#492

Well, it's almost two months into the year. Interesting year so far. Eventful! Personally and on a global scale.

Yes, a post about current events. Perhaps they are to some degree inevitable. Feel free to check out and slide away to more rewarding internet locales. I would. But it would perhaps be unwise, if I am able to offer any kind of useful insight. And maybe I can. That's why I bother to type it out and put it where people can see it, I guess, even if no one looks. Even if people did look, and it caused problems for me, I would still do it. 

Everything, of course, is to some degree inevitable. Arguing about it won't change that.

*

Well, look. I know that Americans reading this, generational Americans specifically, might think they still have a country. Shit, this country technically did survive Andrew Jackson and Warren Harding, two points in history in which the executive was overrun with trolls, gangsters, and petty thieves, and that's not nothing.

The country was much younger and the world much older in both instances. Young organisms are in key ways more resilient than their mature counterparts, and the world has been made anew five or perhaps eight times over since 1923.

But factually we probably don't have a country left. Every 24-hour period makes it less probable that we will be able to return to democratic norms. That's how it works in other countries, and if this past decade and a half has proved anything, anything, it is that the United States is no mythical example, no blessed fluke, no modern utopia, no nothing in any way special. Just another country full of humans.  

If things continue as they have been, then they could very easily just replace the courts with implacable algorithms and congress with a consumer panel overseen by a board of directors. 

Naturally nothing these bodies produce will have any effect on the CEO. That position can and only could ever be decided internally, using machinations whose inputs are completely severed from the public sensorium and indeed, reality. 

Once it has happened, you will see that such has always been their dark vision. They would never have said so! But it will be extremely obvious in retrospect, when you review the lies they told vs. the actions they took, that having a government was never really the plan. 

*

As I have said before, and as was quickly made manifest--they can just deport people wherever the fuck they want. They can make it happen by making it legal by being--it is very simple--bullies. They get it. They have always been bullies and they understand that being a bully works just as well when it's countries and laws as when it's toys and rules.

The reason for having governments is to prevent bullies from ruling the roost. Goverment fails when the bullies are in charge. It is...pretty simple.

*

"They" in this whole screed, by the way, should be understood as the brigands and profiteers whose aim is open and omnivorous theft of the highest possible magnitude, breadth, and scope, as well as any and all ideological maniacs who wish to vent their fear-based genocidal urges. 

As is so often true, the above are entwined in a very profitable and pleasurable position. Indeed, the former have historically found it useful and expedient to maintain in every way they can the conditions to create as much genocidal fear as possible--to embed it deeply in as many subcultures and across language and law and moral commandment. This trick has been key in accelerated forms of societal formation and collapse.

Building slave empires on foundations of total nonsense and thus creating the conditions for their own dissolution. Toppling monarchies with populist movements only to install a regime more brutal than previously thought tolerable or even possible. Coming in to gut existing companies and flying away on a helicopter with all their money. And so forth. That is the basic game.

People do it to themselves and allow it to be done to them. It is hard to hope for change when you see how willing and eager we are to spill the same innocent blood over and over and over again for completely made-up reasons each and every time. Always to the sound of applause, at first.

And believe me--there is always money in it.

*

All the truly useful solutions lie in the realm of fantasy. Such as: if I could magically give these people what they wanted without the human cost involved.

Do you understand? If I could just give these crazy fucking quasi-religious fanatics and twisted race scientists what they were after--a society comprised only of their described acceptable monoculture, inviolable and pure and legitimate in its closed-border holdings, by magically, intstantly withdrawing everyone they would like to fucking murder to a safe location, then I would.

Why? Because they wouldn't know what to fucking do. They would fucking starve. Those fortunate enough to survive the riots and outbreaks of disease, anyway. These people have no fucking clue what they're really after. They don't remember or realize that if there's no one around to be their slaves, then eventually, someone's going to have to lift a finger.

Who cleans the human feces? Who grows the food and deals with it and cooks it? Who gets to sit around all god damned day and point fingers? These questions have answers that they like, for now. What happens when suddenly the basis for those answers is completely gone?

It would even be immoral. To give them what they want. Wouldn't even want to watch that gruesome farce play out. Like the martyred socialist said, they know not what they do. They understand nothing. And to reveal to them the magnitude of their ignorance in this way would be cruel.

But it would probably be better than letting them kill us.

*

Letting them kill us seems to be the plan, as far as I can see. Very Christian of us and I approve, in a sense. I would also like to die later, from other causes, but no one gets to pick how they go, except all those who do. We say they are bad, I guess, but you know what I think about what "we" say en masse without thinking deeply about it.

Who fucking cares. Ballot, bullet, bullshit. It'll all kill you. Don't have any better plan and even if I did, don't know of anyone more socially dead than myself. Might be cool if someone had a strategy and I could trust it. Not from where I'm looking.

But I am seeing something I have seen before: a united and determined political minority has bamboozled the agitated public into giving them the government, and the political majority is too fragmented, inflexible, and fundamentally ineffective to stop them or do anything at all useful, really--just the same ritual genuflections that have been failing thus far, their power drained as though founded on a dead god.

*

So that's the pessimism. Do we have another angle?

Well, another fun fantasy is like, just being able to change someone's mind. Like, if I could, I dunno, concentrate real hard and pull my left earlobe while snapping my fingers and just watch someone let go their fear and their hate and their anger. That would be one fucking hell of a superpower. Better than Superman; fight me.

But, no. No, I don't really have much optimism. Only that this wretched world is visible to us, limited creatures that we are, as through a glass darkly, and to be freed from its bounds and sound what has been hidden will be to see and know one another and this world as it truly was, as we truly have been, as we are and will be, and faith that this veil is drawn over a perfect universe beyond my microscopic and human-all-too-human comprehension. 

In a good way. Guess that's my optimism. We are small, the present brief. Soon all this mess and tension will be of little consequence to whomsoever might walk this weary globe in another thousand thousand years. 

*

Thinking of finding a big giant jar to live in. Could be fun. Could be a novel career move after all this shit burns down around me, if I'm not shot to death in the street or put on a work crew in Nicaragua or wherever the fuck.

--JL

#298

Well, my test was not a success. Didn't get too far before a silly mistake that I could have corrected failed me right out! This time I had the parking brake on during the air brake leak test, which is no good, and any mistakes in your brake test fail you outright. Miserable! Foolish! Ah, the pain of an actual fail is so much more searing than a practice fail. Well, I can try again on Tuesday, and I have promised the tester a perfect test at that time. And by gum, I shall deliver!

Dang, man, though. Fuck. Would have preferred to pass. That would have been preferable, to me. But, as my tester said basically immediately--everything happens for a reason. I believed this as a child, then I doubted it, then unequivocally held that nothing happens for any reason, and eventually I came to believe once more that every particle in the universe is exactly where it needs to be for all time. I did not proceed with my test and pass it today, and the consequences of that will affect my life and the life of those around me such that years from now, I will look back and say "None of this would have happened if I'd passed my test right away. Thank God. I say Yes to this life with an obstinate joy. Do you hear me, demon? A stubborn, relentless joy, a firm and clear and uncompromising Yes!"

*

Ha! Feel better already. Also, we got plenty more moving done. Still a lot to do, but life changes so fast all the time, and people are always doing everything they can to make it faster and faster--annoyances it may contain, but this slow-burn move has its beauties and advantages, as well. 

*

Ezra just came up to me and showed me that someone is selling my books at a higher price than the one I set. Through eBay! Couldn't really care less about the money angle or whatever. Any angle. Guess I hope they do a better job than me? I mean, it is barely possible to do worse. Also the seller is very obviously a bot.

*

Looking back at this post--and my life--I get the sense about myself as a terrible letdown to my family, especially in times/cultures with exacting expectations regarding the product of family units. I have fun imagining myself falling pretty neatly into the a Japanese stereotype of dudes like me. A disgrace, but not like, the worst conceivable disgrace. A faintly amusing, mostly harmless, embarrassing failure--"Gakkari shita chōnan. So fortunate for the parents that there followed other sons, better sons, sons who did not squander their promise."

Drifter mindset, drifting life. Head in the clouds, buried in books, lost in space. I may have mentioned before that at an overnight camp, I was given the nickname "The Wandering Fetus". And, well, yes. To offset this, I've done my best to work hard and at the very least not be a freeloader or a burden, and tried hard to do right and be a support to those around me, when I wasn't drunk off my nutsack or letting the devil take it all.

So it goes! Peace out and give head, good people. Or don't! Your choices are your own.

--JL

#133

Postscript for yesterday: basically I think we have an endemic cultural resentment towards the times that we live in and the centuries that brought us here, and suffer from a combination of mass resignation and mass olfactory revolt, which makes us useless, embattled, neurotic, desperate for absolution we don't believe is real, chronically ill, constantly sorry for ourselves, and either insufferable to each other or lost in another. 

What we need around here is amor fati, and to strengthen our fucking stomachs. That is all. We are each and every one of us lucky to be alive and lucky to be facing the challenges that we are facing. We are lucky to have the opportunity to be the smartest, strongest individuals that have ever lived free and we are lucky to have such great and terrible psychic and material obstacles to overcome. We are lucky to have problems of this complexity and breadth to tackle, lucky to have to deal with such a cacophony of ideas, lucky to have skin in this game. It is a blessed fate. 

Die trying.

*

As for me and my time these days, I've just been smoking all the cigarettes I can fit into my craw. Disgusting myself in general. Living at least thirty percent of each waking hour in the past, reflecting on the wherefores, flows, dynamics, and details of how I have fucked up. Working hard.

Been raising some strong Pokémon. There is always deep satisfaction in this pastime. Also the chiptunes and sprites of Blue Version take me back to the past in a different, much more pleasing way.

*

It's okay to be having a bad time. Lucky to have that, too, frankly.


--JL

#114

This is going to be a long, weird post. It will no doubt serve as a good reason for many people to avoid my work, but what can I do? No different.

*

I was baptized a Roman Catholic, and have been in a crisis over it ever since I began to grasp its implications. Every second of every day of my life has been spent wrestling with them, whether directly in the forefront of my conscious mind, drunkenly wrestling with demons, or taking up a permanent place on my back burner. I was an atheist for seventeen years. Made no difference. 

Can't unknow. Or unlearn. Play pretend, try to forget. Live long enough, it'll catch up to you, or be the thing that kills you.

The Church and I have some problems between us. I've written a fable about it. Didn't feel much at my Confirmation, had a terrifying and incomplete First Confession, didn't feel anything when I accepted the Eucharist. Already it all seemed to me somehow some kind of front. Some bad stuff had happened to me in life and I had seen much worse happen to others by the time these ceremonies came around, and my Jesuitical education was perhaps too good at fostering a spirit of scepticism and scientific inquiry. Later in life I came across the writings of Sextus Empiricus and I was all "right, right. yup".

To make what is already too long of a story short, since I have a lot to get through yet, I do not trust the sacraments. More precisely, I do not trust other men to deliver the sacraments unto me. It gives me no particular pleasure to say it and I use no malice when I say that this Church is no one true Church. Popes are just men, usually even exceptionally venal ones; worse creatures than the human beings they treat like sheep and manipulate like sheep. Fuck popes, fuck this current pope in particular; I take this pope's bullshit very personally. Also, of course, foundation of blood, rivers of blood, oppression, slavery, children's crusades, pederasty, pedophilia, sexual slavery, child pornography, rape and protecting rapists, enabling or directly enacting many genocides, etc. 

Not to say that the Church is evil. It is made up of human beings and is human. It is responsible for some of the most wonderful events in history, some of the most wonderful works of art ever produced, has been a spiritual home for some of the greatest and most human individuals that ever breathed and spoke and thought and wrote. I would not change one thing about the history of the Church, about any part of the human story.  

God made humans. Humans make popes, and priests, and books, and limited conceptions of that which they name God. Human things. Beyond good and evil and under a doom of good and evil, compassing the heights and depths, the full spectra, and transcending being. 

Ultimately, what I believe is that God is in the infinite paradox, in the unavoidable correctness of supratotality. I believe in God because I believe that the universe is absolutely and without equivocation perfect, and so is every other universe. I have chosen to love everything in it, everything and everyone. 

Naturally we have our own immediate concerns, our challenges and duties, our limited perspectives to deal with and our pressures to survive. It's fine to sing universal love and the holy spirit permeating all existence, but on a more granular level, we have inheritances to deal with, and the eternally impermanent nature of the world means we always have battles to fight. I feel I cannot avoid being outside the Church, if I am to be a Catholic; and I am, because that is my inheritance, because baptism is done through water, and water is the holiest thing on this Earth, sacrosanct and fundamentally incorruptible. I am, for I also believe in the Resurrection, and the Ascension. I believe Elijah was carried up, I believe Isaiah spoke through a live coal, and I believe Moses looked upon the Countenance. I believe that Christ set us free, absolutely free, and therefore we are bound to answer for our choices.

So I believe in these, the times that we were born to, I must find ways to serve as my own priest, or to let the world serve as my priest, to deliver myself unto the sacraments rather than have them delivered unto me.

*

Therefore, in order to perform the sacrament of confession, I have determined to give confession to the world, that none may mistake me for what I am not merely because I whisper my secrets in the dark. I have determined to tell the truth about the evil, harm, and hurt I commit and that I cause, knowingly and unknowingly, as truthfully and completely as I can, unsparing.

*

Beginning with the primary qualities, and sticking to the brief and categorical deed-types they have been material to, using detail only for special illustration in the interest of saying everything I have proven myself capable from of childhood to now in one fell swoop: 

cowardice, hypocrisy, stubbornness, impatience, denial, disloyalty, rage, self-pity, hotheadedness, extreme drunkenness, gluttony, wastefulness, arrogance, laziness, lust, pride, vanity, selfishness, destructiveness, prejudice, contempt, hardness of heart, gracelessness, ingratitude, forgetfulness with negative consequences for others, lying to myself constantly and quite enough to be getting on with to others, desire to inflict pain as punishment, inflicting pain as punishment whether through specially calibrated words or in combat or slapping a friend or teammate upside his head, acting in vengeance, leading others astray, cold and calculated thinking and speaking, breaking promises, nonconstructive and willfully negative rhetoric, failing to think before I speak or act or refine my thinking and acting process skilfully, self-harm, standing in baseless judgment of others or things beyond my current scope of understanding, talking about something I don't know about as though I do, belittling others intellectually in order to make myself feel smarter and better about myself, acting as though my qualities and deeds put me above others, looking for fights, breaking the law because I feel like it, breaking rules just to fuck 'em, casual blasphemy (not just Christian blasphemy; if people believe it, I've blasphemed it), rudeness, edgelording, trolling, merciless and spiteful unfair mockery, emotional divorce of self, standing by with my hands in my pockets while terrible things happen right before my eyes, not raising my voice for what I think is right or important when really how little is that to ask, letting my paranoia get the better of me, submitting to the status quo or silence or someone else's will when I knew better, blurring lines of consent and allowing bad communication and bad faith with romantic partners and also breaking up with them in and at terrible wrenching ways and times, thoughts so hideous and abominable I shudder to recall even the shadow of them, abandoning friends even as I cry because friends have abandoned me, placing blame outside myself when have no business doing that, blaming myself alone when I have no business doing that, littering, excessively ugly cursing and casual use of racial slurs, thinking and acting like I'm too good or brilliant for a place or person and ditching out, copping a bunch of dang attitude, letting being an asshole be a kneejerk thing or going way overboard with it, hella bragging, baseless hostility, wallowing in self-pity, consciously acting like things are worse than they are or I feel worse than I do in order to get out of situations or avoid problems or labor, making decisions for people and abrogating their agency when it was not my place, knowingly risky behavior, enabling or talking soft to people and letting their shit slide and their thinking degenerate when I should have been firm and straight up and had the courage to correct them, cheating at card and board games, thievery, deliberate disruption of organized activity, trespassing, hustling, delinquency, truancy, pushing aside all feeling in place of true forgiveness or healing, minimizing other people's experiences, flippant or deflective stances when the sober truth would have served best, letting someone cover for my mistakes or bear the brunt of my bad decisions so I won't have to, shirking responsibilities in general, squandering opportunities, justifying and rationalizing my complicity and bad behavior and that of others, allowing others to abuse me, drunken ruckus such as screaming at people and public disturbance even to the point of an arrest on one occasion, drinking when I damn well know I am an alcoholic, burning all my bridges and throwing my life out the window which doesn't only affect me because I do not live in a vacuum, isolating myself out of preciousness or temper or pure foolishness, and doing the wrong thing entirely on purpose just because.

*

Worked hard to summon it all up and move my fingers to type. 

Very much felt something. Feeling lots of things right now. Lots of stories.


--JL

#23

One of the main things in life is to get away from everyone you ever knew and who ever knew you and learn who you are again. The person both behind and beyond the character you have created in order to survive this world. The more complete the vanishing act, the better. God will bring you back to those who in his wisdom, he has linked you. Some you will never see again, and that too is a mathematical and logical consequence of grace. Sad and sweet, like your own tears falling into your mouth can be. Even bitter partings and hardened hearts have their place in the pattern; some wounds must heal in another life, after the sufferer has already transformed, and the song undergoes a translation.

Simple, really, and never less than the very peak of elegance. 

*

Nobility is no more than the relaxed and cheerful acceptance of ever-changing suffering punctuated by death, and the sublime joy of each profound and elongated moment of such radiance.

*

Good to be back to work. It's a deep and satisfying sort of pleasure to hustle hard and break a sweat. I drank a fucking delicious glass of milk today. Drink raw milk from happy cows living on small wild-pasture farms, everyone. That boiled dead shit from the supermarket sucks a soft dick in an alley where the dumpster grease never stops trickling.

Took a short and pleasing walk with my mother and the family dog. I watched small brown poops squeeze out of his pink anus, and thought briefly about the sliding scale and many modifiers of human dignity.


--JL