#344

Keep coming back to it these days, so I might as well write it down. Elaborately optimize it. Trick it out, even. 

So, it can take place in a bus, since I know how to drive one, and why shouldn't I one day get my hands on one and cock it up to run on, I dunno, momentum. How's that for an optimized fantasy. My bus runs on its own momentum, and generates starting energy and impulse from running a charge sent from a switch connected to a bundle of 5-cell batteries powering electromagnets in the wheel wells and a mechanical man under the hood. It is this man who starts the engine, using a furnace that burns clean and runs on his own good cheer even as he does, and is never in short supply.

Ok. The bus runs. Silently. Maybe, sometimes, when everything and everyone is quiet, you might become aware of a nearly silent, humming grumble. And it plays this playlist I've been working on, and whatever else anybody wants to play no hassle, high quality sound. We'll call the bus Mighty Jake III.

All the highways and byways are empty of other vehicles. It's just our bus. The fields and towns and cities of the land remain populated, but only we drive. The transit is, as it were, sublimated. Otherwise it's all the same. Perhaps the empty highways are only an illusion, but we do not trouble ourselves about that, or about anything. The rest stops serve food as homemade and good as the diners, which use organic ingredients worked on by happy cooks well-paid and treated with dignity. Everywhere we go, we are treated with dignity, and treat everyone we meet with dignity. Everybody has enough money. Everybody's bills are paid. Nobody's got somebody back home who's laid up sick. Everything's tranquil.

MJIII's passenger area doesn't have to conform to safety standards or the rules of dimensional space, so usually it's sized more like a big van, everyone sitting comfortably, but not as comfortably as, say, in a given living room. The conditions and particular sensations need not be uncomfortable physically but adhered to; the body's sense that transit is happening, that everyone is closer together with fewer avenues of movement than they would be in most other contexts. But it's hammocks, it's beanbags, it's what you most need and the most you can get. When it's time for sleep, when some privacy is what's needed, the passenger area can be much bigger on the inside, TARDIS style. Need a shower? Not while the bus is moving, but whenever else, along with getting some laundry done. 

It begins with just me, rolling out in Jake all by myself. After I back the thing into the street, I open the door for Ezra and the cats, who live in a large, enriched section which travels with us without moving, MJIII's own extradimensional top deck. Ezra, looking forward to meeting everyone and introducing me to everyone, for that is the project--gathering the scattered handful of friends and family scattered through time and space whose faces we have not looked upon in for too long a spell, those whom we cherish no matter how long we must miss them. 

Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Miami, NYC, and that's just the big ones and that's just for starters. We have stops in Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, and Japan, We have stops in Nairobi and Baghdad and Warsaw and Istanbul. 

After that it's just terribly personal invented dialogues concerning pieces of music and thoughts about life, an imaginary communion. Maybe someday I'll write it down, maybe as itself, maybe as something some characters are chewing on together. I'll try to make them beautiful, because in my mind, it is so beautiful, driving a pretend vehicle while I talk to absent friends and the dearly departed about what I really want them to hear, what I would give to relish in hearing them say.

*

Hey! Hop in. That all you're bringing? No, my dear, my darling--like our hearts, like our love, like our crazy-ass heads, this bug's bigger on the inside. 

--JL

#340

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

Some examples? Why not!

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

--JL

#338

Dang, blog! So much has happened that it feels like much longer than it has since last I approached this supple text field. Not just in my life, but all over! Weather is happening like crazy, politics is yowza both at home and abroad, and science marches on. My mom fixed up my dad's old bike for me, which was a fun project for her and a massive boon for me, so I've been pedaling around happily. Many friends that had been living or working abroad or interstate have returned to the local haunts, which is great, and I have been seeing them, mostly for lunch or dinner, and on one memorable occasion for shrooming out.

One reason, though, is I don't have anything to say. Well, I do, but I write it down elsewhere, for (god, hopefully swiflty upcoming) publication, or just say it at a person whose face happens to be near mine.

Gonna go cook some eggs now. Cook'm 'n eat'm. Big bouncy yolks. Mmmm.


--JL

#183

Rained all last night after threatening all day, all day, filling the air with an unsettling promise. When the rain came the air itself exhaled, and set down some heavy burden, and the whole world breathed easier. 

This morning a huge chunk of a limb fell off the big willow, one of the bare dead extensions of what remains to it of its former crown, riddled with worms and grubs and the ravages of the hunting and nesting of birds. I heard it crack and the noise of the air and lash of the leaves as it fell and I heard the great thud of its landing. When I went to look, there it was, looking for all the world like someone had hauled a partially rotted log out of the woods and laid it to rest in the mown grass by the willow.

*

Watched some Friends the other day with Moe and was surprised by how fun it was to watch those folks interact and do their lines and shenaniganery. I watched Friends as a kid, fresh as it aired, and these people and the way they mess around with each other and snark it up had a greater impact on how I got by as a teenager than I had perceived. Friends isn't exactly The Wire, y'know, no shit, but it's not really as bad as people act. I mean, parts of it are pretty cringe, but there's tons of fun material there.

"What'd I just say?"

Classic.

*

Another early day at work, folks. Much as I would love to continue to entertain us both, duty summons me with its implacable knell.


--JL

#171

Post number one hundred and seventy-one! Such a cool number. It's Album Week 2019, so I won't blather on, but the foremost thing is that the number one hundred and seventy-one is an anagram of the number one hundred and seventeen. They are not anagram numbers, which is its own thing. Just anagrams of each other.

*

Being into a particular album with all of your friends at once is a special thing, kind of a social supersigil. Like you're all flying the same invisible flag, and wearing the same invisible patch over your hearts. It may happen a great deal that a few of your friends are into the same album, that maybe three of you have a special thing about the same album, that you and one other person in the group are having a freakout over the same album, that people have acquaintances and friends and family members outside of the group with whom albums are being shared and subsequently disseminated throughout the group. Standard activity. Fragments clashing, accepted by some and rejected by others. Codes inscribing themselves into a mainframe or failing to penetrate firewalls.

Standard thereby is that a whole group of friends may be into a set of the same songs, a blanket woven from the preferences and suggestions of several souls, drawn from a wide range of different sources, and used to cover a whole web of interrelation. A floating playlist whose notes swirl around a connected pack of human beings and pierce their hearts in turn to get a thread through, to bind them. Magic is that simple, and that irrevocable.

For a whole album to nail a whole group in the head all at once is a rarer thing, provided you have in mind a group of friends whose tastes, preferences, and ideas cover a disparate range. I've never hung out with a bunch of people who are just like me and like everything I like and dislike everything I dislike, so I can only think of perhaps only one album that has taken everyone I am close to at the moment into its belly.

Don't remember which album it was. Something embarrassing I'm protecting myself from, probably; must be bad, because I'm not very sorry about liking the stuff I like. Whatever it was, I remember how it felt to be a teenager and ride around town listening to it. It is difficult to be a teenager, you're fucking feral, helpless not to broadcast everything you're feeling which is literally everything so no one thing is correct, and the tendency of existence to radically amplify renders you constantly vulnerable to ever-more complicated and acute forms of despair.

So when a bunch of teenagers are all in a good mood, even blissing out, at the same time, it's one of those legitimate miracles. Albums can do that, they have that power of suspension, that ability to gather together and lift up.

*

Yo, I didn't moisturize my hands yesterday! What an ultramaroon.


--JL

#54

I took a weekend, huh? Didn't plan it, but according to physics, making a double-post would naturally incline me towards taking two days off on a row.  And what I did (besides work, and stuff I'll get to later in the post) is make a present for you! You just have to give me seven dollars, first.

Paperback versions of my books! I made new covers so they would be different than the kindle versions and everything. Seven dollars. Seven dollars is, by my lights, a reasonable, honest, and round price, and if you give me seven of your dollars, I will love them forever. Six would have been too cute.

*

One reason I didn't make posts is, of course, immediately after I wrote about friendlessness and abandonment, people came out of the woodwork to make me feel loved and wanted. No one I know reads this blog because while I might mention offhand that I shit out a blog, I do not share links, or generate traffic by word of mouth*, so it was a classic case of screaming into the Void and the Void demonstrating that it contains a universe which can, at times, gently move one of its threads in order to make an idiot know that he is needlessly squaring his own misery.

So when I wrote that I have no friends, I was being way rough on myself and on my, you know, friends.

It would have been more precise to say that my oldest friends have scattered to the winds, some with the possibility of  eventual reunion and some most likely not. It would have been more precise to say that the friends I had made in the years when I was with my ex-betrothed were really mostly her friends, or so their general silence and uneasy tones towards me after I ended things (things were real bad) made me feel like they cared nothing for me. This was compounded by other factors, and when my next partner (a narcissist who had me cut everyone out of my life except for her and my parents, and she wouldn't have had me seeing them either if she'd had things entirely her way) started to get me acting so crazy last spring, I doubt those who did bear me affection and trust will ever speak to me again. Not that my shame would let me so much as meet their eyes, or in a couple of cases, that my fury and hurt would let words escape my locked throat. It wasn't all the narcissist! She needed something to work with, to twist and warp.

But there are a few people around these parts who it turns out still want to know me, who I was able to talk to and whose empathy and care for me, though tested, remains, and remains strong. I played Mario Kart with some of them on Friday night, and helped another couple work on a truck then sat down for real talk on Saturday night, and tomorrow or Tuesday I will see yet another for co-op games and real talk.

My outlook has morphed dramatically based on those hours, and it is difficult--raw enough to ooze--to express how much the words and gestures exchanged during those hours meant to me. The preceding paragraph doesn't sound like much, but it was everything. My last partner is still lurking in the back of my head, insisting that no one can be trusted, promising me that I am truly alone, that I am abandoned.

Not true.

Those who have had their lives turned upside down and inside out by a narcissist will understand what a knife through the heart of confidence and self-conception it is. I'm not a stupid dude. The inborn talent of the narcissist is turning one's own intelligence and empathy against the other sources of life in one's existence and directing them, and every other good thing, toward themselves alone. Then they get bored, or another supply for their narcissism catches their eye, or both, and you're lucky to get out alive.

In my case, when this lady found me, I had a car, a wardrobe, a regular amount of stuff, a library of books, several instruments and an amplifier, my name on a lease, a little money in my pocket, a job, and a broken heart. When I got away, I had no car, no home, no money, less than half the books I once did, and two bags of stuff--mostly the few clothes that remained to me--one box of papers and notebooks, my trumpet, my cornet, and my acoustic bass. I don't know where my heart is, even.

For now, now that I am out, there is only horror at myself, at the lies I fed myself; at the colossal imbecility of letting myself be abused in such a fashion, horror as every memory reveals poison, as every gesture and word turns to dross and the bloody game of it all has light thrown upon its dark heart. I had no idea, really, that a person could do this to another person. 

Ah, and the feeling like a fool. Call me what you will, but feeling like a fool is, to me, worse than any physical pain I have ever felt, and I have not led a sheltered life; I am the best of friends with all manner of pain.

Friends help.

*

I'll write more about friends tomorrow! I need to go to sleep, I slept like absolute nonsense last night.

If you've been fucked with by a narcissist, even if you are a narcissist, may God bless and keep you. I am so sorry.


--JL

*(edit) this has become untrue, I have told some folks about what I make and pointed them in this direction. So what.