#513

So! The fuckin pope died. Made it to one last Easter after a dramatic wind-down, faced down one last daemond on that sacred day, and punched his ticket the morning after. As my friend Valentine quoth, "too plot-heavy."

Plot weight is essentially the main reason the Roman Catholic Church can claim it is the one true church though, and every time something like this happens, the mystic power only grows. It is banal at this point. 

It's a pope post! Don't read my blog. Factually Pointless is not kidding about its title.

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My big takeaway from Francis' papacy is that I didn't appreciate him enough when he was alive. Another terrible cliché. Yet indeed, behold: it is so. He was just a guy, only a dude, simply a man, as well as a pope. 

He was as much my pope, representative of me and who I am and what my values and hopes are, for this world and for the church, as I had any right to hope or expect in this or any lifetime to date, and I acted entitled to him. Acted as though his humility and self-effacement was a given at best, a hypocrisy or smokescreen at worst, and I doubted his commitment to the full scope of our shared humanity and his willingness and his ability to do the job as, in my arrogance, I believe it should be done. The fact that he was not superhuman, was not able to flex his muscles and with one swift gesture put asunder the entire hierarchy and establish peace and justice for all on this world, I interpreted as failure, and I turned my nose up at him.

But it's just a job, done by a guy. As one experienced in dealing with murderous, autocratic regimes and not getting his ass poisoned or shot, he navigated the treacherous whirlpools and breakers of being a pope. He made mistakes, but he was as much the pope he set out to be as the realities of this world allow for, when nothing would have been easier than to settle into a the most luxuriant possible retirement while momentum and the will of others took care of everything. 

Important to remember that a pope, if such is is his whim, can literally eat food all day long. If the pope wants to golf or look at fine art all damn day and let a couple of their favorite cardinals be pope, it is wholly within their power--moreso perhaps than any other worldly power, the pope has the power to let Jesus take the fuckin wheel. I mean, look at all the pedophiles. These guys don't get in because the church loves pedophiles. They get in because motherfuckers don't bother to make absolutely sure they don't. And it's not possible to get them all out at once because sometimes if you use knives instead of chemo you would cut a person into quivering chunks instead of curing their cancer. It seems like the same, but it is not the same. 

So. Much more could be said, but concentrating on the main takeaway. The whole time the best pope of my lifetime and maybe the most authentically Christian pope ever, like ever, like having popes is unchristian actually but here we are, getting away from but bringing it back to me being an asshole about it, and only now that he is gone do I see the miracle.

Typical. It really is just basic. This just goes to show that I probably would have started worshipping a golden farm animal in the few hours Moses was up the mountain. Sad!

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Now it seems to me like the big historical question is whether we will get one pope in the Vatican and one pope in Washington by executive order, Henry VIII-style, or the next pope is such an asshole we all just settle down and go about our other business, secure in the knowledge that the church serves power and is absolutely irrelevant otherwise, as is correct and proper and easy to digest.

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Happy Pope Remains Dead Day 2 or whatever it is. Rest In Peace Francis, you were alright and I love you and I'm sorry in my heart I was mean to you in thought and spoken word and in writing too. It is down to my childishness and hubris, and I will once again work on my humility and sublimation of ego in hopes of being a better person than the one who keeps thinking that the work ever ends or that the world has solutions instead of being God's perfect infinite story.

Do wish I'd written you that letter. Though it may be for the best that I did not.

Book of Job! Book of Job! PAX INFINITUM

--JL

#339

Been on my bike a lot lately. Haven't owned a bike in years and years, and it is crazy what the body and brain will remember with the wheels spinning beneath. Think I wrote a whole post on an old blog I used to write about why I don't wear a helmet (I still don't). Sometimes I wear a safety vest, or a nice eye-catching shirt or pair of shorts. So far this summer I've exclusively worn sandals to ride. For me, a great deal of the pleasure in riding a bicycle is the sense of lightness, of being unencumbered. Helmets, and to a much lesser extent, shoes, and consequently, several layers of safety and protection, hamper my optimal biking experience. In valuing optimized experiences and the feeling of riding the edge of risk if it means the kind of living dangerously I value just as much, riding as I please, how I please, to accomplish what I please achieves the kind of massive endorphin multiplier I rarely bother to deny myself. A measure of heedlessness in every life; it is that too-humanness of ours that makes us just human enough, still, despite everything that seeks to deprive us of such happy dignities, such simple fuck yous at death and the people who would ruin life out of fear of death. 

Bike thinking is often tied to ideas and traumas about freedom and safety, in my experience; in the public sphere, it extends to rights and duties and obligations. Judging by the level of discourse that kicks off when people talk about bicycles whether on internet or meatspace, the space it operates is a powerful emotional and intellectual flashpoint, a hub that can take you down all matter of discursive side arguments and caveats. The conceptual load is wide and tall and by no means neatly packaged. Hard to feel unencumbered with so much baggage, eh, boys?

Anyway, I have a bike again because my mom, purely out of the industry she enjoys engaging in and the great kindness and elevated generosity of spirit she expresses in deed and craft, fixed up my dad's old destroyed one (and my brother's old destroyed one in tandem) like new. It has been a massive pleasure to ride it as much as possible, what with the wildfire pollution and other conditions of our home ellipsoid's agitated systems keeping me at bay. Locally, it has been a very beautiful summer, despite all, and I have ridden a huge amount. 

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Speaking of baggage, been spending lots of time over at the parent's abode, hanging out and helping with the maintenance of canines. It's been a very good time, though not without it's "hey ok it's time for me to go ok love you bye" moments. 

Family. So wonderful, so essential to the core sense of selfhood, of belonging, of coming from a discrete collective bound by its shared identity. How perfectly designed to drive people a special kind of crazy, and make each other crazy also. I love each member of my family completely and unreservedly, and furthermore, I emphatically respect each one in their own way. The emotional vulnerabilities this creates can be sizable, and lead to a lot of pain and misunderstanding. So it goes.  

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Another thing I been thinking about is how bad I am at taking care of stuff, like land "property" and housing, largely becaue I love seeing things break and warp and degrade and generally take on a radically altered aspect over time. It's a real effort to rob myself of the pleasure of watching, say, leaves decompose, or the boards of a deck peel up one by one, in different places, each just a little at the tip. The way rust blooms and spreads on once-lustrous metal. A splintered handle, a crooked structure, ivy o'ergrown over all. I love the aesthetic of a broken thing, ancient wood moldering, mosses and lichens, insects calmly moving across surfaces they own in a much more concrete and tangible way than people ever did. 

Love a broken fence. Love a derelict building. Love the mushrooms and the wet, livesome aura 'round a wet, decomposing log. And damn, a vacant lot that's been a vacant lot for a long time, asphalt practically bleached, huge green furrows of weeds like completely insane caterpillars all scribbled across the old cracks, chain-link rusting and balooning like a slow-motion cloth rotting in a ponderous, ominous wind. 

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Feeling very inspired lately. A great work, a great frenzy of creation and study lies close by my horizon. Gotta save this juice for the work. Oh! Finished David McCullough's John Adams, which I loved and paired very well with the U.S. history classes I took this summer. Nearing the end of Ingrid D. Rowland's Giordano Bruno, which has been a steadily deepening note of bliss. Also I rewatched The Young Pope and watched The New Pope and they comprise a work of art that seemed tailor-made to suit me just fine. I have a lot of ideas about popes and paping about with the lads. This tickled a lot of my pope spots.

Godspeed, dear reader. I shall andeavor to soothe you with a post here and there, but what will be, will be what has to suffice. 

--JL