#347

Man, information. That's some fucked up drugs right there. 

Wishing to retain for myself the most neutral possible starting-point for analysis, I try to limit my daily informational intake, and I try to stick to sources that present their information professionally, source it properly, and provide various perspectives and contrasting commentary as well as a broad assortment of material in writing. One should not listen to people say the news if one can at all avoid it, in my opinion. I also regularly check sources and aggregates I know are ridiculous or obscurantist, so as to remain informed about those varieties of jargon and mindset. Least often, grudgingly, understanding that a lot of people read or watch their news and understand their worlds thereby strictly from materials provided by either msnbc news or fox news, with everybody referencing to cnn news when they're feeling broadminded--in other words, sources which make obscurantism blush--I take a look at what they're up to.

Visiting these nightmare websites this morning, as I do every few months because it is important to see what techniques corporate overlords are using on the news as part of their communications warfare, I am amazed as always, even shocked, at the naked brigandry, the boorishness of their techiques. 

Saw the word "bogus" in two separate headlines on msnbc--is that seriously how motherfuckers edit over there? The entire website bristles with attacks on a bewildering variety of fronts and moral postures, shame running a bright common thread through it all. It's a temple to the pointed finger, to the shrill note that sings in the voice when one is angry to be disagreed with by someone they believe less intelligent, less morally developed than themselves.

The fox news flow is like a hallucination, naked pyschology, not much content. Like experiencing a paranoid delusion firsthand. Larger type, headlines only, less targeted fury, a broader outrage, like a beast whose flank is pierced by arrows breathing fire into the air. Each headline a little angry blast on a cornet or the pleading grief of a fife.

Father to both and cynical heir to their innovations, cnn roars like the one and stings like the other, insinuates and declares and allows headlines whose syntax is built to make head-nodding sense to acolytes and make the outsider cock their head at an angle and squint their eyes. 

These motherfuckers are becoming churches. That's all I'm trying to say. Creepy churches.

*

Dang, I really bum myself out. This is why I adress the concrete matters of the world less and less on the blog. My insights offer me no comfort, and serve as a fairly mealy form of entertainment. 

Read Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alice Wong recently, not a planned book but a very excellent read. Other than that, reading has been mostly in service of school of late. It really does happen like that. I fight it, but the battle is indeed uphill.

Best wishes, dear reader. It's foggy today, that's pretty cool. 

--JL

#213

Boy oh boy, people of Earth. It is such a time to be alive. 

Often as I walk to and fro I am reminded, because of my propensity for inhaling smoke on purpose (really? Think about it. Really? What a stupid fucking monkey is a man) how amazing it is that the air is still breathable at all. Dirty enough, though. I can tell shit is worse because cities smell like shit. Cities always have, but man, my sense of smell has only gotten worse and less sensitive as I have aged, and I think every city, every town, smells way way worse than in 1995. Man, I went to New York a few years ago, and I never in my life want to go back. Talk about a location that is its own brand of ordure with every step you take. New Yorkers are a proud people, and rightfully so; it is possible that no other city in the world presents such a complex assault on each and every sense the human body possesses, and to be a part of the tradition that has brought about such a state of affairs is surely the province of a powerful culture. God love the place and all, but I wanted to sink down to its bedrock and die there, where there is nothing to smell at all. 

Anyhow, we'll get the turtles, and the crocodiles, some other shit that made it since practically the start of the game, but the algaes and the jellies and the sightless worms that feed on heat in the places where only human beings have ever brought visible light are all going to be fine. This planet has way many life cycles left in it, way many, and we do not matter. Try to live your best life. Fight! Be brave, because courage is more significant than life; or, courage is what makes life significant. The symbol is more than the paper and the ink. We've gone down into the impossible crushing dark and fucked the moon up with our dirty feet; what more could you ask for?

Oh, you want to spread, like a dang virus. Ok, we who live in the Philip K. Dick present will determine how bad the Ridley Scott future can be. Let's play the game. Let us... extrapolate.

*

Almost finished with The Running Man. After I complete it--after its clock runs down, so to speak--I'll probably eat chocolate and watch a movie. Those are the decisions I make in the face of the sixth extinction, as democracy dies in the darkness or some other thundering bullshit an asshole sells.

*

Today I looked at the news and found myself unable to parse the headline. It meant less than nothing to me; it was composed of words I knew, each of them I knew, but together, in the order that they made, they became less than themselves, the reflection inside of a box made of mirrors. Pictures of Donald Trump's face in close-up--really only that, for about a fucking minute, as the headline blared the void itself. I have no idea what the voice-over was saying. It was all extremely grotesque, like licking green furry mold off a log of watery cheese. Sometimes bad tastes can actually cause your tongue to feel like it has withered, withered like a dead flower. Ever experienced that? Think of my brain as a tongue. Think of your own brain as tongue, and watch what you put in your mouth. 

My mom tried to explain it to me. I consider myself a decent presence of mind, on a good day if I'm paying close attention, and all I got was that Donald Trump talked on the phone, and what he said might have been illegal. I almost died of a surprise-induced coronary, I did. Look: if that dude made a promise to somebody, that person is getting fleeced. Bouncing memos about what a criminal says to other criminals--be real; these potentates are each and every last one all washed head to toe with blood, from the meanest to the most exalted, and they all lie to each other and to their lying coworkers and to their real bosses and especially to us--and calling it something to pay attention to? Someone marked the memo urgent. Well holy fucking shit.

Man, I'm glad we can get an economy to run around this kind of bullshit. I'm glad someone's getting paid to run the worst rigged game show, contemptuously scribbled by the most cynical writers on the planet. 

I paid extremely close attention to all sorts of news for a few years there. If you're on that tip, have fun while you can, before you pay close enough attention to see the seams.

*

Before I forget, today I bought volumes 14 and 15 of One Punch Man. Also The Legend of Zelda: Encyclopedia, companion volume to The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, which has been a jewel in my collection since it hit the shelves. They look so fucking handsome together that I want to take my last shit and drop dead. I'm serious. The latter deepest, richest green, green of the fathers of all firs, the former a blue whose royalty humbles Royal. The heft of them, their smooth, velvety covers, the astonishing image quality, the wild, rich, somehow fleshly scent of their pages, deep in their centers...

Man, I love making pornography of conspicuous consumption. I love being an American. And I fucking love having sexy books. Used books are also exceedingly sexy, but sometimes ripping the plastic off a coffee table book you actually want and being the first living thing to smell it is like having a new woman. Bam. I fucking said that, and I mean it.

Have a beautiful evening. Yes books are yonic and yes the brain is phallic and yes that interpenetration is the perfect balancing of sexual energy because reading is fucking and being fucked, like all good things, especially fucking, and writing*.


--JL

*I discussed this quite recently. I should give in and read more of Peter Sloterdijk's books. I have mentioned this also, I think. If you allow it to be, Peter Sloterdijk's name is both phallic and yonic, but if you've gone that far, it's phallic twice.

#19

I just want to know--when has it not been hard times on this old planet? It's never! Everybody's always dying in incredible numbers for obscure philosophical and theological reasons, from savage politics and needless wars, and the very earth's wanton and incomparable destructive power. It's normal, and it always costs a lot of fucking money.

Oh! Everybody saying it's worse now than ever is also something that has been said the entire time. Better now than ever, too.

I saw the news a little on TV this week. I haven't had a TV in a very long time, and it was a very, very strange reacclimatization. It was hard, but in just a few short sessions, I didn't know what the fuck was going on, or what the fuck I was talking about--but I knew that what I knew was of incredible national importance.


--JL