#339

Been on my bike a lot lately. Haven't owned a bike in years and years, and it is crazy what the body and brain will remember with the wheels spinning beneath. Think I wrote a whole post on an old blog I used to write about why I don't wear a helmet (I still don't). Sometimes I wear a safety vest, or a nice eye-catching shirt or pair of shorts. So far this summer I've exclusively worn sandals to ride. For me, a great deal of the pleasure in riding a bicycle is the sense of lightness, of being unencumbered. Helmets, and to a much lesser extent, shoes, and consequently, several layers of safety and protection, hamper my optimal biking experience. In valuing optimized experiences and the feeling of riding the edge of risk if it means the kind of living dangerously I value just as much, riding as I please, how I please, to accomplish what I please achieves the kind of massive endorphin multiplier I rarely bother to deny myself. A measure of heedlessness in every life; it is that too-humanness of ours that makes us just human enough, still, despite everything that seeks to deprive us of such happy dignities, such simple fuck yous at death and the people who would ruin life out of fear of death. 

Bike thinking is often tied to ideas and traumas about freedom and safety, in my experience; in the public sphere, it extends to rights and duties and obligations. Judging by the level of discourse that kicks off when people talk about bicycles whether on internet or meatspace, the space it operates is a powerful emotional and intellectual flashpoint, a hub that can take you down all matter of discursive side arguments and caveats. The conceptual load is wide and tall and by no means neatly packaged. Hard to feel unencumbered with so much baggage, eh, boys?

Anyway, I have a bike again because my mom, purely out of the industry she enjoys engaging in and the great kindness and elevated generosity of spirit she expresses in deed and craft, fixed up my dad's old destroyed one (and my brother's old destroyed one in tandem) like new. It has been a massive pleasure to ride it as much as possible, what with the wildfire pollution and other conditions of our home ellipsoid's agitated systems keeping me at bay. Locally, it has been a very beautiful summer, despite all, and I have ridden a huge amount. 

*

Speaking of baggage, been spending lots of time over at the parent's abode, hanging out and helping with the maintenance of canines. It's been a very good time, though not without it's "hey ok it's time for me to go ok love you bye" moments. 

Family. So wonderful, so essential to the core sense of selfhood, of belonging, of coming from a discrete collective bound by its shared identity. How perfectly designed to drive people a special kind of crazy, and make each other crazy also. I love each member of my family completely and unreservedly, and furthermore, I emphatically respect each one in their own way. The emotional vulnerabilities this creates can be sizable, and lead to a lot of pain and misunderstanding. So it goes.  

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Another thing I been thinking about is how bad I am at taking care of stuff, like land "property" and housing, largely becaue I love seeing things break and warp and degrade and generally take on a radically altered aspect over time. It's a real effort to rob myself of the pleasure of watching, say, leaves decompose, or the boards of a deck peel up one by one, in different places, each just a little at the tip. The way rust blooms and spreads on once-lustrous metal. A splintered handle, a crooked structure, ivy o'ergrown over all. I love the aesthetic of a broken thing, ancient wood moldering, mosses and lichens, insects calmly moving across surfaces they own in a much more concrete and tangible way than people ever did. 

Love a broken fence. Love a derelict building. Love the mushrooms and the wet, livesome aura 'round a wet, decomposing log. And damn, a vacant lot that's been a vacant lot for a long time, asphalt practically bleached, huge green furrows of weeds like completely insane caterpillars all scribbled across the old cracks, chain-link rusting and balooning like a slow-motion cloth rotting in a ponderous, ominous wind. 

*

Feeling very inspired lately. A great work, a great frenzy of creation and study lies close by my horizon. Gotta save this juice for the work. Oh! Finished David McCullough's John Adams, which I loved and paired very well with the U.S. history classes I took this summer. Nearing the end of Ingrid D. Rowland's Giordano Bruno, which has been a steadily deepening note of bliss. Also I rewatched The Young Pope and watched The New Pope and they comprise a work of art that seemed tailor-made to suit me just fine. I have a lot of ideas about popes and paping about with the lads. This tickled a lot of my pope spots.

Godspeed, dear reader. I shall andeavor to soothe you with a post here and there, but what will be, will be what has to suffice. 

--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 

#146

There used to be a troll in the creek by my house. His brows were the long stalks of grass overshadowing his big old man nose, lapped by the extreme edge of the water so that the creek was his mustache, the steep banks his cheeks.

Now his nose lies on its side in the middle of a broader, shallower version of his former mustache. His brows collapsed years ago. Even back then I watched his cheeks begin to grow hollow.

If I didn't know better, that nose of his could well be just another big rock, half-buried midstream.

Once upon a time a girl and I smoked cigarettes on new platforms of smooth golden wood and talked and drank beers and watched the troll slumber. We worked together and lived together and squandered all our other hours together like young idiots do. For years. One of them, by the creek.

The platform's boards have gone gray-tinged mossy brown with weathering, all the angles and corners windworn. Nails gave out on one part of the walkway, and much of the ground they are planted in has sloughed into the creek. The troll is dead. Haven't seen the girl in a long time. Others have come and gone, some for years in their own right, and still I remember her as I drift my gaze over the flowing waters.

Or I think about other stuff. It's a toss-up. Often enough I get both. The effects of the world are not always consistent.

Creek by my house still flows. I am still an idiot, smoking cigarettes and watching it stay impermanent.


--JL

#110

Sheeeit. This blog has been a little dull lately! Let me tell you a story.

You deserve this.

*

My godfather's children were so close to me and my brothers when we were kids that they were our cousins. I mean, I made absolutely no distinction between them and my blood cousins, and I still do not. I could not. Spent more time with them than with blood last time I was in Venezuela. That's how tight that shit is.

Godfather was my dad's very best friend coming up, and is directly responsible for my being born: my father, being a vital, powerful, courageous, and high-minded man, was getting set to join the Venezuelan army when he was done with high school. My godfather snapped him right out of that crazy-assed nonsense and told him to go the fuck to college, where my father excelled, graduated with a degree in engineering, and launched himself onto a career path which would eventually place him to meet my mother through a friend who was dating my aunt.

At any rate, my parents were able to conceive me in no small part thanks to my godfather, and his kids and my brother and I were in a part of Caracas which was somewhat familiar to them, though not to me. They're eastside, we're northside. We went for a walk because they wanted to show me this cool-ass hill we could climb.

Now, I had heard them being told by their mom and the old lady we were visiting (their grandmother? Their great-aunt? I remember her face and smooth white hair and her thick droopy bare arms and that brown tint some people's glasses have, and her closet full of board games [we all broke our Jumanji cherry that evening, and I was openly disappointed that our lives were not uprooted and our psyches not destroyed by incredible supernatural misfortune]) that we were not to go to "that place", that it was dangerous, that it was dirty, that we could get hurt there and they were absolutely NOT to go there, point, paragraph, end of story.

Obviously not end of story because how could that be possible. 

This would wreck my street cred if I had ever bothered to hide it, but I like following the rules, generally speaking; it's in my instinctual makeup to avoid trouble and not start it or look for it. I'm not a cop or a snitch or a preacher, I do whatever the fuck I want* and I believe everyone can pretty much do the same, but I do grit my teeth and very plainly tell the idiots I let drag me into trouble that I wish we could do better with our lives by using but a modicum more of the good sense we were born with.

Not even better! Just, like, make them a little easier. Not even a ton.

Also I smoke drugs.* I've sadly had to break a few laws in order to do this, but then, so did the founding fathers as they chased the blue dream that became my awesome, free-ass life.**

So I did protest before we got to the hill, and was--as is always the case with people like me--loudly asked by all three cousins whether I was a pussy, a coward, a wuss, a loser, etc., and as always I clench my jaw and spell out that no I am none of those things and fine I will go and do the thing, it is just can we not think of a single other thing which will not most specifically make authority likely to become unpleasant?  

Approaching the hill suddenly around a corner as we did was such a vista I immediately understood, and when we reached the gate and opened it, began ascent without preamble.

Equator-blue sky at high noon is its own thing, its own whole world of sky. When you're a kid the sky is bigger and it is bluer and it is brighter, true, but this is a sky whose total blue crowns the universe, whose radiance wields a scepter wreathed in sunflame. Looking up from the bottom, swooping up and jutting into the blazing belly of that sky, that forty-seven degree hill of red soil and green tussock looked like the path to God's own embrace. It was titanic.

We had all climbed in silence, five of us, toiling up the hill, hunched over with the effort of coping with the grade and the looseness of the soil, using our hands as much as our feet on the steeper parts. It took us at least ten minutes and a good sweat to get even a third of the way up, and from the little plateau we beheld, from a good four hundred feet up, the little slice of city this height above street level revealed for us. It glittered, proud and ugly and cool and gross and gorgeous and incredible, that weird sprawling valley-mountain city of eternal spring (it's not, any more than it's the earthly cutting of Heaven's branch [for real they say that] but we say that, and it can be believed a surprising amount of the time--even now, I imagine). We ranged in age from four to eight, we stood as kids stand and looked as kids look from a high place on down, and I have never forgotten that view, that hill, that sky, that breeze cooling my sweat and filling my nostrils with the scent of the city and the mountains and the soil.

Then we were told, my brother and I, definitively, that the thing to do was race back down.

The exciting conclusion? My cousin fell and cut his hand wide open on a buried piece of broken glass, and his older sisters freaked out and argued and generally carried on (even bringing God into it as Catholic kids can be very wont to do) as we stumped back to the apartment building while I supported the injured. I'm not a big "I told you so" guy, I prefer to bite my tongue and deal with the problems of the Now, but I was sorely tried that day.

To my surprise, we weren't heavily disciplined, though it quickly became clear that this was because it was just their mom to deal with. Some yelling from her, hidden away from my brother and myself, some tears and tearful apologies. Then we were told to play quietly, and we played Jumanji, as I have mentioned, and we did so very very loudly.

*

Our dads would have fucking creamed us, yo. Not hitting us, mind you, neither of those dudes are big on that, but a pair of howling bellowers they are, really creative and professional, sergeant-major lever screaming, plus hardcore punishments and privations. My mom woulda smacked me upside the head or perhaps even taken her shoe off, after yelling so loud that it is actually quiet, a sort of wildcat's low, back-of-throat hiss-gargle.

Perhaps you have made your own mother or significant other this angry. I shall want a paragraph on the subject, to be handed in to me in the comments, due whenever, I don't really care and won't look.

*

Didn't slip on the ice yesterday! I felt better. Then I played a bunch of Super Nintendo games on a computer that fits in the palm of my hand*** and hooks up to a television that was simply unimaginable in the year the above story took place. Wild shit.


--JL

*within the bounds of subjective reason, duty, self-discipline, and social responsibility

**Hahaha I am so sorry to mention my smoking marijuana in the same breath as the accomplishments of the founders but it's still pretty funny to think they did what they did so Florida Man can just be himself in various ways while existing in the back of a rusted-out pickup truck or soon-to-be-almost-robbed liquor store, and Donald Trump can wear an open bathrobe and nothing else while he eats Mickey D's in the Lincoln Bedroom and fantasizes about like, actually impressing Vladimir Putin, but like he'll really be impressed and like him and everybody will say so. Freedom the true drug, people.

***Okay, I guess that's another illegal thing. I am sorry, Nintendo, I am sorry, FBI, I am sorry Jesus. But guys, I have given no other single company more of my leisure money than I have given Nintendo, and leisure has always been a pretty good chunk of my budget since you only get the one life and I would give it for Nintendo. The contradiction is something we will all have to live with together, as we happily play a healthy mixture of legal and illicit software.

#102

It is difficult to remember for some reason, though further back my memories are clearer, almost overwhelming. I remember the two books from which I learnt my letters and colors simultaneously, as well as the objects and fonts employed in this grasping of the symbol, I remember the feel of sitting in my mother's lap and the look of her fingers as she turned the page. Later than that, but still earlier than when I am trying to remember, there is the full, deep, rich memory of first encyclopedia I ever read, a Spanish translation of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, some edition that was up to speed in the late eighties. The current American edition is what I own these days; the old book was lost in some move. No matter; I remember it with such a clarity that I really have no idea why I bothered replacing it. If I close my eyes, I can see the same illustrations with my child's eyes, sharper and clearer than mine today, richer in color and detail, larger and realer. Certain memory is more than capable trouncing the present moment.


What I am having trouble remembering is the very first novel I ever read. 


*


A friend of mine insists we have the Devil to thank for the written word; would that it were so simple. Of course he is being deliberately provocative and knows full well that this is not quite so; neither can I deny him.


*


On the inside covers or blank pages of the books I have owned the longest I can find examples of my handwriting from when I was three or when I was five; my name, correctly spelled and easy to read but the letters composed of mostly wobbly angles and crumpled curves. I had good handwriting, actually the beginnings of promising penmanship, for a magic span sometime when I was nine. Then it crossed over into hurried sloppiness, still beautiful on occasion, but never neat or truly correct or consistent. 


*


The novel would have had to be in English, but the problem is, it may have come from a library, and not my own collection. I can be fairly sure the International School I first attended did not supply it; like the rest of my very early childhood books, the tomes I selected at that very first, most sacred (to me, the whole place was a temple to Neo-Americo-Brittanic flat-affect employment of right angles using bright primary colors cheer if there ever was one, truly a cradle of the projected global civilization*) library were still largely children's books, even the ones in novel form, like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, both cornerstones of my heart. Well, moreso Phantom Tollbooth. I could read that bad boy seven times in a row and come back for more. One of the best books ever.


Memories of my first collection of short stories are easy; the first, a most precious trove which holds great power to this day, was A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. That was followed by Kipling's Jungle Book, and various collections of children's versions of Aesop's Fables and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Also, The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame,  Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, some others in that vein. I recall also from the age of five through six beginning to read a whole raft of young adult books and children's novels, Animorphs by K.A. Applegate, the Dragon of the Lost Sea series by Laurence Yep (fuckin Boneless King is still one of the scariest things to me), Jerry Spinelli books, Star Wars books, L'Engle's Time Cycle which I have mentioned, the Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis, Patricia Wrede, Louis Sachar, Charles Dickens, Avi, Lois Lowry, Garth Nix, Brian Jacques, Jane Yolen, random stuff, starting to crawl into the adult territory sometimes. Some of these books I would collect for myself, some I would check out of the library up to eight times over the course of two years.


*


Treasure Island. That counts, I'm sure, it was Kipling that brought it to mind, and I read Kipling very early, perhaps four. Robert Louis Stevenson, a grown-up enough book. It's for young people. A novel nonetheless.


Ah, but if we're going to quibble over definitions like that, the first novel must indeed be The Phantom Tollbooth, which I did already mention and I might also need to throw in Roald Dahl's Matilda, being as which came first is a detail lost to memory. I believe. I'll try to remember.

Said goodbye to my childhood in a new way, at the age of eleven, with Stephen King's Bag of Bones, shortly followed by To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and then, irrevocably, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, possibly my very favorite novel, certainly one of the most important to me. 


Stories which disrupted my childhood badly were written by Franz Kafka. Yikes, dude!  


Of course, there is the first book, the Book from which I would have heard my first written word, spoken aloud. Doesn't quite count, probably. Did not read that myself until a bit later, before I turned ten, and, uncharacteristically, I did not reread it until last year. It was fucking fire. Rad book, please do try it no matter how you feel about people who use it as a weapon.


On that note, The Brothers Karamazov deserves to stand amongst among the greatest works of art ever produced, and is certainly one of the greatest novels ever written, as Fyodor Dostoevsky stands in the very front ranks of novelists. I just felt like saying that. If you have only read it once, please! should you only read one book twice in your whole lifetime, let it be this one.


*


That same friend of mine, a white dude, while acknowledging my delicious ethnic ambiguity, does not let me forget that I am basically a white dude, even literally a white dude. Like the other thing, I don't quite agree, but can't say he's at all wrong.


*


Guess some people would say that the above would be my colonized mindset, abetting my oppressor. That's a whole thing to get into, but to be concise: no. Not accurate. 


Another time.



--JL


*by which I mean what I understood as I read the very acclaimed book People, by Peter Spier at the age of three, along with Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Japanese and African folktales, classic British children's literature and nursery rhymes, Eastern European fairy stories, Greek and Russian fables, all these new favorites I was continually discovering in that beautiful little children's library up a mountain in Venezuela where the English books all hid, my first aperture into a wider, vaster world: that this planet is more compassed by a kinship than it is fragmented by a sundering.

#8

People make much of the news cycle, but a long time ago I read that the best indicator of what is actually happening in real-time is the very simple Fire Index: If you look around, and nothing is on fire, it is a good news day. If there are fires, and you can see them, the news day is bad. There is no other worthwhile metric. Credit to one Mr. J. Wigu--once a purveyor of the finest available graphic idea-vehicles, now a wretched and spineless chief executive officer for a perfectly self-sufficient materiel generator.

Another hero of mine now sells high-quality soda that left coast scumyups mix with nettle vodka some dude I went to high school with who squats in Detroit now makes in a row of oil drums and siphons into freecycled bongs decorated with factory-irregular hologram stickers, "subcutaneously" "marketed" by nomadic teenagers as "kaleidoscope notka". Another is sitting in an unpaid-for room on a pile of unsold books, completely out of their fucking minds, convinced they are some sort of Impeccable Thought Emperor. Yet another straight-up died of health complications, and no one ever said a single solitary word about it that I could find.

Of course, death is inevitable, and it is a cold hard fact that you are free to seek whatever happiness you can snatch from life, so a tip of the flask for the pavement and a burning salute to everybody in this blog post.


Successful or not, everyone merely gets older and worse before the common end. This is why I secretly bury copies of everything I write on private property in the dead of night, disguising the coordinates as fragments of riddles squirreled away in ancient English abbeys, crediting everything to various imaginary rappers, known collectively as the Ghost Hands Crew.

In the amnesiac maelstrom of human history, the key aftereffect of a notable life is to have irrevocably messed with the generally accepted data.


--JL