#517

Christmas is my favorite time of the year in many ways, but it is not without its pain and suffering. This 24th I woke up with the leaden feeling, proximal to premonition, that this may well be, if not my personal Final Christmas, the last one my family will have together. It faded by the afternoon, but it was not a good morning. 

I do not want to comment on the state of the world in this space anymore. It is not good for my sanity, nor indeed any part of my well-being. But this feeling was related to the state of the world.

Because it fucking sucks. Because hell is empty, and devils prance and cavort in all their hideous strength before our eyes, seemingly with perfect impunity (killing one or any of them, such as with a bullet through the throat [for an example appropos of nothing at all] accomplishes nothing except aggravating the situation). Describing the process and railing against it also changes nothing, however, except perhaps my blood pressure and overall resilience for the worse.

What do we need? There is no remedy. If I understand history, all that can ever happen is the process taking its murderous, hateful toll, a process which inevitably sows even more demonic seeds, or dragon's teeth, if you prefer. The wheel is greased with blood and pain, the motor fueled by avarice and fear.

So it goes. I've said it before. So it fucking goes. Ting-a-motherfucking-ling.

Better to pretend there is no outside world. 

Better to think about nothing. Or trivial shit. 

*

Also ever since my last 'vid vaxx, my ticker's been feeling bad. Like, who the fuck knows how many more flexes it has left to give, is the feeling, but not as many as I might like to enjoy. That or the valves or aorta or something. But apparently not going to the doctor carries a terrible momentum; doubt that I will experience medical care again without first enjoying the pleasures of the kind emergency room visit that races against the doom clock.

Guess I'd rather experience a catastrophe before dealing with needless, infuriating bullshit rather than dealing with that bullshit up front. Guess that's the kind of person I've become. Screamingly illogical, concussed, foolish, childish, bullheaded, yes, yes; but apparently fixed.

This bad feeling has been more or less persistent since June.

Well, who gives a fuck what I cough up or how my breathing is. Who gives a shit about my liver or intestines. Let that gross nonsense be between God and myself, and no others.

Death is inevitable, but debt can be refused. 

*

Come the new year I will amuse myself with telling you a lot of saved-up ideas in the form of many Factual Projects for 2026. Factually Musical, yes, plenty of that, as well as other sequels and entries on previously-explored avenues, but also many more unbroached topics and fresh approaches. No  more booklists, for example; time for Factually Literate to bring its piquant notions to bear. Factually Cinematic? Why not! All these prospects excite me. It will be good to type some notions again.

Strap in. For what, in actual realization, I am not certain.

--JL

#420

Hoho! Wow! Post four hundred and twenty! Get the fuck out, that's so fuckin stupid.

Weed! It's what's for breakfast! It's what's for before breakfast.

*

Gah, how this world spins! And it keeps on spinnin'. Not to mention the movement itself--so fast! So fuckin' fast! 

You've never known what it is to be travelling thirty kilometers a fuckin second. Except you always are.

*

I'd like to find a card table today. If I could find two, that would be a dream come true. The third part of this dream is that both tables cost no money. Can you simply imagine? How about this: if I go out today and find what I'm looking for, the reader must reconsider their position of the existence of the unseen (faeries, yokai, etc.) if that position has not been reconsidered in some time. I expect research and open-minded meditation.

Of course I will too! I'm doing it right now. I take an open mind fuckin serious. 

That usually means I've got like twenty paradoxes shoved up my ass, rendering me immobile. But it's better than being too damn sure of myself, amirite boys? I know that much.

*

So what? What about it? 

All anyone can do is take in the data available to our singular perspectives and build our individual worlds with it. The world we build is related to the world as it is, but it is not that world. No one holds that world in their mind. They can't. It isn't like that. No one can understand the world, let alone the universe. No matter what we discover about it, how much of it we reveal and represent and are, we cannot understand even our own neighborhoods completely. We do not even know our friends, our families, or ourselves.

We are worlds too complex, vast, and unmappable for that. Plus, it is infinite, all the way out and all the way in, all the way up and all the way down, all the way around in every way that can be found. Infinite you, infinite me, infinite infinities embedded in infinity.

Hey, man. All we can do is the best with what we got. Can't blame anyone. That's what it means to be equally guilty before one another and before all that is, and that is the key to the letting go: to freedom. 

*

PEACE

--JL

#417

A furtive guilt nags at me when I consider how much I enjoy extremely hot weather. It leaps to the fore when I read about how drought is driving millions and millions of people into food-insecure and unsafe conditions. How much food got thrown in the fucking garbage last year? 

As a matter of fact, it gives me decent guilt just to be typing when I know there are people running from gangs and cartels and inexorably advancing armies, that they don't get to keep their houses, that they don't have money for shit and nowhere to buy it, and here I stand. Even if I only have five dollars in my wallet and debt and whatever the fuck else, it's not fair. It's not fair that I should look upon a peaceful, well-feed street of housed and clothed people, because it is literally at the expense of others. It is built upon their backs. It is provided by a system that relies on creating and sustaining conditions of inequality. 

Do I sould like a child when I say that it's not fair?

Good.

My instinct has always been this, and never deviated: none of us should sit easy while there exist those with less than us. I was born on a capital city located just barely north of the Equator--the global south, what was once known as the third world. A democracy, but an unstable one after a string of dictators. There, I lived way up in a tall building while hundreds of thousands of children not ten miles away lived in a carpet of hovels; slums like nothing that exists north of the Rio Grande. Now it's dictators again. I live up here in the U.S., now, first world par excellence, first world with a raging erection and a finger in every pie on the planet--and we might have ourselves a dictator soon. 

Life, huh! It is nothing but a fucking joke.

Anyway.

When something is not fair, we can't just shrug. I knew it was simply not fair, simply inexcusable, that I lived in a building while other kids had to live in slums. I was not wrong. I still feel that way. Children are correct. Things being fair and equitable--it's not some childish thing, some unrealistic pipe dream. That they are not, after all this having of civilization, all these vast piles of wealth circulating the planet and accumulating in vaults, always more, ever growing, and poverty only ever grows with it?

It is not fair.

*

We act like bad things happening far away are only happening because the people there deserve it for not making economies and governments as strong as ours. But we had fuck-all to do with how strong our government and economy is. Getting born in some shithole--as we like to say--instead of America is your own damn fault, we think, because we ourselves did nothing to deserve getting born here. And so we protect ourselves with "well, what do you want me to do about it?" Because after all, we may be lucky, but we're not in charge, and we didn't make the world, and it's all very complicated anyway, and you're bothering me and you should fuck off because I don't like thinking about it actually.

Honestly, I just need you to not be cool with it. That's enough for me. Because making up justifications and deluding yourself on purpose about the actual costs of your lifestyle and the actual ramifications of what your government does with or without your consent is the path not only to this sated, distracted, rationalizing life of self-compromise and consumption and complicity, but to actual secret police shit, actual gulag and torture shit, actual sitting in an office signing documents that authorize things like Final Solutions. I am saying that there comes a point where you're not just a citizen anymore, because you don't live in a state anymore. Something else is happening, and you didn't want to notice, and a very important choice was made for you when you weren't paying attention. 

When you go from a republic to a dictatorship, there are those whose positions do not change that much. It is a condition of class, but also a condition of attitude. It is a condition of the required complicity for a transfer of power that is legitimate not in fact but after the fact. All you have to do to put your seal of approval on it is to keep going to work, keep going for opportunities whose cost is not discussed up front, keep acting like what you do is justifiable because you deserve to have what you have.

But it isn't. And I'm telling you now it is because it is a sin to have while others want. And it is that sin that has driven climate change and fascism and the attitude that industry justifies anything in the name of industry, that profit is the sacrament which washes us clean, and the comforts of our earthly rewards are proof of our righteousness.

But they aren't. 

And frankly, blessedly, it is factual that all you have to do is not be cool with it. Because if you're not cool with it, you have a chance to at least stay awake and keep your eye out. And when the opportunity comes to make a difference, the difference you are suited to make, you'll see the opening. You'll know.

*

Anyway, it was too cold to ride my bike yesterday. I need it to be hotter. That's why I was guilty.

Easy enough for me to go all the way with guilt that I do it most days. Today, I brought you along for the ride.  

What can be done? What is that difference that we should seek to make, and how to make it, and how to know the moment, the opening, the chance?

Well, I've been thinking about it for a long time. Hopefully I've made progress. You'll be the first to know if I figure anything out.

All I know for sure is that hope is what is needed above all. Keep your hopes alive, burning bright, daring, free.

--JL

#386

It is such a mistake to live within industrialized society. What a trap. What a miserable cage we have built for ourselves, our masters delighting in rattling it and poking at our vulnerable flanks through the bars.

For the safety of the cage, we put up with it, and forsake our precious lives.

What fools. What tools. What anemic caricatures of ourselves.

*

We even fight wars for the privilege of this sterilized hell. We allow wars to be fought on our behalf.

We call it good. An even trade.

*

These so-called telephones, addictive portals into a nether realm of nightmarish engineering. 

This chimaeric hydra, capital. 

Infinite chatter. Hydrochloric acid on the limestone of our minds. Chlorine bleach in the soil of our souls.

We call it wealth, and leisure, and efficiency, and productivity, and connectedness, and the duty to be well-informed, of the immense importance of our opinionate display and the general good health of our intellectual array, by which we mechanically sort ourselves into absurd tribes and ridiculous hierarchies.

We call it common sense. We call it righteousness.

*

Someday they will tell each other that as Rome fell, so did her heir and the global empire she forged, fifteen hundred years later or thereabouts, after they have emerged from the consequential period of chaos and forgetting. They will tell each other a fragmentary but satisfying version of how and why it happened. It will have no bearing on their own inevitable disintegrations.

Like cancer, the same accretions always coalesce in the body of a society, a variety of corruptions of form attacking a variety of tissues and bones. It kills them, but never immediately. Slow, fast, painful, bearable. Bodies run down. It's what they do.

We never admit this, though. We say they should not. We say we may yet unlock the secrets of immortality. We say that our city of man will last through eternity.

*

If I am a doctor, I must be a poor one. Enjoy my diagnosis, for I know no cure.

--JL