#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

#261

Managed to live in the same town (or at the very least, in extreme proximity to the township) for a long time despite my mean, mean stature in society and its skyrocketing cost of housing and living. That's done and over with on short notice. The apartment complex where we live is crunching up the rent, and as the lowest rent we could get in this town, it was already too high. So it goes, eh? Those rascals! 

*

On this day in 2020, I got married. This is how our landlords see fit to congratulate us. It would be comical, without the stress of it all. You know I own a lot of books, right? We have stuff, much of it heavy, a good part acquired over the course of the last year. I didn't want to move any of this shit for at least another year. Whatever, though. Adapt or die.

*

The wedding was extremely private, the year 2020 being what it was. I dressed in green from toe to shoulder. He wore a yellow shirt, a denim jacket festooned with buttons, a long yellow skirt stitched with brown leaves, and black boots with neon-green laces. We both wore flowers in our hair, said our vows under an archway hung with flowers, spilling over with flowers, in a room crowded full flower arrangements and flower-based art installations. 

It's been a good year.

*

Well! May the Lord grant us fortitude.

--JL

#162

Seared my right wrist down low and to the outside against the edge of a hot pan a while ago. Still open, peeling, occasionally suppurating scab in the center of it. Two days ago the corner of a hot tray pressed into my left bicep high up and to the inside. The worst part about taking an induction burn like that is the pressure aspect, where you get not just burnt but speed-cooked on the outside and deep down below, so that the burn has a deep ravine structure, inflammation from the lowest point pushing up increasingly dead flesh, itself inflamed. 

Also you can hear them very clearly, the fats in your skin and meat hissing as they burn away.

It is also bad when the top layer eventually sloughs off, leaving naked glistening unskin that cracks and twists as it dries and festers. 

Eventually, though, they'll both just be shadows on my skin. Reminders.

*

We are who we are because of what has happened to us and how we have dealt with it or not dealt with it. At each moment we are the single result of the accumulation of our time as a phenomenon, and the next  moment leaves that phenomenon behind, where it no longer exists and also stays with the phenomenon that is in the moment, this phenomenon which trails an ever-expanding tail of past forms of itself. 

The self is an equation constantly subject to new variables, whose result is accordingly in constant flux. An expanding sphere. 

So, you grow. Older. When the variables stop changing, that is death. 

*

When you're dead, the past is all there is (for the phenomenon which was itself in relation to the moment, not for its trail of selves, which tend to stick around to varying degrees and cause trouble). 

Not so when we are alive; however, I have this tendency to act as though this is so. I live as though the past loomed over the present with such power as to close it down entirely, to freeze me and bury me. I act as though the past has spoken in a voice of judgment and that the tale is told, the math is over, and there is nothing to add, and if there is more content, it is just a shitty appendix to a squandered story.

This way of interpreting the past and of letting it work upon me is a death-aspect, a demon.

How does one defeat this demon?

*

Well, I'll start like this: the past may be the future only two instants too young, but it is also the fucking past and however much power it may have over that future, the future it is not. Only the future is the future. The past cannot see or know anything about the future, only the moment which is becoming the future, the self in the moment of the equation having a result in one moment, only that has an apprehension of the future, as it is happening, and as it recedes into the past.

If you look back, you die. It isn't just that you lose Eurydice. You die. You missed the whole point and now you're dead.

They'd be justified in burying you with your head on backwards.

*

With demons, you don't riddle. You don't wrestle. You don't take up arms or charge or trick or gamble.

You turn away and you take the steps of faith. Forward. Into what, you know not. But away from this demon shaking fistfuls of your own ghosts at you, shoving its tongue into your ear night and day, singing skeletal, endlessly repeated dirges over the live music that's playing right now. 

*

I don't forget a lot of stuff in life. I forget to turn in pieces of homework, among other stuff that is expected of me and stuff I said I would do, but I don't forget life, the living part, the stuff that happened, what I saw, heard, tasted, felt. I forget names, I forget the exact placements in a linear geography of time, but I don't forget the prevailing light and the way the wind was blowing; I don't forget the words or the signs, even if I can't quote them verbatim. Nothing is perfect and every translation transforms. But my memory is insistent and insistently clear. The past is very real to me. Life has been fucked up and very beautiful, so bad and so wonderful I could tear myself apart trying to feel it all at once.

Memory has its uses. It's what makes us human. It's what makes the math work out to something that expands and climbs, rather than merely iterate. Remembering how I have acted, what I have said, what I have done, and attempting to exceed myself as I was in hopes of remembering myself one day as I had hoped to be--it is the past that we use to imagine ourselves into existence, the impetus we have to will our lives into a shape, the stone from which we push off in our endeavor. 

What does not work is trying to jump and hang on tight at the same time. In this bodily/psychic contest, hanging on always wins.

To be ever engaged in the act of pushing off the rock and onto the next movement, the next rock to push off of. That is how you fight the demon that has you clinging endlessly to the same stone.


--JL 

#136

Been a rough season out here. One of those times in life where it takes everything you got just to point yourself in the right direction. Clinging to the rails so hard your knuckles split, vibrating at high frequency.

Trying to have a sense of humor about stuff. If you have a few laughs most days, the static dies down a little bit. Helps the bandwidth.

*

Kind of a killjoy thing to say--it's not a good idea to let your sense of humor get away with you. Thing is, that way lies madness and regret, and potentially doom. I enjoy joking around a great deal and I don't have a lot of scruples in that regard. Laughter can be fucked up and deadly as well as medicinal, though. Probably worth being cognizant of that. 

*

Whatever you need to get by though, of course. Gotta try to survive, and sometimes what the body needs to live is a touch of death. Staying sane means letting yourself go a little crazy. Any pun in a storm. 


--JL

#62

It is so laughable that we seek to know, and even funnier that we declare what we think we know to be correct and permanent! I realize I've started a post this way before, but I cannot care and will very likely do so again. The vanity is endlessly baffling, and so hugely absurd--the joke never grows stale.

There is no end to thinking. There is no end to thought. As long as there is life, it will communicate with life and with the incommunicable beyond, which will tend to life as even life tends to cease being life, to go beyond communication. So what is preserved? And what is the value of preservation, and how long can a memory last? Questions are always alive, answers are always dead. Yet it is through the answers that we seek to build our lives.

What is human existence as an unbroken stream of consciousness but a few sentences, a brief snatch of bloodied song? How much of the universe has every person that has ever lived seen? Expressed? Set down for posterity?

Nothing! It is nothing! One big guess! Unclear in the particulars! And soon, we will forget, blinded by our new versions of old stories and distracted by the fresh contours of new guesses, for which we will scream and kill and die.

If the universe is a forest, all humanity is but stepping underneath the eaves at its edge, and looking around. Briefly, in fear, squinting through shadows.

Speaking in personal, more quotidian terms, if the universe is a forest, then our lives--every thought we think every tree we see, every step we take between the trunks--on paths or through the undergrowth--with guides and partners or all alone--is knifing blazes into the bark, etching markings into the surface of things to show ourselves where we've been, how we got to where we are. 

Collectively or alone, it all comes down to a little patch of "familiar" ground; growing a little every day, maybe, but never more than the most infinitesimal before the incalculable spread of the universe, of time.

Can't go back. No unmarking a marking. No unpathing a path, no unreading a word. No shortcuts, either. Can't get to the edge. Can't read ahead. Can't force static--as if it weren't enough that the trees don't end; they never stop changing, either, and the markings that we make change too; fade, become grown over, lose their meaning, go abandoned and become rediscovered. 

Always, always, the threat of fire, of flood, of blight, of unstoppable decay, of becoming totally lost--having all that we have come to think we know, all that we have come to hold dear torn away from us, violently or through senescence. Death might tear us by the roots or creep in through the leaves, but always, it roams the woods, and how can we object? Every throat alive is bared to death, and if it swept through like a shadow and took its due all in a day, and the human story ended all abrupt mid-sentence as it was just beginning, all the knowledge we pretended meant so much would be lost as if it had never been gained--and so what?

Knowledge may last longer than any one of us, but it is more mortal and less significant than even the meanest life. Knowledge serves life, is subordinate to life. And life is in the heart. 

A single heart has more value than the entirety of human knowledge. Offer me the choice between them and I will not hesitate for a fraction of a second--I would eliminate all living memory for the sake of a single life. Knowledge, thought, wisdom: these are toys, at best. Usually, chimeras. 

What matters is the seeds.

To live among trees is a gift. To walk and breathe in an uninterrupted flux, moving through the flesh of a great rushing wind--what else is there? The whole point is to be a tiny vantage in a vastness, to be a dancing particle, to see what there is to see while we have eyes to see it.

Feeling our hearts. Feeling through our hearts. Our hearts, knowing nothing, present us with the true nature of our world, with the full meaning of the universe.

Dying senselessly in the woods--the very best that we can hope for.


--JL