#438

Today's post might have been one of those posts that begin like "Here I am again, about to yell about how crap the news is at doing its job. God damn what the fuck kind of analysis and priorities etc etc etc" but then it struck that it's a shitty part of the hobby. Kind of like if I wrote occasional but fairly evenly distributed posts about how assholes fucked with me while I was driving.

In the time that I've been writing this blog, let alone beforehand, people have been unbelievable pricks to me thousands of times using the way they drive their cars, and thousands more than that have risked my life or fucked with my temper simply by being idiotic or fallible. A few have come close to killing me. But even though this is direct and real, reportable and an actual set of memories involving actual unique circumstances, I never bitch about it on factually pointless. I bitch about liars lying and occluding using tools designed to help them lie and misdirect on a grand scale, as though they would do anything else. It's their jobs. There's a whole infrastructure around bullshit production. Who am I to tell anyone to shut up?

I never bitch about that other stuff because who cares, right? I've forgotten about it by the time I'm stepping out of the car, though the event gets filed away with he rest for recall purposes, presumably. And who cares also in the sense that it happens to every single one of us. It's how impersonal contact with physical bodies is. By extension, getting fucked with by the powers that be and suffering disaster and upheavals is merely the human condition. Everybody knows this flavor. So the running commentary of a bunch of chittering mynocks only sours the experience, frankly, and running a commentary on that commentary may be asinine. Knowing what politicians are up to has never helped me personally or helped me help anyone else. Maybe I should concentrate on my own monkeysphere and quit thinking about geopolitics.

Think about it. Is it more useful to spend time getting to know people in my neighborhood and striving to contribute to my city and community, or learning the timeline and general sense of the diplomatic interrelations of the Eurasian theater? I mean if knowing about stuff like that isn't your job, you probably might not care to put a lot of effort into the latter. You would probably naturally gravitate towards the former, and you'd be right. That perverse imp astride my shoulders has kept my nose too much in the book. Knowing things feels good, but is perhaps less than utile if not consistently put into some form of praxis beyond doing the least harm and surviving on my own terms.

The cultivation of a perspective that I can respect myself for has come at something of a cost.

Whatever. Perhaps the answer is to double down on my policy of trying my best to only read real websites. Stop with the mass media too. Soon I will have to quit streaming, when it's literally just tv again. A return to a more intentional curation of a more limited and difficult-to-obtain culture, both to experience and to possess. Should quit the news entirely, make use of the Fire Index, and figure out what is happening from context and casual commentary. Who cares if it's accurate or real? It's perceptions and lies and impressions all swirling around and what it will come down to in life is just the choices you made while everything was happening, which are valid no matter what you know or don't know because how could you possibly know enough ever to make a properly informed decision?

No one can. One of the reasons we are all guilty before one another, and can therefore let go.

*

One of the points in this book I'm reading now is that for behavior to change, structures need to change. It is the single greatest point of contention I have found within the text: I could not disagree more. It is precisely in the change of our behaviors based on a revaluation of our values that our lives beyond and around those structures exist. It is in the discipline and will to behave as we please, and not as we are incentivized, that our future lies.

--JL

#373

Fucking losing my mind over here. But what else is new? This is Factually Pointless, the free and easy ravings of a madman undergoing existential mastication. Rejoice, brethren! We are the eternally digested, breaking down together in the great roiling stomach of this universe. 

*

You see a lot more fake bullshit these days, but that's a) kinda relative and b) if you are of any kind of advanced age, say, older than fourteen, and have ever so much as looked at internet, you should have prepared yourself well for this level of saturation. I get that this is not a very reasonable outlook. We are all built to pay attention to very different things in very different ways, from the obscurely particular to the embodied universals.

My policy is to assume that if an institution--let's say, a governmental organization or representative or representative body, or if you prefer, a media outlet--is putting out deepfaked shit or is addressing the social issue of fabricated content less than adroitly and intelligently, then they know goddamn well what they're doing and projected ignorance must be construed as feigned. I don't accept the kind of fucking incompetence I see out there as legitimate. Safer in the long run to consider it a manipulative stratagem.

*

I may be a no-name idiot with no standing at all in this world, but I don't have to be a fucking sucker into the bargain. If I am tricked, let the trick be justifiably sophisticated. If I am subject to powers I cannot resist, let them at least have to exert their irresistibility. I'm not here to make things easy for anybody that wants to fuck me up or own me. 

*

Feels good to write that, but what hope do any of us have? 

Only hope itself, I guess, and whatever paths our particular hopes can illuminate. Only what keeps us going.

Whatever we do, we are not lost if we hope. In hope, nothing is in vain, and no defeat is total.

*

We cannot know the mind of God, so I would say that my actual leap of faith as Kierkegaard would have it is throwing myself as completely as I can, all my life, into the truth of the prior two sentences. It is easy for me to believe the inscrutable universe has no regard for us whatsoever. I can accept that and understand life, having lived, as an even trade. In context, however, in the human particulars of what it is to have lived as part of a narrative--a narrative, that is what is crucial here--I cannot and will not accept the narrative as shitty. I say it's a good story. I say it was worth telling no matter how it ends, how many fucked up evil details make it hard to stomach. That's my leap of faith. That is what I am a knight for, again, in Kierkegaardian terms.

--JL

#327

Looking over some news, and came across some ideas I found too delicious to resist writing some ideas back at. Don't really know that it's a great thing for the blog to be used that way, as my personal comment thread, and I have tried to refrain from that, but it's been creeping back in lately. I mean, I could have written a lot more posts about China. Well, I did write them. I didn't publish them, though. That's something.

Anyway, the salient bits are this: more deepfaked and AI generated images than ever, human brain tasked with processing five percent more information per day every year and it drains people, information apocalypse, a construction worker can make a viral shitpost of the Pope in a puffer while tripping on shrooms and people will think it's real.

It's 2023, twenty years since I started lurking forums on the old web, and to this day I am amazed at how precise and applicable a predictive engine the language I absorbed back then proved to be. The Trump presidency was predicted. The takeover of meatspace by online dynamics and the escalation of the culture wars thereby was not only predicted but theorized, workshopped, designed, and launched, like a flock of autonomous drones darkening the skies. I watched it happen in horror and awe, astonished and fearful, like Ian Malcolm seeing the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park for the first time. The crazy sons of bitches did it, they said what they were going to do and they did it. Meatspace people still think Buzzfeed is like this normal thing that just happened organically instead of a psychic harpoon that punctured their blubber and extended poisonous barbs. Their methodology works on the micro to this day. Practically every niche tworter account swollen with ingroup influence, whose gyrations predict the shape of thousands of sycophant accounts, began as a "mere" shitpost/joke account, as Buzzfeed was once a "mere" shitpost/joke generator/aggregator. It's why my face twists over to one side when someone tells me to lighten up, it's "just" shitposting. It's like, son, I was there. Do you understand? I was reading the posts when these fuckers were telling each other how shitposting is never just shitposting, and this is how we prove it. I was there when they proved it, and now we are all here. 

It is my habit to trade in mental images, especially of internet; one of the reasons people were surprised for a long time that hadn't read Snow Crash. Well, now I have, and the image of ziggurat therein is a powerful one, dispensing the binary commands on which a society operates. How about this: a warehouse big enough to contain eight billion player pianos. 

Hm. I don't have much of a point, I guess, except that some of us have been girding our loins for this type of shit and the level at which it is starting to operate for decades. I have never imagined trusting words and images on internet; almost since I began daily usage I have understood that it is more like a dream than anything else, that words and pictures and even math can lie on internet and that to trust any part of it or think that it is real is to invite a kind of death into your mental processes. It is my overriding assumption, my phalanx, that statements of fact on the internet are designed to mislead your thinking, and that images have been manipulated. To adopt a more relaxed position is to invite calamity. That is all.

*

Another tidbit that I found delicious and amazing was that one Artificial Intelligence guy saying we will one hundred percent go extinct if we don't cut the AI shenanigans like immediately. 

It's like, I hope they stop too! But mostly because it's all been so stupid. It's been a stupid revolution, and it's a stupid way to die. Yet, it is a highly probable way to die. Hope killer AI gives me the chance to smoke that classic final cigarette, because stopping is not a thing we do, as species, as a global civilization. Even if by some miracle ninety percent of all labs and individuals everywhere did stop, the people who most should stop will continue, so as not to lose their precious edge over their competitors, who have not stopped because they know the first motherfucker won't stop, and so on around the world like a noose, plus the dumbfucks who don't stop because they think it's alarmist bullshit. 

At this point, I'm just glad for a surefire solution to climate change. That's probably a factor of my failure to reproduce, but I'm going to take comfort in it anyway. 

*

Against my better judgment, I grabbed Resident Evil VII.I.AGE, and it has been massively rewarding. Resident Evil 4 was never scary enough; this bastard plays like RE4, but it horrifies in a way playing as the world's twinkest superhero never could. No matter what fucked shit RE4 threw at me, I was ready to take it and fuck it up right back. There was tension--certainly, I didn't want to have my head chainsawed off, or plucked from my shoulders and devoured by a writhing parasite. But I was never terrified by the very concept. Playing RE7.1, I don't want any of this shit to happen to me, and on top of that, the things I'm seeing transcend tension and impact the very gut with basal, reptile fear. In RE4, I wanted to shoot the next thing, make progress, to prove my shit-hot skillset. I don't want anything in RE7.1 at all, I want nothing to happen, I want it all to stop, except for getting my daughter back, even though she's clearly some type of fungus, and so am I, apparently. Going by his example, all damage to the body--legs, shoulders, protracted blood loss, whatever--can be repaired by splashing one's left hand with plant extract and pure alcohol. 

It's like, I didn't play Resident Evil 7. Ezra's playing it now, though, and RE7.1 had a nice little recap. But he's definitely some kind of mutant, right? He's a bioweapon. This Mold shit has altered him fundamentally. But still, man. Some shit pierces the illusion. Not enough to block the incredible fear this game makes me feel, like a thick cold syrup invading my blood, but enough that I notice it every time.

Anyhow, I'm two bosses in--that shit in the basement of the house with the puppets was UNBELIEVABLY FUCKED--and I'm hoping this feeling lasts at least all the way through the first playthrough. I understand that subsequent playthroughs will be an exercise in dominance over the material, but for now, cold fear, please and thank you.

--JL

#194

About halfway through Nicholas Nickleby, which made me very much want to read The BFG again real quick (Dahl's Chickens, so funny), which on completion which made me want to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory again real quick, which I also did. 

Man, I've had those two books for more than twenty years and more than seven moves, one of them transcontinental. They're still in fine shape given all that, holding together well, but their age definitely shows, the pages past their initial yellowing and roughening and going into the tan tones and suede textures. In a few years they'll begin to crinkle and throw a little dust as the paper cracks minutely, and then they'll really start to fall apart. For right now, they're still trusty, though. Amazing how things can last.

*

Not going to give any details, but I got so fucking lied to today! It was pretty mind-blowing to be lied to in such a fashion. Truly incredible. I mean this was weapons-grade, fully delusional lying. I knew a reality that a person did not know I knew, and they proceeded to attempt to insert a complete fabrication into what they assumed was void. In doing so, they revealed more true information about themselves to me than they have in almost a year of knowing them.

For example, this person has never read The Art of War.

Like, it's not new information, exactly, but such a resounding confirmation that it became comical; at first, my hands were trembling with outrage, but as time went on, the humor outweighed it.

Now there is mostly just pity. I mean at the end of the day it is extremely pathetic. I have lied like that in my lifetime; having been in this wretched position, I know intimately how low you have to fall, how painful it is to need to convince yourself and how doubly painful it is to need someone else to believe that you aren't as weak and scared and fumbling you are, to support a whole world where that isn't true and heaven itself be damned if the world I ask for contradicts the world that is. 

No, I'm no better than this person at all, but the way things stand, I suppose it doesn't matter. Math starts at different places for different things.

*

My will, these days, is bent on telling the truth, as far as any human can manage such a thing. This means I cannot stay too angry with liars, and don't deserve to; it is incredibly, brutally difficult not to lie, and once you really try to stop, you understand why you need to a lot better, and you catch yourself trying to do it a lot more. Difficulty compounds again as one experiments with the rigor of considering certain silences a type of lie, or an outright one.

Only an idiot blurts the truth at all times, needful or not, though; a measure of idiocy is called for in life, I think, but not the whole damn hog. 

Yet I don't know. Perhaps the discipline is exactly that demanding, and perhaps idiocy isn't valuable precisely unless it is carried too far.

Anyway I am as guilty as anyone, no matter what I say or who lies to me.

*

Maybe maybe maybe. Whatever. I had some really fun thoughts about cutting things up in the kitchen today, overwrought meditations on the nature of knifework. On my walk home in the blazing summer heat I texted them to a couple of coworkers:

"Good knifework approaches Euclidean geometries"

"The purpose of the knife is to make the smoothest, truest lines through the apparent chaos of the organic and effect the approximation of even particles, which could at pains be reconstituted beautifully"

"A knife doesn't destroy, it creates the possibility for harmonious rearrangements"

Those were my private ideas on cutting vegetables and sundry, then I shared them with my friends, and now, you too are burdened with these notions. Will you think of them, I wonder, the next time you approach an onion, or prepare to carve a bird? 

It does not matter, but if it should happen, I humbly pray it enriches the experience. Even if as you read them right now you consider me an overblown douchebag--it could still happen, and I hope it does. 

*

Other things that have happened include going on a beautiful very sunny date on which sushi was consumed and a riverbank thoroughly lazed on, receiving my paring knife in the mail, and some mighty glorious skies to look at. It's been hella summer here, stupendous shit, never gets old. 


--JL

#59

Before I got sick, I saw a red-tailed hawk do some magnificent flying. She lit from the top of a municipal light to  cross a road and wing her way powerfully across an empty soccer field over to the treeline by the river. She was a strong, built, stocky bird, well-made for self-directed, energetic flight. She engaged in a great deal of exuberant altitude-play once across the river before deigning to perch. Clearly, some birds have seasons in their prime wherein the lean season and the easy pickings blur together. The tightening days trouble them not at all. I'm watching some fat robins make mock of the snowy day we're having right now, in fact. They look like chubby little frat boys screwing around together.

*

Putting books on a wall is a lot like putting maps on a wall. I used to have both, but I lost all my maps. I love cartography. Basically I love data points arranged in space, in whatever dimensionality or variety of such you please. Finally, the feeling of being surrounded by connections both unintentional and personal, by literal battlements of psychic power, is a very potent defensive barrier. I cannot recommend it enough. 

I don't have any shelves right now. I have instead arranged great stacks, mostly against walls, a few freestanding, all around the walls of my room. It's a mess, but even in this chaos there are little jokes and coincidences to ponder. For example, I see a series of books that was important to an ex of mine and their sibling just beneath a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents that their mother gave to me as a gift--unintentional, but a nice little twinge. Freud would heartily approve, which carries the whole thing into the realm of the truly disgusting.

Gender Trouble is right over Peter Pan. Amusing. Would that I had any Alison Bechdel to add to the mix; alas, Ulysses is across the room--atop You Can't Go Home Again. Who seethes the more? Ugh. I miss my maps. Ah, well, but they were maps of Middle-Earth anyway. Who the hell am I kidding.

Too many books, folks. Too much bullshit. 

I know a dude, a mechanic works out of a garage in a Citgo station, who once a few years back asked me why the fuck I was reading. Since I was on the clock and delivering him auto parts, I told him I didn't get paid enough not to read a few minutes every stop. 

"No, motherfucker, I'm  talking about why the fuck do you even do that. Read books. All that bullshit. It's all fucking lies."
"Well, lies are kind of the point, with fiction--"
"All of it, motherfucker! I mean all of it! Don't even talk to me about fiction, I mean every book is just lies, history, religion, social shit, all that fuckin bullshit. My fuckin wife, she's always reading books, listening to the news, and now she's full of fucking bullshit. Making her waste her fuckin time thinking about problems that have nothing to do with fuckin anything. Lies!"

At this point I put the book down and leaned forward, interested. "Hold up, man. Are you saying you don't read anything? Like, no books ever, no magazines, no news, because it is all of it nothing but lies? What the fuck do you think is true, man?"

He smiled and waved his hand to show he'd been hot-airin' a little, but dragged his cig and bore down on his point. "Almost all lies, almost, fucking bullshit anyway, news, definitely lies, history, so much lies--listen, the real thing is business, every day. Work. Fuckin money. This shit right here, bitch. Fucking books just fill your head with bullshit, bullshit keeps you from making money. You're a smart motherfucker, you don't need to be reading no books."

Many pleasant arguments with him as we whiled away the cigarettes, neither of us much shifting our positions. Yet, given time and the reading of a lot more books, I find I have become more warmed to his viewpoint than I would have ever believed possible.

Hey, have you read my now-in-paperback lies?


--JL