#443

Looking out of my window and listening to the grinding, slashing, peace-shattering noises of NUMB, TRUNDLING SHEEP BEINGS running their thrice-damned DEATH-DRINKING DEATH-EXHALING DEATH-DEALING MACHINES so they can DESTROY AND STERILIZE THEIR OWN HABITATS. 

It's fine. It just makes me feel like we all deserve to be immolated on the sharp edge of a nuclear blast wave. Fuck us. Honestly. What a bunch of shit-smeared stinking goddamn monkeys we turned out to be. Hard reset NOW!

*

No! No! Jesus, hold my hand.

We are luminous beings. These crude vestments are a deception and a false representation. 

We are doing the best we can. We are not the same. We are all one. My rage, born from my fear of death and failure, will not lead me towards hate. 

I will let it all pass through me, and over me, and when it is done, only I will remain. 

And I am a being of light and love, just like the people working on their lawns. They are my kin, and we are not different.

*

It is harmony that we must seek. If the world be ever more discordant, all the more beauty and richness must I add to my song.

Plus, there's a lot to be said for doom metal anthems and vicious punk refrains.

--JL

#442

Hey, have a post-1:00 a.m. post! That might have to happen consistently. It's a whole new life. We'll see, though. It is possible that I might reclaim part of the morning for writing. But then, it is morning.

*

Well, maybe I would have written a post, if the blind cat hadn't chosen one of her times to go absolutely electrically bugshit for pets and scratches. In this mood, she requires the most exhaustive and complete full-body workover that a cat can get, rubs and smushes and scritches everywhere but her forelimbs down and knees down. In this condition she also allows me to clear her eye sockets of dried gunk, which lowers the chance she'll get a deep itch and harm her eye area scratching away madly. 

Now she's licking her paws and forelimbs and the rest of her own business, completing her process thereby.

*

Hey, look at that, I have a cat. Cats sure are a thing.

*

Friends, I point towards the completely farcical, absolutely criminal stupidity on display with these AI suggestions on search queries, and I allow myself to quote Ian Malcolm: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

This exaggeratedly gross and unseemly preening is a fool's joke I'll allow myself as a seque into saying my actual point, which is that literally everything Michael Crichton and Philip K. Dick said was happening/would happen was and did and is right now, and far from giving a fuck, the web-fingered gnomes who get their money from greed-blind inhuman lunatics and their gasping, flopping acolytes work harder every day to do every single thing, to the letter, that these men strove to postulate would be absolutely disastrous, materially and spiritually, for our species and its societies. 

The improbably complete fuckups and pratfalls we are bearing witness to? The even crazier, more dangerous shit that I am reading that people are actually getting ready to try?

Literally Terminal Man out there. Literally Westworld. Literally A Scanner Darkly. Literally Jurassic Park. Literally The Minority Report. Or a fake/sanitized/extremely marketed version, which is equally scary because it culminates the same.

Fucks out here don't even have the excuse of not wanting to read a book, because they made good movies out of every single one of those and more besides.

Know motherfuckers watch movies. Sell them tickets these days! I can now attest, all kinds of people watch movies.

Anyway, hubris. The only cure is mortal agony. And too often in our benighted times, those whose hubris wracks our shared realities are never consequenced with so much as actual discomfort, let alone pain enough to humble or suffering enough to teach,

*

Well, that's my bad shit for the day. On a good note, people still go out and pay money to see Star Wars movies in a movie theater, even though they're fifty years old in some cases, and even though assholes say the ones that aren't are bad. It doesn't seem to stop people who love Star Wars, and I say that this is a good and a noble thing, a cause for hope; one small thing to celebrate.

Take your pick of them. They matter just as much as all the sad infiuriating bullshit that gets rammed down our throats.

Bears repeating, and I'm always pleased to type a little more: whatever gleam of light you can see in the great and indomitable darkness of this universe is real, and not just real. Those small joys, those everyday comforts, are worth everything. The reason we hope. The reason we pray. The reason we want to be okay and the way we get there. 

Hold the things that make you happy to your lips like a glowing coal. They are worth hoping for, worth protecting, and when you speak through them, you speak in the voice of love, the voice of God.

--JL

#441

The past week has only seen me grow more untethered from reality. As I make the clock real again in order to pin myself to its hands and thus ride its motions to and from a physical place, it loses what lax grip it had on those hours not devoted to that process. Losing myself more completely in what I'm doing and thinking and the fundamental neglect of the realities that involve paperwork and phone calls and emails and telling agencies that your income has changed--all that is as vapor which dispels as soon as I realize it is there, unnoticed till it vanishes again at my mind's accidental touch.

Been spending hours just standing in the sun, thinking. Looking at the plants in my backyard day by day. 

*

Also doing a bunch of shit. Painting and mowing and hauling and digging and chopping and planting and pulling and vacuuming and salvaging and breaking down and  planning, planning, planning, my mind a frothing ferment of ideas and timelines and stratagems and concepualizations of every description I can generate. 

Awash in tides of flotsam. A floating life in an infinite void informed by infinite debris, infinite illuminations.

Reading books and playing games more than before, seeing friends more than before, talking with Ezra more (we always talk a lot, but sometimes there are phases where we can't seem to fit in every idea and story and problem-solving and whatever other thing that we need to even though we never shut up--exhausting, but exhilirating), getting to know coworkers and the new job. Time seems to have dilated and set to a sprint; even as the days pass more hurriedly they giving the impression of having slowed overall--feels like two months since last I pounded words into this blank, yet the actual seven or eight days have perhaps carried enough in them to justify these contrasting impressions. 

And yet it does also seem that I come to myself after an unspecified span of sitting on the couch, staring into the middle distance, having thought myself into a perfect silence. Days where the depression is bad. Days where I don't even know what the fuck is going on and I barely drink a glass of water. All I can do is follow my own private thread, the double yellow line deep inside my brain the only guide, no compass, no altimeter, no clock, no stars.

*

Change. Hm. 

What is this life? All its seasons and transformations, its dragonfire and its long and lightless nights?

*

Hm.

--JL

#440

If I had not written what I had yesterday, and not thought about the people I was thinking about, would I have still been pierced later that same day by the sight of my ex-fiancee, more beautiful than ever, literally reading a book at a table by herself in the middle of the street, long dress flowing in the breeze? Would I have had to hang my head low as I did not break pace? Watch my spirit crash into the windows and walls like a bird caught in a burning room?

Fuck man what the hell. What do you even do with this.

*

Just.

Endure.

That.

Is.

All.

The.

Universe.

Can. 

Ask. 

For a little while.

--JL

#439

Seeing an old classmate by chance and having a little chat gets increasingly surreal as time flows. Some of my cohort, myself included, turn thirty-five this year. Bob and I had known each other since middle school and seen each on and off for a few years after high school as our separate workplaces shared back lot and a dumpster. But once that played out after about three years we'd not seen each other maybe ten years, and my old workplace plus the back lot and dumpster are literally gone, replaced by a high rise, and Bob's old work is a different storefront now, facing a wholly transformed street, as is the way of urban life. Our small and silly city.

Not being on any form of social media, I have no idea what has become of almost anyone I've ever met. Even people I have cohabited with, even people I loved and made love to for years.

That's just how it be.

--JL

#438

Today's post might have been one of those posts that begin like "Here I am again, about to yell about how crap the news is at doing its job. God damn what the fuck kind of analysis and priorities etc etc etc" but then it struck that it's a shitty part of the hobby. Kind of like if I wrote occasional but fairly evenly distributed posts about how assholes fucked with me while I was driving.

In the time that I've been writing this blog, let alone beforehand, people have been unbelievable pricks to me thousands of times using the way they drive their cars, and thousands more than that have risked my life or fucked with my temper simply by being idiotic or fallible. A few have come close to killing me. But even though this is direct and real, reportable and an actual set of memories involving actual unique circumstances, I never bitch about it on factually pointless. I bitch about liars lying and occluding using tools designed to help them lie and misdirect on a grand scale, as though they would do anything else. It's their jobs. There's a whole infrastructure around bullshit production. Who am I to tell anyone to shut up?

I never bitch about that other stuff because who cares, right? I've forgotten about it by the time I'm stepping out of the car, though the event gets filed away with he rest for recall purposes, presumably. And who cares also in the sense that it happens to every single one of us. It's how impersonal contact with physical bodies is. By extension, getting fucked with by the powers that be and suffering disaster and upheavals is merely the human condition. Everybody knows this flavor. So the running commentary of a bunch of chittering mynocks only sours the experience, frankly, and running a commentary on that commentary may be asinine. Knowing what politicians are up to has never helped me personally or helped me help anyone else. Maybe I should concentrate on my own monkeysphere and quit thinking about geopolitics.

Think about it. Is it more useful to spend time getting to know people in my neighborhood and striving to contribute to my city and community, or learning the timeline and general sense of the diplomatic interrelations of the Eurasian theater? I mean if knowing about stuff like that isn't your job, you probably might not care to put a lot of effort into the latter. You would probably naturally gravitate towards the former, and you'd be right. That perverse imp astride my shoulders has kept my nose too much in the book. Knowing things feels good, but is perhaps less than utile if not consistently put into some form of praxis beyond doing the least harm and surviving on my own terms.

The cultivation of a perspective that I can respect myself for has come at something of a cost.

Whatever. Perhaps the answer is to double down on my policy of trying my best to only read real websites. Stop with the mass media too. Soon I will have to quit streaming, when it's literally just tv again. A return to a more intentional curation of a more limited and difficult-to-obtain culture, both to experience and to possess. Should quit the news entirely, make use of the Fire Index, and figure out what is happening from context and casual commentary. Who cares if it's accurate or real? It's perceptions and lies and impressions all swirling around and what it will come down to in life is just the choices you made while everything was happening, which are valid no matter what you know or don't know because how could you possibly know enough ever to make a properly informed decision?

No one can. One of the reasons we are all guilty before one another, and can therefore let go.

*

One of the points in this book I'm reading now is that for behavior to change, structures need to change. It is the single greatest point of contention I have found within the text: I could not disagree more. It is precisely in the change of our behaviors based on a revaluation of our values that our lives beyond and around those structures exist. It is in the discipline and will to behave as we please, and not as we are incentivized, that our future lies.

--JL

#437

Liking the movie theater work. Perhaps I was born to be culture's most open and servile gatekeeper. 

Actually it barely seems real. Too wild not having the superhuman demanded of you. Normal, human expectations around normal, human work?

I keep expecting someone to tell me they need to pull two gruelingly physical doubles in a row or I'm fired. And instead it's like, "are you okay with sweeping up these ten popcorn kernels? I can get someone else if you're not feeling it right now, though. It's enough that you're standing there. I appreciate you."

Could I have been working here this whole time? Is this even real, here, now? What other shoe will drop, possibly from airplane height to kill me on the spot?

*

Some kid asked me if I knew how to fill a 3-compartment sink when I said I was down to wash the ten whole objects that need washing at the end of the night.

Perhaps too well, I had to tell him, suppressing real belly laughter. Never in my life have I even conceived of such an easy time at the triple sink. Astonishing. Can't believe people live like this.

*

I am grateful, awed even. But I have a lot of other feelings, too. Like, what? What?

*

Everyone is really, really nice and fun to talk with, also. WHAT? 

*

Mustn't let my guard down. Everything has its cutting edges and tragedy isn't something that only happens to strangers elsewhere. 

S'nice, though.

--JL

#436

No one's asked me why I'm not worried about generative language models scraping my work or a private school kid stealing my aesthetics to go viral on some bullshit non-website, but I'll let you in on it, dear reader. The reason is simple: things are not the same. Executives, industrialists, engineers of every description and people whose brains are too destroyed by computer concepts cannot and will not understand this, because they are uniformly not people of discernment. Everything is the same to these people; all they feel is numbers going up and solutions costing less in specific ways and by specific metrics. Their abstractions are not like my abstractions, and we feel different numbers and costs differently. My father is an engineer by training. It has always put strain on our relationship. 

Everything is the same, yes. In that existence is infinitely dimensional and separateness is an illusion. But that is not what they mean. In their terms, I must state the opposite, once more for emphasis: everything is not the same.

Synthetic chicken, chicken which must be referred to in parentheses, is not the same as chicken. Even the dream of the replicators from Star Trek do not produce real chicken, and though the very molecules may be the same as real chicken, well, it's in the name. It is a replication of real chicken and even though it is perfect, it is not the same. 

In the present tense, synthetic chicken remains and will remain an inferior product for the foreseeable future basically because it is trying to be chicken, and it can't be, and it won't be, and it will never be, no matter how good the game gets. 

If anybody had asked me what direction to take things in terms of getting people to rely on synthetic or cultured or laboratory-grown proteins--any alternative to organisms raised, harvested, and processed in the time-honored or industrialized ways--I would have told them never to get into competition by imitation.

That is a stupid fucking thing to do, but marketeers and businessfuckers never see it that way. All they see is shortcuts. They have no faith in people because they do not conceive of people as autonomous agents who deserve respect. People are simply the most high-maintenance farm animal, or a type of idiotic, oft-malfunctioning robot. A breed of fish you must motivate in specific ways if you hope to catch a great many at a time in your oversized nets.

Just sell the miracle. It's a fucking miracle that we can make proteins in a lab, proteins that will sustain even our swollen populations, proteins we can grow in space on our way to new worlds! Sell them as themselves and give them flavors and textures that are proprietary and can develop on their own trajectories! It's literally a blank canvas, a vast new continent of possibilities, schools of thoughts, experiences, realities! BLOW PEOPLE'S MINDS WITH A NEW UNIVERSE OF SUSTENANCE! BRING FORTH THE MONOLITH!!!

Instead, it must always fail at being chicken. Who the fuck eyes the situation and decides to set out to sell non-chicken, the concept of not, selling in the negative?

The mechanism is not difficult to grasp, and it's just like on Parks and Recreation: fancy turkeyburgers with classy dressings on fancy buns taste delicious until you have to compare them to beef hamburgers. Then they're fucking bullshit. To invite comparison is to detract from what a thing is or has to be on its own merits.

Generative language models will always suck at trying to be me. It's a pathetic thing to make a program to try and do and they won't ever be good at it or know why they have to try. To invite comparison between a piece I wrote and how and why I wrote it and a piece scraped from my shit and assembled off a calculated or brute-forced prompt for no valid reason? What, to convince some naif that you're a marginally decent writer? That'll hold up. 

I do not fear the results of that comparison. I do not care how teenagers try to avoid work or get laid, or how companies want to cut me out of their demonic equations. By all means! I don't want shit or fuck to do with you, either, if we're coming real. 

As for the dilution and suffusion through global culture of elements of unique, personal, underground, or outside art through the great web of influence and promotion that has come to straddle what can seem like the whole planet's worth of cultural production, I see it only as an accelerant and catalyst for a process that already existed and once again, its mechanism does not frighten or trouble me for two basic reasons: everything is not the same, and a work of art and a product might look identical, might reflect one another like mirrors, and the one might be a million versions of the other and represent it a million ways on a million objects in a million mediums but they are not the same and that is that. I like to look at a print of Da Vinci's Last Supper, knowing that the thing is a copy of a copy of a derelict due to problematic production technique used in a singular time and place meaning I don't know what the thing looked like when it was new. I still like to look at it, but it is an echo and a product and I know it. This to me speaks of both the indelible power of the original and the value and utility of the echo: both have their place in being and time. Second, that just because something gets big and ubiquitous and becomes eyesore and irritant, the next tide always comes in, and after some time in the shadows, everything looks good in the sunlight again. 

It helps if you don't gawp hard at everything hucksters gesticulate madly at. Respect your eyes.

Designers of systems and sellers of products can come together to make some pretty great, existence-altering stuff. They can also really miss the point of everything they're trying to do and do something else instead. The problem is that either process may result in success. Fake shit doesn't have to be real, it just has to work, and thus, when these language systems and sorting systems approximate the success we are looking for and even increase the numbers we wanted to increase, we think we have succeeded in making something better than real, because it's ours and we own it and we control it and we have made a difficult resource pliable and automatic.

Good job?

It'll make you the same money, but it's not the same. 

As for those of us looking to make our way in the art life, our position is fundamentally unchanged. All we can do, our duty and vocation and the pleasure and torment of our days, is simply to do as our natures call upon us to do: make what we want to make and have it look how we want it to look, sound how we want it to sound, say whay we want to say how we want to say it and never mind who gets it and who doesn't, the thing itself and message and the medium are what they are and whatever happens happens. That's something these penny-and-dime fuckers don't know how to do and it's the whole point of doing your own thing. 

Let the machine do what it does. Let the unwashed graspers have their dirty prizes. The idea that something is not real until you sell it or it makes you famous--false. Merely false. 

Fuckem. Just by doing our own thing, we engage in the holy and inimitable. The rest is just noise.

--JL

#435

Dunno. Part of me wants to take a break from posting, and feels that I'm hashing some real nothings out for these posts. Another part of me just wants to write a post, though, and who am I to break a streak even if it's just exercise? Typing feels good. Said it before and I'll type it again.

*

Scratching away with some charcoals also feels good. Just did that for a couple minutes on a whim. One of the cats made innovation and discipline impossible with her insatiable desire for pets and rubs, but I practiced my line and got into the sensation of the instrument on the paper. 

*

We are the charcoals marking the material of our lives, singular and essential elements in the mighty composition that is this infinite universe. 

--JL

#434

Currently reading Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle Chayka. Pretty good so far. Pretty apt.

As is the time-honored, factually pointless way, we present books I have read since last I spoke of it:

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, by David Rooney (this book was GENIUS, extremely should-read stuff)

Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy: II: Greater Good and III: Lesser Evil, by Timothy Zahn, Last Shot, by Daniel José Older, Shadow of the Sith, by Adam Christopher, Alphabet Squadron: II: Shadow Fall and III: Victory's Price, a High Republic comic storyline I forget about (not the story or anything, just the deets of provenance--this is the problem with library books as opposed to gathering everything unto yourself like a crazed magpie), Master and Apprentice, by Claudia Gray (without question one of the number-one Star Wars book I've ever read) probably more Star Wars books that aren't springing to mind at the moment. Dang.

Still got some of the comics I had checked out from the library plus a couple more books, those will all be next. Yes, at least one of them is a Star Wars book.

*

Let me just say that these new Star Wars books are fucking great. Fucking awesome. Some are better than others, the adultification of a couple are a little uneven and just slightly cringe, but all of them are inventive, fresh, daring, beautiful, fun, and fucking awesome. The Thrawn origins and the Alphabet Squadron trilogy were the absolute cream. 

Master and Apprentice was unbelievably pleasurable, I could barely breathe for joy reading that mother. It was pure love letter to everything I adore about prequels-era Star Wars and Star Wars as a whole (except Rebel stuff, evidently), and Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi have been my favorite Jedi for the longest time. Kanan Jarrus, Ezra Bridger, and Ahsoka Tano have more recently risen to these great heights in my heart; Legends Jedi are a whole other tier. My relatonship with Luke has always been complicated, though his greatness in both Legends and Canon is undisputable. Shadow of the Sith was an excellent bolster to his new pedigree, and I loved him in Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. He's somehow never been my favorite, but they have accomplished something remarkable with Luke Skywalker, not to mention Leia's unbridled dopeness.

Anyway! Claudia Gray's Qui-Gon is a masterpiece. A virtuso inhabiting of the character that was some of the most solid, believable, gorgeous, human writing I've ever been struck by. 

Blessings! Blessings, all of you! Dang. Gotta read 'em all, man. Gotta get my own copy of Master and Apprentice. 

*

Ok cool sure yeah I love Star Wars so much WHATEVER BYE

--JL

#433

Having to change my rhythms clock-style to achieve the necessary movements and wakefulness for work and commute--that is the great trial of moving into this new phase of employment. That and that it just doesn't really pay that much. But it gives me more time than any job before this. It's the compromise. It's ok. This is the compromise.

I have to breathe a lot with this compromise. I am uncomfortable. But this is part of growth, and this is what it means to trust yourself and the people who love you, and hope.

*

Just have to be myself about it all and do my best. That all there is.

*

With that, I think I will spend some time just breathing outside. Maybe slap one more coat of paint down before I shower. Have fun at work.

Walk and breathe and be. 

--JL

#432

Had a nice shift. Once again, totally human. The first couple hours took too long and made me feel a little claustrophobic, but as time passed I relaxed.

Spending time alone is something I crave and treasure, but it may be time to reckon with the fact that too much of it makes me strange in my head. That will involve admitting that there is such a thing as too much alone time, rather than the mindset I have always tended to exist in, which is that there is never enough alone time, that it is a precious resource to be fought for and safeguarded.

Well, it is. But meeting people and talking at their faces and having your face talked at is actually important.

Have to admit it. Aloud, too. Repeatedly. As a matter of some long-term urgency.

*

Kids really are incredibly great. They are the point of it all. Yesterday was May the 4th, Star Wars Day, a shining beacon to my people. The theater was running Phantom Menace, and some families came out with their progeny. Man, that was so fucking great to see. That gave me so much life. These kids were losing their bananas about seeing Star Wars on the big screen. I was their age when Phantom Menace dropped. It was a huge blessing to see them get to do the same all these years later, and their joy was as my joy. I also got some undecided customers to see Phantom Menace, so I have already used this position to do some public service--some good in this existence. 

Have to admit it. Have to admit it. It is important to be among people. To have encounters and relate.

To remember what this is all actually for. To keep myself sane, even if people drive me batshit a lot of the time.

*

Kinda burnt out on painting, but it's not the kind of project you can just stop. Kinda gotta finish.

Ok, ok, then. Here we go! 

Final note: ONE PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNCH

--JL

#431

Today is my first tiny shift at the movie theater! What a life. What a privilege. Easily the most bohemian employment I have ever managed to secure, except for I suppose being a folkpunk roadie, but as that was unpaid labor, it's a different tenor. Gonna work very hard to bring value to the place. 

It's too bad to be back to making kid cash, but it's what you'd expect at a nonprofit. And this limit on our shared material gain as household with the money and the hours is what I need in order to still be able to do art and wrap up school. It is a compromise in my favor that I will do my best to honor. 

Woof. It's heavy. But I'm ready. Ah, to be embarking on a new leg of the journey! Again, what a privilege.

*

Do I have elaborations on yesterday's notions? I think not today, but sometime soon. I especially want to clarify what I mean about quitting our jobs and doing whatever we want, which is a phrasing I stand by but which may require significant teasing out in order to be fully coherent.

*

More want to say that the music I have been listening to has stayed essentially on the soundtracks tip, but has also moved into various reorchestrastions in the case of the Pokémon games soundtracks, which aren't really available on the wretched phone services.

Something else I should really consider is getting back into owning the lion's share of my own digital music, even if I have to steal it. What a sham life it is, paying apple x amount over x time for an ephemeral and limited capacity to give me the infinite reach and unerring grasp I crave when it comes to condensing music from the aether. 

Look, I use the service constantly. It gives unto me. But the compomise galls. That's all I'm saying. I miss being able to play .midi files ripped from a ROM on my iPod because it was all so much looser and trickable back in the day when my skills were edgy and my hunger sharp. So what if it was illegal and is still illegal? We lead short lives. I pay many personal prices for modernity along with the many we all pay as a species and force every other organism and the very crust of this earth to pay; at the very least, I should get to play a lot of video games and listen to a lot of music. I'll give up a lot of my money for the privilege, but I will also get what I consider is fair for the asking, and I'm not gonna lie to you: it's always more than what a company is willing to offer. So be it. 

My relationship with Nintendo springs to mind. They get a lot of my money and give me to most value out of any company, in my estimation. Sue me if it's an exceptionally 1% of the planet relationship, these luxury entertainment stylz, fuck it. It's the 21st century. As I say, video games are my personal blood payment for the suff'rance I grant the durance vile of modernity. And still I want more. They should give me more. I should be granted shatterproof assurances that my digital ownerships are ironclad, the they will have my back as much as I have theirs, etc. I'm tired of talking about all of this.

Anyway 0.5: I want like a tricorder from Star Trek with all of human culture nestled safely in its databanks and room for the full cultures of a million more species plus all that other juicy dope shit a tricorder can do. Damn, that would be fucking rad. 

Anyway 1: these reorchestrations are very teh bombuh. Braxton Burks, Masters of Sound, Eric Buchholz, Skotein, to begin a long list I don't have time for. Wonderful stuff, at any rate. 

Anyway 2: electric boogaloo

Anyway 3: think this is it for me.

*

Dang man here we go, gonna take a shower put on some pants a guy's gonna give me a shirt to wear and I'm gonna stand with a person and welcome human beings into a moviegoing experience from 2-5 after a couple of hours of paperwork and orientation stuff. Ok wow. Good to have all this visualized. It's all happening. It's all coming real. Time to remember how to be a human coworker. Whoo!

--JL

#430

Forgot one of my main points yesterday, and thought to edit the post, but forgot that too. Will I remember this point before I mark the end of today's post? We shall see. It's hovering there, just out of reach--I remember the location and prevailing conditions of having the thought, and its content is tantalizingly near.

Maybe gone forever! Doesn't matter. It was a thought, and it was good. Take my word for it. You know how you have some thoughts and it's kind of like they're pitching the yaw of your brain? Like your mind is roating, revealing more of itself to the perceiver and extendng its own field of perception in one.

Our minds and bodies and spirits are ships in an endless space. Sensing phenomena, chaging direction and speed, reacting to stimuli and investigating events according to their purposes, timing, and placement in the universe. 

TAKE ME TO HYPERSPACE, GOD! TO THE BEYOND!!! far, far away, praise be

*

Hm. Yes.

What did I even write about yesterday? The scurrying of the human organism? Pathetic! Who cares. Geology is more important than that stupid chattering nonsense. 

Rocks, brethren! The rocks and stones, the mountains and gorges and continental shelves are the true protagonists. Through that lens, nothing else matters one fuck. And the story is pure, crystalline; dramatic and comedic in the highest. What could be funnier and more terrible than the collapse of a seamont that has weathered the storms of seven hundred throusand years, its supports at long last bowing to the motion of water and its pinnacles to the unchanging word of gravity? All that time standing, then a few seconds of absolute, hysterical madness, then it's over. Over almost as it began. Over in a laughably short amount of time even if it had been built in a day and stood for second day, but after seven hundred thousand years? Totally and completely hilarious. What timing! What slapstick! A new stillness reigns, a new horizon exists, another vast span of incremental change and general stability before the next punchline hits home. 

That's just a little taste, and a lot more fucking poetry than a dude spitting bullets into a crowd of innocent strangers because all governments everywhere have ruined the world and the ideas that his masters implanted within him to control his thoughts and behaviors have curdled and gone septic, at war with reality.

Well, I know which one our lords and masters want us to pay more attention to. On their terms, not mine, though. They just want to shake their heads at the unaccountable madness of this world--who could explain such a tragedy?--do some thinking and praying, and get on with maintaining the situation that created the tragedy in the first place. And they want you to want them to, which is one of their best and oldest tricks. 

We all want our fathers to do something about it when something scares or confuses us. It is his mechanism that the onanist devils who live to fuck us up keep their one hand free always in order to manipulate.

And manipulate they do.

*

It irks me more than it should, perhaps, this long line of assholes shitting on the rest of us. It irks me because I am the type to answer questions and solve problems, and the problems they have caused, the warrens they have built for themselves, the deceptions they employ tactically, their bitter, selfish chess--all of it is hard to do combat with and maintain your sense of self. Maintain, as I always come back around to, your virtue.

One cannot, must not, employ the weapons and strategies of their opponents against them in order to "do good". You just can't. Gandalf won't take the Ring. You can't either. It's very simple, but I have elaborated before and can--will--elaborate again. Strap in.

If by sheer force of personality and will, strength of character, and unimpeachability of virtue I could bring evil to halt and grind its wicked machinery to dust beneath my righteous heel, I would. And if it worked that way, I could, but it doesn't work that way, and I am not simply the best of myself, but my complete self; riddled with venalities and as corruptible and prone to losing my way as the next tiny speck of regular human being. 

To accrue enough capital to clash capital on capital is sin and folly. To play that game is to endlessly sharpen the teeth of your oppenent in the direction they want them sharpened, and you will have grown your own set of teeth, whose purpose, no matter what your intent, is to bite and masticate.

To add prestige to your voice and clash a different capital on a different capital amounts to the same. However you accrue this prestige, you have entered into a market, and the market besmirches the temple. It just does.

We let the opponent choose the time and place as well as define the terms of engagement, which they will break however they please in order to ensure victory. That is the position we have been in for all of recorded history. To be perfectly clear, the opponent--at least, my opponent is always the same twofold pair: the conqueror/master, and the parasite/hustler. These archetypes and their manifold derivations are the forces I set myself in opposition to in this world.

So. Art of War this mess. We must choose our own ground, our own timing, and define our own terms of engagement--terms which must be incomprehensible to our enemy. This may be incomprehensible to you, as well, but I'll stand by it.

Maybe it sounds trite to many ears, but I feel like it is clear and still vital: violence cannot be the answer. That is not the type of combat I am talking about. It will always breed more violence. It is a tool of the conqueror and cannot be used in defense. If physical confrontation is inevitable, is virtually impossible to avoid, then only nonlethal methods may be applied in defense and protection. 

We must never set out to kill. Never. 

The best way to engage in this conflict is to embark on a program of targeted and intelligent disenagagement. Of divestment. Of reclamation.

We quit our jobs and do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. We destroy all these clocks that press into our flesh and start time again. We stop buying so much shit from so many companies all falling over themselves to prove to you that you always need more shit and start remembering how to provide the things we legitimately need for ourselves. We raise that knowledge and spread it around as much as we can, for free. We unchain the signal. We stop suckling on the power they provide and generate our own. We cease and refuse enabling war and poverty through participation in economic systems that drive inequity and concentrates wealth and resources. We stop paying attention to their programming. We stop engaging with their websites and build our own. What the fuck is a news cycle? We don't need that shit. We stop allowing others to tell us what plants to plant, what foods to buy, what time to wake up and how much of it to give to someone who'll spend it and never even look at you on their way to their own dreams. We stop allowing them to destroy the planet in the name of our comfort and our ease by working hard enough to save it that they can't make a profit off of fucking it up anymore. We defund prisons and militaries and mechanisms of surveillance and we tear down monuments and documents that proclaim that we should fear and hate one aother for reasons of state. 

We open our hands and we let go.

We divest. We lose our money and redefine our values and our wealth and what it means to be responisble to one another and the world. We try to remember how to live as people, rather than subjects. There are billions and billions of us who would be peaceful and happy, and we burn in the fires set by the few millions who know not what they do. Needlessly. We can stop it. 

They have the momentum. But if we choose, we can create an irresistible inertia. One born not of leaders and movements but by people waking up and realizing they can be free. Freer every day. In simple, easy ways that have everything to do with doing less, fearing less, engaging less with less toxicity and drudgery. I mean why should we? So some guy can have a golden toilet? Please.

By letting go, we can walk the path of the open hand. We can remember, and therefore invent, the Way.

Final note: this is not to rail against progress. This is to jettison the misconceptions that the appeasement and deceit offered by our opponents in any way represent progress. They seek a form of suicide which they have agreed to call progress because it is useful to them. We must stop that momentum, as I said, and that will be progress enough till the time comes to direct our energies into the dream of true civilization.

*

I could elaborate even more! And I will. But not here, not today. Other tasks call.

--JL

#429

Don't know how I've suffered them this long, considering how I despise white and gray walls. The miserable--I had not realized how miserable!--gray kitchen is becoming orange. The back hall and half the living room, pale green. The other half and the stairwell, pale blue. Our bedroom and Ezra's office were already yellow and two deep tones of green, respectively. The spare room needs a color, as does my office, though the dozens of art pieces and stickers I've mounted all around are helpful. I may go with many colors. I know I will, actually. 

But that's the last priority. For now, finishing the kitchen is still the thing.

* 

Haven't talked about current events for a minute. It's a grim business, and I can do what I want, I know that--but this blog is not merely a humorist's diary or manifold spontaneous rough essay generator--and though the essays may be serious and historical, it is also not fundamentally the same as the blog's final purpose, which is to stand as something of a record of life experienced in the early blush of the twenty-first century's maturity. And that century is fucking batshit right now. The Things are Happening.

Those great, sweeping spasms history is sometimes seen to make are rippling like perhaps never before. Certainly the frequency is unprecedented, the speed of the thing.

Ok, look. Let's keep this simple. I have, in a previous post, commented on the perfect timing of the terrorist attack on Israel which has developed as it has, with every eye on the planet and the thing's gravity warping reality. The domestic side of that was the particular thrust of that comment, and that is what has played out most predictably, though Speaker Johnson's recent actions bucked the trend and are worth honorable notice. Nevertheless, the public demostrations and the reactions they have provoked at every level of our society are the crux of the matter, and that shit is spinning out of control and veering into the kind of unreason that anticipates martial law. With a dictator in the wings literally base at the ready and demonstrated influence over politics as they are happening, nothing could be more dangerous.

Basically, the soft power instruments leveled at the U.S. as early as 2009 and heavily beginning in 2012 are beginning to look as though their long-term efficacy is accomplished fact. The country may devolve and lose its standing in international affairs as well as its domestic stability and even political cohesion. Tech companies will only accelerate these multipolarizations because cooperation with competing interests will guarantee the kinds of influence and privileges they crave. This will cascade globally. Private security of every description will see booms in every sector as paranoia and uncertainty reign amidst increasingly chaotic and unchecked brigandry, governmental overreach, and prisonification. The nomad may once again rise to prominence in global affairs, realizing Deleuzian prophecy. Meanwhile the climate will collapse and the deaths of hundreds of millions will open terrain, change the tenor of migration, colonization, and land use priorities completely.

The crazy part is, some people's lives won't change at all. They'll just keep going to the store, I guess. If we survive in general, it probably won't even slow population growth that long or even noticeably.

Life do go on. No one knows what time has in store for them. All that I have said could well be baloney.

Baloney! I love that corruption.

*

All I can really do is make art and try to survive. It has worked so far. I shall stay the course. And after all, plants grow in the cracks between massive concrete slabs. Always there is hope. Always there are those hundreds and thousands of seeds spread by each step of the sower in the great field, and only one out every so many millions needs to take root and bloom.

--JL

#428

Reflecting on the nature of bonds, their function in life and the spooling out of events in the universe. 

Had to type that with a blind cat hanging from my pants by her front claws. The nature of our bond and the nature of my bond with the keyboard in those moments was in tension. All I could do was move my legs and hips as much as possible for her while continuing to type. Only when the sentence was complete could I unhook her and give her some pets.

Atomic bonds. Chemical bonds. Blood binds. Oaths sworn.

Trust.

Yes, everything is built on bonds. Everything depends on them.

*

Thinking back all of a sudden to when I was a kid and my dad would pose me engineering and physics questions my teachers wouldn't be pestering me with for years yet. They were usually practical and to do with something right in front of us. I was thinking of one regarding water tanks and cubic pressure. The inquiry was never about actual numbers, which is useful for getting my cooperation. I'm not busting out the slide rule on a basic day. It was about visualizing and applying one's mind to the problem; about cultivating both x-ray vision and precognition. 

If your vision is clear and penetrating and your thoughts lucid, your estimations will not lead you too far afield. What are the factors? Variables? Limits? Terms? Conditions? Sets? You look at a giant pile of dirt and think about what it would take to move it. You look at a giant pressurized tank at a refinery and guess about the stress capacities. 

What are the chronometric concerns? Why does it work? Which part would you have had to build first? Generally any one question would lead to several corollary or supporting questions, perhaps leading to the actual question that was the eventual point of the first question.

Guess this is why anytime anyone anywhere asks a question within earshot, my first instinct is to rush and provide my idea of a good and useful answer. A function of my programming. Interesting.

I think I would make a splendid analysis droid. I don't even have to care about this stuff or the answers in order to wonder and generate estimates, and indeed I do not. Just a brain reflex. I rarely give it my full attention.

*

Ok man. I'm reading a book about clocks and wanna get back to that. More painting! Infinite painting! I'll be painting and sanding and painting again into July, maybe. Hilarious.

Peace!

--JL