#514

Man, probably I have written everything I know into this blog twice, but I could do it for the rest of my life and not run out of different ways to say it, plus there is the living process of gaining and losing and regaining knowledge/enlightenment only to lose it again ad nauseum, plus there are functionally infinite ideas, events, and cultural artifacts to discuss, accompanied by true life stories I could tell every single day and never catch up to myself before I had to punch my ticket. I can think of about ten stories I could bang out about me real quick. This is not to brag--how will I ever stop?

Maybe I don't stop. Maybe this is the self-imposed metier for the rest of my span. I mean, I guess that's what being a writer is. 

Maybe I'll just do one immediately because my fingers are itching. GO!

*

Me and the boys were out doing parkour downtown. Hell yeah. Fourteen years old, four motherfuckers with nothing to prove except we don't give a fuck and we're not scared to prove it. Qualifiers abound--but not where we would admit them even to ourselves. That is what makes teenagers dangerous like a pack of coyotes but brittle like burnt sugar. We leaped and vaulted, tucked and rolled, climbed shit we absolutely were not supposed to and took a specific flavor of ownership over everything we gazed upon.

Indeed, activities like this are not frowned upon because they are dangerous--except by moms. The Man doesn't give a fuck if you die, though of course he prefers to turn a tidy profit from the affair, e.g., it is a noble thing for a soldier to rape and kill for massive profits (not theirs; The Man's, just to be clear) until they would be so good as to die, that is what The Man likes best. A soldier is a good example because the worst thing a soldier can do, in the mind of The Man, is not die.

He gives a fuck about three things: having power and making sure people who don't act like they understand it and accept it; the ideal situation is for them to love it, love him for having it and for using it how he pleases: thus is he motivated to loosen his fist and let flow a dribble of honey to the favored. The third thing is to feel, even fleetingly, even the suggestion, that his power is false and all it takes to break it is to simply laugh and ignore him, to act as though he does not exist, and this is sensible: The Man is contingent on belief in him, and his power and his money are a lie our ancestors trapped us in by believing in him and feeding him and letting him live in our homes and our minds. 

Certain Men in public life would probably fucking straight-up stroke out and die if someone were to ignore them just right.

So it was only to add savor to our feelings of sheer selfhood and bounteous, free-breathing free-ass freedom when some apoplectic motherfucker in a shirt with cuffs and a collar tucked into beige pants came out of an air-conditioned building where he wears a figurative diaper all day to scream that we weren't allowed and he was gonna call the cops. We laughed and ran away in such a fashion that neither he nor many cops could match--our bodies processed our oxygen intake far more efficiently than theirs, even if they ran every day, we were effortlesstly flexible, and our athleticism was under the command of sharp, undulled senses and greasy-quick stimulus reflex in a way that even as I type this, basically can't remember. Have stayed fit and gotten lot stronger, but I could never in ten thousand years try to catch my fourteen-year old self doing parkour. Would be absolutely concussed to try. Anyway the screamer was a horizontal creature and we fled in three dimensions, but indeed, only to prove to him real quick that he could not catch us if he tried.

Shortly after this incident we were running by a hedge that ran in a square around a grassy gap. The hedge was trimmed above my hip level and was about three feet wide. Figured I could do it and rode the impulse, looked before I leaped, cleared the hedge no touch forward flip and did a forward roll onto the grassy enclosure. The boys hooted appreciatively without pausing their stride, but I had seen something out of the corner of my eye during my roll that gave me hard pause. As I bound to my feet, I took in fully the half-meter vertical closed iron waterpipe pipe sticking up, which I had rolled right next to, having missed it completely in my assessment glance. 

Well, it was a glance, you see.

Spent about another forty seconds studying its placement relative to my action and satisfied myself that if I had taken another pace or two before jumping, that pipe had a real decent chance of hurting me very badly; I would even confidently say that I would have brought the entire weight of my body headfirst straight onto it and been hashing out the reality of my "free-ass freedom" and its various implications with St. Peter.

As I caught up with my friends I studied my body's reaction to having come so close to death just having some fun, and chalked it up as a natural wink from the yawning vastness of the nonbeing that birthed me and to which I shall return one fine day. Which is to say that like a good monkey I laughed it off and kept playing in the sun.

But like a cold tooth lodged somehwere in the brain, that moment and that knowledge have been a part of everything ever since; a dense lozenge of slow-release maturation that even now glints at me from the depths.

*

Factually Pointless may suffer an interruption of service, but I don't know when or if, really. All I know is that this man right here needs a new computer.

So anyway Peace! Love! Peace and Love on this Planet Earth! Other planets too! Any and all of them, really! I am the laughing monkey, and I turn away and leap into the sunshine! We are all going to die, some sooner, some later! ULTREIA, HOSSANA, PAX DEI, TERRA ET CAELUM

--JL

#430

Forgot one of my main points yesterday, and thought to edit the post, but forgot that too. Will I remember this point before I mark the end of today's post? We shall see. It's hovering there, just out of reach--I remember the location and prevailing conditions of having the thought, and its content is tantalizingly near.

Maybe gone forever! Doesn't matter. It was a thought, and it was good. Take my word for it. You know how you have some thoughts and it's kind of like they're pitching the yaw of your brain? Like your mind is roating, revealing more of itself to the perceiver and extendng its own field of perception in one.

Our minds and bodies and spirits are ships in an endless space. Sensing phenomena, chaging direction and speed, reacting to stimuli and investigating events according to their purposes, timing, and placement in the universe. 

TAKE ME TO HYPERSPACE, GOD! TO THE BEYOND!!! far, far away, praise be

*

Hm. Yes.

What did I even write about yesterday? The scurrying of the human organism? Pathetic! Who cares. Geology is more important than that stupid chattering nonsense. 

Rocks, brethren! The rocks and stones, the mountains and gorges and continental shelves are the true protagonists. Through that lens, nothing else matters one fuck. And the story is pure, crystalline; dramatic and comedic in the highest. What could be funnier and more terrible than the collapse of a seamont that has weathered the storms of seven hundred throusand years, its supports at long last bowing to the motion of water and its pinnacles to the unchanging word of gravity? All that time standing, then a few seconds of absolute, hysterical madness, then it's over. Over almost as it began. Over in a laughably short amount of time even if it had been built in a day and stood for second day, but after seven hundred thousand years? Totally and completely hilarious. What timing! What slapstick! A new stillness reigns, a new horizon exists, another vast span of incremental change and general stability before the next punchline hits home. 

That's just a little taste, and a lot more fucking poetry than a dude spitting bullets into a crowd of innocent strangers because all governments everywhere have ruined the world and the ideas that his masters implanted within him to control his thoughts and behaviors have curdled and gone septic, at war with reality.

Well, I know which one our lords and masters want us to pay more attention to. On their terms, not mine, though. They just want to shake their heads at the unaccountable madness of this world--who could explain such a tragedy?--do some thinking and praying, and get on with maintaining the situation that created the tragedy in the first place. And they want you to want them to, which is one of their best and oldest tricks. 

We all want our fathers to do something about it when something scares or confuses us. It is his mechanism that the onanist devils who live to fuck us up keep their one hand free always in order to manipulate.

And manipulate they do.

*

It irks me more than it should, perhaps, this long line of assholes shitting on the rest of us. It irks me because I am the type to answer questions and solve problems, and the problems they have caused, the warrens they have built for themselves, the deceptions they employ tactically, their bitter, selfish chess--all of it is hard to do combat with and maintain your sense of self. Maintain, as I always come back around to, your virtue.

One cannot, must not, employ the weapons and strategies of their opponents against them in order to "do good". You just can't. Gandalf won't take the Ring. You can't either. It's very simple, but I have elaborated before and can--will--elaborate again. Strap in.

If by sheer force of personality and will, strength of character, and unimpeachability of virtue I could bring evil to halt and grind its wicked machinery to dust beneath my righteous heel, I would. And if it worked that way, I could, but it doesn't work that way, and I am not simply the best of myself, but my complete self; riddled with venalities and as corruptible and prone to losing my way as the next tiny speck of regular human being. 

To accrue enough capital to clash capital on capital is sin and folly. To play that game is to endlessly sharpen the teeth of your oppenent in the direction they want them sharpened, and you will have grown your own set of teeth, whose purpose, no matter what your intent, is to bite and masticate.

To add prestige to your voice and clash a different capital on a different capital amounts to the same. However you accrue this prestige, you have entered into a market, and the market besmirches the temple. It just does.

We let the opponent choose the time and place as well as define the terms of engagement, which they will break however they please in order to ensure victory. That is the position we have been in for all of recorded history. To be perfectly clear, the opponent--at least, my opponent is always the same twofold pair: the conqueror/master, and the parasite/hustler. These archetypes and their manifold derivations are the forces I set myself in opposition to in this world.

So. Art of War this mess. We must choose our own ground, our own timing, and define our own terms of engagement--terms which must be incomprehensible to our enemy. This may be incomprehensible to you, as well, but I'll stand by it.

Maybe it sounds trite to many ears, but I feel like it is clear and still vital: violence cannot be the answer. That is not the type of combat I am talking about. It will always breed more violence. It is a tool of the conqueror and cannot be used in defense. If physical confrontation is inevitable, is virtually impossible to avoid, then only nonlethal methods may be applied in defense and protection. 

We must never set out to kill. Never. 

The best way to engage in this conflict is to embark on a program of targeted and intelligent disenagagement. Of divestment. Of reclamation.

We quit our jobs and do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. We destroy all these clocks that press into our flesh and start time again. We stop buying so much shit from so many companies all falling over themselves to prove to you that you always need more shit and start remembering how to provide the things we legitimately need for ourselves. We raise that knowledge and spread it around as much as we can, for free. We unchain the signal. We stop suckling on the power they provide and generate our own. We cease and refuse enabling war and poverty through participation in economic systems that drive inequity and concentrates wealth and resources. We stop paying attention to their programming. We stop engaging with their websites and build our own. What the fuck is a news cycle? We don't need that shit. We stop allowing others to tell us what plants to plant, what foods to buy, what time to wake up and how much of it to give to someone who'll spend it and never even look at you on their way to their own dreams. We stop allowing them to destroy the planet in the name of our comfort and our ease by working hard enough to save it that they can't make a profit off of fucking it up anymore. We defund prisons and militaries and mechanisms of surveillance and we tear down monuments and documents that proclaim that we should fear and hate one aother for reasons of state. 

We open our hands and we let go.

We divest. We lose our money and redefine our values and our wealth and what it means to be responisble to one another and the world. We try to remember how to live as people, rather than subjects. There are billions and billions of us who would be peaceful and happy, and we burn in the fires set by the few millions who know not what they do. Needlessly. We can stop it. 

They have the momentum. But if we choose, we can create an irresistible inertia. One born not of leaders and movements but by people waking up and realizing they can be free. Freer every day. In simple, easy ways that have everything to do with doing less, fearing less, engaging less with less toxicity and drudgery. I mean why should we? So some guy can have a golden toilet? Please.

By letting go, we can walk the path of the open hand. We can remember, and therefore invent, the Way.

Final note: this is not to rail against progress. This is to jettison the misconceptions that the appeasement and deceit offered by our opponents in any way represent progress. They seek a form of suicide which they have agreed to call progress because it is useful to them. We must stop that momentum, as I said, and that will be progress enough till the time comes to direct our energies into the dream of true civilization.

*

I could elaborate even more! And I will. But not here, not today. Other tasks call.

--JL

#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

#420

Hoho! Wow! Post four hundred and twenty! Get the fuck out, that's so fuckin stupid.

Weed! It's what's for breakfast! It's what's for before breakfast.

*

Gah, how this world spins! And it keeps on spinnin'. Not to mention the movement itself--so fast! So fuckin' fast! 

You've never known what it is to be travelling thirty kilometers a fuckin second. Except you always are.

*

I'd like to find a card table today. If I could find two, that would be a dream come true. The third part of this dream is that both tables cost no money. Can you simply imagine? How about this: if I go out today and find what I'm looking for, the reader must reconsider their position of the existence of the unseen (faeries, yokai, etc.) if that position has not been reconsidered in some time. I expect research and open-minded meditation.

Of course I will too! I'm doing it right now. I take an open mind fuckin serious. 

That usually means I've got like twenty paradoxes shoved up my ass, rendering me immobile. But it's better than being too damn sure of myself, amirite boys? I know that much.

*

So what? What about it? 

All anyone can do is take in the data available to our singular perspectives and build our individual worlds with it. The world we build is related to the world as it is, but it is not that world. No one holds that world in their mind. They can't. It isn't like that. No one can understand the world, let alone the universe. No matter what we discover about it, how much of it we reveal and represent and are, we cannot understand even our own neighborhoods completely. We do not even know our friends, our families, or ourselves.

We are worlds too complex, vast, and unmappable for that. Plus, it is infinite, all the way out and all the way in, all the way up and all the way down, all the way around in every way that can be found. Infinite you, infinite me, infinite infinities embedded in infinity.

Hey, man. All we can do is the best with what we got. Can't blame anyone. That's what it means to be equally guilty before one another and before all that is, and that is the key to the letting go: to freedom. 

*

PEACE

--JL

#417

A furtive guilt nags at me when I consider how much I enjoy extremely hot weather. It leaps to the fore when I read about how drought is driving millions and millions of people into food-insecure and unsafe conditions. How much food got thrown in the fucking garbage last year? 

As a matter of fact, it gives me decent guilt just to be typing when I know there are people running from gangs and cartels and inexorably advancing armies, that they don't get to keep their houses, that they don't have money for shit and nowhere to buy it, and here I stand. Even if I only have five dollars in my wallet and debt and whatever the fuck else, it's not fair. It's not fair that I should look upon a peaceful, well-feed street of housed and clothed people, because it is literally at the expense of others. It is built upon their backs. It is provided by a system that relies on creating and sustaining conditions of inequality. 

Do I sould like a child when I say that it's not fair?

Good.

My instinct has always been this, and never deviated: none of us should sit easy while there exist those with less than us. I was born on a capital city located just barely north of the Equator--the global south, what was once known as the third world. A democracy, but an unstable one after a string of dictators. There, I lived way up in a tall building while hundreds of thousands of children not ten miles away lived in a carpet of hovels; slums like nothing that exists north of the Rio Grande. Now it's dictators again. I live up here in the U.S., now, first world par excellence, first world with a raging erection and a finger in every pie on the planet--and we might have ourselves a dictator soon. 

Life, huh! It is nothing but a fucking joke.

Anyway.

When something is not fair, we can't just shrug. I knew it was simply not fair, simply inexcusable, that I lived in a building while other kids had to live in slums. I was not wrong. I still feel that way. Children are correct. Things being fair and equitable--it's not some childish thing, some unrealistic pipe dream. That they are not, after all this having of civilization, all these vast piles of wealth circulating the planet and accumulating in vaults, always more, ever growing, and poverty only ever grows with it?

It is not fair.

*

We act like bad things happening far away are only happening because the people there deserve it for not making economies and governments as strong as ours. But we had fuck-all to do with how strong our government and economy is. Getting born in some shithole--as we like to say--instead of America is your own damn fault, we think, because we ourselves did nothing to deserve getting born here. And so we protect ourselves with "well, what do you want me to do about it?" Because after all, we may be lucky, but we're not in charge, and we didn't make the world, and it's all very complicated anyway, and you're bothering me and you should fuck off because I don't like thinking about it actually.

Honestly, I just need you to not be cool with it. That's enough for me. Because making up justifications and deluding yourself on purpose about the actual costs of your lifestyle and the actual ramifications of what your government does with or without your consent is the path not only to this sated, distracted, rationalizing life of self-compromise and consumption and complicity, but to actual secret police shit, actual gulag and torture shit, actual sitting in an office signing documents that authorize things like Final Solutions. I am saying that there comes a point where you're not just a citizen anymore, because you don't live in a state anymore. Something else is happening, and you didn't want to notice, and a very important choice was made for you when you weren't paying attention. 

When you go from a republic to a dictatorship, there are those whose positions do not change that much. It is a condition of class, but also a condition of attitude. It is a condition of the required complicity for a transfer of power that is legitimate not in fact but after the fact. All you have to do to put your seal of approval on it is to keep going to work, keep going for opportunities whose cost is not discussed up front, keep acting like what you do is justifiable because you deserve to have what you have.

But it isn't. And I'm telling you now it is because it is a sin to have while others want. And it is that sin that has driven climate change and fascism and the attitude that industry justifies anything in the name of industry, that profit is the sacrament which washes us clean, and the comforts of our earthly rewards are proof of our righteousness.

But they aren't. 

And frankly, blessedly, it is factual that all you have to do is not be cool with it. Because if you're not cool with it, you have a chance to at least stay awake and keep your eye out. And when the opportunity comes to make a difference, the difference you are suited to make, you'll see the opening. You'll know.

*

Anyway, it was too cold to ride my bike yesterday. I need it to be hotter. That's why I was guilty.

Easy enough for me to go all the way with guilt that I do it most days. Today, I brought you along for the ride.  

What can be done? What is that difference that we should seek to make, and how to make it, and how to know the moment, the opening, the chance?

Well, I've been thinking about it for a long time. Hopefully I've made progress. You'll be the first to know if I figure anything out.

All I know for sure is that hope is what is needed above all. Keep your hopes alive, burning bright, daring, free.

--JL

#383

Fucking crazy. These American fascists are seriously down to Weimarize us and clean house. I can't believe the current administration didn't send word down to quietly dispose of a dude like Stephen Miller in the dead of night about early spring 2022. I mean, given the shit he did and said before he was in the White House the first time, the shit he did once he was there, the fresh shit he has now come out and said, the plans he has laid out, all the shit that's happening with the shit falling out of these motherfucker's mouths--doesn't it seem like justifiable use of deadly force in the name of national security? I can't believe these fuckers killed MLK and Malcolm X but Stephen Miller draws breath and says federalize select National Guard troops to deport whoever the president says, wherever they are. Pray tell--aside from all of the massive civil violence such a move would portend--where will you put these people, on their way out, since presumably you'll de driving millions of people like cattle and like cattle you'll have to process them somewhere, I dunno, some sort of camp maybe, where they might end up for longer than predicted, where a lot of bad stuff can unaccountably happen and we don't know just how bad till later.

How many dudes just went out and signed up for their National Guard units just on account of he said that? Somebody checking that data would maybe note little spikes in certain states and areas. Just hinting. Coyly, even though the game is getting pretty fucking easy to call at this point. 

If I had the native sense God gave a goose I'd leave the country right about now. But I lack even that, because I am a man. Still, maybe today is a good day to think new thoughts, thoughts that could maybe carry me far, far away from this place and these wretched dangerous fools. Oh shit! Wait! I got new windows coming.

Guess I have to die in this house. More specifically, in my front yard or atop my roof, protecting my windows and everything behind them best I can. 

Factually Masculine 2024! Bereft of good or common sense!

*

In the western canon, we have a personality test from back in Hellenistic times: are you a Stoic, an Epicurean, or a Cynic? These days: false, brittle, plastic, blank-eyed stoics can be found in significant numbers, blackpillers fail to pull off the point of Cynicism, and you have to have partcipated or accepted the secondary benefits of incredible injustice and human suffering on a massive scale to be able to successfully pull off something resembling epicurean lifestyle, since the values now necessarily entail a level of asceticism  beyond reasonable thresholds. All this is to say that a peaceful life is a privilege and by no means a cheap one, whose price is basically that no matter what you pretend to yourself you are, no matter how you enjoy your pleasures and the sense of righteousness that comes in "earning" and managing those pleasures, you are a tool, and a wicked one, wielded by--you guessed it--liars and thieves, the very liars and thieves I have harped on all along here.

I'm something of a Skeptic, myself, but everything in life is plotted on a spectrum, as Aristotle wisely taught. 

You can take this test with all kinds of three-dude, three-school combinations in order to define yourself and bare yourself thereby to the interpretations of others based on their interpretations of dudes or text or loosely-defined imprimatur. Western canon, Eastern canon, or tradition or whatever we choose to call a textual continuum/semiotic landscape/etc., doesn't matter. Mix 'n match. 

Do as you please. Read what you can get your hands on. Think whatever you want about it. Cinema works this way too. Interactive entertainment, like video games. Looking around at the buildings motherfuckers built where you live. What were they trying to accomplish with these buildings, these cars, these sculptures, these industries? What were they trying to say? Your guess is as good as anyone's, and you can even improve it. 

Anything that is culture is yours, if you go and get it. The more you do that, the less you can be told by some other motherfucker what the world really is and who you really are. You'll start to see for yourself. 

*

Dudes who see for themselves are worth approximately fifty million shitheads that take a liar's word for it. Hopefully the ratio of dudes to shitheads is more favorable than that, but this seems doubtful, even naive.

--JL

#355

"Now listen/look here you son of a bitch/BITCH--"

That's always the sign that a threshold crossed, here in America. A trespass flagged. In response, we go straight for the mother/bloodline/patriarchal brainwashing, but first, we draw the attention of the trespasser and we choose a hook sense--a little modifier that can mean a lot about the situation and the speaker. Our local preoccupation with the word "bitch", a love affair that stretches back several decades and doesn't look to be losing any heat, is a whole other can of bitches.

Jokes aside, patriarchal brainwashing can parenthetize the whole preceding, it seems to me.

Cool! That's all I have to say about that today. Next item of business:

FACTUALLY MUSICAL 2023 

VOLUME FOUR

[unchain the sex machine]

*

Would it have been funny to say "unchain the sex machine, bitch?" Perhaps [unchain the sex machine (bitch)], that's what I originally thought of. Well, no way in fuck is it funny like this! I also thought about doing "...patriarchal brainwashing[mother/bloodline]" because it is more precise, but it reads better as is. 

*

So there had been a pile of nailed-together rotted shit that'd called itself a deck for ten years, and we as a familial household had agreed as a courtesy. My dad had decided this was the summer something got done about it. He's gotten a book about building your own deck from the orange-themed home improvement superstore--overkill, since we'e just refurbishing, but more is better, after all. He's got lumber and tools. He's got a son that has proven degenerate, a drug-addled, sex-crazed, aberrant and out-of-control college-ditching pile of feral reactions. In his masculine wisdom, he knows to aim for several birds with each stone cast. The labor will fall to me, under his expert direction. Even if it doesn't get my head straight, which it might (dudes are weird), he'll have done his part, won't have strained his ass, and by hook or crook, the deck will get done.

Summer 2009 was real hot and sunny, which was good. I wanted it blazing down on me without pause the whole time I was out there. I wanted it to lay me low if it could, knock me on my ass, kill me on the spot. Failing that, as I knew it would and made even more spiteful by the knowledge, I wanted to sweat. I wanted to sweat till I couldn't wear a shirt, till it rolled off my nose in fat drops and I was acclimated to the stinging in my eyes.

Clawing nails out of rotten lumber so I could tear it down board by board, getting underneath the fucker to shore it up and replace the rotten supports with fresh new ones, scraping the old paint off the entire thing, hammering in the new lumber, building benches that formed a barrier around the platform instead of the former railing the weather had already mostly destroyed, taking out a worm-and-ant-eaten decorative pillar attached to where the corner of part of the condo overhung the deck, and finally repainting the entire mess with primer and two coats. The whole time, my old silver 160GB iPod that had been my eighteenth birthday present played through my old silver Bose wraparounds that had been my first purchase with my own money from working a job after I'd turned eighteen played me my music, the music I needed at that time. I was going to be twenty that autumn. 

Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Tampa Red, Ma Rainey, Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightning Hopkins. Some others that escape me at the moment and which I haven't yet put on my iMusic, although my mom did recently find my old music files--gigs of the stuff--which should have it all and who knows what else I've forgotten. Out of that, I depended mostly on Johnson, Muddy, and Red. Woulda listened to John Lee Hooker, but I didn't have any of his stuff in my posession then. I listened to The Mountain Goats, too, but that was about it. Tried listening to other stuff like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Beethoven and whatever else, tried, but couldn't. All pretty much hateful to me. Empty. False coin. 

All I wanted was them Blues. 

*

It was a hard summer. I felt so fucked up. I had crashed and I didn't know what I wanted to do next or if I wanted anything at all. Being in my parent's house was chafing, but egress seemed impossible. When I wasn't working on the deck I'd go to the library at the community college under my mom's orders to keep my mind alive and see if I could think about preparing to take classes there. Read a cool book of all kinds of essays about The Iliad. Read a textbook on electrical engineering. Read Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, since it seemed relevant at that particular moment (it kind of wasn't, but it was a pretty good book). Wrote some poems. Stared out the skylights and listened to the Blues.

Finished learning to drive that summer. That fucking sucked, but at least the test was easy and I didn't have to take classes as a teenager. I hadn't learned to drive yet because not only did I bail on my parents teaching me because I couldn't handle it emotionally (because of their mishandled emotions), but I concluded also that if motherfuckers tried to make me sit in any more classes I was going to lose touch with reality completely and start gnawing on things--objects, other people, my own limbs--and screaming incessantly at the highest possible pitch if anyone dared disoccupy my mouth. 

Let me say this, to clarify unnecessarily: I had a very hard time being a teenager. I know most of us do. I know some of us die from it. I understand; in this life I have all but kissed death on the mouth.

In this life, I have been a stranger in a strange land, always, more stranger in more lands, even the land of time, border crossing after border crossing, visa passport greencard hullaballoo, bilingual alien both ways, stranger can't go home again, stranger sees what others can't, can be hurt by what others can't perceive, homebody has no home. Never did I feel it all more completely up to that point than working on that deck under the pulsing sunlight, with a life that I had purposefully crumpled up and tossed at my own feet.

It wouldn't be the last time, and it would be a lot worse some of the subsequent times, but I was just a boy. How was I to know? That one felt like the big one, and one of the only things I could hang onto was the Blues.

*

Guess that's one of the ways I know and feel myself to be American in the U.S.A. brand of it in a sense that is inviolable and legitimate. Legitimacy concerns immigrants greatly, perhaps overpoweringly. It follows that authenticity and identity are also huge concerns. This is 101 stuff, very entry level, but I want to afford as many entry points as possible that are straightforward because I'm gonna say some very complicated stuff today, sometimes plainly and sometimes obliquely, and I'm hoping to maximize my chances of being understood. 

*

The Mountain Goats led me to Robert Johnson when I was sixteen, closing in on seventeen. On Nothing For Juice, they cover "Hellhound on My Trail", one of my favorite covers of all time. The Johnson version is one of my favorite songs of all time. Many times I have salted the miles I walked with both versions, keeping moving, needing to keep moving.

It's the kind of writing and composition that I like. A variation strong enough to stand out and still be rooted in the core concept. And it haunts. It worries the footsteps. It is what it says. It tells a strained and off-center truth, and there's no escaping once you've heard it. Maybe it just tells you something you've always known.

Once I'd found Robert Johnson, the local library had me covered with a bunch of CD's, as they could so reliably be counted on to do; bluegrass, metal, or seventies funk. More from the Delta, Texas, Chicago, New Orleans, Florida--all these places had their old blues down in the dirt, and I went for it. Around this time I read that Chuck Klosterman essay where he talks about how the old acoustic scratchy recordings put him and a friend to sleep, but not being a sleepy person at all and less so when listening to any music unless I'm exhausted to the point of surrender, I could not relate. There was something there. I didn't get it yet, didn't fully understand why I liked what I was hearing so much, in the strum and thump of it, in the way the words came, the cadence, the tricks on the strings so subtle but changing everything one song to the next. Deeper, though, there was something pure and inviolable but also, again, down in the dirt there. It was a beauty that came from damage, from pain. It was a wholeness that came from being broken. I know what it is now and can name it easy, and if you don't know, look it up: that shit had duende. Duende up the ass. A deep and singular vein of the stuff. 

*

While I was still actually attending college my buddy (all the way back from the very first post! That buddy! Hahaha) and I discovered a shared love of the Delta, of Robert Johnson. His big Johnson song was "Terraplane Blues"; I suppose this preference must say something about both our similarities and differences. Through time and cultural investigations of the kind that make social engagements bearable to me, I came to gauge that he got a lot of his music shit from his older sisters, who were part of a cohort that were predominantly nonblack teenagers in the late nineties and whose cultural influence blanketed my town in the aughts. They got to the blues and reggae music through Bradley Nowell's lyrics, he of Sublime fame and the rock star that died at 26 instead of 27. The man was worshipped where I came up, far as we are from California. Take what you will from all that, I have my own feelings based on a whole lifetime dealing with the strange petri dish where I grew up.

At any rate, we discussed the Blues, the genre and concept and its history and philosophy at length, its strength and bewitchment, its power and beauty. Being musicians and at that "DEFINITELY make a project and be in a music thing" age, we even tried to play our own, me on my acoustic bass guitar and he on slide guitar and vocals. We tried to write originals, one of which was some good,  and had a cover of "House of the Rising Sun" that had some merit. Other than that we were kids on the playground fucking around with shit we didn't fully understand or respect quite enough, but that's the unskippable folly of youth. He also showed me Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, which was dope of him. 

So indeed, the Blues had figured largely in things closing in on that summer, but it was working on that deck under the sun that brought it home to me, that made it a part of me that runs as deep as any of the rest. A part of my dirt. Soil where I grow.

* 

The cultural consumption of Blackness, of Black folks and the continuum of what they make to share and stay alive with, is some complicated fucking shit. Some people may have noticed that last post, in discussing pop music, I did not mention a single group or artist composed predominantly of people who are, was fronted by a person who is, or who simply is--nonwhite. Even though I mentioned groups from a few places around the world, from a lot of discrete origins and nationalities, even though being White is a made-up thing just as fake as being Black, and there is great diversity in the sample if you want it, the fact remains the fact--none of them are Black. Weird how that happens. 

How that plays out economically for people, I don't know for sure and that's not the purpose of this inquiry. The comparison between the label Pop and the label R&B is an old one with a lot of words gone under the talking bridge; money and race always seem to be a lot more the question than questions of composition or categorical qualifications, which makes a lot of sense because money and race and music are all real and emotionally loaded for practically every living person and composition, categorization, and classification are real and emotionally loaded for fewer people; I dare not guess the proportion, but it likely favors the former qualifier. To speak as reservedly as possible on the matter.

My point? My position? Well, I dunno about all that, but I explained all that about the Blues because I wanted to offer some snapshots that illustrate the question as something complex, subjective, and importantly, playing out over time. There's lots more to the story! Before and after. 

Guess my point, to strain the term, is that culture is a geography, on which we are all placed at birth. Just like existence itself, we did not make it, ask for it, or consent to be thrown into the middle of it, to be subjected to its inevitable and unavoidable forces. We did not consent to or ask for any of the things that serve to categorize or subdivide us in this culture and the cultures that comprise it. Things just are what they are.

Culturally speaking in this geographical sense, we all have to work hard and break a lot of rules just to see each other. Just for a chance at a glance. Therefore, it is much easier to make shit up to make our own lives easier, to steal and lie and cheat and build walls and mark borders and have wars about it all. It should be clear that a lot of what we grow up hearing about other people is propaganda. Even what we experience about "other" (all) people through the membranes and apertures of culture is propaganda. When I say propaganda, I mean the dissemination of sets of facts distorted in a calculated manner presented as social knowledge intended to homogenize opinion. Homogenized opinion is only homogenous because it has been manipulted to be so.

Throughout history, all peoples everywhere have received and been presented with lies and distorions about strangers when communicating about other places and the people who live there, lies and distortions that hurt all of us. That was just how the world had to be. It hasn't had to be that way for some time. Now it is like that because time has enthroned tiny and diverse ingroups dotted around the globe who profit immensely out of it, and whose influence is exerted to protect, refresh, reinvent, and reestablish those lies as completely as possible. They help each other knowingly and unknowingly. All the while, like soldiers, we die in the trenches while they sip their wine and look fondly on their children, who will send our children out to hate each other for no god damn reason. This also plays out literally with actual soldiers for actual territory. Indeed, we're at about the point where the metaphor and the literal things we are talking about become the same, but they always were: that's the power of a metaphor. 

No way around it: if we want a better idea about what's going on elsewhere, we have to actually go. 

To to traverse unpaved ground and cross borders in culture is a thing not easily done by all. To call yourself an explorer and possess the means to live up to the name even a little is a huge, crazy privilege, even these massively interconnected days. Terrain can be inaccessible, impossible to navigate, impossible to reach, impossible even sometimes to imagine. There are gates, there are unmarked dangers, there are monsters, traps, paper oceans of outdated maps. Most importantly, there are forces arrayed to keep like with like and all feet on preapproved toll roads. And to arrive and be somehwere is not the same as having been born there and cannot be, even if you are not a tourist or a seeker of capital/clout, even if you were brought, even against your will, even if you came with every intention of being the same or even more than born there, however that's supposed to work: we'll find out how and make it work. But it's not how things work. More's the pity.

However, we were all born on the same planet. We might act like that counts for something. Geographically and all.

At any rate, whether we succeed in getting somewhere is entirely dependent on our will to do so, and what we get out of it is entirely dependent on our ability to be receptive and open to information that may destroy our worlds and even our sense of self. You may have to stretch your mind in a way that you would never dream of stretching your body, for you would break every bone in it and turn inside out. 

That discomfort is how we gain ground. That discomfort is how we dissolve barriers and actually get a shot in at the bastards who keep us down with their boots on our throats. Please help each other see this. Not just the people you think need to see it; you too, your friends, your family, again, over and over, because it's not going to be over, not while we draw breath, not while the story's still happening. Because that little precious bit of ground is hard to keep and easy to lose.

Ok. I'll be done. It's simple: if you listen to music influenced by Black folks, and you do, because human music was very probably heard for the first time on this planet in Africa, because American music has influenced music all over the planet and modern American music is uniformly influenced by the Blues, by Jazz, by Disco and Funk and Hip-Hop, and that is facts--then you should understand that a choice lies before you: stay where you are and drink water stolen from another person's mouth, or uproot painfully and go thirsty as long as they go thirsty because you understand that you are kin, that you are in this thing together no matter what tries to keep you apart. Understand that your skin is in the game. So you will feel pain where there was no pain before. So you will lose a lot of comfort that you had before. So you will understand better the kind of world we live in, the kind of people we can be if we try and the kind of people we could be, if we're not careful. 

Is that too personal? Squeamish? I'll share some undeserved pity: literally the absolute least that you can do is put your own mess to the side for sixty seconds out of one day, act like a human being, and see things from where other people are standing.

There is a payoff, too. Just as you will feel pain and frustration and just as you will find that once-welcoming places and comfortable atmospheres become hostile and inimical, just as you will no longer be able to relax the same way you once did, there will be joy where once joy was impossible, was inaccessible. There will be love and peace within you that you did not know was possible. There will be a new world for you to explore, and that world will be bigger and more beautiful than the one you left behind. That is my promise to you, a fucking promise, and I never promise for shit. But I promise that because that shit is a guarantee.

Ok. For real. The consumption of cultural production whose means and products are tethered to racist ideations and inequitable economic and social structures bears with it a call to responsibility. This call may go unheard, it may be ignored. If heard, the hearer can only respond to it with the tools they have, at the pace that is possible, under conditions that they are subject to as an individual. This is a process which may be long and have setbacks. We are all in it together.

One day, maybe, our shared culture can be a reflection of God, a fractal of the infinite universe which is the seed and realization of infinite possibilities in one: an allness which is one and a oneness which is all. Until then, we do what we can, what we must, as we are able, each of us a single scale reflecting the light of an infinite universe on the body of an infinite serpent flying through infinite time. And we are all the serpent, the infinite, and time.

*

Initially I thought this post was going to be a relatively simple tale followed by the proceeding discussion of this playlist I made last winter, but it turns out I had to get all that out of the way plus some stuff written below. You're probably reading this before that, of course, but you, dear reader, might be a maverick son of a bitch/bitch and I don't control you. You might have read the seventh paragraph first, then this one, and now you might skip to the end before reading the eleventh paragraph, and so forth. Anything is possible.

Presenting a brief on that simple genesis:

After living in the same town, more or less, for all my adult life, an accomplishment whose significance is keenly known by children who moved around a lot as kids and were sensitive to the drawbacks (there are, of course, good points to everything, but nothing is perfect, and pretending anything can be causes a huge amount of global suffering, to be frank), I had moved to the twin town. I'll just say it plain: it's much Blacker here. It's WAY more Poor White here. These are not reasons I tried to stay on the other side of town; as outlined in the opening sentence, I fought and moved and worked and struggled because I needed to keep to what I knew for once in my life, I needed to not deal with new geography, I needed to get good at what I'd been at for a while. Leaving for college was a fiasco, followed by a string of fiascos, and through them all I fought hardest for a single thing: one-dimensional geographical stability. Pathetic, but necessary.

Ironic, too, because I like it way better out here, am much more comfortable here. But there was a period after the exhaustion wore off and when the sun was shining down in the summer that was an emotional transition, and while I was listening to all kinds of music at work with my coworker as we washed school buses inside and out (a harrowing task, but one we got down to a science), while I was driving in my own car, I needed something else. 

So I made a driving playlist, which I shall roughly sketch out:

Quite a bit of Ray Charles, one from Dexter Gordon, a couple by The Meters, a few from Bukka White and Little Richard, a little more sizable a sample from Howlin' Wolf, most of two by Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers, some Bo Diddley, some Funkadelic, some Fats Domino, most of what Elmore James and Elmore James and the Broom Dusters made, couple songs from Cameo, Eddie Hazel's "California Dreamin'", a whole bunch of John Lee Hooker from his whole career, Louis Armstrong's "Tin Roof Blues", and some of a record that Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters are all together on. This brings me of course back to the bunch of Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Ma Rainey (rather less Ma Rainey streams than was recorded, I note), Tampa Red, Lightning Hopkins, and a substantial accounting of everything by Muddy Waters and by Nina Simone. 

All I have to point out any further, besides resisting the temptation to just list every damn track, is that more than half of these artists were masters in three distinct genres and about a quarter of them could do anything on the planet, including stuff that hadn't been invented yet. I dunno. Maybe I'm underselling it. It just feels like, compared to my other playlists, which I would describe as delicate little wire scupltures or specially curated trash piles or magpie nests or lazy rivers, this one's a brick. It would go through a plate-glass window. Perhaps too much genius, perhaps a dangerous amount of fire. 

*

Couple weeks ago I listened to the whole Alicia Keys discography. I had an exceptionally great time all the way through, and talk about a person that can do anything on the planet including stuff that hadn't been invented yet. I guess that's all I have to say, because this post is too fucking long.  

Damn, what if after all that I was all like "Yo, that Keys bitch can plays the piano like a White man! Bet."

Maybe I shouldn't tell as many jokes as I do. 

*

A last thought in this volume: true intsersectionality, total abolition of all forms of slavery--freedom, the first true freedom our species has known since the advent of land as economic property tied to inheritance schemes--means looking out for and ensuring the safety and the future of people that hate you, people that are ignorant, people that will not change. It means you will have to love your enemy as you love your friend, even as you love yourself. We have had no shortage of prophets, dead and living among us, who have understood this. If you fail to understand this, if you cannot let go of your attachments--as the prophets have proclaimed--you lose ground. You stay slave. You give it up to the empire, to the ruler, to the person who owns the chains, which will stay tight on you and yours and everybody else, including the person who owns them.

Maybe this is a crude and overprescriptive way to describe it, maybe this feels like a lot of responsibility or that I have actually minimized the problem and it is possible even that I am merely stupid and naive. This is the truth as I understand it. If I am stupid and naive, well, I would rather be an idiot than a slave. All I know is I got to die. Also that if I can manage to free my mind, my ass may just follow. 

*

It's officially ended, that's the post, in which I did rather more capitalizing than usual. Felt appropriate I guess, but those fluid rules are among the most bullshit on the planet, we should e e cummings it or stop using terms altogether. I guess that was one more thing. Anyhow but here is the following, which has nothing to do with anything, unless you think maybe it does. Nothing to do with me. 

Being able to see and not hear has made one of my cats crazy in one way, and being able to hear and not see has driven my other cat crazy in a different way. Both my cats make perfect sense to themselves in a world that makes sense as they understand it, but they have a pretty hard time understanding each other. One is a tabby and one is dark gray, and each one thinks the other smells bad in a deep-down way. They do smell different. They both smell fine to me. The both make sense to me. I love so much to share my life with them, to live with them and love them.

Maybe I love them too much and piggyback inferences and connections onto them excessively, but maybe that's just part of having cats.

*

Woo! That's gotta be one of the longer posts. It'll serve for yesterday, and probably tomorrow, though I might see if I can squeeze off a quick one. 

You know what cartoon I watched recently and thought was very very good? Apple & Onion. Wish they made more of that. Loved every little episode, each so good, so taut and creamy. Little cream buns. So much good music, so many good songs, and no soundtrack anywhere! Damn.

Next I'm going to listen to The Coup's whole discography. Yes, I have strapped in. Pressing play on 1993's Kill My Landlord--yes, relatable--ohhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

--JL

#346

Have come to identify yet another weakness in my psychic constitution, and as I type that, I want to joke that I need a better hobby. Of course the truth is that the process of recognizing and adjusting in response to our failings, our shortcomings, those foibles of our personality that go so far as to embarass us or harm us whether we are aware of it in the moment or merely ignorant is what Socrates was talking about when he mentioned lives and the due examination of them. So, regrettably, it is more along the lines of an endless duty, this critical process of becoming alive.

Anyway the thing was that one reason I got into walking is, sure, I lost the last of a string of bikes which I have owned and was unable to replace it for years. But also I was partially unwilling to replace it all those years because I had become focused on a solemn convitction regarding the physical, psychic, and spiritual benefits of walking. Correct; walking is the bomb; I have set a great deal into the record to that effect. But there's another side to that too. 

I walk really fast. Locally, I may be the fastest. No one, in my memory, since the time I reached about the upper end of my physical development in my teens, has passed me on the street, the sidewalk, the trail, or the field while walking, unless they literally broke into a half-jog. And, as is evident in the record, I have walked a lot. I'm just gonna say it: I walk like a beast, I am awesome at walking. I've thought about it a lot and put those thoughts into a great deal of practice. 

But even though I believe my style and speed on the bicycle are more than adequate and have rarely let me down, I exhibit nothing comparable to the prowess I possess on foot. I like to ride fast, sometimes as fast as I fucking can, and a lot of people are faster bikers than me on faster bikes to boot; it hasn't happened all summer (this entirely due to the fact that I've had the streets I beat basically all to myself on my rides), but it did today; this wiry dude probably in his forties rode behind me very politely for a while when things were narrow, but as soon as the bikeway opened he lit me up and smoked me to the stub. It was pretty cool. 

At the same time, something deep inside me misliked the feeling, and I knew in my heart that the root of the feeling has nothing noble or sportsmanlike in it at all, coming as it does from a traumatized part of my animal self that hates being approached from behind, hates being outperformed. And as I thought more on that, I came to understand that this part of myself had denied the rest of me the pleasure of two wheels on that basis, when I was weaker and reconstituting myself. And yet, in this, was it not acting to protect me, to set me on a path that would serve me better than the exhilaration of speed? That may be part of it, and it is certainly true also that it was acting selfishly, and would have done the same if it had hurt me--maybe did hurt me. But that is not the important part.

The only important part of any of it is the next step, which is to laugh at myself and begin to learn to let that shit go. And once it is gone I will breathe freer and be more alive. On foot, wheeled up, who cares. We all go at our own pace, and that pace is what it is, and that is right and good.

*

We must be freer, and more alive; that is the point of philosophy, and life.

--JL

#339

Been on my bike a lot lately. Haven't owned a bike in years and years, and it is crazy what the body and brain will remember with the wheels spinning beneath. Think I wrote a whole post on an old blog I used to write about why I don't wear a helmet (I still don't). Sometimes I wear a safety vest, or a nice eye-catching shirt or pair of shorts. So far this summer I've exclusively worn sandals to ride. For me, a great deal of the pleasure in riding a bicycle is the sense of lightness, of being unencumbered. Helmets, and to a much lesser extent, shoes, and consequently, several layers of safety and protection, hamper my optimal biking experience. In valuing optimized experiences and the feeling of riding the edge of risk if it means the kind of living dangerously I value just as much, riding as I please, how I please, to accomplish what I please achieves the kind of massive endorphin multiplier I rarely bother to deny myself. A measure of heedlessness in every life; it is that too-humanness of ours that makes us just human enough, still, despite everything that seeks to deprive us of such happy dignities, such simple fuck yous at death and the people who would ruin life out of fear of death. 

Bike thinking is often tied to ideas and traumas about freedom and safety, in my experience; in the public sphere, it extends to rights and duties and obligations. Judging by the level of discourse that kicks off when people talk about bicycles whether on internet or meatspace, the space it operates is a powerful emotional and intellectual flashpoint, a hub that can take you down all matter of discursive side arguments and caveats. The conceptual load is wide and tall and by no means neatly packaged. Hard to feel unencumbered with so much baggage, eh, boys?

Anyway, I have a bike again because my mom, purely out of the industry she enjoys engaging in and the great kindness and elevated generosity of spirit she expresses in deed and craft, fixed up my dad's old destroyed one (and my brother's old destroyed one in tandem) like new. It has been a massive pleasure to ride it as much as possible, what with the wildfire pollution and other conditions of our home ellipsoid's agitated systems keeping me at bay. Locally, it has been a very beautiful summer, despite all, and I have ridden a huge amount. 

*

Speaking of baggage, been spending lots of time over at the parent's abode, hanging out and helping with the maintenance of canines. It's been a very good time, though not without it's "hey ok it's time for me to go ok love you bye" moments. 

Family. So wonderful, so essential to the core sense of selfhood, of belonging, of coming from a discrete collective bound by its shared identity. How perfectly designed to drive people a special kind of crazy, and make each other crazy also. I love each member of my family completely and unreservedly, and furthermore, I emphatically respect each one in their own way. The emotional vulnerabilities this creates can be sizable, and lead to a lot of pain and misunderstanding. So it goes.  

*

Another thing I been thinking about is how bad I am at taking care of stuff, like land "property" and housing, largely becaue I love seeing things break and warp and degrade and generally take on a radically altered aspect over time. It's a real effort to rob myself of the pleasure of watching, say, leaves decompose, or the boards of a deck peel up one by one, in different places, each just a little at the tip. The way rust blooms and spreads on once-lustrous metal. A splintered handle, a crooked structure, ivy o'ergrown over all. I love the aesthetic of a broken thing, ancient wood moldering, mosses and lichens, insects calmly moving across surfaces they own in a much more concrete and tangible way than people ever did. 

Love a broken fence. Love a derelict building. Love the mushrooms and the wet, livesome aura 'round a wet, decomposing log. And damn, a vacant lot that's been a vacant lot for a long time, asphalt practically bleached, huge green furrows of weeds like completely insane caterpillars all scribbled across the old cracks, chain-link rusting and balooning like a slow-motion cloth rotting in a ponderous, ominous wind. 

*

Feeling very inspired lately. A great work, a great frenzy of creation and study lies close by my horizon. Gotta save this juice for the work. Oh! Finished David McCullough's John Adams, which I loved and paired very well with the U.S. history classes I took this summer. Nearing the end of Ingrid D. Rowland's Giordano Bruno, which has been a steadily deepening note of bliss. Also I rewatched The Young Pope and watched The New Pope and they comprise a work of art that seemed tailor-made to suit me just fine. I have a lot of ideas about popes and paping about with the lads. This tickled a lot of my pope spots.

Godspeed, dear reader. I shall andeavor to soothe you with a post here and there, but what will be, will be what has to suffice. 

--JL 

#325

Let me preface this part of my post by saying that it's not like I think democracy is so great or that I think governments that are not democratic are helmed by gibbering rats. I know enough to know that everything is different everywhere, and that the underdog is not always necessarily the hero simply virtue of opposition to a power that is clearly oppressive. However, I will always be out in favor of more freedom as opposed to less freedom, and Chow Hang-tung, formerly of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, is sentenced to jail along with a couple of others, and what she had to say to her judge resonated with me enough that I'd like to quote her here, not something I have ever done and not something which will happen often.

“Sir, sentence us for our insubordination if you must, but when the exercise of power is based on lies, being insubordinate is the only way to be human,”

Regardless of the context, I can get behind this statement. I too have bared my neck to punishers in this way, for this reason. 

Personally, I would love for China to relax its more authoritarian policies just enough to, I don't know, be considered human. Also for genocide to stop would be awesome. It would also be super optimal if the U.S. could stop treating China like an entity whose behavior materializes from nowhere and try for a less racist perspective on exactly why their government behaves the way it does, reformulating its diplomatic efforts with that knowledge at the fore. I truly believe the possibility for an entente with China is real, culturally, economically, and politically. It would be an amazing start if western powers didn't expect China to merely sit, and heel, like some canid perversion of a superpower, and obediently produce all the stupid plastic shit they want to sell to their citizens.

When reading policy and intelligence reports regarding China, and when listening to economic cross-talk about China, I always find that the size of the country warps and shifts based on the speaker's prejudice. When they want something from China, it's a small place, like Bulgaria or some shit--just so happens it's filled with factories, only factories and nothing else. The acquiescence of the "third-world" is assumed, and when China does not meet these expectations, a truculent and baseless animosity on their part is to blame. When the speaker wants to conjure some devil with which to fight shadow wars, then China is as some alien race, poised in their planet-shattering dreadnoughts, waiting only for the calculation of their firing solutions to be complete ere their red lasers set our own meek and innocent world's atmosphere ablaze. 

Wonder what the dialogue would look like if we modified our notions and expectations just a touch towards the sane and rational. 

*

Anyhow! Peoplefortheworldwideabolitionofprisonssaywhat

WHAT

what

--JL

#263

The sum of the digits of 11/21/2021 happens to be nine, and expressed as 11/21/21, the sum is seven, which makes this an extremely powerful day. Anyone turning nine this year may be in for a hell of a run around the calendar, one for the record books. A seventh son born on this day could very easily one day rule the shattered remnants of this suicidal planet, and raise it from its sad ashes. 

Of course the practicable significance of all this is zero. We will one day wake from all this ridiculous nonsense as though from a dark and distant dream.

*

Till then, whatever entertains us, even for a second! Amirite? Is not entertainment our true God, venerated in the one true Temple? Always think how entertainment is just entrainment with a twist.

If only we had the freedom to think about something else, do something, anything. But that would run counter to our training. We are at our most profitable when receiving programming, going from training to training, in actual pain when not being actively stimulated by familiar patterns, resolutions, endorphin packets.

*

Ok, whatever. Punchline goes here. Signing off. Russ Crowe in Gladiator meme. Right? Yes. Cool. Bye.

--JL

#247

Well, I finished rereading Sinfest, right up to this day. What do I have to say? Well, I don't necessarily take back the concept that the comic is valuable public record. I would still rather read the archive than look at a comparable amount of NYT, but that's just me. The worst comics are better than any news. 

*

Sure, Sinfest has always had problems, famously so. For a while it seemed the author, Tatsuya Ishida, was trying to fix them. In fact, something else was happening, something I will see if I can explain and address in this post, endeavoring to be exhaustive; hence this post will be triggering if you've been here before. Also long.

Today we cover a lot of ground. I shall endeavor to marry as much precision to as much economy as I am able, but we will be here awhile, and I will be forced to ask every reader to meet me halfway as I race by massive points, each of which can and have generated enough debate to fill libraries. 

Hopefully I shall break no glass I have used to build my own house, and hopefully I can admit it when I have. 

* 

Tatsuya Ishida, author of Sinfest, has clearly and in no uncertain terms embraced a system of thought which, at best, takes the position that trans people are victims of a post-modern deception. This is not to say that I think this is possible. According to this system, which brands itself as Radical Feminism, trans people do not exist, for to claim transness is to claim a relativistic position in a purely literal, organic context which is not reinterpretable. I don't think such contexts are legitimate.

According to the "radical" feminism promoted in Sinfest, the trans position is untenable no matter the form: transness as a corrosive meme implanted by bad actors, transness as pathology (interrelated with the memetic argument: the virality of it), transness as a political tool (admittedly, transness is as problematized, reduced, distorted, and manipulated as anything else which enters the political sphere and the news cycle; it is yet another way in which it proves it is as natural a human phenomenon as any other), and in total the possibility of any authentic experience of gender apart from sex, apart from or in contest with essential masculinity and maleness and essential femininity and femaleness. In order to be a feminist, in this school of thinking, one must destroy the roles of gender while enforcing sex as cause and gender as effect. The reproductive genital becomes the lone determinant, the fulcrum of sex and gender. One can do and be what one wishes, may fill any role, as long as one is a woman or a man.

It is, indeed, fully opposed to itself.

At worst, and as the logical consequence of the train of thought I have outlined above, radfems consider trans people a subhuman criminal class of only rapists who groom children through propaganda both to swell their ranks and satisfy their appetites, and seek political power for the same reasons, based on a selective sample of anecdotes involving a tiny minority of a tiny minority, exactly as a white man might make the error of considering every black man in America an uncivilizable ape that wants to rape his wife and help Jews take over the country. Of course, people are perfectly capable of occupying both these stances at once, or one and not the other, and/or a whole array of equally unhealthy and always contradictory impossibilities, and not think themselves violently deluded. 

I take exception to these stances, personally. All these sick, bloody-minded stances, indeed delusions, which are all one delusion, really--exchange the value of any number of variables, put the figures in any number of contexts, but the simple mathematics of this fundamental equation stays the same: 

"X equals I decide the truth and what is fair, and if you, Y, disagree with me, I can say and do whatever it takes to dominate your thinking, control your behavior, fuck your life up, even kill you if I can; socially through ostracizing or by taking your actual life myself, or through an empowered proxy. If you would kill and bury yourself after admitting I'm right, and living a profitable amount of time under what I have decided is fair, that would be best."

Exception taken also to all imaginable sophistry generated in the support and defense of this position, including any that overlap with my own ideas. Unequivocally. With some heat. Heat tripled when X is already incorporated into the safe end of dominant social paradigms and Y isn't, and is outnumbered by X one hundred to one.

*

Therefore I must take exception to Sinfest, a comic not even brave enough to come out and say "I hate trans people, fuckem, that's just me. That's what being a radical feminist means. Lesbians are great (for me), and gays are fine (I am told). Men are men, women are women, only men have penises and only women have vaginas, and every other expression of gender is some fake psyop shit made up by pedophiles to fuck with children. Amirite ladies? Am I a good guy or what? Please don't yell at me, please tell each other in your secret woman councils that I am good and not evil, despite my blatantly misogynistic past. I like white people, I am not a screaming monkey, I am a good and fully westernized Jesus boy who hates the devil. Will a WASP woman finally fuck me or what?"

Well, it is exactly what Tatsuya Ishida has ultimately ended up saying, but it's not what he's been pretending to say.

No. He has to make a coward's comic about how a only a pomo* zombie would believe that a hot dog is a taco, but too gutless to come out and say that trans people don't exist. It's a whole archive of shit like that. Brave enough to put a sign reading "TRANSPHOBE" in the hand of someone in a crowd of woke zombies (and like, I'm with you! go to hell, woke zombies) trashing and threatening a lone girl, but too gutless to come out and say shit like "cisgender" and "transphobe" is a slur on the level of the n-word. Brave enough to play with and appropriate drag culture, but too cowardly to give a single, barely-utilized gay character a single trait to distinguish him from a laundry list of stereotypes. Brave enough to express regret over drawing a joke like the Blaxploitation Funk Bible, but too much of a wuss to have a black character generate an original line of dialogue or a recurring role beyond bolstering the author's progressive credentials--four strips about police killing unarmed black men, token black man storyline, infantilized black girl moral compass, Barack Obama caricatures--I swear, the comic was less racist when it was racist. Brave enough to say that you should quit using porn and paying for sex--to harp on it for years--but too cowardly to say even once that you shouldn't rape, to even use the phrase rape culture--in a comic where there is ALWAYS a pimp around, ALWAYS a bunch of prostitutes around. A couple of #MeToo strips, literally just two, for all the measurable worth such an artifact could vouch for. I guess he thought it would have looked weird if he just completely ignored it. 

All this time, about ten years out of the twenty of the comic's run, screaming about respecting women, liberating women, and the man still draws ten sluts a week in his comic. Every devil girl that was ever a devil girl is still a devil girl. The women of the resistance are primarily infantilized caricatures whose antics never change a thing. Witch culture played with like a toy, played with to be seen playing with it. Frankly, all expressions of femininity, and all the feminine values discussed in the comic, do nothing except serve the creator's interests in one form or another, existing in whatever limbos they are doomed to at his pleasure and at his service--he pimps them out, you might say--and this applies to the comic's entire run, from Monique's first appearance to the whole female cast today.

*

My computer troubles and many other considerations upon my time meant I hadn't caught up with Sinfest since about 2016, so that's a whole presidency I got to read brand-new for the first time. I didn't expect things to look the way they did to me once I got to 2016, and I didn't have any expectations for what I would find as I moved forwards, but indeed, from 2016 onwards, it just gets ridiculous. I've read Sinfest from scratch plenty of times before, but once you see it, the full scope of the run with the benefit of the full two decades, it is fucking transparent. You know what else is transparent? None of the dudes ever change. The asshole dudes are the same asshole dudes. 

Hey. Pay close fucking attention. In the webcomic Sinfest, by Tatsuya Ishida, none of the dudes ever change. 

The main male protagonist has not been written out, doesn't know how to behave like a human being and can't seem to grasp why anyone really would behave like a human being, and still exploits women. In his work, and in secret behavior, Slick continues to degrade and hate women. Like, hate them.

Slick.

Do you get it? It's not a complicated work of art. The red herrings, like the author's actual self-insertion, lose their power over a long enough time period. His presence in his own comic is false; Slick's is real. Slick's public face is canonically inauthentic; his shadow self is authentic, and stronger than him. You don't need a big deconstructive analysis.

These fucking dudes can't even quit jacking it to porn, which like, I don't give too much of a fuck. I used porn like crazy the whole time I was a teenager, and sparingly for old time's sake into my early twenties. Porn is, in my opinion, mostly sad and criminal shit, and no one really needs it, but some people draw porn that isn't like that, and there is porn by women for women (which remains problematic in my opinion, but at least no one is getting a cumshot washed off them in a used toilet), and frankly we have worse problems in this life. But Tatsuya pretends to give a fuck. And yet! The man is at least twelve years older than me, and still this rigmarole with the porn. 

How bout a tip? Why don't you just watch some like, extremely hardcore gay porn, like an Irish bodybuilder and an Ethiopian bodybuilder taking turns pounding each other's tight muscular asses as hard as they can with their thick nine-inchers until what you're looking at is nothing but boring flesh and you start thinking about chores you could be doing. Why don't you look at some penile mutilation porn compilations until you throw up. Oh, are these not your thing? Did you forget that not only women exist in porn? Or are you fully aware and that's not really the point?

Why don't you do literally anything other than think about, look at, or make comics about porn. You massive dork-wad.

*

It's a massive disappointment. Sad shit, man. Having read this comic since I was a twelve-year old kid, as a grown man I'm here to tell you that I held out hope and held my judgment back for years and years, but at the end of the day Sinfest has been self-serving, false-ass bullshit. 

* 

So the point, the reason I am even bothering to say anything instead of rolling my eyes and getting right along with my life, is that it's not just that Sinfest sucks. If it was just that, who would give a fuck? Not me. It used to suck honestly, and I could laugh at how bad and ridiculous those pr0n-loving, unlaid morons could be, un-self-aware and hopeless. Later I could hope that the feminism could grow into something truly revolutionary and the characters would enter stages of growth that would change their world. It never did, but that's no sin. Comics don't have to deliver correct discourse or be cancelled for their failure to do so, don't have to be morally correct on all points. Art doesn't have to be those things, can't be those things really. 

No revolution has ever delivered the revolution it promised at the outset. The wheel mostly just turns, and that's fine or not fine, but there can't really be any justified blame for it. The wheel turns, the river flows, the world spins. 

However, Sinfest is used as a tool and a vehicle, and because of what that tool can be used for and what it is visibly being used for, because of what is being delivered in that vehicle, an interpretation does have to be laid out in order to bring that payload to light.

Problem is, Tatsuya Ishida is not a feminist and has never been a feminist, didn't perform a heel turn from being a misogynist to a being a feminist and then turn again into radical feminism--or there is the possibility that he did exactly that but is in fact nothing, and all of Sinfest is exactly as is professional wrestling: a trick by an actor. 

Either way, to endorse or champion his art as feminist is to be duped. What is actually happening here is that a dude who hates women has spent half his career trying his damnedest to get away with seeming like he's one of the good guys, safe and trying and different than he was, different than the bad men. He made his comic unpalatable to the idiots who actually loved the misogyny taken literally, which seemed great, but he turned them into a strawman to beat and be beaten by, as the occasion best served, for a decade-plus, all while championing a "resistance" that neither resisted nor revolutionized--because it is not equipped to do so, by the author's own design--and maintaining the essentials of his comic completely unchanged, undisturbed--examined, tweaked, repainted, rebranded, but in their fundamentals, just the same. 

You can bullshit a lot in front of me and not hear me comment, but that crap is really too far.

*

At one point in Tatsuya Ishida's such feminism comic, a male character asks a female character how he can be fight misogyny and be an ally. She tells him that in order to fight the patriarchy, he must support women, read radical feminism, and destroy the porn and prostitution industries. And that really is it! Hilarious.

Last Sunday strip, critical race theory was likened to coca-cola. Coca-cola is beneath trash, the worst thing that has ever happened to America and maybe to the world, as anyone with any presence of mind knows and understands. But wait, what, you're not into that shit, Tat? But all you have to do in order to not be racist and be a good ally is support people of color, read critical race theory, and destroy white supremacy! Double hilarious?

Ah, but you're into white supremacists these days, I guess. I guess, indeed, rustbelt and flyover whites are the true and only victims of our unjust society. 2021 revealed to you, somehow, that they're the actual authentic Christians around here, the maligned and the misunderstood, the demonized and brutalized, the beaten down and bloodied hope of the West. Which you're suddenly all about! That's kinda new and weird. 

One feels all in all that in the end this is because there's cultural credit to be gained with the subset of that demographic, and others, which agree with you that we should beat the gay right out of our kids before they turn into filthy trannies or lunatic queers, and that if we fail in this, those children should be disowned, banished, relegated to the lowest possible positions in society, even murdered. So they're the new heroes of Sinfest. We threw our socialism (lmao) hat in the trash. The true revolution (lmao) is in embracing tradition.

And I really am laughing, motherfucker! Who the fuck are you? Are you even, were you ever, real?

*

I am not trying to say that poor white people are evil, and automatically white supremacists. I am not trying to defend rhetoric that dehumanizes poor white people even when they are white supremacists. It's all the same trick, and I'm not against people who are tricked, do not advocate for punishing tricked people. I'm against the trick. This may sound a lot like a different formula, regarding sin. Well, the big thing with sin is that it is propagated by a great Deceiver, no?

Look man. If it's all the same bullshit, don't pick sides. I thought you understood that. Soon as you pick a side, you're on the wrong fucking side. Hate gay people, hate trans people, hate blacks all you want. You don't have to get on a team about it; nor do you don't have to pretend that you love everybody. I'm not asking you to cut a long deep line down the length of your face and bleed and scar for the Rape of Nanking just because you're Japanese. You don't have to suck black dick beneath a pink skirt to prove you have an open mind--it's ok to be straight, it's ok to be racist, you can stay being straight and racist, hate gays and blacks as much as you feel. Maybe you spend too much time on internet if you've been convinced otherwise. 

Literally all you have to do is not fuck with people. Literally! You can choke on a big white salty hot load of your own hate, knock yourself the fuck out with the hard throbbing mallet of your own hate, marry a hateful bitch and sit down every evening for the rest of your lives just to get a good strong hate going, just don't fuck with people.

Hate me all day. It will not affect how many baskets I make when I shoot hoops, the thoughts I have when I look at the sky, how my food tastes, anything. But if you fuck with me, I feel it. That shit interferes with me. That makes it so it's harder for me to think straight, get a job, be perceived as human, etc. 

There's making fun, there's making a statement, and there's fucking with people. And sometimes you gotta fuck with people--I am fucking with you, or at least trying--but then there's being cruel, and also, not knowing what the fuck you're saying.

You are increasingly cruel, you don't seem to know what you're saying, and believe it or not, you do possess certain powers in your fuckery which, consciously or not, give your fuckery the ability to affect people's lives.

I bet women have said something like this to you before. 

*

It is not feminism to maintain a population of victims for you to save or dispose of. That's not progress. That's farming. You know what farming is, in the context of human bodies, when the valuation of the bodies in centered on sex? I know I promised not to waste a lot of words, which is why when I repeat stuff, three times, I am saying, pay attention. So pay attention: that's not progress, or feminism, or learning, or virtue. That's pimping. To be clear, pimping is not feminist, or brave, or anything other than fucking disgusting. 

Almost every pimp I've ever known of, heard of, seen directly, or seen portrayed, has always pretended to love women. They kill, violate, brutalize, enslave them, and sell their parts and time and health away, but they love women. Love bitches. Love 'em. Why is it so important for such a creature to pretend he loves what he so clearly hates?

*

Nor is it feminism to repeat what what women tell you like a parrot in order to seem safe to women. That's being a dog, and a dog will sic what it's told to sic and love what it's told to love; tolerate what it is forced to tolerate. But such a creature, no longer strictly a dog but rather an organic tool, can also turn on its owner, and the world. Such a creature needs a leash; without one, it's nothing but a beast.

Men don't need to be on leashes. A man ought to be capable of being his own master. You shouldn't need to chain a man to a post. A dog may be another matter.

*

The role of feminism in your life cannot be to make you palatable to women. There is nothing any woman in the world owes you in exchange for the decency you treat them with, and treating women with decency is the only thinkable course of action. 

You understand? There's no extenuating circumstance that ever liberates you from that truth. 

*

It is not feminism to game your decency in order to reap any kind of reward. 

*

Feminism, like virtue, is a thing that if done in exchange, ceases to be. And like virtue, if used as a weapon, becomes something else entirely.

*

It is not feminism to tell women what their bodies mean, are, signify, whatever. Worry about the male body, if you're going to try to control someone's agency; at least you have a leg to stand on, since you call yourself a man.

However, you're gonna run into me, and I don't, won't and can't give a fuck what you say I should be or say or do because I'm my own man, and I decide what that means and how to express it. Try to stop me, and I won't let you. Try to do it around me, and I'll stop you like I would any other bully doing any other bully shit, with reason so far as possible, and forcibly if necessary. Dig it? No?

Too bad. Get on your knees and suck my dick about it, if you're angry. Beyond that, I have nothing for you. You know the rules: you wanna stop me, you better be smart enough to get at me and strong enough to kill me. Delicious, delicious male privilege. Savor the flavor.

No one decides for me what a man is. No one decides for you what a man is. If you want to be told, that's your affair. But you can't tell me. I decide for myself what it means to be a man. 

*

Feminism consists of two things and two things only, if you're a man: do your own work, and let women be themselves as complete agents wholly independent of you. All women! I don't give a fuck whether you agree with their lifestyles, ideas, or choices. That's none of your fucking business actually!

*

A man's work lies within himself, and right in front of him. His work compasses the world, as he is an intrinsic part of the song of life, the life of the world. And if there is something eternal in him, what we could call a soul, that too is his work.

So there's a lot of work for every man, each man to his own work. I think mostly we all agree on some form of this. How we hold each other to that as men, in cooperation and in conflict, and what world we build out of that dialogue, is essentially the main part of all our lives and the substrate of all the institutions and agreements we live by as men, as well as all the ways we cheat and change that in our vain efforts to control the consequences of our actions and the causes and effects of this world. In this, each man has a certain degree of freedom, and a certain degree of power, and a certain degree of responsibility.

*

So, bearing that in mind, back to being in relation to women: 

Indeed, respect women as you respect all life.

Keep women safe as you safeguard all life.

Use whatever powers and privileges you are blessed with in such ways as to give women space for themselves and opportunity to manage their affairs with autonomy.

Don't decide for women what their work is. Don't decide for a woman what is appropriate for a woman, or to a woman, or what if anything makes her less than other women (nothing does). Don't decide for women what a woman is. Leave that shit up to women. I understand: women may tell you contradictory things, one woman one thing, another woman another thing. God forbid women disagree; God forbid women not present a totally homogenous population of ideas and standards and boundaries for your ease of consumption! 

Don't decide what makes a woman valid. Can a woman make you valid? No. That is asinine. The validity of a man and the validity of a woman are inherent and equal traits. A woman can no more decide what you are for you than you can decide for her.

The relationship is only a relationship if there is balance. Friendship, love, work, art--balance. No balanced relationship is wholly unhealthy, and no imbalanced relationship can be very healthy. 

A man ought properly seek to have a balanced relationship with as much of the universe as he can reasonably grow into and maintain. 

*

The great misconception, the great driving lie, is that men control.

Slaves control. 

Men, free men, accept.

*

Check the latin on the word "accept". Check the etymology. Then remember that man is not needfully a gendered term; to be a man has meant in many senses to be a member of the human race, and women are decidedly human. The division between man and woman, man of paler skin and man of darker skin, man from the east and man from the west--these are distinctions that block man's ability to accept himself, distinctions made by the elite--men who through the blessings of good fortune and inheritance, and under the warping weight of responsibility over organization and debt (society), mistakenly believe that they are as gods--in order to make their organizations more profitable for themselves, in order to control. The elite are slaves, and it is their slavishness that creates so many of the problems in this world. Like a man who takes good care of his head and lets his feet go to hell. Well, eventually, that dude's back is gonna hurt him badly, and his feet will be as attached as they ever were.

Do you understand what I am saying. Slaves dominate, own, exert control. A free man accepts. Read some Tolstoy. Look at Jesus and the Buddha--you may remember them--they have benevolently appeared in your comic to some extent.

Man accepts.

*

What "radical" feminists are really talking about when they talk about trans people, trans women specifically, is rape. They are by definition adherents of the second wave of feminism (a regressive position, which I will detail), which in its modern form is defined by aversion/dominance responses to historical and persistent trauma. 

First-wave feminism reestablished basic humanity for women in political modernity (for certain women in certain countries). Once this was in place, it is natural that the most acute trauma and worst pressure over and on women be the crux, focus, and goad when it comes to the direction feminism ought to take, its position in society, and the position, definition, and role of woman in society. The movement, second-wave feminism, accomplished much for women and society in its time in terms of securing safety and opportunity for women as the century went on--indeed, to protect women from men that rape, dehumanize, and oppress women. 

Now that generation of feminism has been left behind by the discourse it elevated, through the freedoms it helped generate. Yet it has found consistent life in its historical continuity as the "original" feminist movement and its central precept: the memory and threat of penetrative rape, the segregation of the penetrative from the penetrable. The rhetoric amounts to this: men are defined as penetrators, defined again by their penetrating equipment, and women, defined as only-penetrable and womb-possessing. Patriarchal modes of social organization throughout history have demonstrated that the patriarchal experiment has run its course and failed, and a return to matriarchal modes of social organization is called for and politically desirable. This train of thought it culminates in a female elite, and cultural modes dominated by matriarchal organization. 

We switch places, problems solved. Naturally. 

Second-wave feminism, calling itself--still--radical, past, say, arbitrarily, 1990 or so, is the most slavish, confused, and concussed extant wave of feminism. Like dudes passionately desiring the return of monarchical rule in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty one. Though there is literally no radicality left in the position, every other stripe of feminist is afraid to call themselves radical, because they do not wish to be associated with these old gender-essentialist retrogrades. The truly radical elements of feminism had to be picked up and carried into the third wave, and there have been many since, as is the nature of progressing schools of psychosocial thought--once established, radicality is impossible, and the cutting edge moves on. Second wave feminism attempted to be more inclusive of all women (wonderful irony talking about it now) yet they failed by their own metrics for over twenty years. 

Indeed, working under this formula, women never rape women. This formula asserts that women cannot ever rape men. I suppose in a way that is something of a radical concept.

Can a father not rape his daughter? Some men believe that, believe that a daughter is property, and as property with sexual characteristics, it is his to sexualize as he sees fit. Do some mothers believe the same of their daughters?

I assert that it is so. I assert that fathers rape sons and daughters, sons rape fellow sons and daughters, mothers rape daughters and sons, and daughters rape fellow daughters and sons. These are things that happen, and it is all rape, and it is independent of patriarchy or matriarchy. Further, and logically, raped sons rape other men and other women. Further, and logically, raped women rape other women and other men. Many other kinds of traumas find their outlets libidinally, and it follows once more that traumatized people rape innocent people, that traumatized people rape traumatized people. There is no point looking for an initial trauma vis a vis gender; we were African macaques when we thought nothing of murdering for thrill and gain and raping for the sake of rape, and we still do these things, whatever we call ourselves now.

*

Those left behind by the third wave persist, as rape persists. Its main deal lies in the fight to ensure that trans people not exist, since the entire "trans meme" is a conspiracy designed by rapists. For weak people, the stated direction of the punch is at the strongest enemy--in this case, the patriarchy, which is the devil and his hell. This leaves them with absolutely no hope of victory and frankly no reason for anyone to expect anything material of them, but they sound like heroes. The place the punch actually goes--because there is a punch, a reason all these people get together in the end--is always down. There is nowhere else for weak people to punch. It takes strength to punch up, and not to punch.

Punching down is particularly easy when the target is trans people, because so many people will punch with you even if they are perfectly ready to punch you next. Once those pesky trannies are out of the way, of course. Shit.

* 

Communities that ostensibly fight rape culture have these things in common:

They fight against each other endlessly.

So desperate are they for allies--a limited resource which is one of the things they fight each other for--and for people to understand and see them, that they make rules and use propaganda.

Finally, they often endorse and support rapists who come into their circles. Thanks to their rules and propaganda, the rapists know to be dressed to the nines in the party uniform, and to holler the party line louder and more militantly than anyone else, so that they might rape (also steal, or in other ways parasitize) with ease and at some length, discretion permitting (it often does, in many cases for years). Then they are forced to either protect these rapists or "weaken the movement".

Rapists understand this intimately, and bank on the protection of the latter clause. And it's not just feminist communities or leftist enclaves. Look at the fucking Vatican, just look at all the priests around here that rape kids and stay priests. Look at every level of government and big business in the United States. 

Listen. The trauma of rape hangs over every community that has ever tried to be a community.

Rapists farm these tides intelligently; they drink and eat and grow trauma. How successful they are as individuals is dependent on their charisma, cunning, and manipulative abilities, and even more so, how far they are willing to go, how hard they are willing to work. Many rapists are exceptionally gifted and highly motivated in these areas. These are the exact traits it takes to make effective politicians, executive officers, war generals, presidents and kings. This is why the most raped thing in history is the environment itself, our own planet. Because all flesh, all flesh is ass, and every man's entitled to a piece of ass. Amirite, boys?

So who profits from radical feminist rhetoric? Rapists. Primarily rapists. This I assure you three times over. Are you maybe reading this, J.K. Rowling? I've read your shit since I was small too, and I want you to hear this from someone: that shit only helps rapists. It helps rapists rape children. They tell you that trans people rape children, scream about it constantly, in order to make it seem like they are not the ones raping children. But they are. 

*

That's just life, I guess. I haven't been able to figure out a way to stop them. Rapists work in our schools, banks, police departments, congresses and parliaments and courts, major businesses local, national, and international, everywhere. Rapists write our great literature and music, our just and unjust laws, and they tell us the news. Some get locked up. Some never do. Some get outed, known about, have to change their lives. Some never do. Some change their ways of their own volition; reform, recant, redeem. Some never do. Some are hung out to dry, publicly and gruesomely, so that the vast majority can keep raping, and we can all feel like we do justice. Yes, we all still practice human sacrifice; didn't you know?

Everywhere one turns, rapists hold sway. And yet! We know it is a crime, we do get some of them some ways, and we know, collectively--for not every human being is a rapist, not every victim of rape perpetuates the trauma, not everyone stays silent, complicit, unknowing--we know, collectively, that it need not be this way. Our efforts are necessary, and are not for nothing--same as against any other terrible hallmark of the worst devils of our human nature.

However, if your efforts consists of stressing that one group of people is more likely to rape than another group? I'm gonna conclude you're a rapist, fighting for rapists. That's what rapists do: shift blame. I said that already, and it's the thing most worth repeating. Rapists shift the blame. 

People rape. Every race, color, creed, culture, and gender rapes. All of them. Rapists exist in every category. Get fucking used to it. Humans do what? Eat, shit, breathe, die, and fuck. What else, deriving from that? We steal, lie, make mistakes, kill, and rape. Humans being human, all humans. 

You either fight that or ignore it. If you fight it, you have to have good reconnaissance. So this is your intel, for bitterer and worse: rapists are everywhere, absolutely everywhere. If you try to do something with people, some of those people will probably be rapists right from the outset. They may not have raped yet, but it is in them, as it is in you and in me, and the trajectory of the work and the opportunities that it affords for rape will be taken advantage of. The more people the thing involves, and the longer it goes on--I don't know where the points are, but at some point, rapists will absolutely become involved, and will gain the power and position they need in order to rape. That is literally math. That is literally lines intersecting on a graph. 

* 

Anyway. All this is to say that red flags and trying to be honest are the only tools we have. All we can do is take the best care of and protect ourselves, and the people we can protect and take care of to the best of our ability for as long as we can. Communicating honestly about it all is step one, and there are more, one imagines, but as it stands, there is no perfect defense against rape. If a rape-free culture giving rise to a rape-free society is to be, it is to be in a future no one living is likely to see. We have barely begun that work, and can hardly begun to imagine how to begin healing. 

So. Sinfest is a red flag. Sinfest has always been and has largely stayed either promoting or dependent on rape culture, even though it has pretended otherwise. Currently it is more and more heavy-handedly concentrating on how people who disagree with the author are mind-controlled by demons. That's the conclusion, for what it is worth. 

*

Do I say this to cancel Tatsuya Ishida and bring Sinfest down? No. I never heard of a solution to anything that involved silence and erasure and censorship. I mean, I did, but my interpretation of "solution" was in conflict with what I was hearing.

I say all this because I have to, in my bones I have to. Started typing almost as soon as I caught up with the comic. I say all this also because I believe many people need to read it as I've written it, starting with Tatsuya Ishida. 

Finally I say all this because I believe there is no point at which a human being cannot change their minds, transform their thinking, and choose a new way. As an example in defiance of Godwin, I am of the opinion that it would have been better if Hitler and Goebbels, for all of us as well as for them, if they had found the courage to face justice, and the task of life after their crimes. Not to be executed, but to face a form of justice that was redemptive. There is absolutely nothing Christlike in killing someone to punish them (this would seem obvious, but I guess there's a fight about it), and nothing either in imprisonment, though I grudgingly admit that here we are closer to the mark--where there is life, there is hope, though the life we generally allow the average prisoner is testing the limits of the proverb, and in most cases it is merely a slower and crueler execution. 

Crazy as it sounds, the best thing is to try and forgive. Here is my radical assertion: it is only through forgiveness that healing can begin. And if we determine to do better, but do not forgive ourselves, we are more likely to do worse. 

In life, in art, in work, in interrelation, I believe that while human beings always retain something essential to their individuality in all these categories their whole lives long that is immutable and never changes, human beings always change, and in surprising ways. Some change is superficial and some sinks deep, as deep as the immutable. The immutable, in the end, is framed by the changeable element, and so contextualized within it. And the changeable element cannot exist without its roots in the immutable, cannot be taken as the entire whole just because it is what is dominantly perceived. Words like "immutable" lose meaning when you try to use them literally, and perception is terribly limited. Everything I've ever said could be totally wrong! I don't think so, but I allow that it is possible. Certainly I will assert that everything that everyone has ever said could have at the very least been said more precisely--but ours is limited consciousness, applying microscopic, inefficient tools to measure and describe an infinite universe we can only see a fraction of a percent of.

We are different people and the same people in every moment of existence. Like the world and everything else in it, we human beings ride the edge of total chaos and perfect order and are the edge of total chaos and perfect order. We are all uniquely the same, and there is no point in judgment, or blame, that does not offer forgiveness and absolution. 

So I don't want Tatuya Ishida to shut up. I want him to keep doing whatever he feels like doing and make whatever he wants to make. I want him to give me occasion to see that he has transformed himself into a stronger person, a better artist, a human being whose worldview is capable of transformation. I don't need him to tell me that I'm right, or for Sinfest to start embracing my views and exhorting my values instead of someone else's. And I want him to do this of his own volition, approaching the process with honesty, because I'm not into coercion, or going through the motions. 

What I want is kind of beside the point, to tell the truth; I merely hold on to certain hopes. 

I think it's excellent that Sinfest has never stopped updating, and I hope it continues. I hope that it changes, going forward, changes radically. I have no control over that, but this would be a good outcome.

Right now, I look at the newest update of Sinfest, and I see a form of extra-stupid, cartwheel-turning hate speech, which is just so crazy and sad. That wasn't true back when the comic was "unacceptable". Back then, it made racist and misogynist jokes, but it wasn't hateful. This movement away from that form of toxicity, which was childish and shitty, into its modern form, which is the author's profound hatred of himself holding a twisted mirror up to the world, was slow and gradual and not without its sense; the initial movement was, if honest, exciting. 

Because indeed, patriarchy must be dismantled if we are to have justice; indeed, there is a story trying to come out of Sinfest and transform its characters that the social commentary only blocks and poisons. Indeed, the Church of Wokeness is some bullshit, and the way the discourse has been queered is not the way I would have queered it. I have made it clear that I don't like bullies, yes? Not trying to blame people for their trauma, but I have been in enough queer spaces to say with confidence that queers rape and bully in a social caste system just like straights do.

And twitter...**

*

No, don't be canceled. That changes nothing, fixes nothing. Shit isn't over till it's over. I believe in every single human being on this earth, rapists included, and I believe tomorrow is another day for them, as it is for me. The truth is always there, and its power to liberate is well-documented. I forgive Tatsuya Ishida all his bullshit, the bullshit fifteen years ago and the bullshit now. It's shit, a wide variety, but it's never all and only shit. More art is always the answer, never less.

So I hope for change, and truth, and freedom. I hope to see that forgiveness is worth it, and keep forgiving even if it's not, because whether it's worth it or not is actually impossible for me to know; we have to take these things on faith. 

Corny, pointless, probably for nothing. It's all I got. We can only attempt to be the change we wish for in this world, as authentically and continuously as we can, and never expect to see it.

*

To put a pin in this massive dirigible, Sinfest cannot be political and good at the same time because in the end, the author could do a sociopolitical cartoon or he could tell a story, but doing both seems to be too much for him and we've ended up with a work where the political commentary is reactionary and crushed into metaphorical structures that are unsuitable. The story is lost, wandering in a wilderness, and compromised by the political necessities of the commentary. The characters cannot be authentic individuals and mouthpieces and metaphors at the same time. Finally, are you making art or yelling on twitter? Creating meaningfully or drawing and then jacking off to the same porn? Telling the truth or trying to be right (wrong), and "good"? 

Decide. Up to you. You are a grown-ass man. Think about that, would you?

My advice? Such as it is: take a retreat from life, reevaluate the world and its occupants as you have understood them, revalue all values, reread your whole archive, think again, and come back as who you really are to make the comic you really wanna make. And seriously, remember that you are a grown-ass man. You don't need to be afraid of or pissed off by a bunch of confused and tricked children/robots on twitter or get on your knees in front of any living thing or concept.

Stand the fuck up and open your eyes.

*

I'm tired. This is too long to read. What can I say. What more, I mean. Infinitely more! 

I dunno. Hope it's something to think about.

--JL

UPDATE 3/7/2025:
Since I wrote this, It would appear Tats went one of a few possible routes; the one in which he is at least completely and without dissemblance of any kind just producing hate speech.

It did occur to me that if a person wants to make his living taking money from racists just because it is effortless to produce the kind of content that makes them basically have to support you, that is essentially one's prerogative under capitalism. I mean as I have mentioned, there is no rule that says he actually has to believe in this inane bullshit. But he probably does, for many other subtextual reasons. Also it is still hate speech, and therefore corrosive of prosocial norms and increases the risk of violence against its targets. 

Anyway, as of this update it is now a matter of public record that Sinfest is hate speech and the guy is banned from platforms for it. 

Internet is a trip. Life is a trip. It's also long. Wonder what the next edit will entail.

*That's postmodernism. Supposedly. Calling something something else and believing it. This is of course an absurd reduction. 

Postmodernist thought is nothing more than the case for becoming able read a whole text, the obvious and the hidden, text and subtext and metatext, and to perform textual analysis in areas not traditionally thought of as textual. It leaves you little excuse for just ripping out the parts of a text that you like or hate and calling it the whole, or for believing only what the author wants you to believe, or for believing only what society wants you to believe about the author or the subject or itself. Any statements made about text by postmodernists necessarily represent only the text that particular interpreter generated about said prior text, and is not, by definition, "postmodernism", but either a new or regressive interpretation derived through deconstruction and subjective analysis. There is indeed no guarantee that these conclusions will not be drawn based on the agenda of the interpreter, nor that their interpretation will be free of their prejudices. However, this does not mean that the analytic toolkit of postmodernist thought is without honest application--very much the opposite.

The thing is, anyone can use good ideas to say stuff you hate. 

Same basic game it ever was. 

Anyway if you want to talk about gender as a deconstructible and reconstructible text, we definitely can and should, but that is another longest post ever, probably.

Just by the way, it's the worst when people don't know what the fuck they're talking about and talk shit anyway. Seriously that "'postmodern' taco stand" is the worst comic strip in Sinfest and probably deserves a spot in the top twenty worst four-panel sequences of all time.

**Look, though. If you don't get that Twitter is a psyop designed to divide each from the other by promoting the worst of us all, you are fucked. Imagine a bunch of cows standing in a field. They look like cows. They are cows. Suddenly a bunch of dudes show up and set up like a thousand chutes going in all directions. The chutes look the same to us, and we know they all go to the exact same slaughterhouse. But the cows can appreciate differences in the chutes, aesthetic differences perhaps, differences in workmanship, in direction and grade of descent or ascent. In addition, to each other they are not a bunch of cows; some cows hate bulls, some bulls hate cows, some cows like to huddle close together when they feed, some stand apart, some cows are all descended from a certain pair, some cows are particolored and some are solid, and based on these metrics, none of which change the fact that they are cows going down a slaughterhouse chute, they fight and scream and push each other down, sometimes kill each other. The grass of the field is churned into mud. The noise is absolutely incredible. The cows, who are all the same damn cow in the end, fucking hate each other and stand as far away from each other as possible, and climb into their chosen slaughterhouse chutes like emperors processing on purple velvet to be murdered, racked, flayed, dismembered, packaged, purchased, and consumed. THEY FEEL LIKE HEROES THE WHOLE TIME, HERO GENIUSES WHO ARE WINNING WAY MORE THAN THE OTHER, STUPID COWS.

That's Twitter, but it's also how it's always been in society, and that is what it does to everybody. Get the fuck out of that shit.