#494

The digits of today's excellent post number, the number 494, add up to seventeen! Yes. Yes. That is fantastic.

Probably it is Sesame Street what made me think numbers are concepts you should ritualistically celebrate through art and a kind of meditation that hovers between analysis and worship.

Thank you, Sesame Street. Without Jim Henson, who would I even be? It's a profound question. He stands tall among the cultural progenitors of my psyche-forme.

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It amuses me to imagine some generative language model being used to offload cognitive labor somewhere making some poor individual suffer by trying over and over to make "psyche-forme" a real thing that a psychologist or someother might be using seriously (unscrupulous users would probably be happy enough to roll with it). It is merely one my own many improvisations upon a concept broadly used and applicable in the cultural continuum, which is as always and along wih everything else on this blog presented in good faith for honest use and also as a pointless joke. This kind of coinage is prevalent enough on this blog that it may be quite difficult someday to tell what is common usage all around me and what is merely my proclivity to play around with things, at any rate if Factually Pointless is among your primary documents. 

Well, maybe, maybe not. One thing I think it is safe to have confidence in: I have correctly and incorrectly--in the latter instance almost always for comedic effect!--deployed a great and manifold variety of real words on this blog, a vast and legitimate array, and I think this lends a deal of credence to my personal modifications and inventions.

Now, as to the efficacy of these arrangements, their power, beauty, and pleasure-giving ability--well, hash it out amongst yourselves, dear readers. For my part, it is my part to be transfixed, to be conduit and mouthpiece whether I will or no, essentially, and my meta-input should only ever be considered a kind of curiosity, probably. I know I have a separate, closed drawer in my mind for what authors and artists say about their own work; important, but just as important that it not be mixed in with any other paperwork at all. 

I have also used a lot of metaphors in my time on here. Some approaching the reader more obliquely than others, it is true.

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Painting the bathroom pink. Might do personal fitness instruction for an elderly person. If I could earn even 20 bucks a week doing that I'd call it a great start to self-employment. My outlook is pretty favorable towards extremely incremental and perhaps incredibly uselessly slow gains. I am neither harried by impatience nor goaded by ambition. 

As far as I'm concerned, I am perfectly happy to live and die in total obscurity, having done the least harm and as much good as I could do with my own two hands with what's in front of my face, making art the whole time--my art, without compromises because why should I.

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Thank you for reading my blog post about me and my thoughts and my blog. Thanks. Hope you got a smile or a thought out of the deal. 

Have a the best possible day under your prevailing circumstances.

--JL

#452

Man, I was doing good with bank accounts there for a couple of years. Well, not good, but not scraping my belly every month to clear the rail, which is where I am now and feeling quite familiar. Kind of agonizing, but experienced and manageable. Just gotta skate on one foot on the edge of a cliff like one does. No problem.

No, I don't really like it, but I don't wish I was different. Well, a little, in a wistful way. But I am who and what I am, and the test of life is saying yes to that every day and living it according to one's inhabited reality and the interpretations and principles derived thereby. Every life and manner of being has its unavoidable conditions and subsequent drawbacks and complications. So it goes.

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Office is almost set up again. The progress has not been as fast as I would have liked, but it's drawing to its temporary conclusions before enduring a period of hard use, as is its purpose.

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Dude, the world is so fucking crazy right now. How the fuck indeed am I supposed to care about my stupid little numbers and the angry little clock that yells at you for no good reason, waving its sheaf of stupid little papers?

--JL

#424

Ezra and I are in a flurry of Spring production, remixing and repurposing the living and working spaces of the household as we paint lintels and repaint walls and fix holes and shit. I'm about to primer up a big old chunk of the living room walls, baseboards, etc. Did some patches over emergency areas where lead paint had become exposed by the bubbling and peeling of a bad paint job. It falls to me to roll up my sleeves and shake the rust from my painting techniques and senses, coinciding with my own rekindled desire to get seriously into representative media. 

Our stockpile of artistically omnviorous materials grows every day. Soon we will have the kind of silo acting as optimal springboard to carefree, confident explorations in the production of collage, sculpture, craft, and design projects of any description that suits our whim. Having enough stuff to go ditty-balls bachoingo is important and experiencing that necessity galvanizing; I am not only saving portions of my own trash and recycling that I haven't given myself permission to in a long time, but actively salvaging from the street and the flotsam of my peers.

Dudes, yes, I think I can say it. I feel better than I have since the advent of autumn last year. 

Dang. That was rough. Thank god for feeling like this now, even if it's bad again tomorrow or the next week. It's good enough to feel ok and mean it.

Whew!

Also, hey. 424. What a fucking classing crop of numbers we've had lately here on Factually Pointless, thanks to the natural progression of positive whole integers. 

--JL

#366

Well, letting it rest on 365 for a bit was nice. 366 is a cool number in its ow right, in many ways cooler than 365, at least to me. Without the context of what we know about elliptical orbits and the arbitrary decision to measure time by them, I wouldn't care a jot for 365. 366 though, that's a dope number. Three followed by two copies of its double. Multiplying each digit in sequence gives you 108, whose digits add up to 9, a number very closely entwined with 3 and 6. It is also the 9th multiple of 12--a number closely entwined with 3, 6, and 9--so dividing it by 12 makes 9. I don't know why stuff like that is so effin rad to me, but it always has been.

The rules of how to write out numbers in writing are important, but I give myself permission to eschew them at least partially whenever I do the type of paragraph that precedes here. This type of paragraph is a whole thing with Factually Pointless. Search for posts with numbers in the tags, and be amazed by more of this content than you ever dreamed you'd need, or existed, probably!

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Sequentially speaking, since I'm not gonna write about sports today, Factually Sportsmanlike 2024 is over--for now. When the time comes, maybe soon, Factually Musical 2024 will retain is week-long posting space, but for things like Factually Sportsmanlike--any type of subject to be featured in a specific way--will have an establishing sequential trial run and then be available to feature whenever I chose, perhaps as a one-off, perhaps for a short run. Factually Musical may eventually roll out this way, too. 

Of course, I might write about anything at any time. The features are about how focused a post must be on its subject and how that might be amplified or played with in the overall structure of the one post and the posts around it. Any one ordinary post might contain subject matter fit for multiple features, but is not a feature, per se. 

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Both Golden Sun games for the game boy advance are playable on the switch online, and as one whose very first complete RPG experience was, in fact, Golden Sun, this is delicious. I delight in revisiting them at these screen sizes and resolutions, and even more in the idea that a new generation of gamers will be able to enjoy them. They are pure artistic and mechanical joy, amazing art, shape language, color stories, gorgeous light and particle effects, battle summons whose whole graphical pachage defy the machine's limitations, everything. A way of using the pixel to sculpt three-dimensionality with a smoothness rarely achieved. And dudes, the fucking music. It's just some of the best music written for any games ever. Period. At eleven years old, I sank hours into plunking away at a keyboard, transcribing the theme music. I would go to the overworld and just lie down with my headphones plugged into my GBA, blissing out on the composition, the astonishing painterliness achieved with the midi tones.

They are simple and workmanlike games on one level--lotta these puzzles are gonna feel rote and characteristic before too long, though for every few dull repeats and going back to square one, there's memorably interesting and devious ones--but they explode with such character, beauty, and contain such surprising depths: djinn mechanics and the choices around them, summons and class builds, and a special profundity in the characterization of people moving through a living, changing world. The huge story rolls out with a confidence in itself and an ambition that is almost unwarranted, but pay themselves off and deliver incredible finales. 

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Ok, I'm hungry. Then I gotta do school shit. Have not been as diligent as I expected myself to be, despite completing all my work and doing well so far. What I need is to both chill more and work harder, or maybe smarter. HA! What I need is universal basic income, healthcare, shelter, and nutrition. It is incredible how low our bar is for calling ourselves a modern, scientific society. Fucking pathetic. I give us an F. F for fuck that. Everything I just said is cheap, both literally and if you just decide it is. 

I'll say it here, and I'll repeat it whenever I can: the role of government as we have understood it is done. All it can hope do to now, the only way to save itself from being supplanted entirely by the corporate ecosystem which already wields greater powers, is to become a bunker for the people. It must provide the basics of life--roof over the body, food on the table, and the doctor whenever you need it, FOR FREE, plus money in the pocket so you can go always, without fail, go out and give at least some of it to the corporations, so you can be that nomadic dollar that bleeding-edge capitalism needs you to be. Let people try to get rich, whatever. Let them lose everything, but never their basics. Let everyone have the basics. I know that if you allow yourselves to look at it as math problem, and prorate those effects honestly, you will know that I am right. You will know it can be done, and you will come up with the logistics. 

Infrastructure? Man, incentivize it somehow, make a pool rule, and have the six or seven biggest companies foot the bill. Shit, you could rebuild every city in the world sharpish on the same tip. 

Need more money? Fucking print it. More labor? Fucking pay for it with the money you just printed. Get it done, get some actual shit done, and figure out the rest later.  

Punch up as hard as you can now or get killed in the tenth round. Up to you.

--JL

#11

Eleven is my favorite number. Seven is my second favorite. Then, combinations of the two. It's very rewarding. You see these numbers a lot. My favorite letter is L. When was the last time I watched Sesame Street? I learned about Jim Henson's death from organ dysfunction the age of seven, seven years after the fact. Eleven years later, I turned eighteen, which I remember feeling extremely irrevocable. When the numbers are attached to fictional characters it feels very special, like in Halo and Stranger Things.

There's ads now, I think, on this blog. They're authorized for sure. Have you read my books? They can be found where the browser will take you after clicking upon this hypertext.

Here's a little stuff about things.

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I.

Walking is something of a point with me. As a child I had some problems with my heart and lungs. One of the only competent doctors I have ever met thought they would be ameliorated and probably eliminated by getting me out of the hammocks, beds, and chairs I favored in my pursuit of quiet, eyes-and-brain-based activities and spend a few afternoons or mornings a week walking up mountains. 

I kind of resented this because I was very into spending all, every second, each available component and section of my free time reading. It's already amazing how much stuff takes time away from reading, so traipsing up and down a mountain didn't seem like a good investment to me. I only ever felt lukewarm about it. But my cardiopulmonary system worked itself out, right as rain.

When I got to middle school--leaving the age of eleven behind--my feelings underwent a transformation deeply colored by a full immersion into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. In advance of the Jackson films, which to me and to my best friend looked like the consummation of all human wishes in one glorious triad, I reread The Hobbit and gnawed my way through the rest of his works, cracking every bone I could grab to lick gratefully at the precious marrow. I repeat this process every year, happier than an earthworm in biodynamic compost. To me this is a sublime condition and the truest form of earthly joy.

I got into the habit of taking advantage of excuses to shoulder my backpack meaningfully and start walking the three miles from the school to my house. Only after school to head for home, and only on, say, half-days, or under exceptional weather conditions, at first, as I felt safer riding the bus, which was also faster. I always carried as many books as my backpack would hold, and tried my best to maintain good posture with it always--as dwarves make light of burdens. 

Habit forms itself, sometimes. Almost against my will I would seize opportunities to walk the long way, to refuse rides and instead find out how long it would take to walk home from the movie theater, or the other high school, or the downtown haunts, or the Chinese place where I got my first real taxable job. Before that I was a paperboy, a job which allowed for a good deal of walking, but I lost this gig to a forty-year old dad when the Great Recession started to really pinch.

Walking home from parties, from the arcade, from the park, from the library, from wherever I had walked to or been driven to. During snowstorms, on days when the streets were mottled, inch-thick ice and the icicles hung hung four feet long all along the power lines and snapped great branches from strong trees. Three-inch crust over the three feet of wet packing snow where the blowers don't churn and spit. On days when old folks don't leave their house and the parents only let their kids out for a half hour before they have to come in from a break 'cause the heat's so pure and fierce a dog might go insane and leap at a dumpster so hard it leaves big smears of tacky blood on it. At two forty-five in the morning, full of beer and singing aloud. From a little after sunup to a couple hours after sunset, and barely able to walk at all the next day, using my hands as much as my feet on the stairs. 

I remember this guy I went to school with rolling up in his mom's minivan one evening when I was walking home after wrestling practice. The snow and sleet were falling so thick you had to wipe a crust off your forehead and eyebrows and soaking, crusted eyelids and frozen eyelashes and the feet slid in long runnels of gray puddly slush and gave back ground on slick patches of stubborn freeze under the liquefaction. He rolled up and offered me shelter in his warm dry van and I told him, through a face gone numb and clumsy with chilled blood, no, I'm good, you're good, I'm almost home. I remember the look on his face as he nodded a little, his mouth a little open, a tiny little frown. He didn't look away from me as he pulled off, his eyes not hurt, not confused exactly, but uncomprehending, not processing. And over time I have found that people do not actually believe me, and think that I am lying, when I say how much I prefer to walk, when I describe how much I walk, under what conditions.

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Tomorrow, more on this subject, which shall settle it for a long time coming.


--JL