#440

If I had not written what I had yesterday, and not thought about the people I was thinking about, would I have still been pierced later that same day by the sight of my ex-fiancee, more beautiful than ever, literally reading a book at a table by herself in the middle of the street, long dress flowing in the breeze? Would I have had to hang my head low as I did not break pace? Watch my spirit crash into the windows and walls like a bird caught in a burning room?

Fuck man what the hell. What do you even do with this.

*

Just.

Endure.

That.

Is.

All.

The.

Universe.

Can. 

Ask. 

For a little while.

--JL

#419

Man, there is no pain at all like going through a box of keepsakes from past lives. It is the spiritual equivalent of what I imagine it is like to be fatally shot several times in the torso and limbs--a series of hammer blows so powerful they are numbing, followed by pain unlike anything that has ever spread through your system, the pain of pulverized bones and shredded organs, before a dizziness and lightness of being washes over you and you are gazing into an absence from which there is no return.

Except the spirit does not die, so you can open the box and feel it all again over and over again, lord knows how many times before death claims you.

Hey! Good morning! Happy Monday, as some say with their tongues in their cheeks and too-bright eyes.

*

The sky is a pure, sheer blue. It is a kindness on the vision, but I was reading about how the ocean waves areosolize more PFAS than like, human activity at this point, and how far the heat this year exceeds our frail projections--I mean, everyone should have seen this coming. A pot has fire under it for a long time. For a long time, nothing happens. Then you can kind of see some movement. Then it's like, okay, it's gonna boil, but it's not boiling. Suddenly, ferociously, it's rolling. Why did we think it would look any different? So I'm basically struggling with feelings of "there was hard evidence as far back as the 1960's that were were going to destroy this planet and every year it piled up and piled up as the little bubbles started floating up from the bottom of the pot, and now here we are. Decades before I was born you assholes knew and you did nothing. You delved deeper, greedier! You doubled and tripled down! You went all in and now the rest of the world needs to go all in, four billion more motherfuckers need a washer-dryer combo and a big TV! And still you scream for more power to fuel your twisted, useless dreams, to forge ever more numinous empires at the expense of all we hold dear! You are burning coal in West Virginia to power data centers in Virginia! What? What in the hell? Who are you people? Can't you see? Wake the fuck up!"

You can't change the past, of course, and there is no profit in indulging in resentment and bitterness about chances missed and etc. So it goes. And you can't stop a fool from swinging their pickaxe and spending their money how they like. Fuck it! Why get mad about it? Why even worry that your small life and its efforts are in no way an offset for these coked-out maniacs?

Sky is a pure, sheer blue. For now. For today. Focus on that. It'll be what it'll be, as it has been what it has been, for it is what it is and that's all it can be,

Trying to breathe more. Breathe better. Haven't hit my skill ceiling there. Anywhere, I hope.

*

Perhaps it is important to lift as much as you can, nice and early in the morning, and let it go. It is painful, but just putting your head down and one foot in front of the other seems to me tro be the way we got into and stay in this messy soup. 

We must give meaning and purpose to our lives ourselves, of our own volition, using our own materials and drives. An easy to thing to forget and leave in the hands of others, who would have us as their pawns.

Gonna make art out of trash today. Pretty excited. 

--JL

#265

Wonder if I ought to recover the twitter account I attached to the running of this blog, way back when. 'Twas only good for a couple hits a day, and twitter literally breaks my fragile mind, but it is ahead on page one google search of my actual author page on amazon, where my content lives. The top result on google relating to me and my activities is post number twenty-seven, where I mentioned Google+ and Blogger in the same sentence. Soon this post, too, will enjoy unwarranted spotlight action. Ha! 

Man, visiting twitter in order to inform this decision was like briskly rubbing a sheaf of sandpaper across my bare abdomen. One clean stripe of burning, unnecessary pain. I have said my piece about twitter in this text field, don't need to go over it all again. Some would say it would be hypocritical of me to even consider using twitter to garner readership or communicate ideas, given what I have said about their foul dark magics in the past.

In fact, I feel quite unfettered. Twitter's brand of petty evil is exactly the sort whose combat momentum is best thwarted by the gymnastic of hypocrisy. Of course, this gives one pause to wonder if that is not yet another level in the basement of their cruel and barbarous factory. Naturally, one does need a twitter account in order to criticize twitter on home turf, in order to win the hearts and minds of those afflicted by twitter most directly. 

The account does serve as the blog's alt text, which makes it an archive, and since it does already exist, and since I--wait. No. As information addict, as twitter addict, as completionist--all these truths about myself in their competition and complicity cried out together just now, and the answer must, can only be, no. That way lies madness and personal demise.

Last time I talked about twitter was that long, long Sinfest post, a post basically also about twitter, and way too much other shit. Drove across every goddamn lane I could in that post. Not sorry, but it was indeed something of an act of ridiculous lunacy, and the most exaggerated overtures in that direction were fueled by looking at twitter for all of five fucking minutes. Brain poison. The answer is no. Been sounding like an asshole up in here. No.

If only I could close that account. Such a thing, in this day and age, is impossible; moreso because I have forgotten and lost the relevant access data. So hey, this whole thing has been a total wash.

*

Read the title of the blog one more time, motherfuckers, and have a happy turkeygobble day; good day for shoving that turkeybird up in your gobblehole

--JL

*originally was going to write a post about something else entirely. I've forgotten what that was now twice as I loaded up the text field. Hmm. Well, it's nice to be here again. Always happy to be with you for even one moment more, dear reader. 

Oh! I was going to discuss how sometimes I feel as though the way the blog repeats itself and revisits certain topics again and again and again is in one way something of a failure, speaking in terms of pure creative fertility. Here in this text field I have been extremely disparaging of the Achewood man, the man of Achewood, for basically quitting the strip because he didn't want to plow any furrowed ground, and of course I am disparaging of him because I am of a similar bent in my nature. Aware that there is nothing new to be written here under the sun, nevertheless the compulsion is to offer freshness, dammit. Cooking requires base parts which, at the time you do something to them with the intent of transforming them into an ingredient, must be fresh. It doesn't matter if we are talking about a tomato, an idea, or the idea of a tomato; even the idea a tomato might have. What matters is the freshness of the ingredient, and of course what technique you apply to deliver the payload, which is flavor. Flavor is everything, everything, fucking everything.

Musically speaking: there are only eight notes. With eight notes we must make infinite multiverses of permutations. Repetition is integral to permutation, and without pattern, there is only meaninglessness, which is only interesting and valid in the context of that which has meaning. So, in the end, I have to say to myself whatever, I don't care if I repeat myself for seventy years. Who cares about playing the same song every day. Everything is in how the chord is played in this newly minted and never-before lived moment, the little improvisations, the age of the strings, the little variations in the pressure of the fingers and the stroke and tension of the arm. Do birds worry about repeating themselves? They sing every morning and maybe it's identical and maybe it's completely different each time, but at the day it's fuckin birdsong, which is what it is, and what more do you want.

What you do can be the same, but the way that you do it, who you are and what you bring, that's different every day like it or not, and being as aware of that and the necessity of that, the structure of arcs and loops and wheels and parallels that make up our lives except when it all comes crashing down around us, or when we leap off the rails and throw ourselves into formlessness that will either develop fresh structure out of itself or be our demise--that is what makes existing within the structure of repetitious fractals bearable and even majestic. 

Yeah, whatever. Maybe I've said all this before, in so many ways. I think of posts I've written where I discuss helical structures diametrically opposing one another yet both essential to the superstructure of reality, of posts I wrote about the world being a forest, the universe as forest, of reality composed of infinite simultaneously disrupted and flawlessly perfect spheres, simultaneously homogenous in their perfection and representing spectra ranged between two poles. Or it's all the layers and angles of bismuth, levels and levels and spars and spars, regular and varied. Or everything being part of an infinite and infinitely expanding and collapsing crystal structure, irrationally perfect and not even real, but the only reality there is.

Again, whatever. So fucking what? Who gives a shit how long a scene is, to paraphrase David Lynch? I get off on writing that kind of shit. I get off on writing. As long as that's true, I'll churn out whatever weird crap I want and sell it by the pound.

All this by way of saying, apologies to the Achewood man for being a jerk to him (indirectly) about his choices. They are, of course, his own to make, as all our choices do be also.

#95

Yeah, I smoke cigarettes again. If this surprises you, it indicates that you have not read this blog from the beginning (no pressure) and also that you have not read my poems, a blameless state easily ruined for the low, low price of seven dollars! For another seven you get a considerably more robust books of stories. I worked hard to make them worth the value for money. Maybe I don't think the book of poems are worth seven whole dollars, even though there are poets out there charging ten or even as much as fifteen bucks for fewer poems/pages, but I do think both books together are a fourteen-dollar value, so I say get both and think of the poems as a five-dollar book and the stories as a nine-dollar book. You will feel like you spent a smart dollar. That is my capitalistic wager.

Smoking, man. Fricking smoking.

*

Really I only started smoking cigarettes because I was paranoid about smelling like marijuana. And for my one misspent stupid ridiculous year of real college, I went to a campus where every single organism right down to the urinal scum smoked cigarettes. You could bum cigs off the squirrels. The place must have been unreal when people still smoked inside. 

*

Life involves taking a ton of shit from people, people who you are trying to coexist with, people who you are even trying to help, or care for. One of the hardest realizations I have had, one I had as a child and have tried to wriggle out of ever since, is that there is no way out of taking this shit, no way out of eating it and praising the flavor. Not if you're honest with yourself about being honest, honest with yourself about the mathematics of life. Such a thing is so difficult a person may run from it for years and years and maybe even try and slowly drink themselves to death while smoking lots of cigarettes. It's a possibility.

Ultimately we are all guilty before one another, with no exceptions, and nothing can absolve us of our duty to forgive. No matter what is done to us, no matter how it hurts, we must try to not descend, not to hurt back; we must be the ones that break the cycle of blame and pain even if we are the most blamed, the ones in the most pain.

Or, harden your heart. You are free. 

*

Being a person is exceptionally difficult. Trying to be a better person than you already are is such phenomenal fuckery that I am constantly amazed that anyone attempts it, let alone makes any headway.


--JL

#36

Generally, people have a paleolithic conception of strength; at best, a child's naive projection of parts of strength. The throwbacks to a time of rocks and bones and shitting at the base of a tree think of brawny men lifting heavy logs vertically, or machine-guns, or the unyielding tendencies of the ocean, or hatred. The more sophisticated might mention things like patience, integrity, self-sacrifice, or restraint. Athletes and other bloody-minded folk might mention the seven attributes of strength, or the difference between agile strength and explosive strength, though of course, we had as well simply measure maximum strength. Clever people might speak of the differences between tensile strength and yield strength, hardness, attribute and characteristic cross-assessments, whatever. Egghead shit, the stuff that gets boffins all in a lather, and dorks in a palaver.

Anyway, strength isn't any of that. Like everything else that is actually real, and possible to talk about in a human way, strength is spiritual, also an ur- symbol or hypersigil, just like fecundity, fear, courage, sterility, light, love, power, and some others. Strength contains, compasses, and transcends everything I talked about in the preceding paragraph, and then some. It, and the rest of these concepts, are interwoven into the warp and weft of the whole field and pattern of the physical universe.

When we talk about such things, we necessarily bind them, ensnare them, cut them down to size, reduce them, boiling away much that is unsayable and necessary, intrinsic, in order to give it communicability, and in order to make them into our tools, in order to mine from them some form of utility, and of course, some forms of power.

For all we make it complicated and perverse, though, there is a saving grace: we know it when we see it. All these things are very simple, in the end. All you have to do is pay attention.

Making yourself stronger is learning to be able to see your own weaknesses. Learning how to address these weaknesses in a way that suits your needs, abilities, and aims. Enduring pain, frustration, resistance, and handicaps. Seeking your limits, and forcing yourself past them. Admitting every slip and failure, reckoning with every shortcoming, coming to grips with the inevitable dead ends.

To be stronger is to live and breathe looking your weaknesses in the eye, as being more courageous is to live and breathe staring down your fear. Fear never fucking dies. Weakness will eventually overtake you, or death will take you and never mind if you are in your prime and joy or fallen to malingering in squalor. Nevertheless, you must always gather what strength you have, always summon what courage you possess, and be as strong and as brave as mind and spirit and body can stand, never giving yourself quarter, never surrendering.

Everything goes towards everything else, in life. Our deeds, our words, the deeds and words of the people around us, all currents and eddies in the water of a river running through the heart of our existence. The stuff we do to prove to others who we are, the stuff we do when no one is looking just to prove a little something to ourselves, any little something that we choose to do or not to do--all the little ways we attempt to prove that we are real, to taste something in life that makes us feel in that moment that our lives are truly real and rich and that they have a true and lasting, even eternal significance--all of that adds up into a story, and our stories are who we are. Every little step you take makes a difference in your story. How you walk around, and the reasons why, make you who you are.

I want to feel the earth with the soles of my feet as I walk up a mountain. I want to grip the rock with my toes as golden eagles wheel and plummet beneath me, stronger than I was--weak creature that I am--braver than I was--coward that I have been--with a world's worth of painful steps behind me, each step a difficult lesson and a bitter memory and each step a clarification and a gift and a cast-off burden.

Every step I take in this body is a step on the path to myself, to God, to being taken up into the universe. Each one ought to count, to bear a momentous weight. It is a matter of  perfect discipline, which I suspect is the only way to be free.

*

Well, that's that! Okay, this time I really won't write about walking for a while. I sure do love to walk though. However, I can see it is time to employ some gentlemanly restraint.

Perhaps tomorrow I will write about pirates, or perhaps I will decide to generate bizarre erotica. I have worked hard to become a versatile writer; I hope that one shall never know with total certainty what this blog may have in store.

Read my books lately? Or ever? They are quite reasonably priced. I think some sort of membership means you may already possess the right to read them. I don't know quite how it all works, but the books are real and eminently readable, an excellent value for money. Currently only digital, soon to be in paperback form! I tried to make them fun to read, but profitable for the mind.

Have fun being you today! You're the only one that gets to.


--JL

#35

Now, astute folks, or folks who simply happen to be in the know, are aware that one has many avenues open to one if one should wish to break free from the industrial shoe complex. Some are very nice and some are cons. I've known folks who swear by those shoes with the individual toes, I've seen those special ancient-tech super-moccasin shoes that one guy sells do-it-yourself kits for you to make your pair yourself out of leather that fits your foot precisely, I know about zero-drop hiking shoes, all that good stuff. I'll decide on something, someday. Something that will treat my feet like feet, let them move and stand like feet, and that is responsible and sustainable to own and make.

Not the point right now.

At the moment, I don't have so much as a bicycle. If you really want to know, I can fit everything I own except the books and musical instruments into two bags. And I can fit a couple instruments in the bags. Certainly, this poor brother cat has no car. I do have a job, though, and to get there, I have to walk. A hair under five miles there, a hair under five miles back.

Well, I could take the bus. But again, that is not the point.

While I don't think anyone could fairly make a case against me to show that I am a bad person, a cruel person, a person who is callous about abusing others, causing pain--I'm not a concentration camp guard or a torturer, I don't murder children or attack women to violate them, I don't drive like a jackass or rob people...know that I'm not a good person, either. 

Sure, people make noises based on what they see. I've been called a good person a lot. Doesn't make it true. I'll allow that I have convincingly performed deeds and behaved in ways that people consider good. This only means they were benefited by my labor or attention in some way, though, and no conclusions can be honestly drawn. Maybe all those people were shitfuckers, and deserved none of that. It's possible. Perhaps I only made shitfuckers happy as they took advantage of me, and I can't see how that makes me good, instead of a driveling idiot. I look like an asshole, helping shitfuckers when decent people needed me. But who's to say those shitfuckers didn't need or deserve my help either?

Okay. Without getting too bogged down in the sticky shit, where it's not possible for us to keep or reckon the score, let us take as writ that I have misdeeds, mistakes, and inadequacies that I feel the need to atone for, no matter how politely I speak, how much I mind my own business, or how many dishes I do.

I have, for example, lied a lot. Lying when I sit down to type is one thing, that's what I'm here in world to do. Lying with my mouth is another thing entirely. I love the truth. I love justice. Why am I a fucking liar? I hate that shit so much.

I've pissed away my twenties like a dude pissing in a corner of a yard where two fences meet, which is how I spent a non-trivial portion of my twenties. I have broken many hearts, my own pain notwithstanding, and made terrible mistakes of judgment and commitment with lovers--and oh, I have said so many wrong things. So many words. So many of them wrong. I have stayed silent when it would have better served me to cry out. I have turned my face away when strangers might have needed my help. I have taken the easy road when I knew the hard way was better, the true way. 

Not always, you know? But enough to carry weight. Enough to feel it sitting in your chest cavity.

Finally I am prone to extremely vicious thoughts in anger. I rarely so much as raise my voice, but if your true and unalloyed thoughts could be broadcast, every decent person on this green and weary earth would be screaming for a shred of my flayed skin to toss into a fire so they might curse my name as my smoke dissipates on the wind.

Walking barefoot, then, serves me admirably for this purpose--a jolt of pain, sometimes bad enough to cuss from, for every stupid thing I've ever done or let myself do. 

Penance. That's what comes after the apologies are accepted, and you realize nothing's changed.

Walking barefoot on sidewalk and asphalts hurts very much, hurts in a maddening, ridiculous, insulting way. If I didn't deserve it, need it in some basal, fundamental way, I'd put my shoes back on. No one is making me do this--no priest or king, no vengeful ex-lover or angry friend. There's other ways to get stronger.

That's the other reason. I want the other side of this, when the soles of my feet are like soft brown leather and the concrete of the sidewalk feels like supple, smooth, yet springy velvet, and the asphalt just feels like being on some ground. I'm already getting flashes of it, like when I reach smooth sidewalk after a long stretch of old asphalt--bliss. Like striding onto perfectly flat, cool clay after walking on a rough hot skillet for twenty minutes.

Mostly, though, I want to have gotten stronger. I was not born strong; quite the opposite! I was born weak, and I hate pain. Making yourself stronger hurts. And it is good.

*

This wraps up tomorrow! I shall elaborate, then conclude.

Kanye has gotten so crazy, man. I was watching the correct TV station at the exact moment that dude looked straight into the camera stone-faced and eyes flaring to say that George Bush hates Black people. It was one of the greatest days of my life and I'll never forget it. Now...well, now the world is very fucking different.

On that note, I predict the 2020 election will pass the primaries with Kanye West on the Republican ticket and Oprah Winfrey on the Democratic. Oprah will definitely win, but not in 2024, when Ye's place on the ballot will be taken by the next celebrity president. I don't know who yet. Remember today. I'm as serious as a humorless heart attack. Check the tags, maybe jot them down, so you can find this post quickly when the time comes.


--JL