#487

Man, I never thought I would say this, or anything like this, but I went to a gentleman's club yesterday night for the first time in my life, all by myself, and I had a nice time. Honestly it felt empowering in a feminist way, like, you know what, girl? Yes. Take my money, which I cannot afford to give you. This is a form of justice, and I'm ready to admit that. 

Either I misapprehended the ritual due to the distance I've maintained from it, or I simply had good luck plus my local place isn't some thrice-haunted slimehole. This fact means that I really can't afford to go very often at all--three times a year? If I'm really into it? The whole thing is a luxury experience, I have learned; like, I'm glad I had a nice button-down on, and it would really represent a badly sunk investment if one had a bad night; ruined by those unfit to call themselves gentlemen is primarily my concern. Certainly couldn't afford such a thing as a private room this time or basically ever. Next time I have zero debt and I own everything I own and I have more than a thousand dollars in the bank, I'll consider socking away the price of a private room. Good luck to me on that front. Signs point to fucking never.

But yeah. Told 'em up front it was my first time, asked for and got a rundown on etiquette and do's and dont's, learned the price of most things (the hidden charges must be seen as the price of admission and did not surprise me, but still), all very chill. The place smelled fresh and ventilated, which was really my main thing.

There were two girls on--Monday night, you know, place was just me and the one dude in there when I arrived, he left after awhile, I left a little after two other guys came in later.

This is one of those junctures where it would be easy to use ugly and misogynist language to dscribe kind of what was going on with staffing choices and how to work an entertainment space and serve the public--all dimensions I am acutely aware of as a professional and as a consumer--but it is just as apt to use much different words and ideas. The short and brutal, old-school way to describe it is they had a thoroughbred and a workhorse playing each to their strengths. The better way to formulate it is they had a professional exemplifying standards of rare physical perfection, performance expertise, and working near-silence and air of unavailable mystique (amplified wholly by copious tattoos from calf to neck), and another professional exemplifying hospitality, warmth, welcoming, relaxing the vibe, and putting all comers more physically at ease with a body more rubenesque, soft, and celebratory of physical flaws. The latter was my first on-the-clock stripper experience, and she made me feel at home very quickly--a talent not everyone possesses!

The funny way to say it is that they had the insanely hot girl who cut herself a lot but you really have to know how to see that, and the English major. Probably shouldn't say that.

When I say insanely hot, sadly, I mean that she was too beautiful, so beautiful that it messes up people and society. She even had short hair, a winning choice in my estimation. I been with a lot of beautiful people of all shapes and sizes, some so beautiful that I sort of expected to wake up at any second. She was perhaps the equal or superior of all comers in every respect, so the optimal dancer for my sequential life experience, I guess--I really didn't think it was possible to see something that remarkable on a Monday night. But there was an element of the pain of the reality of things underneath the fantasy she made so sublime.

Both of these women took amazing care of me and got a lot of my money, and I would like to celebrate that. They were gorgeous in every respect, and I honor their heart and their talent and their labor on my behalf. It was a pleasure to act as a gentleman before them, and to enjoy their company and craft.

 *

Beauty. Seen people destroyed by the beauty of another, which is sad but preventable and like, hm. I get it and it can even have a comedic streak, however dark the material. Yet to see people destroyed by their own beauty--that is merely tragic. 

Sometimes, when the world is done and the beauty it wanted is used up and irretreivable, there is nothing left, or close enough to nothing that the rest of the story is the most futile of epilogues. There's no good joke there that I can find. 

*

Beauty. Suppose I can rap this way, or want to, because I was born with a ravenous love for the stuff, an eye starved constantly for beauty, and because by chance I have beautiful parents who bestowed upon me a beauty of my own, just such one of those beauties the world gets weird around. 

Speaking as only a human can speak to other humans, human beings are uniquely beautiful. And when my eye, lover of beauty that it is, looks upon the world of humans, very few in general seem ugly to me, and it is my belief that the ugliness I am seeing is not of the body, but psychic and spiritual ugliness deforming the aspect of the physical. Roald Dahl talks about this in his little book The Twits--maybe this is the kind of occasion to even see if I can dig out a .jpeg I like to keep around to show folks.

copyrights, copyrights, mumbo-jumbo.  Does any of that shit still apply? Hasn't all human achievement been stolen, twice? Who gives a shit anymore. Roald Dahl's words, Quentin Blake's drawings. Mr. Dahl is dead, Mr. Blake draws on as of today.

Anyway!

Still and all, for reasons difficult to identify, some physiques are beautiful in a transcendental way, some faces composed in such a way as to alter reality. Some people have such beautiful eyes it is difficult to make and especially maintain eye contact. Some of these beauties are so total they remain alluring even when they house terrible thoughts and nothing but pain and boiling vengeance. 

It is a strange world, and the surface of things, beautiful though they are, remain nothing more than surfaces; as significant, as durable, and as real as the surface of a pond. The surface--the least pondlike part of the pond--the least real part of anything. Just a membrane, shifting from second to second.

Temporary, even fleeting; like all things, like everything else, like even this ancient, newborn universe.

*

Hey hey what what! Man, still can't believe I went to a strip club. Never in my life! 

My mom's voice and visage as it exists perpetually in my psyche, joined over time by other disapproving, judgmental women with their arms crossed who I have allowed to live in there, have all worked extremely, extremely hard to prevent this and are all very disppointed, trying to make me feel guilt about money and the whole rest of it, believe me--but I think they are wrong, despite my great esteem and love for them. It feels important to realize that they kind of have to be, in some fundamental ways.

*

Ok, ok. Lists tomorrow, rest assured. I know. Got you all salivating down your front like a little baby for some lists and then I pull some shit like this. Now your balls are bluer than a mandrill's face. 

Sorry to hurt you.

Once a girl told me that she had no choice but to masturbate because she'd been so wet and engorged for so long that it caused physical pain.

Sorry to hurt you.

--JL

*we were sexting. On farcebark messenger. A mistake of youth. If I ever piss off that mandroid or anyone working for that hideous obelisk, they're gonna embarass me badly. With a lot of collateral damage I guess, though it would be good if they could avoid that part. But I've said some real mean things about Meta over the years. Sometimes your opponent knows the best way to hurt you is through others, and God help those others if it's the only way.

Fuck you guys, though. I am not afraid of any of you. Computer nerds. Fucking losers.

#465

Ah, election day. And what an election!

This year I really think I did pretty well not mentioning politics in like the sense of naming specific names at least too much. On occasion, the general picture has risen to a temperature which, for me personally, cannot be borne without some type of outcry--usually about the imposition of money and the theft of time and ease--but I believe I have grasped the handle of restraint's cooling mechanism, been served thereby, and passed those savings onto you, dear reader.

But today is after all the day of election, and one might even be called remiss in their duties if one were to let it pass entirely without comment. 

As is classically done in linear time, let us first look back.

*

The vitriol Joseph Biden was able to summon in the national rhetorics was inspiring on both sides. I understand that many on the left carried a great deal of trauma from posting classic Joe Biden as Vice President memes during the Obama years, extremely fucking cringe affairs which they absolutely delighted in--he was their ancient, fun uncle, and his new teeth were a vision back then, it is true. 

For me, the Obama presidency ran as a stupid bullshit tokenization party that I wished would stop but which I now see as an idyllic time; wheras the former revelers live suspended in such shame that the pretend they voted for a mysterious, invisible, morally superior candidate--a 2008 write-in for Bernie Sanders, perhaps; a piece of shit who has miraculously, despite all outstanding evidence, retained his place in the Noble House of Acceptable Compromises with Neoliberal Values. Anyway, fuckers act like Obama was Pol Pot the whole time and not Politi-Jay Z Mk. II, and they always hated Biden, he was always a Bad Old White Guy and I Personally Have Never Liked a White Guy Ever. 

Fucking bullshit. 

As for the right, well, I really had no idea that white dudes were even capable of hating one of their own like that. Though I suppose when one is vehemently enthusiastic regarding the daily sessions of Two Minute's Hate directed at that withered Goldstein, one's capacities and ordnances find themselves naturally expanded. Perhaps they also feel shame for tolerating him in their minds when Obama sat the big chair. I guess it is also easier, as is time-honored and expected, when you assert that your opponent is a homosexual, so as to bring ready, ample, and easily mobilized reserved of baseless, misdirected hatred to bear.

The beauty of it all is that he is of course only a man, and has nothing to do with the incredible caricatures that have been painted of him on the national stage by miscreant and supporter alike, nor anything to do with how the world is and acts out. 

It must be stridently evangelized: all of these ghoulish people, whose faces are masks because they have no true expression, are a cross for us to bear, and not messianic representatives of our human progress. I vote with that attitude, and that attitude alone---that of a grim and barely willing relinquishment of my temporary and performance-based tolerance. Everyone is automatically fired as soon as I vote for them. Any given organism is only beginning the challenge, as keeping the job is where the job begins. As it is for me, it should be for them, eh?

*

This year's particularly contorted and absurd machinations mean that as usual, I could not in good conscience vote for the intellect I would actually prefer at the helm of the office. Sorry, Cornel West. Be assured I stared at your name, and the blank little box next to it, with a true and actually passionate longing. Next time, I pray.

It is honestly a stone bitch that I felt unable to vote for, in my opinion, the most iconic and acceptable third-party candidate in living memory. Very sad.

*

Let us indulge in a look even further back as a matter of brief review even on my own blog, as in this truly benighted and paralyzingly headlong age, even things I said three years ago seem like an archeologist has to blow dust off them and consult dense notes in order to truly grasp the fruit of my prior revelations.

Say it often, but not enough, it has to be repeated: the pus and bile of the Old Web became too much for the Carnis Digitalia and burst into an abcess, the vile and stinking flood flowing into meatspace, which was markedly, one might say intensely unimproved by the infusion, and the open cavity a ripe promised land for external infections. And what infections have taken hold! The sins and curses of that wretched phsyical realm pulse hideously, thrumming in place to the beat of an army of dark hearts. Even now I can see them, in my mind, their stink and wetness anathema to the cool and polished marbles of my dead, romanticized Olympus.

Thus, the problems written into the code developed organically by the social memetic organism we belong to (alas) were hacked by its most internal, most productive, most abstract processes--only for every fractal that every iterated to simply iterate again, in a process that operated in tandem with itself--think of a zipper unzipping, and then the jacket unthreading itself violently in spasms--destabilizedby feedback loops, kicked off the edge of chaos. Out of control fast, out of control big.

Collapse is imminent, and from that collapse, its detritus, shall rise many fresh collectives. A process not unlike the division of one cell into two. But that moment of bicellularity is just that. A fleeting, breathless second. The rate of division is exponential. You might see four for a partial moment before you realize there's a hundred and forty-four probably and from there the mind hitches, unable to usefully process. What I mean is collapse is another word for beginning.

*

All this by way of saying that the outcome of this election is, while of importance in the short term, not terribly important news in the aggregate. Things are going to change so fundamentally and at such speed that the outcomes themselves will hold little import simply because the context will change so radically the very sense of the information will change--and still we will be plunging onwards.

Again: the outcome does matter. Just not with same heft that these things usually matter, as things are so unstable that anything could happen at any time.

Or, y'know, everything's the same. From one's own little speck of perspective, if one is as objectively honest as one can bring oneself to be, one may acknowledge, perhaps even aloud, that one knows absolutely nothing, and every day is a mystery with no solution; you just get through it till it's time to go to bed.

*

Well, it makes sense. Societies are just like organisms, as I have also said in the past. The story of two single cells producing a third, which in a remarkably short time can consider what to wear every fucking morning, and just as quickly finds itself breaking down practically right away into individual cells and even the substrates and wastes that are the byproducts of all cell clusters over time. Before you know it, the process has resulted in a whole new collection of cells living through and adding onto a culture established by cell colonies long past. 

A cell culture. Cell culture. Cell culture. 

Do you get it.

This basic situation has not changed and transposes across many scales of size and granularity.

The multiverse: infinite bits coalescing and disintegrating, forever. 

Infinity infnitely iterating infinitely.

*

The pleasure I take in bringing the post to the prior plateau--I am very aware I have done it several times before--is enormous, but it is also an important task, its repetition an essential part of that task. We cannot forget what we are and where we live. We mustn't.

*

Of course there is no sense minimizing my own feelings, either: I am dismayed at the stark choice this election presented, and how far outside of my prerogative the script has forced me to situate myself. I included who I wanted to vote for as a sort of indication of who I did vote for, wholly against my inclination, the alternative being to me unacceptable to such a degree that my hand felt forced. 

You all know me: I fucking HATE that.

Less, clearly, than I hate certain prospects, but the act being completed, its discomfort stings the more.

*

However it must be said that I do not hold any special ill will for the adherents of either wretched camp. People, as people, which is to say, my fellow citizens--a group which I personally suspend in a wholly different net than I do the elected officials that are supposed to represent them (no official could possibly represent me, and I hardly expect any to)--will tend to congregate, it is their way--the way of all cells, all molecules. Having done so, particular physics and processes take hold, with inevitable outcomes and natural results. I have described them earlier in this post, and the analogy holds. This also works with churches, newspapers; any collective effort, really. 

The bits are innocent, and I can bit around with my fellow bits presumably infinitely without our loyalty to strawmen and colors getting in my way, because I have extremely low faith in and zero loyalty towards collectives of almost any description, but I do like people. I am skilled at manging this tension. For example, I can and have worked productively with people who would probably want me dead if I did not, like a vaudeville performer, keep no less than eight plates spinning on broomsticks during every interaction involving these terribly loaded yet wholly imaginary differences. It is a matter of keeping the both of us grounded in fully human terms and experiences, and steering with a determination unto obstinacy way from the inhuman, chittering, doubletalking drivel our demonic overlords would have us torture each other with while they laugh and pour wine into their already-full mouths.

Simple rule: only talk about real things. Things we can both touch and see, things that materially matter and have to be dealt with and bring that joy and satisfaction that actual, vital concepts and categories bring to an existence being actively experienced at the scale it is appropriate for that life to be lived.

For example, a fancy sports team's outcomes: strawmen and colors. Competing brands: strawmen and colors. Politicians: strawmen and colors in a big way. Improving our own lots, the lots of our fellow man, and our own work and leisure hours to the greatest and most joyful extent we can intelligently manage: actual life. 

Actual life? Please? Can we prioritize actual life every day, instead of this excruciating, neverending round with the fucking goddamn loyalty colors and chattering heads?

*

Ten million unwelcome text messages from grifters and charlatans. That's last week. On just my phone. The background noise from this election season probably registered on alien instruments fifty parsecs from here.

*

How much money do people have, I mean how bad can the economy actually be, if people give money to these brazen fucks? I mean I'm not a person who doesn't spend money on crap and things not everybody understands. I love blowing cash, hate having money. Ice cream, books, and video games, baby. Way more fun than money. And so look, I can take the shit I get for this philosophy in life from fuckers who love to punish people for no reason with equanimity, but it is total bullshit that you can bitch that the economy is bad and the economy is someone's fault and then give any fucker wearing nice clothes with their hand out--a state of affairs which insults my intellect to a degree that it feels pierced, as though by a dagger--I mean, I don't know about you, but I have cats, and bills, and a mortgage, and I like to have fun. I have to work really hard to keep all that going and I barely fucking scrape by. This, in a country which is supposedly the richest and the greatest in all the lands of this poor globe. But the idea that I can spare even a dime for a political party? Let alone the political party of a different state in this union? This is just how I feel, and maybe I am wrong, but no. No.

Bitch, they have money--and they flush it down the toilet in a way that should make everyone who thinks of it blush. We act like there's no money--look at how these fuckers live their lives, and what they spend just to suck each other's dicks! They are the dragons of legend, the reality described by the symbol, and we pile gold on their glittering hordes in obeisance. 

Pathetic. The word is travesty. 

I mean, fucking honestly. What do you think it costs to fill the balloons at something like a national convention? Fucking. Balloons. Travesty. What do you think it takes to fill closets with "appropriate" clothing, pantsuits and ascots and shit? Do you think they can be seen in clothing that has seen wear and tear to any degree, in their hideously glittering society of excess? Why do these so-called representatives all seem to have more houses than I have people in my one household? Correct jewelry, correct makeup, correct private aviation, correct chauffeur services, correct price tags on all that shit and just imagine the colognes, the perfumes, the private schools for the kids, the leasing of a different car every year per driver per property--driven or not driven. 

Shoes.

*

God, and the chatter around it all, media personalities and PR folks. They use military and sports analogies unflinchingly and interchangeably as they discuss how public "servants", whom they are fond of referring to in the most glowing terms, rob the public and spend the stolen money to steal more money, and they say that this process is very important because it is a process, and it is attached inextricably to the process that describes the process (read: money), so with that being how it is, everything will work as long as you keep yourself informed (daily) and participate actively in the system (through approved channels, only during specified periods in the fiscal year).

Damn. Incontrovertible. Except it is the death of reason and the funeral march of what it has ever meant to be human in this world. 

*

Anyway. Election day at least means they should stop texting me for money. Right? For a little while?

Shuddering, beginning to sweat as I see it in my mind: waking up to a text message tomorrow--right above the one that says "one last push"--marked "the fight's not over" or some goddamn equivalent. 

Pretty soon I'm gonna have to destroy the bedeviled thing and start again with a new stupid glaring rectangle. At least these empty, cackling bastards will have to take the time--or their large language scripts will, anyway--to place a new number on their wicked lists, so as to mortar it with unceasing, insulting horseshit.

*

To try and put a good vibe on the day, I went ahead and finished the main campaign in Unicorn Overlord. May this act tip the scales of this day however humbly towards peace, justice, and wise rule.

Man, that would be something to get. Indeed, the game's eneding represented a dream so wholly ensconced in the pipe that you would need a pair of plumbers, brothers maybe, to brave the depths and fetch that thing into the light. It was very, very beautiful. Loved every moment of that game.

*

As a final note: when I voted today, I got not the typical sticker proclaiming that I had done so. You know, the basic statement, the variations on font, the three colors, and Old Glory. No, today I got a sticker with a bitchin werewolf ripping out of his clothes. Not "I Voted"--this sticker screams that "I VOTED", or, perhaps, it would be better, more true, to say that it howls.

Let me say that I endorse this in the strongest possible terms, and, as a voter and a citizen, would work extremely diligently to collect all the stickers of this caliber, made for this purpose, that I possibly could.

--JL

#417

A furtive guilt nags at me when I consider how much I enjoy extremely hot weather. It leaps to the fore when I read about how drought is driving millions and millions of people into food-insecure and unsafe conditions. How much food got thrown in the fucking garbage last year? 

As a matter of fact, it gives me decent guilt just to be typing when I know there are people running from gangs and cartels and inexorably advancing armies, that they don't get to keep their houses, that they don't have money for shit and nowhere to buy it, and here I stand. Even if I only have five dollars in my wallet and debt and whatever the fuck else, it's not fair. It's not fair that I should look upon a peaceful, well-feed street of housed and clothed people, because it is literally at the expense of others. It is built upon their backs. It is provided by a system that relies on creating and sustaining conditions of inequality. 

Do I sould like a child when I say that it's not fair?

Good.

My instinct has always been this, and never deviated: none of us should sit easy while there exist those with less than us. I was born on a capital city located just barely north of the Equator--the global south, what was once known as the third world. A democracy, but an unstable one after a string of dictators. There, I lived way up in a tall building while hundreds of thousands of children not ten miles away lived in a carpet of hovels; slums like nothing that exists north of the Rio Grande. Now it's dictators again. I live up here in the U.S., now, first world par excellence, first world with a raging erection and a finger in every pie on the planet--and we might have ourselves a dictator soon. 

Life, huh! It is nothing but a fucking joke.

Anyway.

When something is not fair, we can't just shrug. I knew it was simply not fair, simply inexcusable, that I lived in a building while other kids had to live in slums. I was not wrong. I still feel that way. Children are correct. Things being fair and equitable--it's not some childish thing, some unrealistic pipe dream. That they are not, after all this having of civilization, all these vast piles of wealth circulating the planet and accumulating in vaults, always more, ever growing, and poverty only ever grows with it?

It is not fair.

*

We act like bad things happening far away are only happening because the people there deserve it for not making economies and governments as strong as ours. But we had fuck-all to do with how strong our government and economy is. Getting born in some shithole--as we like to say--instead of America is your own damn fault, we think, because we ourselves did nothing to deserve getting born here. And so we protect ourselves with "well, what do you want me to do about it?" Because after all, we may be lucky, but we're not in charge, and we didn't make the world, and it's all very complicated anyway, and you're bothering me and you should fuck off because I don't like thinking about it actually.

Honestly, I just need you to not be cool with it. That's enough for me. Because making up justifications and deluding yourself on purpose about the actual costs of your lifestyle and the actual ramifications of what your government does with or without your consent is the path not only to this sated, distracted, rationalizing life of self-compromise and consumption and complicity, but to actual secret police shit, actual gulag and torture shit, actual sitting in an office signing documents that authorize things like Final Solutions. I am saying that there comes a point where you're not just a citizen anymore, because you don't live in a state anymore. Something else is happening, and you didn't want to notice, and a very important choice was made for you when you weren't paying attention. 

When you go from a republic to a dictatorship, there are those whose positions do not change that much. It is a condition of class, but also a condition of attitude. It is a condition of the required complicity for a transfer of power that is legitimate not in fact but after the fact. All you have to do to put your seal of approval on it is to keep going to work, keep going for opportunities whose cost is not discussed up front, keep acting like what you do is justifiable because you deserve to have what you have.

But it isn't. And I'm telling you now it is because it is a sin to have while others want. And it is that sin that has driven climate change and fascism and the attitude that industry justifies anything in the name of industry, that profit is the sacrament which washes us clean, and the comforts of our earthly rewards are proof of our righteousness.

But they aren't. 

And frankly, blessedly, it is factual that all you have to do is not be cool with it. Because if you're not cool with it, you have a chance to at least stay awake and keep your eye out. And when the opportunity comes to make a difference, the difference you are suited to make, you'll see the opening. You'll know.

*

Anyway, it was too cold to ride my bike yesterday. I need it to be hotter. That's why I was guilty.

Easy enough for me to go all the way with guilt that I do it most days. Today, I brought you along for the ride.  

What can be done? What is that difference that we should seek to make, and how to make it, and how to know the moment, the opening, the chance?

Well, I've been thinking about it for a long time. Hopefully I've made progress. You'll be the first to know if I figure anything out.

All I know for sure is that hope is what is needed above all. Keep your hopes alive, burning bright, daring, free.

--JL

#369

Triple sixty-nine. Hilarious. Also known as the Isosceles Lock.

*

Man, you know what I hate? The only thing, object, phenomena I really actually in all seriousness hate, besides hatred itself? Money.

Folks, I fucking hate money. I hate that stuff. I'm coming out as saying I was born with a suspicion around the concept, my childhood grew thick with further doubts about the stuff, and ever since I was a teenager, I have just plain fucking hated that shit. I hate money so much that I'm trembling slightly.

As will inevitably happen with hatred, money hates me back. Good! Screw that nonsense. So my life is more difficult. Maybe that's the price I'm comfortable paying in a world that fucks the shit out of itself for money.

*

I don't want any more money than I have, and I could stand to have less. What I want is to not need money to stay alive. I think that in this day and age that is fucking insane. I know I talked about this pretty recently, but it's the first month of a new year. A ripe time to call stridently for what is needed in the future, to start great works. 

Take the necessities of life off the market and provide them universally to every living human. Provide scientific endeavor the funding you provide the military-industrial complex--we need next-level globally applicable materials and energy options faster and more completely than we're getting them. Weapons are something we have enough of, I should think; I know the people who make billions of dollars crafting weapons would beg to differ, but somehow, I don't trust their testimony. We need to go Bio-Coruscant* if we don't want that Road Warrior shit.

Everything else can continue as the luxuries market, where motherfuckers can destroy themselves and everything that makes them human for imaginary gains all they want if that's their blue heaven--as long as they can prove sustainable and not planet-killing, since not having that will destroy us all anyway.**

Give me the option to stay out of it, and live a simpler, more peaceful life in the knowledge that my having it doesn't deny anyone else their chance for theirs. 

*

Doesn't that sound ok? Fuck, man, you'd think I was asking people to eat a plate of raw dicks. 

"What about my riiiiiights?" Bitch, you simped those away a long time ago and I'm not saying I want to take more. I'm saying we need to sort out the basic shit before we worry about getting you your own gold crapper like the one Donald Trump uses to help himself convince himself he's worth a tinker's damn. 

"What about logiiiiistics?" Do you seriously mean to tell me that with the worldwide circus of mental gymnastics and indecipherable riddles that is the current state of economies, currencies, supply chains, trade--if that somehow grinds on, built with no plan and cobbled together in motion ever with an eye out to allow grifters and thieves to ply their wicked trades, we can't design something better on purpose that works towards reasonable equity and the material advancement of the species, rather than its degradation and self-destruction?

Probably not? Fine, whatever. A man can shit his dreams into whatever hat he likes, though, and this is mine. 

--JL

*this is an idea I have played around with in my head for a long time about how we could shrink human-occupied space on Earth while increasing quality of life for all humans and achieving optimal harmony between human and nonhuman biospheres. This could eventually become a project that is holistically entwined with the maximum possible planetary surface, a fully symbiotic relationship with Terra. Hence, Bio-Coruscant, credit to George Lucas. I also think of the Chozo, from Metroid, as an interesting model, and the Forerunners from the Halo universe. Look 'em up if you care. 

**I get that the game with some of these shitty little pigs is to survive the anthropocalypse and define the new postdiluvian world as gods, progenitors of Human 3.0. They're playing a game they don't understand, but if we let them win, I guess that doesn't matter; we won't be around to raise objections or point out their failures. And time will roll on with all our dusty bones in its wake. But here, now, I say fuckem. That's all the power I have? Fuckem anyway. Regulate these assholes. Fuckin write a new book to throw at them. Consider that a formal request to whom it may concern.

#362

Fuck, good people. Fuck me up. Saturday morning went and got the freshest corona jab plus my first flu shot since I was a teenager, and I was laid low, low out there. The weekend was a corporeally drained, cerebrally fogged mess. I would think I was ok mentally, and then I would attempt to communicate through any medium with another person, and that illusion would shatter. Got my first hard-on since the day of the jab today, though, which is good despite an admittedly listless performance. Corona jabs will eventually render me entirely impotent, I expect. So it goes. Final analysis, I'll take breathing over erections. I did the flu because my aging body has been seeming to reccommend it, particularly after Thanksgiving, as I mentioned. 

Then Monday the current and hopefully final semester of my effing life kicked off, which bore with it tasks, which took up all of my juice in my weakened condition.

Doing it all over the computer this time, the distance learning I was so unwilling to interface with a year ago. But that was a different man entirely, eh, dear reader?

*

For the sake of my mental health and the health of my burgeoning novel, I will make it a point to post regularly. The first daily blast of energy must go towards written assignments, then my own projects till the well runs good and dry, and then reading, of which I have enough to keep me happy. I shall try to be as assiduous and efficient as possible with my academic obligations, so that I might devote as many hours and as much power to what is most vital.

Stated. Intended aloud. Nine blessings. Amen.

*

Though my financial straits are approaching uncomfotable margins, I am experiencing a dread paralysis when it comes to finding employment. The plain fact is I'm not on a big tip of leaving my house much for business reasons. What I want is to work exactly where I'm standing, doing exactly what I'm doing. 

Another intention: I am going to borrow money if I have to, but this is the year I take getting published seriously. I think I've offset a sufficient amount of the guilt I feel about having money with the amount of shit I've had to do in the service industry and beyond in order to barely get the fuck by and never have been able to save a cent. I might as well be in the same condition, but just scrambling to get published, its own shitty job; more time to write. And if things go well? Well, that maybe fucks me up worse, but there comes a time when a dude has to just get over how fucking disgusting cocksucking motherfucking money is and let himself have some in exchange for his privacy and his ability to just tinker by himself unnoticed by all, for the privilege of not having to wear editors down because I'm so precious that once something is done to my satisfaction, to entertain editorial advice is tantamount to ripping a piece of my own skin off with my fingernails. In my defense, except for in the blog, I take a million careful fucking years to finish anything, so by the time someone sees something it is word-fucking-perfect, I unequivocally and with extreme conviction feel I have earned the right to not care what any living soul thinks would read better. It stands there to be read as written, by me, for a host of extremely cogent reasons. All I require is proofreaders for those misspellings that embed themselves in a document sometimes, having become invisible to the author's brain.

Ok. I don't even know where all that really came from. I guess I'm just outlining how ill-suited I am to be a professional writer, uncovering the deep pools of hubris that sabotage me so. But I'm a professional in multiple fields, dammit! I can will myself to do this. I can do this. Please let me be able to do this. Humility NOW

HUMILITY NOW

*

Jesus, man. Time to lie down for a little while. My health is clearly not quite back up to the high water mark.

--JL

#255

Finished Waiting For Godot. It was fucking good. Then I read this book Hunted by a man named William W. Johnstone. It was fucking terrible. I found my copy of Waiting For Godot in a free library. My grandfather-in-law gave me Hunted and its sequel, Prey, to borrow.

Suppose I were the sort of man who would think Waiting For Godot was terrible, and Hunted good. I might not be that different of a man, all things considered. I think that is probably likely. But the aesthetics of me would probably be radically different, so different as to create a real difference, a gap, between this imaginary me and myself. And certainly, this gap might be very notable, even multiplied in aspect, when it comes to this blog. Different books, different stories, a variant set of purposes in mind, no doubt. It's something of a thought.

By which I partially mean of course that Hunted was fairly outside of my usual fare in a couple of key ways. I suppose my power fantasies trend differently.

*

Reading Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat and Samuel Beckett's collected poems in English and French as a breather before I read Prey. Yes, I thought Hunted sucked, even to the point of anger and disgust, but that doesn't mean I didn't find much that was valuable, humorous, and interesting within its pages. Also there is so much to learn from bad writing and opinions diametrically opposed to your own. Also I gotta tell the old man what I think because that's just how I am, I guess, which also means I gotta read both books and think about them honestly. 

After that, who knows?

*

Took a promotion at my job. Salary! Wow. My income has doubled, which is significant with the added bonus of creating absolutely zero class guilt. It's about as small as salaries get. Slightly less than the lower end of what a teacher makes.

Indeed, eating food that won't poison you and the shaping of young minds. Menial shit. Hey, at least we make twice what the janitors and dishwashers make, or even a shade more. So that's awesome, because our jobs are impossible without them. 

I want to be clear about my tone. These facts upset me.

Still. Movin' on up, they say. I don't disagree. T'was good to just go to the fancy supermarket and get what I wanted without feeling tightness in my chest.

--JL

#246

Hello! Factually Pointless do be coming to you today to tell you one thing, a singular thing that is on my mind, for reasons, and that thing is this:

I accept that adults need food and shelter, and no one provides these things for free. Therefore! Comics, like any other produced good, cost sweat of the brow and price of material, and the producers ought--nay, need--be remunerated amply for their efforts.

When I was a kid, on the internet, comics uploaded in jaypeg and other viable formats were free, because they weren't real. Now webcomics are confirmed as real, and I can't afford to read them--specifically, the ones from back in the day that are still producing new work, because I too am an adult, with food and shelter costs, and the legitimacy of these artists--who I was once able to support commensurately with the available avenues of support and my own income (simply showing up to the website, as my income was and has always been close enough to nil)--has led to deals with actual publishers, and holding back relevant content behind paywalls, and QUITTING YOUR COMIC TO START A FUCKING SODA COMPANY*. 

Also, I can't believe how much it costs to keep two cats and a husband alive. I can't really afford to support my favorite artists. Any of them. I'm thinking of the comics, but it's everyone. 

*

Comics can't be free. Not forever. Not for always. Sometimes they are, and that is a wonderful thing that I understand cannot last. 

However, today, on this day and at this time of the morning, I want to take a moment to say two selfish and useless things that I only mean in a certain sense:

1. Fuck soda pop. I don't care how crafty and good it is. Screw that.

2.  Comics should be free to all. Go ahead! Keep charging money for shelter, which is insanely fucking criminal when you think about it! Keep charging money for food and making it increasingly difficult for any given individual to grow their own supply! Also and perhaps even more criminal! Go right the fucking hell ahead! I don't give a shit anymore. Just take a chunk of all those taxes and subsidize every comic ever made and every comic that will ever be made for free public use and reproduction. Pay everyone who ever made a comic strip and give that comic strip to the people. 

*

If you make the bread fake and take even that away, the circuses better come directly to me, suck my actual dick to completion, and dazzle me like no circus has ever dazzled a man since time immemorial. 

Just sayin. 

--JL

*look. You can do whatever you want in life. Nobody has to make a comic if they don't want to. But while I enjoy a high-quality craft effervescent beverage as much as the next person--why, in youth, my friend Red and I were known as quite the connoisseurs, and indeed, I have tried probably hundreds of such tonics--if I have to make a choice, I would forsake ever to so much as taste a fizzy pop again for just one more Achewood strip.

I mean, at least any given strip will serve me for the rest of my life. All I got from pop tastin' is a working familiarity with empty bottle smell and an inability to even look at a bottle of coca-cola without retching quietly but intensely.

#188

Just want to say that to me, using the word "Libra" as a proper noun for your currency sounds too much like Final Fantasy, first and least of all. I think you fucked up, facebook*. It's not tough to get what their marketers were going for, you know, liberation, unchaining the world through the blockchain (irony**), it is the Spanish word for granting or gaining freedom, certain currencies, and also the pound in ounces, which is also a former British currency, the British being the arguable founders of modern currency and banking, but this is the new shit and the revolution because Libra, etc. 

But look. Look. Don't name your currency the same as an astrological sign, no matter how obvious the symbol is for what you are trying to do (the scales invoke justice and balance, like facebook is very concerned about what is fair and just). Someone should have stopped you a long time ago. I am glad that you are not trying to cure cancer, facebook people.

Guess a bunch of people are on board, though. They'll make money hand over fist for a second, before facebook fucks each and every last one of us right up the ass and for real something like Black Monday goes down, once again with our own personal lives collectively raining out the windows along with the cashrats who played so fast and loose with them.

*

So. The Internet. 

Referring to internet just so, as though I were pointing at a dog without a name, is a quirk I picked up from Jeffrey Rowland of Wigu fame, internet's poet cowboy godfather. Maybe this assessment of the man's imprint is specialized; one of those "you had to be there, in order to think and feel as I do" things (everything? "you had to be there" is one of the most boner-killing tautologies, and it's usually hiding a kind of lie). But as I discussed yesterday, breaking ground is deceptively humble, and everything that comes after must make it seem tame and quaint.

This is known as proof of concept.

*

It begins and ends with webcomics, of course. I liked the internet okay initially as an information-gathering and communication tool (as I will confess, I was not always such a lurker), but the .jpeg had to hit its stride before internet truly seized my faculties. I started using internet about 1998, but did not truly get into it till 2002, and wasn't deep till 2003. Webcomics were the portal, the food that drew me to the rabbit hole, and they were themselves a great object lesson in how internet culture was to refract, warp, bend, and ultimately give rise to establishment and merge with a corporate economy. Among other things.

*

When I say deep, I think of individuals that were among the first perusing snuff sites and buying sex slaves that come with a bonus bag of heroin crammed into their rectum, or were building their own open-source operating systems in order to make themselves into powerful virtual entities by various computing methods. When I say deep, I do not mean that I have posts out there on defunct forums that told all my "friends" how to crack the system into a million triangular little eggshells and from the slimy mess that is the corpse of the Deep State raise up a new and perfect society. To simplify greatly. I am not claiming anything approaching the hardcore when I say "deep". I don't know how to code.

What I like to do it just take a good long look at whatever I happen to find, and what I have happened to find includes resources for all of the above and a world's worth more. Thing is, it is very very easy to look around on internet (you just click around, that's how it works), you can go very very far without actually doing anything, and you only matter if you make yourself matter. You can get very good at knowing where to go for interesting new ideas, unusual art, and the type of news that doesn't make the news, and without wasting a ton of time typing, you can get a lot done every day.

All I can really say is that I have looked at a lot of words and pictures on internet. But when I say a lot, I mean a fucking lot. I don't even so much as surf incognito. The volume and breadth of my trawling is its own signature and its own defense. Also the stuff I check if  I'm just quick popping open the browser to do my little routine is so pedestrian it's laughable. Just picture me opening a newspaper and skipping straight to the funnies in a sunny kitchen, a cup of coffee at my elbow and my tie an affable half-windsor, my hat waiting for me on its peg and the dog content with its water dish and large white bone. A federal agent literally thinks of this man as their best customer as they go about their work.

*

Social media brought every toxic thing we learned how to hurt and troll each other with on forums into public life, right up to how our elected representatives seem and behave. That's okay. We will either digest this poison and mature as a culture or tear ourselves apart and what is left can try and learn. 

*

Okay, more internet tomorrow! Got stuff to do.

internet, internet, the world wide web, if you were really any good, you'd have gotten us Jeb!


--JL

*every time I say facebook has fucked up or done something wrong they make another billion dollars net and change society for the worse/more interesting, so this is very good for them and presumably for the blockchain. Don't say I never did nothin' for ya. I'm totally kidding about this fucking evil company ruining the world by getting directly into the money these fuckers have shown their blue-and-white sigil and it is spattered with gore and human pulp how is this company still legal why has no one stopped them fffffffffffffffffffffffffffff***

**this is why Amazon is the company that is good at irony and facebook is staffed by affectless psychopaths who think they're philosopher-rogues: facebook's most ironic thing will always be their company name, and Amazon never offers any explanation for actions which seem destructive but which over the long-term solve problems those who loudest cried "foul" on Amazon had always wanted solved and never did. Amazon continually draws pistols from its coat and points them at the forehead of the terrified consumer. Their face grim stone, Amazon pulls the trigger, and a little flag that says "BANG!" shoots out and a puppy appears in the consumer's arms. Elsewhere, a CEO's head explodes and a whole industry collapses, its ancient bones serving as a delicious and powerful fertilizer for the new economy. Meanwhile facebook changed how the things on its hell of ass website are organized and sold a picture of your kid's genitals to a German murderer while giving the sum total of your human data away for free to people who cosplay as the Illuminati. (this is a cola war scenario of course, I like Amazon better for wholly personal reasons but none of these fucks are your friends; you are their food and never forget it)

***seriously congress is all "facebook demons, are you bad?" and they tell congress, "No! We are good!" and congress is all "Then do you know how I can get my printer to talk to my screen?" and now it's all "We're gonna save the world by giving everybody money-power! Did you know that not everybody can even hold money, and this makes things bad? Now everybody can hold money, though! If someone robs you blind, we can give you more to hold, no problem!" and Visa and Spotify and lord knows who else are all "Sounds real, let's go" and everyone in the facebook building rubs their little claws together and slips their forked tongues out from between their lips.****

****ok who cares though ultimately I am being a Chicken Little about all this, get out of here and try to have a good day without thinking about internet anymore, that's my plan

#99

So what I do is I work five days and get a weekend, but my Monday is Wednesday and my Friday is Sunday. At least, that has been the way things have been able to shake out for a few weeks running, maybe even more than a month (I have a great memory but it is not chrononormative or performative, so I forget what day it is and how much time has passed around events and it is panoramic as opposed to photographic), which is impressive given the way turnover and call-offs go. 

Someone, however, did indeed call off on Tuesday, and I covered the close and opened Wednesday like usual, figured it wouldn't kill me to throw in a clopen at the beginning of my week and take a little overtime. Now the new schedule has come down the line and I do not get a day off till Wednesday, due to various requests for time off, so that's eight days in a row. 

Frankly, I'm glad. I hated Monday, a day on which I accomplished little outside of recuperation, and wished I were at work. Now I have an unbroken stretch in front of me. I have asked, and now I shall receive. It is a blessing to have work for the hands, and paths to tread, so I am grateful.

*

Never before have I wondered if I could get away with simply coming in on my day off, punching the clock, and getting to work. 

Kind of hoping for another call-off I can cover, either to throw a double in there or a ninth day, since I'm already approved for overtime. 

*

I don't need a lot of money to live my life, but I am a gamer, and so when the numbers go up, I feel viscerally rewarded. Paychecks can be a sort of high score. That's why people ask each other "so, what's your game?"

People in my industry are pretty badly underpaid, so my effort-to-number ratio is pretty good. Like, a Wall Street shithead my age pulling in more than three hundred and fifty thousand points after taxes is playing Tetris on easy and getting his dick sucked for it and free cocaine into the bargain. I'm in the corner playing a pinball game that cuts or burns my hands or arms if I fuck up; if I lose, somebody gets sick, and if I play a perfect game, I might get fired with no notice because the pinball machine is fifty grand in the hole. The points don't exactly rack up, but I'm proud to punch my initials next to the score.

--JL