me, great. Good. I'm glad. Be yourself and do your thing. Just don't fuck with me. Just leave me the fuck alone if your life is so great or if you don't actually have a problem or if you do and you just want me to be nice about it (I am, in praxis, nice about it. But this is my ugly space, where I can vent my savagery at will). You don't see me running around trying to make your shit illegal or morally and socially disgusting or whatever, even though I think it is in fact gross and damaged and stunted and the province of spiritual cowards. Despite that, letting you be yourself doesn't fuck me up in any way, shape, or form. Don't see why my being myself should fuck with you so bad. 

*

Hmph. Was hoping for a more cheerful overall tone. So, let's just keep going. 

Books that I have checked out from the library lately include more books about Admiral Thrawn, the rest of the Alphabet Squadron trilogy, various and numerous other Star Wars books, and the following graphic novels:

Roaming, by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki (they are cousins)

Joe Death and the Graven Image, by Benjamin Schipper

The Sons of El Topo, by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ladrönn

*

The state of the household in time and spans of life is of interesting parallell at the moment. There is an older man and a younger man, an older cat and a younger cat.

Me and the older cat, the deaf one, you know, our respective domains of dome hair and face fur are beginning to thin, but our habits remain in place, our energies run high as yet, and our muscles carry on doing everything we've ever asked them to as easily (usually) and sometimes exceeding prior levels. The peculiarities that come with age are manifesting themselves, but we are still in our prime. These are lean and watchful stages of our numbered days, running around and flexing because we sense these times are the midday times, and before too long we must begin the afternoon of our lives. She's a crazy bitch and I'm (as amply evidenced) pretty much a nutcase. That too is an alignment we share, along with attending to careful analysis of our own bowel movements. 

The younger are at the indolent and uncertain times in the twilight of their youth proper. I have come to feel most uncomfortable being more specific than that about people's lives in this space, which I think is a good and important boundary even if it leaves certain portions of my life occluded. Well, I try to be as honest as I can, but if reading American Elf as it was updating after it was free through to the end and reread in total as many times as I had the chance to before it got paywalled taught me anything, it's that protecting people and your own safety is as high a concern as aspirational levels of honesty, truth, performative struggle, and precise self-portrait.

Suffice to say that the parallell and its contrast to where the elders are is as complete and amusing, as poetically feline as you could wish. 

All of it is laden with a cusping, powerful feeling of change; the world is, as ever, transforming, and things are building toward a great series of events which will act as one of those hinges or gravity wells of history--again! Last time seems like yesterday, or four years ago, or almost every fuckin year I've been alive, and the whole century prior, and every day the buzzing hive of human history sang with activity. Spring is acting on all four of us, and the vernal energies play havoc with the status quo. 

Anything could happen! Wow. It's always true.

*

Listened to a couple of old Robin Williams standup routines yesterday on a whim. Something made me think of his 2002 HBO special routine, which was a staple for me throughout middle and high school, and I wanted to cruise on back; hadn't in over a decade. Also listened to his night at the Met recording from '86.

Man, I felt so at home. That dude is such a place and time and sense of things. His work is. He is. It is undeniable. Blessings and blessings and blessings and crack the fuck up laughing about the bullshit. Fuck it. Thank God. 

--JL

#406

Though I have done my best to teach myself ignorance and cultivate that private humility which grants protection from humiliation and the venalities of unjust pride, still I find myself impatient with the fripperies and blunders of my fellow humans. It is my own failing. We are all doing as we must, as we were shaped to by our lives.

But it's so stupid to release a document that you title "Infinite Dignity" and undignify yourself so thereby. It's an act of such childish, such wilful hypocrisy. To contradict yourself so completely in its pages. To dare set limits on the inifinite because of your worst opinions, your grave, earthbound, purely too-human puerility. 

"God's perfect will is not to be fucked with, so trans people can't get help, because I said so basically. When God fucks up in a way that I don't like, though, the doctors are good to go. Stop thinking about gender, too. I already said what it is and how it works so the matter is settled."

Nice.

Fuckwits.

*

Leaving the work of it, the labor and risk involved in facing the truth of the matter, the actual duties and responsibilities of infinite mercy and infinite dignity to us, the meek and disinherited. As it has always been.

Further context: more than sixty years after it should have happened--which would have been a hundred years after it could have happened, and two thousand, really, if we're talking about year upon year of missed opportunities to make a kinder and more harmonious world (one might say, one's main and perhaps only job as pope)--we got a pope that finally said gay people shouldn't be criminalized and killed and tortured, and almost--not quite--said they shouldn't be pathologized. 

Laughable--a textbook example of what it means to do and say too little too late--and furthermore, stopping well short of a mark that again, should have been crossed decades and decades and perhaps centuries and millenia ago.

*

Thanks, pope. Really helping. You do good work out there. Hey, at least you have demonstrably helped with the whole war and poverty thing. I mean, look at all the increasing peace and stability! Too much winning? I don't want to discount your accomplishments, your ability to at least stand exactly where you are able to stand, but I can't help it: it's not enough.

Vayase al carajo, viejo. Perdiste el balón. Ahora te tendrán que recordarte como el que no llegó al gól, y el que tampoco pudo defender. Que hiciste? No pudiste hacer un coño, y no por falta de poder, ni oportunidad. Nisiquiera pudiste con los que se cójen a los jóvenes. Para que eres?

Bueno. Te lo perdono. Tengo algún otro recurso? 

--JL

#405

Man, today is a good day to say it: fuck the pope. Fuck paping, and fuck popery. 

Just a man who exists to disappoint me.

--JL

#404

Number four oh four! Hope my computer doesn't crash. The concept, just so classic, wouldn't be able to get mad at the massive bird flip that would be--it would be too perfect, now you got a story with more mileage in it than any computer, etc, what are you gonna do, etc, etc. CETRA

ET 

CETRA

*

Actually said "Greetings" to someone yesterday, like a teenager's idea of what a "bard" says when they enter a "tavern" to "put the louts at ease" before beginning  to "subtly enquire" after the whereabouts of the macguffin.

"Greetings, earthling! Do you happen to know anything...have you perhaps heard about...cartoons, but from Nippon?"

Maybe (hopefully) no one has actually said the above sentence aloud to another person without the vaguest trace of irony, and I have veered into the truly basement-bound, but it could be even worse somehow and still be real.

Anyway, I don't know why that word came out of me. Must be spending too much time alone.

*

The time I've spent in basements with dudes who never leave those basements except to grab things to bring back into the basement and eat--things, maybe not necessarily food--has made me realize that there truly are all kinds of people in this world. Also how easy it is to just be a kind of tick nestled into the crotch of your own species. And how rewarding, honestly.

*

Celebrate computer code today, the day of the four hundred and fourth post. Point and Laugh at a Coder for being Loser or Weird or Gay (rip, A. Turing) or Virgin or whatever you want to do to them, I guess, sky's kinda the limit--and thus provide a rich reservoir of the fuel that builds the modern world! And be responsible for the deaths of a few innocent women, probably. I guess all kinds of dudes kill women based on being mad about childhood or their rank in dude hierarchy or money or whatever, huh? 

*

Man, I have every reason to be ashamed of myself--these things it pleases me to call jokes are fucking catastrophic--and I'm just not. Fuck you and up yours! Haha!

Is this what it's like to be...normal? Is this...how Donald Trump feels?

--JL

#403

Oh! Man! Dude! From a couple of days ago, I forgot to stress why it is even a matter of consequence that motherfuckers want to agree that the universe we live in isn't real: because it is a profitable concept to entertain while it is made into a reality. They want you to believe you are in the Matrix so that you will heartily and with great pleasure acquiesce--perhaps even demand!--that they put you in an actual Matrix and use you as a cell in a giant battery like for fucking reals. 

They want you to think nothing is real so you won't care as they process every resource on the planet to sustain their vast empires, machines which exist in and of themselves on a different-than-human scale and which will cast us off as husks, if we allow ourselves to fill the role of mere vessels--NPC's--rather than living beings.

Simpler and shorter term: they want to fuck you and have you think you're getting yours. They want you not to look or care while they make the world hideous and sacrifice everything beautiful and valuable about it and its features and its life for no good reason except giving them the win, because the bastardized cucks are only able to give a fuck about making numbers go up.

Fuck them. The world is real. Their fake bullshit is real too, in a sense, but there is a difference. The real world is anyone's game. They want everybody to play the game they wrote the rules for, and come on now. Be real with yourself. They didn't go to the trouble of it just to build a better world and then efface themselves entirely. Look at the fucking money getting thrown around and how and why it's getting spent. It's another round of colonization, the ephemeral-made-digital wet dream of the same mindset that wants to keep building highrises and mcmansions until this bitch is nothing but highrises and mcmansions--Grand Canyon so full of highrises they stretch into the sky, so many mcmansions there's never gonna be a fucking rainforest ever again. Except in this case they build nothing, and you give them everything. You are the resource, your time, your attention, your volition, your capacity and ability to look around and think, the entire potential energy of your individuality completely subsumed into their profit engines.

It might not matter, sure, what the fuck. Everything's the same. But it could. It probably should.

*

Also I just saw my first butterfly of the season. A real thing that I value and treasure. May I always be able to discern this simple truth, for as long as I keep making it alive to another springtime. 

--JL

#402

It's a day to scream it from the proverbial rooftops before I go on a walk: I am alive, right now. Right now. I have lived upon this earth. I have walked upon its surface, breathed, and seen. I have borne witness from my singular and inimitable perspective. I have read thousands of books and listened to tens of thousands of songs, often at the same time I was watching movies or playing video games, all intersecting projects which have occupied I would say conservatively like fifty thousand of my waking hours. These hours have forged me into something powerful and unique. I have won vicious knock-down fights and lost them; same with chess matches, contests on the field of sport and gaming tables, in digital realms, and the court of public debate. I have wandered and driven all across my stomping grounds and the land which I inhabit, and I have crossed oceans and visted many ancient places across the continents. I have met many people, helped as many as I could and hindered as many as I saw fit, and been helped and hindered by many of them in turn. I have listened to them all with all the attention I could spare and observed them as closely as I could in the time we were given. I have tried to be here for my own life, whether turned inward or outward or suffering deeply or outside of myself or wild with ecstasy and maybe going to die of the sublime, of the incandescent light that being in this life may let you see, bathes you with its radiance whether you are aware or oblivious.

All of this was worth it, by any measure. I say yes to it unequivocally, and would not change a second or a thing. I would be excited and thankful to do it all again, infinite times. Yes, yes to this life, to this world, to this universe, to all possible universes. All things becoming, all things enduring, and all things receding--yes. A hundred more years to endure before I rest? Yes. Whatever. Anything. Here I Am. 

Yes to a world without end. Yes to heaven and hell permeating all creation. Yes to the unquenchable flame at the fundament of all being. Here I Am.

*

Took most of the bookshelves out of my office, and the one I left is in the corner I have designated for non-book crafts and projects, as well as whatever decorations cannot be dispensed with, whatever is necessary for me to entrain my eye and weave my defensive enchantments. Plus like, crap. Instruments. Whatever has to go there and not somewhere else, you know?

My purpose is to seek shelving solutions that optimize the space while keeping the total weight bearing down on the structure as low as one may.

--JL

#401

Gonna start today by running an "advertisement", okay?

Read kcgreen dot com dot com

Good comics archived--HIAGB (award-winning? no?), Back (with beartato), other goods including something happening to an increasingly distraught pig

God's Hands updating (the only cartoon you'll ever need, may help the blind see [against their will])

*

Just something I've wanted to try? I guess the way this could work is, if I ever meet the guy, I will ask him if he has any coins on his person, and if I can have them. He probably can't spare them just as bad as I need them, and the exquisite pain of that moment will fuel us both. And like, if he wants to give me a piece of metal, I'll carry it in my pocket awhile before I lose it or make it an arduous part of a transaction.

*

It's kind of a Try To Have a Good Mental Health Friday, I guess? Even though I've been having paranoia about things, like wondering agitatedly whether the jokes or compliments or both of what I'm saying up there somehow some kind of terrible, irretractable mistake that will wound me viciously one day.

Oh well! I've been looking at the dude's comics since like 2004. It's good art, good comix. It's important comix, to my way of thinking.

Just that I have traumas about people I write jokes about somehow, fucking somehow, even though I am a degenerate of no regard or impact, seeing it, reposting it on main, and batting back.

The annoying closer for Time Magazine did this to me when twitter was newish. Griped about him, basically trashing his intellectual capacity (as a younger man, I was sometimes Quite Bad on webz) and he shortened my jab into something truly garbled for his post, not a true retweet--my joke made to no one, to thin air--I literally didn't have any friends on twitter yet! I was just trying shit out, playing with a toy--anyway--he made me look stupid to boost himself with a self-deprecation. I was horrified. I felt used, and also rendered both miniscule and painted with a huge target. I closed that twitter and didn't make another for years. Never fully recovered, apparently. 

The pain of the idea that it would be horrible if I made anyone have shitty feelings based on just shit I typed is an inbuilt part of the game, I guess. You can and must at least partially forget about it while you're writing, but it's not like any callus builds over the spot. It just twinges.

God, I pray to Jesus and Mary and every blessed saint that neither person I have mentioned sees this, and if they do, I guess at that point I just have to bear whatever happens with as much equanimity as possible. Also I hope I haven't told this story already, that would be egg on my face like three times over or something.

My regular paranoia is about way scarier shit than this, by the way. This is just a way to kind of talk about it without directly typing the actual thoughts out, and being forced by my own hand thereby to parse the evidence of my madness--or perspicacity. For not knowing which is half the struggle, eh?

*

Ok, whatever. What the fuck ever! Who cares. I've been at this too long already. I'm gonna play Fire Emblem, which gets weirder all the time. They never forsake my precious grids on which to plot the movements of toy soldiers doing interlinked sets of rock paper scissors, but they have added like datings sims and farming sims and a bunch of other shit and tied it into unit growth, so I'm always having to do a ton of work around the battles. But it is just and correct that it should be so. Battles are 99% preparation or something crazy like that irl, and they are fought by complete people with whole lives and mindsets and circumstances, and they indeed have to do shit like muck out stables and dig latrines and drink tea and eat scones and give each other dozens of presents and shit.

Then they go blast the shit out of each other with magical energies derived from tomes groaning with the whispers of dead languages, armed with weapons forged in the unknown mornings of unremembered histories from irreproducible alloys, woven with the killing intent necessary to pierce scale and flesh and boiling blood--to reach the hearts of dragons.

It's sensible. But...hm. Sometimes the contrast can be a little jarring. 

*

Still no job, but Monday I interview for a seasonal position at a local movie theater. 

Like in the famed, smash webcomic, Multiplex, featuring motherfuckers working at a movie theater. That one's been around awhile, too. 

Man, senescence sure takes the time that it takes and not a minute less, eh boys?

--JL