#302

Better. Feeling, that is. A little better. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be something approaching the new 100% fitness, sans caffeine, sans anything resembling a vice except a touch of sugar once a day. Suppose some consider video games a vice, but I don't know what to say to those people except most of what you can say about video games, positive and negative, can be said about books and paintings and music and basically art in general. If, in your worldview, art is a negative, your confusion is so total that we won't be able to communicate very effectively at all. I mean, you have to suspend your morals just to use language.

Well, anyhow, I also choose to retain the right to smoke a fine cigar on occasions. 

There's a decent chance that rather than waking up fine tomorrow, I will be awoken by an awful headache which is only tolerable in one single precisely upright sitting position, with my head held at one single precise angle; any deviation from this stasis will cause stabbing, otherworldly pain. It should go away in time for me to start work, but it's not a great way to pop the cork on a day. This happened a few times last time I quit drinking coffee.

Point of quitting caffeine is to give me more time and focus in the early mornings to exercise and maybe write a little. Making coffee takes a long time, being as we hand-grind beans and use a chemex-style coffeemaker. This makes for superior coffee. However, I'm also always torn between looking for more independence and imbibing chemicals as a ritual, but right now, I'm in independence mode, and I'm sick of needing coffee, from having to make it to having to sit and drink it. Rather be doing stuff. It's just not time I want to give to a thing anymore. And the contingencies of dependency always bother me. It's the best way for me to motivate myself to stop doing something--the strategic vulnerability, the weakness of need. Can't rely on cigs for sanity buffering; can't afford it in any sense. Can't rely on caffeine for anything; gotta be able to get up and go without aid, without guaranteeing painful incapacitation if I can't for any reason get it.

Yes, the less need the better. For example, it is time to end this post, because my need for nutrition is interfering with my drive to create. And needs must, dear reader.

--JL

#4

Both books are sharply dressed in brand new covers, their third such wardrobe transformation. No more! No more. Third time is said to be the charm; I also consider it in certain cases to be a sort of guillotine gate.

At any rate, the covers will no longer change. By way of apology for not designing covers and then for designing them hastily, I shall share another anecdote, this time without relying on the sordid tonal qualities of cigarettes or alcohol.

*

In the second grade a dude handed me my ass in the middle of class because I looked at him wrong. He offered a gentlemanly apology later that week and we became fast friends, as is time-honored and correct. It was his opinion that I showed balls, an ineffable quality that many other men taller and stronger than me have sensed and respected after they have pounded me into sundry available surfaces.

The way it holds up in this example is that I had indeed been looking at him wrong; fuck him! He was looking at me wrong, had done so first--so I did nothing to avoid the conflict, plus I hit him in the mouth as hard as I could the second he dared me to. Not very hard, true, but I did it, and that's the point, upon which key distinctions hinge. Salient also is the point that I did not alter my attitude towards him one iota simply because he then took hold of my head and smashed his knee into my face several times before throwing me into my desk. This proved fuck-all in my opinion, and I'd fight him again at the slightest notice. What the dude recognized innately was this attitudinal, elemental kinship between us, who could not have had more absurdly different abilities, interests, and approaches to the world.

I was a dreamy idiot who breathed with his mouth open and chewed on his bookmarks as he went through reams of paper in his fully doomed attempts to render convincing illustrations of various Dinosauria and aliens from major science-fiction franchises. John was a cold-eyed, piratical hooligan with a lashing-out problem to where the dude had a cobra for a tongue and two rattlesnakes for hands. We bonded over playing Duke Nukem 3D on our computers and game talk in general, and I believe my overwhelming and all-encompassing loves for interpreting data and waxing philosophical sparked in him a life-enriching interest in these things, he who before me had spent his days mostly coming up with ways to vandalize as many things as possible and assert dominance through various mediums.

It was up to the dude to teach me how to be ruthless, how to access the animal beneath the man: the entity that does not merely win fights, but ends them. He also taught me how to lie, steal, brag, confidently approach women, hide weapons on your person, and engineer mayhem, so in retrospect it seems I got much more out of the deal. These are crucial lessons that have served me all my life, either in direct application or to know them when I see them. Dude also came up with the following schoolyard game: take turns climbing the most difficult tree you and your friends can find, and if you fall off, or fall over when you jump off, your friends beat the shit out of you until you claw your way to your feet. Bonus points to everybody if it is possible to fall from the chosen tree onto the barbed wire from the top of a fence and die.

We served each other very well, I think, putting each other so radically far out of our comfort zones. I did fail him, once--overwhelmed by guilt and evidence, I confessed to chucking a raw egg from four stories up smack center onto a dude's car's roof. Imagine a large, angry man genuinely leaping from his car, on which egg has already begun cooking to the metal, and wheeling his gaze up and locking it directly onto yours. Then he comes and yells at your friend's mom, who summons you to have your face pointed at by the man, you, who had before this day never so much as dreamed of engaging in anything even resembling the crime which your friend is denying with perfectly calm, set features. I cracked perhaps harder and with more mess than the egg had. This betrayal unequivocally lacked balls, and the dude let me know it with no mercy whatsoever for my tears, as well as that only dead idiots stay to watch what happens when you lob a grenade--you chuck the bitch and motor. Since that failure I have made ample use of silence under interrogations, and avoided much self-compromise thereby. I try not to do anything wrong, but when I do, I make dead sure it will go right.

This has been my tip of the pen to my old friend, and men like him, who are so despised and misunderstood in this strange age, and my paean to the hypersigil under which our friendship bloomed in those savage, irretrievably serious days of being eight and nine years old, whose resistive power we need now more than ever--balls. Not testicles, which mean and bestow exactly nothing, but balls, which are the difference between a person who crawls away to lick themselves and nurse resentment after a beating, and a person who spits blood and rains cusses on their opponent as they're dragged away, who'll come back tomorrow to lose all over again, who doesn't run out of what they have to prove.


--JL