#497

Prohibiting myself from writing or even thinking about current events--after this one broadside I am allowing for.

• It's fine to destroy Teslas and whatever--anything that hurts any corporation above a certain size and evil-to-utility ratio is fine--but we need to go harder and broader at the same time. Smash our vile, disgusting smartphones with a hammer. Destroy our corporate personal computers and start building our own or supporting local silicon-heads instead of that Ruined, Accurs'd Vale. Why did we never get a garden, boutique economy going around personal computing? We obviously, obviously need local blacksmiths, but for code, and hardware, and cybertronic upgrades. Anyway, stop buying stuff from massive online retailers, stop using paypal, uber, venmo, streaming services, social media--every digital cancer metastasized by a flock of cretinous salesvampires, every pustule on the face and ass of our society, economy, and body politic we have allowed to become an angry and infected pressurized geyser of pus and befoulment in the name of our own ease and convenience, in the name of saving a buck today using slave labor and cheating and lying and bullying and warfighting and pretending tomorrow was going to be ok. It never was. Chickens always, inevitably come home to roost. But if we all stopped all at once the world would change the next day. Prove me wrong.

*

In emulation of the great sand painters of our global cultural heritage, I've been doing chalk art on the sidewalk basically the same afternoon or evening that it's going to rain. It seems to release something in me of its own tone and texture apart from painting or drawing, but akin to both. And I don't have to store it, which, believe me, is a huge plus currently.

*

Last night as I was drifting off to bed I realized that my truest, oldest, most personal and most total ambition, such as the word can be applied to my temperament, is to be like Dick Van Dyke in the old Mary Poppins movie.

Bert and Ian Malcolm. Them, and Madmartigan from Willow, who is played by Val Kilmer. My protean, formative masculine ideals. The drifting, indefatigable workingman artist, the cynical, analytical trickster-intellect with a side of strong ethics and jokes, and the wild, diamond-in-the-rough fighter who is not the protagonist. All men queered in interesting ways by their characterizations and roles in their narrative, just by the by.

Plus, y'know, Batman. Also Val Kilmer! But more Mask of the Phantasm Batman, with the miserable, guilty, weeping, basically insane Bruce.

Wow, it really is all very complete and turnkey! Sometimes it can swing around to seem that we as individuals are not really very complicated phenomena after all. 

*

PAX EGRESS

PAX EXEGESIS

PAX EMESIS

--JL

#492

Well, it's almost two months into the year. Interesting year so far. Eventful! Personally and on a global scale.

Yes, a post about current events. Perhaps they are to some degree inevitable. Feel free to check out and slide away to more rewarding internet locales. I would. But it would perhaps be unwise, if I am able to offer any kind of useful insight. And maybe I can. That's why I bother to type it out and put it where people can see it, I guess, even if no one looks. Even if people did look, and it caused problems for me, I would still do it. 

Everything, of course, is to some degree inevitable. Arguing about it won't change that.

*

Well, look. I know that Americans reading this, generational Americans specifically, might think they still have a country. Shit, this country technically did survive Andrew Jackson and Warren Harding, two points in history in which the executive was overrun with trolls, gangsters, and petty thieves, and that's not nothing.

The country was much younger and the world much older in both instances. Young organisms are in key ways more resilient than their mature counterparts, and the world has been made anew five or perhaps eight times over since 1923.

But factually we probably don't have a country left. Every 24-hour period makes it less probable that we will be able to return to democratic norms. That's how it works in other countries, and if this past decade and a half has proved anything, anything, it is that the United States is no mythical example, no blessed fluke, no modern utopia, no nothing in any way special. Just another country full of humans.  

If things continue as they have been, then they could very easily just replace the courts with implacable algorithms and congress with a consumer panel overseen by a board of directors. 

Naturally nothing these bodies produce will have any effect on the CEO. That position can and only could ever be decided internally, using machinations whose inputs are completely severed from the public sensorium and indeed, reality. 

Once it has happened, you will see that such has always been their dark vision. They would never have said so! But it will be extremely obvious in retrospect, when you review the lies they told vs. the actions they took, that having a government was never really the plan. 

*

As I have said before, and as was quickly made manifest--they can just deport people wherever the fuck they want. They can make it happen by making it legal by being--it is very simple--bullies. They get it. They have always been bullies and they understand that being a bully works just as well when it's countries and laws as when it's toys and rules.

The reason for having governments is to prevent bullies from ruling the roost. Goverment fails when the bullies are in charge. It is...pretty simple.

*

"They" in this whole screed, by the way, should be understood as the brigands and profiteers whose aim is open and omnivorous theft of the highest possible magnitude, breadth, and scope, as well as any and all ideological maniacs who wish to vent their fear-based genocidal urges. 

As is so often true, the above are entwined in a very profitable and pleasurable position. Indeed, the former have historically found it useful and expedient to maintain in every way they can the conditions to create as much genocidal fear as possible--to embed it deeply in as many subcultures and across language and law and moral commandment. This trick has been key in accelerated forms of societal formation and collapse.

Building slave empires on foundations of total nonsense and thus creating the conditions for their own dissolution. Toppling monarchies with populist movements only to install a regime more brutal than previously thought tolerable or even possible. Coming in to gut existing companies and flying away on a helicopter with all their money. And so forth. That is the basic game.

People do it to themselves and allow it to be done to them. It is hard to hope for change when you see how willing and eager we are to spill the same innocent blood over and over and over again for completely made-up reasons each and every time. Always to the sound of applause, at first.

And believe me--there is always money in it.

*

All the truly useful solutions lie in the realm of fantasy. Such as: if I could magically give these people what they wanted without the human cost involved.

Do you understand? If I could just give these crazy fucking quasi-religious fanatics and twisted race scientists what they were after--a society comprised only of their described acceptable monoculture, inviolable and pure and legitimate in its closed-border holdings, by magically, intstantly withdrawing everyone they would like to fucking murder to a safe location, then I would.

Why? Because they wouldn't know what to fucking do. They would fucking starve. Those fortunate enough to survive the riots and outbreaks of disease, anyway. These people have no fucking clue what they're really after. They don't remember or realize that if there's no one around to be their slaves, then eventually, someone's going to have to lift a finger.

Who cleans the human feces? Who grows the food and deals with it and cooks it? Who gets to sit around all god damned day and point fingers? These questions have answers that they like, for now. What happens when suddenly the basis for those answers is completely gone?

It would even be immoral. To give them what they want. Wouldn't even want to watch that gruesome farce play out. Like the martyred socialist said, they know not what they do. They understand nothing. And to reveal to them the magnitude of their ignorance in this way would be cruel.

But it would probably be better than letting them kill us.

*

Letting them kill us seems to be the plan, as far as I can see. Very Christian of us and I approve, in a sense. I would also like to die later, from other causes, but no one gets to pick how they go, except all those who do. We say they are bad, I guess, but you know what I think about what "we" say en masse without thinking deeply about it.

Who fucking cares. Ballot, bullet, bullshit. It'll all kill you. Don't have any better plan and even if I did, don't know of anyone more socially dead than myself. Might be cool if someone had a strategy and I could trust it. Not from where I'm looking.

But I am seeing something I have seen before: a united and determined political minority has bamboozled the agitated public into giving them the government, and the political majority is too fragmented, inflexible, and fundamentally ineffective to stop them or do anything at all useful, really--just the same ritual genuflections that have been failing thus far, their power drained as though founded on a dead god.

*

So that's the pessimism. Do we have another angle?

Well, another fun fantasy is like, just being able to change someone's mind. Like, if I could, I dunno, concentrate real hard and pull my left earlobe while snapping my fingers and just watch someone let go their fear and their hate and their anger. That would be one fucking hell of a superpower. Better than Superman; fight me.

But, no. No, I don't really have much optimism. Only that this wretched world is visible to us, limited creatures that we are, as through a glass darkly, and to be freed from its bounds and sound what has been hidden will be to see and know one another and this world as it truly was, as we truly have been, as we are and will be, and faith that this veil is drawn over a perfect universe beyond my microscopic and human-all-too-human comprehension. 

In a good way. Guess that's my optimism. We are small, the present brief. Soon all this mess and tension will be of little consequence to whomsoever might walk this weary globe in another thousand thousand years. 

*

Thinking of finding a big giant jar to live in. Could be fun. Could be a novel career move after all this shit burns down around me, if I'm not shot to death in the street or put on a work crew in Nicaragua or wherever the fuck.

--JL

#429

Don't know how I've suffered them this long, considering how I despise white and gray walls. The miserable--I had not realized how miserable!--gray kitchen is becoming orange. The back hall and half the living room, pale green. The other half and the stairwell, pale blue. Our bedroom and Ezra's office were already yellow and two deep tones of green, respectively. The spare room needs a color, as does my office, though the dozens of art pieces and stickers I've mounted all around are helpful. I may go with many colors. I know I will, actually. 

But that's the last priority. For now, finishing the kitchen is still the thing.

* 

Haven't talked about current events for a minute. It's a grim business, and I can do what I want, I know that--but this blog is not merely a humorist's diary or manifold spontaneous rough essay generator--and though the essays may be serious and historical, it is also not fundamentally the same as the blog's final purpose, which is to stand as something of a record of life experienced in the early blush of the twenty-first century's maturity. And that century is fucking batshit right now. The Things are Happening.

Those great, sweeping spasms history is sometimes seen to make are rippling like perhaps never before. Certainly the frequency is unprecedented, the speed of the thing.

Ok, look. Let's keep this simple. I have, in a previous post, commented on the perfect timing of the terrorist attack on Israel which has developed as it has, with every eye on the planet and the thing's gravity warping reality. The domestic side of that was the particular thrust of that comment, and that is what has played out most predictably, though Speaker Johnson's recent actions bucked the trend and are worth honorable notice. Nevertheless, the public demostrations and the reactions they have provoked at every level of our society are the crux of the matter, and that shit is spinning out of control and veering into the kind of unreason that anticipates martial law. With a dictator in the wings literally base at the ready and demonstrated influence over politics as they are happening, nothing could be more dangerous.

Basically, the soft power instruments leveled at the U.S. as early as 2009 and heavily beginning in 2012 are beginning to look as though their long-term efficacy is accomplished fact. The country may devolve and lose its standing in international affairs as well as its domestic stability and even political cohesion. Tech companies will only accelerate these multipolarizations because cooperation with competing interests will guarantee the kinds of influence and privileges they crave. This will cascade globally. Private security of every description will see booms in every sector as paranoia and uncertainty reign amidst increasingly chaotic and unchecked brigandry, governmental overreach, and prisonification. The nomad may once again rise to prominence in global affairs, realizing Deleuzian prophecy. Meanwhile the climate will collapse and the deaths of hundreds of millions will open terrain, change the tenor of migration, colonization, and land use priorities completely.

The crazy part is, some people's lives won't change at all. They'll just keep going to the store, I guess. If we survive in general, it probably won't even slow population growth that long or even noticeably.

Life do go on. No one knows what time has in store for them. All that I have said could well be baloney.

Baloney! I love that corruption.

*

All I can really do is make art and try to survive. It has worked so far. I shall stay the course. And after all, plants grow in the cracks between massive concrete slabs. Always there is hope. Always there are those hundreds and thousands of seeds spread by each step of the sower in the great field, and only one out every so many millions needs to take root and bloom.

--JL

#320

Hey! New computer. Typing has slowed considerably for the nonce, but the keyboard is...luxurious. I'm luxuriating. Feeling pretty fucking luxuriated. Luxuriant. Nothing so grand as a custom clicky-clacky or one of those, I dunno, two hundred-and-fifty-dollar jobs you can buy, but for the keyboard that comes integrated into a laptop, at these prices, there is a deal of pleasure. 

Indeed, my old Toshiba finally broke, pretty bad, I think. All the way, probably. Is it pretty bad and an all the way break when the computer consistently fails to find a bootable disc? It seems bad, when that is happening, and restarts are no avail. Cracked it open to look at its guts and everything but couldn't find the problem. Originally, my plan was to continue to try and fix it, perhaps getting used to the idea of using the computer lab at the community college a lot more than I would prefer, but when I mentioned it to my parents they ordered me this laptop (a Dell Inspiron, as befits a house of noble rank) on the spot. They seem pleased that I've returned to school. I may have to get a master's degree.

*

Haven't talked about the world and its affairs in a little bit. I'll do a bit of dabble.

Number one: don't like the idea of this trillion-dollar coin. It's not that it wouldn't work, technically; it's that it would work in a stupid way and do a lot of damage, not the least of which would be making us look like a bunch of fucking assholes. My opinion, minting that coin is admitting, once and for all, that we as a nation are ready for someone else to take the wheel. We need to scratch our butts and be on our phone in the backseat for a few hours. Nap might hit the spot. And this would be ok, except the domestic implications would be considerably worse, which combined with reduced global standing usually means a spiraling effect. 

Well, maybe that's the long game with the Ukrainian invasion and Russian plants all over the government. Fuck up economies so bad California and Texas finally secede and a bunch of land has to get sold to corporations or NGO's or even foreign governments on top of that. I for one have never stopped thinking about certain papers detailing soft power tactics and their strategic implications, many of which have borne fruit long since ripened and picked.

Number two: there's no number two. Gone and bummed myself out. This is why I don't do this kind of thing very often. It's not that the big picture affects me emotionally; it saddens me on a personal level that people are so manipulable as to let this happen. This isn't tanks advancing on your condo complex; what the fuck you gonna do, you know? This is literally letting yourself get gamed into opening the door to the man with the rifle and thanking him for the privilege. This is letting yourself be cozened into thinking that sitting on your ass and tweeting about nothing is the same as a revolution, the really good one this time. 

Yeah. Who cares, though? Ultimately, things are what they are, eventually fail, and make way for the new. Plus, I haven't had any coffee yet. Probably I'm being ridiculous and everything will come up roses. We are in the palm of God's hand, after all. Greatest country on the planet, hoo-rah. Which reminds me, hope a big chunk of all this gets carved out for First Nations when it all comes crashing down and subdivides.

*

Dang, gotta do better than that for the first post on the new machine! Let's see, what's good? What's fun?

Several nights ago I dreamed about my ex-fiancée for the first time since we stopped being in each other's lives. Over the years I have many times thought it strange that I never once dreamed about her, and then that night, bam. One dream followed the next; intense, vivid, huge dreams, with dense plots and extremely realized settings. I would wake up from one, go back to sleep, and enter the next, and she would be there. 

Returning to school has proven to be a kind of revelation, psychologically; what once was so hard for me on a personal level is now easier and more straightforward than a walk in an extremely basic, flat, one-path park, and I'm laughing about it. Certainly this has brought about much reflection on who I used to be, what my hangups were, and how I have come to grow out of them and heal. As one breakthrough tends to set off another and this kind of processing can unlock stuff, on the balance it shouldn't surprise me that I dreamed of her as if making up for lost time. 

On the day that I woke up from those dreams, I went on a small adventure to see if I could reconnect with certain parental elements from halcyon days gone by. Encountered only marginal success, but it was a positive experience, nonetheless. Got me out of the house, anyway. Be trying again on different fronts soon. It's a new decade, both in lived time and the days of the world. Back in school, married, dreaming...can't remember to what extent I discussed it on here, but I was smoking and ingesting so much weed that I wasn't hardly dreaming anymore. Now I dream every night, practically, as once I did in the days of my vibrant, suffering youth. Man, when I was a teenager, I had like four nightmares a week at least. How did I survive?

At any rate, I am a new man, and a new man cleans out his closet, and pays close, careful attention to his dreams. This one does, anyhow.

*

At my parent's house right now, watching the family dog while they get in a bit of a travel for their anniversary. This post has been interrupted twice on two separate days, so even though I find it most wanting, we shall part ways for the moment here, dear reader, and try to have a better post next time.

Be well. Keep your secrets and your safety and rise one day triumphant and eternal.

--JL

#303

Been avoiding writing about much that is topical in terms of world events in the blog for quite some time. Admittedly, been avoiding the blog itself for a little while, which always happens when I move. It is more difficult for me to be productive with writing when my books are not in some form of organized shape, and they are not right now, but there's lots to do each day--and I'm not the best at prioritizing my most private inner needs, even though they're essentially the most important ones. For me. But like, dishes gotta get done. Kids gotta get bussed to school, and bussed home--at least, if I want a paycheck they do. Shit needs cleaning. Etc. All that is more vital to me, these days, than virtual spaces and distant lands. Also I feel driven to record more lush memories in this space, to make it more autobiographical, though this is hard and time-consuming work.

However, I care deeply about virtual spaces and distant lands, and I do read stuff and have my considered opinions. Six years back, in the truly dark times of 2016, my addiction to information and news media of many varieties reached critical mass and I collapsed in on myself. In the time this blog has run I have practiced dipping my toes in, commenting occasionally, largely because while I was not ON twotter, I was still using. Since I quit that mess completely, it has been easier to just get the essentials and move on with my life.

This business in Ukraine is in its third month, though, and I have so many high-concept notions around it, and Russian policy in general, and multipolarity & globalization, the furthered sagas of covid, the further sagas of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, and this new Chinese autonomous ship class that went from announcement to reality in a year, business news in all its great variety--all these are things I take careful note of, and think about commensurately. So many conflicts! So much progress, and so much backwards thinking and commentary about it from so many quarters, while the real game runs faster and harder and smarter than ever before! I just drooled a tiny bit.

Whatever it is in me that cares about the big picture, about history in the distant past and history carving itself out in blood right now today and where the twain intermix in ferocious, glorious alchemy--I mean, it's an unbelievably exciting time to be alive. All that really happens in life materially, though, is gas prices are up and I have to put away some laundry. So who really cares, really, truly? I shouldn't. But I do. Is the blog better or more useful when I am writing about the complexities of the now that we share virtually, or when I am waxing philosophical and reporting on the mundane intricacies of my own quiet life?

Anyway, sometime in the next series of days I'll try to strike a balance; post something autobiographical, post something about current events, those wicked, heady current events. Past and present. Innerworld and outerworld. 

Today, I dunno. Think this is all I got today. Felt good to type it, though. 

--JL