#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

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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.

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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. 

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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

#58

The light is very good right now. I mean the sunlight on the surface of the world right now, where I am, looking out the window. I have spent a great many hours of my life looking out the window. It is a good pastime. Noble. Quiet hours.

Quiet hours are a gift from heaven. So is light.

Sometimes light kisses everything it touches and carves it fresh and clean and new. Draws the glory and power of everything under the sun to the utmost under the eye; the eye rejoicing, rejoicing.

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Hell's exact location has been famously pinpointed--earthly cohabitation with other human beings. Each human mind is a Hellmouth, dripping vile temptations and a lifetime of betrayal and abuse.  Your mind, too, is a portal to a nightmare dimension. Your friends and family--why, they helped shape your nightmare dimension, even as your cosmic energy and your choice of words influences theirs.

Human beings are also sanctuaries. The minds of others can be hallowed ground, can be gardens. We can carry around little altars to one another in our hearts, and be the talismans that protect one another in dark places. Yes, there are darknesses we could never have borne or crossed, without the light of another human being to help us stumble through.

Our hearts are shrines, yes; also, battlefields, and battlefields are where casualties breed.

To speak more practically, friendship is a contract wherein two hearts build a bridge between themselves and engender a certain flow or exchange between themselves. This flow, made up of events, communication, energy, and time, is a bond. Be it the puddle of acquaintanceship, the wide river of many years of closeness and endeavor, or the inland sea of a lifelong journey, there exists between two hearts and time an exchange of energy, of memory, of trust. There exists in this arrangement an inherent risk of imbalance, in addition to the inevitable series of arithmetical transformations and tonal modifications to the contract--attached subcontracts, hidden clauses, annulments of pertinent minutes, supplementary materials, renegotiations and the acknowledgement of ramifications such as those pertaining to insults, forgetfulness, and betrayals ranging from the microscopic and only appreciable in the aggregate to reversals so egregious they have spilled onto the pages of human history and haunted the universal myth. Also, people just change. It happens.

People's hearts are different sizes and shapes and have different kinds of energy. Any child knows this. Some fit together and complement one another, managing a reasonably even flow of energy over fairly sturdy bridges. Some don't fit that well initially, but manage to find an equilibrium. Some hearts, due to internal quirks or traumatic factors, will tend to seek hearts that they can dominate or manipulate into an uneven flow of energy that benefits them at the expense of the other. Some hearts will seek to be dominated by such hearts, and some will repel them. 

Some hearts change into other hearts while they're still connected up to other hearts, because of circumstances. Sometimes bridges suffer structural damage that have nothing to do with energy flow, and everything to do with distance, or some fresh shock or wound that cannot be shared and which poisons life with silence, burning bridges with cold fire. Sometimes we just go crazy, and start setting torches to all our bridges ourselves, for no good reason other than to welcome despair, or because our hearts are giving us bad advice, perhaps because some other heart wishes us ill, for reasons of its own. Sometimes you don't even realize you lost a bond until, years later, with a start, you realize that behind you, for no particular reason, lie a thousand dried-out stream beds and river bottoms. a thousand little tombs where once fresh flowers were laid at altars in the heedless hope of youth.

It can be tough not to take it personal. Instinctively, the organism understands the perceived source of its experienced pain as antagonistic. You want to blame--people in general, specific individuals for their exact faults, yourself. You want to sketch a story that allows you to make sense of how things have played out.

You have that right. After all, every heart that was joined to yours has changed your heart in one way or another, whether you realize it and reckon with it or play havoc with yourself. Some hearts will use what they get from you to cause you pain you did not think could ever have been possible.

But while you might have to get the fuck away from someone and do your damnedest to make sure they can't get near you again--to blame them, to turn your altar into a butcher's block, is to let that hurt fester, and where that hurt festers, it will spread its infection and make you hurt yourself and hurt others.

Hearts come into and out of our lives. We find ourselves retracing our steps in places we never thought we would set foot in again, finding everything changed but the ghost of familiarity behind each new perspective. Fresh flows turning long-dessicated, cracked earth to fertile stream mud once again. Sometimes we find that the torches we set sprung a mighty blaze, but perhaps more billow and roar than heat--and we are relieved that the framework still bears weight. For we have come to grieve what is truly beyond our power to heal, and see that healing was a choice we did not make, but could have.

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Still a little sick. Hope to be all better tomorrow. Good night.


--JL

#57

I am sick. I've been sick, and I'm still sick. That's all. Stupid cold. Looking forward to getting better.


--JL