#376

Once in some of the most helpless throes of my drunkenness--my profound, acute alcoholism--I took a sheet of paper and ran it through my typewriter three different ways, writing the word "rape" over and over, sometimes in all caps, sometimes all small, sometimes the word six or seven times with no breaks. Rape straight forwards, rape sideways, rape upside down. I was all alone, my girflriend at the time passed out upstairs. The recall is in flashes, suffused with the feeling of being set on fire over and over, reliving things I didn't let myself fully remember when I was sober until years later.

Years later, a couple of years into our relationship, my ex-fiancee saw this sheet of paper when I was going through old piles of work. She told me that I needed to get into therapy, that the artifact was a deeply disturbing glance into a psyche whose potential implications terrified her. I gave her the conditions and background of its production, and she simply repeated herself and walked away. Then I believe she made herself forget what had just happened, as it never came up again, not then and never in the year-plus of couples therapy I let her drag me into.

It was not uncommon, my lived experiences taking a backseat to something she reflexively intellectualized and would not budge on, as well as reactions and proscriptions her social training had instilled in her. Certainly less common is that we left something like that unaddressed, perhaps unique in the relationship, except of course for everything implied but unsaid and everything left buried, as yet unexhumed. I gave her the last word almost all the time. It was very difficult for me not to. She was rigid, and I wanted her to be comfortable and safe, even if I had to mute my own discomfort or pain. 

Well, we must presume we loved each other as best we could, and try to move along.

*

The preceding section, yesterday's first post, and the increased feelings of insanity and pain (already at high levels) I have referenced very recently have me thinking about that sheet of paper, which is the first archival evidence of the extent to which I was raped, or sexually molested if you like, by an older girl on a school bus. I will allow for a worldview in which men cannot be raped by women, or small boys by girls about to graduate from high school, if you will meet me halfway at sexual molestation, ok? Whatever the fuck you want, I guess. I'll even leave the word "assault" out of it. 

Why have these feelings increased? Because I am currently grappling with a situation in which I feel sexually targeted by a woman who has power over me and that could explode in my face fifty different ways. 

So, that's fucking great and awesome, and not a living nightmare aimed at my worst trauma. It doesn't have me clawing at my own head at all.

*

This is why I personally need universal basic income, and to not have to spend it on essentials; this is part of why I've been hammering at this point. Because having enough to survive on and be sheltered guaranteed is more than enough for me to be able to truly contribute the best of myself to society, without having to expose myself to to these kinds of situations. It should be said somehwere if it hasn't been already: what we are talking about when we are talking about materially providing for universal human rights that include the bottom of Maslow's pyramid--safety (which in a world of capital must include financial safety), nutrition, and shelter--is not just ease or the reduction of unjust pressures on the masses that serve to enrich the already enriched. We are talking about freedom. We are talking about ordinary people not being subject to systems and processes that are set up to give one person power over another in a way that they cannot escape because nutrition and shelter supersede safety. Why do you think so fucking many reported and ureported assaults go down at work or school?

Let us be safe, let us have our basic needs regardless of what some employer thinks they should get out of us for the sake of the shareholder, and we will be able to protect ourselves and simply go somewhere where we are not treated like chattel, where our bodies and our minds are not considered property at the disposal of those who can buy and sell us. Make that power dynamic rare to the vanishing point. 

Fucking just let us stand up. Just take the boot off our necks, and it will be ok. I say it will be ok because if we are pushed to the point where we have get it off ourselves, when we do, we will not put the boot on your necks. We will break your back like a snake in a yard, and we will kill you where you lie. It doesn't matter if some Napoleon comes along after the Terror. That's for us to deal with. You'll be guillotined. We'll see who's glib about living through history when you're the one one your fucking knees with the blade hanging over your neck.

*

Maybe it's not a good idea to post that? But I'm fucking gonna. I have to. I'm just a man in his special bathtub, scribbling, and if I get stabbed, I get stabbed.

Yeah, I'm not about the rehabilitation of the French nobility in modern historiography. Fuck a monarch. Fuck a landed class. It was a fucked up mess that went too far, but it doesn't change the fact that they got what was coming.

Too much historical writing is about sucking power's dick in the name of "stability". Well, that's only how you feel in your cushy little office. Most of us have never lived in anything like a stable world, and that wealthy people developed a cattle class as a buffer between themselves and the slave class is a trick that has run its course, especially because that vaunted "stability" was nothing but a public relations cloak draped over the imminent total collapse of all world systems. And the motherfuckers driving that collapse are types of organisms who think themselves safe and protected from all that, but there are only a very few of them, despite the size of their material and textual footprint, despite the loudness of their voices, despite the fact that there a hundreds of millions of meatpuppets willing to echo those voices out of fear or delusion.

So for fuck's sake, man. Get lost with this idea that enormous companies steered by sociopaths have made the world better by destroying nature. Get lost with this interpretation of the statistics that tells you that everyone is happier, safer, and better-fed than ever in history. That's the cloak. That's the PR. That, if you want to understand it with full viscerality, is the lubricated condom used to penetrate this world and fuck it to death. They told you they would free you because they wanted to use you, because they wanted you to be complicit, and that is how they frame their justifications: I was satisfying demand. I was providing. I was working harder than you.

A whore gets money and safety from a pimp, until they're thrown into the street used up, or simply murdered. Do you get this comparison. Do you understand.  

*

Sure, we got some nice things out of it; the computer I'm typing on, the books that surround me as I type, the video games downstairs. But it was a loan, the interest was undisclosed, and now that it's come due fifty times higher than we were led to even imagine, it will be almost impossible to pay it off. So where do we get the money? Or, how do we make it go away? 

If you're able to answer this question from a position of power, I suggest you do it now, at the cost of some of that power, which I know is scary. But necessary, because an answer will have to be forthcoming, and it will be much, much scarier if we have to come up with it ourselves. 

It won't be organized. It won't be the revolution of the proletariat, which you're not scared of because you know it's bullshit. It will be instinctive ape action. It will be an animal at its most dangerous--wounded, panicked, desperate to survive.

--JL

#369

Triple sixty-nine. Hilarious. Also known as the Isosceles Lock.

*

Man, you know what I hate? The only thing, object, phenomena I really actually in all seriousness hate, besides hatred itself? Money.

Folks, I fucking hate money. I hate that stuff. I'm coming out as saying I was born with a suspicion around the concept, my childhood grew thick with further doubts about the stuff, and ever since I was a teenager, I have just plain fucking hated that shit. I hate money so much that I'm trembling slightly.

As will inevitably happen with hatred, money hates me back. Good! Screw that nonsense. So my life is more difficult. Maybe that's the price I'm comfortable paying in a world that fucks the shit out of itself for money.

*

I don't want any more money than I have, and I could stand to have less. What I want is to not need money to stay alive. I think that in this day and age that is fucking insane. I know I talked about this pretty recently, but it's the first month of a new year. A ripe time to call stridently for what is needed in the future, to start great works. 

Take the necessities of life off the market and provide them universally to every living human. Provide scientific endeavor the funding you provide the military-industrial complex--we need next-level globally applicable materials and energy options faster and more completely than we're getting them. Weapons are something we have enough of, I should think; I know the people who make billions of dollars crafting weapons would beg to differ, but somehow, I don't trust their testimony. We need to go Bio-Coruscant* if we don't want that Road Warrior shit.

Everything else can continue as the luxuries market, where motherfuckers can destroy themselves and everything that makes them human for imaginary gains all they want if that's their blue heaven--as long as they can prove sustainable and not planet-killing, since not having that will destroy us all anyway.**

Give me the option to stay out of it, and live a simpler, more peaceful life in the knowledge that my having it doesn't deny anyone else their chance for theirs. 

*

Doesn't that sound ok? Fuck, man, you'd think I was asking people to eat a plate of raw dicks. 

"What about my riiiiiights?" Bitch, you simped those away a long time ago and I'm not saying I want to take more. I'm saying we need to sort out the basic shit before we worry about getting you your own gold crapper like the one Donald Trump uses to help himself convince himself he's worth a tinker's damn. 

"What about logiiiiistics?" Do you seriously mean to tell me that with the worldwide circus of mental gymnastics and indecipherable riddles that is the current state of economies, currencies, supply chains, trade--if that somehow grinds on, built with no plan and cobbled together in motion ever with an eye out to allow grifters and thieves to ply their wicked trades, we can't design something better on purpose that works towards reasonable equity and the material advancement of the species, rather than its degradation and self-destruction?

Probably not? Fine, whatever. A man can shit his dreams into whatever hat he likes, though, and this is mine. 

--JL

*this is an idea I have played around with in my head for a long time about how we could shrink human-occupied space on Earth while increasing quality of life for all humans and achieving optimal harmony between human and nonhuman biospheres. This could eventually become a project that is holistically entwined with the maximum possible planetary surface, a fully symbiotic relationship with Terra. Hence, Bio-Coruscant, credit to George Lucas. I also think of the Chozo, from Metroid, as an interesting model, and the Forerunners from the Halo universe. Look 'em up if you care. 

**I get that the game with some of these shitty little pigs is to survive the anthropocalypse and define the new postdiluvian world as gods, progenitors of Human 3.0. They're playing a game they don't understand, but if we let them win, I guess that doesn't matter; we won't be around to raise objections or point out their failures. And time will roll on with all our dusty bones in its wake. But here, now, I say fuckem. That's all the power I have? Fuckem anyway. Regulate these assholes. Fuckin write a new book to throw at them. Consider that a formal request to whom it may concern.

#366

Well, letting it rest on 365 for a bit was nice. 366 is a cool number in its ow right, in many ways cooler than 365, at least to me. Without the context of what we know about elliptical orbits and the arbitrary decision to measure time by them, I wouldn't care a jot for 365. 366 though, that's a dope number. Three followed by two copies of its double. Multiplying each digit in sequence gives you 108, whose digits add up to 9, a number very closely entwined with 3 and 6. It is also the 9th multiple of 12--a number closely entwined with 3, 6, and 9--so dividing it by 12 makes 9. I don't know why stuff like that is so effin rad to me, but it always has been.

The rules of how to write out numbers in writing are important, but I give myself permission to eschew them at least partially whenever I do the type of paragraph that precedes here. This type of paragraph is a whole thing with Factually Pointless. Search for posts with numbers in the tags, and be amazed by more of this content than you ever dreamed you'd need, or existed, probably!

*

Sequentially speaking, since I'm not gonna write about sports today, Factually Sportsmanlike 2024 is over--for now. When the time comes, maybe soon, Factually Musical 2024 will retain is week-long posting space, but for things like Factually Sportsmanlike--any type of subject to be featured in a specific way--will have an establishing sequential trial run and then be available to feature whenever I chose, perhaps as a one-off, perhaps for a short run. Factually Musical may eventually roll out this way, too. 

Of course, I might write about anything at any time. The features are about how focused a post must be on its subject and how that might be amplified or played with in the overall structure of the one post and the posts around it. Any one ordinary post might contain subject matter fit for multiple features, but is not a feature, per se. 

*

Both Golden Sun games for the game boy advance are playable on the switch online, and as one whose very first complete RPG experience was, in fact, Golden Sun, this is delicious. I delight in revisiting them at these screen sizes and resolutions, and even more in the idea that a new generation of gamers will be able to enjoy them. They are pure artistic and mechanical joy, amazing art, shape language, color stories, gorgeous light and particle effects, battle summons whose whole graphical pachage defy the machine's limitations, everything. A way of using the pixel to sculpt three-dimensionality with a smoothness rarely achieved. And dudes, the fucking music. It's just some of the best music written for any games ever. Period. At eleven years old, I sank hours into plunking away at a keyboard, transcribing the theme music. I would go to the overworld and just lie down with my headphones plugged into my GBA, blissing out on the composition, the astonishing painterliness achieved with the midi tones.

They are simple and workmanlike games on one level--lotta these puzzles are gonna feel rote and characteristic before too long, though for every few dull repeats and going back to square one, there's memorably interesting and devious ones--but they explode with such character, beauty, and contain such surprising depths: djinn mechanics and the choices around them, summons and class builds, and a special profundity in the characterization of people moving through a living, changing world. The huge story rolls out with a confidence in itself and an ambition that is almost unwarranted, but pay themselves off and deliver incredible finales. 

*

Ok, I'm hungry. Then I gotta do school shit. Have not been as diligent as I expected myself to be, despite completing all my work and doing well so far. What I need is to both chill more and work harder, or maybe smarter. HA! What I need is universal basic income, healthcare, shelter, and nutrition. It is incredible how low our bar is for calling ourselves a modern, scientific society. Fucking pathetic. I give us an F. F for fuck that. Everything I just said is cheap, both literally and if you just decide it is. 

I'll say it here, and I'll repeat it whenever I can: the role of government as we have understood it is done. All it can hope do to now, the only way to save itself from being supplanted entirely by the corporate ecosystem which already wields greater powers, is to become a bunker for the people. It must provide the basics of life--roof over the body, food on the table, and the doctor whenever you need it, FOR FREE, plus money in the pocket so you can go always, without fail, go out and give at least some of it to the corporations, so you can be that nomadic dollar that bleeding-edge capitalism needs you to be. Let people try to get rich, whatever. Let them lose everything, but never their basics. Let everyone have the basics. I know that if you allow yourselves to look at it as math problem, and prorate those effects honestly, you will know that I am right. You will know it can be done, and you will come up with the logistics. 

Infrastructure? Man, incentivize it somehow, make a pool rule, and have the six or seven biggest companies foot the bill. Shit, you could rebuild every city in the world sharpish on the same tip. 

Need more money? Fucking print it. More labor? Fucking pay for it with the money you just printed. Get it done, get some actual shit done, and figure out the rest later.  

Punch up as hard as you can now or get killed in the tenth round. Up to you.

--JL