#475

As I fire up the text field and prepare to serve you yet another remaindered, highly constrained, tonally sculpted hunk of prose I wrote in the past for different purposes, it strikes me as an excellent insurance policy in terms of hitting five hundred posts this December. Kind of a twenty-five days of bullshit. Or! Or. A more ennobling term. Than that one. 

Have a short biography of Malcolm X.

*

Few, if any, Americans have presented history with a starker set of contradictions in their lifetimes and legacies than the man born Malcolm Little on the nineteenth of May in 1925. Malcolm X, as he is most widely known, understood, and remembered, was both an agent of change and an ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-translating individual. Born in Omaha, Nebraska to parents active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association founded by Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey and his former wife Amy Ashwood Garvey, Malcolm and his siblings—he was the fourth of seven—would be raised to have pride in themselves, their heritage and people, and above all to respect themselves and demand that same respect from others. Earl and Louise Little were effective in this, fending for themselves economically and instilling in their children a philosophy of self-determination. They were deeply involved in community speaking and organizing; so much so that under threat from the Ku Klux Klan they had to relocate from their Omaha home to Lansing, Michigan. The troubles continued, however; the children’s pride in their race drew attention and caused problems at school, and local White Supremacist organization the Black Legion harassed Earl and his family. Earl would die under suspicious circumstances—crushed by a streetcar on his way to collect money from folks who had purchased poultry from him, but likely assaulted elsewhere and dragged onto the tracks, leaving Louisa Helen with seven children to care for on a meager income. This pressure, combined with the certainty that her husband had been murdered by racists, resulted in her eventual mental breakdown. The children were split up and sent into the foster care system.

Young Malcolm excelled in school—in everything he put his mind to. He is remembered by his sibling as an ever-smiling, always prankish little boy. Beneath the devil-may-care attitude and sparkle, along with the brilliance and the charm, came also a certain pessimism, and a deep sensitivity that life would usually drive him to hide. As he matured, discouragement from taking more advanced and interesting courses and casual racism from his White peers troubled him and agitated his resentment more than they had as a younger student. When he shared his dream of becoming a lawyer with one of his middle school English teachers in Mason, Michigan, they told him such a dream and such a profession were unfit for a member of his race—that he might consider carpentry. Confronted with this betrayal, he saw no point in continuing with his education, his behavior worsened, and he did not enroll in high school. Now fifteen years of age in 1940, he was sent to Boston to live with his aunt in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury.

She was not able to get him to return to school. He would hold a wide variety of jobs and commit a few petty larcenies for the next seven wayward years, but the most significant part of his time in Roxbury would be the music and the fashion, for these were the years of the zoot suits and the swing and jazz explosion, the concerts that would run all night with participants dancing from the moment they hit the floor at night to well past the crack of dawn. Malcolm worked jobs with no commitment, quitting often, and concentrated on women. This lack of direction, loss of positive role models, and general descent would continue until the start of the Second World War, when he would finally work hard to keep the job the advent of war secured for him for a while—because it put him on a Pullman car with regularity and allowed him to visit New York City, and especially, Harlem. To him, the legendary neighborhood was a revelation, and a doorway to even greater pleasures. He found jobs in Harlem and began to live there, entering the criminal underworld in earnest, diving into drug dependency and surviving on the usual ever-rotating temporary jobs, supplemented by grifts, hustles, short cons, robberies, connecting johns to working girls, and bootlegging; in New York, in Boston, even back in Lansing for a brief period in which he tried and failed to get back on the straight. He feigned a kind of insanity to get himself declared 4F when the draft called him up in 1943, a tactic which proved effective, and his lifestyle—affected by the tightening economy as the war progressed—continued on this dark and tightening course until he was arrested for robbery and charged with possession of a firearm back in Roxbury, having formed a crew and betrayed them to police officers who lied to him about being charged if he gave up their names. Further betrayed in court by another of its members, a married White woman he had long carried on a romantic relationship with, Malcolm was served with the maximum possible sentence for his crimes and sent in January 1946 to Charlestown State Penitentiary, at that time the oldest continuously functioning penitentiary in the world and a place of infamously hideous conditions.

The first part of Malcolm X’s prison life is without a doubt his lowest and darkest. His rage and alienation at the method of his arrest, the procedures of his trial, and the conditions in which he now found himself were enormous and poisonous to himself and everyone around him. His prison nicknames were “The Green-Eyed Monster” and “Satan”, for the venom he gave everyone around him and the vitriol and profanity he heaped on God and religion in general. His existential disconnection from the world he had been given to live in was complete, and the pain of this absolute. While jailed and on trial, he had gotten clean, but he returned to the use of drugs and tried to be high as much as possible. His relationship with his siblings and family, which he had always tried to maintain through letters and visits and the sending of money (when possible), deteriorated. All that changed when he met and began to have conversations with John Elton Bembry, a well-read fellow convict with a sparkling intellect and will to pass down some of what he had learned to the younger Malcolm, especially the value of discipline. 

This meeting of the minds would inspire Malcolm begin to use his prison time constructively; most importantly of all, it put him on the path to an engagement with literature and reading that would reignite that old brilliance and completely transform his psychic life. He devoured nonfiction of astonishing breadth and variety: historical accounts of the U.S. slave trade and practices of chattel slavery—and slave rebellions like Nat Turner’s and Toussaint Louverture’s—the history of British and U.S. intervention in China, the Western philosophers like Herodotus, Kant, and Nietzsche, studies in spirituality, influential Black thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois. A prison debate club at his second and much more humane institution in Norfolk, to which he was transferred after his transformation, ignited his passions and increased his autodidactic fervor, causing him to sharpen a self-discipline that would become legendary. He loved the art of debate and took to it with a fierce joy, reveling in the sensation of his voice giving shape to his thoughts, developing his arguments and measuring his delivery with a percussive and melodic element influenced by his immersion in big band and bebop jazz. He read even more voraciously and brought his studies to the debate floor with scholarly precision and revolutionary interpretative fire. At this time, letters from his family and influence from members of the organization itself persuaded him slowly to declare himself a Black Muslim and a hopeful member of the Nation of Islam under the auspices of Elijah Muhammad, its spiritual leader. He began writing letters to prison officials to agitate and persuade for better conditions and more humane treatment of inmates, especially fellow Black Muslims. This was a double-edged sword, for it was seen as agitation, and it was this which both enabled him to leave prison early in 1952, and to enter the new life that had been prepared for him—and for which he had been preparing for. 

Malcolm X’s time in the Nation of Islam is both exciting and troubling. The decade leading up to the revolutionary sixties was one of fomentation and fermentation, and Malcolm X was a leading agent in this catalysis, both for the organization he chose to dedicate his life to and on the national stage. Membership in the Nation skyrocketed, he was made responsible for temples all across the Midwest and Northeast which invariably grew and grew under his leadership, and he played a singular role in the development of the self-defense branch of the Nation, the Fruit of Islam. His oratory style and the content of his speeches and sermons, while always in line with Elijah Muhammad’s teachings as a “Prophet of God Incarnate”, had a flair and cohesion that was Malcolm’s alone, and people responded passionately. While it must be acknowledged that the content of his thought and speech, influenced by his tortured path and hardened by his indoctrination, contained much that was misogynistic, antisemitic, and confrontational, it must also be acknowledged that few Black men were coming forth with the courage, directness, and indefatigability of Malcolm X in advocating for the betterment and dignity of Black people in America, and in speaking the truth about the history of the U.S.A., the evils of White Supremacy, and how these were inextricable from the societal structures and social attitudes that led to and fed the oppression and destruction of Black people in America. Where others in the Civil Rights movement advocated for integration, Malcolm advocated for separation, for Black Nationalism and the forming of separate Black-only state. Where others preached nonviolence, he stressed the importance of self-defense, of Second Amendment rights, of achieving freedom from oppression by any means necessary; a phrase which is one of his great legacies. While others indulged in what Malcolm called “pie-in-the-sky idealism” regarding the ability of White folks to alter their own society and attitudes and sought to work with White liberals, Malcolm cynically denied this ability and urged Black folks to rely on themselves, to divorce themselves from this psychological and sociological dependence on the outlook of White folks and seek autonomy. He told his audiences that Blackness was beautiful, that to wait for liberation was to waste life. Later, Malcolm would characterize himself during these times as a zombie, marching in the direction he was told to march, and say he was glad the sickness and madness of those days was behind him—but this was the time when Malcolm X established himself as a voice for Black folks, a voice which spoke more urgently and eloquently, which more clearly and directly addressed the emotions, needs, and situations of urban and inner-city Black folk than the rural folk more attuned to the message of the Reverend Martin Luther King. His thought inspired young thinkers such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, who would popularize many of Malcolm’s ideas further after his death. Writing of this time years later, James Baldwin had this to say of Malcolm:

What made him unfamiliar and dangerous was not his hatred for white people but his love of blacks, his apprehension of the horror of the black condition, and the reasons for it, and his determination so to work on their hearts and minds that they would be enabled to see their condition and change it themselves. 

(Baldwin 97)

Indeed, such a voice and such a mind could not be constrained by institutions like the Nation of Islam—whose higher echelons and major precepts essentially took the form a cult of personality revolving around Elijah Muhammad, and one which would turn on its favored son. 

In the early sixties, strains developed between Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and the higher-ups in the Nation—around what he was saying, the attention he had garnered from the national media and the intellectual community, his interactions with men like Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali. Ideas and opinions that began to emerge from Malcolm X almost in spite of himself that seemed to run counter to Elijah Muhammad’s party line or to his wishes; decisions made by the “Prophet”—some outright motivated out of envy for Malcolm—began to frustrate and baffle Malcolm to such a degree that he seemed unable to keep from expressing himself, even when it came to instances of Elijah Muhammad’s sexual misconduct. This culminated in a final break in 1964, followed quickly by his conversion to Sunni Islam, his delivery of his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, his Hajj to Mecca, and a tour of several African countries, and speaking engagements in France and the United Kingdom. It was in this final transformation of his life that he at last renounced the callousness and hatred that had marred his career and weighed down his spirit, embracing instead a new understanding of the world that had been revealed to him on his pilgrimage—that racism was responsible for bloodbaths and oppression all over the world and between all kinds of people, that to embrace all peoples as kin was the way to liberation. Seeing Muslims of every body type and skin color together on the Hajj in peace, community, and understanding had shown him a different path, and his experiences with leaders in the Pan-African movement led him to understand his struggles and those of Black Americans in a global framework. He began to discuss race in America not in terms of civil rights, but human rights; only in this way could international coalition-building become successful, and the United States be confronted with its racist structures and practices on the floor of the United Nations and therefore be held accountable before the world. It was this radical turn towards a more global revolution and a more global spirituality—one that may have resulted in his working more closely with the Reverend King, who was himself becoming gradually more radical and thus more likely to work with Malcolm—that became ultimately too threatening for the powers in place and for the enemies he had made in the Nation of Islam.

After returning to the United States, the threats and intimidation towards himself and his wife Betty and their children stepped up. He had funded two organizations of his own: the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, to promote and practice Sunni Islam in the Black community and to advance the cause of Pan-Africanism, respectively. He worked tirelessly for these causes and spoke around the nation, especially at college campuses. At a speech in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom addressing the OAAU on February 19, 1965, he was shot and killed by three Nation of Islam assailants in one of the many assassinations that plagued the Civil Rights Movement during these years. Declassified FBI documents, including COINTELPRO papers, show categorically that both the FBI and the NYPD, both with undercover agents in place around Malcolm and around the event in question—one of whom, Ray Woodson, had categorically stated that he encouraged felonious actions under orders—knew about the timing and nature of the attack. Intent may be legally debatable, but it is undeniable that law enforcement encouraged the preconditions of the attack and then did nothing to protect him.

Malcolm X was buried days later, as el-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

Sources

Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. Dial Press, 1972.

Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Viking, 2011.

Jones LeRoi, Neal Larry, editors. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. William Morrow, 1968.

X Malcolm, Haley Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Random House, 1965.

*

My memory of this effort, undertaken for a U.S. History from Reconstruction to Present class, is of trying to shove and hold and tuck a massive tapestry, something that might cover a whole wall, into a little rolling suitcase. There was a word limit and a page limit; broke both by as much as I felt I could reasonably ask a person to endure, which wasn't by much. I mean, when you look at how much a teacher asks you to write as formatted above, with no margins and spaces, you see precisely how little is asked for--indeed, how limiting at the outset such word barriers can be. The constraint shows, when optimally, professionally, it should never--but you can tell some parts of it are more important to me than others, and that cannot be helped.

As with the last project, my process was to review my materials, all stuff I had on hand, have my thinks, and produce most of the above in one fell swoop. This one demanded time and rewrites, though, to fit its scope. I cut a few thousand words out, stretched and moved things, fretted and clucked. Is my work at all improved when I do this? You are the expert, dear reader. Anyway, just like last post, this is what I turned in, no rewrite, no reread. RAWDOGG FUXXX 4 CHEEP OR FREE

Guess if I thought I could have gotten away with it, if I thought more than one percent of people would know who I was talking about, I might have used Malik El-Shabbazz throughout and as an intro. Another issue though is that it would have made it longer. Anyhow Malcolm X retains primacy, as names go. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel about this, or what I do feel, really. 

*

What wonders await us next time!?! Maybe a paper about water contamination? Could be anything. That sounds probable, though. Anything, though, anything is a possibility! It'll probably be the water thing. Hope your shit is tantalized because I am about to engorge your nether glands/engage canal lubrication.

With the paper about water quality. Yes.

--JL

#465

Ah, election day. And what an election!

This year I really think I did pretty well not mentioning politics in like the sense of naming specific names at least too much. On occasion, the general picture has risen to a temperature which, for me personally, cannot be borne without some type of outcry--usually about the imposition of money and the theft of time and ease--but I believe I have grasped the handle of restraint's cooling mechanism, been served thereby, and passed those savings onto you, dear reader.

But today is after all the day of election, and one might even be called remiss in their duties if one were to let it pass entirely without comment. 

As is classically done in linear time, let us first look back.

*

The vitriol Joseph Biden was able to summon in the national rhetorics was inspiring on both sides. I understand that many on the left carried a great deal of trauma from posting classic Joe Biden as Vice President memes during the Obama years, extremely fucking cringe affairs which they absolutely delighted in--he was their ancient, fun uncle, and his new teeth were a vision back then, it is true. 

For me, the Obama presidency ran as a stupid bullshit tokenization party that I wished would stop but which I now see as an idyllic time; wheras the former revelers live suspended in such shame that the pretend they voted for a mysterious, invisible, morally superior candidate--a 2008 write-in for Bernie Sanders, perhaps; a piece of shit who has miraculously, despite all outstanding evidence, retained his place in the Noble House of Acceptable Compromises with Neoliberal Values. Anyway, fuckers act like Obama was Pol Pot the whole time and not Politi-Jay Z Mk. II, and they always hated Biden, he was always a Bad Old White Guy and I Personally Have Never Liked a White Guy Ever. 

Fucking bullshit. 

As for the right, well, I really had no idea that white dudes were even capable of hating one of their own like that. Though I suppose when one is vehemently enthusiastic regarding the daily sessions of Two Minute's Hate directed at that withered Goldstein, one's capacities and ordnances find themselves naturally expanded. Perhaps they also feel shame for tolerating him in their minds when Obama sat the big chair. I guess it is also easier, as is time-honored and expected, when you assert that your opponent is a homosexual, so as to bring ready, ample, and easily mobilized reserved of baseless, misdirected hatred to bear.

The beauty of it all is that he is of course only a man, and has nothing to do with the incredible caricatures that have been painted of him on the national stage by miscreant and supporter alike, nor anything to do with how the world is and acts out. 

It must be stridently evangelized: all of these ghoulish people, whose faces are masks because they have no true expression, are a cross for us to bear, and not messianic representatives of our human progress. I vote with that attitude, and that attitude alone---that of a grim and barely willing relinquishment of my temporary and performance-based tolerance. Everyone is automatically fired as soon as I vote for them. Any given organism is only beginning the challenge, as keeping the job is where the job begins. As it is for me, it should be for them, eh?

*

This year's particularly contorted and absurd machinations mean that as usual, I could not in good conscience vote for the intellect I would actually prefer at the helm of the office. Sorry, Cornel West. Be assured I stared at your name, and the blank little box next to it, with a true and actually passionate longing. Next time, I pray.

It is honestly a stone bitch that I felt unable to vote for, in my opinion, the most iconic and acceptable third-party candidate in living memory. Very sad.

*

Let us indulge in a look even further back as a matter of brief review even on my own blog, as in this truly benighted and paralyzingly headlong age, even things I said three years ago seem like an archeologist has to blow dust off them and consult dense notes in order to truly grasp the fruit of my prior revelations.

Say it often, but not enough, it has to be repeated: the pus and bile of the Old Web became too much for the Carnis Digitalia and burst into an abcess, the vile and stinking flood flowing into meatspace, which was markedly, one might say intensely unimproved by the infusion, and the open cavity a ripe promised land for external infections. And what infections have taken hold! The sins and curses of that wretched phsyical realm pulse hideously, thrumming in place to the beat of an army of dark hearts. Even now I can see them, in my mind, their stink and wetness anathema to the cool and polished marbles of my dead, romanticized Olympus.

Thus, the problems written into the code developed organically by the social memetic organism we belong to (alas) were hacked by its most internal, most productive, most abstract processes--only for every fractal that every iterated to simply iterate again, in a process that operated in tandem with itself--think of a zipper unzipping, and then the jacket unthreading itself violently in spasms--destabilizedby feedback loops, kicked off the edge of chaos. Out of control fast, out of control big.

Collapse is imminent, and from that collapse, its detritus, shall rise many fresh collectives. A process not unlike the division of one cell into two. But that moment of bicellularity is just that. A fleeting, breathless second. The rate of division is exponential. You might see four for a partial moment before you realize there's a hundred and forty-four probably and from there the mind hitches, unable to usefully process. What I mean is collapse is another word for beginning.

*

All this by way of saying that the outcome of this election is, while of importance in the short term, not terribly important news in the aggregate. Things are going to change so fundamentally and at such speed that the outcomes themselves will hold little import simply because the context will change so radically the very sense of the information will change--and still we will be plunging onwards.

Again: the outcome does matter. Just not with same heft that these things usually matter, as things are so unstable that anything could happen at any time.

Or, y'know, everything's the same. From one's own little speck of perspective, if one is as objectively honest as one can bring oneself to be, one may acknowledge, perhaps even aloud, that one knows absolutely nothing, and every day is a mystery with no solution; you just get through it till it's time to go to bed.

*

Well, it makes sense. Societies are just like organisms, as I have also said in the past. The story of two single cells producing a third, which in a remarkably short time can consider what to wear every fucking morning, and just as quickly finds itself breaking down practically right away into individual cells and even the substrates and wastes that are the byproducts of all cell clusters over time. Before you know it, the process has resulted in a whole new collection of cells living through and adding onto a culture established by cell colonies long past. 

A cell culture. Cell culture. Cell culture. 

Do you get it.

This basic situation has not changed and transposes across many scales of size and granularity.

The multiverse: infinite bits coalescing and disintegrating, forever. 

Infinity infnitely iterating infinitely.

*

The pleasure I take in bringing the post to the prior plateau--I am very aware I have done it several times before--is enormous, but it is also an important task, its repetition an essential part of that task. We cannot forget what we are and where we live. We mustn't.

*

Of course there is no sense minimizing my own feelings, either: I am dismayed at the stark choice this election presented, and how far outside of my prerogative the script has forced me to situate myself. I included who I wanted to vote for as a sort of indication of who I did vote for, wholly against my inclination, the alternative being to me unacceptable to such a degree that my hand felt forced. 

You all know me: I fucking HATE that.

Less, clearly, than I hate certain prospects, but the act being completed, its discomfort stings the more.

*

However it must be said that I do not hold any special ill will for the adherents of either wretched camp. People, as people, which is to say, my fellow citizens--a group which I personally suspend in a wholly different net than I do the elected officials that are supposed to represent them (no official could possibly represent me, and I hardly expect any to)--will tend to congregate, it is their way--the way of all cells, all molecules. Having done so, particular physics and processes take hold, with inevitable outcomes and natural results. I have described them earlier in this post, and the analogy holds. This also works with churches, newspapers; any collective effort, really. 

The bits are innocent, and I can bit around with my fellow bits presumably infinitely without our loyalty to strawmen and colors getting in my way, because I have extremely low faith in and zero loyalty towards collectives of almost any description, but I do like people. I am skilled at manging this tension. For example, I can and have worked productively with people who would probably want me dead if I did not, like a vaudeville performer, keep no less than eight plates spinning on broomsticks during every interaction involving these terribly loaded yet wholly imaginary differences. It is a matter of keeping the both of us grounded in fully human terms and experiences, and steering with a determination unto obstinacy way from the inhuman, chittering, doubletalking drivel our demonic overlords would have us torture each other with while they laugh and pour wine into their already-full mouths.

Simple rule: only talk about real things. Things we can both touch and see, things that materially matter and have to be dealt with and bring that joy and satisfaction that actual, vital concepts and categories bring to an existence being actively experienced at the scale it is appropriate for that life to be lived.

For example, a fancy sports team's outcomes: strawmen and colors. Competing brands: strawmen and colors. Politicians: strawmen and colors in a big way. Improving our own lots, the lots of our fellow man, and our own work and leisure hours to the greatest and most joyful extent we can intelligently manage: actual life. 

Actual life? Please? Can we prioritize actual life every day, instead of this excruciating, neverending round with the fucking goddamn loyalty colors and chattering heads?

*

Ten million unwelcome text messages from grifters and charlatans. That's last week. On just my phone. The background noise from this election season probably registered on alien instruments fifty parsecs from here.

*

How much money do people have, I mean how bad can the economy actually be, if people give money to these brazen fucks? I mean I'm not a person who doesn't spend money on crap and things not everybody understands. I love blowing cash, hate having money. Ice cream, books, and video games, baby. Way more fun than money. And so look, I can take the shit I get for this philosophy in life from fuckers who love to punish people for no reason with equanimity, but it is total bullshit that you can bitch that the economy is bad and the economy is someone's fault and then give any fucker wearing nice clothes with their hand out--a state of affairs which insults my intellect to a degree that it feels pierced, as though by a dagger--I mean, I don't know about you, but I have cats, and bills, and a mortgage, and I like to have fun. I have to work really hard to keep all that going and I barely fucking scrape by. This, in a country which is supposedly the richest and the greatest in all the lands of this poor globe. But the idea that I can spare even a dime for a political party? Let alone the political party of a different state in this union? This is just how I feel, and maybe I am wrong, but no. No.

Bitch, they have money--and they flush it down the toilet in a way that should make everyone who thinks of it blush. We act like there's no money--look at how these fuckers live their lives, and what they spend just to suck each other's dicks! They are the dragons of legend, the reality described by the symbol, and we pile gold on their glittering hordes in obeisance. 

Pathetic. The word is travesty. 

I mean, fucking honestly. What do you think it costs to fill the balloons at something like a national convention? Fucking. Balloons. Travesty. What do you think it takes to fill closets with "appropriate" clothing, pantsuits and ascots and shit? Do you think they can be seen in clothing that has seen wear and tear to any degree, in their hideously glittering society of excess? Why do these so-called representatives all seem to have more houses than I have people in my one household? Correct jewelry, correct makeup, correct private aviation, correct chauffeur services, correct price tags on all that shit and just imagine the colognes, the perfumes, the private schools for the kids, the leasing of a different car every year per driver per property--driven or not driven. 

Shoes.

*

God, and the chatter around it all, media personalities and PR folks. They use military and sports analogies unflinchingly and interchangeably as they discuss how public "servants", whom they are fond of referring to in the most glowing terms, rob the public and spend the stolen money to steal more money, and they say that this process is very important because it is a process, and it is attached inextricably to the process that describes the process (read: money), so with that being how it is, everything will work as long as you keep yourself informed (daily) and participate actively in the system (through approved channels, only during specified periods in the fiscal year).

Damn. Incontrovertible. Except it is the death of reason and the funeral march of what it has ever meant to be human in this world. 

*

Anyway. Election day at least means they should stop texting me for money. Right? For a little while?

Shuddering, beginning to sweat as I see it in my mind: waking up to a text message tomorrow--right above the one that says "one last push"--marked "the fight's not over" or some goddamn equivalent. 

Pretty soon I'm gonna have to destroy the bedeviled thing and start again with a new stupid glaring rectangle. At least these empty, cackling bastards will have to take the time--or their large language scripts will, anyway--to place a new number on their wicked lists, so as to mortar it with unceasing, insulting horseshit.

*

To try and put a good vibe on the day, I went ahead and finished the main campaign in Unicorn Overlord. May this act tip the scales of this day however humbly towards peace, justice, and wise rule.

Man, that would be something to get. Indeed, the game's eneding represented a dream so wholly ensconced in the pipe that you would need a pair of plumbers, brothers maybe, to brave the depths and fetch that thing into the light. It was very, very beautiful. Loved every moment of that game.

*

As a final note: when I voted today, I got not the typical sticker proclaiming that I had done so. You know, the basic statement, the variations on font, the three colors, and Old Glory. No, today I got a sticker with a bitchin werewolf ripping out of his clothes. Not "I Voted"--this sticker screams that "I VOTED", or, perhaps, it would be better, more true, to say that it howls.

Let me say that I endorse this in the strongest possible terms, and, as a voter and a citizen, would work extremely diligently to collect all the stickers of this caliber, made for this purpose, that I possibly could.

--JL

#373

Fucking losing my mind over here. But what else is new? This is Factually Pointless, the free and easy ravings of a madman undergoing existential mastication. Rejoice, brethren! We are the eternally digested, breaking down together in the great roiling stomach of this universe. 

*

You see a lot more fake bullshit these days, but that's a) kinda relative and b) if you are of any kind of advanced age, say, older than fourteen, and have ever so much as looked at internet, you should have prepared yourself well for this level of saturation. I get that this is not a very reasonable outlook. We are all built to pay attention to very different things in very different ways, from the obscurely particular to the embodied universals.

My policy is to assume that if an institution--let's say, a governmental organization or representative or representative body, or if you prefer, a media outlet--is putting out deepfaked shit or is addressing the social issue of fabricated content less than adroitly and intelligently, then they know goddamn well what they're doing and projected ignorance must be construed as feigned. I don't accept the kind of fucking incompetence I see out there as legitimate. Safer in the long run to consider it a manipulative stratagem.

*

I may be a no-name idiot with no standing at all in this world, but I don't have to be a fucking sucker into the bargain. If I am tricked, let the trick be justifiably sophisticated. If I am subject to powers I cannot resist, let them at least have to exert their irresistibility. I'm not here to make things easy for anybody that wants to fuck me up or own me. 

*

Feels good to write that, but what hope do any of us have? 

Only hope itself, I guess, and whatever paths our particular hopes can illuminate. Only what keeps us going.

Whatever we do, we are not lost if we hope. In hope, nothing is in vain, and no defeat is total.

*

We cannot know the mind of God, so I would say that my actual leap of faith as Kierkegaard would have it is throwing myself as completely as I can, all my life, into the truth of the prior two sentences. It is easy for me to believe the inscrutable universe has no regard for us whatsoever. I can accept that and understand life, having lived, as an even trade. In context, however, in the human particulars of what it is to have lived as part of a narrative--a narrative, that is what is crucial here--I cannot and will not accept the narrative as shitty. I say it's a good story. I say it was worth telling no matter how it ends, how many fucked up evil details make it hard to stomach. That's my leap of faith. That is what I am a knight for, again, in Kierkegaardian terms.

--JL

#294

To continue on a bit from yesterday: a wholly disproportionate percentage of our lives are made up of and/or reliant on pure anecdote. The human being has been raised that way, yes, for lack of many better options. We are memetic animals and that's just how it is. However, there is a difference between a demonstrative meme (which can be concrete or metaphorical) and the other kinds, which can be divided roughly into three groups: theoretical (like hypotheses), recreational (tall tales, jokes, and the like), and bullshit. 

Bullshit's alright in sane measure. Fertilizer, y'know. Problem is, as I said, in the proportion. The huge difference between a demonstrative meme--for example: the sun rises in a direction which is one of four cardinal directions and sets in a second, from which the remaining pair can be derived--and bullshit--for example: masturbating will make you go blind.

Well, see, the sun rises in the east. It might not always do so forever into an infinite future, but it's demonstrable for the present, day in and day out. And while you might masturbate, and go blind, no one can prove that there exists a correlation there, meaning that, for the present, to assert causation is to propagate bullshit. 

Because bullshit can sound so much like a theoretical meme, and theoretical memes can sometimes become demonstrated, or seem to be demonstrated, and therefore concrete enough for honest use, bullshit often passes for the truth. Individuals can build whole worldviews based on anecdotal bullshit and believe they are operating on rational grounds, when they are really being manipulated by tricksters, officers of a nation-state, or sacerdotal entities.

There's nothing wrong with that--as I say, governments bank on this to form order from chaos, and it seems tolerable within certain limits--but it can be frustrating, and get out of control fast, because once you believe a little too much bullshit, it's hard to determine where bullshit-eating has to stop. What is persuasive becomes more real than what is true. The truth has no real sales pitch; bullshit has infinity of them and they almost always sound better. Sophistry.

Anyway. All this is to say that we would do well to instill in ourselves a rigorous metric of verification before incorporating any new information into our thinking, and be engaged in a dispassionate vetting process of what we think we believe. Thus, our Socratic thinking, praise God. 

*

Don't know why I feel compelled to try to squeeze these things out on such a crunch time--after waking up, exercising, and making coffee, before breakfast and getting ready to leave for work. But the hours are quite busy after work these days, what with moving books and painting walls/ceilings and whatnot, so I guess they wouldn't get typed otherwise.

Truth is, while I detest working on a deadline, and won't really do it even if I set it myself for some inane reason, I enjoy the challenge of a time trial. Even if I fail, or generate totally idiotic drivel, it's more of a fun time.

Ok, peace the fuck out

--JL

#73

The problem with virtue is that it's stupid, and everyone knows it.

Virtue lies in giving up the advantage. Virtue is beholding an arsenal and keeping your hands empty. Virtue is condemning yourself to death because you must either tell the truth or keep silent. Virtue is a winnowing-down, or up. Always the way grows tighter, narrower, the air thinner, the range of action more constricted. The virtuous path is clear, not because it is straight--a narrower, more crooked goat-track does not exist--but because it is uncluttered.

"Ah! It would be virtuous to pick a weapon from the arsenal in order to protect those who cannot themselves pick up a weapon! It would be virtuous to lie in order to save another's life, or the lives of many! A virtuous person would keep all their options open always, so as not to limit the possibility of action, the possibility of improving upon virtue's outmoded shortcomings. Virtue has been shown to lose, loses always, when it is so simple to win! How is it virtuous to lose to a bad person? You have to win! A virtuous person would be cognizant of how much more utile morals are when placed relative to everything, how much more of the greater good can be accomplished when virtue is defined as volumetric accomplishment in the service of institutions which serve the public. Joseph, I have caught you out: by adhering to the ancient, cast-down idols, you place yourself in a regressive mode, and your so-called virtue is immoral by its decrepitude, by its failure of nuance, by its inaccessibility! Virtue, if it is virtue, is actually not hard, difficult, costly, any of that--it's easy, and it's called just being a decent person. You know? Look. Justice is further along now than ever and it still totally sucks, and what the ancients called virtue was their primitive justification for all their terrible crimes, which stain the pages of our wretched histories. What you want to mean by virtue is social responsibility or liberation, or liberating yourself into your social responsibility. Don't be an asshole."

Bullshit! Ugh.

But it feels right and usually produces preferable material results: other bullshitters will respect you, or seem to in order to use you as social capital; I understand talking this way can actually land you a variety of high-paying jobs; you can give yourself permission to write off a great deal of personal responsibility with this frame of thought; it is currently popular and always easy to speak this way, so you are likely to get positive reinforcement for very little effort; you are very free make your life easier to live and more comfortable and stimulating in a staggering variety of ways; you personally get to feel morally superior to and immeasurably more intelligent than all dead people and most of your contemporaries.

Look, I get why this is extremely popular and that it feels very gratifying. It is total fucking bullshit, though.

Immaterial returns are most of what you can expect from virtue, which is part of what makes it stupid, but them's the breaks. Virtue is as inflexible and unapproachable as the truth, as dangerous and as difficult to find, as profitable, and about as palatable. Almost nobody wants anything to do with it. It is not comfortable. It usually hurts. The people who will thank you the most honestly for it are weaker than you, and can give nothing you can show for it in return. It is almost impossible to live up to and probably not even desirable. But it is virtue, and twisting things around to make them easier cannot change that.

To be virtuous is to suffer, to be a servant, and to behave idiotically; through this, one has a chance to become wise, to live in bliss, and to be free. Probably. Maybe.

I'm not going to elaborate a length on this point here. That belongs in books. I don't give too much of the real business away for free; remember, the blog supplies but sample cups! The good shit costs seven dollars. If you have a Kindle, less.

Anyway, virtue is stupid, but at least it's not bullshit. I am not, myself, virtuous; I'm not even sure that I'm trying correctly.

--JL

#59

Before I got sick, I saw a red-tailed hawk do some magnificent flying. She lit from the top of a municipal light to  cross a road and wing her way powerfully across an empty soccer field over to the treeline by the river. She was a strong, built, stocky bird, well-made for self-directed, energetic flight. She engaged in a great deal of exuberant altitude-play once across the river before deigning to perch. Clearly, some birds have seasons in their prime wherein the lean season and the easy pickings blur together. The tightening days trouble them not at all. I'm watching some fat robins make mock of the snowy day we're having right now, in fact. They look like chubby little frat boys screwing around together.

*

Putting books on a wall is a lot like putting maps on a wall. I used to have both, but I lost all my maps. I love cartography. Basically I love data points arranged in space, in whatever dimensionality or variety of such you please. Finally, the feeling of being surrounded by connections both unintentional and personal, by literal battlements of psychic power, is a very potent defensive barrier. I cannot recommend it enough. 

I don't have any shelves right now. I have instead arranged great stacks, mostly against walls, a few freestanding, all around the walls of my room. It's a mess, but even in this chaos there are little jokes and coincidences to ponder. For example, I see a series of books that was important to an ex of mine and their sibling just beneath a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents that their mother gave to me as a gift--unintentional, but a nice little twinge. Freud would heartily approve, which carries the whole thing into the realm of the truly disgusting.

Gender Trouble is right over Peter Pan. Amusing. Would that I had any Alison Bechdel to add to the mix; alas, Ulysses is across the room--atop You Can't Go Home Again. Who seethes the more? Ugh. I miss my maps. Ah, well, but they were maps of Middle-Earth anyway. Who the hell am I kidding.

Too many books, folks. Too much bullshit. 

I know a dude, a mechanic works out of a garage in a Citgo station, who once a few years back asked me why the fuck I was reading. Since I was on the clock and delivering him auto parts, I told him I didn't get paid enough not to read a few minutes every stop. 

"No, motherfucker, I'm  talking about why the fuck do you even do that. Read books. All that bullshit. It's all fucking lies."
"Well, lies are kind of the point, with fiction--"
"All of it, motherfucker! I mean all of it! Don't even talk to me about fiction, I mean every book is just lies, history, religion, social shit, all that fuckin bullshit. My fuckin wife, she's always reading books, listening to the news, and now she's full of fucking bullshit. Making her waste her fuckin time thinking about problems that have nothing to do with fuckin anything. Lies!"

At this point I put the book down and leaned forward, interested. "Hold up, man. Are you saying you don't read anything? Like, no books ever, no magazines, no news, because it is all of it nothing but lies? What the fuck do you think is true, man?"

He smiled and waved his hand to show he'd been hot-airin' a little, but dragged his cig and bore down on his point. "Almost all lies, almost, fucking bullshit anyway, news, definitely lies, history, so much lies--listen, the real thing is business, every day. Work. Fuckin money. This shit right here, bitch. Fucking books just fill your head with bullshit, bullshit keeps you from making money. You're a smart motherfucker, you don't need to be reading no books."

Many pleasant arguments with him as we whiled away the cigarettes, neither of us much shifting our positions. Yet, given time and the reading of a lot more books, I find I have become more warmed to his viewpoint than I would have ever believed possible.

Hey, have you read my now-in-paperback lies?


--JL