#493

I am extremely happy in my room. My room is a place that fills up steadily with works of art that please me in their execution and completion. The walls are green in here. I have Pokémon stickers and pictures of birds and animals and landscapes scavenged from a number of those paper calendars nature conservancy societies send people all over. The carpet is shitty, but who cares about that. Just means no need for stress about getting paint on it.

Frankly, it's so good that leaving my room is something of an imposition under any given circumstance, but when I am forced to, at least I am still in my house, which is another place I am extremely happy. The house has improved immensely since we moved in, both aesthetically and in terms of functioning elements. The real issues begin when I have to leave the house, but that's more psychological than anything to do with any real problems out there, except bright headlights, poisoned air, and maniacs with easy access to a variety of killing machines (including that two-ton missile attached to each set of those hellaciously bright headlamps).

Every biosphere has its hazards, and each of its residents must deal with their multitudes in their due portion. So it goes.

*

There was a serious fuckton of law enforcement on my street today; yea, right up close to two houses down. Also the house directly across the street. State police, local city, sherriff, and even a car from a different city. Plus a few city trucks and an unmarked white van. Wuuuuut? Nobody liked that.

Pretty much missed what it was all about, though I did infer that it was two separate municipal tasks rolled into one so as to facilitate the whole process; a more complete show of force benefiting both. That's all the commentary I have, I guess, except that there is simply no way for a reasonable person to feel at ease of any kind of with the amount of firepower represented by those vehicles in proximity.

Moments like that--though to be fair I have been thinking about this a lot recently apropos of nothing--one really meditates on how purely symbolic the shelter one is provided with at my economic strata. If anything went wrong on my street and bullets started flying, any one slug could pass through probably up to three houses, maybe a lot more, maybe less depending the caliber and what might impede one. You would not have to ransack the black market to secure rounds which could easily pass through my wall, me, my back wall, my back neighbor's wall, and still hit my neighbor. Because our walls are, for all intents and purposes, made of paper. I can throw a baseball into one and it will stick. Maybe fully knock a hole. I don't really know how hard I can throw a baseball, but I am confident it would stick.

Like I was saying before. Maniacs, of all levels and descriptions, are a serious problem in this environment, all the more so due to their access to tools designed to do nothing but kill as efficiently as possible, and their propensity to cut corners until there is nothing but a dirty knife.

*

Anyway, I like my house and I like my neighborhood but it could all be more durable and sustainable and set in a much, much better society, as far as I can assess. That is the breakdown. You might say that I am wrong to criticize a society as the beneficiary of its mechanisms, and it may be so to a certain extent, but identical as well as superior formats could exist under a wide variety of such sets and norms as call themselves societies, so I don't see why I shouldn't ask for better. 

As a tax-paying citizen under the terms of our particular constitutions and parameters, asking for better, it was always my understanding, was to be the whole point.

Noplace was ever the kingdom of heaven merely because people declared it to be so. 

*

Events even more current and specific, yet sociopolitical commentary even more abstract. Hopefully by next post I will be fully buried in my navel once again, and the world will not present as even so much as a dull roar. It is not really my place to be useful here. The blog is not "the news" or "useful opinions". The blog is "factually pointless". This is how it should be.

Till then, dear reader. My task these days is to find a way to generate income and maintain sanity. Simple things, maybe, but my ability to rise to them by no means certain. Faith and hope! Courage, and to screw it to the sticking-place! That's all we got.

--JL

#484

Comin' up on it now, boi. That five hunnit. More posts will have to be written than even back in January, which holds seventeen, but fewer than in April. It looks like I wrote thirty-two posts this April? Don't even remember that. I'll go read April now.

*

Uh. Wow. Something was up. I'm not sure what! But something was fucking up April 2024. 

Blogger couldn't even show the whole month in one scroll. It's a lot of posts, sure. Some are short. But some are not short. They're fucking long!

That's my first impression. Kinda scared to actually read it.

*

Ok. I was doing a thing, a thirty-posts-for April thing. A thing that apparently helped save my life yet again. Damn. Completely forgot.

Those are some good posts. April and May may be high-water marks for the blog in some key ways.

*

Every time I consider quitting or destroying this blog I am somehow reminded that starting it saved my life, and that at various junctures in the following years, it has done so again. 

That's the kind of return on an activity that makes up for a host of costs and depravities. Makes a person almost superstitious about stopping! Haha. Ha.

*

Well, we'll see where I'm at with things once we hit 500 posts, seven years old, and six years active. New Year's, basically. 

--JL

#403

Oh! Man! Dude! From a couple of days ago, I forgot to stress why it is even a matter of consequence that motherfuckers want to agree that the universe we live in isn't real: because it is a profitable concept to entertain while it is made into a reality. They want you to believe you are in the Matrix so that you will heartily and with great pleasure acquiesce--perhaps even demand!--that they put you in an actual Matrix and use you as a cell in a giant battery like for fucking reals. 

They want you to think nothing is real so you won't care as they process every resource on the planet to sustain their vast empires, machines which exist in and of themselves on a different-than-human scale and which will cast us off as husks, if we allow ourselves to fill the role of mere vessels--NPC's--rather than living beings.

Simpler and shorter term: they want to fuck you and have you think you're getting yours. They want you not to look or care while they make the world hideous and sacrifice everything beautiful and valuable about it and its features and its life for no good reason except giving them the win, because the bastardized cucks are only able to give a fuck about making numbers go up.

Fuck them. The world is real. Their fake bullshit is real too, in a sense, but there is a difference. The real world is anyone's game. They want everybody to play the game they wrote the rules for, and come on now. Be real with yourself. They didn't go to the trouble of it just to build a better world and then efface themselves entirely. Look at the fucking money getting thrown around and how and why it's getting spent. It's another round of colonization, the ephemeral-made-digital wet dream of the same mindset that wants to keep building highrises and mcmansions until this bitch is nothing but highrises and mcmansions--Grand Canyon so full of highrises they stretch into the sky, so many mcmansions there's never gonna be a fucking rainforest ever again. Except in this case they build nothing, and you give them everything. You are the resource, your time, your attention, your volition, your capacity and ability to look around and think, the entire potential energy of your individuality completely subsumed into their profit engines.

It might not matter, sure, what the fuck. Everything's the same. But it could. It probably should.

*

Also I just saw my first butterfly of the season. A real thing that I value and treasure. May I always be able to discern this simple truth, for as long as I keep making it alive to another springtime. 

--JL

#269

Oh, depression. Oh, the will to death. How does one say it in German? There was once a blog of invented words for real feelings. I will search for it now. 

*

Ah, yes. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Seems it is not only text onscreen, but a hardcover book, which reached that bestseller list published by that main newspaper. This is very cheering; I fully expected to find nothing but vague references and one of those shell websites trying to direct you towards buying fake plane tickets. 

Anyway, depression, but sometimes something weird and fantastic and necessary and, INDEED, obscure, does not vanish in your wake like so much else, and stays. One of the counter spells that makes survival in the face of depression and existential angst possible and durable.

Idly but consistently thinking about durability these days. The concept, its applications. Nothing concentrated, many wide-ranging and useless thoughts. This is my favorite kind of thinking. Doing my favorite kinds of thinking instead of the more practical varieties is another thing that makes surviving depression possible. 

*

Losing my computer to its own lack of decent durability, software and hardware-wise alike, and being unable to replace it when it breaks or transfer the contents to a new box has been a real fuckin problem in life. It's happened once during the course of this blog, which I touched on in due course, but that was merely the latest chapter in a whole sordid section of the JL Encyclopedia. 

Ugh. I am not deleting that last sentence in order to try and teach myself a lesson.

*

The first family computer I can remember using was a Macintosh Quadra, no idea which and I really don't want to talk to my folks about jack shit right now so who knows. Definitely a Quadra model, though. I played Kid Pix and Thinkin' Things on that machine, and nothing else. The years were 1993 and 1994. The builds of those computer programs were fucking badass back then; later versions of Kid Pix always felt too smooth to me, like they'd taken away a cool toy and given me back something similar in shape but covered in padded foam. It's who I am as a person, clearly; most people think internet has actually gotten better. Either I'm just a retrograde lunatic and have been since I was a baby, or almost all originally cool shit has to get warped and ruined beyond all recognition in the direction of stupidity verging on intentional evil due to, I don't fucking know, the influence of Ahriman. I didn't even need to look at a single frame of the so-called Cowboy Bebop "reboot", "remake"--whatever the fuck they wanted to call that organ of cultural rape--to know the score.

Thinkin' Things aesthetic and gameplay got worse with the next version release and I couldn't look at it anymore. Forced to leave childish things behind and having rehashed the material within Mega Math Blaster, The Hunchback of Notre Dame game from Disney Interactive, and Reader Rabbit 2 to exhaustion, I moved on to Duke Nukem 3D. Guess some people played Oregon Trail or something at that age, but I had kind of a fucked-up childhood in some ways. 

*

Aside: my contemporaries and I went straight from Lincoln Logs and that ancient phone toy that made a cameo appearance in Toy Story 3--you know the one, the original Fisher Price Chatter Phone--to computer programs, and we were the second or third wave of kids and teens on internet. I don't think my parents, or anyone's parents, were prepared for this event in childrearing, but almost every one of my contemporaries, even the stupidest pieces of shit, were smarter in key ways than their parents by incredible margins, even the scientist parents. It's just how we grew up. From this we may derive that my own offspring will process me as hyperefficient biofuel before they turn eight, and that's just evolution, baby. Up the children. May I be utilized in order to be surpassed by significant margins in every metric.

*

The next computer in the house was a Compaq Presario, which makes plenty of sense. It was the mid-nineteen-nineties and we had just moved to the U.S.A., and Compaq was first among equals in the PC revolution. I have no idea what models the computers were at the computer lab in my first U.S. elementary school, but they were dependable and very usable machines. I started to learn Python on those computers; that great little turtle.

Woof! History truly is crazy. Look at computers now! The ubiquity, the gleam, the power! I miss those gray boxes designed by those Texas Instruments men. I miss that they whined like jet engines and got hotter than the devil's taint just to read a CD-ROM. I miss only pixels, no one even imagining the concept of the Retina display I'm looking at as I type this (hilarious that retina gets capitalized automatically in this context. Someday, in the future, we will not be able to publish a single thing in "our own words" without auto-signing a dozen agreements about how they're not our words, they are a company's words).

At my Catholic school later in the nineties when we had moved back to Venezuela for awhile, the computer lab was outfitted with IBM PC's from 1981 or even before, I don't fuckin know. In this case, when I say PC, I may not mean personal computer, but the older conception of portable computer. If they read floppy discs, that was a recent breakthrough at date of production. I remember the point of the class was to make them process typing into word display and perform input on very basic equations. The screens were uniformly black and white, expressing only straight lines.

The next year, back in the 'States, they herded me into the computer labs at the more upper-crust elementary school where I did fifth grade and I was confronted with serried ranks of pink iMacs. I don't remember what they tried to teach us, if anything. This gave me much to think about, at the time. 

Dude, the mouses on those iMacs sucked, in my personal assay. Fancy lasers my ass.

*

My first internet thing was visiting the Animorphs website for the games and blog and boards and chat rooms (the chat rooms were too rich for my bandwidth, but I read about them elsewhere). A heady time, these early internet message boards for teens, and of course, snotty little punks reading above their weight. The Scholastic website, to which the Animorph's website naturally swore fealty, was a pretty good website. You could market, but you couldn't sell directly or monetize advertisement yet, so the content was mostly just good and descriptive stuff about kid lit and intermediate lit and all the other literature that's better than Literature. Plus, when it came to the flagship titles and series, interactive stuff crafted before online interactivity carried the price of your immortal soul, like the Animorphs flash games.

Oh yeah, triple-A Flash games, in the times well before Flash games could pop up and steal your data after you managed to shoot the monkey or whatever the fuck, which was well before actual quality FG aggregators or the recognized quality of stuff like Puzzle Pirates.

*

Remembering shit can be fucking exhausting. I guess that's Classic Aging, folks. It gets to feel like so much stuff happened, how could it even be true? Certainly there's no way to remember. World memory--durable? No. No, all this could easily be gone and forgotten again, and a new world of men might rise higher than we ever managed to over the unseen ruins of this near-failure of ours. Those humans might never look down, never know that we were here, except in the origins of their oldest stories--tales of a technological godlessness cast down for its reeking hubris.

Yes, I am saying that we are Atlantis 2.0 and we are obviously a worse and shittier program than Atlantis 1.0, which dovetails with my earlier observations concerning programs. For whatever that is worth (less than zero probably).

*

This has been Computers Day here on FP, I guess. Next time I'll try to finish this and talk more about whatever I talked about last time, but you know how I am, dear reader.

Be well, and be good, be virtuous and true, and if it gets you nowhere and you get fucked over and killed, at least you'll be in happy company.

--JL

#158

You know, I like number one hundred and fifty-seven a lot. Couldn't think of anything about it in particular yesterday, but it's a cool number. It's just cool. I bet there's lots of reasons why, there always are, but I just feel like it is cool. A cool cat. 157.

*

Definitely one of those days where it's very hard to be alive. Very hard to have a body and be in it.

*

Well, what are ya gonna do.

Me, I write poems. Then I throw them in the garbage or consign them to flame or digitally destroy any evidence that they ever existed. Put one of my feet in front of the other foot, then put the second foot in front of the first foot.

Go on like that for a while.  

It is amazing that anything survives.


--JL

#134

Something special about yesterday's post number that I neglected to mention is that one plus three plus three is seven, which is great, also that 133 is very visually pleasing in itself, a shapely and very soothing number. Saying one hundred and thirty three out loud provides an excellent cadence. Could be used in place of a mantra.

*

There is a huge, ruinous willow tree near my house. When my family first moved into the neighborhood it was hale and hulking out of its boundaries; more alive, huger, more treeish than reality could allow for, but you could see it almost, how there was more willow than tree. Living sigil. First and strongest among kings of willows.

Disease ripped through it and it has lost more than half of itself. Nearly all of its old crown, two boles, and a good portion of the main trunk rotted and sloughed off, came down in hard weather, withered away to fine brown dust. A tree whose leaves and pendulous branches were once so thick and numerous they created an elongated curtain dome thirty feet in diameter to hide under, hands parting branches for three seconds before you could enter the sanctuary, now sports leafage on one side only, from a meager set of stunted branches.

What limbs remain are full of woodpecker holes, many enlarged by starlings, scarred by the ravages of the illness that nearly destroyed it, and give the tree the impression of a stagger, as the remaining limb system was once but one of four mighty tops.

I've thought the tree was going to die for sure this time at least fifteen times. No one bothers about it. There has been no treatment or care. It has fought for its life alone and unaided and still it puts out flowers every spring, still it reaches up into the air. Brutalized, shrunk, weakened, still it breathes and sinks its roots and reaches toward the sky, straining for its life.


--JL