#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

#497

Prohibiting myself from writing or even thinking about current events--after this one broadside I am allowing for.

• It's fine to destroy Teslas and whatever--anything that hurts any corporation above a certain size and evil-to-utility ratio is fine--but we need to go harder and broader at the same time. Smash our vile, disgusting smartphones with a hammer. Destroy our corporate personal computers and start building our own or supporting local silicon-heads instead of that Ruined, Accurs'd Vale. Why did we never get a garden, boutique economy going around personal computing? We obviously, obviously need local blacksmiths, but for code, and hardware, and cybertronic upgrades. Anyway, stop buying stuff from massive online retailers, stop using paypal, uber, venmo, streaming services, social media--every digital cancer metastasized by a flock of cretinous salesvampires, every pustule on the face and ass of our society, economy, and body politic we have allowed to become an angry and infected pressurized geyser of pus and befoulment in the name of our own ease and convenience, in the name of saving a buck today using slave labor and cheating and lying and bullying and warfighting and pretending tomorrow was going to be ok. It never was. Chickens always, inevitably come home to roost. But if we all stopped all at once the world would change the next day. Prove me wrong.

*

In emulation of the great sand painters of our global cultural heritage, I've been doing chalk art on the sidewalk basically the same afternoon or evening that it's going to rain. It seems to release something in me of its own tone and texture apart from painting or drawing, but akin to both. And I don't have to store it, which, believe me, is a huge plus currently.

*

Last night as I was drifting off to bed I realized that my truest, oldest, most personal and most total ambition, such as the word can be applied to my temperament, is to be like Dick Van Dyke in the old Mary Poppins movie.

Bert and Ian Malcolm. Them, and Madmartigan from Willow, who is played by Val Kilmer. My protean, formative masculine ideals. The drifting, indefatigable workingman artist, the cynical, analytical trickster-intellect with a side of strong ethics and jokes, and the wild, diamond-in-the-rough fighter who is not the protagonist. All men queered in interesting ways by their characterizations and roles in their narrative, just by the by.

Plus, y'know, Batman. Also Val Kilmer! But more Mask of the Phantasm Batman, with the miserable, guilty, weeping, basically insane Bruce.

Wow, it really is all very complete and turnkey! Sometimes it can swing around to seem that we as individuals are not really very complicated phenomena after all. 

*

PAX EGRESS

PAX EXEGESIS

PAX EMESIS

--JL

#496

Can't understand politics anymore. The reason for this is, while it was difficult for me to understand what President Trump was saying back when the only half-loaded cock in his mouth was Vladimir Putin's, it has become absolutely impossible now that Elon Musk has improbably wedged his insecure penis into that ancient craw. The Three Amigos, as it were.

So I have no idea what people are talking about anymore. Is it because the president cannot possibly make himself understood that there appears to be no government?

No, it is because his opposition is as useful as a dog that was shot three days ago and not been moved from the spot where it lay down to twitch and die. 

Glitterati fistfucker ultimate victory, with technocrat chaser on the back of the christofascist and mindgamed masses. Hell yeah, boys. Peak civilization. Should we call it the Reverse Arab Spring or simply the Suicidal Reflex?

*

At this point I'm even prepared to entertain the idea that I am wrong, and that this monstrous crazy horseshit really is the best thing for the country and the world, after all. Just to make myself feel a little better. And, look. I mean. I am not privy to classified data! Try to read a lot of history and keep up with current events, but all of our knowledge is so incomplete in the face of the vast complexity of ten billion human stories which are sequels to fifty billion other stories, set in a world made out of stories. If some of the internet I read in my youth was as prophetic as some of the other internet that has proven prophetic, at the end of all this chaos and destruction we will see that there was an endgame all along, and that endgame will be good, Good, even Real Good--The Fuckin' Tight Sweet Redemption of Western Civilization or something. 

What the fuck do I know? Maybe, man! Maybe.

Anyway I would be prepared to entertain that notion. If there weren't individuals like Stephen Miller running around actually doing shit. If you know what a person should know about that piece of work, you know how deadly-ass close we are to the kinds of genocide and extralegal uses of military force that really stick with you, maybe make it into classrooms all around the world. Stuff dudes get tried at the Hague for--but not before they get away with it.

So there's not a lot of fun penis jokes I can write around that. Steve Bannon didn't pull this double-barreled blitzkrieg to make DJT the president. That would be funny and I would barely care to comment, frankly. He did it for Stephen Miller and the people like him currently hard at work with no apparent holds barring them, which is decidedly not funny and I am remiss in my duties as keeper of record, a writer, an artist, and a human being if I don't say so plainly. This will be tragic in the extreme if it truly runs its course.

*

Shit though, what do I know from funny or tragic? What do I even know about shit? Maybe I want to feel better. Fuck it. The alternative is to meditate on all the years I spent enduring being the immigrant, all the work I put into becoming a citizen, all the taxes I've paid and the work I've put into my communites, all for the twist of having to witness democracy collapse and the killers and thieves rule the roost--the same reason I emigrated in the first place. 

Wow. Yes, it is a little bleak written out like that. I guess I don't regret it, though. I love being an American, and I have loved being an American and living in America. It has not been perfect, but it has been fun and extremely generous with freedoms and privileges. I tried to do a good job, give back, earn my keep, all the stuff they say is right and proper.

Ah, but killers and thieves have always lolled in the sun while I worked the night shift. There was always a blood price being paid for the fun I had and the ease I took. Should I resent it when it comes due?

You know what? No. In fact. It strikes me in this moment that I don't have the right. 

When things looked good for us--according to my perhaps optimistic perception, all of us, a human family with all its flaws and glories, marching bravely into an egalitarian future that would transcend poverty and hatred--I said to myself that things were working well enough to that end given the realities of this weary world, and anyway I could expect them to continue to improve while doing my most basic civic duty and tending to my garden as virtuously as possible. I thought that by speaking the truth and setting a good example, that by merely living a life for its own sake, it would all come to pass--right before my very eyes! Global truth and reconciliation, hossana in the highest, etc.

Well, that wasn't enough, and to let myself think so was perhaps a kind of delusion. Not that there is anything wrong with just trying to live a simple life trying to be a good person--on the contrary, it is the highest attainable goal. I just mean that maybe I should not have shipped my oars and chilled to the music of the spheres. Should have joined model U.N. after actually accepting that invite to Cranbrook Academy, gone to MIT or somesuch, and accomplished something major in order to be most useful to my fellow citizens. Instead I opted to get really good at wearing leather jackets and cultivating an ultimately unwieldy body of (perhaps excessively fiction-based) knowledge and non-utile principles. Also drugs.

Service, when necessary, must come before self-cultivation. Perhaps I have failed to live up to this truth. That of duty, and rising up to meet it. Such is the tattered attraction of a degenerate culture, I suppose! Service in the service industry, I suppose, lacks the necessary gravitas that is granted to say, a diplomat.

*

Really, though. End of the day, fuck these people. Fuck them. Cretinous poltroons. Dog-livered cowards with cockroach minds. Fucking cuck simp bitches. Look to your own houses! That's all I have to say to you wretched, thrice-damned afterbirths. The cowards doing violence and the cowards letting them.

Because, see, it's not fuck red, or fuck blue. It's fuck the Man. Fuck the whole Man, that whole guy. Not half of him. The motherfucker himself, always. These are the optimal times to say it loudly, perhaps even feverishly. Screaming it might be appropriate, or typing it out as if you are screaming; perhaps, even, screaming as you type.

--JL

#495

There are but two main sources of comfort and useful counsel that I find are able to supply me with anything like the peace necessary to get through these days without flipping my lid.

One is to simply ignore the outside world and throw myself completely into my stuff. Stuff lately has included many layers of spray paint added to existing works, as well as a finishing or in-process coat of lacquer. That lacquer is some interesting stuff. It has also included finally getting seriously into NieR: Automata: The End of YorHa Edition. An experience I am glad to have squirreled away for these troubled, muddled, times. A world wiped clean of this too-human life--the perfect place to be right now.

The second thing is the retroactove consolation that even though the country I emigrated to in my childhood has fallen prey to the exact same breakdowns in civil society as 

a) the country I was born in, so, delicious, sweet, horribly painful irony. Venezuela! Yes! These fuckers can just say whatever they want about me and ship me to El Salvador for nothing! For whatever! For typing these very words! Who gives a fucking shit!

b) the Weimar Republic, so, just ugly and exasperating and exhausting and stupid, but

corollary consolation: the cake was a lie, and the country's propaganda about itself was crazy overdeveloped and self-defeating. It was an empire of genocide, lies, graft, brute force, and total bullshit. This is karma for far, far less the due portion merely than for what was done to the varied peoples of this continent in the name of "civilizing" it; but the project was a lie told by uncivilized peoples, whose stolen time is finally ending in a futile, repetitive, cacophanous fart. 

Sometimes the fact that doom is logical and consequential is the best thing we can cling to. The last bulwark. Who are you going to complain to, when two plus two came out to four yet again?

*

So let it all fall down. Best you can do is hold on. Hang tight. As I like to say, strap in. 

Because this is it, people. I want to say it clearly in case anyone need to hear it from me, for some obscure reason.

American fascism is no longer creeping, no longer covert. Democracy has completed its course, as useful and real as it was useful and real, and as much a sham as it was a sham. American fascism is now open and rampant, and the entrenched political forces are unequal to the task of containing it--even if it corrects itself, they have shown they are unfit to govern. 

Shit is real.

*

Hey hey! Let's try to eat lunch today. 

And.

*

Let us try once again to inculcate and nourish the best power we have: to love our fate; the higher the stakes, the better.

--JL

#494

The digits of today's excellent post number, the number 494, add up to seventeen! Yes. Yes. That is fantastic.

Probably it is Sesame Street what made me think numbers are concepts you should ritualistically celebrate through art and a kind of meditation that hovers between analysis and worship.

Thank you, Sesame Street. Without Jim Henson, who would I even be? It's a profound question. He stands tall among the cultural progenitors of my psyche-forme.

*

It amuses me to imagine some generative language model being used to offload cognitive labor somewhere making some poor individual suffer by trying over and over to make "psyche-forme" a real thing that a psychologist or someother might be using seriously (unscrupulous users would probably be happy enough to roll with it). It is merely one my own many improvisations upon a concept broadly used and applicable in the cultural continuum, which is as always and along wih everything else on this blog presented in good faith for honest use and also as a pointless joke. This kind of coinage is prevalent enough on this blog that it may be quite difficult someday to tell what is common usage all around me and what is merely my proclivity to play around with things, at any rate if Factually Pointless is among your primary documents. 

Well, maybe, maybe not. One thing I think it is safe to have confidence in: I have correctly and incorrectly--in the latter instance almost always for comedic effect!--deployed a great and manifold variety of real words on this blog, a vast and legitimate array, and I think this lends a deal of credence to my personal modifications and inventions.

Now, as to the efficacy of these arrangements, their power, beauty, and pleasure-giving ability--well, hash it out amongst yourselves, dear readers. For my part, it is my part to be transfixed, to be conduit and mouthpiece whether I will or no, essentially, and my meta-input should only ever be considered a kind of curiosity, probably. I know I have a separate, closed drawer in my mind for what authors and artists say about their own work; important, but just as important that it not be mixed in with any other paperwork at all. 

I have also used a lot of metaphors in my time on here. Some approaching the reader more obliquely than others, it is true.

*

Painting the bathroom pink. Might do personal fitness instruction for an elderly person. If I could earn even 20 bucks a week doing that I'd call it a great start to self-employment. My outlook is pretty favorable towards extremely incremental and perhaps incredibly uselessly slow gains. I am neither harried by impatience nor goaded by ambition. 

As far as I'm concerned, I am perfectly happy to live and die in total obscurity, having done the least harm and as much good as I could do with my own two hands with what's in front of my face, making art the whole time--my art, without compromises because why should I.

*

Thank you for reading my blog post about me and my thoughts and my blog. Thanks. Hope you got a smile or a thought out of the deal. 

Have a the best possible day under your prevailing circumstances.

--JL