#362

Fuck, good people. Fuck me up. Saturday morning went and got the freshest corona jab plus my first flu shot since I was a teenager, and I was laid low, low out there. The weekend was a corporeally drained, cerebrally fogged mess. I would think I was ok mentally, and then I would attempt to communicate through any medium with another person, and that illusion would shatter. Got my first hard-on since the day of the jab today, though, which is good despite an admittedly listless performance. Corona jabs will eventually render me entirely impotent, I expect. So it goes. Final analysis, I'll take breathing over erections. I did the flu because my aging body has been seeming to reccommend it, particularly after Thanksgiving, as I mentioned. 

Then Monday the current and hopefully final semester of my effing life kicked off, which bore with it tasks, which took up all of my juice in my weakened condition.

Doing it all over the computer this time, the distance learning I was so unwilling to interface with a year ago. But that was a different man entirely, eh, dear reader?

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For the sake of my mental health and the health of my burgeoning novel, I will make it a point to post regularly. The first daily blast of energy must go towards written assignments, then my own projects till the well runs good and dry, and then reading, of which I have enough to keep me happy. I shall try to be as assiduous and efficient as possible with my academic obligations, so that I might devote as many hours and as much power to what is most vital.

Stated. Intended aloud. Nine blessings. Amen.

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Though my financial straits are approaching uncomfotable margins, I am experiencing a dread paralysis when it comes to finding employment. The plain fact is I'm not on a big tip of leaving my house much for business reasons. What I want is to work exactly where I'm standing, doing exactly what I'm doing. 

Another intention: I am going to borrow money if I have to, but this is the year I take getting published seriously. I think I've offset a sufficient amount of the guilt I feel about having money with the amount of shit I've had to do in the service industry and beyond in order to barely get the fuck by and never have been able to save a cent. I might as well be in the same condition, but just scrambling to get published, its own shitty job; more time to write. And if things go well? Well, that maybe fucks me up worse, but there comes a time when a dude has to just get over how fucking disgusting cocksucking motherfucking money is and let himself have some in exchange for his privacy and his ability to just tinker by himself unnoticed by all, for the privilege of not having to wear editors down because I'm so precious that once something is done to my satisfaction, to entertain editorial advice is tantamount to ripping a piece of my own skin off with my fingernails. In my defense, except for in the blog, I take a million careful fucking years to finish anything, so by the time someone sees something it is word-fucking-perfect, I unequivocally and with extreme conviction feel I have earned the right to not care what any living soul thinks would read better. It stands there to be read as written, by me, for a host of extremely cogent reasons. All I require is proofreaders for those misspellings that embed themselves in a document sometimes, having become invisible to the author's brain.

Ok. I don't even know where all that really came from. I guess I'm just outlining how ill-suited I am to be a professional writer, uncovering the deep pools of hubris that sabotage me so. But I'm a professional in multiple fields, dammit! I can will myself to do this. I can do this. Please let me be able to do this. Humility NOW

HUMILITY NOW

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Jesus, man. Time to lie down for a little while. My health is clearly not quite back up to the high water mark.

--JL

#351

As I moved a notebook on my desk just now as I went to type, it fell open to a page with some of my handwriting on it, which I read out of that momentary curiosity that such events may trigger. Dimly, very dimly remember writing this, because I thought when I heard or read it that it was very beautiful somehow. I guess it is. I mean, I still think that, now that I relax into really thinking about it rather than wondering so avidly what it means, you know? The urge to decipher and decode can indeed obstruct true meaning betimes.

Anyway, this is what I wrote:

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Salt Marsh Snakes

drink only rainwater

*

There you have it. It makes sense. It's what I would do, living in a salt marsh. Straightforward stuff, just what poetry is made of.

Oh, I bet it was in Wikipedia's little Did You Know?... section that they have on their front page. I look at it most days. It's almost always got fun stuff to perceive and think about.

*

It should come as no surprise that I pretty much fucked this semester up. Stopped attending two of my four classes, managed as little as possible to scrape decent grades in the other two. It's been so much illness and pain to deal with. I didn't even mention yet how fucking sick I got after Thanksgivng, I was slightly deliriously afraid I might die at a couple of points, like how it gets sometimes when you're proper fighting it off. Fucking goddamn it all, though you know? Fucking school, fucking grades, fucking bodies, fucking societies, fucking shitting World War fucking III and multiple motherfucking genocides and fucking the total collapse of rational, cohesive thought thanks to playing around with fucking computers. Fuck it, that's all. Just get it the fuck fucked. Fuck that shit. Fuck that. I don't want to give a fuck about any of that fucking shit right now. 

So fuck it! It is all just ass, and the shit that issues thence perforce!

Whew. That's feeling a little better. 

*

To microquote Kimya Dawson's music lyrics, sorry I'm a deadbeat friend. That's a powerful non-sequitur, needing no elaboration or specification. Happy to use it as a springboard to the next thing, which has nothing to do with this.

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Don't believe I mentioned reading Stephen King's Fairy Tale--it was a heavy hitter. Putting it on the same racetrack as Eyes of the Dragon, Fairy Tale laps the poor old beast and stays winning. King's still not quite my favorite hand with elements and structures of  what might be termed high fantasy, which is why to this date I have never been able to stay with The Dark Tower. But the fairy-story elements were very powerful here, the included elements of the high fantastical ennobled for being more authentically Stephen King, the horror more horrible, the beautiful more true. Of course it is low hanging fruit to say the man is older and has read more books, but that's only part of it. It is a true modern fairy-story, which I believe to be a spiritually advanced accomplishment. Very good work out there. Gives a person some hope.

Also reread Breakfast of Champions, the Kurt Vonnegut book that really got me on that particular tip for serious. I read Slaughterhouse Five for school and loved it, but it's the one you grab under your own power that has more power to stick with you and define you, and so it has been. It was also interesting being reminded how much of the insight on the world around that I have presented people in my adult life came straight out of reading Kurt Vonnegut to completion as a teenager, before he was dead. Refreshing, these breezes from youth, and strange. I'm rereading Jailbird, now. Maybe Galápagos, one of my most favorite books ever of all, after that.

This is yet another in an increasingly criminal list of non-sequiturs here in this post, but astute (and almost frighteningly pedantic, with what I would term abnormal levels of recall) readers will have noticed that I posses the following three books, acquired in order: The Penguin History of the World, A History of Europe, and Europe 1880-1945, all fully or mostly written by the historian J.M. Roberts. The nature of this constellation pleases me greatly; a set of lenses, increasing in magnification, and it is a great pleasure to imagine the lenses switching back and forth, the overlap, the gained and the lost from the coarse grain to the fine and back again. I like to think about all my history books like this. Holster full of lenses.

This has been your book update, you filthy, reprehensible bibliophile. I mean that like a screwed-up, violently expressed paraphilia, not the family-friendly way fuckin' society, fuckin' librarians would have it. Pft. I'm gonna put my dick in one of my books immediately. 

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Ah, it would have been great to end the post there. But I've been advised not to leave jokes about my own personal sex stuff up where anyone could just quote me out of context without leaving myself an out. My sex stuff is pretty boring, frankly. Like...not vanilla, but plain yogurt. Kefir. Stuff like that. Pouring liquid yogurt into gaping assholes, mixing it with lactation, pouring it all over the floor and rolling and thrashing around like you're having a seizure, that sort of thing. Nothing weird. 

--JL

#332

Because of my grimy, checkered past, I find myself in the interesting position of being simultaneously denied the use of my financial aid by my institution, and called to be honored by them for outstanding academic performace. Guess the bodies in charge of these separate processes don't communicate that much, or at a very granular level, or something. An appeal has been filed, and I have been assured that it should be granted, but who knows. Haven't RSVP'd to the honors thing because even if all goes well I have a natural aversion to being honored and even if I got over that it would be too bitter, I think, for the opposite to take place and be honored and denied at the same time. I don't fuckin know. It's so much easier not to think about this stuff. When I got that email, about being denied financial aid despite all my A's and pulling my GPA up more than a full point, an old familiar part of me rose up in my chest cavity and told me to say fuck it, quit everything, go back to just reading whatever the fuck you want all the time and forget this noise. I won't--but can't pretend it wasn't a struggle for a minute. And I do miss being my own teacher and the only one, but this new situation is nice too, and I do like it. Perseverance! How annoyingly necessary, how perversely vital.

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Went to the Toledo Zoo yesterday with Ezra and my mother-in-law. It was pretty great. It's so good to look at creatures. Organisms are fucking incredible. The whole enterprise was lent a special interest because I've been reading the work of Eugene M. Marais, specifically The Soul of the White Ant, and it's amazing work, and has me thinking a great deal about the nature of what life truly is, what constitutes it, e.g. the body and the possible interpretations of what a body is; where it begins and ends, and what life leaves behind when it departs what has been its vessel, or the billions of vessels which make up the vessels which make up the vessel. And in the end, is it all white light? The light of God, as the Sefirot says? That seems to be the secret that lies in quantum mechanics, in the oneness of the universe, in the illusory nature of the separateness of being. That we are vessels made of light, filled with light, and life and death only changes in refraction. A crystal universe, with infinite light radiating throughout. Concretions of imagination, metaphors and stories as atoms and molecules.

Also been reading that book I got about Giordano Bruno. Fucking good as FUCK.

*

Dunno. Maybe I'll write a letter to the Pope about it. He's supposed to know. Don't wanna bug the guy, really, but I'm curious about what he might say to me, if anything. I mean, the chances that the Pontifex of Rome would ever respond to any letter my apostasical ass would write him are so slim it is comical, but sometimes you write and mail a letter because it's a thing, not because you seriously expect anything out of it. There's a letter to Disney I'd also like to write, for all the difference that would make in the universe. 


--JL

#322

Dang! I really do be busy, quite. Turns out working about half as much and taking five courses adds up to more work than just working. Well, fine. That's fine. I'm procrastinating right now, by writing this, but that's fine. Tomorrow will a good day to do three assignments; today is not. That's just how it is sometimes, and I need to learn to be okay with that. Burning out is a grave risk when you want to achieve near-perfection, and I must allow myself the space to not do that. Back in high school, achieving perfection in the areas I wanted to achieve perfection was a breeze, because I let the rest of it all happen however it was going to happen without giving it a second thought or instant of stress. Failing the same algebra course two years in a row? Ask me if I give a flying fuck! I'll laugh right in your face. No, no fucks buzzing around my airspace. That second year, I had an A+ in both accelerated English and AP European History. Achieved a C in chemistry, mostly by showing up and cracking jokes all hour. I also got an A in Twentieth Century Literature. Don't remember what else I took, besides Concert Band, where I did fine but never brilliantly. Maybe another English elective. Took all the English they let me get away with back then. When it came time at the end of that year to talk to my counselor about graduating next year, she let me know that strictly speaking, I had not accumulated enough math credits to leave school on time. 

"I see you haven't signed up for any math next year, which makes sense, since you haven't met the requirements for any of the classes. What you might not know is, you can't graduate like that. Not in this state. Look here, though. You've already exceeded your English graduation requirements. In fact, you've taken and passed more English classes at a high level of performance than anyone else in your class, and you're maintaining that trend for next year. Nobody else taking AP English and Humanities and an English elective on top. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna make a deal. You're going to take this class called Geometry X. It is remedial. You take this class and pass it--just one semester--and do well with the rest of your planned courses senior year, and we'll let you walk. Fail this class, we'll have to have a different discussion. Do we understand each other?"

And thus, I fell at her feet, praising her benevolence, her wisdom, her power and acumen. The one and only administrator in my entire middle and high school career that acted like a human being. And indeed, though my overall GPA was really nothing to write home about, the English department awarded me an Outstanding Student of English award, which was worth more to me than the actual diploma. Also at this point I'm bragging about nothing,but my SAT scores would have been in the 98th percentile nationwide if my math hadn't been down at the 70th. Everything else, the bar was tickling that sweet 100. 

As you may know, dear reader, I soon proceeded to drop out of college and drink myself almost to death/madness over the course of the subsequent four years instead. I mean, I accumulated some credits at the community college I attend now, but my performance was awful, even worse than high school, as I would usually stop turning up mid-semester or even before.

Now I am giving all my classes the same focused I effort I once gave a chosen few. I will pull this academic situation out of the ashes, so help me, but I must also continue to take care of me in the ways I need taking care of--and hammering some bullshit into this blog every now and again should be part of that. Even moreso, actual projects, which I should really get to instead of any more of this nonsense.

So PEACE THE FUCK OUT, READER! THIS WAS HELLA POINTLESS! YAAAAAAAA


--JL