#359

God damn. It's 2024. Who the fuck are you now, dear reader? More to the wellspring, who in the fuck am I. Who have I become.

Since last I wrote, my younger brother and I traveled far north to the town where he has been living for the past year and a half, a place where the rocks are as old as any you will find anywhere along the face of this planet. More time with each other than we have been granted in many years. I have reached deep into the clear waters at the root of my hills and I have stood at their crown and looked down upon the leafless branches of my winter forests. I have learned and taught, perceived and been perceived, and long and rich were the miles and the processes of the days. 

Then, it was new year's fuckin eve, and all that goes with that at the family home, with the family dogs, and two triumphant and reasonably recentered yet exhausted men and their parents.

The important thing about my family, the big thing--every family has their Big Thing--is we talk a lot, about a lot of stuff, and we bring a lot of stuff into a lot of other stuff. I mean on top of reminiscing and basic logistics and comparative sensorium stuff, all manner of practicalities and daydreams, admonitions and rebuttals, jokes and quotations and fripperies, any and all of which can be embroidered and interwoven into each other and the following: we talk about world history, cinema, philosophy, bullshit, sex, morality, politics, books, science, sports, fitness, nutrition, art, food, race, religious and spiritual matters, drugs, I dunno, literally fuckin everything, if it occurs to us and we can find a way to express it we say it and either talk about it or fight about why we do or don't want to talk about it and table it and bring it up later and come at it from a different angle. We are not a family of prolonged silences or areas of discussion that stay closed for inviolable spans of time. We just say stuff and react to each other constantly. 

This information may or may not surprise you, dear reader, but it generally surprises friends and acquaintances who hear of it or witness it firsthand. I don't really say all that much, out there in the world, unless called upon--a question hanging in the air, a vacant space where somene needs to step up, when at last the fools and talkers have talked themselves out and I can speak, preferably with the concision--brutal or careful--which I exercise so rarely in this blog. Generally if I allow myself to talk too long, people start to get angry.

Of course, some friends have heard me talk and even ramble at length, and they are as such more familiar with the man as you know him, dear reader. 

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Wow, that was so baring. I feel like I do this on occasion, pretty close to the new year--throw aside a cloak or a curtain to reveal a very personal little trinket or secret room in my fortress. You sly dog, you perfect, blank listener! How you draw me out into the open, on internet of all places!

Ah, well. Ting-a-ling.

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May we find the wisdom and courage to avoid cruelty this year, if we can. May we not give in to its temptations and may we not suffer its trespasses. It will make an important difference.

--JL 

#144

What is up, the square root of twelve! A special and super cool number, for a variety of interesting reasons. I shall have to post steadily for another sixty or seventy years to get to the next square. We shall see. It is not a predictable reality.

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My younger brothers and I used to strike out down the creek on mapping expeditions. As the oldest, I have always allowed my brothers what I thought was a normal but have found through comparison an extraordinary amount of license and autonomy while we spent time together and in cohabitational praxis. Basically, I did not act as a tyrant over them nor aggressively curb their behavior through punitive terror or emotional coercion, but treated them as equals under my care and protection, with rights and privileges no different than my own. I'm not saying I am a great brother, or that this made life easy or free of violent disagreement, but they are both smarter, more successful, and way less fucked up than I am, and when my brothers and I cooperate, it is as one three-headed organism.

The oldest of a brood can sometimes fill the role of icebreaker, nautically speaking. In gaming parlance, the tank. Militarily, the tip of the spear.

So really we would just go for walks and use our imaginations together, exploring and interpreting the natural world conveniently available to us, usually using the creek as a funnel for our spirits. We would join its flow into the woods, which allowed us to transform as we left the world behind.

Small woods. Small creek. But for us, an entire continent, laced with otherworldly fevers, and sometimes unspeakable terrors. There's a German word for it. 

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When my parents and my youngest brother were living in a different country for a spell and my other brother was away at college, my first long-term ex and I moved into the house. We made a horrible mess of it and I disintegrated into level 9 alcoholism. I was getting ready to hit level 10 when I got arrested, so I didn't, but I did not stop making huge mistakes, nor was it the last time I would start drinking and eventually lose control of it.

She and I would leave the house to smoke, which is one of the kinder things you can say about how we treated the place. Cohabitational praxis indeed; we were disgusting shitty trashbabies, and it was still better than how we had treated the apartment we had lived in predating this period. I can't imagine who I would be without this woman, respect and honor her to that high degree you reserve for the cream, there is no one like her in the world and she is a down girl and the real business, but we were exceptionally bad together.

Awful. Nightmare shit.

We smoked cigarettes on the back deck more than we should have, especially in the dead of winter, but optimally we'd go down to the wooden platforms by the creek.

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More about the creek...tomorrow! Hope you're digging this creek malarkey. Have a wonderful day.


--JL