#228

Sure is plenty to be anxious and afraid about these days. I mean, there's no real need to be. But the salesmanship of it all! There is so much to gain by being as afraid as we can possibly be made to be, and it is has been made so easy. Fear is virtue and commodity, mass-produced, sold, and used to sell. Fear-based economies, fear-based social lives, fear-based sociopolitical discourse, fear-charged atmosphere and a 24/7 terror propaganda machine to keep us up-to-the-minute on the whole fuckin dirge. Lord, and how we pay handsomely for the privilege of helping them spread their charlatanery for free! Sheep can only make their own noise, but parrots can meme whatever memes their masters care to shove into their heads.

Things are bad, and a huge part of how bad things are is the histrionic flagellation about how bad things are constantly on every level of the broadcast. I picture a fox in a trap, who, rather than gnawing off the trapped limb, elects to beat its own brains out against a stone.

*

Nothing ever changes the existential position. Everyone could die of some crazy shit at any second of every day of their lives, and eventually something gets 'em. That's just the game. All you can do is roll with the circumstances and watch your step. You don't have to let fear write the rules or own the whole situation. Own your own situation. Have some dignity.

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This really great cartoon called The Fungies came out and I watched the first season and it was radical. Loved every minute. Recently watched Adventure Time in one shot for the first time, plus the new specials that have been released so far. What can be said? Completely fucking gay for Adventure Time. Don't even listen to me about it. Also finally watched all of Steven Universe. Similar feelings.

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Watch as many cartoons as possible. It's the right thing to do, perhaps the last ethical thing in this lost and benighted world of ours.

ok peace

--JL

#222

Yes! The two hundred and twenty-second post! I fucking love numbers like this. 

Looked at my twitter today, really dove in. Even tweeted.

Man, what the fuck is up with twitter. What the fuck is up with people when they tweet. That website has screwed us over a fucking barrel, and I don't give a shit anymore. Twitter proves that we deserve the worst apocalypse we can imagine for ourselves.

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Related: I have instagram now. I put selfies on it and everything. 

Unrelated, mostly: maybe I'll start a crappy punk band. As I say, I gave up giving a shit. Maybe being in a band will be fun again if it's just absolutely no work for me at all.

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Never really taken lots of selfies before. Feels like unclenching my asshole, the asshole of my self-conception. Kinda cool. I've begun to feel that the aloofness (based in fear rather than arrogance, usually) that has kept me separate from the essence of my own life and the lives of people around me is something to overcome.

Terrifying notion. Gotta face it, though.

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Why we should be afraid to be who we are is a profound mystery. The terror is real, however, and insidiously stealthy.

Ok, also, people might kill you, depending on what you let on about yourself. That's just the world we live in. Certain camouflage must be adopted. Certain patterns and compromises are unavoidable. Even still. To be as much yourself as possible and harmonize with the world as much as possible--that seems like a dope riddle to try and solve. 

Or just be a clenched asshole.

Bigger and bigger mysteries, all the way up, all the way down!

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Signed a lease on an apartment today. It is the upper floor of a small house, a space in which I will live alone. I am very excited to finally live alone; I have lived with twenty different people over the course of my twenties and have fucking earned this. Loved most of those people, but cohabitation breeds unique and venomous hatreds, too.  

Roommates and housemates can be good people and those good people can behave in ways that make you want to gleefully murder them, butcher them, and cook them in the kitchen, whistling the whole time. Instead you make nice and try to be the bigger person. And they are tolerating your bullshit right back. Results vary wildly.

That was fun and all, but it's time to move into a stage in life where someone else's shit isn't strewn all over the fucking place and you can get into the goddamn bathroom. 

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2 2 2 

two hundred and twenty-two posts, motherfuckers

sit on a dildo and scissorkick your way to heaven


--JL

#36

Generally, people have a paleolithic conception of strength; at best, a child's naive projection of parts of strength. The throwbacks to a time of rocks and bones and shitting at the base of a tree think of brawny men lifting heavy logs vertically, or machine-guns, or the unyielding tendencies of the ocean, or hatred. The more sophisticated might mention things like patience, integrity, self-sacrifice, or restraint. Athletes and other bloody-minded folk might mention the seven attributes of strength, or the difference between agile strength and explosive strength, though of course, we had as well simply measure maximum strength. Clever people might speak of the differences between tensile strength and yield strength, hardness, attribute and characteristic cross-assessments, whatever. Egghead shit, the stuff that gets boffins all in a lather, and dorks in a palaver.

Anyway, strength isn't any of that. Like everything else that is actually real, and possible to talk about in a human way, strength is spiritual, also an ur- symbol or hypersigil, just like fecundity, fear, courage, sterility, light, love, power, and some others. Strength contains, compasses, and transcends everything I talked about in the preceding paragraph, and then some. It, and the rest of these concepts, are interwoven into the warp and weft of the whole field and pattern of the physical universe.

When we talk about such things, we necessarily bind them, ensnare them, cut them down to size, reduce them, boiling away much that is unsayable and necessary, intrinsic, in order to give it communicability, and in order to make them into our tools, in order to mine from them some form of utility, and of course, some forms of power.

For all we make it complicated and perverse, though, there is a saving grace: we know it when we see it. All these things are very simple, in the end. All you have to do is pay attention.

Making yourself stronger is learning to be able to see your own weaknesses. Learning how to address these weaknesses in a way that suits your needs, abilities, and aims. Enduring pain, frustration, resistance, and handicaps. Seeking your limits, and forcing yourself past them. Admitting every slip and failure, reckoning with every shortcoming, coming to grips with the inevitable dead ends.

To be stronger is to live and breathe looking your weaknesses in the eye, as being more courageous is to live and breathe staring down your fear. Fear never fucking dies. Weakness will eventually overtake you, or death will take you and never mind if you are in your prime and joy or fallen to malingering in squalor. Nevertheless, you must always gather what strength you have, always summon what courage you possess, and be as strong and as brave as mind and spirit and body can stand, never giving yourself quarter, never surrendering.

Everything goes towards everything else, in life. Our deeds, our words, the deeds and words of the people around us, all currents and eddies in the water of a river running through the heart of our existence. The stuff we do to prove to others who we are, the stuff we do when no one is looking just to prove a little something to ourselves, any little something that we choose to do or not to do--all the little ways we attempt to prove that we are real, to taste something in life that makes us feel in that moment that our lives are truly real and rich and that they have a true and lasting, even eternal significance--all of that adds up into a story, and our stories are who we are. Every little step you take makes a difference in your story. How you walk around, and the reasons why, make you who you are.

I want to feel the earth with the soles of my feet as I walk up a mountain. I want to grip the rock with my toes as golden eagles wheel and plummet beneath me, stronger than I was--weak creature that I am--braver than I was--coward that I have been--with a world's worth of painful steps behind me, each step a difficult lesson and a bitter memory and each step a clarification and a gift and a cast-off burden.

Every step I take in this body is a step on the path to myself, to God, to being taken up into the universe. Each one ought to count, to bear a momentous weight. It is a matter of  perfect discipline, which I suspect is the only way to be free.

*

Well, that's that! Okay, this time I really won't write about walking for a while. I sure do love to walk though. However, I can see it is time to employ some gentlemanly restraint.

Perhaps tomorrow I will write about pirates, or perhaps I will decide to generate bizarre erotica. I have worked hard to become a versatile writer; I hope that one shall never know with total certainty what this blog may have in store.

Read my books lately? Or ever? They are quite reasonably priced. I think some sort of membership means you may already possess the right to read them. I don't know quite how it all works, but the books are real and eminently readable, an excellent value for money. Currently only digital, soon to be in paperback form! I tried to make them fun to read, but profitable for the mind.

Have fun being you today! You're the only one that gets to.


--JL