#463

Woof! Maturation. Living in history. Sharing space with a crazy imbalance of new souls vs. old souls or whatever. 

It's like. Can I get stronger drugs? Gotta get through this. Find myself wanting stronger drugs so badly that my usual drugs aren't even dragging me out of bed. Only video games and a full bladder.

*

What the fuck, man. I hate that. Hate piloting around this self-heating skinful of blood and slime and keratin that doesn't have the sense to only want good things. It has to want horrible vile things too.

And thus! Factually Macabre, twenty twenty four.

More specifically, I am here drawing on a deeper definition of angst than is usually flippantly applied to the tormented, but. I guess in English it reads across the concepts.  

*

Have you noticed? That I am trying something new with periods and using more fragments? I dunno. Might not stick.

*

Maybe it's just how I feel today, this here post, in this, the month of the octopus.

That's how I've always felt, anyway. Also that October should be the eighth month, and that it is not is one of the things about calendars that serves as fundament to my chronovertigo.

Is my chronovertigo a chronic condition, you ask? Man, why don't you shut your fucking mouth. Jesus.

*

Doctors are terrible for many reasons. One of  them is their wretched imprecision, especially around language. Oh, sure, the Greek and Latin are straightforward and mean exactly what they sound like--typically. The English and Spanish, less so, and that's as far as my personal knowledge stretches, though many translated doctors also seem to suffer from this terrible disrespect for straightforward use of common tongue. More flagrant are the more recent linguistic conventions and innovations, and it is these I speak of when I say that doctors are shameless and disgusting word criminals. Language perverts, who attack not only words and sentences, but the concepts they are meant to enshrine. 

Every fucking god damn condition that exists is a chronic condition. It starts and ends, either after x time or because death cured every problem you ever had. Without a doctor there to "explain", if you were told you had a chronic condition, you would have to ask if you were somehow sick in the time, or if time had done something to you or harmed you somehow (it has), or if you were permanently sick like a vampire is sick and you will endure like an impossibly dense stone of disease plunging through the liquid suspension of interminable ages, or if the fucking illness would come at you every Thursday at five p.m. on the dot and would call ahead if anything should change day of, and would stay precisely thirty-seven hours per stretch--so, out with my bags at six every Sunday, darling. Next week. Ta!

Chronic illness describes nothing. And their given definition? Some shit, anything, that lasts from three months to the rest of your life. Ok, cool. So it's at least potentially like it sounds, depending on what you heard. And what is to be done? Well, don't go throwing clocks at anyone. Also rubbing a clock on the affected area will not affect the progression of the disease, though it may while away the hours. Kills time, anyway.

Starting to feel like I've lost control of this idea. Time to cut the cord.

*

So. All that aside, what's creepy today? 

Well, I dunno what's not creepy about being consigned to an existence where you can wake up sick one morning and it doesn't go away for the rest of your life no matter what you or anybody else thinks to try or does at all.

In addition, I have vaguely referred to the very real situation that a class of people--moneyed people, people with power and education and various brands of clout--exists who demand and are given access to our bodies through various social and governmental mechanisms. These people have created a fully armed, operational, and ingrained set of mores and durable material realities resulting in that we trust them with our very lives, and they do whatever they fucking want to us. They swear an oath to do real good with your body, but never since the dawn of time have we been more aware that oaths are maybe just words, and words are just wind, and we see every single day on a neverending loop that people have no problem using any word to rationalize any deed. And indeed, just like anyone else, doctors rape, cheat, lie, obey power's terrible and insane commands through apathy or turpitude or terror, steal, fall prey to hubris, dodge responsibility, and in their special capacities try and have you take insanely dangerous and addictive drugs, or cut you open even though they don't need to, and expose you to  you might never know what shit. Because they can. And if you think I am being an asshole, just look it up. Look up some real-ass, classic, juicy bits of medical malpractice history. Are you perhaps aware of the case of the Tuskegee Airmen?

Now, a brain surgeon has to swear not to fuck your actual brain tissues up on purpose if they go in there guns blazing as they do. And if they should happen to anyway? They can be sued. Now, the fuckers that go in there and screw around without a knife? The one everyone in society tells you to go spill your guts out every single week to for the rest of your life so that they know you in a way no other person on this planet knows you, and if you don't, there's something wrong with you? They don't have to say jack shit, basically, and they are way, way harder to deal with in court. In general. Unlike most doctors, nearly every psychologist knows how to talk to people.

In the end, however, these two types of people are fully complemented only with a third type: that thing which will allow itself to be called a lawyer, and act in such a capacity.

Man. I know this opinion is unpopular, but these three professions should be some untouchable caste shit. Fuck these people. In their modern hyperextensions, that is, where every human activity that has ever served us has been warped and corroded into something that hurts us.

An experienced healer, a powerful shaman, and a wise keeper of rules walk into a bar and are instantly murdered by a doctor, a psychologist, and a lawyer. Rimshot.

*

One final creepy thing about existence that I already said (the point that kicked us off proper): we are stuck in these bodies.

Do you hear me? We are stuck in these bodies.

We cannot get out. 

Death is no guarantee--only a chance.

--JL

p.s. look alright I apologize to all the execrably litigious people I have reduced to the absurd today it is a bad habit that I indulge in to keep my perspectives flexible and it is my particular affliction that I am goaded to flex the perspectives of others through doing word jazz but in the end I believe all people are fundamentally good and should not be loathed for doing their stupid asshole jobs or being grownups instead of being adults

quit your jobs though and stop being grownups what the fuck

BONUS CREEPSHOW: Final apropos of doctors: they know that what I am about to say is true--we are on the bleeding, verging cusp of some true life mad scientist shit. That Chinese dude CRISPRing some little girls to life was just the quickly subdued first spasm of a motherfucker showing up with something no one now living is truly prepared to report on as fact, but will change our ideas of the possible and the permissible irrevocably till the end of our culture, perhaps our species.

Also ideas are creepy in that--did you see? I cut the cord, and it came crawling right back to take over my brain with undiminished and perhaps increased fervor.

Ideas, you see, are not things we are really in control of and should probably take less credit for. Ideas have their own shit going on, their own physics and appetites.

Like...ghosts.

#462

Internet has been colonized and fucked into the ground, its vital natural resources stripped and refashioned into shitty engineering. Just like meatspace. And just like meatspace, even though everything--everything except people and their perishable works, I guess, so you better try hard to like hominids and their fucking antics--yes, though absolutely everything that was once good and beautiful in the life of this planet is currently diminished and dying, there are still ways to have a good day and see some cool stuff, if you're lucky.

I think myself lucky because again, even in this benighted, grasping age, I can go online and just lose about an hour just looking at valid information about things that make sense, like about a specific genus of tarantula, or the longest-running light bulbs in the world (wikipedia rabbit holes) and clicking around to websites about endangered species and materials science newsposts and blogs about information as a self-organizing principle that uses complex phenomena as both vehicle and life cycle--the ark of the covenant, if you will.

Anyway. Glad I'm not so old and broken that I'm not actively down to spend some time following curiousity sparks around the infinite corridors of time.

*

Beat Final Fantasy XII, which was just a regular story until all of a sudden it was full on Final fuckin Fantasy and the tears were streaming down my face as I breathed deeply and irregularly. Wow. I mean it was fucking amazing. Beautiful. Astonishing decision to bury almost all the payoff deep in the third act, all the buildup and rising tension so casual and masked in the long long hours of the grind and tinker. But when that game is ready to reveal its flourish--none are left standing. We all must bow our heads to what is on offer here. To what is being said, and how it came to be spoken.

Put it away in single digits over a hundred hours, about when I just wanted to stop doing endgame side content, which seems good for another twenty hours at least. So that's seven through twelve, with XIII, XII: Revenant Wings, X-2, replaying VII: Dirge of Cerberus (maybe), VII: Crisis Core Reunion, and I through VI on deck. Maybe that chibi version of XV. Oh, maybe Legend and that other one. Should I add the Mana series? I was also thinking about the Dragon Quest series.

However, all that stuff has to wait, because I got and will have to beat The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which is absolutely phenomenal--and I can say the basic reason why very simply. Link is a perfect hero with only one flaw: though he has access to spells and magical items and techniques aplenty in his capacity as the all-rounder of all all-rounders, because of this wonderful, apt-to-the-hand sphericity, Link is not a wizard. He couldn't just be a wizard. However! Princess Zelda has all the conceptual space in the world to be a wizard, ample precedent in fact, and thus, we have--at last--a Zelda game where you get to do a bunch of crazy fucking wizard shit and bonkers magical manipulations that Link can but wistfully dream of.

And even that is sort of in a holding pattern on the way to the second main area part in the quest because the other game I started playing for a palette cleanser after five full Final Fantasy games in a row is Unicorn Overlord which, well. It's absurd is what it is. Keep forgetting to eat, and I'm done wasting time here--gotta go play Unicorn Overlord right goddamn now.

--JL

p.s. for today's Factually Macabre 2024 feel free to consider that real-life grownups expose their own children to grasping pedophiles for secondhand fame and easy money. Well, for the concept of those things. Not even the promise of them.

That's pretty good, right? I don't know if I can come up with much worse. Child soldiers. Internment camps. The kind of cheap, cut-rate, shoe-polish-stinking dirty linoleum corruption that's barely worth remarking upon until its logical cosequences string out to an environmental disaster or a case of mass poisoning, with like enormous blistering lumps growing on the necks of schoolchildren and a whole entire neighborhood of babies with brain damage and dead dogs and cats and tall cancer rates for two decades. That's macabre. 

Oh, you mean like pumpkins and bats and candy-apple shits? Scooby-Doo? I dunno. That stuff's fine if you work for a marketing company that is jointly owned by a holding company whose controlling share is owned by a petroleum giant, and a food conglomerate owned by a company owned by an agricultural conglomerate that owns a separate company that owns about seventy percent of the all the corn grown in North America and, somehow, all the sugar cane on this side of the planet. But that's not what I'm talking about. Unless I am.

p.p.s. We didn't do ghosts today. I am, however, fairly haunted, so there is at least that. Ghosts soon.

#461

Returning to the subject of skeletons (yes! yes! Factually Macabre 2024 continues!), perhaps nothing is so iconically and universally used to symbolize the fearful and gruesome aspects of death itself, though it is in actual fact essential to life, part of a living body, and is merely the most enduring of a certain kind of organism's structure. A human skull should no more symbolize death and evoke fear than a seashell, or a dead leaf. 

And yet it does.

Skeletons could never hurt you, unless they were indeed animated by dark magicks or the like. They cannot in actuality hold themselves up. It's not merely a matter of nothing attaching the joints and bones themselves--the very cohesion we grant a skeleton, its human shape, is a human conceit, a deception. A skeleton is a pile of useless junk. The parts are nothing without the life of the whole. Bones do not support themselves just to make a shape, they are parts of how a leg is, they hold suspensions in a stasis, they change densities and temperatures throughout the course of a day, they are affected by the physics of the tendons and the unceasing contraction and relaxation of the muscle fibers. A skeleton does not walk; it floats. It is not wired together or marionetted like a puppet, it is flowing and falling and breathing and mostly water, and the dried-out husk that lives in the human imagination brimming with jealousy and evil intent is nothing more than persistent minerals reminding us that no one grows too old, and it really is no big deal.

And yet it is.

For some reason, most of us shudder. And indeed, given everything I have just said, to witness a skeleton standing on its own? Would shit myself instantly. I have destroyed probably hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million skeleton enemies in video games and I have trained my mind and spirit to welcome death as a release and an adventure, and still, in present tense and living color, a skeleton would freak my whole composure to pieces. 

Thankfully, they can be summarily destroyed. Not like a fucking ghost.

*

Ghosts next time? I'm thinking ghosts next time.

--JL

#460

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024

WILL MURDER YOU IN YOUR FANCY CAR

AS PUNISHMENT FOR YOUR LUST FEELINGS

*

A friend of mine reads new books; that is to say, almost entirely writers and trends that have surfaced not only this millenium, but the few years surrounding whatever screaming NOW we happen to inhabit should we bring the matter up again. A current reader, a reader of trends. I read new books, yes, but as anyone who reads this blog knows, a) I am into too many things at once to try to keep up with everything happening at the bleeding edge of anything, and b) my requirements even within the book spectrum are too omnivorous and exploratory to be satisfied by this model at all; I am as avidly curious about old books and dead people as I am about who the most interesting living writers are and what they're up to, according to my own metrics. Finally, c) things like books on tikkle tokkle and the best sellers on the argmazon merketplorg mean less than nothing and in fact anything that thrives in such an environment must penetrate my most virulent antibodies and craggy, hardened carapaces.

I am aware that I myself have had products on sale on the ahrizon mellscapelace, but they could never have succeeded in such an environment. I'd hoped to sell a few books more or less on terms I could live with and a few--a laughable handful--is exactly what I accomplished. 

Anyway. The horror stories that they read and send passages of in the group chat seem mostly horrifying in how they are written rather than their subject matter, and in this they achieve levels which must be understood as pure evil, though nothing like the spiritual corruption and total abandonment of human feeling and standards of personal quality on display in the "erotica" and "fantasy" I am exposed to in this way. 

These doses act very like inoculation. If I didn't see shit like that for ten years and then got blindsided by it? I might have a heart attack and fucking die. I might snap right then and there, on the goddamn spot like a sick cartoon, unrecognizable. Shitting pissing nutbag lose my grip and start gnawing on the nearest human face. 

So if I let this person administer tiny doses of lethal toxins, I can continue to live in this world, and try to understand the people I was born to share it with.

*

They got gross shit, these horror books, sure. Revolutionarily gross maybe, stuff that sure, traditional publishers would not acknowledge a market for--perhaps wisely, perhaps not. Not for me to say, though my basic stance on traditional publishers is that they are scorpions trying to cross a river. But they--the stories--are not, at the same time, exactly, what I would forthrightly call books. They are long-form pieces of writing, yes. People read them, this is true. However everyone knows that all kinds of evidence about the given duckness of a thing does not necessarily equate to a thing being a duck, conventional wisdom notwithstanding. Guess what: we live in an age where we have to discard a bunch of that shit, and rediscover much that has been forgotten or erased. So it goes.

Oooooh, graphic descriptions of skinning a penis like taking a sock off a foot. Am I talking about the horror or the erotica? Yes.

Dang, groundbreaking. The year two thousand and two AIM'd; they want their basic flame war threats back.

*

So boring. I know, nestled deep in the folds of the great beast's hide, great books struggle for air and will die smothered, some of them so scary that it's probably a good thing that no one will ever read them.

*

Still haven't watched the theatrical run movies I been meaning to! This is not optimal, especially re: The Substance. I just want to stay home and play video games real bad, is all, and there's always chores to do. The days go by how the days go by.

And then you die. Maybe in the room you're reading this post in. Maybe in the bathroom. Maybe somehwere you never could have guessed. What will your last thought be? I'm trying to get my house so that if it happens here, no matter where I happen to be within its envelope, I have interesting and beautiful colors and shapes and objects to look at and trigger my last thoughts. Something hopefully semicoherent, towards the ecstatic; something poetic and complete into and of itself that places the kind of punctuation I could marvel at and laugh with after all is said and told and told again. 

REMEMBER EVERY DAY THAT YOU GONNA FUCKING DIE

MEMENTO GOD DAMN MORI

PEACE

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024

--JL

#459

Alright, alright, I'm beginning to adjust to being a MANager again. The heavy investments, in time and currency, I have made towards video games have leavened the portion and granted me the necessary rise.

Boy, I'd hate to find out what full-bore description of maniac I would be without video games. The government would no doubt have me developing something gruesome, conceptually or experimentally. Or I would be a priest. It's hard to say with me, with the past, with the might-have-beens and probablies.

With the priest thing, I do not visualize the kind that messes with anybody but definitely the kind that drinks too much and turns up dead. At least, from the vantage point of the phenomenon I am in this universe, in this iteration, that is the kind of thing it is easy for me to imagine. We are all of course one of infinite versions of ourselves, including infinite shadow doppelgangers we barely dare and perhaps cannot imagine, let alone confront.

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It's a good month to entertain spooky, twisted, maladroit, and outright horrifying notions. And what better way to celebrate this quirk of the human mind than by doing a thing here on the ole blog? Let us enjoin a brash and rousing session of 

FACTUALLY MACABRE

2024

yessssssss

*

One rather feels that, with the consideration of real beings, real persons, invaders from another universe whose familiarity to you and with you is as absolute as their proclivities and appetites and attitudes are abhorrent to you, I have already completed the mandate for the day. But perhaps we can drive our scalpel deeper, and observe how marrow will issue from a cut in living bone.

*

Haven't watched The Substance yet, but I'm gonna! Before it leaves theaters, I will do this thing. My buddy almost passed out! To lose consciousness right in a movie theater; imagine.

*

I will also watch the second Joker and F.F. Coppola's Megalopolis by F.F. Coppola. All of these viewings will take place near the end of the run of the film, maybe on or close to the same day I bet. 

Also I would like to see The Wild Robot,

*

We're gonna roll Akira this month at the old theater. Gotta catch that shit; never seen it on the big screen. If that is not factually macabre piece of art, man, I dunno. I guess the scope of "macabre" is to a certain extent whatever you decide it is, so "macabre" might define a fairly narrow band of light. I think of it more like a vein of substance that runs through many different sedimental layers and types of bedrock, and is component to many alloys and composites. 

*

Oh, skeletons. Yes, the simple skeleton is macabre, natural and of a piece with something as basic as shitting or eating or having sex. One does use one's skeleton for all these things, after all. Don't you ever think about that? The way your skeleton looks underneath it all, as you wait in the elevator with a bunch of other flesh-sheathed, organ-laden skeletons? As you grind your flesh into the flesh of another in the heat of passion, do you imagine two skeletons having come together to perform a bizarre mummery in which they pretend to but never quite touch? 

How ridiculous your skeleton looks as you fuck. As you wipe your ass. You fool! Cover that thing up!

*

Cool. Cool. Some food for thought, eh? I mean. Some maggots to devour your brain even as you stumble from horror to horror here on

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024 

--JL