#488

It's funny--there's no real need to report this fact--but today's Pnnies Arkhad comical strip has a huge amount in common with the very first joke ever told in the strip, and it was still pretty funny and like, fine. An arguably objective comedic and artistic improvement over a linear span of time, and it didn't make me feel like I was choking down abject hackery! Think this shows Jim Davis did a high-acumen assessment of the medium when he said it's okay to literally repeat your own jokes after ten years.

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Guys, I should probably mention that typing has become weird and much more typo-driven since one of the cats ripped my "E" key right off the board once when I was unwisely prising her off her chosen sleep surface. Well, I wanted to fucking write, dammit, was indeed in the middle of writing and she was making deep and penetrating editorial changes--but one ought to know better than to mess with the household god that way. The slapdown was swift, and of course, ironic.

Anyway typing isn't as fun now. Hasn't been. Need a new computer, or maybe a professional tablet. Something with an "E" key. Lived this stunted life for months now. Think this incident happened in maybe October.

Something about writing in English, Singaporean bots that comprise my new readership: the letter "E" is vital to the easy use of the language. One would not be wrong in saying it is the most important and common vowel; indeed, it is provable fact.

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Jim Davis is the Garfield guy, in case that information has faded in the dead orange glow and sheer scale of that feline monument.

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Non-seq! Nintendo, you are never going to get the respect you deserve if your wonderful and constantly-growing music app doesn't work as well as other music apps. I can blame Apple for this if you need me to, though. If that were justified, I would not be the least little bit surprised.

Of course, Apple's music player is the one I like--and it could also work better on their own hardware. Maybe it's kind of a hard job?

All right, guys. Maybe I'll cut you some slack. Though if anybody that works at you ever tells me it was super easy and it was all just boardroom shenanigans harming the product and adversely affecting the consumer and their investment, I still won't be surprised. 

Guess the main issue at hand isn't whether I'm surprised. Maybe we should concentrate on everything I pay money for working perfectly every time I go to use it or all my money back for the month. How's that for a fucking suggestion box slip, you silent monoliths?

I'm looking at all of you. Maybe glaring is a better word. Glaring up, up, from the garbage-strewn canyons where my kind make their trammeled living, up to the great carven faces, the ozymandic golden idols whose slow, titanic motions reverberate through the wearied materials of this shambling, already-dead world and wrack it ever more spasmodically as it crumbles into the sands of time.

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So, what's up with everybody? Seen any good movies lately?

Perhaps that's entirely smarmy now that I work at a movie theater. That's what I'm up to later, by the way. Think there's some kind of event to host.

Peace the FUCK OUT

--JL

#458

When it comes to play, the only analog game that really thrills and grips me is chess. Even pinball, which is basically a video game, merely diverts me for the most part. Besides that, by and large, I find manipulating board games, pencil-and-paper games, dice and card games and the like to be more of a hassle than anything else. I dunno. I just don't feel the spark, the galvanized, intent feeling that is so free and instantaneous when I've got a controller in my hands. 

Used to play around with kind of a specially carved wooden chess set and board that my dad had as a children's toy--the pieces were quite big and blocky--and the old man started teaching me around the same time I was learning to read, so like, two and three years old. Chess is one of the first and only tabletop games I ever learned, and I only started getting really serious about learning it when, predictably, my dad found the right book for me to learn out of, allowing me to make studying it and defeating (killing) him a project I could work on in my own time and through my own imagination.

Though I technically learned to play Super Mario World first, and video games are therefore my first love, as I beame older and more capable, chess took over my ideation and sense of the world in a way that few video games--indeed, few worldly phenomena or cultural apertures--ever have. 

That's the crazy thing about chess. So powerful that it is all games, all puzzles, all contests. It is even all stories. 

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Around when I started becoming proficient at chess, so, seven and eight years old, my dad had me start reading Plato and Aristotle, and a text intended to enrich and supplement called Ética Para Amador, by Fernando Savater, a Spanish philosopher who wished to create a philosophical primer for his collegues to use with new students, an intimate instruction in ethics for his son, and a modernized, slimmed-down work in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, also a text that has been of great importance in my life. Though I did not complete any of these books cover to cover until I was about ten, they put quite a lot of grist into my little mill right away, more than enough to grind on.

Why bring this up? You know me, dear reader--simply reflecting on my childhood. One of my passions, eh? Plus my chess set is near me.

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Also I blame my inability to perform in the modern academy and indeed modernity itself on this early instruction. Once again, like Oskar Matzerath, I had everything I needed early on, and it stunted me profoundly.

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Guess I'll probably read The Tin Drum again sometime soon. It was a really big deal to me when I read it as a teenager. One of the deeper oceans of those years, like East of Eden and One Hundred Years of Solitude and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 

One crazy thing I did book-wise was taking my second-ever recreational Adderalls and staying up all night to read  Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways from cover to cover. Doing this changed my brain permanently. That would have been in college, at age nineteen, which feels at this advanced age like relating some Shakespearean apocrypha; like nineteen-year-old William Blake was in the next dorm room lying on his bed, staring at his ceiling in the dark and weeping silently. 

Another crazy book thing I did was read The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales and The Hobbit every single year. Now its's every few years. Funny how the landscapes change. 

A final crazy book thing is how if I'm having anxiety I might just read like eight thousand pages of George R.R. Martin's words. It is a  warm comfort to me, you see, how very many of them there are. The pleasure of their arrangements and their construction is soothing on top of that, and of course, we circle back to chess--very comforting, the chess of his writing, his books, his mind.

With soothing anxiety, a different remedy is listening to Patton Oswalt routines. Something about that voice of his--he just makes me feel calmer, even when he's agitated.

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Good bet a lot of this post is repeating myself. Well, one is bound to, on occasion. That, too, can be comforting to an anxious turn of mind.

--JL

#265

Wonder if I ought to recover the twitter account I attached to the running of this blog, way back when. 'Twas only good for a couple hits a day, and twitter literally breaks my fragile mind, but it is ahead on page one google search of my actual author page on amazon, where my content lives. The top result on google relating to me and my activities is post number twenty-seven, where I mentioned Google+ and Blogger in the same sentence. Soon this post, too, will enjoy unwarranted spotlight action. Ha! 

Man, visiting twitter in order to inform this decision was like briskly rubbing a sheaf of sandpaper across my bare abdomen. One clean stripe of burning, unnecessary pain. I have said my piece about twitter in this text field, don't need to go over it all again. Some would say it would be hypocritical of me to even consider using twitter to garner readership or communicate ideas, given what I have said about their foul dark magics in the past.

In fact, I feel quite unfettered. Twitter's brand of petty evil is exactly the sort whose combat momentum is best thwarted by the gymnastic of hypocrisy. Of course, this gives one pause to wonder if that is not yet another level in the basement of their cruel and barbarous factory. Naturally, one does need a twitter account in order to criticize twitter on home turf, in order to win the hearts and minds of those afflicted by twitter most directly. 

The account does serve as the blog's alt text, which makes it an archive, and since it does already exist, and since I--wait. No. As information addict, as twitter addict, as completionist--all these truths about myself in their competition and complicity cried out together just now, and the answer must, can only be, no. That way lies madness and personal demise.

Last time I talked about twitter was that long, long Sinfest post, a post basically also about twitter, and way too much other shit. Drove across every goddamn lane I could in that post. Not sorry, but it was indeed something of an act of ridiculous lunacy, and the most exaggerated overtures in that direction were fueled by looking at twitter for all of five fucking minutes. Brain poison. The answer is no. Been sounding like an asshole up in here. No.

If only I could close that account. Such a thing, in this day and age, is impossible; moreso because I have forgotten and lost the relevant access data. So hey, this whole thing has been a total wash.

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Read the title of the blog one more time, motherfuckers, and have a happy turkeygobble day; good day for shoving that turkeybird up in your gobblehole

--JL

*originally was going to write a post about something else entirely. I've forgotten what that was now twice as I loaded up the text field. Hmm. Well, it's nice to be here again. Always happy to be with you for even one moment more, dear reader. 

Oh! I was going to discuss how sometimes I feel as though the way the blog repeats itself and revisits certain topics again and again and again is in one way something of a failure, speaking in terms of pure creative fertility. Here in this text field I have been extremely disparaging of the Achewood man, the man of Achewood, for basically quitting the strip because he didn't want to plow any furrowed ground, and of course I am disparaging of him because I am of a similar bent in my nature. Aware that there is nothing new to be written here under the sun, nevertheless the compulsion is to offer freshness, dammit. Cooking requires base parts which, at the time you do something to them with the intent of transforming them into an ingredient, must be fresh. It doesn't matter if we are talking about a tomato, an idea, or the idea of a tomato; even the idea a tomato might have. What matters is the freshness of the ingredient, and of course what technique you apply to deliver the payload, which is flavor. Flavor is everything, everything, fucking everything.

Musically speaking: there are only eight notes. With eight notes we must make infinite multiverses of permutations. Repetition is integral to permutation, and without pattern, there is only meaninglessness, which is only interesting and valid in the context of that which has meaning. So, in the end, I have to say to myself whatever, I don't care if I repeat myself for seventy years. Who cares about playing the same song every day. Everything is in how the chord is played in this newly minted and never-before lived moment, the little improvisations, the age of the strings, the little variations in the pressure of the fingers and the stroke and tension of the arm. Do birds worry about repeating themselves? They sing every morning and maybe it's identical and maybe it's completely different each time, but at the day it's fuckin birdsong, which is what it is, and what more do you want.

What you do can be the same, but the way that you do it, who you are and what you bring, that's different every day like it or not, and being as aware of that and the necessity of that, the structure of arcs and loops and wheels and parallels that make up our lives except when it all comes crashing down around us, or when we leap off the rails and throw ourselves into formlessness that will either develop fresh structure out of itself or be our demise--that is what makes existing within the structure of repetitious fractals bearable and even majestic. 

Yeah, whatever. Maybe I've said all this before, in so many ways. I think of posts I've written where I discuss helical structures diametrically opposing one another yet both essential to the superstructure of reality, of posts I wrote about the world being a forest, the universe as forest, of reality composed of infinite simultaneously disrupted and flawlessly perfect spheres, simultaneously homogenous in their perfection and representing spectra ranged between two poles. Or it's all the layers and angles of bismuth, levels and levels and spars and spars, regular and varied. Or everything being part of an infinite and infinitely expanding and collapsing crystal structure, irrationally perfect and not even real, but the only reality there is.

Again, whatever. So fucking what? Who gives a shit how long a scene is, to paraphrase David Lynch? I get off on writing that kind of shit. I get off on writing. As long as that's true, I'll churn out whatever weird crap I want and sell it by the pound.

All this by way of saying, apologies to the Achewood man for being a jerk to him (indirectly) about his choices. They are, of course, his own to make, as all our choices do be also.