#488

It's funny--there's no real need to report this fact--but today's Pnnies Arkhad comical strip has a huge amount in common with the very first joke ever told in the strip, and it was still pretty funny and like, fine. An arguably objective comedic and artistic improvement over a linear span of time, and it didn't make me feel like I was choking down abject hackery! Think this shows Jim Davis did a high-acumen assessment of the medium when he said it's okay to literally repeat your own jokes after ten years.

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Guys, I should probably mention that typing has become weird and much more typo-driven since one of the cats ripped my "E" key right off the board once when I was unwisely prising her off her chosen sleep surface. Well, I wanted to fucking write, dammit, was indeed in the middle of writing and she was making deep and penetrating editorial changes--but one ought to know better than to mess with the household god that way. The slapdown was swift, and of course, ironic.

Anyway typing isn't as fun now. Hasn't been. Need a new computer, or maybe a professional tablet. Something with an "E" key. Lived this stunted life for months now. Think this incident happened in maybe October.

Something about writing in English, Singaporean bots that comprise my new readership: the letter "E" is vital to the easy use of the language. One would not be wrong in saying it is the most important and common vowel; indeed, it is provable fact.

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Jim Davis is the Garfield guy, in case that information has faded in the dead orange glow and sheer scale of that feline monument.

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Non-seq! Nintendo, you are never going to get the respect you deserve if your wonderful and constantly-growing music app doesn't work as well as other music apps. I can blame Apple for this if you need me to, though. If that were justified, I would not be the least little bit surprised.

Of course, Apple's music player is the one I like--and it could also work better on their own hardware. Maybe it's kind of a hard job?

All right, guys. Maybe I'll cut you some slack. Though if anybody that works at you ever tells me it was super easy and it was all just boardroom shenanigans harming the product and adversely affecting the consumer and their investment, I still won't be surprised. 

Guess the main issue at hand isn't whether I'm surprised. Maybe we should concentrate on everything I pay money for working perfectly every time I go to use it or all my money back for the month. How's that for a fucking suggestion box slip, you silent monoliths?

I'm looking at all of you. Maybe glaring is a better word. Glaring up, up, from the garbage-strewn canyons where my kind make their trammeled living, up to the great carven faces, the ozymandic golden idols whose slow, titanic motions reverberate through the wearied materials of this shambling, already-dead world and wrack it ever more spasmodically as it crumbles into the sands of time.

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So, what's up with everybody? Seen any good movies lately?

Perhaps that's entirely smarmy now that I work at a movie theater. That's what I'm up to later, by the way. Think there's some kind of event to host.

Peace the FUCK OUT

--JL

#326

Probably the nicest thing about getting up super duper early even when I don't have to leave the house at six in the morning is listening to the birds wake up and do their morning dispatches, or paeans to their avian deities, or self-promotions, or community catchups, or hate speeches, or their art for art's sake, or whatever it is they're warbling and chirruping about before the sun comes up. Love to hear that stuff. 

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Maybe you're wondering what kind of music I've been listening to lately! If so, today is a present just for you; today, the universe has rewarded you, and you specifically, with precisely what you crave, what you long for in the cold watches of the night. And who could blame you for these harrowing needs? To try to live one's life in ignorance of what I play in the car to stave off transit madness is to languish in a darkness far from God. I also play music when I do the dishes.

That's the when of it. The how? A bluetoof speaker, because our hatchback's audio system is not functional. Sometimes, with the dishes, a boombox, to play CD's. 

Now, finally, the what.

Carpenter Brut's first album, Trilogy, has seen some play, as has The Protomen's The Protomen. SeZon's remake of the Metroid Prime OST is quite good. Taken separately, Kimya Dawson's album Thunder Thighs and Aesop Rock's Garbology have made their rounds, especially Thunder Thighs, which is probably my most-played music lately; taken together, as The Uncluded, their album Hokey Fright has also been "spinning", inasmuch as albums can spin through a streaming service and in a telephone. Kimya Dawson's other albums have also seen action of late. Traditional and Folk Songs of Yugoslavia, played by Branko Mataja, brought me great pleasure. 

Finally, deserving of their own paragraph, The Movers have brought me such joy and lightness of soul that I seriously considered printing pamphlpets and making time to hand them out on street corners, courtyards, pavilions--wherever the public blood courses, that I may infuse it with Glad Tidings. 

Seriously, in my head, I was composing lines like "Did you know that music has healing properties? Have you ever imagined a world living in a sustained and glorious harmony? Please, take a minute to listen to The Movers, and once you have, tell a friend. In this simple way, we can contribute to a new era of peace and prosperity on our beautiful planet."

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Ok! There is a lot for me to do for school right about now, but I'll try to make some more posts this week. Maybe sometime this spring deliver a fresh book, finally, finally go from ninety-five percent complete to one hundred. I keep saying it, in hopes that it may encourage the thing to come to pass. 

PEACE


--JL

#319

Looks like I was being a jerk yesterday. Guess I was cranky. Guess when I'm cranky, maybe I pick on an illustrated image I generated myself of a technically disadvantaged-type dude. Today I get to feel guilty. Today I ask in all seriousness, without venom, who cares about not being able to do push-ups? Who gives a fuck about pants. What the fuck do pants, or how a person smells, have to do with their innate worth and infinite spiritual potential? Do their opinions and their affect as a subculture or stereotype mean that they deserve my snide excoriation? 

No. Not at all, dammit! The best thing that can be said about my outburst may be that it was fundamentally born out of frustration at my inability to help this kind of person, but that's not my job, or my problem, so what the fuck, man. Really stupid stuff. Gotta be better than this.

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Anyway. Fucking hell. Let's talk about books. I'll finish The Wars of the Roses today or tomorrow, and then I'll kill three birds with one swift and terrible stone by reading the textbook for my current poetry class cover to cover, thereby preparing like gangbusters for that class, fulfilling the "poetry" checkmark on my "next book in planned alternating sequence", and also still pretty much reading a nonfiction book, what with all the hard data and background and terminology and other crap that fills textbooks so dang full.

That reminds me to mention I have been reading psychology textbooks and humanities textbooks, which means, when it comes to the latter, a bunch of stuff about art and history and culture and anthropology and law and economics and also like The Epic of Gilgamesh (but a condensed, prose form, for economy's sake--not very satisfying but still good) so that's nothing but rad. 

Makes me happy as a pig in shit, to tell the truth. I decided to take only classes that would please me greatly if I properly apply myself, which is decidedly my firm intent, and so far it's paying off. Those classes have been a lot of fun to be in and do work for, even though it's a lot to deal while working and keeping a house together with and it's only ever going to get more intensive. I am prepared, though, in body and brain. Feeling strong. Getting back into the swing of the endeavor and determined to, for once in my WRETCHED ARC, excel without getting a complex about it and throwing my life in the garbage.

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Listened to all of Mega Drive's discography a bunch. It was so fucking awesome to do that, damn that's good music. The synthwave revival fellates my soul with such pleasure it should be illegal. This music ought to be a controlled substance.  Also the newest album from the band Alvvays is very good. Listened to it because John Alison, the former Scary-Go-Round (currently, Solver and Giant Days and maybe a few other things; formerly, many many comics including Bobbins and Bad Machinery) man and great delighter of my eyeballs as far as comics go for the past twenty years, put up a list of albums of the year, which he does most years (I don't always see it, as sometimes I have been off the grid or distracted or whatever), thereby delighting my ears as well. Before that, a bunch of Bleach soundtrack music, made by Shirō SAGISU, finally got put on iTunes, and I was listening to it a lot. Before that, the Andor soundtrack, which is a magnificent achievement both on its own and in the context of a Star Wars endeavor. Before that a couple of playlists I tinkered with for weeks, full of all manner of music new to my rotation and reliable classics. Before that, a massive playlist containing all my favorite blues, funk, soul, and low dirty honkytonk jazz music, which was all I wanted to listen to for weeks, only occasionally breaking form to check out A Hawk and a Handsaw or Vetiver or listen to some Mogwai albums. I'm listening to Lazerhawk's Skull Shark as I type all this.

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Wow! Who cares about any of that shit! Maybe sometime soon, by the grace of the Almighty, I might come up with a thing or two that is actually of use to anyone. Tell a story. Have a thought. Something. Anything that isn't me just blathering about the things I like, even though, of course, people like that sort of thing. Me too, when someone else is doing it. Doing it myself, it's some weird completionist compulsion; I look up and there's just this ridiculous wall of text describing what a fucking loser I am.

--JL

#98

Listened to a record some people who were my friends and more than my friends made before I knew them. They don't know me anymore, which is a situation I created, unfairly and for no good reason. 

Sometimes, when you love a lot of people very much, you rip yourself out of all of their lives because you think deep down you are a mindless, devouring cancer. Not for the first time, you try to let yourself be destroyed. Not for the first time, you are spared, and forced to face your aching memories and peer uselessly at all the unknown dead ends laid out before you, groping in the dark.

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When their second album is finally released I will listen to it, I will buy it the day that it comes out and I will listen to it. They wrote it and hammered it out while I did my best to feed and take care of them, and then I left them alone so they could lay down track. 

That was almost two years ago. Nothing is the same.

Their voices will ring out, and I will listen, and I will remember, and I hope my ungrateful heart cracks down the middle. 

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Miss them. Hurts. 


--JL