#409

Been raining for a couple days now. At first it was heavy enough to up the waters a bit, show some deep puddle on most street, but that subsided. The grass and top bit of the topsoil are still saturated to inunadation point but it doesn't seem to be rising beyond that or spilling or anything that I can see yet.

Sometimes we get some pretty fun and ultimately mostly harmless flooding. Property damage might happen but never in my memory have we ever had to, in this county, huddle on rooftops or prove that our ingenuity is the equal of our ancestor's through the jury-rigging of imromptu watercraft solutions. The backyard at one of the old places flooded pretty good, you could float an empty kiddy pool around.

It can sure fuck up traffic sometimes, though. Once I had to drive my company's shitty little Ford Fiesta (which to my taste drove like Ford wanted to make a car inspired by a potato chip made out of plastic. I drove with that car struggling in my wake, if you know what I mean) around the edge of a puddle so massive I was still displacing about a foot of water in the center and the water had to be six inches up the door on my side. The electronics in that car were literally never the same again.

*

Drinking at a bar in thirty years you might meet a fifty-five year old man, scrungid, rufulous, reeking and maladroit, who will fix on you and slur something along the lines of 

"I fuggin help'd mikka fuggin chatbot so gud 't shruptid th'CONmee! FAGGOT!"

I won't be in that bar, God willing and the devil be kept back. I guess that's my main thought. Hopefully I won't be floating in a tube, getting my oxygen and electrolytes and proteins and acids through a saline suspension in my lungs and bloodstream, dreaming an infinite dream. Haha, who says I'm not? But, Matrix or no Matrix, it's important not to drink.

That fucking movie will never stop memeing in my face and at my nutsack. I need to constantly work on a more mature acceptance of that. How many people have been tricked into taking a blue or red pill which both contained the same dangerous cocktail of chemicals before having their lives ruined? Who knows. It's a grim possibility. 

Anyhow, sympathy is my main feeling, I guess. We're all just doing the best we can with the best information available that we are able to stumble upon and interpret. We are all therefore guilty before one another. It's simple to say and hear but difficult to understand and remember that understanding and take it into every moment of life. 

It happens to be true: reading The Brothers Karamazov just the once will not do. Pardons if I've said it before, but that is a worthy meme, worth an occasional repeat. 

*

We must have mercy. If we cannot have mercy, we must try to at least go towards mercy. 

Matrix or no Matrix, you know? 

--JL

#183

Rained all last night after threatening all day, all day, filling the air with an unsettling promise. When the rain came the air itself exhaled, and set down some heavy burden, and the whole world breathed easier. 

This morning a huge chunk of a limb fell off the big willow, one of the bare dead extensions of what remains to it of its former crown, riddled with worms and grubs and the ravages of the hunting and nesting of birds. I heard it crack and the noise of the air and lash of the leaves as it fell and I heard the great thud of its landing. When I went to look, there it was, looking for all the world like someone had hauled a partially rotted log out of the woods and laid it to rest in the mown grass by the willow.

*

Watched some Friends the other day with Moe and was surprised by how fun it was to watch those folks interact and do their lines and shenaniganery. I watched Friends as a kid, fresh as it aired, and these people and the way they mess around with each other and snark it up had a greater impact on how I got by as a teenager than I had perceived. Friends isn't exactly The Wire, y'know, no shit, but it's not really as bad as people act. I mean, parts of it are pretty cringe, but there's tons of fun material there.

"What'd I just say?"

Classic.

*

Another early day at work, folks. Much as I would love to continue to entertain us both, duty summons me with its implacable knell.


--JL

#173

Real quick before I go on with Album Week 2019, I'll letcha in on how reading has been happening. You like that, you like when I talk about the books I'm reading. 

Well, I like writing about them, baby. What we have here is a case of synergy. Let's hunker down.

*

Just about halfway through the pages of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, which is to say I have read the original translator's introduction and the introduction by the commentator which took ninety-seven pages and am about fifty-two pages into the text itself. I have only about fifty-eight more before I am done with the book and then there are the roughly hundred and seventeen pages of commentary. I'm not sure if I'm going to read them this time around. I liked his intro enough to do it, but come on. Not a big "coulda been done with this already" guy, but the math on this is damning and Kierkegaard writes accessibly by my lights, really seems like excess.

Due to misunderstanding about a copy of Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore, I read it in its entirety so I could return it to a coworker only to be told that it was mine to keep. It was a pretty dang good book--and as an added bonus, my typing those words marks the end of a whole teenaged-to-adult life with a prejudice against Christopher Moore on the basis that his books look stupid and annoying and he seems stupid and annoying and the very first page of one made me hate him when I was a teen so I have never read one of his books till now, to show my coworker that I have an open mind. The book as an aesthetic object still drives me crazy, it looks bad and stupid and they made it ugly and hateful and painful to the eye and mind, but he is a real, real smart dude and a skilled and funny writer and the book's content skips and kills and frolics like its titular creature/totem (never does trick you, though). Great stuff, I'll read more in future.

Read Distance Mover and Don't Come In Here by Patrick Kyle. That's everything I could get my hands on, everything collected and bound I'm pretty sure (I mentioned reading Roaming Foliage I'm pretty sure, I know I mentioned Black Mass and it all started with Everywhere Disappeared) and it checks out: genius-level ouvre, can't wait for Death of the Master to drop, raise no monuments to the living and all but Patrick Kyle is a living king.

Also read the first couple pages of Death World by Harry Harrison. I'll get back to that soon.

*

Okay! Album Week. Album Week 2019. What fucking day is it? How many of these have I done? 

*

It is raining outside. A beautiful rain. Silver light, thick heavy drops coming down even. Further south this business was a fucking shitstorm, floods everywhere, railroad tracks high in the air, the gravel beds they rested upon washed away completely in deluges that tore people's homes from where they sat and washed them away down the street, windblown chunks of roof coming to rest in what branches remain to the trees. 

Few were injured. Truly incredible. Yesterday there were tornadoes all over the place; not many people hurt then either. Miracles happen, they demonstrate video evidence of miracles, and we just keep on going like nothing is real. That's part of the overarching miracle, I suppose.

*

My dad's recording of Handel's Water Music got lost somewhere I think, so I can't determine the details of my formative recording of the composition. I can't even think of it right now, in my mind. I forget how it goes. Sad.

*

Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is a great song. I've never heard the studio recording, only outtakes. That's how I like Dylan, by and large. Some of his studio stuff is okay, but I like The Gaslight Tapes and stuff from No Direction Home and old live recordings and stuff like that. I read Chronicle vol. I, appropos of nothing. Talk about a book that changed nothing in my life. Unlike "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall". Unlike "Moonshiner".  So forth.

*

Rain's slacking off already, after an hour. I stared out at it and watched it fill floodplains over the asphalt and burst crystal fireworks on the corner of the roof the garage building.

You know what's a good album? Having everything be totally quiet and listening to the rain fall on the world.  

*

Precipitation's done for now. Got the window open to let in the breeze.

--JL