#485

Ah! It appears, lost in contemplation and the hustle and bustle of the modern day, I missed my window to hit five hundred posts in 2024. So it goes. Perhaps it is just and meet that 2025 gets the rights to five hundred. Fives go with fives, mathematically. Fives like a five. 

Been playing tons of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII; Reunion or however it is most proper to arrange that title. It's a real good story, real fun game. Lots of game in the crannies of it, where Final Fantasy does best, at least to me. I am such a sucker for all of their systems, though. I go hog wild, screw around in menus for hours and hours, tweaking and rebuilding everything they let me tinker with. 

*

The difficulty of finding the place between taking pride in your work and working too hard--to stay steady, excelling whenever possible, without burning out or making a tool of yourself--has always borne down hard on me in my professional life and other endeavors. All endeavors, I guess, except school, the one area in which I am gifted in the opposite sense entirely. There, I can see so clearly that pride is a false virtue, everything in front of my eyes and at my hands is total fucking bullshit, and the obvious and correct thing to do is to coast on my personal qualities in the service of doing the absolute bare minimum while devoting all my proper energies to my own ends.

Even here, athletics and music proved a weak spot. I don't especially seek out intrinsically social endeavors, but when present, I abhor not pulling my weight, and dread underperforming or quitting out. However resentfully, I am wired to put in an honest effort, because I'm not made to say that kind of fuck you to people who are engaged in something they care deeply about. I can even make myself care. Lo and behold, sometimes this praxis finds me actually caring deeply. It can become a problem, as eventually, I can care more than is strictly required or even wise. I can care so much that I quit, which, y'know. I could have saved myself a lot of time, there. But again, I am wired to earn quitting in many cases. Not all! Thank the lord. But enough.

Yet what price personal growth? 

It could probably be worked out, actually, and winced at. 

*

Real life is some fucked up shit, man. Never stops coming at you. People get covid, motherfuckers have a plan to denaturalize and deport you, other motherfuckers want to make every house in America a lethal-force compound, so like, maybe that's ok? 

Guess I'll just keep going to work and like, doing laundry and playing games and shit. Hang out with my cats. Dunno what the fuck else I'm supposed to do. 

--JL

#386

It is such a mistake to live within industrialized society. What a trap. What a miserable cage we have built for ourselves, our masters delighting in rattling it and poking at our vulnerable flanks through the bars.

For the safety of the cage, we put up with it, and forsake our precious lives.

What fools. What tools. What anemic caricatures of ourselves.

*

We even fight wars for the privilege of this sterilized hell. We allow wars to be fought on our behalf.

We call it good. An even trade.

*

These so-called telephones, addictive portals into a nether realm of nightmarish engineering. 

This chimaeric hydra, capital. 

Infinite chatter. Hydrochloric acid on the limestone of our minds. Chlorine bleach in the soil of our souls.

We call it wealth, and leisure, and efficiency, and productivity, and connectedness, and the duty to be well-informed, of the immense importance of our opinionate display and the general good health of our intellectual array, by which we mechanically sort ourselves into absurd tribes and ridiculous hierarchies.

We call it common sense. We call it righteousness.

*

Someday they will tell each other that as Rome fell, so did her heir and the global empire she forged, fifteen hundred years later or thereabouts, after they have emerged from the consequential period of chaos and forgetting. They will tell each other a fragmentary but satisfying version of how and why it happened. It will have no bearing on their own inevitable disintegrations.

Like cancer, the same accretions always coalesce in the body of a society, a variety of corruptions of form attacking a variety of tissues and bones. It kills them, but never immediately. Slow, fast, painful, bearable. Bodies run down. It's what they do.

We never admit this, though. We say they should not. We say we may yet unlock the secrets of immortality. We say that our city of man will last through eternity.

*

If I am a doctor, I must be a poor one. Enjoy my diagnosis, for I know no cure.

--JL

#367

A kind of madness I am well-used by has taken its familiar possessions. My mind is a ransacked fortress, the only feelings of safety found in raising Pocket Monsters with the only focus available to me that is quiet and warm, and that not unfailingly. 

Well, what are you gonna do? We are the piece of leather that we are, and have we have been shaped and marked indelibly by all that touches our surface and affects our texture, the irrestistible forces and the hard corners and edges of things. 

So it goes. The worst part is I'm not built to properly care about the problems, I am built to flow around them like water whenever possible and concentrate only on what I care about. My childhood shaped me for quiet acceptance of what befalls me, for the world is a beast not to be controlled, events are driven by the devil, and the only true release is in the infinite immanence of God, in radiance beyond the universe, in that which is that it is. My sense of victory comes with letting all pass through me and over me like a gravitational wave, leaving only the remnant on the very curve of spacetime, and a prayer that this remnant will be more free than the preceding form, less tied to the crude materials of this world. 

Yes, that part of me that longs to be destroyed. To be crucified, then ascend.

*

As anyone can see, deeply Catholic grandparents and a healthy chunk of early education administered by Jesuits really did a fucking number on this poor sinner. But how can I blame them, or anyone, for anything? The thing cannot be done in good conscience or honest thought. The thing cannot be done at all.

*

In the end, it's just us, alive, right this second, doing what we're doing. The past is dead. The next second could be anything. We have what we have in front of us, right now, and nothing else. Gettng the body to the next thing. 

There is no time or space for heavy shit in this life, for blame, or fear, or resentment, or anything except what is light to carry, what is uplifting, for hope and curiosity.

Love is heavy, but it's heavy as it needs to be to make you strong enough to fly.

--JL

#262

Jesus Christ. Look, I'm fucking depressed, I'm buying a house, my job has provided me with enough to deal with given a surplus three of me--between the four of us, I would have no problems except for the other two problems I just mentioned plus all the other problems. 

But problems are not the issue, dear reader! As you know, I strive to be a man of solutions.

*

Reason I ain't been posting is really that I have been working at a feverish pace (well, as feverish as that paragraph one bullshit has allowed for) on the first print collection of the blog. As you know, I am all about value for money, so I have been giving the process of annotating the hallowed words that have come before in this sacred text field all my available energies. It is hoped that the results will please.

Okay. I am also playing a lot of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Thank you. Goodbye.

--JL