#229

This blog is often concerned with me, the author, at times by means of an honesty which makes my face contort. Part of the reason for the long hiatus was the desire for a measure of privacy from that. Also at play: the computer problems which perennially hinder me. A public health crisis. Chaos, triumph, madness, union, disintegration, survival, renewal, failure, transition after transition. 

Much has developed. Got a spouse and two cats now. 

How this came about--what I have been doing with my time, what has happened in my life--will be something I intend to parse out at no brisk pace. Frankly I intend to more adhere to the spirit of the masthead, and blather uselessly.

*

Welp! Ready to tie a bow on this one. 

Peace & Love on the planet Earth

--JL

#228

Sure is plenty to be anxious and afraid about these days. I mean, there's no real need to be. But the salesmanship of it all! There is so much to gain by being as afraid as we can possibly be made to be, and it is has been made so easy. Fear is virtue and commodity, mass-produced, sold, and used to sell. Fear-based economies, fear-based social lives, fear-based sociopolitical discourse, fear-charged atmosphere and a 24/7 terror propaganda machine to keep us up-to-the-minute on the whole fuckin dirge. Lord, and how we pay handsomely for the privilege of helping them spread their charlatanery for free! Sheep can only make their own noise, but parrots can meme whatever memes their masters care to shove into their heads.

Things are bad, and a huge part of how bad things are is the histrionic flagellation about how bad things are constantly on every level of the broadcast. I picture a fox in a trap, who, rather than gnawing off the trapped limb, elects to beat its own brains out against a stone.

*

Nothing ever changes the existential position. Everyone could die of some crazy shit at any second of every day of their lives, and eventually something gets 'em. That's just the game. All you can do is roll with the circumstances and watch your step. You don't have to let fear write the rules or own the whole situation. Own your own situation. Have some dignity.

*

This really great cartoon called The Fungies came out and I watched the first season and it was radical. Loved every minute. Recently watched Adventure Time in one shot for the first time, plus the new specials that have been released so far. What can be said? Completely fucking gay for Adventure Time. Don't even listen to me about it. Also finally watched all of Steven Universe. Similar feelings.

*

Watch as many cartoons as possible. It's the right thing to do, perhaps the last ethical thing in this lost and benighted world of ours.

ok peace

--JL

#227

Well! The year twenny-twenny will, I suppose, retain infamy for some time. 

Guaranteed, we will be seeing phrases to the effect of "then 2020/covid, and everything changed" for years, in articles, essays, stories, social media posts, advertisements...boys, we gonna prove that we know about twenty-twenty for the rest of our natural lives; so will a few of our direct descendants, and those who seek the new longevity, for however long it takes to work the year out of our system. 

Probably though I would hazard that deucetwenny will be one of those years that people learn about in history books. A lot more died last year than just people, and it seems very probable twentwent will be a cap year for a set of years that change the world dramatically.

Plus, the blog didn't update once! Among the great turbulences and mindquakes of that wild and crazy two thousand and twenty, year of, historians will not fail to note that Factually Pointless took its first gap year. 

Or, indeed, so much more crazy fucked-up shit could happen in the next fifty years that the drama of these upheavals will be barely thought about, and the blog will only be accessible as a direct mind-dump to individuals with illegally modified neural implants. Yeah, you gonna feel me think my contraband thoughts in real-time and my own brainprint, baby, and it's gonna be all intimate. Get ready.

Anyhow, it is no doubt easy to surmise that I was busy, as well as distracted, so for any number of reasons (some of which I will elaborate on in coming days), posting was unfeasible.

*

Collapse is singularity and singularity is collapse. Nothing will ever be the same, and nothing is really that different. Truly it is the age of the paradox.

*

Well, it's 2021 and time to start making posts again. I put out a brand new book on the last day of 2020. A collection of poems called Broken Arrow, Laudable Marauder. New author page, old books are not on it, but that will be remedied in due time. Meant to start bloggin away again in January, but I didn't! So what. Read my book.

Praise be that we should live to interpret days such as ours.

--JL

#226

Logitech. All these damn library keyboards are logitech keyboards and man, there is a reason they do not cost very much. They're pretty new, I haven't seen this iteration of their logo before, but logitech is just reliably shitty. One rung above the kinds of brands that only exist long enough for the upper management of the company to abscond with conned millions, leaving unpaid hourly workers and ripped-off consumers in their wretched wake. 

Dunno, maybe this new logo impresses a new durability. I will say that it does not equate to improved ergonomics.

*

There is that school of thought that implies that ripped-off consumers are a section of the free market that has only itself to blame for its gullibility. Maybe it's a correct claim, but it's not really a fair one. The problem is that even simple maxims like "you get what you pay for" don't fill your pocket, so the countertautology to that is "you get what you can afford to pay for". And now we are circling down the drain of total uselessness together, one of us thinking it is rad and cool to basically steal from poor people and is impressed with someone who knows how to pick low-hanging fruit and one of us can only gesture weakly at the notion that it is better to not do that, though there is no cogent reason not to. 

You are free to con whoever you want. A sucker is, after all, born every minute. But if you have balls, I don't know why you'd pick on suckers. I guess the same reason people climb mountains. But the creature derided as a sucker is much more often merely desperate, merely hungry, so the nobility of conquering an obstacle simply because it is there is absent, at least so far as I can see. Anybody can piss on a fucking anthill. Punching down doesn't make you anything but a bully and a louse, in my opinion, but I can't argue with the fact that the world will treat you like a champion and suck your dick for it.

*

Hey, I'm mad that my local library, one of the most well-funded in the nation for the size of the population that it serves, buys crappy cheap keyboards! There's like thirty computers in this area I'm sitting in, plus special fancy computers for the blind and deaf and otherwise differently abled in another part of the library, but I'm mad that I can't punch the keys. Do you see this, my cried river?

Fuck it. You should see the size of the monitor. Hella crisp display, too. Nobody gives a fuck about keyboards as long as they work and this is a rich person's library, even though they let homeless people chill in it.

If you're bitching, the bitch is usually you. Nine times out of ten, you are the bitch. So it goes. 

*

Been missing teaching, so after this post is done and I kill whatever time is left before they open the doors, I'm going to go down to the local youth center and see if they have any paid writing instructor positions that I qualify for. Got decent experience, much of it through the center itself, so chances are even. Most writers ditch this town, see. Most writers try to go where the action is supposed to be. My action is wherever I happen to be. So there is hope. I will probably volunteer if they can't pay me, but if I do that I'll either demand and receive a raise at work or I will find a kitchen that isn't being strangled by managerial incompetence (or outright sabotage, I can't decide which because they tend to look so similar) and pays an adult wage. 

There are dishwashers around here making two fifty an hour more than I get for prepping and cooking two hundred pounds of food a day on average, plus running the shift and making the schedule and doing part of the orders and stocking the orders and putting out fires and whatever fucking else needs to get done. I have mentioned having to clean human feces. 

What I am getting at is that the punishment I have felt it is necessary to take by working my job is feeling pretty much over. I am now feeling like my rent is punishment enough, and it should be easier to make enough dough to cover it.

This has been more bitching, and once again, I am probably the bitch. Time to change that situation, one way or the other.

*

Keep forgetting to roll myself an after-work joint. That is another thing that has to change. I mean, it's fine today, because I prefer to do interviews sober (I am a square like that) but damn. Not doing the post high takes a lot of flavor out of it, honestly. A lot of writers and artists would look down their noses at me for this, but fuck them. I'm here to have fun.

Smoke weed every day, children. Go to sleep stoned and wake up to get high. Tell your parents I said so.


--JL

#225

Man, I really wanted to make posts on the seventh and the eleventh. Circumstances did not allow. Those same circumstances dictate that for the second time in this blog's run I am typing this ridiculous and aimless missive from a library computer, on one of their phenomenally displeasing keyboards. At least last time I got a keyboard where you could punch the keys, even if they were crappy. This one right here, not so much. No way to satisfyingly pound. The sexual element is entirely absent from this device. 

Nevertheless, my typing is without doubt the loudest in the computer area, and draws glances like a spoiled haunch of roadkill draws the circling flies, eager to breed and sow outright, squirming stares.

*

Pretty settled into the new place. Obviously I have been very busy with that, plus it's not like work just stops, and the new budget has not yet allowed for getting internet hooked up. Probably I'll look at that starting December or the New Year. Til then I'll hope to get a better keyboard when I come to write posts here at the library. Updates will probably be kinda sporadic this month. 

Next time I will write out all the lists I owe you, dear reader, and bring them here to type them into the post. I know how everybody loves all the lists. Gonna be some long ones. Remember how shortly before I started filling this text field with lists, I talked about how I don't really write lists anymore? How I wrote a whole post about not having pictures of myself on the internet, and now I use instagram like a mad bastard, microblogging almost as explicitly as I blog? 

Just not a fan of setting anything in stone. The right to change your mind is an important one to reserve, and doing so requires a set of muscles it is important to keep limber.

*

Ok, I'm sober and I hate it, so I'm going to be done for now. Last time I came to the library to write a post was Saturday, the ninth of the month, and on that day I had a joint for the walk here and a joint for the walk home but what I did not have was my phone, which is a requirement for logging into the blog machine. Man I felt put out. Man did I feel a fool. Then I felt better, as I smoked my second joint. 

Also I have seen three regular customers from work in the short time I've been here and it is difficult to put into words how much it irks me to lay eyes on them.  

*

Been writing into my notebooks with a variety of pencils. Generating some shit. If this keeps up I might open 2020 with a new book. The poems currently spilling from my guts in electrifying fugue states (the new desk works just fine, happy to note; good desks want you to get down to fucking business on them) are very pleasing to me. Hitting one of those rare veins that really gushes, words coming pretty much right the first time, requiring only a light burnish. As opposed to shitting something out knowing in your heart that maybe it can be fixed, but most likely it wants fire to cleanse it.

peace the fuck out and get tough or die crying

--JL

p.s. Oh! Halloween was great. Did a rad job with my costume. 

#224

Last Halloween I wrote a post about staying in on this night of maddened revelry. Wearing pajamas, I think, and exhorting the manifold virtues of being careful. Well, I maintain everything I said, but tonight I'm gonna go dancing in a costume at a club. My take on an early draft of a "human" Joker. Tonight I'm gonna have outside fun.

However, I will endeavor to remember death, and honor the spirit world. That's the "core value", as I believe the cool kids declaim.

Also, today, "outside" has been spitting cold shitdrizzle, just as it has been for the last two days, when it hasn't been raining quite a bit harder. It may well turn to snow tonight. I predict a certain amount of vehicular chaos. I believe my carefulness is honed to a fine edge, but y'know, be careful all you like. Knock yourself out, genius! World's gonna do you how it does ya. Brain hemorrhage could interrupt your careful ass literally at any second.

*

Feeling the quotation mark vibe today. Came up with a word: apostrophastic. For when you're feeling just fucking enthusiastic about apostrophes.

Need to take a nap.

*

have a happy ghostfuck


--JL

#223

Ah, the two hundred and twenty-third post. Fascinating. Just keep waking up alive, you know? And sometimes I write. Mostly read. Do a my job at work as best I can.

Each day is a test and a gift. That's existence, best as I can figure.

*

Today I'm going to draw some pictures and haul some furniture from place to place. Gonna put some stuff in boxes and take all the naps I want. Perform smoke rituals. Eat cheese and bread. See how things go. 

*

Bought a wooden desk, a wooden library chair with a green cushion to sit at the desk in, couple beach chairs with crimson, red, pink, and white plastic straps stretched over yellowed white metal frames to sit outside in, a comfy-ass blue leather armchair and a comfy-ass short green leather couch. Big fan of leather, me. 

Armchair don't really look like much, the design is kind of clunky, but it is one of those chairs that, when you sink into it, reminds you what a comfortable--a pleasurable--sit actually is. I'll be spending quite some time in this weird-lookin, slightly blown-out baby.

I'll describe the desk after I've sat at it for a while, while sitting at it. That's the only way.

Upcoming attractions! Bam! Pow!

*

Read Bazaar of Bad Dreams, by Stephen King. Reading Firestarter now. I'm gonna write a long-ass post about reading as much Stephen King as I have been once I'm through, and the way things are going I'll have obtained, read, and reread all of his books exempting the Dark Tower cycle before I seriously read anything else, and probably I will buy and read the Dark Tower before that too. This process might be complete by the New Year, or early 2020. 

Man! 2020. Comin right up. New decade! It is going to fuck us up. Best strap in. 

*

Been treating myself to a lot of chocolate lately. I love milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, gianduja in whatever density and style you care to name, cacao nibs, all of that. I fuckin love chocolate.

When I was twenty-five I went to Aldi's three or four times just to grab about six pounds of Utz chocolates--chocolate wafer, motherfuckers? strawberry cream? yes please, four packages--and slam that shit over the course of a week. I walked and worked a lot, just like now, and carried on with a pretty spare diet, so it didn't ever make me feel sick or anything. If you make room for it, chocolate is the best thing you can eat. That chocolate made me feel radiant with health. Just felt extra good all that week and the week after.

Don't like chocolate cake. Takes a very particular bake to produce a chocolate cake I would enjoy. Only run into a couple all my life. Good chocolate ice cream ain't as rare, but most is no good either.

Brownies are dank. 

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Ok signing off that's the end no punchline no moral 


--JL