#453

Can't help but notice...no one is talking anymore about universal basic income, even though all the test balloons flew great, even though y'all might as well, since the way you manage the world has been so wrong and so bad that most of us will probably die. Your stupid race to beat heedless excess with scientific "advancement" has been a shitty plan, and at this point, might as well relax the resources into making sure everyone is comfortable before the end.

Least we could do for each other at this point, and we won't do that. Though I guess it's kinda noble to keep trying. 

But man. What a fucking feeling. The world at a melting point--a real and true apocalypse after all this asinine noise about a hundred fake ones, millions of people already dying for dozens of needless reason on multiple fronts all over the planet, and it's like, go to work! Those who do not wish to participate will be enslaved if apprehended, so drive your fucking car to work, right now, and keep working, or DIE. 

--JL

#432

Had a nice shift. Once again, totally human. The first couple hours took too long and made me feel a little claustrophobic, but as time passed I relaxed.

Spending time alone is something I crave and treasure, but it may be time to reckon with the fact that too much of it makes me strange in my head. That will involve admitting that there is such a thing as too much alone time, rather than the mindset I have always tended to exist in, which is that there is never enough alone time, that it is a precious resource to be fought for and safeguarded.

Well, it is. But meeting people and talking at their faces and having your face talked at is actually important.

Have to admit it. Aloud, too. Repeatedly. As a matter of some long-term urgency.

*

Kids really are incredibly great. They are the point of it all. Yesterday was May the 4th, Star Wars Day, a shining beacon to my people. The theater was running Phantom Menace, and some families came out with their progeny. Man, that was so fucking great to see. That gave me so much life. These kids were losing their bananas about seeing Star Wars on the big screen. I was their age when Phantom Menace dropped. It was a huge blessing to see them get to do the same all these years later, and their joy was as my joy. I also got some undecided customers to see Phantom Menace, so I have already used this position to do some public service--some good in this existence. 

Have to admit it. Have to admit it. It is important to be among people. To have encounters and relate.

To remember what this is all actually for. To keep myself sane, even if people drive me batshit a lot of the time.

*

Kinda burnt out on painting, but it's not the kind of project you can just stop. Kinda gotta finish.

Ok, ok, then. Here we go! 

Final note: ONE PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNCH

--JL

#431

Today is my first tiny shift at the movie theater! What a life. What a privilege. Easily the most bohemian employment I have ever managed to secure, except for I suppose being a folkpunk roadie, but as that was unpaid labor, it's a different tenor. Gonna work very hard to bring value to the place. 

It's too bad to be back to making kid cash, but it's what you'd expect at a nonprofit. And this limit on our shared material gain as household with the money and the hours is what I need in order to still be able to do art and wrap up school. It is a compromise in my favor that I will do my best to honor. 

Woof. It's heavy. But I'm ready. Ah, to be embarking on a new leg of the journey! Again, what a privilege.

*

Do I have elaborations on yesterday's notions? I think not today, but sometime soon. I especially want to clarify what I mean about quitting our jobs and doing whatever we want, which is a phrasing I stand by but which may require significant teasing out in order to be fully coherent.

*

More want to say that the music I have been listening to has stayed essentially on the soundtracks tip, but has also moved into various reorchestrastions in the case of the Pokémon games soundtracks, which aren't really available on the wretched phone services.

Something else I should really consider is getting back into owning the lion's share of my own digital music, even if I have to steal it. What a sham life it is, paying apple x amount over x time for an ephemeral and limited capacity to give me the infinite reach and unerring grasp I crave when it comes to condensing music from the aether. 

Look, I use the service constantly. It gives unto me. But the compomise galls. That's all I'm saying. I miss being able to play .midi files ripped from a ROM on my iPod because it was all so much looser and trickable back in the day when my skills were edgy and my hunger sharp. So what if it was illegal and is still illegal? We lead short lives. I pay many personal prices for modernity along with the many we all pay as a species and force every other organism and the very crust of this earth to pay; at the very least, I should get to play a lot of video games and listen to a lot of music. I'll give up a lot of my money for the privilege, but I will also get what I consider is fair for the asking, and I'm not gonna lie to you: it's always more than what a company is willing to offer. So be it. 

My relationship with Nintendo springs to mind. They get a lot of my money and give me to most value out of any company, in my estimation. Sue me if it's an exceptionally 1% of the planet relationship, these luxury entertainment stylz, fuck it. It's the 21st century. As I say, video games are my personal blood payment for the suff'rance I grant the durance vile of modernity. And still I want more. They should give me more. I should be granted shatterproof assurances that my digital ownerships are ironclad, the they will have my back as much as I have theirs, etc. I'm tired of talking about all of this.

Anyway 0.5: I want like a tricorder from Star Trek with all of human culture nestled safely in its databanks and room for the full cultures of a million more species plus all that other juicy dope shit a tricorder can do. Damn, that would be fucking rad. 

Anyway 1: these reorchestrations are very teh bombuh. Braxton Burks, Masters of Sound, Eric Buchholz, Skotein, to begin a long list I don't have time for. Wonderful stuff, at any rate. 

Anyway 2: electric boogaloo

Anyway 3: think this is it for me.

*

Dang man here we go, gonna take a shower put on some pants a guy's gonna give me a shirt to wear and I'm gonna stand with a person and welcome human beings into a moviegoing experience from 2-5 after a couple of hours of paperwork and orientation stuff. Ok wow. Good to have all this visualized. It's all happening. It's all coming real. Time to remember how to be a human coworker. Whoo!

--JL

#82

Damn! That was a dense couple of days. Dense with events! Feels like such a long time to me! Remember my teeth? Good times. Scroll down, if you didn't read about my teeth before. It's totally good information. If you're reading the archive, future reader, you just read it; but, maybe you can scroll back down, give yourself a quick refresher on my teeth. If you feel like you need to. I heard the test is supposed to be pretty easy.

*

This evening was glorified outrageously by among the most spectacular sunsets I have ever borne witness to. The sky's movement into twilight stands in total defiance of any description, and joins the ranks of celestial vistas that define my life and whose ghosts I sometimes attempt to translate into readable form, long after the fact.

*

Indeed, my life is in great part defined by the skies I have seen. They are etched into an inviolable place within me.

*

Back to work! Ha, no, so what happened is I walked to work a surprise double, walked home, walked in the next day, worked, walked home to shower, allowed a get-together to rob me of much psychic energy and sleep to boot, walked in today, worked, walked around a bunch after my shift, then walked home. I'm a little beat! And I work the next two mornings! I am going to go to sleep! 

As soon as my clothes come out of the dryer. 

Peace out, brothers, sisters, and siblings of other identities! Merry Christmas and every other holiday or anti-holiday anybody cares to name! Even if it's something I find objectionable or repellent, have a merry time of it. I take that goodwill on earth towards all mankind shit serious. 


--JL

#45

Strictly unimpressed by "comics" that are just hand-drawn memes. That is a concession for artist and humorist both. If you make shit like that, it is like making sprite comics, or political cartoons. Truly. There is nothing wrong with you, but the future won't give the tenth part of a fuck about your buried and forgotten nega-creativity. 

Plus you suck now, today. Make a fucking layout. Take a long moment, and pretend your audience isn't a writhing pile of crabs and lobsters.

What's that? "You don't even make comics, Joseph! Fuck you. You draw like an idiot." Well, that's as may be. I suck too, but opinions are free.

*

The window of my room faces west. My childhood apartment room's window faced north. I'm one of those people that can work and look out the window in equal measure, and for that I count myself lucky. One informs the other in a magnificent flow.

I love to work. With my hands, with my eyes, with my mind, feet, tongue, whatever. And I love to be absolutely still and do nothing at all, not so much as think. Churning dynamo, bright blank. If I can be both of these things in a day, then I don't know what more to ask from life.

As states, the two have an astonishing amount in common. When I am hardest at work, typing most furiously or managing a knife with all the skill I have managed to accumulate or tending to a stovetop's worth of six-quart pots, there is a stillness and quiet at my center, where my breath whispers down to a liquid--I run all to nothing, just a fluidity behind a machine which manipulates the world of tools and symbols in front of it with gestures of an absoluteness and a surety that becomes transcendental. Doing and thinking are one, and then narrow to a vanishing-point. You can't stay there for very long; there simply isn't enough to do, or something goes wrong, or your body cries out for something and brings you back.

When I have stilled and quieted every nerve and every need to move a muscle and relaxed my physical vision and my conscious stream into a diffuseness, I lift off. The body once again is gone, only rather than transforming into fluid it becomes instead a socket, something vestigial to be slipped back into at another moment--after the wild untethering reaches its conclusion, either organically as embodiment reasserts itself, some insight or dream draws me back into analysis, or because someone, like my mom, is snapping their fingers in my face or yelling for attention. Or some other environmental interruption, like sudden rain or approaching enemies. The body always has its say--till it doesn't, eh?

Both states have much about them that relegates and perhaps even deprives the senses. Both alter embodiment and psychic activity. One transports literally and the other does not. One has practical applications in terms of being-in-the-world, especially socially, and the other perhaps does as well, but to assert such is to enter treacherous ground and philosophical obscurity. Although, the sort of soft-headed all-encompassing bullshitosophy that delights in absorbing and perverting liminality and currently informs so much talk and thought and decision in the world today does demonstrate more of a tolerance for claims that thought alone is sufficient cause to justify existence and propagation of further existence, if only to make a quick dollar out of it.

The latter state has come naturally to me ever since I was a child, but it took me a long time to be able to find work in anything that wasn't writing. Working in kitchens, I realize more and more, was a very lucky find for me. The work is perfect, and feeding people has meaning, a quality I crave like oxygen. 

I also have a prodigious ludic appetite, with its corresponding hyperfocus state. Moments of concentration so absolute that I remember them more as dreams than actual events. I know I am aging because I have come to prefer the thrill of getting up extremely early to go work very hard over kicking back and playing some games.

*

It's my day off. I'm getting this out of the way early so I can work on writing I care about in a different way; not to say this blog is not important to me, but it is not books, after all. I put a deal more effort into those, and I hope it shows. Do me a favor and find out, huh?


--JL

#38

Well, I didn't have anything interesting to say this morning, I guess. Not to this blog, anyway. I said a bunch of interesting things to the people I interacted with throughout the day. That's how I live.

Nothing interesting to tell you, blog, except that my whim led me to J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf (including many accompanying materials of great interest to me), and not whatever I said I would read yesterday. I already forgot, and regret nothing. When I'm reading a book, my focus is complete. I have an idea of the next one, even the next few, usually, but nothing is ever guaranteed. I follow my gut. When it comes to reading, the appetite is always correct. Now I believe I will read The Monsters and The Critics, also by Tolkien.  

I would say that J.R.R. Tolkien is my favorite writer, but that would not even remotely begin to cover the situation here. Just...don't even dream of fucking stepping to me. I'll eat your hot guts on a Sunday morning. I'll burn your name from the histories and the registers of names, and I will bury you broken and unmarked in a grave of pure salt. 

*

I wish I weren't on the computer this late. I love computers, but they're totally bad for you. Sucks shit. Part of me also hates computers, hates them to hell. It is a complex relationship, as are the bulk of relationships.

I closed a kitchen tonight, and tomorrow I will get up to open it again, and then I will work until it is time for me to close it, and then I will wake up to open it once more. Then I'll rest.

I'm thinkin' day off tomorrow from the ole bloggo, but who knows? I don't know anything.


--JL