#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

#87

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! It's just possible that you might not have known that and missed it, or forgotten what day it was entirely, or some such trouble. Then it would be on my conscience. I am happy to remind you.

*

Christmas is a pretty good time of year. I have never experienced any of these nightmare Christmases so celebrated and aggrandized in the wider culture, nor have I ever felt the approach of yuletide as a groaning doom which my shoulders must bleed under once every year. I know a lot of people really do, and the omnipresence of Christmas is torture, a torture whose chronoterritory expands yearly, like a holly, jolly cancer eating the calendar.

Deplorable as the mass hypercommercialization of Christmas is, and despite the trauma, inseparable from the holiday which afflicts so many, Christmas is a net good. I have been known to speak in a voice progressively more thick with rage to the point of actual spit coming out of my mouth as I talk about it all; the hypocrisy, the greed, the avarice, the out-of-control acquisitiveness. The holiday as it is marketed and often expressed is a twisted nightmare inverse of its rooted intentions: spiritual and physical rebirth, honor and charity for the humble and the meek, breaking bread with loved ones, the rising of the sun and other stars--renewal, sustenance, the promise of ascension.

These are necessary things to act out, even if it's all cocked up practically beyond recognition, even if mostly it's awful. It's because it's taking a shot at it. Taking a shot at it is the only way to get it right even once. Feeling that feeling even once is worth it. Worth it all. Pays for itself and everything else.

The only way to get anything--anything-- out of life is to believe in something that's not real, and making it happen, making it true. Believing in real shit is comparatively easy, still complicated, but easier. The other thing's a little harder, but it makes the real more real and the unreal more real than that, which I believe is sublime. And as human beings, we need an agreed-upon time, a significant time, to remind ourselves of that, to remind each other.

It is possible to let go of what has been, to embrace what is, to become prepared and willing and able to love more than before, give more than before, rejoice more than before, more than ever in your life, in ways you barely dared imagine and some you couldn't have. 

Truly, it is something which will hold you through the year. Truly, it is not about the single day, but what that day can, through the laughably simple spell of belief and love, kindle in your spirit--the transfigurations that begin as tiny moments of love and grow great within us, sustaining and bolstering us, if we are lucky, till next Christmas.

Have a merry holiday, dear readers. Season's blessings upon all of you, and all those you love. May peace reign supreme over a healing world.


--JL