#153

It may be that the great delusion of our time is grandeur, even though what almost anybody talks about is insignificance. The death of this and the death of that*. The most advanced and self-aware accretion of individuals who ever lived getting off on how powerless they are, as though they were not indispensable and active participants in the transformation of the planet.

*

Oh, but Joseph, we are killing the planet! Everything is tits-up and it's all our fault! And the world wide web turned out to be a huge mistake! We need to go back to simpler times!

Let me stop you there, hypothetical. You're not wrong, but the very fact that you're capable of grasping this situation is itself revolutionary and astonishing. The fact that you can feel psychologically responsible for the situation is also phenomenal. You represent a paradigm in human self-understanding, and that is reason enough to be optimistic.

Simple times ain't comin back, though. Nothing works that way.  

No doubt, it's a bad situation. Stuff got complicated and threatening fast, and it seems like it was better yesteryear. But it's just a simple evolutionary problem, and it is the same one as it has ever been: are we smarter than we are rapacious? Are we capable of having enough collective discipline to curb our collective excess? Do we have the guts and the brains to keep riding the edge of chaos? We are not going to stop destroying or consuming. The best we can do is create more than we kill.

If we're able to balance the shit that refuses to get right with the the ideals we can never quite achieve, we keep on going. If we can't we very likely go extinct, or undergo a total change in our ecosystem niche. And if it's just civilization that collapses, then it is literally no big deal. That happens all the fucking time, and while of course it seems like the end of the world when it's happening, it hasn't been yet. We are all the inheritors of the spoils of hundreds of dead empires.

Like I say, the stakes feeling higher than ever before doesn't change the fundamental problem. All we can to is try every day to keep the world going, just to see if it does, until we can't. No use wallowing in how futile it seems. Pathetic to pretend you're above it all. Just do what you can think best to do, every day. Push your thinking in that matter as far as it can go. Do what you can to follow through for real and materially.

*

Personally, being well-satisfied with reality, I am not optimistic. As I said, too many delusions of grandeur, regression fetishes, and post-nihilist death-fixations out here; I think most people would happily welcome the apocalypse just to say that they were right all along and that someone else was to blame, managing to still feel guilty over their complicity. I mean, what did you expect them to do, change their lives?

However, some people that are much smarter than me are optimistic; they trust their reasoning, they are hard at work, and there are a lot of them, so I am at least relaxed enough to enjoy watching it all happen, gut-wrenching as it can be. I hate seeing a sea turtle covered in plastic with a gut full of the stuff to boot as much as anyone.

Also if we haven't blown each other to final perdition yet, at this point I really think it'll be an accident if we do. Small comfort, but, not being an optimist, I can make do with very scant comforting. A cactus only needs a little rain.

--JL

*Irony never dies. It is a fractal.

#152

Nothing quite like pissing the bulk of the day away carving swathes of destruction through mobs courtesy of one of Blizzard's objets d'grind. Diablo III, in this instance. 

Fascinating, a whole company focused with streamlining every facet of every single thing to such a fine degree. Also the harvesting of broad composite in order to produce what can be thought of as a compact cube of everything else that has ever appeared in a given genre made somehow original without being altered.

Playing a Blizzard game is like endlessly turning over a highly polished piece of mirrored metal in your fingers, and having the part of your brain that is entranced by that fill most of your consciousness.

*

Also I walked the dog and fed it and did laundry. It was my day off.  


--JL

#151

Number one hundred and fifty-one is just as special as one hundred and fifty, for very similar reasons to the ones sketched in brief yesterday. 

*

I wonder if one could translate something like, say, a Socratic dialogue into a brief series of memes, and lose no overall textual payload. Memes might have sufficient explicative power to carry it off.

More accessible by far than something like a condensation or a "cliff's" "note".

*

Had the thought that the universe is just an incomprehensible equation working itself out.

We have managed to piece together so little of the math involved. Gonna have to evolve so hard just to understand more math.

*

Cool. Yet another robust and worthy post, ornately accomplishing nothing. I just pulled a band-aid off my forearm and tore off quite a bit of hair. Positively hilarious.


--JL

#150

Number one hundred and fifty is a sacred number, a titan: the number of the first generation of Pokémon, not counting Mew, which is weird, but canonical. It is strange and mind-bending to have Mewtwo come before Mew, the hybrid before the prime, but there is no way out of it. It's like how you are free to not exist, but not free to have not existed. Numbers and language and the seeming contradictions between what they describe and seeming reality and the truly real are just the rules of the game. 

Nothing can ever be truly real, but everything that is not real is contained within reality, is just as real as anything else. Unreal things are just as independent of how many people believe in them or what they believe about them as real things. Their reality, their having-been-in-the-world, is unaffected, despite relying on belief to have come into existence in the first place.

*

Reality has this tendency towards getting realer all the time. The realer it gets, the harder it is to believe in it.


--JL

#149

Been a strange, tense couple of weeks. One of those times in life where relations with every single person in your life are a little sandpapery at best, a season of snags in every instance, tiny violences intentional and accidental blooming everywhere along with the branches of the early trees. All the time a low insistent drone at the back of your skull, the unlocking of the season ratcheting everyone's intensity up, causing us to chainsmoke and make mistakes. 

All you can do is weather the storm, throw all the dead weight you can find overboard as you reframe what does and does not constitute dead weight under present conditions, and use whatever you can catch hold of to stay alive. Try not to make as many mistakes as you want to. 

Hold the center.

*

Personally I have always had a tricky relationship with early Spring; it can really fuck me up. I have made some really terrible, even fantastically terrible decisions at this time of year. 

Keeping it pretty steady this time around. Thankful for that. 


--JL 

#148

Just reread One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. One of my favorite books of all time; used to collect different printings and editions of this book. Stole two copies of the same edition from my high school, had one with a weird movie cover, one with a cover by some French artist that I bequeathed to my younger brother, one or two others. Got rid of them over the years and stuck with my Penguin Classics Deluxe edition containing the introduction by Robert Faggin and the foreword by Chuck Palahniuk with the Joe Sacco cover, full of the author's evocative sketches. I like the cover okay and absolutely love Kesey's artwork right in with the text, but the foreword and intro are unbearable, albeit intelligent and useful. I mean they are fine but a part of me is cringing the entire time I read them.

Still one of the best bangers ever fucking written. I need to not go another year of my life without rereading this book. It has been a mistake to slack off. 

Now I am going to read Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett, because my buddy just keeps slinging his books at me, because I told them to throw him at me whenever, because Discworld books are simply incredible every time. Dude is smart as all hopping hades and an unbelievable condenser. An implication of his swings more dick than three whole regular books.

Finished A History of Europe, quite a ride. Really phenomenal work. During the process of absorption I leavened it with Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, and Small Gods, by that selfsame Terry Pratchett we were discussing. Both of these books thoroughly rocked me. I now understand why people are surprised that I haven't read Snow Crash, and bug me so much about it when they find out I haven't. Well, now I have, and I get it, and am simply living a better life now that it's happened. Everybody wins.

Also read a lot of comics every day, per dietary standards. 

Peace, flickering candles. Stay lit.


--JL

#147

In number one hundred and forty seven, we have the excellent situation of a compound number composed of its own double. I really dig that kind of thing.

One of my favorite things in the whole wide world is adding 123,456,789 to 987,654,321 to get 11,111,111,110. Equally pleasing is the addition of 321,654,987 to 789,456,123 in order to create exactly the same result. That shit is the definition of sublime. There is no feeling like it.

Also? 123,456,789 plus 789,456,123 equals 912,912,912. How do you fucking like them apples? 321,654,987 plus 987,654,321 is 1,309,309,308. That last eight is what really makes the whole affair transcend perfection, the single digit--just the first whole number, ripped from the ones column and thrown into the millions.

No matter what happens in life, there's always math. Just doing a problem and seeing the result. The mind goes to a place.

I also like graphs a lot.


--JL