#487

Man, I never thought I would say this, or anything like this, but I went to a gentleman's club yesterday night for the first time in my life, all by myself, and I had a nice time. Honestly it felt empowering in a feminist way, like, you know what, girl? Yes. Take my money, which I cannot afford to give you. This is a form of justice, and I'm ready to admit that. 

Either I misapprehended the ritual due to the distance I've maintained from it, or I simply had good luck plus my local place isn't some thrice-haunted slimehole. This fact means that I really can't afford to go very often at all--three times a year? If I'm really into it? The whole thing is a luxury experience, I have learned; like, I'm glad I had a nice button-down on, and it would really represent a badly sunk investment if one had a bad night; ruined by those unfit to call themselves gentlemen is primarily my concern. Certainly couldn't afford such a thing as a private room this time or basically ever. Next time I have zero debt and I own everything I own and I have more than a thousand dollars in the bank, I'll consider socking away the price of a private room. Good luck to me on that front. Signs point to fucking never.

But yeah. Told 'em up front it was my first time, asked for and got a rundown on etiquette and do's and dont's, learned the price of most things (the hidden charges must be seen as the price of admission and did not surprise me, but still), all very chill. The place smelled fresh and ventilated, which was really my main thing.

There were two girls on--Monday night, you know, place was just me and the one dude in there when I arrived, he left after awhile, I left a little after two other guys came in later.

This is one of those junctures where it would be easy to use ugly and misogynist language to dscribe kind of what was going on with staffing choices and how to work an entertainment space and serve the public--all dimensions I am acutely aware of as a professional and as a consumer--but it is just as apt to use much different words and ideas. The short and brutal, old-school way to describe it is they had a thoroughbred and a workhorse playing each to their strengths. The better way to formulate it is they had a professional exemplifying standards of rare physical perfection, performance expertise, and working near-silence and air of unavailable mystique (amplified wholly by copious tattoos from calf to neck), and another professional exemplifying hospitality, warmth, welcoming, relaxing the vibe, and putting all comers more physically at ease with a body more rubenesque, soft, and celebratory of physical flaws. The latter was my first on-the-clock stripper experience, and she made me feel at home very quickly--a talent not everyone possesses!

The funny way to say it is that they had the insanely hot girl who cut herself a lot but you really have to know how to see that, and the English major. Probably shouldn't say that.

When I say insanely hot, sadly, I mean that she was too beautiful, so beautiful that it messes up people and society. She even had short hair, a winning choice in my estimation. I been with a lot of beautiful people of all shapes and sizes, some so beautiful that I sort of expected to wake up at any second. She was perhaps the equal or superior of all comers in every respect, so the optimal dancer for my sequential life experience, I guess--I really didn't think it was possible to see something that remarkable on a Monday night. But there was an element of the pain of the reality of things underneath the fantasy she made so sublime.

Both of these women took amazing care of me and got a lot of my money, and I would like to celebrate that. They were gorgeous in every respect, and I honor their heart and their talent and their labor on my behalf. It was a pleasure to act as a gentleman before them, and to enjoy their company and craft.

 *

Beauty. Seen people destroyed by the beauty of another, which is sad but preventable and like, hm. I get it and it can even have a comedic streak, however dark the material. Yet to see people destroyed by their own beauty--that is merely tragic. 

Sometimes, when the world is done and the beauty it wanted is used up and irretreivable, there is nothing left, or close enough to nothing that the rest of the story is the most futile of epilogues. There's no good joke there that I can find. 

*

Beauty. Suppose I can rap this way, or want to, because I was born with a ravenous love for the stuff, an eye starved constantly for beauty, and because by chance I have beautiful parents who bestowed upon me a beauty of my own, just such one of those beauties the world gets weird around. 

Speaking as only a human can speak to other humans, human beings are uniquely beautiful. And when my eye, lover of beauty that it is, looks upon the world of humans, very few in general seem ugly to me, and it is my belief that the ugliness I am seeing is not of the body, but psychic and spiritual ugliness deforming the aspect of the physical. Roald Dahl talks about this in his little book The Twits--maybe this is the kind of occasion to even see if I can dig out a .jpeg I like to keep around to show folks.

copyrights, copyrights, mumbo-jumbo.  Does any of that shit still apply? Hasn't all human achievement been stolen, twice? Who gives a shit anymore. Roald Dahl's words, Quentin Blake's drawings. Mr. Dahl is dead, Mr. Blake draws on as of today.

Anyway!

Still and all, for reasons difficult to identify, some physiques are beautiful in a transcendental way, some faces composed in such a way as to alter reality. Some people have such beautiful eyes it is difficult to make and especially maintain eye contact. Some of these beauties are so total they remain alluring even when they house terrible thoughts and nothing but pain and boiling vengeance. 

It is a strange world, and the surface of things, beautiful though they are, remain nothing more than surfaces; as significant, as durable, and as real as the surface of a pond. The surface--the least pondlike part of the pond--the least real part of anything. Just a membrane, shifting from second to second.

Temporary, even fleeting; like all things, like everything else, like even this ancient, newborn universe.

*

Hey hey what what! Man, still can't believe I went to a strip club. Never in my life! 

My mom's voice and visage as it exists perpetually in my psyche, joined over time by other disapproving, judgmental women with their arms crossed who I have allowed to live in there, have all worked extremely, extremely hard to prevent this and are all very disppointed, trying to make me feel guilt about money and the whole rest of it, believe me--but I think they are wrong, despite my great esteem and love for them. It feels important to realize that they kind of have to be, in some fundamental ways.

*

Ok, ok. Lists tomorrow, rest assured. I know. Got you all salivating down your front like a little baby for some lists and then I pull some shit like this. Now your balls are bluer than a mandrill's face. 

Sorry to hurt you.

Once a girl told me that she had no choice but to masturbate because she'd been so wet and engorged for so long that it caused physical pain.

Sorry to hurt you.

--JL

*we were sexting. On farcebark messenger. A mistake of youth. If I ever piss off that mandroid or anyone working for that hideous obelisk, they're gonna embarass me badly. With a lot of collateral damage I guess, though it would be good if they could avoid that part. But I've said some real mean things about Meta over the years. Sometimes your opponent knows the best way to hurt you is through others, and God help those others if it's the only way.

Fuck you guys, though. I am not afraid of any of you. Computer nerds. Fucking losers.

#232

Two three two. GOOD NUMBER. Enjoyable. A little spike of a number. What a cutie.

*

Had a thought about what I might want to blog about, came straight to the computer, thought immediately gone. It happens. There is no sense getting attached to the thing that might have been. The only thing to do is hammer out the thing that will be. 

*

Either decide to act, or allow yourself to be compelled. The act of taking no action is a sort of art. Inaction being a form of action, sitting on your hands or walking away completely is as ringing a statement as plunging into the most heated and productive activity. 

In extremis, and in the humdrum of every single day, there is often no right course of action. No one can blame you for what you do or don't do in these instances, though many will be happy to throw it in your teeth and some will even take it upon themselves to punish you for it. Choosing to deserve this punishment, choosing to act in order to curry favor or garner praise and advantage, choosing to take the course which seems best and most virtuous to you regardless of personal cost or gain, choosing the lesser of two evils, taking the easy way out, handing off the choice to another, doing nothing at all--in these moments it is only you and the choice, which is is singular in the universe, no outcomes are knowable, and only God knows the complete story and the role your choice will play in the song of infinity. In the end, and in fact, all choices are the same, none better than another, and there is nowhere to lay your blame.

So we punish each other for the choices that we make. We see no other way to make our choices seem material. We relate everyone else's choices to perceived outcomes for ourselves, and judge individuals for the choices that they make so far as we can account for them and so much as they reinforce what we already feel, think, and believe to be good and right, or offend us for their breach of such. On the malign strength of this miscreant data, we consign other human beings to psychic hells in our own hearts, and occasionally, when given the opportunity, hurt or kill them. We hurt life, maim it, chain it, and torture it to death in the name of being better than those living things we degrade and deny. We feel like heroes. Like human beings performing a sacred duty. Like good people.

Or we forgive, and lay no blame, remembering how little it really is that we know. 

Just saying, in short, if you're really out to punish someone, you're probably wrong.

But it is after all your choice. You must act as you see fit. Everything is in deciding for yourself what is just, and taking responsibility for what that justice looks like. In deciding what you believe the right thing to do really is. That is between you and yourself, and nobody else. 

--JL

#181

Today marks the seventy-fifth year since the landing on the beaches of Normandy by the Allied forces in 1944, which is marked down as quite a moment. The situation is pretty hardcore if one lets the prevailing conditions factor in, if you get even a little subjective with the equation. It's some significant shit. It's not like any of those dudes didn't know exactly what the uncorrectable math was. If you were there, you would know for a cold hard fact that when the hull scraped the sand you were probably going to die screaming and hurting like a son of a bitch, breathing out your last far away from home too early in the morning and your mother would never see you smile again. If by some miracle you made it through, the math was again clear and irreducible: some of the dudes praying and vomiting next to you would not, and you were consigned to walk over their threshed bodies into however long you had to live on time they bought you. 

In addition, June 6 has the honor of hosting the Battle of Midway in 1942. That's just World War II. June 6 has a lot to its name. Extending just a shade, it is the date that Union forces seized Memphis from the Confederacy.

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Also, birth date of  Thomas Mann, Isaiah Berlin, and Paul Giamatti. Just to name the ones who are on my shelves or whose acting for the screen I have perceived and interpreted. Patrick Rothfuss gets an honorable mention since I only know him by reputation but a lot of people seem to like his book The Name of the Wind a lot. I'll get around to it. Have been meaning to get around to it.

*

Oh, apropos of nothing, war is a shitty thing, and the people who fight it do shitty things. Crimes within crimes, and in secret, the truly unthinkable, the shit nobody knew about, the shit every living soul denies they would do when asked and yet happens every time there's a war on, and there is always a war on. There is no defense for the shit that soldiers do every time that soldiers do what soldiers do.

But it is mad low class and an extremely rude and off-base dis to trash soldiers. Get off of it. I've read Sartre, I know and consider cogent the case that it is always a choice not to be a soldier, that you are always free to not be a soldier, that all war is accomplished by cooperation and if no subject agreed to cooperate with war, then it could not be brought off; hence, each of us is responsible to the other to deny the soldiering contract. I always love how philosophers use freedom to try to force you to act how they think you should act. I always love when philosophers are indiscernible from politicians.

Well, it is my small and uneducated opinion that Sartre* didn't really understand Heidegger, who was a Nazi and a cuck and a living piece of shit but wrote more important books and he talked about something called a situation and if you're not in someone else's situation it is just my opinion that odds are good that you know precious little, probably little enough to amount to dick, about what freedom looks like to them. It is difficult for me to consider that you know enough to tell them what they should do with their freedom.

Look, I don't go around volunteering to go to war. I'm not that kind of person; my situation is not that. War happens, that's a situation, and there are always going to be a lot of people who have a stake in that situation and create a gravity around it. There is an accretion of war whose gravity would pull me into it whether I willed it or not; that is a change in situation. That there is no such accretion is because wars are fought and won without my cooperation for my benefit, a fact I am at both at peace with and unhappy about but a fact, which I must consider when I criticize war as a situation and consider the situation of the individuals who are in it. 

It seems to me like I get to sit on my biscuit and intellectualize about all this because other people died and are dying in order to grant me the privilege! Huh. I would feel like a real asshole if I didn't at least have the grace to keep silent on the matter, if I didn't feel like waxing poetic about glorious sacrifice. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. My own business, mostly.

At the end of the day, I feel the least you can do is recognize the situation, and respect the decision, and use the whole thing to get some perspective. 

Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do. It may be opaque to you, it may seem to amount to the same thing, but the why matters, and the why is different in every situation, for every subject.

Not being a soldier is not a decision that makes me any better or more correct than a person who made the decision to be a soldier. 


*

Of course, this does not mean we do not hold individual soldiers accountable for their personal misdeeds. It never means that! It just means we do not consign every soldier as an individual to the horns of a demon nor the wings of an angel on the basis of current pop ideology heated by a feverish press. It just means that maybe you and I, dear reader, can perhaps slow down together and remember that even in the act of holding others accountable we may become greater hypocrites and monsters than those we would judge, must be on our watch for that always, must remember that the rush of righteous condemnation is one of the things that war is founded on, one of the things that breeds the iniquitous social organizations that give rise to warlike situations.

Just means that we can remember that in other shoes, we'd walk other paths.

*

Got more to say on this subject and another I was thinking about yesterday which relates, but I am tired, and this has gone one quite long enough. It was a big day today.

Ok, real quick: I had absolutely stupendous sex. It was fricking superreal. It was healing.

Cool peace barely gonna make the deadline tonight haha


--JL

*it is my habit to be extra mean to Sartre but he's all right really dude just sucks

I have a few of his books though