#323

Awww, you know how I feel about numbers like 323! Numbers like 323 are absolutely fucking perfect, that's how I feel. I mean, the sheer beauty of it. Three hundred is so great, I mean, what a number, what an icon, and then, the fabled, nearly sinister quality of the number 23, which is great number, a prime number, a quality I find so lovable--and smashed together, a pair of threes just flanking the number two! SO PERFECT DEATH TAKE ME NOW

*

Taking a moment here to presumably welcome a very special reader! You don't know them, dear reader. Only I get the personalized satisfaction of knowing when a certain pair of eyeballs joins your ranks however briefly before wandering away again; disgusted, disappointed, and determined to no longer know me. Depressing! Or, conversely, they may be diverted: delirious, even deranged--nay, distended with delight.

*

Typing at you once again from my parent's dining room table--the table I have sat at since I was old enough to sit up unsupported and not decorate myself with mashed vegetables. Thinking about childhood a lot lately, even more than followed the uptick brought on by bussing the preschoolers, which, as you may know or inductively parse, means that I am thinking about childhood basically every spare minute of every single day. It's these developmental psychology courses I mentioned; they just bring the memories, and it falls to me to riffle through them. Plus we go over the data and I get to be like, yeah. Yeah, man. I see that shit every single day. Plus, I remember. I am reminded. 

Dudes, this one time, a kid pushed me down a broad stone slide at a musical daycare I attended when I was extremely tiny. I smashed my fingernail tip-first onto the smooth stone so bad I could see triangular fragments of nail stuck to my bloody finger where they'd run away from the main nail body. Who knows why, but my instinct was to run screaming to the water cooler, instead of for a teacher. I remember the way that old-school bad boy with the giant glass bottle glurpled when you'd filled enough little paper cones with water. Perhaps it was the comfort of this wonderful sound that I was seeking, in my pain-maddened terror frenzy.

Oh! The reason I am here an not at my house watching a movie is that an ice storm knocked out our power and the power company which enjoys state monopoly can't promise to do anything about it before Sunday. Fucking Sunday! Guess what: the house has gotten cold. It is dark in there. We can't open our refrigerator. I'm not sure, but I think we might not be supposed to be using our water. These conditions are so far from optimal and yet of course so totally mundane that it frustrates me to even feel frustrated by them. 

*

You know, I forgot to mention this massive, like, this epic book haul I scored off a dead librarian. It's almost as macabre as it sounds, and yet, not really: a fellow bus driver was substiting for my usual bus monitor a couple months back, and we got to talking about stuff, and a certain minor predilection of mine for books and book sundries came up. Well, it just so happens that her old school librarian, whom she had remained very close to, was in hospice care, and many of the librarian's worldly possessions, including many boxes of her books, were in her care and taking up most of the space in her and her husband's storage unit. Well, would I be interested in going through the books and seeing what I could do to ameliorate the situation? Oh, perhaps I could be persuaded to ransack your shit like an unbridled Visigoth.

So yeah, she was hella pregnant and only going to get pregnanter, plus she was in school, so she'd let me know when I could swing by the unit. I waited for months, no hurry, no problems--she would occasionally get in touch to assure me I was not forgotten, and I would assure back that all was calm and bright in my domains and that I had no problem waiting on her pleasure. Finally the time came, and on a misty, rainy morning after the bus but before class her husband and I were dick deep in that storage unit, the librarian was a week dead, and my coworker was sitting in the car, two days away from the doctors inducing labor. I made sure she got the cream of the children's books for her own kids, including some cool middle grade novels about dragons for her oldest boy, but I absconded with such a pile, such a full two bigass boxes worth of stuff--it was a bloodbath. So many books, they're all over the floor of the bookroom right now and the way things are, who knows when I'll have the chance to do my best to find shelf space for them. We may be looking at a return of the piles, which I had managed to reduce to a single pile of oversized. I even got some Hercule Poirot DVD's, for the little gray cells.

Truly I think it's too many books to list; it would be cumbersome even for this storied text field, already groaning under the weight of the booklists I have subjected my readers to for god knows what purpose. I might do a selection at some point, but obviously not right now because I am not with my books. Though I'm heading back as soon as I finish this, it is important that my laptop energy be conserved when at home for the purposes of schoolwork. What a drear. Next time though, maybe, dear readers.

*

This post is scribed in memory of a dead librarian whose name I choose not to share, with special thanks to my coworker whose name I will also not share. This blog has no real names, of course, and rarely goes further than an oblique reference.

Ok keep your dicks up everybody peace out

--JL 

#313

Among my very early memories is running around the little vacation home complex my mother's side of the family used to have on the coastal city of Puerto La Cruz. There was the swimming pool where I learned to swim, in which I cracked my chin so hard once on one of the submerged hubcap lights that I thought my little face had started to split in two. Stung like a hornet got me, silver bubbles rose with my screams shivering inside them, blood billowed into the water, and to this day, my beard won't grow on that little line where the gash was, though it's smooth and unmarked when shaved. On a separate occasion, I scraped most of the skin off my knee, enough that there was a little eyelet of white beaded with crimson glaring out of the oozing, flowing pink when my mom wiped it before disinfecting it. I yelled and fought and begged her to leave it, to no avail. My father, too, shed blood there; once went for a run and returned dripping sweat all over and with blood running down his shin from his own injured knee. Sitting by him on the front steps, I asked why come it didn't hurt him; in my own experience, bleeding that much meant you were having an experience that demanded unwilling tears and venting the sensation by dint of screaming. He told me that when you get older, you get used to pain, that it doesn't mean as much as when you're little. 

I have grown more like my father, as one does. For example, I was never the most powerful or technically adept wrestler; though strong and skilled enough to matter, my true advantages were my quickness and the fact that no one could ever hurt me badly enough to easily turn me into meat. Whatever they did to me, I kept fighting, shoving pain aside. Once I took a spill from a moving motor scooter (well, three separate times) and smashed the living hell out of my right knee, losing a bunch of skin there and on my arms and elbows. My knee and various connected muscles and tendons were quite damaged and forever changed by this incident, but I did not go to hospital--I walked it off that day and for weeks and months afterwards. Cleaned and took care of my own wounds, and took care of my own leg my own way. 

Guess this tangent is just to say that to age in a body is, in a sense, to grow numb; to become ever more inured. 

What I was actually getting at when I started writing is that the complex concierge's daughter, a lithe dark girl with jet-black eyes, was about my age, and we used to run around together sometimes. Early on, when we were about three or getting near four, she told me she had to go poop. I said I'd wait for her right where we were standing, on the grass on the side of one of the buildings, and she said she didn't want to go home. She skinned her underwear down and off under her skirt, squatted where she stood, and took the biggest shit, proportionally, that I have ever seen anyone take in my entire life. It was bigger around than her arm and almost as long. 

Though I had no problem, intellectually, understanding what had happened, and her reasoning, though quite alien to mine own (in my mind, shitting outside of a toilet was something done only while camping, and only when your parent was with you to help you bury it), was sound enough--"when you gotta go, you gotta go" is a tautology every human understands--I found myself astonished, abandoned by my faculties. I told her that her poop was the biggest one I'd ever seen, and she ran away, underwear clutched in her fist. Later, I went out to look at it again and found it crawling with flies. The grass was so incredibly green, the scat such a dark and vivid brown, the flies as black and gleaming as madness itself. Don't know if anyone found it before we left for home. Don't remember hanging out with her again.

Only three years later, the neighborhood bully in my section of the university housing complex we lived in when we first moved to the United States, a huge-boned hefty red-haired girl a few years older than I was, urinated in front of me in a secluded little grove of pines behind and in between a couple of the buildings, fenced off from the street and obscured from the view of passersby in the courtyard in front of the buildings. She made me stay in the grove, and by all accounts didn't let me watch, telling me to be her lookout; though she suggested that a boy who saw a girl pee was destined to marry her, implying that if I looked over my shoulder I would be sealing a form of accord with her.

"Did you peek?" She asked, after zipping up.

"No. Can we get out of here."

"Yeah, stupid. Get away from me, ok? You're such a stupid little kid."

*

No idea whatsoever what it is about me that brought these incidents on. I was but a lad, and still don't fully grasp what was happening, to be honest. I've never remembered this kind of thing during talk therapy; they did me no harm and did not foster in me any kinks or deep-seated dissatisfactions or dissonant confusions. I believe they merely make up a part of the tapestry of my memory that displays a profound mystification with what other people want and how they express their desire for it. Also that shit just happens, and nobody can stop it.

--JL

#277

In fact, this was written some years ago, but I deem it requires little if no tinkering.

*

I was very excited to see real live horses. It would be my first time, and the pitch of my equine fever sustained me all the unbelievable span of the drive from Caracas to Los Llanos. My parents had arranged a stay at a finca out somewhere in the flat vastness, I don’t quite remember, but far from home, way out — not as far as going to the Andes, a reasonable ten-hour westward shot to Merida, or the truly long drive southeast to Canaima, past El Tigre, past Ciudad Bolívar, fourteen hours at least out to the realms of cloud and cascade— but long, especially for a little kid that had just gotten really into some kind of horse-racing cartoon and was writhing with constant anticipation to meet and ride one straight into a glorious, lifelong friendship marked by gallant adventures and dramatic triumphs.

Horses are phenomenal organisms, but they are not cartoons, and I was somewhat disappointed that there was no unbreakable bond secured upon eye contact, no profound and immediate understanding between fated partner-souls. I was very deeply, existentially disappointed, but I played it stoic; or, a three-year old’s version of stoic: wandering the hallways in unsmiling silence, running my fingers wistfully along the walls, and staring deeply into the liquid emerald of the half-full, algae-choked swimming tank by the side of the house, shadowed by low trees with long, waxy dark leaves that would drop heavily into the thick water.

Sometimes I see a very young person evincing a very particular solemnity, bathed in a ghostly, personal prevailing light, something ancient showing in their youthful features, and I remember how strange and quiet and terrible it was — those first few times reality had its graceless way with a powerful fantasy.

Each time I had to, I walked about ten feet away from the tails of the line of horses, tied to their long hitch, for I had been warned of their propensity for kicking, should they sense me within range, and been assured with due intensity that this was likely to result in my gruesome death. I felt ashamed of myself for my childishness. I looked down the row and pictured their skeletons, remembered the pages in our Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Ancient Creatures devoted to their ancestors, pictured my head smashed open and my blood spattering the fine yellow dust over the hard earth.

Pretended I liked the white-gray dappled horse best, because it was the closest in appearance to the white horse in the cartoon I liked. I gave it the same name as the cartoon horse, because it was something I had planned and was following through with in order to punish and console myself in one stroke.

Red howler monkeys would be calling, sonorous and mournful and immediate, long before the roosters engaged their gravelly shrills. They had me up before dawn each morning, and I began to go out onto the porch to try to get a glimpse of the monkeys, who sounded as though they were calling from the nearest branches of the copse of trees a hundred feet from the door. The old rancher told me they were calling from far away, that they were too shy to come so near to where men and horses lived. His son was old too. I do not remember what we ate. I was at an age when I would, given the choice, make a cheese sandwich or buttered noodles my meal three instances out of three; perhaps I even still partook of some formula with the nipple on the bottle.

The younger old man, the son, led me to the horse and placed me on the saddle. I felt unreal, emotionless — there was a kind of huge, reptilian fear at being suspended, twice, thrice, over and over, saddle over cloth over hide over muscle over bone, the nearness of an alien will with whom there had been no communication. I forced it down and followed directions carefully. I wanted it to stop, but I stayed silent. I had come this far expressly to ride a horse. To turn back would be babyish; worse, it would be rude, or, that most cardinal of all sins, ungrateful.

Relinquishing control of a situation has been a core part of my survival skillset for so long that it has assumed the sort of reflexive pride that constant use lends certain tools; one forgets that one ever existed without the tool, the incorrect and frustrating episodes before the tool came into one’s life seeming to have occurred to some other hapless caricature. It becomes embarrassing and feels unnecessary to remember a version of one’s self which was at any time unprepared to devise an exit strategy, unable to sauteé minced garlic and onion in shimmering fat from muscle memory, or daunted by the challenge of building a structure to safeguard the structural integrity of a raw egg, using only toothpicks and bonding agent.

Discernment! The mark of the civilized animal. I could not tell, at the time, how the old man could know that the monkeys were not nearby, invisible in the darkness, the density of the foliage. I had not heard one up close.

Stars at night, out there on the equator, hundreds of kilometers from any city — they made the world like a dark postage stamp, my body a distant little stem, the stars and my head fusing and swirling, a boiling explosion of blooming light, frothing hypercolor sailing, chorused roaring. Sometimes my mom would have to clap hard and scream my name to call me back to the world. Even years later.

Drank a draft of milk fresh from the cow, watched the hand coax it from the udder, watched it squirt into the pail. Tilted my head back and felt the warm slide down into me and set off a firework in my brain.

Out there, folks ride huge white oxen where the cracked hard land turns into a swamp, beasts with huge, backwards-sweeping humps on their backs, above the shoulders. Like riding a rolling marble mountain, your hands on the foothills, your head the eagle in a tight gyre.

Out there, what was fictional and expected, constructed, mythologized and made digestible, retreated in the face of what was real and incomprehensible, inconstructible, indigestible, irreducible, asymbolic, and therefore, protomythological. The cartoons had lied to me, yes; but the contradiction was far more unreal than the false premise. There were more dimensions than I had processing power to grapple with; the suggestion of more than stars hiding behind the vault of the night sky. A mystery that would overpower any myths that would make it soluble and finite; I sensed this, but could not process it. Put simply, I wondered, without language, what lay beyond heaven, and sealed my fate.

Out there I learned to begin learning the difference between what is learnable and what is true. I got to where I was able to ride a horse all by myself. Time morphed and split and shivered, and I thought about Orpheus and Eurydice as I spilled a little water in the dust and followed the trickle to see how it ran.

It was dismemberment, and it was reintegration. I saw my dead body on the ground, watched the standing water hold the rot, felt my living body with my fingertips, set water free upon the thirsty plain, amused the grownups with my good appetite and odd questions, pretended I was a ghost, stood more alone than I had ever been in my life and was penetrated by the Void.

Told the old men about how thin little Old Man Lightning shamed the Jaguar, proved he was stronger than the roaring, mighty jungle cat. They had heard the story before, of course, but laughed and praised my telling.

What matters is the telling. Fake, real; it’s all in the story. Lightning does not make noise. What sounds across the plain is the air superheating and exploding, not the lightning itself. No power can be greater than that which cannot be fought, that which exercises no will, that which desires nothing, cannot be prevented, foreseen precisely, touched.

Yes — true power is to be nothing, yet greater than all power. Immediate as death and as remote as heaven.

Only energy obeying itself unto entropy. A flash in the darkness, then nothing.

What does the flash illuminate? That’s the question, and the answer to it.

Of course, we cannot but be both, in most cases; the flesh and claw and panicked mortality of Jaguar and the inviolability and supernal prowess of Lightning, that Promethean Flame which illuminates and destroys.

When we got back to the city, back to our apartment on the ninth floor, back to my little playskool table with my little playskool chairs, I fell into the habit of sitting and looking out the window at the mountain that rose above the city to the north. I could stare out the window from my bed, as well, and began sleeping badly. I would concentrate as hard as I could on how it would feel to not exist, to “be” the sum of the components and materials that made up a car, or a fence, or a pane of glass; how it would feel to have your engine fire and to be the oil that ran through the mechanism, to have light pierce your molecular structure nigh-undisturbed, to be the photon slightly jostled by the glass, the pebble rolling down the mountain path, the shoe on a horse, the lightning rod.

To possess something other than my own body.

To eventually wear away to nothing.

*

Some style issues abound here that I prefer not to allow into my work these days, but there you have it. 

--JL

#269

Oh, depression. Oh, the will to death. How does one say it in German? There was once a blog of invented words for real feelings. I will search for it now. 

*

Ah, yes. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Seems it is not only text onscreen, but a hardcover book, which reached that bestseller list published by that main newspaper. This is very cheering; I fully expected to find nothing but vague references and one of those shell websites trying to direct you towards buying fake plane tickets. 

Anyway, depression, but sometimes something weird and fantastic and necessary and, INDEED, obscure, does not vanish in your wake like so much else, and stays. One of the counter spells that makes survival in the face of depression and existential angst possible and durable.

Idly but consistently thinking about durability these days. The concept, its applications. Nothing concentrated, many wide-ranging and useless thoughts. This is my favorite kind of thinking. Doing my favorite kinds of thinking instead of the more practical varieties is another thing that makes surviving depression possible. 

*

Losing my computer to its own lack of decent durability, software and hardware-wise alike, and being unable to replace it when it breaks or transfer the contents to a new box has been a real fuckin problem in life. It's happened once during the course of this blog, which I touched on in due course, but that was merely the latest chapter in a whole sordid section of the JL Encyclopedia. 

Ugh. I am not deleting that last sentence in order to try and teach myself a lesson.

*

The first family computer I can remember using was a Macintosh Quadra, no idea which and I really don't want to talk to my folks about jack shit right now so who knows. Definitely a Quadra model, though. I played Kid Pix and Thinkin' Things on that machine, and nothing else. The years were 1993 and 1994. The builds of those computer programs were fucking badass back then; later versions of Kid Pix always felt too smooth to me, like they'd taken away a cool toy and given me back something similar in shape but covered in padded foam. It's who I am as a person, clearly; most people think internet has actually gotten better. Either I'm just a retrograde lunatic and have been since I was a baby, or almost all originally cool shit has to get warped and ruined beyond all recognition in the direction of stupidity verging on intentional evil due to, I don't fucking know, the influence of Ahriman. I didn't even need to look at a single frame of the so-called Cowboy Bebop "reboot", "remake"--whatever the fuck they wanted to call that organ of cultural rape--to know the score.

Thinkin' Things aesthetic and gameplay got worse with the next version release and I couldn't look at it anymore. Forced to leave childish things behind and having rehashed the material within Mega Math Blaster, The Hunchback of Notre Dame game from Disney Interactive, and Reader Rabbit 2 to exhaustion, I moved on to Duke Nukem 3D. Guess some people played Oregon Trail or something at that age, but I had kind of a fucked-up childhood in some ways. 

*

Aside: my contemporaries and I went straight from Lincoln Logs and that ancient phone toy that made a cameo appearance in Toy Story 3--you know the one, the original Fisher Price Chatter Phone--to computer programs, and we were the second or third wave of kids and teens on internet. I don't think my parents, or anyone's parents, were prepared for this event in childrearing, but almost every one of my contemporaries, even the stupidest pieces of shit, were smarter in key ways than their parents by incredible margins, even the scientist parents. It's just how we grew up. From this we may derive that my own offspring will process me as hyperefficient biofuel before they turn eight, and that's just evolution, baby. Up the children. May I be utilized in order to be surpassed by significant margins in every metric.

*

The next computer in the house was a Compaq Presario, which makes plenty of sense. It was the mid-nineteen-nineties and we had just moved to the U.S.A., and Compaq was first among equals in the PC revolution. I have no idea what models the computers were at the computer lab in my first U.S. elementary school, but they were dependable and very usable machines. I started to learn Python on those computers; that great little turtle.

Woof! History truly is crazy. Look at computers now! The ubiquity, the gleam, the power! I miss those gray boxes designed by those Texas Instruments men. I miss that they whined like jet engines and got hotter than the devil's taint just to read a CD-ROM. I miss only pixels, no one even imagining the concept of the Retina display I'm looking at as I type this (hilarious that retina gets capitalized automatically in this context. Someday, in the future, we will not be able to publish a single thing in "our own words" without auto-signing a dozen agreements about how they're not our words, they are a company's words).

At my Catholic school later in the nineties when we had moved back to Venezuela for awhile, the computer lab was outfitted with IBM PC's from 1981 or even before, I don't fuckin know. In this case, when I say PC, I may not mean personal computer, but the older conception of portable computer. If they read floppy discs, that was a recent breakthrough at date of production. I remember the point of the class was to make them process typing into word display and perform input on very basic equations. The screens were uniformly black and white, expressing only straight lines.

The next year, back in the 'States, they herded me into the computer labs at the more upper-crust elementary school where I did fifth grade and I was confronted with serried ranks of pink iMacs. I don't remember what they tried to teach us, if anything. This gave me much to think about, at the time. 

Dude, the mouses on those iMacs sucked, in my personal assay. Fancy lasers my ass.

*

My first internet thing was visiting the Animorphs website for the games and blog and boards and chat rooms (the chat rooms were too rich for my bandwidth, but I read about them elsewhere). A heady time, these early internet message boards for teens, and of course, snotty little punks reading above their weight. The Scholastic website, to which the Animorph's website naturally swore fealty, was a pretty good website. You could market, but you couldn't sell directly or monetize advertisement yet, so the content was mostly just good and descriptive stuff about kid lit and intermediate lit and all the other literature that's better than Literature. Plus, when it came to the flagship titles and series, interactive stuff crafted before online interactivity carried the price of your immortal soul, like the Animorphs flash games.

Oh yeah, triple-A Flash games, in the times well before Flash games could pop up and steal your data after you managed to shoot the monkey or whatever the fuck, which was well before actual quality FG aggregators or the recognized quality of stuff like Puzzle Pirates.

*

Remembering shit can be fucking exhausting. I guess that's Classic Aging, folks. It gets to feel like so much stuff happened, how could it even be true? Certainly there's no way to remember. World memory--durable? No. No, all this could easily be gone and forgotten again, and a new world of men might rise higher than we ever managed to over the unseen ruins of this near-failure of ours. Those humans might never look down, never know that we were here, except in the origins of their oldest stories--tales of a technological godlessness cast down for its reeking hubris.

Yes, I am saying that we are Atlantis 2.0 and we are obviously a worse and shittier program than Atlantis 1.0, which dovetails with my earlier observations concerning programs. For whatever that is worth (less than zero probably).

*

This has been Computers Day here on FP, I guess. Next time I'll try to finish this and talk more about whatever I talked about last time, but you know how I am, dear reader.

Be well, and be good, be virtuous and true, and if it gets you nowhere and you get fucked over and killed, at least you'll be in happy company.

--JL

#110

Sheeeit. This blog has been a little dull lately! Let me tell you a story.

You deserve this.

*

My godfather's children were so close to me and my brothers when we were kids that they were our cousins. I mean, I made absolutely no distinction between them and my blood cousins, and I still do not. I could not. Spent more time with them than with blood last time I was in Venezuela. That's how tight that shit is.

Godfather was my dad's very best friend coming up, and is directly responsible for my being born: my father, being a vital, powerful, courageous, and high-minded man, was getting set to join the Venezuelan army when he was done with high school. My godfather snapped him right out of that crazy-assed nonsense and told him to go the fuck to college, where my father excelled, graduated with a degree in engineering, and launched himself onto a career path which would eventually place him to meet my mother through a friend who was dating my aunt.

At any rate, my parents were able to conceive me in no small part thanks to my godfather, and his kids and my brother and I were in a part of Caracas which was somewhat familiar to them, though not to me. They're eastside, we're northside. We went for a walk because they wanted to show me this cool-ass hill we could climb.

Now, I had heard them being told by their mom and the old lady we were visiting (their grandmother? Their great-aunt? I remember her face and smooth white hair and her thick droopy bare arms and that brown tint some people's glasses have, and her closet full of board games [we all broke our Jumanji cherry that evening, and I was openly disappointed that our lives were not uprooted and our psyches not destroyed by incredible supernatural misfortune]) that we were not to go to "that place", that it was dangerous, that it was dirty, that we could get hurt there and they were absolutely NOT to go there, point, paragraph, end of story.

Obviously not end of story because how could that be possible. 

This would wreck my street cred if I had ever bothered to hide it, but I like following the rules, generally speaking; it's in my instinctual makeup to avoid trouble and not start it or look for it. I'm not a cop or a snitch or a preacher, I do whatever the fuck I want* and I believe everyone can pretty much do the same, but I do grit my teeth and very plainly tell the idiots I let drag me into trouble that I wish we could do better with our lives by using but a modicum more of the good sense we were born with.

Not even better! Just, like, make them a little easier. Not even a ton.

Also I smoke drugs.* I've sadly had to break a few laws in order to do this, but then, so did the founding fathers as they chased the blue dream that became my awesome, free-ass life.**

So I did protest before we got to the hill, and was--as is always the case with people like me--loudly asked by all three cousins whether I was a pussy, a coward, a wuss, a loser, etc., and as always I clench my jaw and spell out that no I am none of those things and fine I will go and do the thing, it is just can we not think of a single other thing which will not most specifically make authority likely to become unpleasant?  

Approaching the hill suddenly around a corner as we did was such a vista I immediately understood, and when we reached the gate and opened it, began ascent without preamble.

Equator-blue sky at high noon is its own thing, its own whole world of sky. When you're a kid the sky is bigger and it is bluer and it is brighter, true, but this is a sky whose total blue crowns the universe, whose radiance wields a scepter wreathed in sunflame. Looking up from the bottom, swooping up and jutting into the blazing belly of that sky, that forty-seven degree hill of red soil and green tussock looked like the path to God's own embrace. It was titanic.

We had all climbed in silence, five of us, toiling up the hill, hunched over with the effort of coping with the grade and the looseness of the soil, using our hands as much as our feet on the steeper parts. It took us at least ten minutes and a good sweat to get even a third of the way up, and from the little plateau we beheld, from a good four hundred feet up, the little slice of city this height above street level revealed for us. It glittered, proud and ugly and cool and gross and gorgeous and incredible, that weird sprawling valley-mountain city of eternal spring (it's not, any more than it's the earthly cutting of Heaven's branch [for real they say that] but we say that, and it can be believed a surprising amount of the time--even now, I imagine). We ranged in age from four to eight, we stood as kids stand and looked as kids look from a high place on down, and I have never forgotten that view, that hill, that sky, that breeze cooling my sweat and filling my nostrils with the scent of the city and the mountains and the soil.

Then we were told, my brother and I, definitively, that the thing to do was race back down.

The exciting conclusion? My cousin fell and cut his hand wide open on a buried piece of broken glass, and his older sisters freaked out and argued and generally carried on (even bringing God into it as Catholic kids can be very wont to do) as we stumped back to the apartment building while I supported the injured. I'm not a big "I told you so" guy, I prefer to bite my tongue and deal with the problems of the Now, but I was sorely tried that day.

To my surprise, we weren't heavily disciplined, though it quickly became clear that this was because it was just their mom to deal with. Some yelling from her, hidden away from my brother and myself, some tears and tearful apologies. Then we were told to play quietly, and we played Jumanji, as I have mentioned, and we did so very very loudly.

*

Our dads would have fucking creamed us, yo. Not hitting us, mind you, neither of those dudes are big on that, but a pair of howling bellowers they are, really creative and professional, sergeant-major lever screaming, plus hardcore punishments and privations. My mom woulda smacked me upside the head or perhaps even taken her shoe off, after yelling so loud that it is actually quiet, a sort of wildcat's low, back-of-throat hiss-gargle.

Perhaps you have made your own mother or significant other this angry. I shall want a paragraph on the subject, to be handed in to me in the comments, due whenever, I don't really care and won't look.

*

Didn't slip on the ice yesterday! I felt better. Then I played a bunch of Super Nintendo games on a computer that fits in the palm of my hand*** and hooks up to a television that was simply unimaginable in the year the above story took place. Wild shit.


--JL

*within the bounds of subjective reason, duty, self-discipline, and social responsibility

**Hahaha I am so sorry to mention my smoking marijuana in the same breath as the accomplishments of the founders but it's still pretty funny to think they did what they did so Florida Man can just be himself in various ways while existing in the back of a rusted-out pickup truck or soon-to-be-almost-robbed liquor store, and Donald Trump can wear an open bathrobe and nothing else while he eats Mickey D's in the Lincoln Bedroom and fantasizes about like, actually impressing Vladimir Putin, but like he'll really be impressed and like him and everybody will say so. Freedom the true drug, people.

***Okay, I guess that's another illegal thing. I am sorry, Nintendo, I am sorry, FBI, I am sorry Jesus. But guys, I have given no other single company more of my leisure money than I have given Nintendo, and leisure has always been a pretty good chunk of my budget since you only get the one life and I would give it for Nintendo. The contradiction is something we will all have to live with together, as we happily play a healthy mixture of legal and illicit software.

#63

I was precisely the "blazing, unchecked, nigh-supernatural fever" age when Pocket Monster Mania swept the nations of the world. Being a contrary sort, I held out for a little bit--the toys, the cards, the cartoon, it was all appealing enough in its way, but I held it at arm's length a bit. As far as Japanese Animation went, I held that Dragon Ball, Knights of the Zodiac, and Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) were superior to the yellow mouse and his whole deal. Until I played the games.

Man, I still play those games. Buy new ones every time they make 'em and sell 'em. Pull the old cartridges out for old time's sake now and again. I used to stay up late, dreaming so hard on a life free in the fields and forests and mountains with my beloved parters at my side that I would break a sweat and basically hallucinate.

All manner of complex ideas about Pocket Monsters brew in my mind. Ah, and the memories.

Watched the movie where Mewtwo threatens to take over the world using clones with a friend of mine and I cried in a movie theater for the first time in my life. I now bring a handkerchief to the theater, and not for my sinuses. I heard that dude got rabies but did not die, a few years after I moved away. I heard he stayed weird and extremely unpopular, just like when we played pretend together, folding innumerable paper airplanes and exploring highly unlikely but tremendously exciting fictional scenarios years after the little kids around us started to get off on pretending to be adults, which is what fucks up the entire planet and really spoiled a great many recess periods. 

Respect to that dude. Hand on my heart. I'll never forget watching that movie, or what a good guy he was.


--JL

#4

Both books are sharply dressed in brand new covers, their third such wardrobe transformation. No more! No more. Third time is said to be the charm; I also consider it in certain cases to be a sort of guillotine gate.

At any rate, the covers will no longer change. By way of apology for not designing covers and then for designing them hastily, I shall share another anecdote, this time without relying on the sordid tonal qualities of cigarettes or alcohol.

*

In the second grade a dude handed me my ass in the middle of class because I looked at him wrong. He offered a gentlemanly apology later that week and we became fast friends, as is time-honored and correct. It was his opinion that I showed balls, an ineffable quality that many other men taller and stronger than me have sensed and respected after they have pounded me into sundry available surfaces.

The way it holds up in this example is that I had indeed been looking at him wrong; fuck him! He was looking at me wrong, had done so first--so I did nothing to avoid the conflict, plus I hit him in the mouth as hard as I could the second he dared me to. Not very hard, true, but I did it, and that's the point, upon which key distinctions hinge. Salient also is the point that I did not alter my attitude towards him one iota simply because he then took hold of my head and smashed his knee into my face several times before throwing me into my desk. This proved fuck-all in my opinion, and I'd fight him again at the slightest notice. What the dude recognized innately was this attitudinal, elemental kinship between us, who could not have had more absurdly different abilities, interests, and approaches to the world.

I was a dreamy idiot who breathed with his mouth open and chewed on his bookmarks as he went through reams of paper in his fully doomed attempts to render convincing illustrations of various Dinosauria and aliens from major science-fiction franchises. John was a cold-eyed, piratical hooligan with a lashing-out problem to where the dude had a cobra for a tongue and two rattlesnakes for hands. We bonded over playing Duke Nukem 3D on our computers and game talk in general, and I believe my overwhelming and all-encompassing loves for interpreting data and waxing philosophical sparked in him a life-enriching interest in these things, he who before me had spent his days mostly coming up with ways to vandalize as many things as possible and assert dominance through various mediums.

It was up to the dude to teach me how to be ruthless, how to access the animal beneath the man: the entity that does not merely win fights, but ends them. He also taught me how to lie, steal, brag, confidently approach women, hide weapons on your person, and engineer mayhem, so in retrospect it seems I got much more out of the deal. These are crucial lessons that have served me all my life, either in direct application or to know them when I see them. Dude also came up with the following schoolyard game: take turns climbing the most difficult tree you and your friends can find, and if you fall off, or fall over when you jump off, your friends beat the shit out of you until you claw your way to your feet. Bonus points to everybody if it is possible to fall from the chosen tree onto the barbed wire from the top of a fence and die.

We served each other very well, I think, putting each other so radically far out of our comfort zones. I did fail him, once--overwhelmed by guilt and evidence, I confessed to chucking a raw egg from four stories up smack center onto a dude's car's roof. Imagine a large, angry man genuinely leaping from his car, on which egg has already begun cooking to the metal, and wheeling his gaze up and locking it directly onto yours. Then he comes and yells at your friend's mom, who summons you to have your face pointed at by the man, you, who had before this day never so much as dreamed of engaging in anything even resembling the crime which your friend is denying with perfectly calm, set features. I cracked perhaps harder and with more mess than the egg had. This betrayal unequivocally lacked balls, and the dude let me know it with no mercy whatsoever for my tears, as well as that only dead idiots stay to watch what happens when you lob a grenade--you chuck the bitch and motor. Since that failure I have made ample use of silence under interrogations, and avoided much self-compromise thereby. I try not to do anything wrong, but when I do, I make dead sure it will go right.

This has been my tip of the pen to my old friend, and men like him, who are so despised and misunderstood in this strange age, and my paean to the hypersigil under which our friendship bloomed in those savage, irretrievably serious days of being eight and nine years old, whose resistive power we need now more than ever--balls. Not testicles, which mean and bestow exactly nothing, but balls, which are the difference between a person who crawls away to lick themselves and nurse resentment after a beating, and a person who spits blood and rains cusses on their opponent as they're dragged away, who'll come back tomorrow to lose all over again, who doesn't run out of what they have to prove.


--JL