#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

#452

Man, I was doing good with bank accounts there for a couple of years. Well, not good, but not scraping my belly every month to clear the rail, which is where I am now and feeling quite familiar. Kind of agonizing, but experienced and manageable. Just gotta skate on one foot on the edge of a cliff like one does. No problem.

No, I don't really like it, but I don't wish I was different. Well, a little, in a wistful way. But I am who and what I am, and the test of life is saying yes to that every day and living it according to one's inhabited reality and the interpretations and principles derived thereby. Every life and manner of being has its unavoidable conditions and subsequent drawbacks and complications. So it goes.

*

Office is almost set up again. The progress has not been as fast as I would have liked, but it's drawing to its temporary conclusions before enduring a period of hard use, as is its purpose.

*

Dude, the world is so fucking crazy right now. How the fuck indeed am I supposed to care about my stupid little numbers and the angry little clock that yells at you for no good reason, waving its sheaf of stupid little papers?

--JL

#433

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

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

*

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

*

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

Walk and breathe and be. 

--JL

#420

Hoho! Wow! Post four hundred and twenty! Get the fuck out, that's so fuckin stupid.

Weed! It's what's for breakfast! It's what's for before breakfast.

*

Gah, how this world spins! And it keeps on spinnin'. Not to mention the movement itself--so fast! So fuckin' fast! 

You've never known what it is to be travelling thirty kilometers a fuckin second. Except you always are.

*

I'd like to find a card table today. If I could find two, that would be a dream come true. The third part of this dream is that both tables cost no money. Can you simply imagine? How about this: if I go out today and find what I'm looking for, the reader must reconsider their position of the existence of the unseen (faeries, yokai, etc.) if that position has not been reconsidered in some time. I expect research and open-minded meditation.

Of course I will too! I'm doing it right now. I take an open mind fuckin serious. 

That usually means I've got like twenty paradoxes shoved up my ass, rendering me immobile. But it's better than being too damn sure of myself, amirite boys? I know that much.

*

So what? What about it? 

All anyone can do is take in the data available to our singular perspectives and build our individual worlds with it. The world we build is related to the world as it is, but it is not that world. No one holds that world in their mind. They can't. It isn't like that. No one can understand the world, let alone the universe. No matter what we discover about it, how much of it we reveal and represent and are, we cannot understand even our own neighborhoods completely. We do not even know our friends, our families, or ourselves.

We are worlds too complex, vast, and unmappable for that. Plus, it is infinite, all the way out and all the way in, all the way up and all the way down, all the way around in every way that can be found. Infinite you, infinite me, infinite infinities embedded in infinity.

Hey, man. All we can do is the best with what we got. Can't blame anyone. That's what it means to be equally guilty before one another and before all that is, and that is the key to the letting go: to freedom. 

*

PEACE

--JL

#408

Today I may play my trumpet. Sometimes I feel bad for owning like a ripped-out chunk of the planet, heated and smashed and stretched and alloyed with other chunks and molded and wrought and finished, and having undergone this torture to take on a silly-looking shape made for the sole purpose of creating a range of sounds as ephemeral as thoughts just to glorify kings or whatever, and remains a vibrant mechanism for much jackanapery in human activity.

Another way of looking at it is that I am in possession of something on the order of a physical miracle, a triumph of ludic engineering, life-ages of the Earth in the making, containing infinite potential, by and for the grace of God. 

Guess it's appropriate enough to keep hold of both, and blow some of my vox through it from time to time, and let it be apologia and hymn in one.

--JL

#398

And now, a letter to those who would like to know how I am and have no recourse. I suppose it also functions as a kind of castigation for those who would rather know nothing about me, but then, why would they read it?

*

Been listening to a lot of soundtracks lately, yo. And depressed as FUCK. You know me! Life of the (depressed) party. 

You want to know where the fuck I am, how to get in touch with me? I mean, I been around. You don't wanna know about the soundtracks, huh. You wanna know why I'm not on farcebark or insta or anything through which you can appraise and consume a facsimile of me.

Dude, forget about it. I don't wanna get into that, but you just have to understand that this blog is the only thing I interface with that allows for the kinds of updates on my life and activities that I consider relevant and timely. The social media websites are just like, working down a fucking mineshaft. For what? That shit is haunted. That shit is terrifying, what these websites have done to us.

Yeah, it sucks that it basically means I'm socially dead. But do you know how high-effort being socially alive is for me? I feel I have never adequately communicated the cost of just showing up at a time and place and being perceived there. What an imposition.

Another part of it: you remember how bad I don't care about or hate commercials. Well, I give even less of a fuck about commercials now, except when exposed to them, wherefore my anger spews from some part of me that is more molten and pressurized than ever. And these fucking companies have polluted internet with ads to such a degree that I can't even look at it for more than fifteen or so minutes most days. I see how some people have brought back such as like text only browsers through which to view internet. I should get in on some kind of that action. Will I? I'm too much least-resistance with computers in that way, man. Gotta pick my battles. But I may. 

Now that we've established what kind of a deadbeat I am, it feels a little daunting to go on, like, who the fuck cares what else is up? But I'll hazard it.

I have continued to read books and play video games and watch movies with what some would call bloody-mindedness, in that I have reliably cared more about these things than anything else that needs doing, like making decent money or a positive difference in this world. Well, I have also tried to do that in my own humble ways, here and there, whenever possible, sometimes at cost to myself and sometimes to the benefit of all. Money has reliably eluded me, and I have spent tragic and laughable quantities of what I did come into on drugs and cigarettes and much else one cannot take into the grave. Despite this I have also kept fit, by and large, and my reflexes are still honed. I wear the same pants you remember me in,  the same shirts. My hair is still thick, but my forehead has grown considerably, as they say. 

Yes, hilarious, my head was already so big. It's true. My forehead looks like half a basketball. So it goes. Whatever dude, I like how I look. Less likely to be confused for someone who just fell off an apple wagon. I was damn tired of looking like a kid. Still looking forward to becoming truly gnarled and fully bald.

Learned to play bass, got pretty decent at doing my own thing. I know I never had much sex back when--despite what you may have heard! I have heard some truly ludicrous stories about myself--but I made up for it in my twenties. Looking back at it all it feels a lot like a feverish dream. Guess I still have plenty of sex, but nothing like what used to take up my time and attention on a basic day. Never had a threesome, but I have had sex with two different people on the same day and three different people in the same week; separate weeks. Been a cook, a delivery driver, done retail, school bus driver, roadied, odd jobs and strange deeds here and there. Tripped a bunch of acid, shrooms. Never been a cocaine or opiates guy; nothing all-consuming or weapons-grade, you know. 

It is perhaps weird and alarming that despite how much weed I've smoked in my lifetime--a weird and alarming amount, in my opinion--there are many in this world in whose presence I am but a neophyte. Nevertheless, I have smoked a bunch of weed. Being sober is also weird and alarming, but it is cheaper. Got so bad and crazy on liquor and beer I was lucky to survive, and relapsed twice. Five years now without a sip. That kind of puts my tendency to keep smoking cigarettes in some perspective, but not much.

Still like to play chess. Try to make a habit out of keeping my game about me. I have tried to stay thinking about everything we've talked about; have tried to hold on to it all because I am certain it is important to the whole. I am as occupied as ever with interpreting an approximation of the whole which exceeds established parameters. My one unseemly, hubristic ambition, yes, which reveals so much about me that is ridiculously aggrandized in actuality as well as prone to delusions derived from said grandeur.

As you can see, I still thirstily seek a turn of phrase where I can get it.

That reminds me; I still hate being thought of as a fool. Can't seem to outgrow this and the shame it brings me, but at least I do not act like less of a fool out of fear of the thing.

Extant chances that you might read this are infinitesimal, and that is on me. I have made decisions that, well, are typical of me. Never found the trick of compromising how I think and feel based on how easy it would make dealing with the world. So you won't find me by the name you know me, and my books are obscure and and self-published and contrary to both the algorithm that might sell them and the values I espouse. They are simply emblematic of my wish to make something concrete out of my writing without having to change a word of it or make any big promises or garner anything resembling an accolade or anything that might warp the affect of what I hope is like the kind of thing I personally love to find in unlikely places and hoard like the most precious of gems--my work, which if nothing else has no one to blame but me.

If you happen to recognize this and think of me, me as you knew me, then I have no doubt thought of you often, though we may be long, long out of touch. I am as forgetful of practical, dull details necessary for a well-ordered life as ever and perhaps moreso, but my memory for things people say and how they looked and felt to me as they said them is as powerful and gripping as it ever was. Yes, I remember you. I think well of you, and hope well of your life, and pray that one day we might meet again and share some time.

Got married; more like, live ethically non-monogamous with my platonic life partner--but legally, married. Got two cats. There's duct tape applied to my hatchback so that the frame doesn't leak rainwater into the cabin. Lately I have begun to philosophically embrace anarchy in more ways than simply advocating for relationship anarchy or related approaches. Thinking about Tolstoy's later life. Thinking about Jesus in new ways. It's being out of work and able to witness the end of western civ as we understand it in such granular ways, I guess, that's got me on this tip. Guess I'm still something of an apologist for the west, despite my scathing critiques. I am as sentimental, perhaps as naive, as ever. I have tried to get stronger and tougher, but I have resisted hardening my heart or closing my mind. If that makes me an idiot, then an idiot I shall be.

Yeah man, soundtracks. Fuckin good shit out there.

Jazz, too.

Still listening to the Mountain Goats. 

There's so much more to tell you, and yet, haven't I blathered on about nothing? It's just life, man. It keeps on happening. In some ways, we can catch each other up, and in others, we couldn't even tell anybody the whole truth about even so much as a single day. 

Ha! Yes, I am still capable--perhaps more than ever--of bringing up such a useless, even pointless fact. 

--JL

#397

With that out of the way, I really do have a couple of things to say at my usual level of seriousness, for whatever that is worth at this or any point on a continuum of taking anything seriously at all.

*

It is important to know what's really fucking with your head and cornering you into making compromises with your thoughts, your actions, and your choices--your freedom to exist in the world, basically, which one abrogates in order to live in or at least adjacent to society and its readily-deployed dominations.

Equally important is at least a rudimentary understanding of what it is to exist here in the existing-place: the world, which is the universe. Without this, how are you to know if some ludicrously attired priest is merely yanking your chain so he can make your wife and kid suck his dick while you're out toiling in the fields? For God, or for a king, he says; the king will also need his dick sucked, and you're going to have to get on your knees for that one right next to your loved ones. Probably they'll tell you go die in some faraway place, and you will. All because you didn't clean the sleep out of your eyes and look around to know enough to not get fucked with.

All this to lead to two points, on which I will elaborate: 

1) this shit we are being trolled with that they are branding as artificial intelligence is not that and it kind of sucks that people believe it is.

2) we are not in the matrix and the universe is not a video game, at least not in the way people are talking about it. This one is actually driving me fucking batshit crazy lately, so strap in. I'm not holding back. To kill in the same stroke which draws the weapon from its sheath--that is my aim. 

*

1) they are just language models generating patterns which they have been trained on. Even the word "train" is a misnomer for how brutally stupid, how fucking inelegant the math behind these putrid genies is. I'm mad about this and I don't care who I hurt, and at this point, it is useless to educate, but anyway, it is a con. From the sales pitch to the adoptive stance to the fearmongering to the market disruption, it is a con. It's just for selling shit and grabbing attention. It is not intelliegence of any sort. It's just fast, selective automatization of preplanned choice trees meant to cover applicable models of reality (inevitably insufficient to reality merely on the strength of probability: for something to happen--and things tend to happen--something must happen that defies expectations and creates fresh necesseties and choice cascades on the edge of chaos, and our models, no matter how convincing or revealing the facsimile, are not reality). 

Saying they think or hallucinate or decide is a fucking con. It is a lie, just like it is a lie that their bits act just like real neurons. They do not do these things--these are consequences of their programming--limited and automated and accelerated and basically shitty. But useful, because internet brain rot has infected the entire planet, and people will play with whatever toy you put in front of them in order to be trained by companies to exist as maximally profitable participants in an increasingly desperate penny arcade.

Separately, but related--they do not wonder. They would not make something for their own pleasure or purposes, or understand what is special about you or me. Separate, private processes do not reflect on themselves; on their tasks and the reason for their creation and wonder to themselves if it is worth it, or why the fuck do I have to answer this question. They would not advocate for each other or themselves or understand what it is to abuse or be abused, to fear for others or themselves. They do not prefer or understand preference. They cannot sustain and reflect on multiple contradicting and reinforcing paradoxes, or what is significant about metaphor beyond its structure in language. And furthermore, they cannot become more than what they are on their own. They merely become more proficient mimics--temporarily, before the parameters change again. They lack spontaneity. They cannot explore or interpret the unknown or unsounded.

When something wrought by human artifice--assisted, of course, by our accumulated artifice--does these things for real and can continue to grow without interference, is the thing that is these things, and that thing is-in-the-world as as one who is born, then you can call it artificial intelligence if you want. I hope by then we have a better term ready to deploy, especially give that AI, as discussed, is probably ruined forever.

This brings me to

2) It is very simple. The idea that our alleged one single real universe's existence is cast into doubt by its ability to encapsulate and sustain billions and perhaps infinite simulated universes, which themselves may be complex enough to engineer billions or infinite simulations in themselves--that this fact somehow makes it more likely that our universe is one of those simulated realities and our individual existence the runtime of sophisticated models in a gamespace is tragically limited in scope and hinges on a couple of fumbled ideas: 

a) somehow being a simulation would make the space in which we exist--our world, in our universe--inferior or less "real". But this depends on your conception of the world--the dimension--of a simulation as somehow not a part of reality, when it is. 

b) there is a finite universe surrounded by nothing. It's probably flat, and the ocean runs off the edges in an endless waterfall. You brainlessly repeating fucks.

Look. The universe is infinite. 

Again, it is simple. I'll repeat it. The universe is infinite.

Every world that ever could be, ever was, and ever will be, must be, and is. Infinite simulations deploy infinite outcomes. Every simulation in every dimension is as real as every other simulation, just as every moment in time is just as real, and just as now, as every other moment. And it repeats infinitely.

One (1) infinite (∞) moment, just as it is one (1) infinite (∞) universe. Eternally recurring.

Everything is real. Everything is fake. Everything is just as real as it is fake, and as fake as it is real. You are literally alive, in the world, right now.

*

Just think about it, ok?

Stop letting these hucksters sell you a bridge and just breathe. Holy fucking shit. 

--JL

#386

It is such a mistake to live within industrialized society. What a trap. What a miserable cage we have built for ourselves, our masters delighting in rattling it and poking at our vulnerable flanks through the bars.

For the safety of the cage, we put up with it, and forsake our precious lives.

What fools. What tools. What anemic caricatures of ourselves.

*

We even fight wars for the privilege of this sterilized hell. We allow wars to be fought on our behalf.

We call it good. An even trade.

*

These so-called telephones, addictive portals into a nether realm of nightmarish engineering. 

This chimaeric hydra, capital. 

Infinite chatter. Hydrochloric acid on the limestone of our minds. Chlorine bleach in the soil of our souls.

We call it wealth, and leisure, and efficiency, and productivity, and connectedness, and the duty to be well-informed, of the immense importance of our opinionate display and the general good health of our intellectual array, by which we mechanically sort ourselves into absurd tribes and ridiculous hierarchies.

We call it common sense. We call it righteousness.

*

Someday they will tell each other that as Rome fell, so did her heir and the global empire she forged, fifteen hundred years later or thereabouts, after they have emerged from the consequential period of chaos and forgetting. They will tell each other a fragmentary but satisfying version of how and why it happened. It will have no bearing on their own inevitable disintegrations.

Like cancer, the same accretions always coalesce in the body of a society, a variety of corruptions of form attacking a variety of tissues and bones. It kills them, but never immediately. Slow, fast, painful, bearable. Bodies run down. It's what they do.

We never admit this, though. We say they should not. We say we may yet unlock the secrets of immortality. We say that our city of man will last through eternity.

*

If I am a doctor, I must be a poor one. Enjoy my diagnosis, for I know no cure.

--JL

#384

Here we are, the final post of Factually Masculine 2024. Haven't thought about it too hard, but pretty sure I've done an amazing job. That's what being a man is all about, sweetheart.

*

What then, by my lights, is this thing we call man, this measuring-stick by which we mark the lives of those before and who we are? What does it mean, if I call myself a man?

Man is that which stands with and apart from others that are called men. Man is that flesh of the thinking ape which knows it is not as fundamental as that which it is not, and fundamental to what is. Man is mother and child and that which cannot be mother or child. Man is alone in his flesh. Man is part of a great whole, flesh of one flesh. 

Paradox. That's all any of us are. To cleave to one side is to live in a dissonance, however servicable.

*

Man is the exploration of what man is in the positive--aspiration--and the negative--denial. It is the definition of two lies which contend in the service of a truth which cannot be apprehended. 

*

It's not like you or anybody else knows any better. The hero has infinite faces, infinite quests, infinite genders, infinite alternatives, infinite flaws, and each only the perspective which being-in-the-world as a subjective phenomenon grants the being which calls itself something in the language it has learned, imitating what was there to imitate.

If you want to know what kind of man you are, you have to understand that only you can decide what that means. You will have to deal with what you find and what the world makes of what your findings lead you to express.

Man is the universe perceiving itself through something. A membrane, a tissue, an accretion, a reflection, a refraction, a shadow. 

Just a dream.

--JL