#515

Post 515! Well, well, well. There is so much to say about this number! Other shit be on my mind, though, so I shall content myself with saying the information that 5:15 is a good Who song. That would be The Who, whomst I am reffering to.

*

Like within a comic strip, there is information in and about a blog that ought to be needlfully repeated if the blog is to be sensible to the reader by executing an internal logic. In my pointless yet extremely zestful quest for as much variety as I can fit into a given canvas or tapestry or tesselation or composition, whatever (did you know that I have painted the walls of my house ten different solid colors, and that I have chucked and brushstroked like twenty different paints at a good chunk of the walls I left white? Man, I hate a bland sameness and a canvas you're "not supposed to touch") I may not provide enough reemphasis on important things. 

In brief, it seems to me that I do not reaffirm my own internal logic enough in this space.

I was thinking about that because I was wondering seriously, once again, if I might not be completely insane, off my chain and my rocker and a complete stranger to sense, in particular sense that is good or utile. I don't really believe so, but man, also, I cannot make sense of this world, and checking my impressions against the common logic does not provide me with comfort or surety of any kind.

*

But whatever! The rules of making Factually Pointless are this:

• A post, once begun, must be either posted or discarded within 24 hours, unless I am working on a special project that went wrong. Special projects are subject to the same constraint if they go well, but I reserve the right to hold back certain elements of special projects when needful, such as the infamous Cutting Room Floor post. A good example of projects that went well and produced each of its posts within 24 hours are all the special projects undertaken last year: Factually Masculine, Factually Sportsmanlike and the Videos Game Saga. Also Factually Musical 2023.
• After I hit post, I have 48 hours to make content edits, cuts, and additions. After that, the post is final, unless I missed spelling errors or admit to myself that my syntax got completely out of control. I type a lot of words correctly, so I try not to be ashamed, but I find spelling errors all over the place even back to the first one hundred posts, which have been subject to this type of aftercare probably a dozen times. The problem, according to science, is that I already know what it says, so my brain just openly tricks me about what my eyes are seeing. Truly needling.
• Very occasionally I will give myself permission to add postscripts, or more than one, to a post. Sometimes this is because the last part of the post simply calls for one and it is part of the original post and other times I am formally making the exception and postscripting days or years after the fact, though these are, I think, usually labeled "edit" for clarity. Hopefully all of them, but I may have slipped. 
• I can't just go deleting posts even if I come to think they are ghastly and irresponsible. The blog is meant to be a type of record; it should thus be honest about my missteps, rashness, illogical conclusions, excessive  candor, terrible jokes, resolution-breaking, tantrums, and splits with reality.
• Read the disclaimer! It is on the sidebar, labeled Nutritional Facts. Over there →→→→→
• This blog has disclaimers for a fucking reason. I am a truly confused man who has read far more books and internet than is healthy for a brain and played way too many videos game hours completely alone. I started out pretty weird, became truly ruined, and you should absolutely not take my word for anything, no matter how compelling I am--verify, dammit, consider but do not just swallow. I would also like to not be rejected out of hand, but if you must pick one, go with the latter, even if it infuriates me when my ego is waxing. Also go ahead and remember that I am a dry alcoholic that has hallucinated extensively using chemicals and fungi and I smoke way too much weed. This can sometimes agitate my paranoia, as is well-known.
• It is difficult to tell the difference between my jokes, my hyperbole, and my seriousness. This is by design, and it makes everything more difficult for the reader, but this ambiguity is important. All honest thought requires negative space and admittance to ignorance, uncertainty, and doubt. Sometimes something is a joke one day and deadly serious the next, or different readers take different jokes and imperatives from the same screed. Thought is wobbly stuff, and that is to the good, I think--but all the more reason to READ THE DISCLAIMERS. Also if it is any consolation living with my own mercurial nature and mindset can cause extreme complications on my end, and I try to give you the least painful version of that experience. Usually. Sometimes I'll just straight up tell you that God fucked up making the universe and human beings in particular, and sometimes I'll just straight up tell you that it is perfect with every quark in its place and unfolding exactly as it should. Both are true and false. Every time you wake up, you are a new person in a new world, or everything is exactly the same. Etc.
• Special note about current events posts: they are the bane of this blog and the cross I bear in this life. I hate them and I hate the compulsion to even think about the things that form their genesis, let alone actually writing them out. It is a dark and fucked up evil twin to my love for history, and I formally apologize for it and for all its vile waste product. I constantly say that I am done making them, and I try, folks, but let me formally apologize in advance for the seemingly inevitable future ones. 

*

There, that felt necessary! Happy 515. I think it fits the theme. Whatever that might be.

We are done here, and I am going to go listen to Who songs as I play video games until a tree guy comes over so I can show him how bad these other tree guys fucked up my oak tree and he can tell me how much it will cost me for him to try and ameliorate the damage.

Boy, I need that new computer! I need a new computer. Couldn't we all use a new computer?

--JL

#514

Man, probably I have written everything I know into this blog twice, but I could do it for the rest of my life and not run out of different ways to say it, plus there is the living process of gaining and losing and regaining knowledge/enlightenment only to lose it again ad nauseum, plus there are functionally infinite ideas, events, and cultural artifacts to discuss, accompanied by true life stories I could tell every single day and never catch up to myself before I had to punch my ticket. I can think of about ten stories I could bang out about me real quick. This is not to brag--how will I ever stop?

Maybe I don't stop. Maybe this is the self-imposed metier for the rest of my span. I mean, I guess that's what being a writer is. 

Maybe I'll just do one immediately because my fingers are itching. GO!

*

Me and the boys were out doing parkour downtown. Hell yeah. Fourteen years old, four motherfuckers with nothing to prove except we don't give a fuck and we're not scared to prove it. Qualifiers abound--but not where we would admit them even to ourselves. That is what makes teenagers dangerous like a pack of coyotes but brittle like burnt sugar. We leaped and vaulted, tucked and rolled, climbed shit we absolutely were not supposed to and took a specific flavor of ownership over everything we gazed upon.

Indeed, activities like this are not frowned upon because they are dangerous--except by moms. The Man doesn't give a fuck if you die, though of course he prefers to turn a tidy profit from the affair, e.g., it is a noble thing for a soldier to rape and kill for massive profits (not theirs; The Man's, just to be clear) until they would be so good as to die, that is what The Man likes best. A soldier is a good example because the worst thing a soldier can do, in the mind of The Man, is not die.

He gives a fuck about three things: having power and making sure people who don't act like they understand it and accept it; the ideal situation is for them to love it, love him for having it and for using it how he pleases: thus is he motivated to loosen his fist and let flow a dribble of honey to the favored. The third thing is to feel, even fleetingly, even the suggestion, that his power is false and all it takes to break it is to simply laugh and ignore him, to act as though he does not exist, and this is sensible: The Man is contingent on belief in him, and his power and his money are a lie our ancestors trapped us in by believing in him and feeding him and letting him live in our homes and our minds. 

Certain Men in public life would probably fucking straight-up stroke out and die if someone were to ignore them just right.

So it was only to add savor to our feelings of sheer selfhood and bounteous, free-breathing free-ass freedom when some apoplectic motherfucker in a shirt with cuffs and a collar tucked into beige pants came out of an air-conditioned building where he wears a figurative diaper all day to scream that we weren't allowed and he was gonna call the cops. We laughed and ran away in such a fashion that neither he nor many cops could match--our bodies processed our oxygen intake far more efficiently than theirs, even if they ran every day, we were effortlesstly flexible, and our athleticism was under the command of sharp, undulled senses and greasy-quick stimulus reflex in a way that even as I type this, basically can't remember. Have stayed fit and gotten lot stronger, but I could never in ten thousand years try to catch my fourteen-year old self doing parkour. Would be absolutely concussed to try. Anyway the screamer was a horizontal creature and we fled in three dimensions, but indeed, only to prove to him real quick that he could not catch us if he tried.

Shortly after this incident we were running by a hedge that ran in a square around a grassy gap. The hedge was trimmed above my hip level and was about three feet wide. Figured I could do it and rode the impulse, looked before I leaped, cleared the hedge no touch forward flip and did a forward roll onto the grassy enclosure. The boys hooted appreciatively without pausing their stride, but I had seen something out of the corner of my eye during my roll that gave me hard pause. As I bound to my feet, I took in fully the half-meter vertical closed iron waterpipe pipe sticking up, which I had rolled right next to, having missed it completely in my assessment glance. 

Well, it was a glance, you see.

Spent about another forty seconds studying its placement relative to my action and satisfied myself that if I had taken another pace or two before jumping, that pipe had a real decent chance of hurting me very badly; I would even confidently say that I would have brought the entire weight of my body headfirst straight onto it and been hashing out the reality of my "free-ass freedom" and its various implications with St. Peter.

As I caught up with my friends I studied my body's reaction to having come so close to death just having some fun, and chalked it up as a natural wink from the yawning vastness of the nonbeing that birthed me and to which I shall return one fine day. Which is to say that like a good monkey I laughed it off and kept playing in the sun.

But like a cold tooth lodged somehwere in the brain, that moment and that knowledge have been a part of everything ever since; a dense lozenge of slow-release maturation that even now glints at me from the depths.

*

Factually Pointless may suffer an interruption of service, but I don't know when or if, really. All I know is that this man right here needs a new computer.

So anyway Peace! Love! Peace and Love on this Planet Earth! Other planets too! Any and all of them, really! I am the laughing monkey, and I turn away and leap into the sunshine! We are all going to die, some sooner, some later! ULTREIA, HOSSANA, PAX DEI, TERRA ET CAELUM

--JL

#513

So! The fuckin pope died. Made it to one last Easter after a dramatic wind-down, faced down one last daemond on that sacred day, and punched his ticket the morning after. As my friend Valentine quoth, "too plot-heavy."

Plot weight is essentially the main reason the Roman Catholic Church can claim it is the one true church though, and every time something like this happens, the mystic power only grows. It is banal at this point. 

It's a pope post! Don't read my blog. Factually Pointless is not kidding about its title.

*

My big takeaway from Francis' papacy is that I didn't appreciate him enough when he was alive. Another terrible cliché. Yet indeed, behold: it is so. He was just a guy, only a dude, simply a man, as well as a pope. 

He was as much my pope, representative of me and who I am and what my values and hopes are, for this world and for the church, as I had any right to hope or expect in this or any lifetime to date, and I acted entitled to him. Acted as though his humility and self-effacement was a given at best, a hypocrisy or smokescreen at worst, and I doubted his commitment to the full scope of our shared humanity and his willingness and his ability to do the job as, in my arrogance, I believe it should be done. The fact that he was not superhuman, was not able to flex his muscles and with one swift gesture put asunder the entire hierarchy and establish peace and justice for all on this world, I interpreted as failure, and I turned my nose up at him.

But it's just a job, done by a guy. As one experienced in dealing with murderous, autocratic regimes and not getting his ass poisoned or shot, he navigated the treacherous whirlpools and breakers of being a pope. He made mistakes, but he was as much the pope he set out to be as the realities of this world allow for, when nothing would have been easier than to settle into a the most luxuriant possible retirement while momentum and the will of others took care of everything. 

Important to remember that a pope, if such is is his whim, can literally eat food all day long. If the pope wants to golf or look at fine art all damn day and let a couple of their favorite cardinals be pope, it is wholly within their power--moreso perhaps than any other worldly power, the pope has the power to let Jesus take the fuckin wheel. I mean, look at all the pedophiles. These guys don't get in because the church loves pedophiles. They get in because motherfuckers don't bother to make absolutely sure they don't. And it's not possible to get them all out at once because sometimes if you use knives instead of chemo you would cut a person into quivering chunks instead of curing their cancer. It seems like the same, but it is not the same. 

So. Much more could be said, but concentrating on the main takeaway. The whole time the best pope of my lifetime and maybe the most authentically Christian pope ever, like ever, like having popes is unchristian actually but here we are, getting away from but bringing it back to me being an asshole about it, and only now that he is gone do I see the miracle.

Typical. It really is just basic. This just goes to show that I probably would have started worshipping a golden farm animal in the few hours Moses was up the mountain. Sad!

*

Now it seems to me like the big historical question is whether we will get one pope in the Vatican and one pope in Washington by executive order, Henry VIII-style, or the next pope is such an asshole we all just settle down and go about our other business, secure in the knowledge that the church serves power and is absolutely irrelevant otherwise, as is correct and proper and easy to digest.

*

Happy Pope Remains Dead Day 2 or whatever it is. Rest In Peace Francis, you were alright and I love you and I'm sorry in my heart I was mean to you in thought and spoken word and in writing too. It is down to my childishness and hubris, and I will once again work on my humility and sublimation of ego in hopes of being a better person than the one who keeps thinking that the work ever ends or that the world has solutions instead of being God's perfect infinite story.

Do wish I'd written you that letter. Though it may be for the best that I did not.

Book of Job! Book of Job! PAX INFINITUM

--JL

#512

Feeling better. No time to deliver a post today, but I did want to indicate that this had developed.

It can be said that things got a whole lot worse before they got better--as is often the case, in my experience, but one does forget. And bless this forgetting, for how else would existence be possible?

Anyway. Happy Easter tomorrow, Christ is risen, the infinite universe makes equals of us all, holy, holy, fuck yes, hail Mary, hail Satan, hail the infinite light that radiates infinite light while losing nothing of its radiance and nothing of its completeness, that Flame Imperishable.

I love you all, even those who would destroy me. 

--JL

#511

Thought of the day, related to the last post:

Consciousness is a disgusting, inheritable disease. The idea that a "higher order" of consciousness infected us with this abortive, flawed operating system is as perfectly reasonable as any other irreperably underinformed notion that our finite and completely maladaptive code generators are capable of manifesting, and the intervention of alien species as reasonable as the idea of a surveilling creator-god or pantheon. This smorgasboard of illusion holds up generation after generation because one of the symptoms of our shared illness is to see that the collective mass of interacting symptoms plays out like a big horrible perfect shakespeare play if you happen to have a comfortable balcony seat, or can imagine one, as our diseased and overburdened brains are wont to do. 

Fucking goddamn things'll imagine fricking anything. Plus, because they are lazy on top of everything else that is wrong with them--cuntivorous and cocktivorous to the detriment of the psyche and the species, for instance--they will tend to repeat what they have seen before. So everything is still full-blown animal shit, even though by nature of iterating complexities and fractal growth it seems very different to the casual observer.

"Of course I am not a monkey! Look at my top hat! The top hat is a symbol--it shows that I am smart and beautiful, a god! I made a machine to think for me and solve all my problems because I am so smart and industrious! I am sure I did a good job because, see above, I am not a monkey! I am smart and beautiful, a god! I have the fanciest hat! I will repeat this, not quite the same way, until I die! And my children will repeat after me!"

Concussively stupid. Draining. Worse, I've written it before.

But I can save myself labor, if that's what interests me. There exists one convenient term to encapsulate all this: farce.

Utter farce.

*

Must be very tired--things must be bad--because readers have actually checked in, concerned, that something worse than usual is wrong with me. 

Maybe. Thoughts of the day, related to my well-being in the here and now:

The farce has me down, and I am not in an accepting mode. Resentful of my impending desctruction, even though there is not one single solitary thing that I can do to avoid it and retain my selfhood, which is the only real possession I have--without it I am nothing. This seems obvious, but think about it. Maybe it was true for you and you already gave up the ole self-ghost a long time ago, just kept on doing stuff because everybody does stuff all the time and they incessantly bray that it is normal and good to always be running around busy and providing themselves and others with proofs of authenticity and badges of correct accomplishment. But that is farce. It's just not true that anyone has to do anything. They are kidding themselves with trinkets, but you don't have to let them kid you, though if you would prefer to be kidded that is perfectly fine.

Anyway, an impasse: there is nothing I want to do as I await destruction. All action is contributing to farce, and I am tired of farce. So I do the things I always want to do, farce or no farce: I read, and play, and paint, staying as much as possible in my dark room with the curtains drawn and the space heater cranked to max. I think in circles and speak as little as possible to anyone. This is an act of hypocrisy, wasteful and selfish, but it's mine, and it's all I am fit to accomplish.

The only thing left is to lose my guilt about it and be as honest as possible.

I am going to eat what food I have availabe and enjoy being warm and entertained at the expense of others weaker and less fortunate than myself, feeding off their pain and their pointless deaths until I also die in a futile and meaningless way.

Heidegger was right about everything. Getting raped by this farce means no one ever has to say they are sorry for anything, ever. That's what Dostoevsky said, too, and Jesus and the Buddha. It is up to you if you decide farce is farce because of phenomenology or because of God or because the truth of infinity means that everything must be. It doesn't matter which you pick because it doesn't affect anything, not even you. From here you can sell special insights by the immaterial pound or give them away for free.

You will either let everything go or keep right on having what you can get, clinging to your safety and rationalizing whatever you must in order to do so. As will I. Others will keep on wanting, or decide to destroy the world. Too bad for us all. But none of us are better or worse than the other. In fact, we are all one infinite thing.

There is no one to blame for this. No one to hold responsible. If everyone is guilty, no one is.

*

Grappling with all this along with being unable to tear my eyes away has meant that I don't even bother to put on clothes anymore until I absolutely have to, and I am just flat-out not going to get a job. I feel fine, whatever. Exhausted. Just done.

This is my new "praxis": anti-resistant non-participation. If you get it and feel like getting in on it, you'll quit your job and peaceably wait for whatever is going to happen to just happen already with as much equanimity as you can summon.

The revolution has already begun!

*

Fun post next time. Why not.

--JL

#510

Still. Knowing it's all a big joke and knowing the joke is on me--I'm not laughing. Fuck it! If I'm the butt, I'm the butt. That's archery butt, by the way. The target of the joke, e.g. the archery butt. I am also the ass, though.

Fuck it. They say you can only be a target if you make yourself one, and even if it's not always true it is decidedly so in this case. So I am the butt and the ass on purpose, and wholly embrace it. Fuming pointlessly is the sweet business. I've earned this butthurt shitty feeling that won't leave me alone and intend to savor it.

*

Speaking as a pretender to my own understanding, performing said farce is an act of steadily increasing hypocrisy. With each scrap of accumulated "knowledge", with the experience of each day attaching itself to the built-up wad of days that represents a life, the intensity and scale of one's personal hypocrisy grows and grows. Well, maybe I can only speak to mine. Maybe your knowledge is good somehow. Mine has proven itself false coin in every material way. 

*

There have been times I knew how to laugh, and nothing else. Look through the archives and you will find them.

What I need is to become that person again, to give birth to myself again before the self-inflicted labor pains kill me.

--JL

#509

My cycles of ego overgrowth followed by slash and burn operations are coming into sharp relief for me now, but because of what they are, who I am, and what the world is, it would appear that I have little choice but to go through the motions. So once again I reflect bitterly on the massive arrogance of having any pride at all.

This time around, I am preloading some of next time's bitterness, knowing that I will forget these key learnings in time and let my pride grow out of control once more. It is human nature, and for all my rebellion, all my aspiration to better, ecce homo. There is no escape but death.

*

Thee following are my own personal truths that should always be rolling around in my pocket, waiting to be grasped whenever and always. To repeat myself, that I ever let them go is a testament to my ability to let myself down consistently and with aplomb. 

• the illusion of control brings only needless pain
• the illusion of knowledge brings only false pride
• the illusions of good and evil are the foundations of hell upon this earth
• beyond good and evil, beyond knowledge, is the infinite universe, which is the only truth, and it is meaningless.

*

There is no point where one has suffered enough. There is no point where one has learned enough. There is no enough, no progress, no goal. There are no points at all. No point in, to, or about anything whatever.

Only the infinite. 

*

I point you to the unbelievable weight of the time that has passed and all that it was witnessed, more than even the absurdly overclocked little meat computers thrumming beneath our dura mater could ever properly conceive of or hold or process. Then, to the infinitely larger and infinitely the same amount of time that has yet to transpire, which could be so large as to crush our time multiplied by itself, rendering ten trillion years a paper-thin layer at the base of ten million layers that composes one layer of a sedimentary strata that is the visualization of part of a section of a moment in infinite time. 

And it could all repeat infinitely, even though it never ends.

*

It's all a joke, and all the time you are forgetting to laugh, it is on you.

--JL

#508

In these uncertain times, philosophy is the only consolation. I have looked elsewhere, and found comfort only in Final Fantasy games. Other video games too, I guess. Art. NieR: Automata is a complete review and proof of existentialism made digital sculpture, so that has been an exceptionally consoling game. Its glorious, unerring purpose is ripping your heart into bloody soup chunks and trapping you in a pointless, endless loop of meaningless action and empty, inescapable violence--just like life, and death brings no escape, no surcease. It is so fucking good. 

Also I have been listening to the soundtrack a lot. Consoling stuff. 2-B's ass is also admittedly consoling in the extreme, which is very funny when you think about it. The game is filled with great jokes and profound beauties and pleasures. This does not blunt its slow, merciless edge, nor soften its killing blows in the slightest.

*

Never been able to nor ever sincerely wished to separate philosophy from art, nor art from philosophy. Both are life; not its purpose, not its meaning, but literally all there is to and within life. This beingness, this world-aperture that perceives the infinite universe, is art, is philosophy. The act of creation-perception that has been my embodiment and the chronophenomenon it has occupied--my body on the world, in history, acting out its part in a story on a stage which is the art philosophic, the life of the world.

*

It's a trip, as they say. All there is is to ride it out.

--JL

#507

Well, I guess the ride is over. The ride, in this case, is--I am pretty sure--having Factually Pointless scraped by foreign crawlers a thousand times a day or better. Specifically but not limited to hits coming out of Sinagapore and Hong Kong. This started when I made the crude mistake of using reddit--yes, pathetic, cringing, sad of me--to try and boost a few pieces, get a new reader or two. Being unemployed can often lead me into these terrible, incautious, and bad-aesthetic decisions. This did not prove efficacious in a real sense, but in a different sense, it certainly made the numbers go up. Now they are zero, at least on new posts; looks like scrapers are still sneaking into the old ones.

The end of the tale, such as it is, came in the form of a couple hits from what appeared to be a google admin, followed by a dramatic throttling of this false and likely pernicious traffic. I've done a bit of research and it seems difficult to keep hungry crawlers out of your stuff, and this is, in a very real sense, google's stuff I'm typing for them. Right? It's not like I don't have certain rights and responsibilities as regards the content of these text fields, but also, google hosts them and has its own rights and duties and best practices. So thank you, google admin, be ye organism or daemon. It was fun to pretend that my blog was useful to somebody for something, but it's definitely less creepy now that everything is back to normal.

Normal, I am now convinced, consists of random pings and a single friend. I think even those are gone now. My blog is zero views for the last three posts now.

Seemingly in contrast to what I say about the product of LLMs, I don't really care if my work gets scraped or by whom, really, but I guess I'd rather whoever has a more ostensible claim to the rights of it get the benefits. But who really knows whose rights are whose? Not my fight, not my problem. Just hope google itself is getting some value out of all my labor. I guess value for anyone is something more than nothing, which is basically what I get out of it beyond the intrinsic and sufficient value of typing all this to amuse myself. 

In perfect isolation, it would seem. Here, on the vast and thrumming net, it would appear that, identically to out there in meatspace, I am but a man without a country, allowed to take up space and fill certain voids in the absence of an observer effect. Which is cool by me, and if it isn't, I ought to make peace with it, eh?

*

Man, I hope no unsuspecting sap tries to learn English from anything trained on my words. To put it lightly: I did not, assuredly not, attend Oxford college. You are not going to want to show someone you speak English with the shit I put out. I write specifically to piss off form/grammar cops, bosses, and government officials. You fucked up; unless you want to sound like a fevered, spasmoidal ululator on a mission to become completely impenetrable to anyone with clout or decent sense.

--JL

#506

As is, I suppose, traditional at this stage in the life of things, it is time to print some clarifications, adjustments, and modulations on prior positions after writing several posts in an emotive state unbecoming of the site's masthead.

*

To be penetratingly simple and clear: if it pleases you to generate artefacts on an LLM, if it helps you do tasks, if its use removes barriers that were a legitimate hindrance, and even if you're a lazy piece of shit who is literally laughing at me and flipping me the bird, use AI however you want, for whatever you want to use it. No part of that affects me in the slightest, near as I can tell, and I did not mean to attach moral significance to the choice. What I wanted to communicate was merely that it seems to me that this allegedly liberatory project is a scam, not on me, not really on society or power or capital or anything, but on the user. Like, I don't see how it helps you and I can definitely see how it harms and robs you. Also I have sampled a broad range of comics and art produced on LLMs by a variety of individuals and indeed I cannot see how you are not simply stealing labor in order to waste time. Sorry. Gotta call it as I see it--but again, who cares, don't stop on my account, prove me wrong.

*

Truly I have no business ever talking about politics in the moment. Just because it doesn't stop any other mouth-breather doesn't mean I have to make the same mistake. It's nothing personal. It is not my duty nor is this blog a truly suitable record of anything except the hideous contortions of my ego.

The truth is I don't know what is good or bad or how anything will shake out. The truth is I don't know jack or shit about fuck or dick, actually. Don't count on me if you know how to count. I keep forgetting that this is so and going through this shit again and again, but dammit, may it please take hold this time.

*

A cleanser for the palate! A shot of something resinous and 120-proof to cut through our system. 

Yes! Yes! Lists! The true purpose of Factually Pointless. Have a dash of them! A salting! A peppering! A smorgasboard! A variety platter! 

Alright okay. Ok cool. Here we go.

*

One of the clearest signs that something is fundamentally at issue in the core of my being is that I read much fewer honest-to-god physical books. There's always ups and downs in how many books I get through based on the influx of other media and the tides and vicissitudes of life, but the last long while has been particularly not-much and very other-stuff heavy. Still, even though I have not managed to complete O. Wilson's excellent Consilience, I have started and finished a few other books, and a veritable pile of comics. Follows an account of all such as I am able to dredge from the memory. Hasn't been that long since I hitcha with the lists, but somehow I do get through things.

books I have started and not finished in addition to Consilience

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl, reread, aloud to Ezra as a pastime especially before bed or driving someplace

books I have managed to start and finish since they're fewer than a hundred pages long and filled with illustrations

George's Marvelous Medicine, Roald Dahl, reread for maybe the seventieth time (Roald Dahl childhood 100, Roald Dahl teenager and adult 100, all the stuff, every scrap and bit a person can find, I have read it multiple times)

Solutions and Other Problems, Allie Brosh (wow this is one of the funniest persons ever to have drawn breath and shown their work. Also profoundly courageous, or, persistent, which hits the same)

Who knows how many Star Wars books I forgot to put into the record, honestly, what a buffoon

print comics, usually from the library

completed:

The Last Delivery, Evan Dahm (genius)

Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz, Francesco Matteuzzi and Luca Debus

Where I'm Coming From: Selected Strips 1991-2005, Barbara Brandon-Croft

Batman: White Knight, Sean Murphy

Batman vol. 1: The Court of Owls, Scott Snyder

Miles Morales Spider-Man vol. 1: Trial by Spider, Cody Ziglar

same category, forgotten from last summer:

Social Fiction, Chantal Motellier

Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir, Joyce Farmer

comics in progress:

This Is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle

webcomics I have read from start to finish, caught up on, or revisited from long ago lately--who knows which! Me, but I really don't wanna type all that shit out right now. I want to be done with this so I can shove my unemployed ass into the bed and raise digital pocket monsters.

Kill Six Billion Demons, Abbadon

Bobbins/Solver/Steeple, John Allison

Sam and Fuzzy, Sam Logan

Dumbing of Age, David Willis

Yellow Brick Ramble, Daisy McGuire

Dresden Codak, A. Senna Diaz

Elephant Town, Danielle Corsetto

*

OK! Okay okay all right now woo woo wooooo

--JL

#505

Yes, I took to bed on April first, completely in the grip of that illness called despair. Everything became very personal, you see. Everything so personal it was impossible to turn my hand or mind to anything constructive or pleasurable. Only to lie exhaustedly and think myself three hundred miles per hour into a delirious passion of hurt and rage and personal blame. 

What I forgot is that we are all guilty before one another, there is no one and nothing to blame, and the universe unfolds as it unfolds. That it is not personal. That I have no enemies, and we know not what we do. That this world is a violence and a charnel house precisely because we seek to control and blame and act as though we know what is best and what would have been better when we know nothing, nothing.

I forgot, as is so easy to do, that I know nothing. That perceiving hurt at the hands of others is a mistake--it is all just me hurting myself, them hurting themselves, for we are not, in fact, separate entities, but aspects of the godhead, a oneness and a completeness whose distinction is an illusion. 

But despair is only an illness. The worst, but just a passing thing. Here I am. Do with me as thou wilt.

Thank you, Kierkegaard, thank you Nietzsche, thank you Socrates, thank you all the rest. Truly the only consolation lies in philosophy and the contemplation/(re)discovery[immanence/transcendence] of the infinite universe/incomprehensible (smokeless flame, lossless radiance) mind of God.

That's what's important, mang.

*

Back to the vital business of being factually pointless. It is so off-brand of me to act like I should have a point. Must try to remember to remedy this tendency with maximum prejudice as I approach the next four hundred and ninety-four posts.

*

I better take a walk. Peace. As in, really.

Peace.

Also remembered this, yesterday; speaking of sublime consolation:

memento et mori

caro temporalis est

facta aterna



--JL

#504

If I worked really hard at this, harder than before, I could hit one thousand posts in about three and a half years, optimistically. Daily posting, of course, would make it about a year and about a quarter, but that is less than realistic, probably. 

Well, time will tell us what it has in store for us day by day.

Day by day by grinding, painful, all-too-incremental and seemingly infinite day. Yet pass they do, vanishingly swift, irretrievable.

*

Spent most of the day before yesterday either pacing frantically or in bed, stark naked either way, thinking the worst thoughts my brain knows how to think. The fucked shit. The tentacular, overhwelming, viscous, poisonous demon shit you see surging and writhing against all that is good and true in this world, chewing and spewing and struggling like a diseased rat inside my skull. I guess before it got bad, I got the post written, which is something.

Very rare indeed that I would take a day to the backyard by the collar and part its body from its life to the hollow boom of a shotgun, but sometimes one is simply powerless to resist the full-body grip of the shadowself and must know the bitter, oily taste of pure defeat. My better angel beat a full retreat, and I had no stick with which to beat the devil down.

Today feels more natural, except I'm tired like I ran ten miles too far yesterday, instead of mostly lying down fitfully. Also residual thoughts and feelings from yesterday include visualizing the choking black soot that will coat this fully ruined planet like a grave shroud. 

As a fossil enthusiast, I do not mind this in the abstract, as I can better hope that whatever historians, scientists, and philosophers of whichever species might unearth this cursed and haunted strata may find me and use my bits to teach themselves something interesting about the past.

*

God, and learn. Pray that someone, anyone, sometime, on this blasted, accursed, beautiful and weary space rock, has learned anything. For example, in my self-inflicted total suffering, I learned something, or remembered it. Shall elaborate next post.

--JL

#503

Poking around the onlines, it becomes clear how some extremely clever fuck, a pastiche of LLM-adopters (indistinguishable at times from the tools they no doubt used to assist in the composition of their rhetorical volleys), could easily be all "how can you hate AI when it helps disabled people reach for their dreams? ableist much? also you are a gatekeeper" when reacting to ideas along the lines of yesterday's post.

Which might scare some teenagers and the feckless, who have not had much time to really, truly think about their convictions or lack the conviction to have convictions in the first place. Being well past grown, though, and having worked and lived with disabled artists my entire adult life, I know that this is more than likely a clever rhetorical maneuver rather than any particular concern for disabled people and their access. Disabled or differently-abled people are known for their artistry perhaps to the point of being stereotyped about it. Have I listened to a diverse range of disabled artists tell me about some of their challenges across a broad range of challenges and disciplines? Have I marveled at their resourcefulness, patience, vitality, and ingenuity in creating art whenever possible, however possible? To the point of exhaustion, frankly. So the prior lack of LLM assistance has not been a real barrier as you are framing it, out where people are actually making art. 

The entire point of what I was saying is that the only gates are in your mind. I am not the one putting gates anywhere! This I swear. Barriers, gates, elitism, your perception of "writer's privilege"--what the fuck?--this is all literally in your own mind. Well, they are real as it relates to the acquisition of capital, clout, whatever else, but nothing can stop you from writing.

*

Maybe you should get an LLM to read my last post for you and reframe it for you in a way that is best and most accessible for you. 

See? I am in fact extremely open to using technology to bridge an ability gap. And not literally like the bad guy from the first Incredibles movie, which is what you guys all seem like when you talk. How that isn't a massively viral meme yet, I'll never know. It's exactly the kind of cheesy dotted line people love to draw and beat to death. Maybe it happened and I missed it. Maybe the movie was a response to the discussion in the first place. I digress. Movies are very good. Syndrome is the guy. Man. The parallel really is kind of absurdly on-point. 

*

Anyway! Whole moral is that if you suck, the LLM can't help you. That's what you can't talk your way around and that is what infuriates you. That people aren't falling to their knees in order to suck your dick because you "beat" "writer's privilege". That the problem, as I have stated and as unfortunately cannot be avoided, lies within.

What the fuck, yo? What the hell are you talking about? If you can type the words "writer's privilege", then in fact, you have that. It's called literacy. I kind of wish you were using it better! Also have some fucking dignity.

*

Fun fact: wrote this yesterday. It just didn't seem like the right April Fool's Day to post anything at all. Man, that so-called holiday really grates my ass.

--JL

#502

One problem, perhaps, to be identified with my cognition journey--my thought palazzio and its sweeping grounds--the subjective throughline of my consciousness and process-as-being-in-the-world-of-my-own-creation--my bullshit--is that I have perhaps understimated the scope and intensity of the background radiation, as it were, of other people's pathetic fucking resentment.

I mean, so what if you can't draw a decent picture and practice yields no fruit? So what if you can't write a story that anybody on this wide, cruel world will tell you is good and cool? So what if you can't seem to make anything happen with the opposite sex? This is a letter to anyone in this venn diagram, I guess.

*

Since I was a baby, I have tried to draw good pictures. Now, I'm not some big-shot success story--I don't think I have ever achieved this once. Can't draw a real-looking thing, man. But, uh, so what? Can't draw good pictures, no, but because I never stopped drawing or at least never abandoned drawing, I can draw pictures that are real, that look like I drew them. They are me. 

Point was always just to draw pictures and to be myself, or the point was moot. 

*

Maybe one might forget to draw and paint for a few years at a time sometimes, but a person gets busy, and also, a person might lose or destroy the majority of their possessions multiple times. Hard to paint a picture without paint, tools to apply it, and a viable field of action. Not impossible, but. Plus, had to write. On top of that, had to keep practicing and composing music. On top of that, had to have sex all the time with partners and amenable strangers. On top of that, a person has to work and eat and exercise and travel and get in and out of trouble and do nothing, and also read and play video games and do philosophy and look at the color of the sky. 

Life takes massive effort and all of your focus, so it never really sunk in, I guess, that while I was trying desperately to live it and have some fun even though the odds are kind of stacked against us--more reason to do it, of course--other people sat in their rooms not living theirs and literally hated me for it. 

But hark! The reason you weren't out there doing it yourself is not because the world was somehow set up to laud and reward me and screw you over a barrel. Trust me, it was set up to screw us all. Before puberty, I was reliably the weirdest freak kid who only was friends with the teacher or one or two of the other weird freak kids. Even after puberty, the main way I ever got any respect coming up was cussing hard and saying opinions without fear or mercy. It's the only way for a weirdo to get by with any dignity, in my experience.

The truth of the matter, the reason I am rather rudely using myself as a counterexample is simply that you gave up, and I am trying to show that never giving up is the whole entire battle. Life takes massive effort and all of your focus. It doesn't come to you with all its vital juices and condiments sizzling on the platter ready to eat. You have to live it.

If you wanted to draw a comic book, there was never any reason to do anything else. If instead of drawing shitty comic after shitty comic, enough shitty comics to build a house out of, you sat around hoping someone would invent something you could pay them for to draw in your stead, then you wasted your life and using the product is wasting more of your life. Because you didn't like drawing in the first place! Because drawing all those shitty comics is the whole point! Luckily, it is not too late. You can draw shitty comics literally any time on any surface, and you can start right this second. But if you don't want to draw comics, then why would you?

Comics of themselves are hardly the issue, of course. What you make is barely the question. Why you make what you make is closer to the mark, but it is possible to make good art while only wanting to get money and fame out of it--talent goes where talent goes. It's not a special dispensation from God that makes a person sanctified. It is possible to do what you are best at, be dazzlingly rewarded, want for nothing, and still be as unhappy as before, maybe worse. It is also possible to be all of those things and an asshole that is bad to be around. In fact, it's easy. So the things themselves--fleeting and transient states of matter, no more--are not the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is who and what you choose to make of yourself as a person on your own recognizance. The Main Issue is, this is your life and you are concentrating all of your imagination and longing and want on someone else's idea of someone else's life. You don't know what you actually like, or want, is the problem.

What does it mean when you tell me "I made this using AI."  What are you really saying?

"I made this using the outsourced labor provided by a computer program. To be precise, I gave a daemon instructions until I had something in front of me that I convinced myself was born in my mind's eye, but is actually a composite of other people's real achievements. Producing it required no skill or imagination on my part. I don't know what makes it good or bad. It has nothing to do with me. It is just a set of parentheses around itself which I am trying to use to communicate..."

What?

What are you trying to tell me or give me when you present me with such an artifact? Or, what is it that you expect from me? From the world?

For not caring enough to do something, for lacking passion and drive and love, you want...what? Some reward? And why do you want it? Who owes it to you and why? I'll tell you one thing. The reason most actual artists get mad about it is that it kind of feels like you are saying that you think everything that makes us human is only worth what you can get in exchange for what you seem to think is merely some kind of token.

And this is why you can't get laid, or make it last or mean anything, if you've managed to learn to trick or coerce people. The above question and answer might as well be tattooed on any potential lover, replacing the word "artist" with "potential lover". Pretty fucking straightforward, I think, as is the following. 

*

The reason to live life, the reason to make art, and the reason to have sex are one thing: to discover something real.

So a product cannot help you with that. Stop thinking that. No one can help you with this, actually. You are already worth love, and do not need to produce any content that proves it.

*

Can't write? Can't draw? Not a skilled or experienced lover? No problem, actually. 

Believe the product of a product that makes products out of products represents some kind of solution to this state of affairs?

All you lack is tubes going into your body and a saline suspension to float in while the machine empire makes actual use of your radiant energy. 

Doesn't have to be like that. That scenario requires your sumbission, your acquiescence. The battery pod is a sci-fi Plato's Cave. You can get up and walk out any time.

*

This blog gets made for no money, not the tenth part of a doomed penny. Been putting it out since 2018, looks like; guess it doesn't look like I'm gonna stop. Back when I played music shows, by myself or with bands, it would be in backyards and basements for part of the take of a donations jar. I have never sold a piece of art or painting I made--gifts or garbage. Very, very rarely managed to get paid a little bit for a piece of writing or give one away for free; more usually, publication has cost me money. Put shitty books on amazon through their self-publishing thing, and these books did not sell basically any copies. That's for the best. Didn't really do the best job of making them, though it is nice to have shitty books to give away. Free can sometimes be a good enough price for the cost of the thing existing.

Who cares, man? Who gives a fuck? I like doing it. Feels like jazz. I think people that make lots of money from art are lucky, if you can call it that, and the caliber of their work often merits its share of recognition, but I also think most of them would be doing it for nothing, just like me, and also that there is so much more great art to see that is not famous, and that if great art is great then it is great whether it gets famous or not.

Just do whatever you want. I am giving you permission, if you need it. Try to find out what kind of person you really are through the singleminded pursuit of your passions, which you should indulge in and propagate as much as possible. It is almost certain that people will want to have sex with you for that and you'll figure that part out organically and find out it's pretty cool but you were kind of overreacting back then. Nothing is ever as good when you get it as when you were anticipating it; this is one of the sadder but more unbreakable laws of the universe. It's the surprises that you really end up savoring, and you cannot plan for those or force them to happen. That should be clear. 

Listen. You probably won't get famous or make very much money ever. That's just mathematically true. But the big joke is that it doesn't matter at all, because another big joke is that fame is miserable, except for the amenities. 

Point of life is only to do fun things you want to do so bad it's like you need to do them. That way, in this short existence, you might be able to have some fun, even though you will naturally endure hardships.

You are alive. That's the game. Try to have fun. Do things you like to do. Be a friend to yourself, which will involve trying to understand yourself and hear yourself--a lifelong and arduous process, but a worthy one.

Using the products of LLMs to pretend you are alive or skip to parts of being alive that you think are better (and you have no reason to think that, really) will not supply you with what you have been missing or are searching for. Nothing I can say will provide that either--I am telling you that this is a power you must find within yourself or not at all.

Within, friends. Within. A product is just a product. Life is art.

Problem is not that LLM's create inferior products and it is not that they could supplant artists with equivalent or superior products.

It is that they subvert the purpose of making art, which is only, only to live life.

Sex, by the way, can be thought of as an artistic collaboration. 

--JL

#501

Man, my heart bleeds for us. Humanity, you know. I like to think, implacably hewing to my childish aspects as I do, that we deserved a better world than the one we made for ourselves.

Just thinking, you know. About being in a human body, spewing language, taking language in through the eyes and ears, suffering and exulting and perceiving. About how great it has been, and how much better it could have been, and how fucked up it got instead. I guess it could be great again, but only after a lot of really bad stuff happens.

Hey man, fuck it. Some people have only ever experienced awful things while I was running around in comfortable t-shirts and good shoes on my feet, idly consuming the inheritance of empire and squandering a valuable education. Absolutely no right to complain.

*

It's true! I wonder how much people are pointing it out to my fellow Americans, out there on the international socials. That turnabout is fair play. 

*

Saw that LLMs tend to ply their generations with bolds and underlines and italics in apparently whimsical or arbitrary ways but, it seems to me, in a misunderstanding of how to represent the freewheelin' desperado emphaSEEZ we of the blogosphere like to bust out here where there are no ruling manuals of style. Maybe. Haven't examined a broad array of samples.

Since I use these forbidden techniques with sloppy abandon, I guess it's prudent to assert that every word of this blog is just me, and I take what pride there is to have in that. Rest assured that I am perfectly aware this does not leave me with much. 

"Ooh, my wet tangled cortex did puppetry so much better than a dumb computer! Truly mankind is a mirror for the Almighty"

--JL

#500

So here is the problem. The problem is simple, and the solution is simple. It's just that no one wants to see it, I guess, out there where they wear suits and ties and have nice timepieces to wear on their wrists.

The problem is you see a dictatorship destroying your country. 

They are actually doing everything you have ever read about dictatorships doing in Africa, in Eastern Europe and Russia, in Latin America, in Indochina and the South Pacific, in all these places that used to be comfortingly somewhere else, all these magazine article places and Hollywood movie trend places--it is finally happening here, as was always warningly spoken but never followed through, like, never a "and then the thing to do is..." because the idea was the warning should be enough.

Kids have been hurting themselves in spite of the dire warnings provided by their parents for 500,000 years bare minimum and STILL somehow we think warnings are ever enough.

Anyway, it's happening, and the reason no one seems to know what to do is they seem to be looking for a legal solution to the problem.

But though the problem is simple, sadly, there is no legal solution. That time was before. The Rubicon lies some ways behind us.

When dictators are in power, acting against them, trying to deter them in any way, even to disagree with them, is immediately framed as antisocial and from there, criminal. That's why the news people and the congresspeople and the feds that suddenly aren't feds anymore don't want to see it. To actually resist this process is to risk that precious bank account, that vaunted feeling of safety and accomplishment that comes with having been favored and eventually beatified by the system.

That is over now. 

To resist autocracy is to be a criminal. There is no other way. This is because in an autocracy, to say that the law is more important or more powerful than the people in charge is to break the only law that matters anymore.

If you are not a criminal, you either will be in due time, or you are on the other side of things, for as long as that is allowed to last.

That is why the executive and the sycophant bloc in "congress" turning against the judicial system has been so swift and complete. It is why they can never again admit wrongdoing or weakness, no matter the blunder or callous disregard--those days are past. It is why our intelligence security and military power was so immediately and swiftly compromised--so that the instinct of wounded animal is awakened within that institution, and it can be turned towards conquest, and the deterrence laid upon other conquerors might be lifted.

Dictators do not deter, they only aggress. They only take vengeance. They respect only strength, for awhile, but in the end they respect nothing, and will destroy themselves in their attempt to destroy the world, for the world is God's, not theirs, and that is unforgivable. 

That's the kind of people that they are.

When it comes to the type of people that are currently brandishing their chainsaws and putting other people on lists, the only reason not to fuck you today is to fuck you later.

Redress for the failures of the political left is not forthcoming. They will continue to fail. To hope otherwise does not strike me as prudent, though, as always, I could be wrong in each particular and the general sense, too.

Not that I concede that. It's a dictatorship now, and shit is very bad. This here, all this, I am calling it. I'd call it at this point anywhere else geographically, and we the American people have proved something beyond the final shadow of a doubt: there is no exceptionalism here. We are all of us the same shitty primate the world over and there is no soil or water that will cure any of us of our human, all-too-human marks of hubris, hatred, pettiness, and self-annihilation.

When it comes to the type of people that are currently brandishing their chainsaws, the only reason not to fuck you today is to fuck you later.

*

So. So! The solution is simple: join or decline. I hate the word resist; it has been truly stripped of every last shred of its meaning or resonance by modern pseudo-activism, coupling the word as it does with lawful obedience to the status quo in all things, every habit of mind and deed.

To decline means to risk everything you have and everything you are, while you are alive. But that's all right, because the chances are extremely excellent you will be executed by the state. It's never been a more flatly impossible time to rebel against state power--the technology that me and the boys dreamed would free the world and help us achieve a heroic new stage in human evolution has been completely and entirely consumed and weaponized by predatory wealth mechanisms and fascist surveillance ghoul-and-devil butcherwork--a mechanism to turn the clock back rather than bravely step forward. 

Guess it's the only reasonable thing to do, though, unless you just want to pretend it isn't happening or pretend acting normal long enough will mean it blows over like most bad things do. I know it is very idiotic to be told that everything is against you and there is no advantage and you should still fight.

Hey, shit. Maybe. 

Declining really is the only thing, though. So it goes. It doesn't feel great to me either. Nobody wants to be told that it's time to choose to die. 

*

Hey, you know what? I'll offer an out. I like Heidegger, and he turned in his mentor Husserl to the Nazis so he could live in Nazi Germany and teach in Nazi universities in hopes he could renounce it all later--if he is to be believed. He was a cuck, and his choices made him a Nazi even if he wasn't one in his heart, and he was never sorry because he made an admittedly impermeable philosophical argument that showed no one ever has to be, for anything.

And I can accept that. Dying is final, and sometimes we have to choose life, not for ourselves alone but for those who cannot choose, for a distant but more vital hope than I have in my own life. I just can't accept it from myself. But I can accept it, for reals. I am not a person of blame or recrimination. And I am asking a lot after laying out some stark terms. I can be an asshole--even a hypocrite. I don't like hypocrisy, but I don't think anyone's immune.

*

Yeah, it should be recognized that I'm stepping forward with some real big talk for a no-account rascal. I realize that. What are any-sized words worth, coming from an unemployed paranoiac artist with no social life, no social gravity or pull, and no resources beyond the house he increasingly has problems leaving? I have never joined a protest or march of any kind because I do not believe in such things and plus because crowds of that type freak me out and I am allergic to being subsumed by group dynamics. I am not a member of any party or movement or club or lodge or anything at all resembling that. 

Still, I have my dignity and my principles, even if I don't have shit-all else. And I have my words and this stupid blog. So.

*

Donald J. Trump is no king of mine and the cadre of sycophants and stormtroopers under him are criminals and fascists. I demand their recusal from their positions, I deem them unfit to serve the public, and I name them renegades who speak and act in bad faith and a spirit of spite and underhandedness. I do not accept this government as legitimate and do not trust that it will loose its grip on power at the duly appointed time. 

Nothing I can do except say so, but I do say so, in the strongest possible terms.

Further, to repeat: I decline. I decline to abet or aid in word or thought or deed the actions done in this cruel and vengeful spirit, this waking nightmare that dogs our shared reality and our collective unconscious.

No. Fuck that. It is paramount to act against it and vote against it and speak against it and think against it. 

I am an American citizen and I recognize no king and no tyranny of any kind, not of any oligarchy or theocracy, not of the economy, not of the masses, not of any person or party, and in no uncertain terms I want to state that no man is my master simply because he has wealth and I do not. As a citizen I am free in body and mind and spirit and will not be compelled to submit to any other justice than the true law of this land, as laid out in its constitution. The law which though imperfect seeks justice, not the scribbled writ of tyrants or the jingling of some robber baron's pockets. The law. 

No tyranny of any kind. It will not be borne.

*

Kind of wish I could have had fun with the five hundredth post of my shitty stupid blog, but times being what they are, futile gestures come first.

--JL

#499

The third best webcomic as stated on the "links" area of Factually Pointless is drawing to a close--Unsounded, by Ashley Cope. It is a fantasy graphic novel. In my rough and humble estimation, Unsounded represents the pinnacle of the field and indeed, the genre. This is all information that I have relayed to the reader before in this space. It's really the best webcomic; all three of them are and I should probably even link a few more.

Anyway, the reader may be further interested to know that I have had to step away from my computer just to messily weep--and had to walk away again when I came back because I, a grown man who has buried friends and family in the cold earth, the winner and loser of hundreds of knock-down-for-blood physical battles and other hardcore-type confrontations, was in fact not ready and started to cry again as soon as I laid eyes on it. The last twenty-odd pages of this work of art have been an emotional experience so intense that I am actually kind of scared for myself, for the author, and for all of us who have followed this tale to its transformative crescendo.

But I am also ready.

*

Apropos of what I was saying yesterday, these drooling godforsaken orcs are pulling the devil's own trick around here, "arresting" people for "antisemitic" behavior and holding them without a charge after whisking them away in an unmarked van. Deporting people beause--why? State secrets. You know what that is? That is gestapo shit. That is gulag, fucking deep up the ass of the iron curtain dictatorship-style shenanigans and they are an unmistakable sign that your civil society is about to break down into militarized terror-fascism. Well, open militarized terror-fascism.

I refuse to equate saying that Israel is doing genocide in Palestine with antisemitism. At best, I will modulate the word "genocide" to "inexcusable war crimes carried out in full recognition of the fact." The inclusion of genocide might be a part of that. Not for me to say legally. As far as I'm concerned, if your warmaking incurs this many civilian casualties and this kind of destruction of life-supporting infrastructure, I don't care if it is because your opponent is flaying innocent people alive and wearing their skins around as a disguise. You are not trying hard enough. Plus you are having people do the settling thing as it all happens. Difficult to look away from that, I guess. I call it genocide. Call me what you want about it, except an antisemite. Bullshit. 

Anyone can do genocide. I wish suffering genocide erased your capacity for genocide, but if it worked that way, we would have left all that shit behind long, long ago.

Genocide is about groups and power, that's it. That's all. Groups and power. Strip everything away, all the nonsense and the propaganda, and you will see very clearly what is happening.

No one has to seek justification or revenge. We just need to demand that it stop. That it stop and not resume. 

Fight a war like it is 2025 and you give a fuck. This is a plea. I really believe that a different strategic philosophy could yield surgical success while minimizing casualties. If I am wrong, I would love to ever see a cogent argument that can prove how bombing the living shit out of hospitals is better than not doing that. Variations on whether they deserve it, fuck their hospitals, etc. are not valid to me.

Solutions that maximize the well-being of both groups as they curtail bad actors and work towards resolutions that point confidently towards lasting peace are about all that I'm accepting at the front desk these days. Oh, is that difficult? Fuck me, guess I'm being unreasonable.

*

Circling back to the domestic picture, this shit? Masked whoever-the-fucks who don't show a badge whisking people--people known to be harmless--away at 5:30 p.m. off a public sidewalk, no charges filed in any system? They're on a list for something they wrote? 

People need to understand. This is what they do to their own populations in "third world countries" because the Central Intelligence Agency taught them how because they learned it from the Soviets who had it from the Nazis who believed deeply in Teutonic methodologies for unearthing witches and demons.

And by the way! The incompetence and stupidity are part of it! Do not mistake them. The imbecilic blunders are calculated, their chaos and weakness planned, and they are a smokescreen for the deeds done in the dark with perfect competence and deadly intent. Mark me on that, if nothing else in this scribble*.

People absolutely need to understand that every single day that they do this shit and get away with it, it takes one more year to get things back to something resembling a free state and a civil society. And they absolutely need to understand that it is never stays at the level it is or pulls back by itself, but always, always ramps up, always always. They move the schedule along and before you could react--how? the news didn't say it was going to happen--it is having to wear government-issued badges or get arrested off the street, it is armed checkpoints between neighborhoods that were never walled and are now walled, and people disappearing all the time for stuff they said or might have said or for no fucking reason; they will disappear a grandmother just to keep a neighborhood on its toes, just to scare a grandson into silence because they need him where he is. They will lynch people to make examples and there will always need to be examples made until one day there are no more examples and it's the muzzle of a gun for every single person and eventually themselves. That's how these death-cults finish. Bullets and poison and whole countries burning.

They will eat this place alive from the inside out so that when some outside force comes to put a stop to it it will all collapse inward like a rotten pumpkin and the stench of the grave will rise to the heavens. Or it will get so bad, so unbelievably bad--no one would have believed how bad it would get, they will say, but they had precedent to look at and I am saying it now: it will get so bad that it will topple from the inside, but you will not believe how bad it would have to get before that happens. It rarely does, you see. People will tell you things are fine well beyond the previous limits of your imagination. You might hear it out of your own mouth, and somewhere deep inside you, your past self will scream in horror--and you will pretend not to hear.

*

 

This is not a partisan thing. When things are this crazy, the pendulum swing back to the opposite pople has an excellent chance to be even crazier. Terror fascism is bad, but it's not worse than terror collectivism. I mean, they are the same, a profoundly intertwined dipole. Wish it hadn't somehow become controversial to present that fact. It's in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and it has stayed true. 

To me it does not matter if my face is ground into a filthy poster of DJT before they put the barrel to the back of my neck, or a filthy poster of AOC. Both of these parasites are the same to me, save that one is--like Taylor Swift--roughly my age and will likely fuck up my patience for a long time yet, and one is a doddering mummy kept alive only by high-quality cocaine, spray-tan preservatives, and the warm blood of the young. End of the day, both are merely stand-ins for elemental human forces; not to deny them their basic humanity, but history hands us each our roles and that's that, I suppose.

Think that it is not real or not your problem all you want. Think yourself a beneficiary? Look, I'm trying to lend emphasis, but I'm not screaming or shaking or anything. I am speaking to the best of my knowledge and the direct experience of one whose life has been defined by these social realities when I say that the chances are low in the extreme that the direction things are taking is good or healthy for anybody, even and maybe especially those calling most ardently for it to happen and those making it happen or aiding and abetting.

Conversely, if you are letting yourself become radicalized to the point that staring into this abyss has given birth to a dragon in your spirit, best quench yourself before you fuck everything up for everyone.

What we need--again!--is to stop for a minute.

* 

Call it harebrained, but I finally came up with something resembling a cogent solution, at least for the issues facing the United States. It's dramatic, which I feel fitting, but probably impossible to pull off and maybe no one would want this, but I've been mulling over a few years now and I think it might be time to say fuck it and throw it at the (obscure, unobserved) wall and see if it sticks (it will not).

Nationwide truth and reconciliation hearings, at the community, town, city, county, state, and regional level. Our groups and classes need to reckon with the past interactions of power between them. Understanding must be found, between the people and by the people. Dragged to it if need be, but these conversations must be had. The truth must set us free. It is time for all the sweet-sounding prophecies to salve our brows, but we must reach out to one another in order to accomplish this. 

The impetus for this great undertaking will be a parallel undertaking of equal scale, scope, and impossibility: it is time to call a fresh constitutional convention, with a delegate stucture that shatters the two-party system and replaces it with a more modern solution in one fell swoop as it drafts a constitution modified, condensed, and expanded to steer the nation into this millenium. 

A non-partisan and bipartisan referendum government should be installed in order to handle the maintenance of services rendered unto the people and the operation of the courts and military, but congress and the executive will be suspended until the production of a restructured model for their operational scope. The opportunity should be especially taken to curtail corporate power, especially as concerns interactions of corporate behavior and species-defining data processes and the guidance of technological paradigms. 

*

Hey man, if I'm crazy--isn't it still pretty much worth the moonshot? I'm aware that there are countable infinities of details, problems, and impossibilities in the way of this, but I also know that summarized like this in three paragraphs, it makes a decent pitch if you've got the balls to want to try it. I would hope a lot of people had those kinds of balls, but who knows. Plus crazier things have worked. It can be suprising what people will agree to, and what energy that fresh direction can produce.

*

Though we are not like to find out. In truth we will all likely be living under a Chinese proxy state soon enough.

Just had the need, the desperate futile drive, one last time I hope, to call it out as it is happening and say what could be done. I'll try to go back to farting out bullshit and talking about all the dang books I read and video games I piss my life away with. That's my whole plan of action through all this, by the way; that and painting. 

Ever a wastrel of no regard or influence, me, but these days, that could still get a guy in a lot of trouble, huh?

PEACE, FUCKS

whatever like I give a shit. proxy state more like pussy state amirite boiz

--JL

*seriously, remember that

#498

It is not beyond me to grasp the same handles on this existence as one who has realized that violence is inescapable, an ineluctable part of our cosmos, its warp and its weft, and that this being so, there is no way to reach heaven but through violence, if heaven is a place at all. Therefore what matter how many lives are ground to dust under my heel? For the truth of this universe is power, which is beyond good and evil, and wills itself whether you accept all this or no.

That the world will grind us all into dust is beyond dispute. 

That I should act however the fuck I want is also simply true. There is no special virtue in holding yourself back from power and pleasure merely because you are convinced it proves that you are somehow better than those who do not. It doesn't.

What we choose--choose--to do is what sets us apart from one another, and it is my way--no better or worse, no purer or more corrupt than any other way--to use my power in ways that minimize suffering and maximize pleasure, beauty, coolness, and other things that are dope--not only for me, though I come first--why trouble to deny it? Those of us who truly put others before ourselves are rare as hen's teeth and too busy to read this blog, since their sisyphean task is infinite, so I need feel no shame--but for everyone in my vicinity and, whenever possible, beyond. 

Some of us don't care who we hurt in our quest to ensure our pleasures. Not built that way. That's not a worse hero's journey or whatever than what I do, it just runs counter in principle and, if successful and endemic, creates conditions that make my way difficult to survive in. So it goes. These are functions of power. This is not a complaint. Some of us have far less choice in far fewer matter than others, by dint of birth, position, or the waters and winds of fate. 

*

Perhaps at least a few of scales have fallen from my eyes! I have remembered that my duty lies not in raining calumny down on those who I would call sinners, in my hierophantic aspect, but in simply working to be their opposite in all ways, to the extent of my scope and my ability in this life. Better a vagrant than a hierophant, after all; though admittedly I hope for a better compromise with society than that. It's not off the table, of course.

Also, why do eyes grow scales? And the fuckers grow back, they do. Personal hygiene never ends.

*

Ok, listen. All this is by way of saying that I can barely fucking move over the guilt I feel over the genocide in Palestine, over and above other ongoing genocides I guess--this one seems the most, I don't know. Personally and nationally aimed at the heart. Seeing these dead children is agonizing to the point of paralysis.

How do I get a job and help, however minimally, an economy and a tax base that contributes to this? How do I continue to benefit from it every day? I always have! Everyone around me, we all do! But where does it end? Oh, where does it fucking end? How do you ever divest completely from something like this, other than the obvious self-abnegation (vagrancy as I have mentioned today, living in giant jars as I have mentioned before, etc.)  or the obvious waiting around to be deported?

It comes back to power. I don't have the power to stop this, and if offered, I could only accept this power in a form that in in line with my aesthetics and principles of being-in-the-world. A thorny issue and a narrow, switchback path to walk. But one must walk one's path as it is set, not as one would set it.

Tolkien condensed the strictures and truths of the matter in the form of Gandalf and what he had to say on the subject: that to reach out one's hand to take the power of your enemy with the desire to be different, to do what you know to be good in your heart, is to become first your enemy's mirror; then, something worse.

Gandalf also said, aptly to another part of the idea at hand, that it is not given to us to choose what times we live in; all (all) there is to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. This decision is what defines us, showing the world and ourselves who we are, or, at least, who we were allowed to be and to what extent we allowed that to influence us in the span of time allowed.

*

As superpowers go, shooting scales out of your eyes is superficially not the most radical thing--but what kind of scales are we talking about here? What do they do? Could be something interesting. Plus the whole trick is a worthwhile hero first--someone, in this case, who sees things in life, the world, and existence more and more clearly? And is able to put these lessons into some form of creative action--making the world a better place. Not merely fighting crime, now, not saving the world from some crazy problem from the outside, but making it a better place in the here and now, materially, durably?

Crazy talk. Who even am I? Laughable.

--JL