#340

What an August it has been! So much has happened since last I pounded symbols into these pixels. Indeed, initially, I typed out three weeks, reflecting that it feels more like four. In fact, no! It has been only sixteen days, evidence that not all of life is lived in the same chronometrical rhythm. Veritable cascades of impressions, changes, and conversations, further remarkable in that I have, despite being on vacation, largely hewed to a simple routine, stable despite multitudinous modifiers and prevailing conditions.

Some examples? Why not!

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August is fourteen days old today, which is a great and very old-school unit of time which makes it for me to measure some things by--a fortnight. In the fort of these nights and days of a two-week period, which is, besides a very sensible span by many utilitarian measures, a comfortable unit of memory to me--the glowing coal of the most recent discrete chunk of time, past, but not yet the past, speaking loosely and subjectively. Anyhow I've taken a dozen round-trips on my bicycle in that time, during which the air quality has been mercifully almost always good. 

Some have been absolutely incredible rides. The worst was merely great. Stuff has happened to me like yesterday a young buck burst out of the scrub not ten meters from me diagonally in full career off the left side of the street, bolted across it, and made as if to zag in my direction; in my zeal to get a good look at the buck in movement I forgot all caution and actually sped up. The buck zagged away, across the path, and into the woods on the right. An air show is in the area and yesterday, too, many strange planes were flying around making some truly remarkable noises, which I factor as a catalyst to the weird but exhilarating deer behavior I personally experienced. Apparently one of the planes crashed later in the day. Bunch of 'em still flying around.

Other things I have seen include many people going about their day in many different modes of being; riding bikes also, puttering about their yards, driving their cars, walking along, being with animals, doing chores or paid work or nothing at all; sometimes, doing bizarre shit, as is normal and expected. For example, one man was shirtless on his porch, delivering a kind of monotone, medium-volume rant which seemed to me the indication of a banked but potentially explosive rage. This interpretation may have colored the impression I received of his holding a large revolver loosely in his right hand. I was never closer than about seven meters and moving along at a good clip I saw no reason to slack on, so my perceptions are by no means certain. Saw a man wandering up and down the strip separating a thoroughfare from a long drive that runs parallel screaming on his cell phone to someody about everything he could see happening interspersed with the outline of a vast conspiracy arrayed against him. He was doing the same from within a car that sat there abandoned ever since that day--perhaps ten days ago--till at least three days ago. 

Many amazing birds--goldfinch pairs, mourning doves, hawks and eagles, turkey vultures, woodpeckers, bluejays, crows, grackles, sparrows, starlings. Some of the flights and activities I have caught glimpses of has been very satisfying indeed--painterly, jewel-bright, elements of a ride which elevate its nature. To ride at the same speed of a low-flying bird not two armslengths away is such a snapshot of motion in space, such a spontaneous unification with the great dance of those who ride the wind with just their bodies, who in that moment seem to be saying, in the language of movement, "hey, you almost could be flying." The memories are all very dear to me, incandescent with that feeling of being close to flight, which is the best part about riding a bicycle.

Could go on and on, but there's other kinds of stuff to it all, which I want to be sure and try and cover. Onwards!

*

Read the incredible History, Big History, & Metahistory, ed. David C. Krakauer, John Lewis Gaddis, & Kenneth Pomeranz, from the Santa Fe Institute Press. It really was fucking phenomenal. Pursuing the Giordano Bruno thread with a certain avidity, I am rereading Lucretius' On The Nature of Things, which is cool but I think I would like to try a different translation. Pursuing concepts from the first book mentioned, also reading the other SFI Press book I have, Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019, ed. David C. Krakauer. Also Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks. If I get through those before my vacation is up, I should like to read a small book I have about Logic, or perhaps a book about Math.  

*

The Pontiac Vibe I drive finally shit the bed, so I've been driving Ezra to his job at summer camp in the van, which has been nice time together for us, and this amount of driving has resulted in listening to a lot of different music, following several programs of interest. Those pope teleplays were basically made by the music they wove into their picture, and consequently I have explored their soundtracks and gained an interest in recent electropop. Also this metal band Cattle Decapitation. Other recent trends inclue reacquainting myself with my CD collection and some of the stuff you can't really stream, like Cutting Room Floor's first album and its nested solo projects. Also a live Bob Marley & The Wailers show, Babylon by Bus, which presented its most enjoyable-ever listen--it had been a very long time, and I experienced many aspects and consequences of my maturation very positively through the sounds and ideas on this record. Beautiful. Plus I had never fully realized how amazing the guitar playing is.

*

On the gaming front, I concluded the storyline of Tears of the Kingdom. Absolutely phenomenal. There's a good thirty-five percent of the game still before what one might term true completion, and I have continued with some relish. The end of the story was one of the most gorgeous things that has ever happened to me. From the descent, which I performed from the highest reachable sky island, to the dazzling conclusion, it was perhaps the best ending to any Zelda game ever. Some finales have presented more of a challenge, some were mechanically denser, and the aesthetics of each places it firmly in a Golden Palace type situation, but for me, right now, this one leads the pack. Nintendo saw fit to release some Pokémon games on its official subscription ROM bank, and for some reason the Game Boy Color game featuring the Pokémon TCG really hooked me in. I've reached the Elite Four equivalent of that game.

*

On the social front, a friend I met during winter semester in class is staying with us while she figures out a housing situation. Been nice having a guest, some fun stuff. We saw Oppenheimer with her and her girlfriend, have shared many enlivening conversations, etc. That movie was super good, by the way. She even helped me move my dear friend Persephone's stuff from a storage unit to her new apartment, which was a nice fun time. 

Due to scholarly and transportation-rooted consideration, I've terminated my employment as a school bus driver on excellent terms, deciding that returning after vacation would finally present more logistical problems than it was worth. I'll get a more humble and less demanding position somehwere I can walk or bike to, just as I can walk or bike or bus to school. This is brought up by way of saying that this is why I could apparently so cold-bloodedly partake of ganja and trip on shrooms while in my position; I was fairly certain at the outset it would come to this. 

All that and I should make time for a few other friends, and perhaps my old friend Len, he with whom I am freshly shroom-communed should be playing and recording more soundscapes--one of the things we did on our trip--and perhaps even playing a show. We shall see! I know from wearying experience that one should never speak too confidently of such things are reality before their time, indeed, even up to mounting the stage at showtime. Strange to even entertain the idea of playing onstage again, but with Len, I think the thing may just be plausible. 

*

My spiritual condition has been boosted tremendously by this break, and by reuniting with the bicycle as near-daily practice. Every day a great joy is sustained within me; passes through me and moves around me. My heart is moved towards compassion towards each of the people that I see, however fleetingly. Love my husband and my cats, my digs and my tempos. I feel as though I am at the leading crest of a great vibration, a wave of energy that is clean and refreshing and tuneful. Listening to God's mighty silence I hear the universe, its great rushing whisper. It is infinite, as are we all, though this journey is brief, as all that exists in the universe is brief in the reckoning of infinite time.  

Our lives are an immutable part of an allness. No element of or perspective in the infinite narrative is unnecessary. Thus, all that exists, exists in a perfect balanace of equal meaning with everything else, from the infinitesimal to the cosmic, from the first to the last and in infinite recurrence. 

That's just some of the thinking I've been entertaining, along with its further implications. Possibly I am entirely off-base. 

*

Alright, fuckers! Signing off. Pray for this odd sinner.

--JL

#161

Spring is a time of such soft delicacies springing up everywhere. All the newest, rawest things resurfacing the world. Trees dropping their tiny, brief buds, their work already done, as little white flowers start springing up in the deep uncut grass. Frogspawn in the still pools of the creek, small toads on the sidewalk at night. The big dying willow put forth more branches and blossoms than last year. New growth all the way around.

Is it really dying? Yes. Everything is. Even as it is born.

That is the great wonder and opportunity of this existence.

*

Taking an infinite multiverse as writ, the death of the universe is just the end of a symphony, one symphony among infinite symphonies. Every note ends, the piece runs its course, but the music is eternal.

*

One note sounds out, one voice singing one tone. It begins, and ends, and though there exists not a trace of its passing, it was; it sounded. Thus it sounds eternally, will always have sounded, and the truth of this endures beyond the end of all things.

Nothing needs to do anything to be. And to be is to possess universal significance, whether anyone knows it or it goes unnoticed, stays secret, exists only beneath text.


--JL

#139

Art is all about being at the right place at the right time. There is no way to be in the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the wrong time, and being at the wrong place at the wrong time is only a matter of perspective; from a broad and intelligent one, there are no wrong places or wrong times.

Every second of existence is loaded with artistic potential. It's how one exploits it that matters. Manipulating the significance of existence. The rest is just medium, aesthetic, and practice. Planning, in some instances. Some tactical elements.

*

People have said that I am tactless. People have also called me very diplomatic. What I am is flexible; art is also coming to know and become proficient in the use of the best tool for every task.

*

Speaking of tactility, I notice that the surfacing of dream-memory is always accompanied by a very particular feeling in the body cavity. Sometimes high in the breast, sometimes behind the diaphragm, sometimes as low as the bowels, always coupled with heavy effervescence inside my head, coming in thick, potent surges as the memories rise to the surface. A battery of queer physical sensations, little balloons blowing up in my entrails, my heart dipped in a stinging, cooling ointment, weightless spine and hipbones. Sometimes the images and effects are so intense I am liable to trail off mid-sentence or stop what I am doing and remain completely still as I am assailed, assaulted even, by my dreams.


--JL

#61

11/17. That's a special day for me. I have mentioned my favor for seven, and eleven, and seventeen, and one hundred and seventeen, and other such permutations. I also like primes, so I like that this is the sixty-first post. 

No special deed, nor any ritual; no observance at all really except for my private acknowledgement that the calendar has branded this day with those numbers. To a person of my psychic makeup and spiritual background, significance is its own reward, and its own justification.

*

I walk by a field with a sycamore at the far edge on my way home. It stands all stark among a throng of smaller, uniformly dark trees. To the eye they are nameless drab, a murmuring backdrop like sackcloth behind a graceful nude in white marble. The tree, tall and slender, leaps into the field of vision, springs up fresh every day like the next step of a nigh-incomprehensibly slow dance yet more joyful in high exuberance and vaulting through an air more upper and rarefied than any dancer quickened by heart and pulse and dragging bone could ever hope to even briefly breathe.

*

Incidentally, the skis by the speed limit sign never did get picked up by the trash folks. Eventually, they were thrown into the underbrush near the sign, which is just up a hill from the place where I look over at the field with the sycamore tree.

*

There is a row of sycamore trees by the river in the park across the river from the bluffs which are my favorite place to be in town. They are huge, towering, thick bastions whose great slabs of bark could split the top of your head open when they come down on a molt. 

Eagles sometimes build their nests in their highest branches. Hawks nest all around there. The trails take you to places where you can stand high above the world, above the branches where the raptors build their generations and ply their killing drive, above the rivers and bridges and the playgrounds and the fields and the roads. 

Above all that pounded pavement and all those lived-in, worked-in buildings. Above all the shadows being cast.

*

My face is cold. I need to grow a beard. My hair is bothering me, so I ought to shave it down. I wore my hair long for a long time. I've been keeping it tight for a while.

I think we have embarrassingly close relationships with our hair. Even a brutalist or performatively non-performative or minimalistic approach is this whole fucking undeniable thing. 

As for my beard, it mainly reminds me of mortality. 

*

Cool. That's a very believable blog post; totally full of words and images. Chew on that, readers! Masticate! Devour! 

Happy November the seventeenth, everybody. Do your part to bring about peace on earth. Whatever small victory you can score.


--JL