#368

We all have a reason to go to internet, or anyways, we should. Most people's reason to go online is to find a reason to be online, which many corporations and technologists motivated largely by maximizing the potential of the space to generate capital and influence in powerful, throbbing feedback loops have taken advantage of in just the way one would expect--to do landscape architecture on internet that renders the space a sterile, frictionless conveyance to impulse purchases and the ratcheting of emotionally-driven dialogue into the stratosphere. A droning, monochrome soap opera running in tandem with the purring cash engine feeding publishers of every description and giving everything to the shadow government, feeding on pain and anger and regurgitating more of both, funneling in more and more people to crowd into their immaterial coliseum to purchase ideas, opinions, bread, circuses, feuds, mindsets, a common, neutered language, whatever other fucking bullshit, including unhinged conspiratorial nonsense stitched from whole cloth and anti-semitic science fiction. 

The currency? Why, basically free. You got the juice and a portal and a way to get the signal, you might even think you get the rest for absolutely free. But there is always a charge in this world, starting with the calorie, and on internet you pay in time and attention, which the aforementioned robber barons and slaves-turned-masters realized early on is more valuable than any other resource in the world. Now that, you give away for free, although there is case to be made for the idea that you are, in fact, paying for the privilege to give it away and then have it sold back to you.

Life is rife with such comedies, and was long before internet, but it has been just a thrill ride to see the process take place so quickly, to hear about the old days and the true frontier era as I grew up, to be a part of the first large colonies and explorations in the time of the dot com boom, the puncture, the renaissance, the premodern forms of internet, and then, to have become a worthless old relic typing away into a blog--a fucking blog! lmao--the online equivalent of a typewriter in a derelict old cabin on the stony shore of a frozen lake--in this absolutely poisoned and degraded (and worse, prophecied, planned, and executed) merging of meatspace and cyberspace that even now is undergoing another seismic shift and showing new terrain, outgassing some weird shit as it plays out. 

Well, it is the Third World War. Some cracking and tearing of the norm is to be expected. More precisely, it is the latest stage and the beginning of the third peak of what could currently be termed the Global Centennial War, if one had a mind. 

*

Before Ukraine, which I wrote about and hoped would be over with quickly, I had prayed nothing would break out in Europe in the first place, because the odds were good that they would and it would seal the deal. China re: Hong Kong and Taiwan and the U.S. by proxy, Russia's perfectly effective soft power maneuvers, North Korea and South Korea, tensions sliding up in the Middle East--a broad and engaging stripe of potential energy. A ground war in Europe would close the cordon, and did, and dragged on, and subsequently (with timing so perfect vis a vis the obvious effect on the United States and its election politics that a suspicious man would, well, harbor suspicions) the most globally contentious centennial conflict pops off again, and now, today, it's all basically engaged in a perfect, classic fault line, from northern Ukraine to the South Pacific. The gravity of this line, which was potential and is now smoldering and sparking, pulls everything else in. I say not that it will; it is pulling. We are going for a ride.

*

Anyhow, back in 1996, when it could be optimistically opined that we might not have to deal with any of this kind of fucking horseshit next millenium, I started clicking around internet in order to explore more about the Animorphs books. Of course they got me with books; Scholastic knew what the fuck was up. "Vist the website at..." right on the back-page ads. And I would! Why not? It was in a book!

So I read everything on the site and downloaded and played hours of their little yet robust browser games. I read about other book series, authors, everything that drew my eye on the Scholastic website. And did I want to read more stuff? Well, yes. I'm into that. And it seemed like there was some stuff to read, there on that old internet. It seemed like there was actually more to read, then. There aren't really websites anymore, but there sure used to be. Dozens of the little guys, at least!

*

My reason for going to internet has always been simple: to satisfy my curiosity and explore culture. This very organically led me to play my small roles here and there throughout the twenty years of culture wars birthed in meatspace and tempered, perhaps perfected, in the message board of old. I have seen no real innovation in the deployment of ordinance and the specifics of that ordinance, at any rate; by and large it is the medium that has evolved, or been taken over by it like a cordyceps; the exponentially expanding factors have been area of effect and penetration. The twitterification of national television "news" outlets is a good example of the latter. I knew those Something Awful Buzzfeed motherfuckers had their proof of concept the second I saw a random tweet on a screen behind a newsanchor talking about the tweet. The facebook effect--making the first space online to truly echo in form and function the sparse, corporate, eternally-tweaking, never-changing, smooth-eyeball smooth-brain virtual reality of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash--served to pull in millions upon millions of the uninitiated, like a wave of immigrants to a new world, induced with pleasures and opportunities but in fact there to serve as a resource, to be strip-mined, to be pickpocketed, to be manipulated and tricked and herded like the cattle they regrettably are. 

The weaponization of dangerously alienated and isolated individuals (a common and natural consequence of fundamentally inhuman and hypocritical society, whose schools are the presages and pipelines to its prisons) is an example of collateral damage, fed into and further weaponized by the very systems that created these conditions. Like so much else, it predates the internet--see Richard Wright's Native Son for a compelling narrative exemplifying this--but has been accelerated by its machinations and their interbreeding with the overarching aims of mass media. Roland Barthes' Mythologies is a good book to look at too. Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, while we're listing shit that helps explain how fucked up our situation is. 

Now we have a whole nation under basically a four-point, double-blind hermenutical delusion enchantment. Not for nothing; a binary division makes both sides easy to play against the middle. A chatter war with very real, on-the-ground, in-your-face consequences, and you need look no further than the events of January 6th 2021 to see documentary-style proof. It ends in blood. Sorry to be such a downer about imminent conflict on these grand dramatic scales in this post, but them's the times*. I'm livin' through history just like you, baby. I mentioned acceleration in the last paragraph--an important theme when discussing internet and its whip-fast tentacles. Since this seems to be the post I reccommend all kinds of supplementary texts, and I mentioned documentary-style proof, Andrew Callaghan's work in This Place Rules is everything that I could have personally asked someone to make on the subject. That dude knows his shit and how to wade through it. For being one of the only journalists in America--by virtue of not really being one, plus the benefit of a solid head and a suite of personal qualities that lend themselves to the task--a natural, in other words--I would like to take this opportunity to extend formal appreciations.

*

Before wikipedia, which I look at every day, there were lots of websites just about sharing information, telling stories, making informative stuff people could access. Message boards are still the place for the deep wisdoms, if you can sift through the wreckage and ignore the limpets clinging to the hulls of those great ruined ships. There was this really great mythology website, just top-shelf that I read all the time. There was also a website where a man detailed his experiences and the ins and outs of having sex with dolphins in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a story I love to tell. Eat your heart out, Margaret Lovatt.

The first piece of video pornography on the internet that I ever saw was of what appeared to be a college girl who had a German Shepherd in her tiny dorm room. She let that dog fuck her, dear reader, and my twelve-year old mind, which thought itself hardened by its first season of education at the hands of print smut and jpegs, lay cleaved in twain. I had no concept, even less concept of filming something like that and distributing it. Who is this for? I remember thinking, over and over. Well, plenty of people; in the no-holds-barred, no-one-the-fuck-is-looking days of yore, bestiality porn was crazy prolific. 

Check this out: I had to see what some stupid fucking train tickets cost for some stupid fucking homework. I typed "amtrac" into the search bar by accident. It took me to a website that at first blush looked reasonably like the entrance site to buy tickets for a train; logo, the colors looked right, yada yada. But there were no links or text fields. At least, I thought so, until I saw a little button at the bottom, kind of popping out in yellow and green on that dark blue and white page. It said "Extra". Well, what is extra? Why not find out?

Extra is like seventy popups. Girl sucks goat penis, girl puts a fish or a snake up her vagina, girl fucks dog after dog after dog, and of course, the holy grail and crown jewels, girls take horse cocks. Girl fucks lion was probably fake, gorilla too. But like I said, I go on the internet because I'm curious. I know exactly what a goat penis looks like, and the logistics of getting one in your mouth. I don't know who gets off on seeing a girl put a fish inside her, but I've seen the thing done.

I've seen a lot of things done, on internet. It's not all just reading. And when you've seen stuff like that, you have to know what the fuck else people get up to and--for the love of god!--post where people can look at it. I was a teenager, and I did my job: I made it my business to look at every kind of pornography people made, and think about why they made it. Yes, dear reader, I am not made of stone--I looked at stuff for myself, for the purposes of ejaculation--not the stuff with animals. But that represents only the well-worn comfortable patch close to home, my humble knowings of what I want, which is straightforward and quotidian, with a high production value. Stories are good. Yet in my zeal for discovery, for novelty, for the unimaginable, the psychology and effort of it all, I roamed very far afield indeed. 

Eventually, I had to concede. It's anything. People will fuck anything and get turned on by the idea of turning into anything and fucking anything while it turns into something else. There is no limit. We'd turn into a gas and fuck other gases if we could. We'd let Pyramid Head rip off our whole skins if we were convinved it would get our rocks off like never before, one last time. Thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, have probably already masturbated to that fantasy.

Eventually, I also had to conclude that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, sex stuff is not really creepy or scary or even that strange. Our culture makes even missionary-style for the furtherance of the species a thing of deep and brutal shame, something ugly and dangerous to show and see and know about. But sex is sex. People have a drive, and it is bound up with identity and creativity and embodiment in miltitudinous ways. Mostly, we could stand to leave each other alone about it and have our shit out in the open where it can be a thing of daylight. Also the line between fantasy and reality is generally thick, and the translation from ideal to practical typically fairly modest, and if it has its risks, so does every other human behavior. Even that old missionary can result in penile breakage and vaginal tearing. It's not a safe act, and that statement is manifold--disease, unintended progeny, improbable lighntning strike.

Which brings us to the actual scary shit, which I don't really want to give any power to in this space. That stuff can stay in the dark. The dark is quite good for some things.

*

 

Look. You can't get that far into seriously discussing internet without discussing bestiality, and bestiality-adjacent phenomena. Definitely internet is basically synonymous with pornography, not to say sex crime. But I'll definitely say sex crime; there's a whole TV show been running for decades about just that.

Guess I should say that you know, the complex issue of having sex with animals, having sex with objects you've anthropomorphized, like pillows or hunting bows or the Eiffel Tower, having sex with anyone or anything--all complicated, all brutally simple--is that we are certainly animals, never more animals that around the issue of and in the throes of sex, and to humanize sex, to moralize around it, is equally complicated and can be as easily and as destructively harmful to society as not giving it any thought or effort at all. People should not be demonized no matter how outsized their proclivities, certainly not in a broad stroke based on sharing those proclivities. 

Also I would like to point out that while people wring their hands very publicly about fetishists and drag queens and trans people, hundreds of thousands of women and girls and thousands of men and boys across this continent are very quietly and matter-of-factly being sold into and existing in sexual slavery, which is not really a political hot button issue for some reason, except when it's totally fake. 

*

All that being as it is, as individuals we are the first in the line when it comes to understanding and regulating our own actions, and there is no doubt that actions in the sexual realm carry a certain existential weight. So, we must have our own rules and values. We must set boundaries that matter. Here are mine:

-Don't fuck without consent. 

-Animals basically can't really consent; if they fuck you, to my mind it's basically because you tricked them. Furries are a distinctly human-type-sentient subset of animals and are not the locus of this discussion, but it should be easy to find that if you want it.

-Don't fuck children or teenagers, their consent is not the same as your consent; curiosity, trust, and compliance are distinct from consent and are not replacements for consent. It is much worse than a trick no matter who you think you are or what you tell yourself you're actually doing.

-Don't fuck without consent, even if you need to bleed or draw blood or worse. Guess you could call yourself unlucky, but you're gotta figure out how to get what you need consensually. Hopefully safely and preventatively against infections.

-Again: don't fuck without consent, the more specific, the better, and don't abuse consent by throwing anybody any curveballs en flagrante delicto. 

-Making erotic drawings or generating overtly positive written or filmed portrayals of anything that breaks these rules is a pretty fucked up thing to do too. Using art and the position of the artist to wield power and influence over consent is not consent, and you don't fuck without consent.

Personally I think these are extremely basic and leave room for probably ninety-five percent of the crazy shit I've seen online. If you can't hang with these rules, well, it would be better that we never meet, we shall certainly not fraternize, and don't let me catch you doing your dirt, because probably what I will do is administer a forcible halt. This will very likely involve strong prejudice on my part, and that's just the breaks. 

*

We just finished rewatching the first season of True Detective, so maybe I'm a little nerve-frayed on sex violence and the fucked-up conditions we live under at the moment. 

Didn't think I'd end up talking about that stuff! Any of that stuff. I had no idea, when I fired up the text field, that this would happen. Am I really going to hit that publish button? I guess at this point it'd be dishonest not to.

--JL

*remember how wrong I was about Kanye vs Oprah 2020, though? I could be wrong like that again. We can only pray.

#258

It strikes that perhaps too regularly when I approach this space the result of the encounter is a failure to properly navigate the line between the management of alert, manifold cogency and the irreverence with which I am tempted to skewer and demean myself. Also a failure to manage the tension between my overbearing vanity and too-precious desire to sound clever, and my wish to be as honest as possible.

All of which is so stupid. I feel like such a fucking twit, sitting in the dirt with too-small pants riding up my calves, splaying each testicle onto a separate thigh. Drool running all the way down my chin and drying on my neck. Very proud of myself, big smile.

Not literally in that position as I type this. Just saying I feel like a total asshole sometimes. Guess we all do.

*

Let me just tell you a story. Let me just be done talking for a moment.

*

Cedar Point, the amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, has been a destination in my life. I mean, that is what it's there for, its exact and stated purpose: a place to go to. For those times you need a place to take a bunch of middle school concert band students somewhere. Somewhere they can conduct themselves with dignity and comport themselves with grace, like a roller coaster pileup what gift kiosks do be sellin' rebel flag durags n' fried mars bars. Somewhere you are surrounded by men whose lifestyle's cumulative contribution to their frame and physique has rendered them unable to cover ground for more minutes than they need to rest in a day, though these men are typically not yet sixty.

We hearken back to that basically revolting and yet truly magical age of thirteen. We evoke a maladapted little atheist with spiked hair, caustic t-shirts, evilly rubber-banded braces, long drab cargo shorts, and two rows of homemade brujo beads hanging round my neck down to my groin. Only my black slip-on moccasins, slightly overlarge, and particular dysfunctions betrayed me as autistic. I played, of course, the trumpet.

*

Before noon I had already used one of the disposable cameras I used to like to bring everywhere to snap an incriminating picture of my buddy Red, and also a picture of an impressively-endowed classmate with her shirt up. The way I accomplished this was by feeling the impulse enter my mind and acting upon it without thinking: she was perhaps ten feet away, ahead of me and my boys in the line for the standing-up coaster. I called out to her to show me her tits, she did, and I took the photo without consent. There is no excuse for this behavior. Troubled youth. If I have not already paid for the balance in personal agony, may I continue to do so, amen.

Funny thing about this girl, a couple years later she pulled her shirt up at me again. I was already a different man, though, had already drunk deep from the shame of having done her like that in the first place, and turned my eyes away. This, of course, offended her profoundly, and also caused a wrestling teammate that was talking to me up till that moment pitch a fit at me like "motherfucker you crazy, that bitch is showing you her tiddies what the fuck is the matter?!?" Dude shoved me and everything. Thought I was gonna hafta deck'm with an elbow.

Couldn't explain it, really. Both occasions are founts of equal guilt and pain. Perhaps it's not such an amusing thing that of her own volition a teenaged girl would show her tits to a dude that once tricked her into same for no particular reason other than that he could. Perhaps it doesn't matter. And perhaps it does.

*

In line for the fast coaster (plenty of fast coasters at the park now, but back in the day, you'd know which coaster I meant), me and the boys were very naturally horsing around. No real mayhem, just mocking grins at all and sundry, the kind of fidgeting that isn't nervous but rather makes other people nervous, and laughing raucously at inside jokes and Monty Python quotes. Just being little assholes, you know? 

To make a long story short, there was this super hot chick further back in the line. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my entire life up to that point, and it is easy for me to remember that this was so because it was by such a ridiculous, such a painful margin; seven times hotter than anyone I could think of or remember. I think she contributed to how long it took me to come around to actually having sex. If I had waited for real for a chick as hot as her to give it up to, I would have stayed virgin till I was twenty-six. This was a thirteen-year girl, a flesh-and-blood occurrence of the mysterious stranger of lore that pops up in people's lifetimes. Like the loveliest cicada imaginable.

Shan't bother to describe her. You've either seen a thirteen-year individual or you haven't; if you have, there is no purpose in wasting words, and if you haven't, understand that looks as describable are barely a part of this, and understand that in this matter, words are a waste. You, too, may be someone's mysterious stranger, showing up in a beam of light before their eyes, representing a great axis in their lives.

As I say, thirteen years after this little story, I consummated the cycle and fucked the next thirteen-year girl I saw. She deserves her own post and she shall have it, but I will say this: I didn't flirt with a single customer the entire five years I worked at this remanufactured automotive parts outlet except for her (I'm not in any case a flirter, really; don't have the ear or the tongue or the type of patience for it), I knew I was gonna fuck her the moment she walked through the door, and I let it happen without giving it too much thought. You can't. With a mysterious stranger, you're either gonna pretty damn soon or right then and there or not for a long time or maybe ever, decided essentially in the first few instants of the juncture. 

So, when we noticed this girl, the boys just about shit their pants. They regressed about five years at a leap and shoved their hands in their pockets as the blood ran away from their faces, an ashen hush collapsing their voices and deflating their auras. I don't blame them. We were confident enough amongst ourselves, but it's not like we were the coolest cats in town. Remember, Monty Python quotes. Braces. We thought doing a real good professional German accent and a real good British accent back to back, playing with the stereotypes, was a total crackup. We still spoke of Space Camp sometimes, with a wistful gleam in our eyes.

Me, much as it would go thirteen years later, I looked into her eyes and I knew that I could get it done if I wanted to. That day, that very blessed hour. Unless she just wanted to hop the line and thought the naïveté of this gaggle of twerps was a good safe bet. Don't think so, though. So maybe her bet was on this twerp (me) possessing delusions towards the sigma male posture. Maybe. But I doubt it. This was sustained eye-contact, actual-flavor-on-the-tongue real come-on as in come on, boy, come get this, I have it and you see that I have it and I want to give it to you. I remember the shape and color of her eyes like no time has passed at all because she drilled them into mine with no doubts at all. And what eyes.

Problem is, I was thirteen, and plain weird. Now, I've known guys to turn in their v-card on just such an occasion, no other consideration in the world at all in their minds, just going for it. They are everywhere in literature. I remember reading an article the year before this tale took place in Men's Healf Maggrozeen about a sex addict who turned in his v-card at twelve in a tunnel on a playground and spent the rest of his life as the type of dude who, in his own words, would chew through a brick wall if he knew there was pussy on the other side of it. But I'm a dude who, first, values loyalty and doesn't like to set people up to have their feelings hurt needlessly (I might be extremely good at hurting feelings both intentionally and through many unflattering varieties of fuckup, but I really don't like to), and second, values his independence. I am, by and large, a dude of discipline and behavioral rigor. I value honor, justice, freedom, courage, wisdom, prudence, and honesty. I also love to fuck, drink hard, and smoke like a chimney. These, and intellectual arrogance, comprise my Achilles heels and the foundations of my hubris and death-drives. Known all that pretty much since I was a kid. 

Therefore much as I could already feel my feet shucking the pointless line, leaving my dudes castrated and abandoned (really not good for their psychology and a profoundly bad look on me), taking her by the hand literally without saying a word over to the Ferris wheel, and finding out what the songs are all about, I did not do this thing. So it goes.

Stayed in line with the fellas like a brother ought. Yes, I looked at that girl: I feasted my eyes and I told her I was sorry though mine as best as I could. Yes, I stood up straight shoulders squared chest out gut tight, and let her see me smile, because she was curving herself and setting herself up some angles and letting me see her smile. Yes, there were moments, many, when the intensity even got turned up, and it is hard to describe honestly and not sound like a bullshitter, but if you've been there, then you know: moments when that girl and me were all alone in that line, when it was quiet because there was, in those moments, no Sandusky, no Ohio, no cut-rate amusement park, no line, no time. Just the sunlight falling on two humans, the sound of the ocean in their ears the one and only sound, the maybe, the beckoning, the holding of the peace, the yes and the no at the same time. 

Yes, I looked at that girl. And she looked at me.

But I kept joking with my boys, got 'em laughing, got 'em pumped and grinning and full of themselves and psyched for the roller coaster. Reminded myself about brick-wall-pussy dude and made other memories; like this older dude with a big gray grizzled ponytail under a trucker hat wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and sporting on his upper arm the absolute hugest, longest, most out-there fuckin mole I have ever seen, and let me tell you the best part: this mole had a long gray ponytail too. Never saw another like it. A mole that impressive, on display? Rarer than a thirteen-year girl. Never seen its like before or since, not even on an old man's pate.

A gem. Really, truly, you don't stand in a line like this every day.

*

That's the tale, folks. Hope to do more stuff like this, through the end of this year. Yet, who knows?

Peace,

--JL

#181

Today marks the seventy-fifth year since the landing on the beaches of Normandy by the Allied forces in 1944, which is marked down as quite a moment. The situation is pretty hardcore if one lets the prevailing conditions factor in, if you get even a little subjective with the equation. It's some significant shit. It's not like any of those dudes didn't know exactly what the uncorrectable math was. If you were there, you would know for a cold hard fact that when the hull scraped the sand you were probably going to die screaming and hurting like a son of a bitch, breathing out your last far away from home too early in the morning and your mother would never see you smile again. If by some miracle you made it through, the math was again clear and irreducible: some of the dudes praying and vomiting next to you would not, and you were consigned to walk over their threshed bodies into however long you had to live on time they bought you. 

In addition, June 6 has the honor of hosting the Battle of Midway in 1942. That's just World War II. June 6 has a lot to its name. Extending just a shade, it is the date that Union forces seized Memphis from the Confederacy.

*

Also, birth date of  Thomas Mann, Isaiah Berlin, and Paul Giamatti. Just to name the ones who are on my shelves or whose acting for the screen I have perceived and interpreted. Patrick Rothfuss gets an honorable mention since I only know him by reputation but a lot of people seem to like his book The Name of the Wind a lot. I'll get around to it. Have been meaning to get around to it.

*

Oh, apropos of nothing, war is a shitty thing, and the people who fight it do shitty things. Crimes within crimes, and in secret, the truly unthinkable, the shit nobody knew about, the shit every living soul denies they would do when asked and yet happens every time there's a war on, and there is always a war on. There is no defense for the shit that soldiers do every time that soldiers do what soldiers do.

But it is mad low class and an extremely rude and off-base dis to trash soldiers. Get off of it. I've read Sartre, I know and consider cogent the case that it is always a choice not to be a soldier, that you are always free to not be a soldier, that all war is accomplished by cooperation and if no subject agreed to cooperate with war, then it could not be brought off; hence, each of us is responsible to the other to deny the soldiering contract. I always love how philosophers use freedom to try to force you to act how they think you should act. I always love when philosophers are indiscernible from politicians.

Well, it is my small and uneducated opinion that Sartre* didn't really understand Heidegger, who was a Nazi and a cuck and a living piece of shit but wrote more important books and he talked about something called a situation and if you're not in someone else's situation it is just my opinion that odds are good that you know precious little, probably little enough to amount to dick, about what freedom looks like to them. It is difficult for me to consider that you know enough to tell them what they should do with their freedom.

Look, I don't go around volunteering to go to war. I'm not that kind of person; my situation is not that. War happens, that's a situation, and there are always going to be a lot of people who have a stake in that situation and create a gravity around it. There is an accretion of war whose gravity would pull me into it whether I willed it or not; that is a change in situation. That there is no such accretion is because wars are fought and won without my cooperation for my benefit, a fact I am at both at peace with and unhappy about but a fact, which I must consider when I criticize war as a situation and consider the situation of the individuals who are in it. 

It seems to me like I get to sit on my biscuit and intellectualize about all this because other people died and are dying in order to grant me the privilege! Huh. I would feel like a real asshole if I didn't at least have the grace to keep silent on the matter, if I didn't feel like waxing poetic about glorious sacrifice. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. My own business, mostly.

At the end of the day, I feel the least you can do is recognize the situation, and respect the decision, and use the whole thing to get some perspective. 

Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do. It may be opaque to you, it may seem to amount to the same thing, but the why matters, and the why is different in every situation, for every subject.

Not being a soldier is not a decision that makes me any better or more correct than a person who made the decision to be a soldier. 


*

Of course, this does not mean we do not hold individual soldiers accountable for their personal misdeeds. It never means that! It just means we do not consign every soldier as an individual to the horns of a demon nor the wings of an angel on the basis of current pop ideology heated by a feverish press. It just means that maybe you and I, dear reader, can perhaps slow down together and remember that even in the act of holding others accountable we may become greater hypocrites and monsters than those we would judge, must be on our watch for that always, must remember that the rush of righteous condemnation is one of the things that war is founded on, one of the things that breeds the iniquitous social organizations that give rise to warlike situations.

Just means that we can remember that in other shoes, we'd walk other paths.

*

Got more to say on this subject and another I was thinking about yesterday which relates, but I am tired, and this has gone one quite long enough. It was a big day today.

Ok, real quick: I had absolutely stupendous sex. It was fricking superreal. It was healing.

Cool peace barely gonna make the deadline tonight haha


--JL

*it is my habit to be extra mean to Sartre but he's all right really dude just sucks

I have a few of his books though