#493

I am extremely happy in my room. My room is a place that fills up steadily with works of art that please me in their execution and completion. The walls are green in here. I have Pokémon stickers and pictures of birds and animals and landscapes scavenged from a number of those paper calendars nature conservancy societies send people all over. The carpet is shitty, but who cares about that. Just means no need for stress about getting paint on it.

Frankly, it's so good that leaving my room is something of an imposition under any given circumstance, but when I am forced to, at least I am still in my house, which is another place I am extremely happy. The house has improved immensely since we moved in, both aesthetically and in terms of functioning elements. The real issues begin when I have to leave the house, but that's more psychological than anything to do with any real problems out there, except bright headlights, poisoned air, and maniacs with easy access to a variety of killing machines (including that two-ton missile attached to each set of those hellaciously bright headlamps).

Every biosphere has its hazards, and each of its residents must deal with their multitudes in their due portion. So it goes.

*

There was a serious fuckton of law enforcement on my street today; yea, right up close to two houses down. Also the house directly across the street. State police, local city, sherriff, and even a car from a different city. Plus a few city trucks and an unmarked white van. Wuuuuut? Nobody liked that.

Pretty much missed what it was all about, though I did infer that it was two separate municipal tasks rolled into one so as to facilitate the whole process; a more complete show of force benefiting both. That's all the commentary I have, I guess, except that there is simply no way for a reasonable person to feel at ease of any kind of with the amount of firepower represented by those vehicles in proximity.

Moments like that--though to be fair I have been thinking about this a lot recently apropos of nothing--one really meditates on how purely symbolic the shelter one is provided with at my economic strata. If anything went wrong on my street and bullets started flying, any one slug could pass through probably up to three houses, maybe a lot more, maybe less depending the caliber and what might impede one. You would not have to ransack the black market to secure rounds which could easily pass through my wall, me, my back wall, my back neighbor's wall, and still hit my neighbor. Because our walls are, for all intents and purposes, made of paper. I can throw a baseball into one and it will stick. Maybe fully knock a hole. I don't really know how hard I can throw a baseball, but I am confident it would stick.

Like I was saying before. Maniacs, of all levels and descriptions, are a serious problem in this environment, all the more so due to their access to tools designed to do nothing but kill as efficiently as possible, and their propensity to cut corners until there is nothing but a dirty knife.

*

Anyway, I like my house and I like my neighborhood but it could all be more durable and sustainable and set in a much, much better society, as far as I can assess. That is the breakdown. You might say that I am wrong to criticize a society as the beneficiary of its mechanisms, and it may be so to a certain extent, but identical as well as superior formats could exist under a wide variety of such sets and norms as call themselves societies, so I don't see why I shouldn't ask for better. 

As a tax-paying citizen under the terms of our particular constitutions and parameters, asking for better, it was always my understanding, was to be the whole point.

Noplace was ever the kingdom of heaven merely because people declared it to be so. 

*

Events even more current and specific, yet sociopolitical commentary even more abstract. Hopefully by next post I will be fully buried in my navel once again, and the world will not present as even so much as a dull roar. It is not really my place to be useful here. The blog is not "the news" or "useful opinions". The blog is "factually pointless". This is how it should be.

Till then, dear reader. My task these days is to find a way to generate income and maintain sanity. Simple things, maybe, but my ability to rise to them by no means certain. Faith and hope! Courage, and to screw it to the sticking-place! That's all we got.

--JL

#331

Oh no! I've been putting off the last post of Album Week 2022 until post #333, and it fast approaches! This is terrible! Not ready! But I must be ready. It is essential that the post be dropped on #333 and no other, and I can't just take a hiatus right now--feeling extremely productive lately and wanting very much to put a lot of posts into the blog this spring and summer as well as finish and start some books, so I will simply have to screw my courage to the sticking-point and plunge headfirst into the deep end. Literally and metaphorically and literally within the metaphor! You'll see what I mean when we get there, dear reader. Water, and plunging--will we sink, or will we swim? 

That is what is known as a teaser.

What is the sticking-point of courage, I wonder? Is it the nipple on the left side? Your right hip? Up your own ass far enough to plant it in your guts? This bears long consideration. Courage a threaded thing, made to fit a threaded hole in the body, or the spirit, and hold fast. Does its mere presence do the job thereafter, or does its function as an affordance require further manipulations? You know, like a strap-on. Or, I dunno, a crank.

Perhaps we all have our own unique sticking-points. Perhaps many sticking-points, for many varieties of courage. I get my artisanal, shade-grown courage at the stupid fucking farmer's market, and it makes me feel super good about myself. I put it in a reusable cloth bag before I take it out and casually but conspicuously screw it to my extremely obvious sticking-point.

That's an example that occurred to me just now. Suppose we don't have to respect every kind of courage, even if we're obliged to acknowledge them when we see them in our effort to appraise the world with honesty.

*

Thinking about openly carrying a pistol or other high-velocity projectile weapon, as is so prized by certain types of individuals in this vast, strange land of ours, these nominally united States. More like federally linked conditions, but those aren't the hairs I'm here to split.

One reason I would never carry a gun is I just don't like them, but even if I did like them I don't think I would carry one openly because of the very simple reason that to me, carrying a gun is a clear signal that I want to get shot at. I dunno. It feels like, fucking airtight to me. 

"Why did you kill that man? There was no provocation."

"Well, he had a gun."

"So?"

"I don't understand the question."

"Explain to me why you killed that man, as though I were a five-year old, son."

"Ok. I'll try. Listen, kid, that dude had a gun, and he made sure I knew it, so what I heard him saying was that he walks around looking for an excuse to use it. I killed him to make sure he didn't kill me first for a real or imaginary reason. This is a function of my paranoia and the fact that I also had a gun, which I carry because I know a lot of people carry them, and so I knew it was only a matter of time."

So like, I dunno. That's exactly how I feel, so if I had a gun, I would have killed a man by now. You know what's fucking crazy? I think it's a miracle that there isn't more gun violence in this blood-drenched, gunpowder-reeking nation. It's fucking pathological the way shit is about them and it is absolutely incredible that the very gutters don't reek with clotted gore.

No solution! I'm just saying, you know? Well, I have my solution, which is to accept that man with a suppurating infection for a brain might shoot me for a faggot or a wetback or a heretic or some other scapegoat for his own massive personal problems or as a form of revenge against our embattled society with its broken institutions or even just as performance for the pageviews and and that's just how life is, and death is, and fuck him, he's not gonna run my life, make me have things I don't want to have, or do things I don't want to do. I live how I want to live, which is with my hands empty.

Wage peace or fuck off. Or don't. All anyone can do is walk their own path.

--JL

#175

Family dog is barking at the window of my room, where he likes to survey the cul-de-sac with what on a larger canine would be a magisterial, commanding mien, but on him just seems like preoccupation and a certain amount of noble irritation. The difference between a tall, powerfully framed lighthouse-keeper and the undersized but very professional security man for a small historical preservation museum composed of a general store combined with a post office.

*

All right, I'm wasting time. It's because what I want to write about will so bare my emotions, also because I woke up thinking about work instead of anything I wanted to be thinking about, anything else at all, and have been thinking about work in a way that no one likes thinking about work even if you did want to think about work thirty-two milliseconds after your eyes opened.

*

Falling in love is a scary thing, especially when you know how bad someone else can treat you, on purpose and without meaning to, and how eminently you can fail to be what another person needs, accidentally and deliberately. I've broken an engagement to be married, escaped from a narcissist, and lived and loved through a range of other entanglements, each their own kind, each accorded due significance, each painful. Frankly, bluntly, I wasn't trying to go through anything like that again. 

Life isn't about being safe, though. Life is about doing something with what you have in front of you, and sometimes life is a pretty girl that wants to talk to you with her very nice and cute voice and get to know you and see you special. And the part of you that sees something special in that girl and responds to her eyes and her smile and her good kind heart is more important than the part of you that is scared that things are going to go bad again. It just is. Life is for living. Living is dangerous, but it's good. It's good to be alive, but you gotta be brave. Even if you've fucked up a lot, you've gotta keep trying to be brave.

*

So if you find yourself with a story playing out like this girl's reading a book you just reread and it's a great book, a real humdinger full of special language and tendernesses you treasure and special psychic movies you're the better for having witnessed, bearing undercurrents that change how your blood flowed, and you talk about it for a little bit, how you both so love the author, so you smile when you see one another and you keep on talking a little here and there, more books, some laughs, a note in your backpack, a spliff in the sun, a walk in the woods, and you wonder what the fuck is happening, it's so good that it's too good, it's unrealistic, it's unreasonable, you're fucking with yourself, what the fuck are you doing, don't you ever learn, and so you throw a stick into the spokes and foul the machine and you get back to the quiet and the cold lone and you are proud that you are learning and you are okay with being the person that can protect themselves but it is really truly very difficult to see this girl around and it is clearly not easy for her either but you are both getting by and you are both doing the right thing but merely because you don't look at something, merely because you turn away and try not to see it, it does not in fact cease to be or change position, so you cannot keep pulling it off, the thing is there, you can feel it no matter where you fix your gaze, so you smile more and you laugh more and you look in her eyes and then you have no choice but to turn back, and meet it where it is, and write a letter, and let the letter be a true and dangerous letter, the kind that throws everything into the air and makes you wait to see how it all comes back down. 

See where the story goes from there. 

*

As I am a super lucky guy, the story seems to be coming out okay. More than okay. The math has never looked like this to me before. Things in general have never looked this way to me before; choices, time, objects in space, distances. It's a different level. Is this something you get used to, or the beginning stages of some long and ever-morphing symphony? These are the kinds of thoughts shooting through me as I walk home in the full blast of a thunderstorm, heedless and thinking only of the smell and taste of her and the feeling of her arms around me and water pours down my face and off my chin like a spigot. 

*

Just keeps getting more beautiful, more dangerous, more and more storied. It can threaten to be overwhelming again, memory striking at me with the terrors of experience, doubt in myself dogging my footsteps. But courage is the only game in town and beauty is for enjoying while it lasts. Being in danger just means you've got skin in the game. And this is a game I am down to have all of my skin in, my whole body and self. It's cool.

*

Anyhow I love my fully gorgeous amazingly kind hella considerate super creative warmhearted hilarious girlfriend, she is the downest girl ever and fully hardcore. That's what's up these days. It's pretty fun and rad. We are having a nice time. 

*

Peace for the billions and peace forever on this charming and lovely Memorial Day, people. May you remember every dead soldier that ever was next time you raise your hand in anger. Kill it where it starts and you'll shed no blood; that's how you honor a sacrifice.


--JL