#452

Man, I was doing good with bank accounts there for a couple of years. Well, not good, but not scraping my belly every month to clear the rail, which is where I am now and feeling quite familiar. Kind of agonizing, but experienced and manageable. Just gotta skate on one foot on the edge of a cliff like one does. No problem.

No, I don't really like it, but I don't wish I was different. Well, a little, in a wistful way. But I am who and what I am, and the test of life is saying yes to that every day and living it according to one's inhabited reality and the interpretations and principles derived thereby. Every life and manner of being has its unavoidable conditions and subsequent drawbacks and complications. So it goes.

*

Office is almost set up again. The progress has not been as fast as I would have liked, but it's drawing to its temporary conclusions before enduring a period of hard use, as is its purpose.

*

Dude, the world is so fucking crazy right now. How the fuck indeed am I supposed to care about my stupid little numbers and the angry little clock that yells at you for no good reason, waving its sheaf of stupid little papers?

--JL

#428

Reflecting on the nature of bonds, their function in life and the spooling out of events in the universe. 

Had to type that with a blind cat hanging from my pants by her front claws. The nature of our bond and the nature of my bond with the keyboard in those moments was in tension. All I could do was move my legs and hips as much as possible for her while continuing to type. Only when the sentence was complete could I unhook her and give her some pets.

Atomic bonds. Chemical bonds. Blood binds. Oaths sworn.

Trust.

Yes, everything is built on bonds. Everything depends on them.

*

Thinking back all of a sudden to when I was a kid and my dad would pose me engineering and physics questions my teachers wouldn't be pestering me with for years yet. They were usually practical and to do with something right in front of us. I was thinking of one regarding water tanks and cubic pressure. The inquiry was never about actual numbers, which is useful for getting my cooperation. I'm not busting out the slide rule on a basic day. It was about visualizing and applying one's mind to the problem; about cultivating both x-ray vision and precognition. 

If your vision is clear and penetrating and your thoughts lucid, your estimations will not lead you too far afield. What are the factors? Variables? Limits? Terms? Conditions? Sets? You look at a giant pile of dirt and think about what it would take to move it. You look at a giant pressurized tank at a refinery and guess about the stress capacities. 

What are the chronometric concerns? Why does it work? Which part would you have had to build first? Generally any one question would lead to several corollary or supporting questions, perhaps leading to the actual question that was the eventual point of the first question.

Guess this is why anytime anyone anywhere asks a question within earshot, my first instinct is to rush and provide my idea of a good and useful answer. A function of my programming. Interesting.

I think I would make a splendid analysis droid. I don't even have to care about this stuff or the answers in order to wonder and generate estimates, and indeed I do not. Just a brain reflex. I rarely give it my full attention.

*

Ok man. I'm reading a book about clocks and wanna get back to that. More painting! Infinite painting! I'll be painting and sanding and painting again into July, maybe. Hilarious.

Peace!

--JL

#427

Ah, the final day of April, and what an April it has been. Balm upon an agonized and fevered brow.

Looking back at the early April posts and even moreso the pre-April posts, it is like seeing shadows gathering around a dying beast in a thicket as the evening purples into twilight. I am looking upon something that is in its death throes, that can feel the blood welling up its throat from a rupture deep inside, and I feel empathy, but no true communion. Darkness gathers there, but I am under the sun.

That's the crazy part: already it is as looking upon some one not-I, some-thing other and benighted which claws at the earth in fear and agony. That person was me, and I am that person--but drawn on the diorama of a far-flung past, in the midst of a horrible but now-complete transmogrification. Relating differently, wildly differently, doing different things and living a completely different life.

And we do not remember fear or pain as clearly as we should. Our over-clever mechanisms protect us too well, and we forget what it is to truly suffer. Thus, all the time and depravity we spend and allow for in the pursuit of our most barbed and poisoned pleasures. All the ways we won't protect ourselves from our abscesses and chasms.

A blee blah bloo! Whoop-de-doo. I feel better, yet find a way to feel bad and doubtful about that. Excellent. High-level stuff, here. 

*

We must be as we are. Honest, if we can manage it. Doing our best. 

And yes, if we are honest, we must say: sometimes you have to suffer terribly in order to become the next you.

--JL

#420

Hoho! Wow! Post four hundred and twenty! Get the fuck out, that's so fuckin stupid.

Weed! It's what's for breakfast! It's what's for before breakfast.

*

Gah, how this world spins! And it keeps on spinnin'. Not to mention the movement itself--so fast! So fuckin' fast! 

You've never known what it is to be travelling thirty kilometers a fuckin second. Except you always are.

*

I'd like to find a card table today. If I could find two, that would be a dream come true. The third part of this dream is that both tables cost no money. Can you simply imagine? How about this: if I go out today and find what I'm looking for, the reader must reconsider their position of the existence of the unseen (faeries, yokai, etc.) if that position has not been reconsidered in some time. I expect research and open-minded meditation.

Of course I will too! I'm doing it right now. I take an open mind fuckin serious. 

That usually means I've got like twenty paradoxes shoved up my ass, rendering me immobile. But it's better than being too damn sure of myself, amirite boys? I know that much.

*

So what? What about it? 

All anyone can do is take in the data available to our singular perspectives and build our individual worlds with it. The world we build is related to the world as it is, but it is not that world. No one holds that world in their mind. They can't. It isn't like that. No one can understand the world, let alone the universe. No matter what we discover about it, how much of it we reveal and represent and are, we cannot understand even our own neighborhoods completely. We do not even know our friends, our families, or ourselves.

We are worlds too complex, vast, and unmappable for that. Plus, it is infinite, all the way out and all the way in, all the way up and all the way down, all the way around in every way that can be found. Infinite you, infinite me, infinite infinities embedded in infinity.

Hey, man. All we can do is the best with what we got. Can't blame anyone. That's what it means to be equally guilty before one another and before all that is, and that is the key to the letting go: to freedom. 

*

PEACE

--JL

#394

Positivity! 

Ugh.

So part of the big issue is that I find mindfulness shit, positivity, good-vibe talk a raft of utter nonsense. The mind rebels. That's just a natural reaction, like a hedgehog curling up into a ball. 

Happiness is real. Joy, jouissance, contentment--though transitory, real. The world is certainly full of vibrations, some pleasant, some painful. That other stuff up there makes no sense at all, and even the stuff in the first part of the paragraph is often mishandled, misrepresented, and used as a bludgeon.

But who cares! You gotta try to look on the bright side, because that's where the light is, etc. 

*

Aku. Soku. Zan.

Despair is an evil. That, if nothing else about evil, is true.

But in having overcome it, there is the greatest triumph in life, which would not be without that which had to be vanquished. For hope is meaningless without despair. Faith is nothing without the darkness that only faith can lighten.

*

We must seek relief in these paradoxes, rather than allow ourselves to be tormented.

As they say, the only way out is through.

*

Another part ofthe big issue is that I can see where my relating to the world went wrong, and how the dysfunction is operating on my spirit to make me ill, and the way my mind contributes to and exacerbates the problem, because it is without guidance, and there is nothing more dangerous to itself than a machine without guidance or whose guidance is compromised. 

In short, I am struggling to be in the world as-it-is, strangled as I am by my attachments to the world as I want it. A beautiful but nonexistent phantasy, which my current transfixation in an I-I mode of relating with the world serves only to pain and paralyze me, preventing me from relating with the You of the infinite, the I-You relation which is being-in-the-world and being-with-the-world.

That Martin Buber has some useful thoughts, boy, I tell ya. I'm out here trying, Marty.

*

Why not, as I sometimes say. Since I bring it up, these things I'm reading, perhaps we are long overdue for a list of books I have read. It's been a long time, but I have played a HUGE amount of videos game instead of reading consistently, so perhaps it won't be all that onerous.

You will notice an increase in Star Wars books. Watching Star Wars, all the Star Wars, every bit of Star Wars I can look at, has also taken up a lot of time. The books are relatively recently read; I've been relying on the electronic hearth quite a lot, as I say.

Anyhow. As typical, presented in no particular order.

Star Wars: [Alphabet Squadron, by Alex Freed; Thrawn Ascendancy (Book I: Chaos Rising), by Timothy Zahn; Phasma, by Delilah S. Dawson; new] [Young Jedi Knights: Heirs of the Force; Shadow Academy; The Lost Ones; Lightsabers; Jedi Under Siege; by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta (reread)]

Peanuts: As You Like it, Charlie Brown; Peanuts 2000; Play Ball, Snoopy!; What Makes You Think You're Happy?; The Wonderful World of Peanuts; Peanuts Treasury; Peanuts I: 1952-1955; by Charles M. Schulz (reread)

Calvin and Hobbes: Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons; Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat; There's Treasure Everywhere; The Complete Calvin and Hobbes Book Two; by Bill Watterson (reread)

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

I and Thou, by Martin Buber, translated and introduced by Walter Kaufmann

Shadow Life, written by Hiromi Goto, drawn by Ann Xiu

*

It can be assumed that if I mentioned a book I've forgotten to list here, I finished it. Also I read a bunch of 19th century short stories by various peeps I don't feel the need to list out. Also large chunks out of various textbooks.

*

Ok. Better. We're struggling towards it. We're approaching some kind of thing here. We are alive, and we are crawling towards Jerusalem.

--JL