#316

Perhaps it is to become a tradition, or at any rate, a yearly condition of this blog that I will fall off posting around November through to January. Anyway, it happened, for no real reason other than that it did. Also, it is very cold in my bookroom/writing office, as it is basically a converted attic space, lacking ventilation and not amply insulated. At any rate, we forge onwards. Brave 2023, we greet ye!

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Largely, I hewed to my word concerning my reading plans--plans whose layout and execution are doubtless the main reason anyone reads this blog. Completed Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, as planned, and read 1Q84 and First Person Singular, as planned, but could not bring myself to let it rest there and subsequently acquired and read Men Without Women, Colorless Tsuruku Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, (at this point there was a brief pause on the Murakami and I read Shigeru Mizuki's Tono Monogatari while waiting for more books to come in the mail) and Sputnik Sweetheart. Also acquired A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, but have not read those yet, nor reread Ulysses.

Primarily this shortcoming is due to the glut of video games I downed in the months of November and December, as well as a great cacophony of films and television programs. Watched Sopranos for like, what, the ninth time? Also, The Many Saints of Newark, for the second time. Exhaustive detailing is more work than with books, which is part of why I talk about it less, but here is merely a sampling of the rest of the backlog: Boardwalk Empire, The Irishman, Strange World, Amsterdam (if I gave Moving Picture Awards, like some asshole Academy, this would be my best picture for this year, I think, though it's not easy to be definitive about this, given human limitations on time and attention, and also, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery would certainly be a contender as well), Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, American Splendor, and a whole bunch more. All kindsa stuff.

Videogames, though. Notably, Pokémon Violet/Scarlet versions dropped, and I sank thirty hours into the former in a single intensive weekend. I beat it and completed its Pokédex in record time, a very enjoyable endeavor. Also picked up Sonic Frontiers (probably the best Sonic game made in about twenty years, as far as I'm concerned), Super Mario Odyssey, NieR: Automata - The End of YoRHa Edition, Pokémon Shining Pearl, Death's Door, Disgaea 5, Cuphead, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I played all of these and more to varying degrees, eating up a lot of time I might have reasonably devoted to reading and writing, but it was fucking great and I regret nothing, a life practice I recommend to everyone, applying to everything they do. 

Remorse and regret are different things, by the way. Remorse is fine. Not that I feel any over playing video games. Remorse is reserved for hurting people, indecencies, so forth.

Remorse is a natural and noble reaction to a past made up of imperfect choices, a side effect of our paltry, laughable consciousness. Regret is an affront to God's perfect universe, a seductive trap that keeps us enmeshed in samsara's gravid loop.

Something to consider for the new year.

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So! Today I set out on this year's literary journey with Alison Weir's The Wars of the Roses. Thought it best to finish all the Murakami after I complete my planned task for 2023, and then, in that distant future, we will see what comes next. Pretty great so far; it really does read like Game of Thrones! Life is so wild.

Feels good to be back in the nonfiction section. Gonna read the shit out of my books this year, dear reader, all my nonfiction and poetry and comics, and I'm gonna tell you all about it. Might have to hit the library or secure more poetry and comics in order to properly alternate between them and my nonfiction, but that'll just be even more fun. Plus, we'll see what else happens. A whole blank slate to piss and shit all over! Ahh, the illusory yet very real grace of elliptical orbits.

--JL

#268

Well, it's the new year. 2022 is quite a number. I was born at the tail end of the eighties, almost 1990; to my parents, the year 2000 was the distant future, but I was eleven years old the year 2000. Now, and only now, have we reached year numbers that sound as space-agey to me as 2003 did to the author of Achewood on the morning of that year. It tracks; he was thirty-two or thirty-three at the time, and I am thirty-two now.

Yes, I think about Achewood literally all the fucking time, in all kinds of weird contexts applicable mostly or exclusively to myself. A friend of mine does the exact same thing with One Piece, and never you mind whether you know it as well as he does (placing you in a firm minority worldwide, by my lights), liked it but don't remember which pirate ate what devilfruit or uses only kicks in combat, or even know what One Piece the fuck is--my boy will explain at length, for as long as it takes, until you understand what he means and why he made the brain connection he just made or until you walk away from him. He is also like this about Dungeons and Dragons.

Me, I can be like that too. Specifically, about Lord of the Rings, Achewood, Star Wars, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Twin Peaks, Bleach, Animorphs, and Sopranos. Also, Mountain Goats lyrics. These are the fundamental pillars of my cultural being, and I can connect their payload to anything in the world, so far as I know. Deeply autistic about a lot more stuff than just those things, way more and very varied, but those are the things I can always thought-step over to at any given moment in a single effortless motion. Technically, also Jesus Christ plus the Word and Immanence of God, but that's like, superluminal and supraliminal and not really subject to what I'm talking about here. It might be more informative to discuss runners-up and materials which are very very nearly in that top-tier zone, such as Jurassic Park, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. LeGuin, James Baldwin, Haruki Murakami, and a dozen or twenty more, why not; bestiaries scientific and mythical and other books by naturalists, A Song of Ice and Fire, Halo, Dune (Frank Herbert books only, and also, other books by Frank Herbert), Unsounded, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese classics, fairy tales and myths worldwide (special mention to King Arthur), buncha superhero shit, the other works of David Lynch, and for fuck's sake all of this shit is too much and no one cares. I choose to end this paragraph here, and move on. I'm into a lot of shit. This barely touches comics, or nineties cartoons. 

An exhaustive list of the shit I could autistically and realistically talk about for hours could drive a regular person fucking insane. In ancient times I would be considered nothing short of a madman, a wizard, or an alien. That's just how brains are, mine and everybody else's. Some people's brains make them suitable only for statesmanship, or physically torturing other people, things which would drive regular people, to varying degrees, fucking insane. In modern times, we are all insane, and therefore suitable for a wider variety of roles with less meaning and durability than in properly organized societies.

There is no need for me to discuss any of the material extant in the preceding paragraphs with strangers for entertainment or clout, since such discussions rage in my subconscious eternally and satisfy me tremendously on a personal level. Don't need to win about it at anyone, though I'm of course happy to talk about it face-to-face with people who want to (never online, never, ever). The complete selves in me which have recorded every scrap of information I have ever been exposed to about the underlined material and related interpretative material constantly grow and give input to my ur-self about my life, other creative works, the world at large, memetic generation, everything. It would be fair to state that my opinions and ideas relating to these topics are, speaking concisely, developed. And, still developing. The process will end with my death, maybe. If it does not, I will be quite well-pleased to carry on indeterminately. 

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Good digressions today, dear reader, good mental flexibility, but getting back to the fact that it is a new year, I have to go do life in it, and there's more than enough words in this post. Maybe I'll do that thing where I finish talking about what I started talking about in the next post, and maybe I won't.

All I know is that we are in another year and anything fuckin goes, baby. Who knows what'll happen. Only the Good Lord and the wargamers, know what I mean? 

PAT YOURSELVES ON THE BACK BITCHES WE DID ANOTHER LAP

ONE MORE LAP

ONE MORE LAP

UNTIL THE SUN EXPLOOOOOOOOODES

--JL

#88

I'll be back after the New Year! I should have mentioned that. I don't feel like making any more blog posts this year. I'll write the first post of the year of our Lord two thousand and nineteen on New Year's Day. Hopefully I'll generate something marginally worth the effort required to read it.

I have had my fill of 2018! This was a really difficult year to survive, but I think I learned a huge amount. Wretched and incredible. So it goes! Upward and onward! If you look back, you die! If you give in to fear, you grow old! Step forward, forward, ever forward!

Enjoy your holidays.


--JL