#421

It bears saying every now and again, lest I seem forgetful or inured: this wartime shit hurts my heart. All this war everywhere and more to come, and the pain of it is in every single day. It is terrible watching hatred consume people and the havoc of retribution. 

Man, I hate that people have to suffer and die on this nonsensical, farcical, line-in-the-sand, get-me-mine-and-fuck-you bullshit. Hate the vile vibration that possesses them to strike out rather than seek peace.

But I guess they have to. I guess we have to. 

Human is as human does.

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Dunno. Fuckin read a lot of history, fuckin lotta war and hate and anti-semitism every other thread of ghastly twisted ever-unspooling racism and genocide and conquest and theft and punishment and torture and every kind of sexual violence imaginable plus the dark everyday shit and the serial killers and the negligence of every kind which can even lead to stuff like mass poisonings and preventable catastrophes and finally, the rape and strangulation of the natural world, which continues apace. 

What the fuck, people? I am beginning to doubt a few sculptures and some sheet music were worth the trouble!

No, I must imagine that the good and happy times that people have managed to have in spite of the great machinations of rulers and the bloody paths that history must carve, despite the appetites of the wicked and insatiable and harmed, are in a balance. That process, awful as it is, creates the space for a more refined process.

Given time. Time always seems short. Must remember that.

*

Primacy must be established always! Primates! We are primates! 

Disgusting.

*

Per yesterday's quest: found a table, but not a card table. It cost money, and there was only the one. So! Nobody has to do anything. Nobody ever did, really.

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Ok. Gotta do a lotta stuff, man. Gotta clean things and fix things and make more art. Making more art is very very important to me right now. 

Coping mechanisms, eh?

--JL

#411

With civil war bearing down upon us, we dutifully trudge to the cineplex en masse and consume a movie entitled Civil War. 

Well, if that isn't just too fucking perfect and complete.

Have heard that this film asserts that journalism is our only hope. Jesus, can that be true? It plunges into my stomach like a depth charge how unequivocally fucked we are if so. Unless the thesis of the movie is that a nontrivial percentage of the citizen body should transform themselves into a renegade verifiable information supply chain, here in the times of the tail wagging the dog openly and without artifice. Guess I should watch it and see. One should not talk too much about what one don't know.

Just wanted to point out in that first paragraph how utterly, completely steeped in Modern Americanism this situation is. We wouldn't believe it was possible or even desirable to go to the moon until Walt Disney said it was ok. It's just how we are. 

People don't need porn to fuck nasty, but movies tell us how to act nonetheless. Art reflects life, which can only reflect art. Indeed, I have met many people who seemingly constructed their identities and based their speech patterns on a loose mix of perennial and recently perused films. I myself borrow from fiction in these ways--it's only human. But it is always possible to be a little too human. 

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Lately I have been seized in philosophical and ethical paroxysms that can only be called fits or perhaps fevers of anarchy. Never have I perceived more clearly its allure as a basis for action. 

Because why should we hew and cling to this stability we have enjoyed? To nurse at its teat is to drink a black poison, and all our choices are tainted by our demanding the ability to pay good money for our best lives while existing as the justification and topsoil for corporate and political vines which strangle and destroy our human dignity and the life of our planet. We aid and abet it no matter how much we make noises of outrage or legally protest or whatever, because we are convinced we can have our cake and eat it too and guess what, fucks? The cake is a lie. Always has been.

If we want to enjoy our nice sunny days, it might serve everyone better if we did it without having governments and companies that are literally Ahriman. There is no better way of illustrating it. Maybe we'd get sick and die a little more, maybe there won't be a whole eleven billion of us. Maybe that's ok.

I don't fuckin know, though. I didn't make this world. I don't get to decide these things, or know if my feelings are right. I get stressed out and fight response just from seeing and hearing this motherfucker down the street from me run a gas lawnmower. I can't set policy. I'd collapse every economy on the planet in under a week and many hundreds of millions of people would die. Is that worth saving the world? I don't know. I'm not likely to find out.

Too paranoid to ever make a difference in any way, shape, or form, you see. Can't trust anyone far enough to throw them, let alone enough to coordinate anything. How can I commit to action under conditions which have driven groups of people to act inhumanely since time immemorial? It's a guaranteed way to compromise your ethics, and then, you have to keep going. If you find yourself fighting a war, you have already lost more than half the fight, and the rest is seeing how quickly you can put an end to it or get out of it or die for it--how grave the loss and how compromised you will be before the end.

Plus ultimately I am more interested in expanding my rock collection and playing video games than I am in actually holding myself or anyobody else accountable for anything.

There's your moral high ground. Like all other systems that tempt a human being towards irrational and irretrievable actions which help no one, anarchy is not lucid or explicative. It cannot feed or clothe you. It will not help you make decisions that are more moral or efficient or superior in any way than choice-paths supplied by any other ideologies, systems, worldviews, or hybrids or adaptations derived from existing sets. 

It's all just a lattice we set in front of our eyes in order to try and see an incomprehensible infinite vastness as limited and quanitifiable. All our mistakes start there, because it isn't.

Action is absurdity. The sacred infinite cares not. We are dust motes falling chaotically through time; fixed points on tesselations; fractals made of fractals made of fractals all the way down and all the way out.  

*

Have a nice day? 

Fuck that guy mowing his lawn. Seriously. I hate people acting like anything we've done this past century is something we can just keep on blithely doing till the sun falls down. We need to change everything. Why the fuck are people building houses? Stop it! We have to stop! Stop mining shit, stop making new shit, stop fueling evil tech with massive energy costs! Goddamn it, this other fucking bitch just started in with an even bigger, louder lawnmower! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

--JL

#285

Saw on Slashdot, reported in Nature but unconfirmed on other news sites: a UK laboratory has accomplished the use of quantum technology to perform an accurate underground scan outdoors on live dirt to image an existing tunnel. I have been waiting for this watershed moment in sensor technology since I was a tiny child, feeling instinctively and coming to know intellectually that the complete fossil record will only get us partway to where we want to go, let alone digging for it. Also, scan tech is just fucking cool as hell. I am cautiously but giddily excited. The times, man! To have been alive for the past thirty years, and, I imagine, the past fifty, is to have lived in a ridiculous fantasy world. Can't wait to be a hundred years old so I can teleport to the moon colony and jump around the terraformed gardens, to tour the moons of Jupiter and witness the great planetrises.

Also I guess war is happening. When is it not, though. Hope no one is bothering my diasporic Ukranian friends at this time. There is a particular agony when your point of origin is in the newsmedia; photographs you never wanted to see reproduced everywhere you look, know-nothing fuckwits telling you what you should feel or accept, the worst questions at the most inane and inopportune times, etc. I pray for a swift end to these harrowing events, and as minimal a fallout as reality will allow. Also the many other conflicts and genocides unfolding as I type.

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It would be a good day to talk about like, a U2 record, specifically, War. You know, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and all. I don't really like U2 at all, though. A task for others.

Now, the song "No Man's Land", by Eric Bogle (I always think of the Dropkick Murphys version, personally), that's close to the mark for me. Also and more generally applicable in any case, Black Sabbath's "War Pigs (Luke's Wall)", the best song about war as far as I know anything about it, right up with "Masters of War" by Bob Dylan (my preference is for the New York City Town Hall version on The Bootleg Series vol. 7: No Direction Home, which are the discs closest to my heart in that series). Great tracks, those, evergreen in any situation. Could be wrong and out of touch, but it seems like people don't do antiwar songs like they did back in the day. Can't personally think of anyone off the top of my head besides Neil Young, who is an old-timer from back in the day. Living With War, there's an album. 

At any rate, maybe I don't talk too much about the whole deal. Maybe there's no need to pack that kind of heat on a day like today. I am sure, though I shall not look around to verify, that enough people are doing enough stuff, at least in terms of satisfactorily performative self service to personal optics and the amassment of modern clout.

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What differentiates modern clout from traditional clout? Well, some would say that a wi-fi outage or a server crash evaporating every trace of your clout means you are in fact without what the ancients would have considered clout. Clout used be more durable. Took more to earn, took more to lose.

We are how we are and the times are the times, though. As someone who wields absolutely zero clout outside of his own personal bubble, maybe I'm not even qualified to comment. Maybe I've got the wrong idea.

*

The Berlin Wall came down the year I was born; nevertheless, the world was still at war, and it has been at war without cease ever since. Mostly people just get on with it. What the fuck are you gonna do, you know? What the fuck is there to do. Make art. Fuck around. Do necessary communitarian labor. These activities make it hard to go to war, which is basically a net good even if you're not great at any of them. 

As always, my disclaimer: what the fuck do I know about anything? Nothing.

*

Well, I mentioned some albums. That'll have to do for today, because today is kind of depressing, and I'm gonna hang out with a friend. 

Peace, peace, peace gosh darn it

--JL

#181

Today marks the seventy-fifth year since the landing on the beaches of Normandy by the Allied forces in 1944, which is marked down as quite a moment. The situation is pretty hardcore if one lets the prevailing conditions factor in, if you get even a little subjective with the equation. It's some significant shit. It's not like any of those dudes didn't know exactly what the uncorrectable math was. If you were there, you would know for a cold hard fact that when the hull scraped the sand you were probably going to die screaming and hurting like a son of a bitch, breathing out your last far away from home too early in the morning and your mother would never see you smile again. If by some miracle you made it through, the math was again clear and irreducible: some of the dudes praying and vomiting next to you would not, and you were consigned to walk over their threshed bodies into however long you had to live on time they bought you. 

In addition, June 6 has the honor of hosting the Battle of Midway in 1942. That's just World War II. June 6 has a lot to its name. Extending just a shade, it is the date that Union forces seized Memphis from the Confederacy.

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Also, birth date of  Thomas Mann, Isaiah Berlin, and Paul Giamatti. Just to name the ones who are on my shelves or whose acting for the screen I have perceived and interpreted. Patrick Rothfuss gets an honorable mention since I only know him by reputation but a lot of people seem to like his book The Name of the Wind a lot. I'll get around to it. Have been meaning to get around to it.

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Oh, apropos of nothing, war is a shitty thing, and the people who fight it do shitty things. Crimes within crimes, and in secret, the truly unthinkable, the shit nobody knew about, the shit every living soul denies they would do when asked and yet happens every time there's a war on, and there is always a war on. There is no defense for the shit that soldiers do every time that soldiers do what soldiers do.

But it is mad low class and an extremely rude and off-base dis to trash soldiers. Get off of it. I've read Sartre, I know and consider cogent the case that it is always a choice not to be a soldier, that you are always free to not be a soldier, that all war is accomplished by cooperation and if no subject agreed to cooperate with war, then it could not be brought off; hence, each of us is responsible to the other to deny the soldiering contract. I always love how philosophers use freedom to try to force you to act how they think you should act. I always love when philosophers are indiscernible from politicians.

Well, it is my small and uneducated opinion that Sartre* didn't really understand Heidegger, who was a Nazi and a cuck and a living piece of shit but wrote more important books and he talked about something called a situation and if you're not in someone else's situation it is just my opinion that odds are good that you know precious little, probably little enough to amount to dick, about what freedom looks like to them. It is difficult for me to consider that you know enough to tell them what they should do with their freedom.

Look, I don't go around volunteering to go to war. I'm not that kind of person; my situation is not that. War happens, that's a situation, and there are always going to be a lot of people who have a stake in that situation and create a gravity around it. There is an accretion of war whose gravity would pull me into it whether I willed it or not; that is a change in situation. That there is no such accretion is because wars are fought and won without my cooperation for my benefit, a fact I am at both at peace with and unhappy about but a fact, which I must consider when I criticize war as a situation and consider the situation of the individuals who are in it. 

It seems to me like I get to sit on my biscuit and intellectualize about all this because other people died and are dying in order to grant me the privilege! Huh. I would feel like a real asshole if I didn't at least have the grace to keep silent on the matter, if I didn't feel like waxing poetic about glorious sacrifice. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. My own business, mostly.

At the end of the day, I feel the least you can do is recognize the situation, and respect the decision, and use the whole thing to get some perspective. 

Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do. It may be opaque to you, it may seem to amount to the same thing, but the why matters, and the why is different in every situation, for every subject.

Not being a soldier is not a decision that makes me any better or more correct than a person who made the decision to be a soldier. 


*

Of course, this does not mean we do not hold individual soldiers accountable for their personal misdeeds. It never means that! It just means we do not consign every soldier as an individual to the horns of a demon nor the wings of an angel on the basis of current pop ideology heated by a feverish press. It just means that maybe you and I, dear reader, can perhaps slow down together and remember that even in the act of holding others accountable we may become greater hypocrites and monsters than those we would judge, must be on our watch for that always, must remember that the rush of righteous condemnation is one of the things that war is founded on, one of the things that breeds the iniquitous social organizations that give rise to warlike situations.

Just means that we can remember that in other shoes, we'd walk other paths.

*

Got more to say on this subject and another I was thinking about yesterday which relates, but I am tired, and this has gone one quite long enough. It was a big day today.

Ok, real quick: I had absolutely stupendous sex. It was fricking superreal. It was healing.

Cool peace barely gonna make the deadline tonight haha


--JL

*it is my habit to be extra mean to Sartre but he's all right really dude just sucks

I have a few of his books though