#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.

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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.

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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