#340

What an August it has been! So much has happened since last I pounded symbols into these pixels. Indeed, initially, I typed out three weeks, reflecting that it feels more like four. In fact, no! It has been only sixteen days, evidence that not all of life is lived in the same chronometrical rhythm. Veritable cascades of impressions, changes, and conversations, further remarkable in that I have, despite being on vacation, largely hewed to a simple routine, stable despite multitudinous modifiers and prevailing conditions.

Some examples? Why not!

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August is fourteen days old today, which is a great and very old-school unit of time which makes it for me to measure some things by--a fortnight. In the fort of these nights and days of a two-week period, which is, besides a very sensible span by many utilitarian measures, a comfortable unit of memory to me--the glowing coal of the most recent discrete chunk of time, past, but not yet the past, speaking loosely and subjectively. Anyhow I've taken a dozen round-trips on my bicycle in that time, during which the air quality has been mercifully almost always good. 

Some have been absolutely incredible rides. The worst was merely great. Stuff has happened to me like yesterday a young buck burst out of the scrub not ten meters from me diagonally in full career off the left side of the street, bolted across it, and made as if to zag in my direction; in my zeal to get a good look at the buck in movement I forgot all caution and actually sped up. The buck zagged away, across the path, and into the woods on the right. An air show is in the area and yesterday, too, many strange planes were flying around making some truly remarkable noises, which I factor as a catalyst to the weird but exhilarating deer behavior I personally experienced. Apparently one of the planes crashed later in the day. Bunch of 'em still flying around.

Other things I have seen include many people going about their day in many different modes of being; riding bikes also, puttering about their yards, driving their cars, walking along, being with animals, doing chores or paid work or nothing at all; sometimes, doing bizarre shit, as is normal and expected. For example, one man was shirtless on his porch, delivering a kind of monotone, medium-volume rant which seemed to me the indication of a banked but potentially explosive rage. This interpretation may have colored the impression I received of his holding a large revolver loosely in his right hand. I was never closer than about seven meters and moving along at a good clip I saw no reason to slack on, so my perceptions are by no means certain. Saw a man wandering up and down the strip separating a thoroughfare from a long drive that runs parallel screaming on his cell phone to someody about everything he could see happening interspersed with the outline of a vast conspiracy arrayed against him. He was doing the same from within a car that sat there abandoned ever since that day--perhaps ten days ago--till at least three days ago. 

Many amazing birds--goldfinch pairs, mourning doves, hawks and eagles, turkey vultures, woodpeckers, bluejays, crows, grackles, sparrows, starlings. Some of the flights and activities I have caught glimpses of has been very satisfying indeed--painterly, jewel-bright, elements of a ride which elevate its nature. To ride at the same speed of a low-flying bird not two armslengths away is such a snapshot of motion in space, such a spontaneous unification with the great dance of those who ride the wind with just their bodies, who in that moment seem to be saying, in the language of movement, "hey, you almost could be flying." The memories are all very dear to me, incandescent with that feeling of being close to flight, which is the best part about riding a bicycle.

Could go on and on, but there's other kinds of stuff to it all, which I want to be sure and try and cover. Onwards!

*

Read the incredible History, Big History, & Metahistory, ed. David C. Krakauer, John Lewis Gaddis, & Kenneth Pomeranz, from the Santa Fe Institute Press. It really was fucking phenomenal. Pursuing the Giordano Bruno thread with a certain avidity, I am rereading Lucretius' On The Nature of Things, which is cool but I think I would like to try a different translation. Pursuing concepts from the first book mentioned, also reading the other SFI Press book I have, Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019, ed. David C. Krakauer. Also Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks. If I get through those before my vacation is up, I should like to read a small book I have about Logic, or perhaps a book about Math.  

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The Pontiac Vibe I drive finally shit the bed, so I've been driving Ezra to his job at summer camp in the van, which has been nice time together for us, and this amount of driving has resulted in listening to a lot of different music, following several programs of interest. Those pope teleplays were basically made by the music they wove into their picture, and consequently I have explored their soundtracks and gained an interest in recent electropop. Also this metal band Cattle Decapitation. Other recent trends inclue reacquainting myself with my CD collection and some of the stuff you can't really stream, like Cutting Room Floor's first album and its nested solo projects. Also a live Bob Marley & The Wailers show, Babylon by Bus, which presented its most enjoyable-ever listen--it had been a very long time, and I experienced many aspects and consequences of my maturation very positively through the sounds and ideas on this record. Beautiful. Plus I had never fully realized how amazing the guitar playing is.

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On the gaming front, I concluded the storyline of Tears of the Kingdom. Absolutely phenomenal. There's a good thirty-five percent of the game still before what one might term true completion, and I have continued with some relish. The end of the story was one of the most gorgeous things that has ever happened to me. From the descent, which I performed from the highest reachable sky island, to the dazzling conclusion, it was perhaps the best ending to any Zelda game ever. Some finales have presented more of a challenge, some were mechanically denser, and the aesthetics of each places it firmly in a Golden Palace type situation, but for me, right now, this one leads the pack. Nintendo saw fit to release some Pokémon games on its official subscription ROM bank, and for some reason the Game Boy Color game featuring the Pokémon TCG really hooked me in. I've reached the Elite Four equivalent of that game.

*

On the social front, a friend I met during winter semester in class is staying with us while she figures out a housing situation. Been nice having a guest, some fun stuff. We saw Oppenheimer with her and her girlfriend, have shared many enlivening conversations, etc. That movie was super good, by the way. She even helped me move my dear friend Persephone's stuff from a storage unit to her new apartment, which was a nice fun time. 

Due to scholarly and transportation-rooted consideration, I've terminated my employment as a school bus driver on excellent terms, deciding that returning after vacation would finally present more logistical problems than it was worth. I'll get a more humble and less demanding position somehwere I can walk or bike to, just as I can walk or bike or bus to school. This is brought up by way of saying that this is why I could apparently so cold-bloodedly partake of ganja and trip on shrooms while in my position; I was fairly certain at the outset it would come to this. 

All that and I should make time for a few other friends, and perhaps my old friend Len, he with whom I am freshly shroom-communed should be playing and recording more soundscapes--one of the things we did on our trip--and perhaps even playing a show. We shall see! I know from wearying experience that one should never speak too confidently of such things are reality before their time, indeed, even up to mounting the stage at showtime. Strange to even entertain the idea of playing onstage again, but with Len, I think the thing may just be plausible. 

*

My spiritual condition has been boosted tremendously by this break, and by reuniting with the bicycle as near-daily practice. Every day a great joy is sustained within me; passes through me and moves around me. My heart is moved towards compassion towards each of the people that I see, however fleetingly. Love my husband and my cats, my digs and my tempos. I feel as though I am at the leading crest of a great vibration, a wave of energy that is clean and refreshing and tuneful. Listening to God's mighty silence I hear the universe, its great rushing whisper. It is infinite, as are we all, though this journey is brief, as all that exists in the universe is brief in the reckoning of infinite time.  

Our lives are an immutable part of an allness. No element of or perspective in the infinite narrative is unnecessary. Thus, all that exists, exists in a perfect balanace of equal meaning with everything else, from the infinitesimal to the cosmic, from the first to the last and in infinite recurrence. 

That's just some of the thinking I've been entertaining, along with its further implications. Possibly I am entirely off-base. 

*

Alright, fuckers! Signing off. Pray for this odd sinner.

--JL

#304

We're going to blame the seeking of neurochemical stability and balance on the lack of posts and creative output in general. Guess also I should admit to myself that my office is not a super great place to write in yet, but making it better seems like too much hard work at a time when there's lots of other hard and necessary work to choose from and also I just want to chill a bit.

Back to to the brain chemistry: it's not strange being off everything, which is the strange part. I mean, because I'm the type of person who invests a lot of energy into the types and forms of bodily, psychic, and spiritual consumption they're undertaking in particular, I am concentrating on vitamin intake, nutritional supplements, and the timing of hydration and exercise with more zeal then when I smoked and drank--weed, tobacco; caffeine, alcohol. Once was a time I would eat a big spoonful of wheat germ for breakfast, have a small lunch at the Chinese place I worked at, and take the rest of my calories as brown liquor and foamy beers, smoking all the day and night. Occasionally, eggs, or a peanut butter sandwich. Didn't drink coffee back then. Started with the coffee in earnest when I quit drinking the first time. I would also drink cans of flavored sparkling water by the case, and smoke my cigs, though I'd left weed at that point as well. Even at points when I'd quit the rest, I'd stick with one; caffeine and nothing else at one point, weed and nothing else at another. But I haven't used nothing, nothing at all on the daily, since schoolboy days, basically.

Feeling fine, but at the same time, there are things I have to figure out how to do and carve the space for again. Writing is the main thing. A better chair, a lower desk, time, better organizing the writing space. In truth, I've done a great bulk of my writing recumbent, which is part of why my laptops tend to fall apart, but that's my most habitual zone. The most important ingredient will be time.

Truly, I am exhausted from merely this small effort. But I will nail myself to the duty of getting another one out tomorrow, The discipline must begin again. 

--JL

#113

One time this buddy of mine told me that he was trying to get the location of a mutual friend's wildcrafted marijuana, somewhere in one of the many local woods. He would spring the question at him at odd times, right after smoking, in the middle of a critical gaming moment, setting up long, meandering conversations around the subject in hopes of gleaning some form of data which might lead him to the motherlode.

Don't want to give you the wrong impression, though. I am not describing a scoundrel, by any means. Like basically every dude, there are merely certain aspects and areas of existence around which very few scruples come into play for him.

Second dude never did crack, was the point, but in a very relaxed way. Never told the guy to cut the shit, never lost his composure, always slowly and smilingly revealed nothing. The way the first dude boiled it down was this characteristic exchange:

"So where's that dro patch at, bro?"
"Where the dro patch grows, man."

Deliciously tautological, no? Better for the fact that "dro" is hydroponically grown in particular equipment and almost always indoors, electricity being a relevant, even crucial factor.

The dro patch; only ever a figment, a koan about nothing.


--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.