#319

Looks like I was being a jerk yesterday. Guess I was cranky. Guess when I'm cranky, maybe I pick on an illustrated image I generated myself of a technically disadvantaged-type dude. Today I get to feel guilty. Today I ask in all seriousness, without venom, who cares about not being able to do push-ups? Who gives a fuck about pants. What the fuck do pants, or how a person smells, have to do with their innate worth and infinite spiritual potential? Do their opinions and their affect as a subculture or stereotype mean that they deserve my snide excoriation? 

No. Not at all, dammit! The best thing that can be said about my outburst may be that it was fundamentally born out of frustration at my inability to help this kind of person, but that's not my job, or my problem, so what the fuck, man. Really stupid stuff. Gotta be better than this.

*

Anyway. Fucking hell. Let's talk about books. I'll finish The Wars of the Roses today or tomorrow, and then I'll kill three birds with one swift and terrible stone by reading the textbook for my current poetry class cover to cover, thereby preparing like gangbusters for that class, fulfilling the "poetry" checkmark on my "next book in planned alternating sequence", and also still pretty much reading a nonfiction book, what with all the hard data and background and terminology and other crap that fills textbooks so dang full.

That reminds me to mention I have been reading psychology textbooks and humanities textbooks, which means, when it comes to the latter, a bunch of stuff about art and history and culture and anthropology and law and economics and also like The Epic of Gilgamesh (but a condensed, prose form, for economy's sake--not very satisfying but still good) so that's nothing but rad. 

Makes me happy as a pig in shit, to tell the truth. I decided to take only classes that would please me greatly if I properly apply myself, which is decidedly my firm intent, and so far it's paying off. Those classes have been a lot of fun to be in and do work for, even though it's a lot to deal while working and keeping a house together with and it's only ever going to get more intensive. I am prepared, though, in body and brain. Feeling strong. Getting back into the swing of the endeavor and determined to, for once in my WRETCHED ARC, excel without getting a complex about it and throwing my life in the garbage.

*

Listened to all of Mega Drive's discography a bunch. It was so fucking awesome to do that, damn that's good music. The synthwave revival fellates my soul with such pleasure it should be illegal. This music ought to be a controlled substance.  Also the newest album from the band Alvvays is very good. Listened to it because John Alison, the former Scary-Go-Round (currently, Solver and Giant Days and maybe a few other things; formerly, many many comics including Bobbins and Bad Machinery) man and great delighter of my eyeballs as far as comics go for the past twenty years, put up a list of albums of the year, which he does most years (I don't always see it, as sometimes I have been off the grid or distracted or whatever), thereby delighting my ears as well. Before that, a bunch of Bleach soundtrack music, made by Shirō SAGISU, finally got put on iTunes, and I was listening to it a lot. Before that, the Andor soundtrack, which is a magnificent achievement both on its own and in the context of a Star Wars endeavor. Before that a couple of playlists I tinkered with for weeks, full of all manner of music new to my rotation and reliable classics. Before that, a massive playlist containing all my favorite blues, funk, soul, and low dirty honkytonk jazz music, which was all I wanted to listen to for weeks, only occasionally breaking form to check out A Hawk and a Handsaw or Vetiver or listen to some Mogwai albums. I'm listening to Lazerhawk's Skull Shark as I type all this.

*

Wow! Who cares about any of that shit! Maybe sometime soon, by the grace of the Almighty, I might come up with a thing or two that is actually of use to anyone. Tell a story. Have a thought. Something. Anything that isn't me just blathering about the things I like, even though, of course, people like that sort of thing. Me too, when someone else is doing it. Doing it myself, it's some weird completionist compulsion; I look up and there's just this ridiculous wall of text describing what a fucking loser I am.

--JL

#317

This is one of those posts written on the cusp of something, a border post, overlooking uncharted lands. Often, these posts are the final post before the blank, terrifying void of a hiatus, but pray with me, dear reader: this cusp is different. This cusp, this cusp right here? This is the cusp of heretofore unprecedented productivity, the cusp of rich, thick, ambrosial bounty.

When it was time for me, as a newly minted adult, to attend a four-year college, well, I didn't feel like doing that. What I wanted to do was ingest a bunch of drugs, drink till I went fucking blind, and smoke enough cigarettes to sound like Tom Waits. Wanted to work and earn only enough to pay a small rent and support my habits, at a restaurant or other food place so that I could mostly eat for free, and write. Also, play music on my bass guitar.

Also, die. This last wish went unexpressed, but was really the head of the pack. Funny how psychology works.

Over ten years and many adventures later, it is time to concede and accept that I did not die, and that the many reasons I gave and feelings I felt that prevented me from continuing my education and taking up a post in society that befits a whole and balanced individual were fabricated from that tempestuous mix of bloated arrogance, particular traumas, and corrosive self-hate that defined my tender youth. However, life has worked upon me, and I am a different man, a man that has been to the brink, back to the beginning, and ready for a new adventure. So on Monday, I go back to school, at the community college, and later, when I am done, I will secure work as a teacher. My feeling is that my experiences and skillsets will serve me very well in this endeavor, to which I feel unmistakably called.

Indeed, having withstood what I have withstood, and dealt with what I have dealt with, the idea of being derailed in my academic endeavors by what once derailed me is laughable. Once, I stopped attending a class because the teacher didn't deal with a student in a way I felt the situation called for. This other student stole about twenty minutes of class time from the rest of us because she could not see, and had to be informed, how understanding Nietzsche was supposed to help her with her business degree*. She hijacked the class, coarsely and witlessly, I might add, which incensed me greatly. After the allotted time had passed, I wanted to talk to the teacher about why that had been allowed. The man fled from me, literally, avoiding my eye, brushing past me, and exiting the building at such a rapid clip that I would have had to jog to catch up. Before this, I had liked and respected this teacher enough to have quite a bit of enthusiasm for his class. 

That's it. No more. An autodidact is all that I can be. It's all that I ought to be. I will not be taught by that kind of coward, I told myself, and left school; forever, I thought. 

Don't get me wrong; I love and live for being an autodidact. My only reservation about this process as I embark upon it is a reduction in the time I will have to pursue my own academic interest wholly unencumbered by outside demands from an actual academy. But on the balance, I believe it will only serve me to double my demands. No longer do I fear I lack the bandwidth to pursue my own interests and others at the same time. My time in the service industry and other brute workforces has taught me otherwise. Disengaging myself from various social and material pressures unique to the young and drug-addled has also broadened my perspectives tremendously.

For example, I have come to understand various hows and whys as related to that teacher allowing that sincerely idiotic individual to do as she did, and his subsequent ignominious behavior. It's not how I hope to comport myself if similarly tested, but yeah, I get it. We all have rights, and boundaries, and rights to our boundaries, and this creates untenable situations sometimes. So it goes.

Guess another basic worry is money and will we have enough, but that's never bothered me too much. This attitude, I believe, has kept me relatively unwrinkled and spry in the step, albeit light in the wallet, so I shall continue with this policy and hope it continues to serve me in more or less tolerable stead.

--JL

*this avenue of inquiry still repulses me viscerally. Fuck you, lady. Fuck you and may you have failed yourself utterly.