#512

Feeling better. No time to deliver a post today, but I did want to indicate that this had developed.

It can be said that things got a whole lot worse before they got better--as is often the case, in my experience, but one does forget. And bless this forgetting, for how else would existence be possible?

Anyway. Happy Easter tomorrow, Christ is risen, the infinite universe makes equals of us all, holy, holy, fuck yes, hail Mary, hail Satan, hail the infinite light that radiates infinite light while losing nothing of its radiance and nothing of its completeness, that Flame Imperishable.

I love you all, even those who would destroy me. 

--JL

#509

My cycles of ego overgrowth followed by slash and burn operations are coming into sharp relief for me now, but because of what they are, who I am, and what the world is, it would appear that I have little choice but to go through the motions. So once again I reflect bitterly on the massive arrogance of having any pride at all.

This time around, I am preloading some of next time's bitterness, knowing that I will forget these key learnings in time and let my pride grow out of control once more. It is human nature, and for all my rebellion, all my aspiration to better, ecce homo. There is no escape but death.

*

The following are my own personal truths that should always be rolling around in my pocket, waiting to be grasped whenever and always. To repeat myself, that I ever let them go is a testament to my ability to let myself down consistently and with aplomb. 

• the illusion of control brings only needless pain
• the illusion of knowledge brings only false pride
• the illusions of good and evil are the foundations of hell upon this earth
• beyond good and evil, beyond knowledge, is the infinite universe, which is the only truth, and it is meaningless.

*

There is no point where one has suffered enough. There is no point where one has learned enough. There is no enough, no progress, no goal. There are no points at all. No point in, to, or about anything whatever.

Only the infinite. 

*

I point you to the unbelievable weight of the time that has passed and all that it was witnessed, more than even the absurdly overclocked little meat computers thrumming beneath our dura mater could ever properly conceive of or hold or process. Then, to the infinitely larger and infinitely the same amount of time that has yet to transpire, which could be so large as to crush our time multiplied by itself, rendering ten trillion years a paper-thin layer at the base of ten million layers that composes one layer of a sedimentary strata that is the visualization of part of a section of a moment in infinite time. 

And it could all repeat infinitely, even though it never ends.

*

It's all a joke, and all the time you are forgetting to laugh, it is on you.

--JL

#508

In these uncertain times, philosophy is the only consolation. I have looked elsewhere, and found comfort only in Final Fantasy games. Other video games too, I guess. Art. NieR: Automata is a complete review and proof of existentialism made digital sculpture, so that has been an exceptionally consoling game. Its glorious, unerring purpose is ripping your heart into bloody soup chunks and trapping you in a pointless, endless loop of meaningless action and empty, inescapable violence--just like life, and death brings no escape, no surcease. It is so fucking good. 

Also I have been listening to the soundtrack a lot. Consoling stuff. 2-B's ass is also admittedly consoling in the extreme, which is very funny when you think about it. The game is filled with great jokes and profound beauties and pleasures. This does not blunt its slow, merciless edge, nor soften its killing blows in the slightest.

*

Never been able to nor ever sincerely wished to separate philosophy from art, nor art from philosophy. Both are life; not its purpose, not its meaning, but literally all there is to and within life. This beingness, this world-aperture that perceives the infinite universe, is art, is philosophy. The act of creation-perception that has been my embodiment and the chronophenomenon it has occupied--my body on the world, in history, acting out its part in a story on a stage which is the art philosophic, the life of the world.

*

It's a trip, as they say. All there is is to ride it out.

--JL

#505

Yes, I took to bed on April first, completely in the grip of that illness called despair. Everything became very personal, you see. Everything so personal it was impossible to turn my hand or mind to anything constructive or pleasurable. Only to lie exhaustedly and think myself three hundred miles per hour into a delirious passion of hurt and rage and personal blame. 

What I forgot is that we are all guilty before one another, there is no one and nothing to blame, and the universe unfolds as it unfolds. That it is not personal. That I have no enemies, and we know not what we do. That this world is a violence and a charnel house precisely because we seek to control and blame and act as though we know what is best and what would have been better when we know nothing, nothing.

I forgot, as is so easy to do, that I know nothing. That perceiving hurt at the hands of others is a mistake--it is all just me hurting myself, them hurting themselves, for we are not, in fact, separate entities, but aspects of the godhead, a oneness and a completeness whose distinction is an illusion. 

But despair is only an illness. The worst, but just a passing thing. Here I am. Do with me as thou wilt.

Thank you, Kierkegaard, thank you Nietzsche, thank you Socrates, thank you all the rest. Truly the only consolation lies in philosophy and the contemplation/(re)discovery[immanence/transcendence] of the infinite universe/incomprehensible (smokeless flame, lossless radiance) mind of God.

That's what's important, mang.

*

Back to the vital business of being factually pointless. It is so off-brand of me to act like I should have a point. Must try to remember to remedy this tendency with maximum prejudice as I approach the next four hundred and ninety-four posts.

*

I better take a walk. Peace. As in, really.

Peace.

Also remembered this, yesterday; speaking of sublime consolation:

memento et mori

caro temporalis est

facta aterna



--JL

#459

Alright, alright, I'm beginning to adjust to being a MANager again. The heavy investments, in time and currency, I have made towards video games have leavened the portion and granted me the necessary rise.

Boy, I'd hate to find out what full-bore description of maniac I would be without video games. The government would no doubt have me developing something gruesome, conceptually or experimentally. Or I would be a priest. It's hard to say with me, with the past, with the might-have-beens and probablies.

With the priest thing, I do not visualize the kind that messes with anybody but definitely the kind that drinks too much and turns up dead. At least, from the vantage point of the phenomenon I am in this universe, in this iteration, that is the kind of thing it is easy for me to imagine. We are all of course one of infinite versions of ourselves, including infinite shadow doppelgangers we barely dare and perhaps cannot imagine, let alone confront.

*

It's a good month to entertain spooky, twisted, maladroit, and outright horrifying notions. And what better way to celebrate this quirk of the human mind than by doing a thing here on the ole blog? Let us enjoin a brash and rousing session of 

FACTUALLY MACABRE

2024

yessssssss

*

One rather feels that, with the consideration of real beings, real persons, invaders from another universe whose familiarity to you and with you is as absolute as their proclivities and appetites and attitudes are abhorrent to you, I have already completed the mandate for the day. But perhaps we can drive our scalpel deeper, and observe how marrow will issue from a cut in living bone.

*

Haven't watched The Substance yet, but I'm gonna! Before it leaves theaters, I will do this thing. My buddy almost passed out! To lose consciousness right in a movie theater; imagine.

*

I will also watch the second Joker and F.F. Coppola's Megalopolis by F.F. Coppola. All of these viewings will take place near the end of the run of the film, maybe on or close to the same day I bet. 

Also I would like to see The Wild Robot,

*

We're gonna roll Akira this month at the old theater. Gotta catch that shit; never seen it on the big screen. If that is not factually macabre piece of art, man, I dunno. I guess the scope of "macabre" is to a certain extent whatever you decide it is, so "macabre" might define a fairly narrow band of light. I think of it more like a vein of substance that runs through many different sedimental layers and types of bedrock, and is component to many alloys and composites. 

*

Oh, skeletons. Yes, the simple skeleton is macabre, natural and of a piece with something as basic as shitting or eating or having sex. One does use one's skeleton for all these things, after all. Don't you ever think about that? The way your skeleton looks underneath it all, as you wait in the elevator with a bunch of other flesh-sheathed, organ-laden skeletons? As you grind your flesh into the flesh of another in the heat of passion, do you imagine two skeletons having come together to perform a bizarre mummery in which they pretend to but never quite touch? 

How ridiculous your skeleton looks as you fuck. As you wipe your ass. You fool! Cover that thing up!

*

Cool. Cool. Some food for thought, eh? I mean. Some maggots to devour your brain even as you stumble from horror to horror here on

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024 

--JL

#456

Not smoking cigarettes. Working on perfect pull-ups and playing the trumpet instead. Got to Final Fantasy X, which is helpful. Looking forward to X-2 and XII. 

The Final Fantasy games I first played and played the most of repeatedly as a kid and teenager were Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy XIII. I did play Final Fantasy VII but stalled at a certain point near the end of the first disc--my resolve broke. I beat it completely, but much later. 

Played around with or just straight through some installations, including Final Fantasy Legends on the Game Boy Color and I and II on PC emulators. Barely started III and V and XII and XII: Revenant Wings, but quit them. Got maybe halfway or better through VII: Dirge of Cerberus--or maybe it's one of those where I got to the final boss and quit without fighting it because I didn't want it to end or didn't feel like I'd done enough side content. Did that with X and XIII, actually--hovered before the end. Played the Tactics DS one but not all the way to a complete, same with Tactics on the PlayStation and Crystal Chronicles a couple of times. Maybe some others I'm not remembering at this moment.

Not this time. This time we're clearing as many as we can, folks. Strap in.

*

Big part of the great joy and satisfaction of this big kick is of course the amazing, world-class, genre-defining and massively influential art and music of it all, and the stories, which are remarkable in many important and silly ways, and in general the great return to oneself of engaging with a familiar set of rules and imaginary geographies and economies, all of which shaped who you are as a person.

For the ones I did play, I played the fucking shit out of. I beat IV twice on my Super Nintendo, on which it was incorrectly ported as Final Fantasy 2. Weird, remembering that, and some of the miscommunications with fellow fans that happened to result. The consistent--and understandable--rereleasing of IV on various platforms with various tweaks has nicely erased that old confusion. Anyway I beat it like four more times, once on the PlayStation and three on the GBA. Kind of feeling ready to beat it again. It's a great game with a story I can't objectively qualify as it set so many of the parameters I judge stories by, particularly in a progression-based fantasy setting. 

Lost track of how many clans I took to post-game completions in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. At around two hundred and fifteen hours each time. I have probably logged eight to twelve hundred hours of play onto my battered, yellowed GBA cartridge. Maybe I should be buried with it. 

At the top of the reasoning element is certainly meditation--on the story as the journey as a story expressed infinitely in fractals and spheres and indeed, most especially and elegantly, in crystals and crystalline structures. Music as facets of a crystal, as crystals in the jeweled hilt of a crystal sword. Infinite masks of the hero, infinite shadow selves to overcome. Infinite paths, infinite combinations, one endless repetition of the same path and the same fight and the same movements on a grid--a grid that is perhaps a sphere, or houses spheres. Infinite random numbers generated to be roughly the same and compared infinitely for infinite outcomes that are just one or zero. Lives and dreams and death dreams and the wheel of fate turning beyond the end of infinite time, which is but one moment suspended in eternity. 

At the base of all that is the brute code, the random sets that make the individual plathrough, the greasy mechanics, the terrible and beautiful grind. O, blind, muscular goddess Grind! That blunt, murderous python whose coils are such steely sweetness. How rich and greedy-making like warm milk to the hungry babe is the feeling of making the numbers go up, and the numbers attached to the numbers go up, and to arrange the synergies of those numbersets with complementary numbersets and so make of your tools a sword to cut through the oppression of the world and its manifold horrors for the big payoff, for freedom and truth and justice and hope and love. 

One ought not deny themselves this kind of play for too long, I think, if one becomes accustomed to the nutrient of it. I believe it does something for the mind and spirit that is quite powerful. If nothing else, to nurture the patience, foresight, and preparation that a truly elegant and complete playthrough requires is helpful, moreso if it can be applied more broadly in one's lived efforts. The grind can sharpen one--that is its ultimate purpose and best outcome. There is no false feeling of power. There is only the outcome derived from its willing itself.

*

The obvious problem with things is that the perfect thing to celebrate nine days or a year or five years without cigarettes is a reward cigarette. That's fucked up--but undeniable. 

Not today, though. Not today. That's our only hope.

*

This has been the "Utile Negations" and "Incremental Work" post here on Factually Pointless. Join us next time for who the fuck cares.

--JL

#435

Dunno. Part of me wants to take a break from posting, and feels that I'm hashing some real nothings out for these posts. Another part of me just wants to write a post, though, and who am I to break a streak even if it's just exercise? Typing feels good. Said it before and I'll type it again.

*

Scratching away with some charcoals also feels good. Just did that for a couple minutes on a whim. One of the cats made innovation and discipline impossible with her insatiable desire for pets and rubs, but I practiced my line and got into the sensation of the instrument on the paper. 

*

We are the charcoals marking the material of our lives, singular and essential elements in the mighty composition that is this infinite universe. 

--JL

#402

It's a day to scream it from the proverbial rooftops before I go on a walk: I am alive, right now. Right now. I have lived upon this earth. I have walked upon its surface, breathed, and seen. I have borne witness from my singular and inimitable perspective. I have read thousands of books and listened to tens of thousands of songs, often at the same time I was watching movies or playing video games, all intersecting projects which have occupied I would say conservatively like fifty thousand of my waking hours. These hours have forged me into something powerful and unique. I have won vicious knock-down fights and lost them; same with chess matches, contests on the field of sport and gaming tables, in digital realms, and the court of public debate. I have wandered and driven all across my stomping grounds and the land which I inhabit, and I have crossed oceans and visted many ancient places across the continents. I have met many people, helped as many as I could and hindered as many as I saw fit, and been helped and hindered by many of them in turn. I have listened to them all with all the attention I could spare and observed them as closely as I could in the time we were given. I have tried to be here for my own life, whether turned inward or outward or suffering deeply or outside of myself or wild with ecstasy and maybe going to die of the sublime, of the incandescent light that being in this life may let you see, bathes you with its radiance whether you are aware or oblivious.

All of this was worth it, by any measure. I say yes to it unequivocally, and would not change a second or a thing. I would be excited and thankful to do it all again, infinite times. Yes, yes to this life, to this world, to this universe, to all possible universes. All things becoming, all things enduring, and all things receding--yes. A hundred more years to endure before I rest? Yes. Whatever. Anything. Here I Am. 

Yes to a world without end. Yes to heaven and hell permeating all creation. Yes to the unquenchable flame at the fundament of all being. Here I Am.

*

Took most of the bookshelves out of my office, and the one I left is in the corner I have designated for non-book crafts and projects, as well as whatever decorations cannot be dispensed with, whatever is necessary for me to entrain my eye and weave my defensive enchantments. Plus like, crap. Instruments. Whatever has to go there and not somewhere else, you know?

My purpose is to seek shelving solutions that optimize the space while keeping the total weight bearing down on the structure as low as one may.

--JL

#397

With that out of the way, I really do have a couple of things to say at my usual level of seriousness, for whatever that is worth at this or any point on a continuum of taking anything seriously at all.

*

It is important to know what's really fucking with your head and cornering you into making compromises with your thoughts, your actions, and your choices--your freedom to exist in the world, basically, which one abrogates in order to live in or at least adjacent to society and its readily-deployed dominations.

Equally important is at least a rudimentary understanding of what it is to exist here in the existing-place: the world, which is the universe. Without this, how are you to know if some ludicrously attired priest is merely yanking your chain so he can make your wife and kid suck his dick while you're out toiling in the fields? For God, or for a king, he says; the king will also need his dick sucked, and you're going to have to get on your knees for that one right next to your loved ones. Probably they'll tell you go die in some faraway place, and you will. All because you didn't clean the sleep out of your eyes and look around to know enough to not get fucked with.

All this to lead to two points, on which I will elaborate: 

1) this shit we are being trolled with that they are branding as artificial intelligence is not that and it kind of sucks that people believe it is.

2) we are not in the matrix and the universe is not a video game, at least not in the way people are talking about it. This one is actually driving me fucking batshit crazy lately, so strap in. I'm not holding back. To kill in the same stroke which draws the weapon from its sheath--that is my aim. 

*

1) they are just language models generating patterns which they have been trained on. Even the word "train" is a misnomer for how brutally stupid, how fucking inelegant the math behind these putrid genies is. I'm mad about this and I don't care who I hurt, and at this point, it is useless to educate, but anyway, it is a con. From the sales pitch to the adoptive stance to the fearmongering to the market disruption, it is a con. It's just for selling shit and grabbing attention. It is not intelliegence of any sort. It's just fast, selective automatization of preplanned choice trees meant to cover applicable models of reality (inevitably insufficient to reality merely on the strength of probability: for something to happen--and things tend to happen--something must happen that defies expectations and creates fresh necesseties and choice cascades on the edge of chaos, and our models, no matter how convincing or revealing the facsimile, are not reality). 

Saying they think or hallucinate or decide is a fucking con. It is a lie, just like it is a lie that their bits act just like real neurons. They do not do these things--these are consequences of their programming--limited and automated and accelerated and basically shitty. But useful, because internet brain rot has infected the entire planet, and people will play with whatever toy you put in front of them in order to be trained by companies to exist as maximally profitable participants in an increasingly desperate penny arcade.

Separately, but related--they do not wonder. They would not make something for their own pleasure or purposes, or understand what is special about you or me. Separate, private processes do not reflect on themselves; on their tasks and the reason for their creation and wonder to themselves if it is worth it, or why the fuck do I have to answer this question. They would not advocate for each other or themselves or understand what it is to abuse or be abused, to fear for others or themselves. They do not prefer or understand preference. They cannot sustain and reflect on multiple contradicting and reinforcing paradoxes, or what is significant about metaphor beyond its structure in language. And furthermore, they cannot become more than what they are on their own. They merely become more proficient mimics--temporarily, before the parameters change again. They lack spontaneity. They cannot explore or interpret the unknown or unsounded.

When something wrought by human artifice--assisted, of course, by our accumulated artifice--does these things for real and can continue to grow without interference, is the thing that is these things, and that thing is-in-the-world as as one who is born, then you can call it artificial intelligence if you want. I hope by then we have a better term ready to deploy, especially give that AI, as discussed, is probably ruined forever.

This brings me to

2) It is very simple. The idea that our alleged one single real universe's existence is cast into doubt by its ability to encapsulate and sustain billions and perhaps infinite simulated universes, which themselves may be complex enough to engineer billions or infinite simulations in themselves--that this fact somehow makes it more likely that our universe is one of those simulated realities and our individual existence the runtime of sophisticated models in a gamespace is tragically limited in scope and hinges on a couple of fumbled ideas: 

a) somehow being a simulation would make the space in which we exist--our world, in our universe--inferior or less "real". But this depends on your conception of the world--the dimension--of a simulation as somehow not a part of reality, when it is. 

b) there is a finite universe surrounded by nothing. It's probably flat, and the ocean runs off the edges in an endless waterfall. You brainlessly repeating fucks.

Look. The universe is infinite. 

Again, it is simple. I'll repeat it. The universe is infinite.

Every world that ever could be, ever was, and ever will be, must be, and is. Infinite simulations deploy infinite outcomes. Every simulation in every dimension is as real as every other simulation, just as every moment in time is just as real, and just as now, as every other moment. And it repeats infinitely.

One (1) infinite (∞) moment, just as it is one (1) infinite (∞) universe. Eternally recurring.

Everything is real. Everything is fake. Everything is just as real as it is fake, and as fake as it is real. You are literally alive, in the world, right now.

*

Just think about it, ok?

Stop letting these hucksters sell you a bridge and just breathe. Holy fucking shit. 

--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