#490

Wow man. Even in the understanding that life is a saga and every day it adds to itself another entire page full of interminable details, each one advancing the plot equally--life comes at you fast. 

My little sister lived for all of forty-seven seconds. Suppose I misremember the precise amount of them. Confident that it was less than a minute.

Confident it was fewer seconds than I got.

This has always seemed like a fully insane juxtaposition, and it has only grown more maddening with the passing of the years. A burden. In manifold ways. That void, which should have been occupied. That silence wherein a voice should have sounded.

But there are no should haves. Only what is. 

*

Wow man. What the fuck makes me bring that up? Have I ever? Might suppose it's something the average reader deserves to know about me, maybe, before I hit 500 posts and/or stop forever. It's also something they will get to know about my whole family, but them's the fuckin breaks, I guess. My family is by no means unique in this experience.

*

The real "wow man" is that I lost my job, so I don't have a job again. Feels bad actually. I don't like that this has happened, or that I am in this situation.

b U t  T h E m ' S  t H e  F u C k I n   B r E a K s and plus it is my own fault. Couldn't hold it together. Had to quit, no fallback no plan. It's just me. It's how I can be, when I am how I am.

One for the "FIAL" column.

*

Guess what makes me bring it up is kind of this feeling like staring down the barrel of a gun. This feeling, one of utter finality, brings about a certain feeling of closeness with my sister. What can be fucking said about that, eh?

Fuck-all. 

*

But. It is only a feeling, despite its many reasonable foundations. 

For now, I am alive, and there is hope. There is still a lot of life to live, if I can keep getting just through this next day, as I have scraped along thus far.

And been grateful. Been joyful. Made sure it was worth it. 

There is at least that.

*

Maybe now is the time to start a youtube channel. Or a fight club. Or foster at-risk teens. Or found an academy modeled after the pursuit of Hesse's Glass Bead Game from Magister Ludi, or, The Glass Bead Game.

*

Or claim myself as a religion and that my religion demands that I stay on my own property five days out of the week, and that Jesus demands that I read and produce words and take images in through the eyes as well as craft my own, as a form of universe-sustaining worship twelve hours five days a week and three hours the other two--one of His Didactic Instruments, and a busy one at that!

You see, I have noticed how even far more immoderate ideas than that get people tax-exempt status and all sorts of other goodies. Maybe it is time to leverage this prodoundly idiotic system for my own tiny benefit. 

*

Probably not, but maybe? It kind of seems like a time in American history where maybe it's fair to try any number of new things and hope you don't get fucking murdered.

Peace, Love, Try Not to Die

--JL

#463

Woof! Maturation. Living in history. Sharing space with a crazy imbalance of new souls vs. old souls or whatever. 

It's like. Can I get stronger drugs? Gotta get through this. Find myself wanting stronger drugs so badly that my usual drugs aren't even dragging me out of bed. Only video games and a full bladder.

*

What the fuck, man. I hate that. Hate piloting around this self-heating skinful of blood and slime and keratin that doesn't have the sense to only want good things. It has to want horrible vile things too.

And thus! Factually Macabre, twenty twenty four.

More specifically, I am here drawing on a deeper definition of angst than is usually flippantly applied to the tormented, but. I guess in English it reads across the concepts.  

*

Have you noticed? That I am trying something new with periods and using more fragments? I dunno. Might not stick.

*

Maybe it's just how I feel today, this here post, in this, the month of the octopus.

That's how I've always felt, anyway. Also that October should be the eighth month, and that it is not is one of the things about calendars that serves as fundament to my chronovertigo.

Is my chronovertigo a chronic condition, you ask? Man, why don't you shut your fucking mouth. Jesus.

*

Doctors are terrible for many reasons. One of  them is their wretched imprecision, especially around language. Oh, sure, the Greek and Latin are straightforward and mean exactly what they sound like--typically. The English and Spanish, less so, and that's as far as my personal knowledge stretches, though many translated doctors also seem to suffer from this terrible disrespect for straightforward use of common tongue. More flagrant are the more recent linguistic conventions and innovations, and it is these I speak of when I say that doctors are shameless and disgusting word criminals. Language perverts, who attack not only words and sentences, but the concepts they are meant to enshrine. 

Every fucking god damn condition that exists is a chronic condition. It starts and ends, either after x time or because death cured every problem you ever had. Without a doctor there to "explain", if you were told you had a chronic condition, you would have to ask if you were somehow sick in the time, or if time had done something to you or harmed you somehow (it has), or if you were permanently sick like a vampire is sick and you will endure like an impossibly dense stone of disease plunging through the liquid suspension of interminable ages, or if the fucking illness would come at you every Thursday at five p.m. on the dot and would call ahead if anything should change day of, and would stay precisely thirty-seven hours per stretch--so, out with my bags at six every Sunday, darling. Next week. Ta!

Chronic illness describes nothing. And their given definition? Some shit, anything, that lasts from three months to the rest of your life. Ok, cool. So it's at least potentially like it sounds, depending on what you heard. And what is to be done? Well, don't go throwing clocks at anyone. Also rubbing a clock on the affected area will not affect the progression of the disease, though it may while away the hours. Kills time, anyway.

Starting to feel like I've lost control of this idea. Time to cut the cord.

*

So. All that aside, what's creepy today? 

Well, I dunno what's not creepy about being consigned to an existence where you can wake up sick one morning and it doesn't go away for the rest of your life no matter what you or anybody else thinks to try or does at all.

In addition, I have vaguely referred to the very real situation that a class of people--moneyed people, people with power and education and various brands of clout--exists who demand and are given access to our bodies through various social and governmental mechanisms. These people have created a fully armed, operational, and ingrained set of mores and durable material realities resulting in that we trust them with our very lives, and they do whatever they fucking want to us. They swear an oath to do real good with your body, but never since the dawn of time have we been more aware that oaths are maybe just words, and words are just wind, and we see every single day on a neverending loop that people have no problem using any word to rationalize any deed. And indeed, just like anyone else, doctors rape, cheat, lie, obey power's terrible and insane commands through apathy or turpitude or terror, steal, fall prey to hubris, dodge responsibility, and in their special capacities try and have you take insanely dangerous and addictive drugs, or cut you open even though they don't need to, and expose you to  you might never know what shit. Because they can. And if you think I am being an asshole, just look it up. Look up some real-ass, classic, juicy bits of medical malpractice history. Are you perhaps aware of the case of the Tuskegee Airmen?

Now, a brain surgeon has to swear not to fuck your actual brain tissues up on purpose if they go in there guns blazing as they do. And if they should happen to anyway? They can be sued. Now, the fuckers that go in there and screw around without a knife? The one everyone in society tells you to go spill your guts out every single week to for the rest of your life so that they know you in a way no other person on this planet knows you, and if you don't, there's something wrong with you? They don't have to say jack shit, basically, and they are way, way harder to deal with in court. In general. Unlike most doctors, nearly every psychologist knows how to talk to people.

In the end, however, these two types of people are fully complemented only with a third type: that thing which will allow itself to be called a lawyer, and act in such a capacity.

Man. I know this opinion is unpopular, but these three professions should be some untouchable caste shit. Fuck these people. In their modern hyperextensions, that is, where every human activity that has ever served us has been warped and corroded into something that hurts us.

An experienced healer, a powerful shaman, and a wise keeper of rules walk into a bar and are instantly murdered by a doctor, a psychologist, and a lawyer. Rimshot.

*

One final creepy thing about existence that I already said (the point that kicked us off proper): we are stuck in these bodies.

Do you hear me? We are stuck in these bodies.

We cannot get out. 

Death is no guarantee--only a chance.

--JL

p.s. look alright I apologize to all the execrably litigious people I have reduced to the absurd today it is a bad habit that I indulge in to keep my perspectives flexible and it is my particular affliction that I am goaded to flex the perspectives of others through doing word jazz but in the end I believe all people are fundamentally good and should not be loathed for doing their stupid asshole jobs or being grownups instead of being adults

quit your jobs though and stop being grownups what the fuck

BONUS CREEPSHOW: Final apropos of doctors: they know that what I am about to say is true--we are on the bleeding, verging cusp of some true life mad scientist shit. That Chinese dude CRISPRing some little girls to life was just the quickly subdued first spasm of a motherfucker showing up with something no one now living is truly prepared to report on as fact, but will change our ideas of the possible and the permissible irrevocably till the end of our culture, perhaps our species.

Also ideas are creepy in that--did you see? I cut the cord, and it came crawling right back to take over my brain with undiminished and perhaps increased fervor.

Ideas, you see, are not things we are really in control of and should probably take less credit for. Ideas have their own shit going on, their own physics and appetites.

Like...ghosts.

#267

Life is ever full of surprising blessings. Never would I have imagined that parting ways with a company over the ethics of my job the week of Christmas could be one of them, but it's such a classic trope that I find myself chuckling about it over and over. What a joke. 

Entirely my own decision anyway. Saw it as a definite probability when I took the job. That it should happen this week, under the circumstances that it had to happen under, is added layers to the joke of having to make so damn sure to myself of being right and doing the right thing that I would literally let myself be fired on purpose the week of Christmas just to prove a point. Just to be able to say that I tried everything and be honest. To prove I'm not a liar to liars to who do not give a fuck if I lie or tell the truth, I practically made them fire me, and they don't give a fuck Christmas or no Christmas and never have. Hilarious.

Anyway. Fuck all that nonsense. It's over. Kept my word and did what I thought and felt was right. If I feel like I could have or should have done more, that's my own weird brain problem. I went in at three in the morning at one point and stayed till three in the afternoon.

Last night I slept better than I have in months, maybe over a year. That shit was killing me, and only me. Let it be done.

For my part, I like Christmas and try to keep in my heart the year round. Happy to not be working this week. If the advantage of being an idiot is literally sleeping easier, I'll take it as a win.

*

Ok, so I wrote that first part six days ago, then shambled away from my monitor, loathing myself and the very concept of recording so-called human progress. 

Currently, today, the 27th of December, one full week after I lost my job, I am very close to doing the same thing, so that's that. Guess I'll bang out some sentences quick as I can while there's a degree of warmth in my blood.

Sleep continues to be better. I have typed that. It's sort of a sentence. Now I'm gonna take a shit, make more coffee, and smoke some weed. Maybe I'll finish this post after that.

*

Holy crap! It went just like I said it would. I took a shit and lived to type about it, which is great--you always hear and read about someone dying on the toilet because the process was in some way too much for their system that one time out of the many thousands, due to whatever circumstance. Every successful bowel movement is truly something to be grateful for. 

Christmas was pretty wonderful. Good to be with family. Good to have it be Christmas. I don't think so much about the birth of Christ as incident or general whatever come Christmas these days; I did as a child, of course, living in a culture that drilled the significance of the point home with a lot of emphasis--Christ was born. Later in the year, we discuss his death. Thus we remind you and give you to understand that all men live, and die, and in this particular case, live eternally after death, whatever that may be like, whatever that will be. 

What I think about these days is: there is birth, there is death, and there is Mystery, which our small lives witness and investigate but can never, individually, fully illuminate. In this dark universe, we all rely on light, which is what this celebration is all about; making a sacrifice of some kind to our hope that light will continue to shine. Light is God, and what is God in us is light. On this world of ours, we cast a light in the darkness, shining in our togetherness, in our apartness, in our joy and our despair. 

Been in something of a haze since being out of work. I felt extremely depressed about it, and everything. Feeling a little better, and this week I will try to get a job. Start with something I don't really care about, probably. Who knows, though.

Ok, I gotta make breakfast. Time to be done with this post and wait for the next one.

Peace on Earth, past Earth, beyond all limits

--JL

#266

Working on a project. If God wills it, I can finish another project or two as I plug away steadily at this project, and also meet the responsibilities and challenges of everyday life. Demanding, but doable. It requires of me a certain concentration and drive, under prevailing conditions which must be met, and that life shit is sure a lot. So who knows the time it will take. I will endeavor. Oh, how I will endeavor.

This does mean I cannot make any promises about posting in the blog too often, or much effort when I do. Always something somewhere has to give. This universe has laws about balance. Also it's extra hard because I want to play a lot of video games right now. This, like reading, aids me tremendously survival-wise, but takes time.

So there's that! It's December. I wish my job was to cook fancy soup all day for approximately twice what I make now, ten fewer hours per week. That's my wish. If I weren't such a fucking idiot in so many ways I would absolutely be doing that right now, but I am who I am instead. Woop woop. Bam!

--JL

#255

Finished Waiting For Godot. It was fucking good. Then I read this book Hunted by a man named William W. Johnstone. It was fucking terrible. I found my copy of Waiting For Godot in a free library. My grandfather-in-law gave me Hunted and its sequel, Prey, to borrow.

Suppose I were the sort of man who would think Waiting For Godot was terrible, and Hunted good. I might not be that different of a man, all things considered. I think that is probably likely. But the aesthetics of me would probably be radically different, so different as to create a real difference, a gap, between this imaginary me and myself. And certainly, this gap might be very notable, even multiplied in aspect, when it comes to this blog. Different books, different stories, a variant set of purposes in mind, no doubt. It's something of a thought.

By which I partially mean of course that Hunted was fairly outside of my usual fare in a couple of key ways. I suppose my power fantasies trend differently.

*

Reading Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat and Samuel Beckett's collected poems in English and French as a breather before I read Prey. Yes, I thought Hunted sucked, even to the point of anger and disgust, but that doesn't mean I didn't find much that was valuable, humorous, and interesting within its pages. Also there is so much to learn from bad writing and opinions diametrically opposed to your own. Also I gotta tell the old man what I think because that's just how I am, I guess, which also means I gotta read both books and think about them honestly. 

After that, who knows?

*

Took a promotion at my job. Salary! Wow. My income has doubled, which is significant with the added bonus of creating absolutely zero class guilt. It's about as small as salaries get. Slightly less than the lower end of what a teacher makes.

Indeed, eating food that won't poison you and the shaping of young minds. Menial shit. Hey, at least we make twice what the janitors and dishwashers make, or even a shade more. So that's awesome, because our jobs are impossible without them. 

I want to be clear about my tone. These facts upset me.

Still. Movin' on up, they say. I don't disagree. T'was good to just go to the fancy supermarket and get what I wanted without feeling tightness in my chest.

--JL