#514

Man, probably I have written everything I know into this blog twice, but I could do it for the rest of my life and not run out of different ways to say it, plus there is the living process of gaining and losing and regaining knowledge/enlightenment only to lose it again ad nauseum, plus there are functionally infinite ideas, events, and cultural artifacts to discuss, accompanied by true life stories I could tell every single day and never catch up to myself before I had to punch my ticket. I can think of about ten stories I could bang out about me real quick. This is not to brag--how will I ever stop?

Maybe I don't stop. Maybe this is the self-imposed metier for the rest of my span. I mean, I guess that's what being a writer is. 

Maybe I'll just do one immediately because my fingers are itching. GO!

*

Me and the boys were out doing parkour downtown. Hell yeah. Fourteen years old, four motherfuckers with nothing to prove except we don't give a fuck and we're not scared to prove it. Qualifiers abound--but not where we would admit them even to ourselves. That is what makes teenagers dangerous like a pack of coyotes but brittle like burnt sugar. We leaped and vaulted, tucked and rolled, climbed shit we absolutely were not supposed to and took a specific flavor of ownership over everything we gazed upon.

Indeed, activities like this are not frowned upon because they are dangerous--except by moms. The Man doesn't give a fuck if you die, though of course he prefers to turn a tidy profit from the affair, e.g., it is a noble thing for a soldier to rape and kill for massive profits (not theirs; The Man's, just to be clear) until they would be so good as to die, that is what The Man likes best. A soldier is a good example because the worst thing a soldier can do, in the mind of The Man, is not die.

He gives a fuck about three things: having power and making sure people who don't act like they understand it and accept it; the ideal situation is for them to love it, love him for having it and for using it how he pleases: thus is he motivated to loosen his fist and let flow a dribble of honey to the favored. The third thing is to feel, even fleetingly, even the suggestion, that his power is false and all it takes to break it is to simply laugh and ignore him, to act as though he does not exist, and this is sensible: The Man is contingent on belief in him, and his power and his money are a lie our ancestors trapped us in by believing in him and feeding him and letting him live in our homes and our minds. 

Certain Men in public life would probably fucking straight-up stroke out and die if someone were to ignore them just right.

So it was only to add savor to our feelings of sheer selfhood and bounteous, free-breathing free-ass freedom when some apoplectic motherfucker in a shirt with cuffs and a collar tucked into beige pants came out of an air-conditioned building where he wears a figurative diaper all day to scream that we weren't allowed and he was gonna call the cops. We laughed and ran away in such a fashion that neither he nor many cops could match--our bodies processed our oxygen intake far more efficiently than theirs, even if they ran every day, we were effortlesstly flexible, and our athleticism was under the command of sharp, undulled senses and greasy-quick stimulus reflex in a way that even as I type this, basically can't remember. Have stayed fit and gotten lot stronger, but I could never in ten thousand years try to catch my fourteen-year old self doing parkour. Would be absolutely concussed to try. Anyway the screamer was a horizontal creature and we fled in three dimensions, but indeed, only to prove to him real quick that he could not catch us if he tried.

Shortly after this incident we were running by a hedge that ran in a square around a grassy gap. The hedge was trimmed above my hip level and was about three feet wide. Figured I could do it and rode the impulse, looked before I leaped, cleared the hedge no touch forward flip and did a forward roll onto the grassy enclosure. The boys hooted appreciatively without pausing their stride, but I had seen something out of the corner of my eye during my roll that gave me hard pause. As I bound to my feet, I took in fully the half-meter vertical closed iron waterpipe pipe sticking up, which I had rolled right next to, having missed it completely in my assessment glance. 

Well, it was a glance, you see.

Spent about another forty seconds studying its placement relative to my action and satisfied myself that if I had taken another pace or two before jumping, that pipe had a real decent chance of hurting me very badly; I would even confidently say that I would have brought the entire weight of my body headfirst straight onto it and been hashing out the reality of my "free-ass freedom" and its various implications with St. Peter.

As I caught up with my friends I studied my body's reaction to having come so close to death just having some fun, and chalked it up as a natural wink from the yawning vastness of the nonbeing that birthed me and to which I shall return one fine day. Which is to say that like a good monkey I laughed it off and kept playing in the sun.

But like a cold tooth lodged somehwere in the brain, that moment and that knowledge have been a part of everything ever since; a dense lozenge of slow-release maturation that even now glints at me from the depths.

*

Factually Pointless may suffer an interruption of service, but I don't know when or if, really. All I know is that this man right here needs a new computer.

So anyway Peace! Love! Peace and Love on this Planet Earth! Other planets too! Any and all of them, really! I am the laughing monkey, and I turn away and leap into the sunshine! We are all going to die, some sooner, some later! ULTREIA, HOSSANA, PAX DEI, TERRA ET CAELUM

--JL

#505

Yes, I took to bed on April first, completely in the grip of that illness called despair. Everything became very personal, you see. Everything so personal it was impossible to turn my hand or mind to anything constructive or pleasurable. Only to lie exhaustedly and think myself three hundred miles per hour into a delirious passion of hurt and rage and personal blame. 

What I forgot is that we are all guilty before one another, there is no one and nothing to blame, and the universe unfolds as it unfolds. That it is not personal. That I have no enemies, and we know not what we do. That this world is a violence and a charnel house precisely because we seek to control and blame and act as though we know what is best and what would have been better when we know nothing, nothing.

I forgot, as is so easy to do, that I know nothing. That perceiving hurt at the hands of others is a mistake--it is all just me hurting myself, them hurting themselves, for we are not, in fact, separate entities, but aspects of the godhead, a oneness and a completeness whose distinction is an illusion. 

But despair is only an illness. The worst, but just a passing thing. Here I am. Do with me as thou wilt.

Thank you, Kierkegaard, thank you Nietzsche, thank you Socrates, thank you all the rest. Truly the only consolation lies in philosophy and the contemplation/(re)discovery[immanence/transcendence] of the infinite universe/incomprehensible (smokeless flame, lossless radiance) mind of God.

That's what's important, mang.

*

Back to the vital business of being factually pointless. It is so off-brand of me to act like I should have a point. Must try to remember to remedy this tendency with maximum prejudice as I approach the next four hundred and ninety-four posts.

*

I better take a walk. Peace. As in, really.

Peace.

Also remembered this, yesterday; speaking of sublime consolation:

memento et mori

caro temporalis est

facta aterna



--JL

#426

It was a little weird because it's been awhile and I'm older now, but with time also came a certain self-assurance and determination as I salvaged some pretty excellent trash from the curb:

• partially rusted metal trash can with partially rusted lid
• some rusty and some ok lengths of broken chain
• a satellite dish and its supporting arm,
• seemingly barely used DVD player
• universal remote
• a metal box fan seemingly from the fifties or somesuch, haven't investigated yet
• long plastic tube attachment for a leaf blower

Add all that to the couple of toaster ovens and dead DVD players I already happened to have on hand, and we have the base materials for some interesting play. Must finish disassembling my old laptops soon as well.

Think we need some fresh filing cabinets in the house. Hafta look! It's trash season. Gotta tool around downtown and around the apartment complex dumpsters and see what the students leave scattered about this year. Filing cabinets are long odds, but not impossible. 

*

Gotta go to the library today. Gotta spackle some kitchen wall, wait and sand, do a little brushwork in there before bedtime. Gotta paint some other shit too, probably. Once I'm done painting there's kitchen cabinets to powersand. One last class at school. Work. 

Life, life, life. Putting gas in the car and making coffee. Taking a big shit and feeding the cats. Scraping at the floor with a wet rag to fix my paint spills basically with elbow grease. Happily wielding scissors and brushes and shovels as I listen to beautiful songs, meditating on dead and distant friends.

Treasuring the peace of these days. May it last.

*

Ok cool so off to honor these halcyon days baby

--JL

#418

Just realized that if I'd ever written just three more posts, I would have been able to put up the four hundred and twentieth post on April 20th! What a brass ring to miss by so little. 

Ah, well. No regrets. I like yesterday's post a lot, and it's got the number 17 in it. That is more than enough. We must accept the hits and misses of this life with equanimity and say yes to them joyfully.

*

Believe I'll take a light Sunday. No useful thoughts chase themselves around my skull, no great fire rises in my breast as yet. If they do, I can jot them for tomorrow, or use them elsewhere.

I'll try and sign off with some style, at least.

*

Peace the motherfucker out, you living souls, you seething apertures in the flesh of the universe, caught in the roiling churn of life in a body! Peace, peace, I say!

Crush the cup of peace, kin. Do it in the face of fear and laugh triumphant.

--JL

#267

Life is ever full of surprising blessings. Never would I have imagined that parting ways with a company over the ethics of my job the week of Christmas could be one of them, but it's such a classic trope that I find myself chuckling about it over and over. What a joke. 

Entirely my own decision anyway. Saw it as a definite probability when I took the job. That it should happen this week, under the circumstances that it had to happen under, is added layers to the joke of having to make so damn sure to myself of being right and doing the right thing that I would literally let myself be fired on purpose the week of Christmas just to prove a point. Just to be able to say that I tried everything and be honest. To prove I'm not a liar to liars to who do not give a fuck if I lie or tell the truth, I practically made them fire me, and they don't give a fuck Christmas or no Christmas and never have. Hilarious.

Anyway. Fuck all that nonsense. It's over. Kept my word and did what I thought and felt was right. If I feel like I could have or should have done more, that's my own weird brain problem. I went in at three in the morning at one point and stayed till three in the afternoon.

Last night I slept better than I have in months, maybe over a year. That shit was killing me, and only me. Let it be done.

For my part, I like Christmas and try to keep in my heart the year round. Happy to not be working this week. If the advantage of being an idiot is literally sleeping easier, I'll take it as a win.

*

Ok, so I wrote that first part six days ago, then shambled away from my monitor, loathing myself and the very concept of recording so-called human progress. 

Currently, today, the 27th of December, one full week after I lost my job, I am very close to doing the same thing, so that's that. Guess I'll bang out some sentences quick as I can while there's a degree of warmth in my blood.

Sleep continues to be better. I have typed that. It's sort of a sentence. Now I'm gonna take a shit, make more coffee, and smoke some weed. Maybe I'll finish this post after that.

*

Holy crap! It went just like I said it would. I took a shit and lived to type about it, which is great--you always hear and read about someone dying on the toilet because the process was in some way too much for their system that one time out of the many thousands, due to whatever circumstance. Every successful bowel movement is truly something to be grateful for. 

Christmas was pretty wonderful. Good to be with family. Good to have it be Christmas. I don't think so much about the birth of Christ as incident or general whatever come Christmas these days; I did as a child, of course, living in a culture that drilled the significance of the point home with a lot of emphasis--Christ was born. Later in the year, we discuss his death. Thus we remind you and give you to understand that all men live, and die, and in this particular case, live eternally after death, whatever that may be like, whatever that will be. 

What I think about these days is: there is birth, there is death, and there is Mystery, which our small lives witness and investigate but can never, individually, fully illuminate. In this dark universe, we all rely on light, which is what this celebration is all about; making a sacrifice of some kind to our hope that light will continue to shine. Light is God, and what is God in us is light. On this world of ours, we cast a light in the darkness, shining in our togetherness, in our apartness, in our joy and our despair. 

Been in something of a haze since being out of work. I felt extremely depressed about it, and everything. Feeling a little better, and this week I will try to get a job. Start with something I don't really care about, probably. Who knows, though.

Ok, I gotta make breakfast. Time to be done with this post and wait for the next one.

Peace on Earth, past Earth, beyond all limits

--JL

#175

Family dog is barking at the window of my room, where he likes to survey the cul-de-sac with what on a larger canine would be a magisterial, commanding mien, but on him just seems like preoccupation and a certain amount of noble irritation. The difference between a tall, powerfully framed lighthouse-keeper and the undersized but very professional security man for a small historical preservation museum composed of a general store combined with a post office.

*

All right, I'm wasting time. It's because what I want to write about will so bare my emotions, also because I woke up thinking about work instead of anything I wanted to be thinking about, anything else at all, and have been thinking about work in a way that no one likes thinking about work even if you did want to think about work thirty-two milliseconds after your eyes opened.

*

Falling in love is a scary thing, especially when you know how bad someone else can treat you, on purpose and without meaning to, and how eminently you can fail to be what another person needs, accidentally and deliberately. I've broken an engagement to be married, escaped from a narcissist, and lived and loved through a range of other entanglements, each their own kind, each accorded due significance, each painful. Frankly, bluntly, I wasn't trying to go through anything like that again. 

Life isn't about being safe, though. Life is about doing something with what you have in front of you, and sometimes life is a pretty girl that wants to talk to you with her very nice and cute voice and get to know you and see you special. And the part of you that sees something special in that girl and responds to her eyes and her smile and her good kind heart is more important than the part of you that is scared that things are going to go bad again. It just is. Life is for living. Living is dangerous, but it's good. It's good to be alive, but you gotta be brave. Even if you've fucked up a lot, you've gotta keep trying to be brave.

*

So if you find yourself with a story playing out like this girl's reading a book you just reread and it's a great book, a real humdinger full of special language and tendernesses you treasure and special psychic movies you're the better for having witnessed, bearing undercurrents that change how your blood flowed, and you talk about it for a little bit, how you both so love the author, so you smile when you see one another and you keep on talking a little here and there, more books, some laughs, a note in your backpack, a spliff in the sun, a walk in the woods, and you wonder what the fuck is happening, it's so good that it's too good, it's unrealistic, it's unreasonable, you're fucking with yourself, what the fuck are you doing, don't you ever learn, and so you throw a stick into the spokes and foul the machine and you get back to the quiet and the cold lone and you are proud that you are learning and you are okay with being the person that can protect themselves but it is really truly very difficult to see this girl around and it is clearly not easy for her either but you are both getting by and you are both doing the right thing but merely because you don't look at something, merely because you turn away and try not to see it, it does not in fact cease to be or change position, so you cannot keep pulling it off, the thing is there, you can feel it no matter where you fix your gaze, so you smile more and you laugh more and you look in her eyes and then you have no choice but to turn back, and meet it where it is, and write a letter, and let the letter be a true and dangerous letter, the kind that throws everything into the air and makes you wait to see how it all comes back down. 

See where the story goes from there. 

*

As I am a super lucky guy, the story seems to be coming out okay. More than okay. The math has never looked like this to me before. Things in general have never looked this way to me before; choices, time, objects in space, distances. It's a different level. Is this something you get used to, or the beginning stages of some long and ever-morphing symphony? These are the kinds of thoughts shooting through me as I walk home in the full blast of a thunderstorm, heedless and thinking only of the smell and taste of her and the feeling of her arms around me and water pours down my face and off my chin like a spigot. 

*

Just keeps getting more beautiful, more dangerous, more and more storied. It can threaten to be overwhelming again, memory striking at me with the terrors of experience, doubt in myself dogging my footsteps. But courage is the only game in town and beauty is for enjoying while it lasts. Being in danger just means you've got skin in the game. And this is a game I am down to have all of my skin in, my whole body and self. It's cool.

*

Anyhow I love my fully gorgeous amazingly kind hella considerate super creative warmhearted hilarious girlfriend, she is the downest girl ever and fully hardcore. That's what's up these days. It's pretty fun and rad. We are having a nice time. 

*

Peace for the billions and peace forever on this charming and lovely Memorial Day, people. May you remember every dead soldier that ever was next time you raise your hand in anger. Kill it where it starts and you'll shed no blood; that's how you honor a sacrifice.


--JL

#128

Experienced reading Patrick Kyle's short comics through the medium of the short comics of Patrick Kyle in Everything Disappeared: Short Comics by Patrick Kyle, which contains the short comics of Patrick Kyle.

These are some of the best god damn comics I have ever had the fortune and pleasure to run my eyes across. This motherfucker is a supergenius. The short comics of Patrick Kyle stand among equals on that narrow platform which makes up the highest pinnacle of humankind's cultural achievements. Rarely have I experienced such wonder and pleasure, and never in my life have I laughed out loud on a city bus.

For real, ridiculously Quality. I was lent these comics by a coworker and as soon as I finish this post I am going to order my own copy. Dunno what I can lend back that will even this situation out. This is one of my favorite feelings and favorite challenges. 

Patrick fucking Kyle. This person has achieved something uncommon.

*

Also I ate a sandwich today. Let me tell you about this motherfucking sandwich.

This sandwich stepped up to home plate and sliced a thousand-mile-an-hour pitch in half with a sword. This sandwich punched the other boxer's head clean off like a dandelion. This sandwich dove into the pool with such force and technical prowess that in one clean three-second glide it laid its fingers on the far wall. 

Dogg, this sandwich punished. This was one of the sandwiches worth the suffering that staying alive has put you through and makes your cells heal a little as your soul resonates one clear pure note of honest and uncomplicated sacred pleasure.

Rustic Italian with delicious and flawlessly executed chicken salad (clean local farm chicken and house-made mayo) minced fine, roasted red pepper spread, two big exactly correct crunch and texture peppered strips of Arkansas bacon, and a mess of delicious thin-sliced spicy tang pickles, toasted to the precise point in butter; bread seared and delicate to hold, red peppers married into chicken salad warmed just barely to dripping.

Holy jumping saints in heaven. That sandwich was confirmation of value itself. That was God saying "Hey baby, look, I'm here. I'm right here with you. And I love you more than I can say, so here is a sandwich. Bite into it. I made it just for you."

Daily bread, man. I'm almost crying over here.

*

By no means all the blessings that today has placed into my basket, but frankly, much more and I'd just be chattering about how wonderful my life is. While it certainly is that, it's best to keep it simple and not get all high on your luck, so it shall suffice to say that I was gifted more wonderful food and the company of an old friend.

Some days just roll straight twenties. Turn up sevens every hour on the hour. Days you gotta grow your thankfulness just to keep up. 

*

Haven't drawn a picture in over a year! What the hell! This was once inconceivable to me. Have I mentioned this? Well I still haven't done it, but let me stand forsworn if that doesn't change right now, today, this instant.

After I, uh...eat another meal. 


Peace, peace, a thousand time peace plus one strong and firm out, yo.

--JL

#124

Worked a double yesterday! Had a pretty good shift. There are always a few good seconds in even the grimmest of shifts at the worst of workplaces, in my experience--and after eleven-plus years of swapping stories and accruing the misery that is the right to tell them, I can say I've worked some dark, truly regrettable shifts in my time. My spirits were up pretty much the whole time yesterday, which is really an incredible gift when you think about it. Lucky stuff.

*

Having bookshelves again has disrupted my life considerably. My room is in somewhat of a transition phase. To bring about form, to trend towards order and organization and hold a pattern, the universe must undergo changes. Changes are chaotic and disruptive. Patterns are never perfect in their repetition. Forms, never identical, interact. This is the paradox that describes being and time.

*

Well, I boiled it down a lot.

*

My room is a mess. Difficult to concentrate.

*

Perspective truly is the only thing that has any chance of saving your life.

Might as well throw that into the pool, while I'm casually saying whatever.

*

Okay, peace. I want to play some video games before I go to work, and also read, and have some nutrition. Again, peace. Peace out.


--JL

#61

11/17. That's a special day for me. I have mentioned my favor for seven, and eleven, and seventeen, and one hundred and seventeen, and other such permutations. I also like primes, so I like that this is the sixty-first post. 

No special deed, nor any ritual; no observance at all really except for my private acknowledgement that the calendar has branded this day with those numbers. To a person of my psychic makeup and spiritual background, significance is its own reward, and its own justification.

*

I walk by a field with a sycamore at the far edge on my way home. It stands all stark among a throng of smaller, uniformly dark trees. To the eye they are nameless drab, a murmuring backdrop like sackcloth behind a graceful nude in white marble. The tree, tall and slender, leaps into the field of vision, springs up fresh every day like the next step of a nigh-incomprehensibly slow dance yet more joyful in high exuberance and vaulting through an air more upper and rarefied than any dancer quickened by heart and pulse and dragging bone could ever hope to even briefly breathe.

*

Incidentally, the skis by the speed limit sign never did get picked up by the trash folks. Eventually, they were thrown into the underbrush near the sign, which is just up a hill from the place where I look over at the field with the sycamore tree.

*

There is a row of sycamore trees by the river in the park across the river from the bluffs which are my favorite place to be in town. They are huge, towering, thick bastions whose great slabs of bark could split the top of your head open when they come down on a molt. 

Eagles sometimes build their nests in their highest branches. Hawks nest all around there. The trails take you to places where you can stand high above the world, above the branches where the raptors build their generations and ply their killing drive, above the rivers and bridges and the playgrounds and the fields and the roads. 

Above all that pounded pavement and all those lived-in, worked-in buildings. Above all the shadows being cast.

*

My face is cold. I need to grow a beard. My hair is bothering me, so I ought to shave it down. I wore my hair long for a long time. I've been keeping it tight for a while.

I think we have embarrassingly close relationships with our hair. Even a brutalist or performatively non-performative or minimalistic approach is this whole fucking undeniable thing. 

As for my beard, it mainly reminds me of mortality. 

*

Cool. That's a very believable blog post; totally full of words and images. Chew on that, readers! Masticate! Devour! 

Happy November the seventeenth, everybody. Do your part to bring about peace on earth. Whatever small victory you can score.


--JL

#40

Had quite a day with the old emotions. I almost began writing at various junctures, but held off. I am glad now, as I shall be able to write about it dispassionately, and using far fewer words than I would have otherwise. This is economical for both of us.

*

Was rendered helpless by a rapid onset of racking sobs and hot-teared, spit-dripping weeping. The trigger was innocuous enough, and let me tell you: the sun had not so much as risen! It was five-thirty in the damn morning. The family dog assuaged the deluge as a good companion ought.

Drowned myself in musical nostalgia with my CD case. This led to an absolute spate of emotions in a long gamut of textures, colors, hues, and temperatures. I sighed audibly, and also laughed aloud several times. Eventually, listening to an album one of my exes recorded about six years ago drove me to a paroxysm of crying that dwarfed the last one. I ended up in a legitimate puddle on the floor, left knee drawn up to my runny nose, strengthless hands palms to heaven near my face, sleeves soaked, lap roped and strung with saliva and spattered with tears. The dog was nowhere to be found, this time. Poor animal, came the bleared thought, locked in here with a crazy person.

A little while after that I was watching the Disney Channel, and then Cartoon Network, laughing aloud and often, sometimes hard enough to double me over or cause me to lean against something and really shut my eyes quite tightly. I love cartoons, love animation. Caught some real good action today. Gravity Falls and Hotel Transylvania and The Amazing World of Gumball and Craig of the Creek. Each brought strong game.

Walking the dog for the final time, as the light became slanted and a brighter gold than any earthly metal or alloy, I found that smooth purity of thought that comes with being under a bright sky, breathing a clean cold breeze, all the clouds flaring bright peach and cream, deepening and burnishing against late afternoon's last powerful upthrust of bright blue before the pale wash of the first gloaming. A fresh, clean expanse of unmarked silver water, reflecting quiet. I just breathed, and thought, and then came home.

*

It's hard to stay alive, but you gotta do your best. Feel your way through it.

The sun is setting now. Tonight I shall watch a movie.

--JL