#502

One problem, perhaps, to be identified with my cognition journey--my thought palazzio and its sweeping grounds--the subjective throughline of my consciousness and process-as-being-in-the-world-of-my-own-creation--my bullshit--is that I have perhaps understimated the scope and intensity of the background radiation, as it were, of other people's pathetic fucking resentment.

I mean, so what if you can't draw a decent picture and practice yields no fruit? So what if you can't write a story that anybody on this wide, cruel world will tell you is good and cool? So what if you can't seem to make anything happen with the opposite sex? This is a letter to anyone in this venn diagram, I guess.

*

Since I was a baby, I have tried to draw good pictures. Now, I'm not some big-shot success story--I don't think I have ever achieved this once. Can't draw a real-looking thing, man. But, uh, so what? Can't draw good pictures, no, but because I never stopped drawing or at least never abandoned drawing, I can draw pictures that are real, that look like I drew them. They are me. 

Point was always just to draw pictures and to be myself, or the point was moot. 

*

Maybe one might forget to draw and paint for a few years at a time sometimes, but a person gets busy, and also, a person might lose or destroy the majority of their possessions multiple times. Hard to paint a picture without paint, tools to apply it, and a viable field of action. Not impossible, but. Plus, had to write. On top of that, had to keep practicing and composing music. On top of that, had to have sex all the time with partners and amenable strangers. On top of that, a person has to work and eat and exercise and travel and get in and out of trouble and do nothing, and also read and play video games and do philosophy and look at the color of the sky. 

Life takes massive effort and all of your focus, so it never really sunk in, I guess, that while I was trying desperately to live it and have some fun even though the odds are kind of stacked against us--more reason to do it, of course--other people sat in their rooms not living theirs and literally hated me for it. 

But hark! The reason you weren't out there doing it yourself is not because the world was somehow set up to laud and reward me and screw you over a barrel. Trust me, it was set up to screw us all. Before puberty, I was reliably the weirdest freak kid who only was friends with the teacher or one or two of the other weird freak kids. Even after puberty, the main way I ever got any respect coming up was cussing hard and saying opinions without fear or mercy. It's the only way for a weirdo to get by with any dignity, in my experience.

The truth of the matter, the reason I am rather rudely using myself as a counterexample is simply that you gave up, and I am trying to show that never giving up is the whole entire battle. Life takes massive effort and all of your focus. It doesn't come to you with all its vital juices and condiments sizzling on the platter ready to eat. You have to live it.

If you wanted to draw a comic book, there was never any reason to do anything else. If instead of drawing shitty comic after shitty comic, enough shitty comics to build a house out of, you sat around hoping someone would invent something you could pay them for to draw in your stead, then you wasted your life and using the product is wasting more of your life. Because you didn't like drawing in the first place! Because drawing all those shitty comics is the whole point! Luckily, it is not too late. You can draw shitty comics literally any time on any surface, and you can start right this second. But if you don't want to draw comics, then why would you?

Comics of themselves are hardly the issue, of course. What you make is barely the question. Why you make what you make is closer to the mark, but it is possible to make good art while only wanting to get money and fame out of it--talent goes where talent goes. It's not a special dispensation from God that makes a person sanctified. It is possible to do what you are best at, be dazzlingly rewarded, want for nothing, and still be as unhappy as before, maybe worse. It is also possible to be all of those things and an asshole that is bad to be around. In fact, it's easy. So the things themselves--fleeting and transient states of matter, no more--are not the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is who and what you choose to make of yourself as a person on your own recognizance. The Main Issue is, this is your life and you are concentrating all of your imagination and longing and want on someone else's idea of someone else's life. You don't know what you actually like, or want, is the problem.

What does it mean when you tell me "I made this using AI."  What are you really saying?

"I made this using the outsourced labor provided by a computer program. To be precise, I gave a daemon instructions until I had something in front of me that I convinced myself was born in my mind's eye, but is actually a composite of other people's real achievements. Producing it required no skill or imagination on my part. I don't know what makes it good or bad. It has nothing to do with me. It is just a set of parentheses around itself which I am trying to use to communicate..."

What?

What are you trying to tell me or give me when you present me with such an artifact? Or, what is it that you expect from me? From the world?

For not caring enough to do something, for lacking passion and drive and love, you want...what? Some reward? And why do you want it? Who owes it to you and why? I'll tell you one thing. The reason most actual artists get mad about it is that it kind of feels like you are saying that you think everything that makes us human is only worth what you can get in exchange for what you seem to think is merely some kind of token.

And this is why you can't get laid, or make it last or mean anything, if you've managed to learn to trick or coerce people. The above question and answer might as well be tattooed on any potential lover, replacing the word "artist" with "potential lover". Pretty fucking straightforward, I think, as is the following. 

*

The reason to live life, the reason to make art, and the reason to have sex are one thing: to discover something real.

So a product cannot help you with that. Stop thinking that. No one can help you with this, actually. You are already worth love, and do not need to produce any content that proves it.

*

Can't write? Can't draw? Not a skilled or experienced lover? No problem, actually. 

Believe the product of a product that makes products out of products represents some kind of solution to this state of affairs?

All you lack is tubes going into your body and a saline suspension to float in while the machine empire makes actual use of your radiant energy. 

Doesn't have to be like that. That scenario requires your sumbission, your acquiescence. The battery pod is a sci-fi Plato's Cave. You can get up and walk out any time.

*

This blog gets made for no money, not the tenth part of a doomed penny. Been putting it out since 2018, looks like; guess it doesn't look like I'm gonna stop. Back when I played music shows, by myself or with bands, it would be in backyards and basements for part of the take of a donations jar. I have never sold a piece of art or painting I made--gifts or garbage. Very, very rarely managed to get paid a little bit for a piece of writing or give one away for free; more usually, publication has cost me money. Put shitty books on amazon through their self-publishing thing, and these books did not sell basically any copies. That's for the best. Didn't really do the best job of making them, though it is nice to have shitty books to give away. Free can sometimes be a good enough price for the cost of the thing existing.

Who cares, man? Who gives a fuck? I like doing it. Feels like jazz. I think people that make lots of money from art are lucky, if you can call it that, and the caliber of their work often merits its share of recognition, but I also think most of them would be doing it for nothing, just like me, and also that there is so much more great art to see that is not famous, and that if great art is great then it is great whether it gets famous or not.

Just do whatever you want. I am giving you permission, if you need it. Try to find out what kind of person you really are through the singleminded pursuit of your passions, which you should indulge in and propagate as much as possible. It is almost certain that people will want to have sex with you for that and you'll figure that part out organically and find out it's pretty cool but you were kind of overreacting back then. Nothing is ever as good when you get it as when you were anticipating it; this is one of the sadder but more unbreakable laws of the universe. It's the surprises that you really end up savoring, and you cannot plan for those or force them to happen. That should be clear. 

Listen. You probably won't get famous or make very much money ever. That's just mathematically true. But the big joke is that it doesn't matter at all, because another big joke is that fame is miserable, except for the amenities. 

Point of life is only to do fun things you want to do so bad it's like you need to do them. That way, in this short existence, you might be able to have some fun, even though you will naturally endure hardships.

You are alive. That's the game. Try to have fun. Do things you like to do. Be a friend to yourself, which will involve trying to understand yourself and hear yourself--a lifelong and arduous process, but a worthy one.

Using the products of LLMs to pretend you are alive or skip to parts of being alive that you think are better (and you have no reason to think that, really) will not supply you with what you have been missing or are searching for. Nothing I can say will provide that either--I am telling you that this is a power you must find within yourself or not at all.

Within, friends. Within. A product is just a product. Life is art.

Problem is not that LLM's create inferior products and it is not that they could supplant artists with equivalent or superior products.

It is that they subvert the purpose of making art, which is only, only to live life.

Sex, by the way, can be thought of as an artistic collaboration. 

--JL

#441

The past week has only seen me grow more untethered from reality. As I make the clock real again in order to pin myself to its hands and thus ride its motions to and from a physical place, it loses what lax grip it had on those hours not devoted to that process. Losing myself more completely in what I'm doing and thinking and the fundamental neglect of the realities that involve paperwork and phone calls and emails and telling agencies that your income has changed--all that is as vapor which dispels as soon as I realize it is there, unnoticed till it vanishes again at my mind's accidental touch.

Been spending hours just standing in the sun, thinking. Looking at the plants in my backyard day by day. 

*

Also doing a bunch of shit. Painting and mowing and hauling and digging and chopping and planting and pulling and vacuuming and salvaging and breaking down and  planning, planning, planning, my mind a frothing ferment of ideas and timelines and stratagems and concepualizations of every description I can generate. 

Awash in tides of flotsam. A floating life in an infinite void informed by infinite debris, infinite illuminations.

Reading books and playing games more than before, seeing friends more than before, talking with Ezra more (we always talk a lot, but sometimes there are phases where we can't seem to fit in every idea and story and problem-solving and whatever other thing that we need to even though we never shut up--exhausting, but exhilirating), getting to know coworkers and the new job. Time seems to have dilated and set to a sprint; even as the days pass more hurriedly they giving the impression of having slowed overall--feels like two months since last I pounded words into this blank, yet the actual seven or eight days have perhaps carried enough in them to justify these contrasting impressions. 

And yet it does also seem that I come to myself after an unspecified span of sitting on the couch, staring into the middle distance, having thought myself into a perfect silence. Days where the depression is bad. Days where I don't even know what the fuck is going on and I barely drink a glass of water. All I can do is follow my own private thread, the double yellow line deep inside my brain the only guide, no compass, no altimeter, no clock, no stars.

*

Change. Hm. 

What is this life? All its seasons and transformations, its dragonfire and its long and lightless nights?

*

Hm.

--JL

#426

It was a little weird because it's been awhile and I'm older now, but with time also came a certain self-assurance and determination as I salvaged some pretty excellent trash from the curb:

• partially rusted metal trash can with partially rusted lid
• some rusty and some ok lengths of broken chain
• a satellite dish and its supporting arm,
• seemingly barely used DVD player
• universal remote
• a metal box fan seemingly from the fifties or somesuch, haven't investigated yet
• long plastic tube attachment for a leaf blower

Add all that to the couple of toaster ovens and dead DVD players I already happened to have on hand, and we have the base materials for some interesting play. Must finish disassembling my old laptops soon as well.

Think we need some fresh filing cabinets in the house. Hafta look! It's trash season. Gotta tool around downtown and around the apartment complex dumpsters and see what the students leave scattered about this year. Filing cabinets are long odds, but not impossible. 

*

Gotta go to the library today. Gotta spackle some kitchen wall, wait and sand, do a little brushwork in there before bedtime. Gotta paint some other shit too, probably. Once I'm done painting there's kitchen cabinets to powersand. One last class at school. Work. 

Life, life, life. Putting gas in the car and making coffee. Taking a big shit and feeding the cats. Scraping at the floor with a wet rag to fix my paint spills basically with elbow grease. Happily wielding scissors and brushes and shovels as I listen to beautiful songs, meditating on dead and distant friends.

Treasuring the peace of these days. May it last.

*

Ok cool so off to honor these halcyon days baby

--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

#398

And now, a letter to those who would like to know how I am and have no recourse. I suppose it also functions as a kind of castigation for those who would rather know nothing about me, but then, why would they read it?

*

Been listening to a lot of soundtracks lately, yo. And depressed as FUCK. You know me! Life of the (depressed) party. 

You want to know where the fuck I am, how to get in touch with me? I mean, I been around. You don't wanna know about the soundtracks, huh. You wanna know why I'm not on farcebark or insta or anything through which you can appraise and consume a facsimile of me.

Dude, forget about it. I don't wanna get into that, but you just have to understand that this blog is the only thing I interface with that allows for the kinds of updates on my life and activities that I consider relevant and timely. The social media websites are just like, working down a fucking mineshaft. For what? That shit is haunted. That shit is terrifying, what these websites have done to us.

Yeah, it sucks that it basically means I'm socially dead. But do you know how high-effort being socially alive is for me? I feel I have never adequately communicated the cost of just showing up at a time and place and being perceived there. What an imposition.

Another part of it: you remember how bad I don't care about or hate commercials. Well, I give even less of a fuck about commercials now, except when exposed to them, wherefore my anger spews from some part of me that is more molten and pressurized than ever. And these fucking companies have polluted internet with ads to such a degree that I can't even look at it for more than fifteen or so minutes most days. I see how some people have brought back such as like text only browsers through which to view internet. I should get in on some kind of that action. Will I? I'm too much least-resistance with computers in that way, man. Gotta pick my battles. But I may. 

Now that we've established what kind of a deadbeat I am, it feels a little daunting to go on, like, who the fuck cares what else is up? But I'll hazard it.

I have continued to read books and play video games and watch movies with what some would call bloody-mindedness, in that I have reliably cared more about these things than anything else that needs doing, like making decent money or a positive difference in this world. Well, I have also tried to do that in my own humble ways, here and there, whenever possible, sometimes at cost to myself and sometimes to the benefit of all. Money has reliably eluded me, and I have spent tragic and laughable quantities of what I did come into on drugs and cigarettes and much else one cannot take into the grave. Despite this I have also kept fit, by and large, and my reflexes are still honed. I wear the same pants you remember me in,  the same shirts. My hair is still thick, but my forehead has grown considerably, as they say. 

Yes, hilarious, my head was already so big. It's true. My forehead looks like half a basketball. So it goes. Whatever dude, I like how I look. Less likely to be confused for someone who just fell off an apple wagon. I was damn tired of looking like a kid. Still looking forward to becoming truly gnarled and fully bald.

Learned to play bass, got pretty decent at doing my own thing. I know I never had much sex back when--despite what you may have heard! I have heard some truly ludicrous stories about myself--but I made up for it in my twenties. Looking back at it all it feels a lot like a feverish dream. Guess I still have plenty of sex, but nothing like what used to take up my time and attention on a basic day. Never had a threesome, but I have had sex with two different people on the same day and three different people in the same week; separate weeks. Been a cook, a delivery driver, done retail, school bus driver, roadied, odd jobs and strange deeds here and there. Tripped a bunch of acid, shrooms. Never been a cocaine or opiates guy; nothing all-consuming or weapons-grade, you know. 

It is perhaps weird and alarming that despite how much weed I've smoked in my lifetime--a weird and alarming amount, in my opinion--there are many in this world in whose presence I am but a neophyte. Nevertheless, I have smoked a bunch of weed. Being sober is also weird and alarming, but it is cheaper. Got so bad and crazy on liquor and beer I was lucky to survive, and relapsed twice. Five years now without a sip. That kind of puts my tendency to keep smoking cigarettes in some perspective, but not much.

Still like to play chess. Try to make a habit out of keeping my game about me. I have tried to stay thinking about everything we've talked about; have tried to hold on to it all because I am certain it is important to the whole. I am as occupied as ever with interpreting an approximation of the whole which exceeds established parameters. My one unseemly, hubristic ambition, yes, which reveals so much about me that is ridiculously aggrandized in actuality as well as prone to delusions derived from said grandeur.

As you can see, I still thirstily seek a turn of phrase where I can get it.

That reminds me; I still hate being thought of as a fool. Can't seem to outgrow this and the shame it brings me, but at least I do not act like less of a fool out of fear of the thing.

Extant chances that you might read this are infinitesimal, and that is on me. I have made decisions that, well, are typical of me. Never found the trick of compromising how I think and feel based on how easy it would make dealing with the world. So you won't find me by the name you know me, and my books are obscure and and self-published and contrary to both the algorithm that might sell them and the values I espouse. They are simply emblematic of my wish to make something concrete out of my writing without having to change a word of it or make any big promises or garner anything resembling an accolade or anything that might warp the affect of what I hope is like the kind of thing I personally love to find in unlikely places and hoard like the most precious of gems--my work, which if nothing else has no one to blame but me.

If you happen to recognize this and think of me, me as you knew me, then I have no doubt thought of you often, though we may be long, long out of touch. I am as forgetful of practical, dull details necessary for a well-ordered life as ever and perhaps moreso, but my memory for things people say and how they looked and felt to me as they said them is as powerful and gripping as it ever was. Yes, I remember you. I think well of you, and hope well of your life, and pray that one day we might meet again and share some time.

Got married; more like, live ethically non-monogamous with my platonic life partner--but legally, married. Got two cats. There's duct tape applied to my hatchback so that the frame doesn't leak rainwater into the cabin. Lately I have begun to philosophically embrace anarchy in more ways than simply advocating for relationship anarchy or related approaches. Thinking about Tolstoy's later life. Thinking about Jesus in new ways. It's being out of work and able to witness the end of western civ as we understand it in such granular ways, I guess, that's got me on this tip. Guess I'm still something of an apologist for the west, despite my scathing critiques. I am as sentimental, perhaps as naive, as ever. I have tried to get stronger and tougher, but I have resisted hardening my heart or closing my mind. If that makes me an idiot, then an idiot I shall be.

Yeah man, soundtracks. Fuckin good shit out there.

Jazz, too.

Still listening to the Mountain Goats. 

There's so much more to tell you, and yet, haven't I blathered on about nothing? It's just life, man. It keeps on happening. In some ways, we can catch each other up, and in others, we couldn't even tell anybody the whole truth about even so much as a single day. 

Ha! Yes, I am still capable--perhaps more than ever--of bringing up such a useless, even pointless fact. 

--JL

#346

Have come to identify yet another weakness in my psychic constitution, and as I type that, I want to joke that I need a better hobby. Of course the truth is that the process of recognizing and adjusting in response to our failings, our shortcomings, those foibles of our personality that go so far as to embarass us or harm us whether we are aware of it in the moment or merely ignorant is what Socrates was talking about when he mentioned lives and the due examination of them. So, regrettably, it is more along the lines of an endless duty, this critical process of becoming alive.

Anyway the thing was that one reason I got into walking is, sure, I lost the last of a string of bikes which I have owned and was unable to replace it for years. But also I was partially unwilling to replace it all those years because I had become focused on a solemn convitction regarding the physical, psychic, and spiritual benefits of walking. Correct; walking is the bomb; I have set a great deal into the record to that effect. But there's another side to that too. 

I walk really fast. Locally, I may be the fastest. No one, in my memory, since the time I reached about the upper end of my physical development in my teens, has passed me on the street, the sidewalk, the trail, or the field while walking, unless they literally broke into a half-jog. And, as is evident in the record, I have walked a lot. I'm just gonna say it: I walk like a beast, I am awesome at walking. I've thought about it a lot and put those thoughts into a great deal of practice. 

But even though I believe my style and speed on the bicycle are more than adequate and have rarely let me down, I exhibit nothing comparable to the prowess I possess on foot. I like to ride fast, sometimes as fast as I fucking can, and a lot of people are faster bikers than me on faster bikes to boot; it hasn't happened all summer (this entirely due to the fact that I've had the streets I beat basically all to myself on my rides), but it did today; this wiry dude probably in his forties rode behind me very politely for a while when things were narrow, but as soon as the bikeway opened he lit me up and smoked me to the stub. It was pretty cool. 

At the same time, something deep inside me misliked the feeling, and I knew in my heart that the root of the feeling has nothing noble or sportsmanlike in it at all, coming as it does from a traumatized part of my animal self that hates being approached from behind, hates being outperformed. And as I thought more on that, I came to understand that this part of myself had denied the rest of me the pleasure of two wheels on that basis, when I was weaker and reconstituting myself. And yet, in this, was it not acting to protect me, to set me on a path that would serve me better than the exhilaration of speed? That may be part of it, and it is certainly true also that it was acting selfishly, and would have done the same if it had hurt me--maybe did hurt me. But that is not the important part.

The only important part of any of it is the next step, which is to laugh at myself and begin to learn to let that shit go. And once it is gone I will breathe freer and be more alive. On foot, wheeled up, who cares. We all go at our own pace, and that pace is what it is, and that is right and good.

*

We must be freer, and more alive; that is the point of philosophy, and life.

--JL

#303

Been avoiding writing about much that is topical in terms of world events in the blog for quite some time. Admittedly, been avoiding the blog itself for a little while, which always happens when I move. It is more difficult for me to be productive with writing when my books are not in some form of organized shape, and they are not right now, but there's lots to do each day--and I'm not the best at prioritizing my most private inner needs, even though they're essentially the most important ones. For me. But like, dishes gotta get done. Kids gotta get bussed to school, and bussed home--at least, if I want a paycheck they do. Shit needs cleaning. Etc. All that is more vital to me, these days, than virtual spaces and distant lands. Also I feel driven to record more lush memories in this space, to make it more autobiographical, though this is hard and time-consuming work.

However, I care deeply about virtual spaces and distant lands, and I do read stuff and have my considered opinions. Six years back, in the truly dark times of 2016, my addiction to information and news media of many varieties reached critical mass and I collapsed in on myself. In the time this blog has run I have practiced dipping my toes in, commenting occasionally, largely because while I was not ON twotter, I was still using. Since I quit that mess completely, it has been easier to just get the essentials and move on with my life.

This business in Ukraine is in its third month, though, and I have so many high-concept notions around it, and Russian policy in general, and multipolarity & globalization, the furthered sagas of covid, the further sagas of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, and this new Chinese autonomous ship class that went from announcement to reality in a year, business news in all its great variety--all these are things I take careful note of, and think about commensurately. So many conflicts! So much progress, and so much backwards thinking and commentary about it from so many quarters, while the real game runs faster and harder and smarter than ever before! I just drooled a tiny bit.

Whatever it is in me that cares about the big picture, about history in the distant past and history carving itself out in blood right now today and where the twain intermix in ferocious, glorious alchemy--I mean, it's an unbelievably exciting time to be alive. All that really happens in life materially, though, is gas prices are up and I have to put away some laundry. So who really cares, really, truly? I shouldn't. But I do. Is the blog better or more useful when I am writing about the complexities of the now that we share virtually, or when I am waxing philosophical and reporting on the mundane intricacies of my own quiet life?

Anyway, sometime in the next series of days I'll try to strike a balance; post something autobiographical, post something about current events, those wicked, heady current events. Past and present. Innerworld and outerworld. 

Today, I dunno. Think this is all I got today. Felt good to type it, though. 

--JL

#265

Wonder if I ought to recover the twitter account I attached to the running of this blog, way back when. 'Twas only good for a couple hits a day, and twitter literally breaks my fragile mind, but it is ahead on page one google search of my actual author page on amazon, where my content lives. The top result on google relating to me and my activities is post number twenty-seven, where I mentioned Google+ and Blogger in the same sentence. Soon this post, too, will enjoy unwarranted spotlight action. Ha! 

Man, visiting twitter in order to inform this decision was like briskly rubbing a sheaf of sandpaper across my bare abdomen. One clean stripe of burning, unnecessary pain. I have said my piece about twitter in this text field, don't need to go over it all again. Some would say it would be hypocritical of me to even consider using twitter to garner readership or communicate ideas, given what I have said about their foul dark magics in the past.

In fact, I feel quite unfettered. Twitter's brand of petty evil is exactly the sort whose combat momentum is best thwarted by the gymnastic of hypocrisy. Of course, this gives one pause to wonder if that is not yet another level in the basement of their cruel and barbarous factory. Naturally, one does need a twitter account in order to criticize twitter on home turf, in order to win the hearts and minds of those afflicted by twitter most directly. 

The account does serve as the blog's alt text, which makes it an archive, and since it does already exist, and since I--wait. No. As information addict, as twitter addict, as completionist--all these truths about myself in their competition and complicity cried out together just now, and the answer must, can only be, no. That way lies madness and personal demise.

Last time I talked about twitter was that long, long Sinfest post, a post basically also about twitter, and way too much other shit. Drove across every goddamn lane I could in that post. Not sorry, but it was indeed something of an act of ridiculous lunacy, and the most exaggerated overtures in that direction were fueled by looking at twitter for all of five fucking minutes. Brain poison. The answer is no. Been sounding like an asshole up in here. No.

If only I could close that account. Such a thing, in this day and age, is impossible; moreso because I have forgotten and lost the relevant access data. So hey, this whole thing has been a total wash.

*

Read the title of the blog one more time, motherfuckers, and have a happy turkeygobble day; good day for shoving that turkeybird up in your gobblehole

--JL

*originally was going to write a post about something else entirely. I've forgotten what that was now twice as I loaded up the text field. Hmm. Well, it's nice to be here again. Always happy to be with you for even one moment more, dear reader. 

Oh! I was going to discuss how sometimes I feel as though the way the blog repeats itself and revisits certain topics again and again and again is in one way something of a failure, speaking in terms of pure creative fertility. Here in this text field I have been extremely disparaging of the Achewood man, the man of Achewood, for basically quitting the strip because he didn't want to plow any furrowed ground, and of course I am disparaging of him because I am of a similar bent in my nature. Aware that there is nothing new to be written here under the sun, nevertheless the compulsion is to offer freshness, dammit. Cooking requires base parts which, at the time you do something to them with the intent of transforming them into an ingredient, must be fresh. It doesn't matter if we are talking about a tomato, an idea, or the idea of a tomato; even the idea a tomato might have. What matters is the freshness of the ingredient, and of course what technique you apply to deliver the payload, which is flavor. Flavor is everything, everything, fucking everything.

Musically speaking: there are only eight notes. With eight notes we must make infinite multiverses of permutations. Repetition is integral to permutation, and without pattern, there is only meaninglessness, which is only interesting and valid in the context of that which has meaning. So, in the end, I have to say to myself whatever, I don't care if I repeat myself for seventy years. Who cares about playing the same song every day. Everything is in how the chord is played in this newly minted and never-before lived moment, the little improvisations, the age of the strings, the little variations in the pressure of the fingers and the stroke and tension of the arm. Do birds worry about repeating themselves? They sing every morning and maybe it's identical and maybe it's completely different each time, but at the day it's fuckin birdsong, which is what it is, and what more do you want.

What you do can be the same, but the way that you do it, who you are and what you bring, that's different every day like it or not, and being as aware of that and the necessity of that, the structure of arcs and loops and wheels and parallels that make up our lives except when it all comes crashing down around us, or when we leap off the rails and throw ourselves into formlessness that will either develop fresh structure out of itself or be our demise--that is what makes existing within the structure of repetitious fractals bearable and even majestic. 

Yeah, whatever. Maybe I've said all this before, in so many ways. I think of posts I've written where I discuss helical structures diametrically opposing one another yet both essential to the superstructure of reality, of posts I wrote about the world being a forest, the universe as forest, of reality composed of infinite simultaneously disrupted and flawlessly perfect spheres, simultaneously homogenous in their perfection and representing spectra ranged between two poles. Or it's all the layers and angles of bismuth, levels and levels and spars and spars, regular and varied. Or everything being part of an infinite and infinitely expanding and collapsing crystal structure, irrationally perfect and not even real, but the only reality there is.

Again, whatever. So fucking what? Who gives a shit how long a scene is, to paraphrase David Lynch? I get off on writing that kind of shit. I get off on writing. As long as that's true, I'll churn out whatever weird crap I want and sell it by the pound.

All this by way of saying, apologies to the Achewood man for being a jerk to him (indirectly) about his choices. They are, of course, his own to make, as all our choices do be also.

#235

Crazy thing, just going through the process. Fuckin wakin up. Time after time you wake up, even after the nights you sweat into your sheets thinking there's no way, there's no way, these are my last hours of being alive and to sleep is to enter unbeing oblivion. You wake up and a cat wants something, or a lover, or you're alone and no one wants anything, and you have time to sit and have your first thoughts or you have to jump and start and let the thoughts trickle as they may through the business of movement. Thinking is all you're really good for, you suspect, have for some time, but the world demands movement of you as it does of every extant thing within its bounds, is itself never ever still. You think of a book by a physiologist who wrote in his book about other physiologists who believed that the purpose of organic life, of evolution, of time, is to create poses through movement, that the universe is a vast series of perfect frames, countless fractals of bodies in motion for no other reason than to be in motion. That the universe is dance, set to music more huge and complete than anyone but God could hear in all its fullness. Then you brush your teeth, if you're in the right place in life to remember that you gotta brush your teeth and the ability to follow through on the thought. Maybe you don't brush your teeth, maybe you just open a beer or go straight to work. Maybe you turn over and fuck somebody first, or leave them to their sleep after a kiss and murmurs. Having sex is the time of no thoughts, a time when the physiologists who speak of frames are perhaps most correct. Impressions, adjustments, convulsions, sensations. Only after do thoughts come, usually unwelcome, sometimes exalted. Leaving someone in bed is a little grief, a little practice for goodbye forever. But you leave when you leave, always early, to be the first student at the school building and relish to yourself the functionless but massive power that comes with that accomplishment, or to be early enough to work to leave early or work your full shift and tack an extra hour on the week by the end of it. Just to be early. Doesn't really matter, being late or on time, but the instinct and compulsion is to be early. Early to your own funeral? Even this is compelling, and so more than likely your first cigarette is smoked before seven in the morning, probably before six. Soon as you can make the space for it, at any rate. And whether you smoke four or nine or nineteen or twenty-four more, more than likely they will be smoked in the space before something, some phone call or task or appointment, using the time made available by being early. Smoking weed follows many of the same principles. Drinking distorts time, differently than dropping acid or eating shrooms, differently again the way tobacco and caffeine and weed do, but at any rate you perform time magic, with all these and with your friend's prescription methamphetamines, with video games, with typing and scribbling, with kicking rocks along the sidewalk you contort the time around yourself to fit your needs and you call it trying to get close to something like freedom and you think about freedom a lot, about infinite multiverses, about mistakes made and in the current offing, about the litany of failures that run a crooked line through your life, about how stupid crazy it is that you're still alive, still pulling in breath after breath and that muscle in your chest spinning your lifeblood flex after flex, step after step, looking up at the sky and considering the infinite, staring at the ground gnawing on some stupid brainbone. How much flight, how many minutes and gallons of fuel, how many explosions taken place within an internal combustion engine to get you to where you're standing now? When is the rent due in relation to the next paycheck? Where do you have to be next? Are you going to bother showing up? Is right now a good time to bomb everything, forget it all, quit the job, sever every tie you can and jettison yourself into a random horizon? Are you going to stick with what's going on right now? Are things level, or are they haywire? Are you in denial about either situation? Is it always both? Are questions fundamentally stupid? Are answers? Who cares?

Ah, who cares. The best question. The one that always makes me feel better right away, and lets me shut up for a little while.

--JL

#234

Every living thing was born to suffer and feel alien among its fellows. I believe even the ant and bee, even the branch on the tree and the leaf on the branch, are as my left hand and my right hand: even if joined in a oneness, cleaved from the whole. This is just one of the paradoxes of existence which torture us all, and ought to make us more tender towards one another in understanding of our shared pain. We have many more in common, each of us, no matter who or when or where or what. 

We were born to scar and smash and bloody our hands, chipping our fingernails in the scrabbling to hold on to our lives. Some rare few of us claim to have consented to and chosen their bodies and circumstances before birth, but the great mass of us did not ask to be born, or do not remember doing so, and at any rate the world is not ideal, often too painful to remain fully sane in, and we are never truly as good as we want to be. We have to lie to ourselves about so much just to get through being awake, nightmares may plague our sleep, the great roaring unknown of death may remind us every day that it awaits us, our fleeting pleasures sadly outnumbered by our griefs and ailments. There is no guarantee that our greatest loves and hopes and triumphs will not turn to dross, if not through the corrosion of time, then disintegrating rapidly before our very eyes. Even the things we choose to ignore, to disbelieve, the things we try to avoid and the things we took precautions against can reverse all our fortunes and kill us where we stand, and we have no guarantees about the hereafter save educated guesses and titanic acts of faith. This is true, best as I can tell, for practically everyone you might meet. 

So I was thinking we could stand to cut each other a lot more slack than we tend to. All of us being guilty before one another and all that. All of us just storm-tossed little boats on the same infinite ocean, beautiful and terrible.

*

But also I just want everyone out of my face, pretty much.

Goodwill only for my fellow human. But it's not the season for conversations with me. A dude needs to eat all the silence he can snatch to himself sometimes.

*

The world, by the way, is noisier than ever. Is the internet a new Tower of Babel? Will our tongues, tied together in this spiderweb, soon be sundered once more by catastrophe and collapse? I don't care! I don't want to have a fight about it!

--JL

#221

Hello! Hello. Welcome to the two hundred and twenty-first post. It falls upon the twenty-first of October, in the year of Our Lord two thousand nineteen. I should post this on the twenty-first minute of the twenty-first hour of the day, but man, no. I won't. 

There is a pretty good chance this kind of thing can happen again two years from now, if I live that long. Every day is a day you might not have woken up YOLO

*

Anyway, coincidences are a fake concept. It is a denial of reason to assert that anything is provably random. At the same time, nothing is provably certain. You might never die, because time might just stop. Or, the eternal recurrence. That good quantum shit. Who cares, actually. Shit happens. Just does.

*

Going back to the previous post a bit, for a few a loose ends. If you haven't read it, you might not want to, but it's there, along with many other posts detailing private things and idiotic ideas and bad jokes I must be fucking insane to put on internet. I'll keep it brief.

In truth, there's only one thing to say: shit happens. Just does. It's not easy to accept that, but it does. I watched Hostiles finally, a western worth watching if only to see three perfect forty-minute acts. I mean exactly forty minutes for act one, act two, and act three. Also it is extremely good in many other ways, I loved it very slowly, warming up a little at a time. One line leaped out at me over all the rest: "We will never get used to God's rough handling."

Perfection.The context it was in elevated it tremendously; the case of the movie was proven in that moment; ironically, the one moment where the camera focus was less than perfectly controlled (it is a painstakingly controlled and curated picture, sharp enough to cut, huge, and intimate all at once).

We won't, either. We get stronger and stronger, and things only get harder. The universe rises up to meet us, and the only way to live and die is by grappling, by wrestling with angels and demons. And every good thing you've found and been able to hold onto in order to steady yourself can blow away in a strong wind, in God's breath, and you have to keep going. 

I wouldn't take back what happened to me. It made me who I am, and gave me the life I've had to live. It's a life I'm grateful for. I wasn't always, but I am, and I hope to feel that way every day until I die.

Fuck it. Fuck them. Still get my kicks. Still kickin. Had a lotta laughs and a lotta love since then. Borne shit near as bad. Worth it. I'll take the rest to the last drop, the sweet and the bitter dregs.

*

Ok, yesterday's post was the longest ever, and I just gave it a fucking appendix. That's enough for the day. At least, once you get through these lists I'm about to drop.

Stephen King books I have read since last time I wrote about that:


Dreamcatcher, Needful Things, Under the Dome, Elevation, 11/22/63

Other books I have read:

The Death of The Master, by Patrick Kyle

Books I have purchased since last time I wrote about that:

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Throat and Houses Without Doors by Peter Straub
Dracula by Bram Stoker (a recovery purchase)
Military Mavericks by Daniel Rooney
Are Women Human? by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, Brian Holland, and John Higgins
Squee's Wonderful Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors by Jhonen Vasquez
Alan Moore's Magic Words by the titular dude and like a dozen other people I ain't typin out right now
The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin
Shadow Box by George Plimpton
The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
The Wonder of Birds and Living on the Earth by the National Geographic Society
The Atlas of Scientific Discovery published by Crescent
Coral Kingdoms by someone named Roessler but it's under a bunch of other books right now and I'm not about to move anything right now to see more. It is published by Abrams.


*

Hey! Next time will be the two hundred and twenty-second post. How about that, man? I'm so pumped to see that.


--JL

#192

Damn, doggies, a dude is tired from the day, and must wake early on the morrow, and would fain rest his head upon the pillow, but I bought a knife today, and that marks a day particular, so one feels bound to punch the record.

Forsooth!

*

When a dude drops two hundred of his own dollars after tax on a tool, which in his case equates to half of the average monthly rent he has paid throughout his adult life and close to seventeen hours of work before tax, it is natural and correct that he should feel it is a proper day to take stock of oneself, to see where one stands. 

What kind of man is this, that spends this kind of money on a knife? And then, of course, spends a hundred more on blade guards, a carrying case, and a paring knife to exactly match my new Wüsthof Classic Ikon 4596/23cm (nine cool inches of full-tang German engineering with that hybrid ergonomic handle for relaxed-grip comfort).

*

Well, it is a tool of my trade. I spent this money for work, which is special way of spending money on myself. It is not a hand-forged, unique carbon-steel masterpiece; it is not the dream knife that I am not even sure that I want. But it is time I had a knife for work that is mine, whose edge no one is allowed to scrape across a cutting board, which will not be stuck into an industrial dishwasher or run through a shitty hand-sharpener, a knife no disrespectful, careless, unprofessional-ass hand will ever fucking touch and therefore a knife worth caring for, care for which it will reward me with leal and untroubled service for years, and faithfully keep its edge for more than fifty fucking minutes after the knife guy brings the fucking freshly sharpened knives back to the kitchen after which each knife is a ketchup hammer to a tomato and cannot so much as leave a mark on the skin of an onion.

Also stainless steel is in now, the sharpening game has caught up to it and it is a perfect choice for the kind of kitchens I work in.

Most importantly, after trying a couple eight-inchers and pretty much resigning myself to just a basic work knife I would not really enjoy, the dude at the store (I chose a local vacuum store with a Wüsthof stock) asked if I wanted to try the niner, it being discounted in a damaged box and all. I could give a shit about the box (stainless, suckaz!) and gave it a shot. The moment I held it in my grip and felt the balance travel up my arm, I knew it was my knife, said wow out loud, and reached for my wallet.

It was like that with Stray Dog*, too. Some of the tools we encounter in life, well, we've all hurt ourselves and known in our heart of hearts that this one was not on us, this time the motherfucking tool came at us with evil intent and no one can convince us otherwise. I believe this is perfectly true; malice aforethought can  reside in the inanimate and tools, being made with purpose and thrown into the world to exist as vessels of purpose, quite naturally react as subjective individuals to the purpose of the user to varying degrees. Energy acts upon energy. Some groups of molecules come together and something lights up. This knife and I were meant to cut together, as Stray Dog and I were meant to do our thing.

People are kind of like this, too.

*

So what kind of dude is Joseph Lidd, on the day he meets his knife? A dude that got up at four in the morning after about three and a half hour's worth of sleep, walked the old five miles to work in his brother's birkenstocks, put breakfast out on a hot table, got so tired of the gee-dee work knives that he resolved out loud to go buy his own knife after work, put lunch out on a hot table, closed the hot table and pulled the leftovers and cleaned and closed his station, walked six blocks to a place to get a certain lovely lady of intimate acquaintance a welcome-home present (presents?) for when she returns from her overseas vacation to that most emerald of isles, walked a little over a mile to the vacuum store, thinking over the notion that this was it, hell or high water come crashing through the world he was going to walk into a store and drop more than one hundred and fifty dollars on a single object, which he did, and having accomplished these errands, walked the mile and bit back nearly to where he works; rather, cruised into the shoe store in front of his workplace, inquired after a pair he has under their charge for resoling, was told they would likely be ready in a few days, and walked home barefoot the five miles on the burning asphalt and cement, backpack loaded quite to the maximum healthy capacity, system perhaps not having been provided with quite the recommended calories for all of the above, mind and body full of the special clarity that comes with determining and carrying out acts demanding of such a blend of endurances undertaken for the purpose of tempering the body and mind like steel in the forge, of sharpening the self like a knife, until he got home, to the dog so glad to see him and his mother's good cooking which has made him strong, to his feet hurting like the proverbial son of a bitch and walking around extremely gingerly, to saying fuck it beautiful day let's do this thing let's not be done with this sun I still got more juice behind the hose, so he puts on socks, which hurt, and shoes, which also hurts, and he fills his backpack once more with clothes he's getting rid of as they are ruined by wear and tear and honest accident, walks them a mile and a half to those bins that are a tax scam but who can make themselves really give a fuck without enjoining upon themselves to also give a fuck about the invisible insects we cannot but crush underfoot or fret over the bacterial genocide which is the act of drawing breath**, walked a mile and a half back, pain completely forgotten, pushed aside by the natural medicine of continuing to walk and the ease of spirit that comes of listening to Blind Boy Fuller truckin' his blues away.

Hardly necessary as it is to add, nevertheless it should go on record that I periodically vaporized THC throughout all of this. I am a dude who does that stuff plus a bunch of other stuff I ain't got time or spare wherewithal to detail. I mean, like I said at the outset, I'm pretty beat.

--JL

*ideas like this are why I would make a poor Buddhist, which would nevertheless not prevent me from being an exemplary Buddhist, the great genius of this mode of spirit being that it should be impossible to tell if anyone is doing it correctly merely by observing, or even probing. For who would know the right questions, and still have to ask them?

Hoooooly fuck I gotta go to bed

Anyway I know there are better ways but like I said, can't care about everything all the time

bed

#175

Family dog is barking at the window of my room, where he likes to survey the cul-de-sac with what on a larger canine would be a magisterial, commanding mien, but on him just seems like preoccupation and a certain amount of noble irritation. The difference between a tall, powerfully framed lighthouse-keeper and the undersized but very professional security man for a small historical preservation museum composed of a general store combined with a post office.

*

All right, I'm wasting time. It's because what I want to write about will so bare my emotions, also because I woke up thinking about work instead of anything I wanted to be thinking about, anything else at all, and have been thinking about work in a way that no one likes thinking about work even if you did want to think about work thirty-two milliseconds after your eyes opened.

*

Falling in love is a scary thing, especially when you know how bad someone else can treat you, on purpose and without meaning to, and how eminently you can fail to be what another person needs, accidentally and deliberately. I've broken an engagement to be married, escaped from a narcissist, and lived and loved through a range of other entanglements, each their own kind, each accorded due significance, each painful. Frankly, bluntly, I wasn't trying to go through anything like that again. 

Life isn't about being safe, though. Life is about doing something with what you have in front of you, and sometimes life is a pretty girl that wants to talk to you with her very nice and cute voice and get to know you and see you special. And the part of you that sees something special in that girl and responds to her eyes and her smile and her good kind heart is more important than the part of you that is scared that things are going to go bad again. It just is. Life is for living. Living is dangerous, but it's good. It's good to be alive, but you gotta be brave. Even if you've fucked up a lot, you've gotta keep trying to be brave.

*

So if you find yourself with a story playing out like this girl's reading a book you just reread and it's a great book, a real humdinger full of special language and tendernesses you treasure and special psychic movies you're the better for having witnessed, bearing undercurrents that change how your blood flowed, and you talk about it for a little bit, how you both so love the author, so you smile when you see one another and you keep on talking a little here and there, more books, some laughs, a note in your backpack, a spliff in the sun, a walk in the woods, and you wonder what the fuck is happening, it's so good that it's too good, it's unrealistic, it's unreasonable, you're fucking with yourself, what the fuck are you doing, don't you ever learn, and so you throw a stick into the spokes and foul the machine and you get back to the quiet and the cold lone and you are proud that you are learning and you are okay with being the person that can protect themselves but it is really truly very difficult to see this girl around and it is clearly not easy for her either but you are both getting by and you are both doing the right thing but merely because you don't look at something, merely because you turn away and try not to see it, it does not in fact cease to be or change position, so you cannot keep pulling it off, the thing is there, you can feel it no matter where you fix your gaze, so you smile more and you laugh more and you look in her eyes and then you have no choice but to turn back, and meet it where it is, and write a letter, and let the letter be a true and dangerous letter, the kind that throws everything into the air and makes you wait to see how it all comes back down. 

See where the story goes from there. 

*

As I am a super lucky guy, the story seems to be coming out okay. More than okay. The math has never looked like this to me before. Things in general have never looked this way to me before; choices, time, objects in space, distances. It's a different level. Is this something you get used to, or the beginning stages of some long and ever-morphing symphony? These are the kinds of thoughts shooting through me as I walk home in the full blast of a thunderstorm, heedless and thinking only of the smell and taste of her and the feeling of her arms around me and water pours down my face and off my chin like a spigot. 

*

Just keeps getting more beautiful, more dangerous, more and more storied. It can threaten to be overwhelming again, memory striking at me with the terrors of experience, doubt in myself dogging my footsteps. But courage is the only game in town and beauty is for enjoying while it lasts. Being in danger just means you've got skin in the game. And this is a game I am down to have all of my skin in, my whole body and self. It's cool.

*

Anyhow I love my fully gorgeous amazingly kind hella considerate super creative warmhearted hilarious girlfriend, she is the downest girl ever and fully hardcore. That's what's up these days. It's pretty fun and rad. We are having a nice time. 

*

Peace for the billions and peace forever on this charming and lovely Memorial Day, people. May you remember every dead soldier that ever was next time you raise your hand in anger. Kill it where it starts and you'll shed no blood; that's how you honor a sacrifice.


--JL

#134

Something special about yesterday's post number that I neglected to mention is that one plus three plus three is seven, which is great, also that 133 is very visually pleasing in itself, a shapely and very soothing number. Saying one hundred and thirty three out loud provides an excellent cadence. Could be used in place of a mantra.

*

There is a huge, ruinous willow tree near my house. When my family first moved into the neighborhood it was hale and hulking out of its boundaries; more alive, huger, more treeish than reality could allow for, but you could see it almost, how there was more willow than tree. Living sigil. First and strongest among kings of willows.

Disease ripped through it and it has lost more than half of itself. Nearly all of its old crown, two boles, and a good portion of the main trunk rotted and sloughed off, came down in hard weather, withered away to fine brown dust. A tree whose leaves and pendulous branches were once so thick and numerous they created an elongated curtain dome thirty feet in diameter to hide under, hands parting branches for three seconds before you could enter the sanctuary, now sports leafage on one side only, from a meager set of stunted branches.

What limbs remain are full of woodpecker holes, many enlarged by starlings, scarred by the ravages of the illness that nearly destroyed it, and give the tree the impression of a stagger, as the remaining limb system was once but one of four mighty tops.

I've thought the tree was going to die for sure this time at least fifteen times. No one bothers about it. There has been no treatment or care. It has fought for its life alone and unaided and still it puts out flowers every spring, still it reaches up into the air. Brutalized, shrunk, weakened, still it breathes and sinks its roots and reaches toward the sky, straining for its life.


--JL

#129

How we keep going is all the miraculous proof that I need. Serious talk.

That we as a species have not instigated total nuclear annihilation--that we did not blow ourselves to perdition the minute that was an option--on top of each individual shouldering their trauma and exhaustion and the innumerable burdens of existence and stepping forward to fight the battle that is life is so overwhelmingly outrageously laughably against the odds, even for one day, that it is mathematically a miracle.

Mathematics themselves count as a miracle too, though. 

*

Drew three pictures last night. Did what I said I would do. 

The miracles we make ourselves are valid, too. To approach blankness and fill it with yourself--the performance of miracles. Everyone has this within them; even a creature like Charles Manson can make art that earns its name. That is a miracle, like it or not.

Nobody said miracles are always good things however you frame them, or that they're ever simple.

Universe doesn't have to be good to be miraculous. 

*

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said that he believed increasingly in spite of, and not because of, the miracles. I haven't read his books yet, just about him, some quotes, very superficial. Think about what I've seen quite a lot, though. Getting ready. Reading is a process I take seriously; my priorities and decisions may seem violently changeable and wildly chaotic, but this is misleading. I set myself a program, through which I allow a rich seam of chaos to run, so that I never stagnate, and to which time is subordinate, not determinate. Waiting for fruits to ripen while I ride the wind and account for what it brings me. 

Discipline is not the same as control.

*

Anyhow, I am proud of everybody reading this for having survived to make it this far.

Fucking life! That shit is killing us, amirite?

*

Today I cooked some bomb scrambled eggs. Those fuckers got treated correctly every step of the way. 

Let me tell you something: eggs are a miracle. Think about an egg for a minute. Remember that an egg is how you got your start, and that when you eat eggs you are eating giant versions of the cell that you once were.

Stirred up some big cells in a hot pan and ate 'em right up. Yum yum! Man, they were decent. I honored their sacrifice to the best of my ability.


--JL

#111

Wow! Post one hundred and eleven! That is the birthday Bilbo Baggins celebrates at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings! One Gross! Three ones in a row! One plus one plus one is three! Without question, one of the best and most special numbers of all!  

Incredible. It is a small and factually pointless thing, but I am brimming with joy to be writing this one hundred and eleventh post.

*

Sometimes you wake up empty. The world has faded in the suprareal ur-presence of the Void. You know that you are only alive out of a tired and irrational sense of duty. Your best weapons and armor, which you worked so hard to forge in the fires of putting one foot in the other despite it all and tempered in the water of not putting a decisive and irrevocable end to your own life, have shattered and fallen to the ground, not for the first time, and once again you face the truth: there is no reason to live, and there is no significance in existence.

All I got is, don't stop kicking your feet when you feel like you're floating weightless and without value to anyone and nothing but the most loathsome burden to what passes for your own self. Hope they find the ground again. That final trumpet's coming no matter what, and you might find the fire and the water once again before the end. You've survived a lot already. Even if you don't realize it, it made you stronger. Coming face to face with death and fighting your way back to life--there is nothing else that makes one stronger.

I think it's worth the fight, for the times when you don't have to. I think you can always at least try to get up one more time, pick up the hammer one more time, hit the forge one more time. 

When we all lay down our arms one day, when the last of us is dead and gone, it won't have mattered, sure, but it won't have mattered that it didn't matter if you make it matter. You are free to determine the significance of your own life, on your own terms.

Personally, I consider life significant and valuable, when I am thinking clearly. Yes, I am one of those madmen that believe in freedom. Therefore, I respect agency. Do what you are going to do.

*

Well, I was going to write some more stuff about something else--something funny, maybe, or perhaps bolster what I was saying by talking about Seneca, but I walked away to eat some dinner and as I ate a movie with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler where the former played a brilliant but potentially questionable lawyer and the latter played some kind of maddened Deep State ultratactician going dark justice held me to the end through commercials, a rare occurrence because walking away and watching it later is such an easily available option. Then I got sucked into watching the Grammies with my dad. My dad's a fun dude and these Grammies aren't at all as bad as some I've seen, but I resent having a television in the kitchen. 

*

One hundred and eleven! 111! 


--JL

#100

One hundred is not important to me. But! I think the end of double-digit posts is wild; a brief, frenzied infancy. It is wild that the posts will be three-digit posts for a long time to come. Feel no pressure to write anything special for such an occasion, though. 

Matter of fact, the only reason there's a post at all is I really don't like going more than three days without putting something up. I'm tired. It was negative twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit this morning as I walked into my seventh straight shift. I have really used up a great deal of human energy over the last seven-day period. A great variety of expenditures in a great variety of fields. Many returns and gains, of course. Life. Exhausting in its quotidian richness. 

Oh! And I don't have to work that eighth day. I am okay with that.

*

I said this out loud to my coworkers, duly warning them that it was going to be pretentious: one excellent perspective is to take as much comfort in paradox as in tautology. 

*

See? I think that's the optimal amount of sparkle and palaver required celebrate the hundredth post, though, pray: no one pretend that I am any better than a fool, that I am ever more right than I am wrong or more knowledgeable than I am ignorant. May peace born of what understanding we may foster reign over all humankind, and may we one day come to know one another as we really truly are.


--JL

#88

I'll be back after the New Year! I should have mentioned that. I don't feel like making any more blog posts this year. I'll write the first post of the year of our Lord two thousand and nineteen on New Year's Day. Hopefully I'll generate something marginally worth the effort required to read it.

I have had my fill of 2018! This was a really difficult year to survive, but I think I learned a huge amount. Wretched and incredible. So it goes! Upward and onward! If you look back, you die! If you give in to fear, you grow old! Step forward, forward, ever forward!

Enjoy your holidays.


--JL

#78

Been thinking about feces today. I'll elaborate.

As a kid, I liked the idea of having a dog in the apartment enough to ask for one. None of the attendant realities appealed to me at all, though, and once my parents explained it to me a a couple of different times a couple of different ways, I left off for good. By the time I was six I felt like maybe it would be tolerable if we happened to one day have the kind of life where a dog would be possible, if I wasn't the one who had to be responsible for its feeding, health, safety, and most especially, its poops.

In short, I haven't seen the appeal of owning a companion animal for a long time, and a bedrock for that has always been that I have considered it beneath human dignity to handle the waste product of another animal if that animal is not the covalent in true husbandry, such as would be called manure, or for scientific inquiry. I'm talking about plops and turds, here. Usually left someplace inconvenient.

Other considerations (not exhaustive):

• yeah, you can think of it as symbiosis or coevolution but it can also be easily construed as slavery and I believe there have always been individuals and institutions ready and willing to take it to that level on the real. The carriage driver whipping the overworked nag whose entire lifespan he has stolen and brutalized to death in the street the very hour her overtaxed strength gives out: an important image.
• obviously, researchers maintain perfect dignity as they study animal feces in their noble efforts to increase our understanding of wildlife.
• most creatures bred to live in houses suffer from the same breeds of terrible and unique afflictions we self-domesticators have inflicted on ourselves and each other, such as overbreeding to the tune of gross musculoskeletal disorders, air passages that barely allow the lungs to inflate, etc. Humans selectively breed canines and felines to capitalize on traits that create miserable, stricken lives, and feed them dead food which sickens the animals and dooms them to a further-ravaged, cancer-ridden graveslope. 
• creatures bred and raised more responsibly require vast territories and huge demands on their energy and drive to maintain exemplary health. Such animals are constantly denied this by the majority of modern animal owners, largely because of factors outside their control, which is sad for everyone. People love their frustrated, anxious, and depressed animals, of course, and they love their people, but then, they would, in a codependent relationship; all these afflictions and gains are comorbid and duly portioned. I don't like the thought of playing loving jailer, personally.

Yes, pet ownership is something I had essentially relegated to a privileged fraction of the world's people, all things being equitable and just, but of course that would be a poorer world. To say that it would be more ethical for there to be less life and that most human beings do not deserve the love and companionship of creatures is to me outstandingly cruel. Life lives to beget life, to crowd in on life, to push into the cracks and break open new niches and inscribe new signs and boundaries. Sometimes it's unspeakably ugly to witness. 

Yet life endures incredible privations in the name of love, and rightly so. There is value in acting out of sheer irrationality even if we don't always like paying the price, just as there is value perfect reasoning even if it is not desirable and even harmful to act out its consequences. 

My younger brother irrationally went and got a fucking dog one day even though I told him not to do that five hundred times in a row. Now he lives on a different part of the continent, engaged in peacework. I'm here taking his dog for walks on freezing winter morning. He needs an operation in his leg, someone cut his nuts off when he was little more than a baby, he had PTSD from abuse when he came to live with the family, it took a year to calm  him down, and he's still a neurotic sort. This is an animal with intentionally bred dwarfism. But he's happy a lot. He makes us happy a lot. He's some life in our life. 

Which brings me back to handling another animal's shit, which I realized this morning, I'm finally just totally cool with. Huh, I thought to myself this morning. Once again it is shown, though you would think it would not need be so many times over, that one can  get used to anything. I do not resent picking up this warm turd that the family dog just rhythm-squeezed out its rectum in the slightest. Huh. Huh! Wonders unceasing.

*

Monkeys and apes will shit into their hands to throw it at whatever they're mad at or scared of. People do this too.

*

According to W.C. Fields: "there comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation." Also: "What is a dog, anyway? Merely an antidote for an inferiority complex..."

*

The family dog wished to take a second shit upon his walk this morning, and I lacked a second bag. He almost shat in someone's front yard before I snapped to and unfortunately yanked him from his business. However, it is very very poor form to have that sort of thing go down, so to simply abide was not an option. He tried to stop a couple more times but I hustled him out of the neighborhood we were at and onto a spit of land off the road where he could do his thing and I could quickly hoof back to after I took him home.

Having done that, I returned to the stop and hunted down his leavings. As I picked up the little pile of dogshit, I shuddered, gripped with fresh revulsion. I experienced a fundamental difference in the handling of fresh shit, filled with bacteria and complex living systems, rife with the potential to nourish, to fertilize, to give rise to life anew, and the feeling of this cold lump of matter, rendered biologically inert to human senses. It felt deader by far than a corpse, deader by far than cold raw meat dead for days and sealed in plastic. It was not sterile, not really, I know this in my intellect, but to my body, it epitomized sterility. DNA memories bloomed in my chest about it.

I guess if one were afflicted with coprophagia it would be different.

*

I've had to handle plenty of fecal matter, professionally and personally. It's not easy, at first. Personally, you know, I'm a big brother, I got lots of younger cousins. Sometimes your friends have problems. Sometimes you do. Illness strikes, catastrophe rains down a cruel rain. Your roomate heedlessly destroys their own bowels, but also, never properly cleans up after, leaving you to chip away at a hardened, reeking lacquer underneath layers of fresher spatter should you flag in cleaning up after him, or should you stop doing so in a vain attempt to get him to notice there is a problem. Professionally, well, you end up cleaning some bathrooms, at least in my career path. Sometimes the food you serve them or previous foods or sheer bad luck means they create violent, demonic scenes in these bathrooms. Sometimes drunk people seem to wish to give vent to a form of pre-mimetic creativity with only the material of the body; back to apes. As a person who has often let the lizard brain take over through the fermented passage, I have no room for judgment, but also, as a person who has cleaned up lots after others, I can hold up my head.

See, dignity has nothing to do with excretion, with "waste", which is not. Shit simply is. You gotta clean it up, or it'll cause problems. Simple. Finally I have come to be able to look Dolores Claiborne in the eye. Finally I have ceased to think myself as better or cleaner or any different than shit in my own hand. Nothing is better or worse than shit. Nothing ever could be.

*

When I was a kid, a real little kid, I stepped in massive dog doo in my nice shoes. The shock of reek  that floated up to me as my hard-soled black shoe squished through the center of the turd almost knocked my head off my shoulders; I can smell the damn thing now. I'm getting over it, though. Ha!


--JL