#422

Four-two-two. Four two two. Man, that's fuckin great. That's so fuckin awesome. What a number. A four and two twos. Just a parent and a pair of twins. Just a big child and two parents. 4=2+2. 

*

The dude that lives up on the near corner of my street is his own man, and I respect that. He's out with his crazity-ass biting dogs in the public park opposite his house. They are not on their leashes and he is using the "scream at the dog" method of keeping them under a semblance of control. 

Kind of suboptimal in my view, but like, I ain't gonna yell at the guy--I mean, the dogs are loose. I ain't goin' near there! I guess that's the point. For right now, that real estate is his in every way that matters, which is something of a breach of the public trust. 

Couple of city utilities trucks rolled up kind of in formation, looking for eyeball confirmation I guess, then rolled away without fully stopping. Should I expect law enforcement next? Probably. 

I would like to formally assert that I never contact law enforcement. In the wildest, most apocalyptic scenario I can imagine, I might, if it occured to me and fit the situation, call the local sherriff, because he used to be my wrestling coach. If he loses the upcoming election, I wouldn't even do that.

Anyway the situation--and I recognize that it is a situation, with like scared people and my own sense of justice and fair use somewhat bruised--isn't legally a problem unless it actually causes harm beyond fear, in my view. If I were taking a walk and came upon a different corner where this was happening without warning, I can see becoming quite frightened because the possibility of being mauled or simply terrified and then laughed at--

WHOA. I interrupt this bulletin from the ground to let you know that even closer to the ground, I just pinched my knee-skin and pushed off a perfectly healed scab, fully intact in one glorious perfect flawless moment, that scab-coming-off feeling so pure and unadulterated, baby, yeah--good god damn.

Anyway, wow. Um. Yes. That would not be great, but I would not be harmed. In my own estimation. If the dog takes a piece of me, or like mauls a child, then it's a different conversation.

I'm not scared of dogs, and I'm not scared of his dogs, even though he and his family kind of all implied that I really should be last time I was near all of them at once and not exercising proper caution. They got 'em tied to the park fence now, not that anyone would be wise to go near anyhow. I mean, do you want to toddle up to the playground so bad you'll walk past a dude screaming at three jumping, barking, pitbullish dogs? I dunno, maybe you don't care, maybe you know 'em, maybe you decide fuck it. 

With all the rest of the related and merely corollary yelling and cussing that's happening, my corner is not a tranquil Thursday breeze today, is what I'm getting at. But I ain't care. 

Lived in too many neighborhoods where nothing fucking ever happens, not for ten damn ass years. That out there seems fine, and whatever.  It could have been safer and calmer, but it reached an equilibrium and a peace, with the dogs quiet and wagging and everybody chill. Too chill? It's a free country, man. Abide. 

That out there is the texture and occurrence that is supposed to define life, not interrupt it. 

Dang, three of the dogs got loose. I must shake my head. 

Man, that scab came off iconic, people. Phew. God planned that moment out my entire life. Wow.

*

Live, up-to-the-minute stuff! Wow. Stupid. They got the hoop up on the street and they're shooting some baskets now. I'm still just up here approximately one hundred feet away and up fifteen more feet, typing and looking up information and planning art projects and writing projects and not checking my email enough.

Have a happy Thursday! Keep your wits about you, though. You never know when they might be called upon.

--JL

#176

Sometimes you have a sandwich for breakfast. Today was one of those days, for me. I was able to enjoy it sans the appellate gaze and meaningful shifts in body position that the family dog accompanies my every meal with, for he was out on his walk.

Did you know that begging, to a dog, is like going to work for a human person? My dog stretches carefully, shakes his head a bit, does everything short of punch a clock and put on a cute little uniform before he sits down as close as he can get to me without losing a good angle for his giant sad brown eyes to peer without cease at my face, trying out a running gamut of pitiable and adorable facial expressions and even going so far as fretfully whining as he shifts from side to side on his butt that he sits on kinda sideways. He also licks his little chops. 

*

Today's sandwich was two pieces of regular supermarket sliced bread, one of the fancier brands, toasted, some French butter melted onto the bottom slice, a sweet cherry tomato about the size of a superball sliced and laid out, three and three quarter strips of applewood bacon grilled and cooked again slow in its own fat so it's dark and crumbly and dry on the outside and redolent with moist lipids on the bite*, as much baby spinach as I could get on there, and then I might have fried an egg but just put the top bread on and ate it.

Only better bread could have improved that sandwich. I'll coddle myself an egg later and eat it with spices. Or I shall cook a small amount of chicken meat.**

*

For a while now I've been needing to go and purchase clothing from a thrift store or two; a few t-shirts, maybe a pair of pants or shorts. I've had excellent success buying socks and underwear and solid black t-shirts online, but while I shall sometimes indulge in the odd internet purchase of a more "signature" garment, on the whole I prefer to venture into my analog environment and see what's what. 

One reason is that in an analog environment your girlfriend can come and look for stuff too, and then you can grab dinner somewhere. It's the meatspace advantage. 

*

Clothing! That is some high-concept shit right there. Mark Twain quote. 

*

Been playing it solid dark colors or white tees for a long minute now, with only the odd emblem or pattern to break the chromatic monism. I feel like I may have mentioned this. Today's aim for the wardrobe is the infusion of some linework, some multicolored affairs, perhaps a cool design or the exact right band or movie or provoking concept. Perhaps I will find a shirt with a meme on it. Perhaps a fine tie. 

*

The anime Kill la Kill involves itself deeply with clothing, and is extremely high-quality. I don't very often watch anime twice--I can count 'em on one hand--but I'd watch that again anytime.

*

Cool cool. I forgot to drink coffee earlier, which is weird. I fell asleep on the floor by my desk. The dog curled up to sleep by me, and before two minutes had elapsed he was up and barking loudly at stimulus I could not fathom. Such is coevally evolved interspecies cohabitation.

Look. He is a very good boy.


--JL

*my dad had cooked this ingredient before I got up, props to the old man

**I defrosted a frozen cornmeal-crust mushroom pizza. Some of the mushrooms were porcini. I may seek out pork and string beans, or eat a pork fried rice at a Chinese joint tonight for dinner. Some days are just like this, just eating pig all the time, pig flavors, collecting pig grease in a little jar, etc.

#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

#78

Been thinking about feces today. I'll elaborate.

As a kid, I liked the idea of having a dog in the apartment enough to ask for one. None of the attendant realities appealed to me at all, though, and once my parents explained it to me a a couple of different times a couple of different ways, I left off for good. By the time I was six I felt like maybe it would be tolerable if we happened to one day have the kind of life where a dog would be possible, if I wasn't the one who had to be responsible for its feeding, health, safety, and most especially, its poops.

In short, I haven't seen the appeal of owning a companion animal for a long time, and a bedrock for that has always been that I have considered it beneath human dignity to handle the waste product of another animal if that animal is not the covalent in true husbandry, such as would be called manure, or for scientific inquiry. I'm talking about plops and turds, here. Usually left someplace inconvenient.

Other considerations (not exhaustive):

• yeah, you can think of it as symbiosis or coevolution but it can also be easily construed as slavery and I believe there have always been individuals and institutions ready and willing to take it to that level on the real. The carriage driver whipping the overworked nag whose entire lifespan he has stolen and brutalized to death in the street the very hour her overtaxed strength gives out: an important image.
• obviously, researchers maintain perfect dignity as they study animal feces in their noble efforts to increase our understanding of wildlife.
• most creatures bred to live in houses suffer from the same breeds of terrible and unique afflictions we self-domesticators have inflicted on ourselves and each other, such as overbreeding to the tune of gross musculoskeletal disorders, air passages that barely allow the lungs to inflate, etc. Humans selectively breed canines and felines to capitalize on traits that create miserable, stricken lives, and feed them dead food which sickens the animals and dooms them to a further-ravaged, cancer-ridden graveslope. 
• creatures bred and raised more responsibly require vast territories and huge demands on their energy and drive to maintain exemplary health. Such animals are constantly denied this by the majority of modern animal owners, largely because of factors outside their control, which is sad for everyone. People love their frustrated, anxious, and depressed animals, of course, and they love their people, but then, they would, in a codependent relationship; all these afflictions and gains are comorbid and duly portioned. I don't like the thought of playing loving jailer, personally.

Yes, pet ownership is something I had essentially relegated to a privileged fraction of the world's people, all things being equitable and just, but of course that would be a poorer world. To say that it would be more ethical for there to be less life and that most human beings do not deserve the love and companionship of creatures is to me outstandingly cruel. Life lives to beget life, to crowd in on life, to push into the cracks and break open new niches and inscribe new signs and boundaries. Sometimes it's unspeakably ugly to witness. 

Yet life endures incredible privations in the name of love, and rightly so. There is value in acting out of sheer irrationality even if we don't always like paying the price, just as there is value perfect reasoning even if it is not desirable and even harmful to act out its consequences. 

My younger brother irrationally went and got a fucking dog one day even though I told him not to do that five hundred times in a row. Now he lives on a different part of the continent, engaged in peacework. I'm here taking his dog for walks on freezing winter morning. He needs an operation in his leg, someone cut his nuts off when he was little more than a baby, he had PTSD from abuse when he came to live with the family, it took a year to calm  him down, and he's still a neurotic sort. This is an animal with intentionally bred dwarfism. But he's happy a lot. He makes us happy a lot. He's some life in our life. 

Which brings me back to handling another animal's shit, which I realized this morning, I'm finally just totally cool with. Huh, I thought to myself this morning. Once again it is shown, though you would think it would not need be so many times over, that one can  get used to anything. I do not resent picking up this warm turd that the family dog just rhythm-squeezed out its rectum in the slightest. Huh. Huh! Wonders unceasing.

*

Monkeys and apes will shit into their hands to throw it at whatever they're mad at or scared of. People do this too.

*

According to W.C. Fields: "there comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation." Also: "What is a dog, anyway? Merely an antidote for an inferiority complex..."

*

The family dog wished to take a second shit upon his walk this morning, and I lacked a second bag. He almost shat in someone's front yard before I snapped to and unfortunately yanked him from his business. However, it is very very poor form to have that sort of thing go down, so to simply abide was not an option. He tried to stop a couple more times but I hustled him out of the neighborhood we were at and onto a spit of land off the road where he could do his thing and I could quickly hoof back to after I took him home.

Having done that, I returned to the stop and hunted down his leavings. As I picked up the little pile of dogshit, I shuddered, gripped with fresh revulsion. I experienced a fundamental difference in the handling of fresh shit, filled with bacteria and complex living systems, rife with the potential to nourish, to fertilize, to give rise to life anew, and the feeling of this cold lump of matter, rendered biologically inert to human senses. It felt deader by far than a corpse, deader by far than cold raw meat dead for days and sealed in plastic. It was not sterile, not really, I know this in my intellect, but to my body, it epitomized sterility. DNA memories bloomed in my chest about it.

I guess if one were afflicted with coprophagia it would be different.

*

I've had to handle plenty of fecal matter, professionally and personally. It's not easy, at first. Personally, you know, I'm a big brother, I got lots of younger cousins. Sometimes your friends have problems. Sometimes you do. Illness strikes, catastrophe rains down a cruel rain. Your roomate heedlessly destroys their own bowels, but also, never properly cleans up after, leaving you to chip away at a hardened, reeking lacquer underneath layers of fresher spatter should you flag in cleaning up after him, or should you stop doing so in a vain attempt to get him to notice there is a problem. Professionally, well, you end up cleaning some bathrooms, at least in my career path. Sometimes the food you serve them or previous foods or sheer bad luck means they create violent, demonic scenes in these bathrooms. Sometimes drunk people seem to wish to give vent to a form of pre-mimetic creativity with only the material of the body; back to apes. As a person who has often let the lizard brain take over through the fermented passage, I have no room for judgment, but also, as a person who has cleaned up lots after others, I can hold up my head.

See, dignity has nothing to do with excretion, with "waste", which is not. Shit simply is. You gotta clean it up, or it'll cause problems. Simple. Finally I have come to be able to look Dolores Claiborne in the eye. Finally I have ceased to think myself as better or cleaner or any different than shit in my own hand. Nothing is better or worse than shit. Nothing ever could be.

*

When I was a kid, a real little kid, I stepped in massive dog doo in my nice shoes. The shock of reek  that floated up to me as my hard-soled black shoe squished through the center of the turd almost knocked my head off my shoulders; I can smell the damn thing now. I'm getting over it, though. Ha!


--JL

#23

One of the main things in life is to get away from everyone you ever knew and who ever knew you and learn who you are again. The person both behind and beyond the character you have created in order to survive this world. The more complete the vanishing act, the better. God will bring you back to those who in his wisdom, he has linked you. Some you will never see again, and that too is a mathematical and logical consequence of grace. Sad and sweet, like your own tears falling into your mouth can be. Even bitter partings and hardened hearts have their place in the pattern; some wounds must heal in another life, after the sufferer has already transformed, and the song undergoes a translation.

Simple, really, and never less than the very peak of elegance. 

*

Nobility is no more than the relaxed and cheerful acceptance of ever-changing suffering punctuated by death, and the sublime joy of each profound and elongated moment of such radiance.

*

Good to be back to work. It's a deep and satisfying sort of pleasure to hustle hard and break a sweat. I drank a fucking delicious glass of milk today. Drink raw milk from happy cows living on small wild-pasture farms, everyone. That boiled dead shit from the supermarket sucks a soft dick in an alley where the dumpster grease never stops trickling.

Took a short and pleasing walk with my mother and the family dog. I watched small brown poops squeeze out of his pink anus, and thought briefly about the sliding scale and many modifiers of human dignity.


--JL