#367

A kind of madness I am well-used by has taken its familiar possessions. My mind is a ransacked fortress, the only feelings of safety found in raising Pocket Monsters with the only focus available to me that is quiet and warm, and that not unfailingly. 

Well, what are you gonna do? We are the piece of leather that we are, and have we have been shaped and marked indelibly by all that touches our surface and affects our texture, the irrestistible forces and the hard corners and edges of things. 

So it goes. The worst part is I'm not built to properly care about the problems, I am built to flow around them like water whenever possible and concentrate only on what I care about. My childhood shaped me for quiet acceptance of what befalls me, for the world is a beast not to be controlled, events are driven by the devil, and the only true release is in the infinite immanence of God, in radiance beyond the universe, in that which is that it is. My sense of victory comes with letting all pass through me and over me like a gravitational wave, leaving only the remnant on the very curve of spacetime, and a prayer that this remnant will be more free than the preceding form, less tied to the crude materials of this world. 

Yes, that part of me that longs to be destroyed. To be crucified, then ascend.

*

As anyone can see, deeply Catholic grandparents and a healthy chunk of early education administered by Jesuits really did a fucking number on this poor sinner. But how can I blame them, or anyone, for anything? The thing cannot be done in good conscience or honest thought. The thing cannot be done at all.

*

In the end, it's just us, alive, right this second, doing what we're doing. The past is dead. The next second could be anything. We have what we have in front of us, right now, and nothing else. Gettng the body to the next thing. 

There is no time or space for heavy shit in this life, for blame, or fear, or resentment, or anything except what is light to carry, what is uplifting, for hope and curiosity.

Love is heavy, but it's heavy as it needs to be to make you strong enough to fly.

--JL

#344

Keep coming back to it these days, so I might as well write it down. Elaborately optimize it. Trick it out, even. 

So, it can take place in a bus, since I know how to drive one, and why shouldn't I one day get my hands on one and cock it up to run on, I dunno, momentum. How's that for an optimized fantasy. My bus runs on its own momentum, and generates starting energy and impulse from running a charge sent from a switch connected to a bundle of 5-cell batteries powering electromagnets in the wheel wells and a mechanical man under the hood. It is this man who starts the engine, using a furnace that burns clean and runs on his own good cheer even as he does, and is never in short supply.

Ok. The bus runs. Silently. Maybe, sometimes, when everything and everyone is quiet, you might become aware of a nearly silent, humming grumble. And it plays this playlist I've been working on, and whatever else anybody wants to play no hassle, high quality sound. We'll call the bus Mighty Jake III.

All the highways and byways are empty of other vehicles. It's just our bus. The fields and towns and cities of the land remain populated, but only we drive. The transit is, as it were, sublimated. Otherwise it's all the same. Perhaps the empty highways are only an illusion, but we do not trouble ourselves about that, or about anything. The rest stops serve food as homemade and good as the diners, which use organic ingredients worked on by happy cooks well-paid and treated with dignity. Everywhere we go, we are treated with dignity, and treat everyone we meet with dignity. Everybody has enough money. Everybody's bills are paid. Nobody's got somebody back home who's laid up sick. Everything's tranquil.

MJIII's passenger area doesn't have to conform to safety standards or the rules of dimensional space, so usually it's sized more like a big van, everyone sitting comfortably, but not as comfortably as, say, in a given living room. The conditions and particular sensations need not be uncomfortable physically but adhered to; the body's sense that transit is happening, that everyone is closer together with fewer avenues of movement than they would be in most other contexts. But it's hammocks, it's beanbags, it's what you most need and the most you can get. When it's time for sleep, when some privacy is what's needed, the passenger area can be much bigger on the inside, TARDIS style. Need a shower? Not while the bus is moving, but whenever else, along with getting some laundry done. 

It begins with just me, rolling out in Jake all by myself. After I back the thing into the street, I open the door for Ezra and the cats, who live in a large, enriched section which travels with us without moving, MJIII's own extradimensional top deck. Ezra, looking forward to meeting everyone and introducing me to everyone, for that is the project--gathering the scattered handful of friends and family scattered through time and space whose faces we have not looked upon in for too long a spell, those whom we cherish no matter how long we must miss them. 

Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Miami, NYC, and that's just the big ones and that's just for starters. We have stops in Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, and Japan, We have stops in Nairobi and Baghdad and Warsaw and Istanbul. 

After that it's just terribly personal invented dialogues concerning pieces of music and thoughts about life, an imaginary communion. Maybe someday I'll write it down, maybe as itself, maybe as something some characters are chewing on together. I'll try to make them beautiful, because in my mind, it is so beautiful, driving a pretend vehicle while I talk to absent friends and the dearly departed about what I really want them to hear, what I would give to relish in hearing them say.

*

Hey! Hop in. That all you're bringing? No, my dear, my darling--like our hearts, like our love, like our crazy-ass heads, this bug's bigger on the inside. 

--JL

#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

#87

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! It's just possible that you might not have known that and missed it, or forgotten what day it was entirely, or some such trouble. Then it would be on my conscience. I am happy to remind you.

*

Christmas is a pretty good time of year. I have never experienced any of these nightmare Christmases so celebrated and aggrandized in the wider culture, nor have I ever felt the approach of yuletide as a groaning doom which my shoulders must bleed under once every year. I know a lot of people really do, and the omnipresence of Christmas is torture, a torture whose chronoterritory expands yearly, like a holly, jolly cancer eating the calendar.

Deplorable as the mass hypercommercialization of Christmas is, and despite the trauma, inseparable from the holiday which afflicts so many, Christmas is a net good. I have been known to speak in a voice progressively more thick with rage to the point of actual spit coming out of my mouth as I talk about it all; the hypocrisy, the greed, the avarice, the out-of-control acquisitiveness. The holiday as it is marketed and often expressed is a twisted nightmare inverse of its rooted intentions: spiritual and physical rebirth, honor and charity for the humble and the meek, breaking bread with loved ones, the rising of the sun and other stars--renewal, sustenance, the promise of ascension.

These are necessary things to act out, even if it's all cocked up practically beyond recognition, even if mostly it's awful. It's because it's taking a shot at it. Taking a shot at it is the only way to get it right even once. Feeling that feeling even once is worth it. Worth it all. Pays for itself and everything else.

The only way to get anything--anything-- out of life is to believe in something that's not real, and making it happen, making it true. Believing in real shit is comparatively easy, still complicated, but easier. The other thing's a little harder, but it makes the real more real and the unreal more real than that, which I believe is sublime. And as human beings, we need an agreed-upon time, a significant time, to remind ourselves of that, to remind each other.

It is possible to let go of what has been, to embrace what is, to become prepared and willing and able to love more than before, give more than before, rejoice more than before, more than ever in your life, in ways you barely dared imagine and some you couldn't have. 

Truly, it is something which will hold you through the year. Truly, it is not about the single day, but what that day can, through the laughably simple spell of belief and love, kindle in your spirit--the transfigurations that begin as tiny moments of love and grow great within us, sustaining and bolstering us, if we are lucky, till next Christmas.

Have a merry holiday, dear readers. Season's blessings upon all of you, and all those you love. May peace reign supreme over a healing world.


--JL