#465

Ah, election day. And what an election!

This year I really think I did pretty well not mentioning politics in like the sense of naming specific names at least too much. On occasion, the general picture has risen to a temperature which, for me personally, cannot be borne without some type of outcry--usually about the imposition of money and the theft of time and ease--but I believe I have grasped the handle of restraint's cooling mechanism, been served thereby, and passed those savings onto you, dear reader.

But today is after all the day of election, and one might even be called remiss in their duties if one were to let it pass entirely without comment. 

As is classically done in linear time, let us first look back.

*

The vitriol Joseph Biden was able to summon in the national rhetorics was inspiring on both sides. I understand that many on the left carried a great deal of trauma from posting classic Joe Biden as Vice President memes during the Obama years, extremely fucking cringe affairs which they absolutely delighted in--he was their ancient, fun uncle, and his new teeth were a vision back then, it is true. 

For me, the Obama presidency ran as a stupid bullshit tokenization party that I wished would stop but which I now see as an idyllic time; wheras the former revelers live suspended in such shame that the pretend they voted for a mysterious, invisible, morally superior candidate--a 2008 write-in for Bernie Sanders, perhaps; a piece of shit who has miraculously, despite all outstanding evidence, retained his place in the Noble House of Acceptable Compromises with Neoliberal Values. Anyway, fuckers act like Obama was Pol Pot the whole time and not Politi-Jay Z Mk. II, and they always hated Biden, he was always a Bad Old White Guy and I Personally Have Never Liked a White Guy Ever. 

Fucking bullshit. 

As for the right, well, I really had no idea that white dudes were even capable of hating one of their own like that. Though I suppose when one is vehemently enthusiastic regarding the daily sessions of Two Minute's Hate directed at that withered Goldstein, one's capacities and ordnances find themselves naturally expanded. Perhaps they also feel shame for tolerating him in their minds when Obama sat the big chair. I guess it is also easier, as is time-honored and expected, when you assert that your opponent is a homosexual, so as to bring ready, ample, and easily mobilized reserved of baseless, misdirected hatred to bear.

The beauty of it all is that he is of course only a man, and has nothing to do with the incredible caricatures that have been painted of him on the national stage by miscreant and supporter alike, nor anything to do with how the world is and acts out. 

It must be stridently evangelized: all of these ghoulish people, whose faces are masks because they have no true expression, are a cross for us to bear, and not messianic representatives of our human progress. I vote with that attitude, and that attitude alone---that of a grim and barely willing relinquishment of my temporary and performance-based tolerance. Everyone is automatically fired as soon as I vote for them. Any given organism is only beginning the challenge, as keeping the job is where the job begins. As it is for me, it should be for them, eh?

*

This year's particularly contorted and absurd machinations mean that as usual, I could not in good conscience vote for the intellect I would actually prefer at the helm of the office. Sorry, Cornel West. Be assured I stared at your name, and the blank little box next to it, with a true and actually passionate longing. Next time, I pray.

It is honestly a stone bitch that I felt unable to vote for, in my opinion, the most iconic and acceptable third-party candidate in living memory. Very sad.

*

Let us indulge in a look even further back as a matter of brief review even on my own blog, as in this truly benighted and paralyzingly headlong age, even things I said three years ago seem like an archeologist has to blow dust off them and consult dense notes in order to truly grasp the fruit of my prior revelations.

Say it often, but not enough, it has to be repeated: the pus and bile of the Old Web became too much for the Carnis Digitalia and burst into an abcess, the vile and stinking flood flowing into meatspace, which was markedly, one might say intensely unimproved by the infusion, and the open cavity a ripe promised land for external infections. And what infections have taken hold! The sins and curses of that wretched phsyical realm pulse hideously, thrumming in place to the beat of an army of dark hearts. Even now I can see them, in my mind, their stink and wetness anathema to the cool and polished marbles of my dead, romanticized Olympus.

Thus, the problems written into the code developed organically by the social memetic organism we belong to (alas) were hacked by its most internal, most productive, most abstract processes--only for every fractal that every iterated to simply iterate again, in a process that operated in tandem with itself--think of a zipper unzipping, and then the jacket unthreading itself violently in spasms--destabilizedby feedback loops, kicked off the edge of chaos. Out of control fast, out of control big.

Collapse is imminent, and from that collapse, its detritus, shall rise many fresh collectives. A process not unlike the division of one cell into two. But that moment of bicellularity is just that. A fleeting, breathless second. The rate of division is exponential. You might see four for a partial moment before you realize there's a hundred and forty-four probably and from there the mind hitches, unable to usefully process. What I mean is collapse is another word for beginning.

*

All this by way of saying that the outcome of this election is, while of importance in the short term, not terribly important news in the aggregate. Things are going to change so fundamentally and at such speed that the outcomes themselves will hold little import simply because the context will change so radically the very sense of the information will change--and still we will be plunging onwards.

Again: the outcome does matter. Just not with same heft that these things usually matter, as things are so unstable that anything could happen at any time.

Or, y'know, everything's the same. From one's own little speck of perspective, if one is as objectively honest as one can bring oneself to be, one may acknowledge, perhaps even aloud, that one knows absolutely nothing, and every day is a mystery with no solution; you just get through it till it's time to go to bed.

*

Well, it makes sense. Societies are just like organisms, as I have also said in the past. The story of two single cells producing a third, which in a remarkably short time can consider what to wear every fucking morning, and just as quickly finds itself breaking down practically right away into individual cells and even the substrates and wastes that are the byproducts of all cell clusters over time. Before you know it, the process has resulted in a whole new collection of cells living through and adding onto a culture established by cell colonies long past. 

A cell culture. Cell culture. Cell culture. 

Do you get it.

This basic situation has not changed and transposes across many scales of size and granularity.

The multiverse: infinite bits coalescing and disintegrating, forever. 

Infinity infnitely iterating infinitely.

*

The pleasure I take in bringing the post to the prior plateau--I am very aware I have done it several times before--is enormous, but it is also an important task, its repetition an essential part of that task. We cannot forget what we are and where we live. We mustn't.

*

Of course there is no sense minimizing my own feelings, either: I am dismayed at the stark choice this election presented, and how far outside of my prerogative the script has forced me to situate myself. I included who I wanted to vote for as a sort of indication of who I did vote for, wholly against my inclination, the alternative being to me unacceptable to such a degree that my hand felt forced. 

You all know me: I fucking HATE that.

Less, clearly, than I hate certain prospects, but the act being completed, its discomfort stings the more.

*

However it must be said that I do not hold any special ill will for the adherents of either wretched camp. People, as people, which is to say, my fellow citizens--a group which I personally suspend in a wholly different net than I do the elected officials that are supposed to represent them (no official could possibly represent me, and I hardly expect any to)--will tend to congregate, it is their way--the way of all cells, all molecules. Having done so, particular physics and processes take hold, with inevitable outcomes and natural results. I have described them earlier in this post, and the analogy holds. This also works with churches, newspapers; any collective effort, really. 

The bits are innocent, and I can bit around with my fellow bits presumably infinitely without our loyalty to strawmen and colors getting in my way, because I have extremely low faith in and zero loyalty towards collectives of almost any description, but I do like people. I am skilled at manging this tension. For example, I can and have worked productively with people who would probably want me dead if I did not, like a vaudeville performer, keep no less than eight plates spinning on broomsticks during every interaction involving these terribly loaded yet wholly imaginary differences. It is a matter of keeping the both of us grounded in fully human terms and experiences, and steering with a determination unto obstinacy way from the inhuman, chittering, doubletalking drivel our demonic overlords would have us torture each other with while they laugh and pour wine into their already-full mouths.

Simple rule: only talk about real things. Things we can both touch and see, things that materially matter and have to be dealt with and bring that joy and satisfaction that actual, vital concepts and categories bring to an existence being actively experienced at the scale it is appropriate for that life to be lived.

For example, a fancy sports team's outcomes: strawmen and colors. Competing brands: strawmen and colors. Politicians: strawmen and colors in a big way. Improving our own lots, the lots of our fellow man, and our own work and leisure hours to the greatest and most joyful extent we can intelligently manage: actual life. 

Actual life? Please? Can we prioritize actual life every day, instead of this excruciating, neverending round with the fucking goddamn loyalty colors and chattering heads?

*

Ten million unwelcome text messages from grifters and charlatans. That's last week. On just my phone. The background noise from this election season probably registered on alien instruments fifty parsecs from here.

*

How much money do people have, I mean how bad can the economy actually be, if people give money to these brazen fucks? I mean I'm not a person who doesn't spend money on crap and things not everybody understands. I love blowing cash, hate having money. Ice cream, books, and video games, baby. Way more fun than money. And so look, I can take the shit I get for this philosophy in life from fuckers who love to punish people for no reason with equanimity, but it is total bullshit that you can bitch that the economy is bad and the economy is someone's fault and then give any fucker wearing nice clothes with their hand out--a state of affairs which insults my intellect to a degree that it feels pierced, as though by a dagger--I mean, I don't know about you, but I have cats, and bills, and a mortgage, and I like to have fun. I have to work really hard to keep all that going and I barely fucking scrape by. This, in a country which is supposedly the richest and the greatest in all the lands of this poor globe. But the idea that I can spare even a dime for a political party? Let alone the political party of a different state in this union? This is just how I feel, and maybe I am wrong, but no. No.

Bitch, they have money--and they flush it down the toilet in a way that should make everyone who thinks of it blush. We act like there's no money--look at how these fuckers live their lives, and what they spend just to suck each other's dicks! They are the dragons of legend, the reality described by the symbol, and we pile gold on their glittering hordes in obeisance. 

Pathetic. The word is travesty. 

I mean, fucking honestly. What do you think it costs to fill the balloons at something like a national convention? Fucking. Balloons. Travesty. What do you think it takes to fill closets with "appropriate" clothing, pantsuits and ascots and shit? Do you think they can be seen in clothing that has seen wear and tear to any degree, in their hideously glittering society of excess? Why do these so-called representatives all seem to have more houses than I have people in my one household? Correct jewelry, correct makeup, correct private aviation, correct chauffeur services, correct price tags on all that shit and just imagine the colognes, the perfumes, the private schools for the kids, the leasing of a different car every year per driver per property--driven or not driven. 

Shoes.

*

God, and the chatter around it all, media personalities and PR folks. They use military and sports analogies unflinchingly and interchangeably as they discuss how public "servants", whom they are fond of referring to in the most glowing terms, rob the public and spend the stolen money to steal more money, and they say that this process is very important because it is a process, and it is attached inextricably to the process that describes the process (read: money), so with that being how it is, everything will work as long as you keep yourself informed (daily) and participate actively in the system (through approved channels, only during specified periods in the fiscal year).

Damn. Incontrovertible. Except it is the death of reason and the funeral march of what it has ever meant to be human in this world. 

*

Anyway. Election day at least means they should stop texting me for money. Right? For a little while?

Shuddering, beginning to sweat as I see it in my mind: waking up to a text message tomorrow--right above the one that says "one last push"--marked "the fight's not over" or some goddamn equivalent. 

Pretty soon I'm gonna have to destroy the bedeviled thing and start again with a new stupid glaring rectangle. At least these empty, cackling bastards will have to take the time--or their large language scripts will, anyway--to place a new number on their wicked lists, so as to mortar it with unceasing, insulting horseshit.

*

To try and put a good vibe on the day, I went ahead and finished the main campaign in Unicorn Overlord. May this act tip the scales of this day however humbly towards peace, justice, and wise rule.

Man, that would be something to get. Indeed, the game's eneding represented a dream so wholly ensconced in the pipe that you would need a pair of plumbers, brothers maybe, to brave the depths and fetch that thing into the light. It was very, very beautiful. Loved every moment of that game.

*

As a final note: when I voted today, I got not the typical sticker proclaiming that I had done so. You know, the basic statement, the variations on font, the three colors, and Old Glory. No, today I got a sticker with a bitchin werewolf ripping out of his clothes. Not "I Voted"--this sticker screams that "I VOTED", or, perhaps, it would be better, more true, to say that it howls.

Let me say that I endorse this in the strongest possible terms, and, as a voter and a citizen, would work extremely diligently to collect all the stickers of this caliber, made for this purpose, that I possibly could.

--JL

#464

Oh no! I let October end without filling the seven-post imaginary quota I already absolved myself from when it comes to the chilling, frigid depths that Factually Macabre 2024 potentially represented. I did not properly discuss ghosts, some might say--some people who might try rereading the presented works with more circumspection. Or at the very least, with widened apertures. But at any rate, four is less than seven, and casting the shadow of ghosts is not the same as discussing ghosts forthrightly, and for all this, I don't apologize at all. This is my little censored and redzoned corner of what was once the vast and untamed Web, and if I want a stretch of silence to symbolize a post about ghosts and perhaps allow you to wonder if I have quit or, of course, expired, then I will, no bones about it. 

Or, some bones. Skeleton bones. 

Factually Macabre 2024

*

With that out of the way, I'll tell ya: I have suffered severe spiritual, physical, and chronomatic disruptions since last I posted. So I'm just gonna say some stuff about video games, specifically me and video games, like writing about boys I like and why in my diary, because who gives any fuck about any of that shit, or the fact that it's November and here we go with the fucking politics to where like, by the end of the week, will I have to barricade my house against a pack of inbred lunatics whipped into a frenzy by the depradations of AR trolls, con artists, and race war agitators? Who fucking cares. Who gives a shit what plot point kills you in this batshit freaky narrative. As far as I'm concerned, and as far as I have always been concerned, uniformed strangers with submachine guns could murder or deport me at any time for completely fabricated, indeed, feverishly imagined trangressions or potential transgressions. This has been true since I grew pubic hair, basically. Who gives a fucking fuck--who fucking cares. 

If I get deported, I'm just going to walk to the nearest beach and bum there till I die. Full disclosure. I guess I'm assuming I'll get deported roughly in the direction of my geographic origin, though I guess they could as easily deport me to Greenland if they liked. Who would stop them?

*

Closing in on the end of the main story of Unicorn Overlord, and while it seems to be promising a rich enough postgame experience and of course has assured me of its replayability every step of the way, I am lingering over the final bite and filling in many tasks, powering up weapons, filling my pockets, leveling stragglers, etc.--the kind of behavior symptomatic of one who is about to walk away from a finish. Or, as is also true of me, getting ready to absolutely subjugate the final hurdle.

It is my preference, and there is much debate in general around this issue, but it is my preference, if given any kind of chance, to go against the final boss or final enagement of an adventure or campaign with the benefits of the kind of maniacal preparation that allows me to take hold of that entity and snap its scrawny fucking little neckbones purely as a gesture of my dominance. It is how I have always chosen to destroy Sephiroth, for example--laughing at him, as I would laugh at a child whose forehead I was holding onto as they swung their clenched little fists madly at thin air.

So yes, I'm going to go into the eponymous final battle of Unicorn Overlord with my weakest characters leveled higher than the average enemy level by at least three and every person kitted in the absolute cream of the available equipment, their nested arrangements precision-tuned to devastate every mix of units that might be foolish enough to ensnare itself in any one of their ten arrangements, ten steel flowers in deadly bloom, ten buffeting gusts of a howling gale I have dubbed DECA-KAZESHINI.

*

Unicorn Overlord consumed me entire, as a flame consumes and causes magnesium to flare like a young star, but here in this slowing period at the end I've had a chance to start up Octopath Traveler and New Pokémon Snap. Pleased to have the headpsace to return to playing Zelda, and being able to play Banjo-Tooie on my Switch is nothing but a joy. Looking forward to FFVII: Crisis Core Reunion when all that has been more worked through.

The new music app from Nintendo, distributed free with the online membership I already subscribe to, is an answered prayer. They have modeled their music player and its organizing principles on iMusic rather than something like spotify, cementing once again how perfect Nintendo and I are for each other and what a harmonious marriage we might enjoy. As a matter of shared preferences and shared values--speaking purely in terms of design and philosophy--no company on earth hews more closely to me, nor I to any other.

*

As a parting idea, I'd like to discuss playing the Gunner in the warthog in Halo. I love doing that. It essentially consitutes its own game--mainting your targeting reticule and optimizing the lethality of your payloads during every millisecond of the endeavor is to me one of the highlights of the series.

That's all. I have no problem driving the car or flying the aircraft, and will if called upon--but it is the defense of these machines by way of the most withering possible offense that I truly adore.

*

Fucking hell I want only to be alone why does anyone ever leave their little area for any reason? I have, despite my fundamental desire to not do so, done many things recently. Even been to the zoo. I must admit I do enjoy the zoo.

--JL

#463

Woof! Maturation. Living in history. Sharing space with a crazy imbalance of new souls vs. old souls or whatever. 

It's like. Can I get stronger drugs? Gotta get through this. Find myself wanting stronger drugs so badly that my usual drugs aren't even dragging me out of bed. Only video games and a full bladder.

*

What the fuck, man. I hate that. Hate piloting around this self-heating skinful of blood and slime and keratin that doesn't have the sense to only want good things. It has to want horrible vile things too.

And thus! Factually Macabre, twenty twenty four.

More specifically, I am here drawing on a deeper definition of angst than is usually flippantly applied to the tormented, but. I guess in English it reads across the concepts.  

*

Have you noticed? That I am trying something new with periods and using more fragments? I dunno. Might not stick.

*

Maybe it's just how I feel today, this here post, in this, the month of the octopus.

That's how I've always felt, anyway. Also that October should be the eighth month, and that it is not is one of the things about calendars that serves as fundament to my chronovertigo.

Is my chronovertigo a chronic condition, you ask? Man, why don't you shut your fucking mouth. Jesus.

*

Doctors are terrible for many reasons. One of  them is their wretched imprecision, especially around language. Oh, sure, the Greek and Latin are straightforward and mean exactly what they sound like--typically. The English and Spanish, less so, and that's as far as my personal knowledge stretches, though many translated doctors also seem to suffer from this terrible disrespect for straightforward use of common tongue. More flagrant are the more recent linguistic conventions and innovations, and it is these I speak of when I say that doctors are shameless and disgusting word criminals. Language perverts, who attack not only words and sentences, but the concepts they are meant to enshrine. 

Every fucking god damn condition that exists is a chronic condition. It starts and ends, either after x time or because death cured every problem you ever had. Without a doctor there to "explain", if you were told you had a chronic condition, you would have to ask if you were somehow sick in the time, or if time had done something to you or harmed you somehow (it has), or if you were permanently sick like a vampire is sick and you will endure like an impossibly dense stone of disease plunging through the liquid suspension of interminable ages, or if the fucking illness would come at you every Thursday at five p.m. on the dot and would call ahead if anything should change day of, and would stay precisely thirty-seven hours per stretch--so, out with my bags at six every Sunday, darling. Next week. Ta!

Chronic illness describes nothing. And their given definition? Some shit, anything, that lasts from three months to the rest of your life. Ok, cool. So it's at least potentially like it sounds, depending on what you heard. And what is to be done? Well, don't go throwing clocks at anyone. Also rubbing a clock on the affected area will not affect the progression of the disease, though it may while away the hours. Kills time, anyway.

Starting to feel like I've lost control of this idea. Time to cut the cord.

*

So. All that aside, what's creepy today? 

Well, I dunno what's not creepy about being consigned to an existence where you can wake up sick one morning and it doesn't go away for the rest of your life no matter what you or anybody else thinks to try or does at all.

In addition, I have vaguely referred to the very real situation that a class of people--moneyed people, people with power and education and various brands of clout--exists who demand and are given access to our bodies through various social and governmental mechanisms. These people have created a fully armed, operational, and ingrained set of mores and durable material realities resulting in that we trust them with our very lives, and they do whatever they fucking want to us. They swear an oath to do real good with your body, but never since the dawn of time have we been more aware that oaths are maybe just words, and words are just wind, and we see every single day on a neverending loop that people have no problem using any word to rationalize any deed. And indeed, just like anyone else, doctors rape, cheat, lie, obey power's terrible and insane commands through apathy or turpitude or terror, steal, fall prey to hubris, dodge responsibility, and in their special capacities try and have you take insanely dangerous and addictive drugs, or cut you open even though they don't need to, and expose you to  you might never know what shit. Because they can. And if you think I am being an asshole, just look it up. Look up some real-ass, classic, juicy bits of medical malpractice history. Are you perhaps aware of the case of the Tuskegee Airmen?

Now, a brain surgeon has to swear not to fuck your actual brain tissues up on purpose if they go in there guns blazing as they do. And if they should happen to anyway? They can be sued. Now, the fuckers that go in there and screw around without a knife? The one everyone in society tells you to go spill your guts out every single week to for the rest of your life so that they know you in a way no other person on this planet knows you, and if you don't, there's something wrong with you? They don't have to say jack shit, basically, and they are way, way harder to deal with in court. In general. Unlike most doctors, nearly every psychologist knows how to talk to people.

In the end, however, these two types of people are fully complemented only with a third type: that thing which will allow itself to be called a lawyer, and act in such a capacity.

Man. I know this opinion is unpopular, but these three professions should be some untouchable caste shit. Fuck these people. In their modern hyperextensions, that is, where every human activity that has ever served us has been warped and corroded into something that hurts us.

An experienced healer, a powerful shaman, and a wise keeper of rules walk into a bar and are instantly murdered by a doctor, a psychologist, and a lawyer. Rimshot.

*

One final creepy thing about existence that I already said (the point that kicked us off proper): we are stuck in these bodies.

Do you hear me? We are stuck in these bodies.

We cannot get out. 

Death is no guarantee--only a chance.

--JL

p.s. look alright I apologize to all the execrably litigious people I have reduced to the absurd today it is a bad habit that I indulge in to keep my perspectives flexible and it is my particular affliction that I am goaded to flex the perspectives of others through doing word jazz but in the end I believe all people are fundamentally good and should not be loathed for doing their stupid asshole jobs or being grownups instead of being adults

quit your jobs though and stop being grownups what the fuck

BONUS CREEPSHOW: Final apropos of doctors: they know that what I am about to say is true--we are on the bleeding, verging cusp of some true life mad scientist shit. That Chinese dude CRISPRing some little girls to life was just the quickly subdued first spasm of a motherfucker showing up with something no one now living is truly prepared to report on as fact, but will change our ideas of the possible and the permissible irrevocably till the end of our culture, perhaps our species.

Also ideas are creepy in that--did you see? I cut the cord, and it came crawling right back to take over my brain with undiminished and perhaps increased fervor.

Ideas, you see, are not things we are really in control of and should probably take less credit for. Ideas have their own shit going on, their own physics and appetites.

Like...ghosts.

#462

Internet has been colonized and fucked into the ground, its vital natural resources stripped and refashioned into shitty engineering. Just like meatspace. And just like meatspace, even though everything--everything except people and their perishable works, I guess, so you better try hard to like hominids and their fucking antics--yes, though absolutely everything that was once good and beautiful in the life of this planet is currently diminished and dying, there are still ways to have a good day and see some cool stuff, if you're lucky.

I think myself lucky because again, even in this benighted, grasping age, I can go online and just lose about an hour just looking at valid information about things that make sense, like about a specific genus of tarantula, or the longest-running light bulbs in the world (wikipedia rabbit holes) and clicking around to websites about endangered species and materials science newsposts and blogs about information as a self-organizing principle that uses complex phenomena as both vehicle and life cycle--the ark of the covenant, if you will.

Anyway. Glad I'm not so old and broken that I'm not actively down to spend some time following curiousity sparks around the infinite corridors of time.

*

Beat Final Fantasy XII, which was just a regular story until all of a sudden it was full on Final fuckin Fantasy and the tears were streaming down my face as I breathed deeply and irregularly. Wow. I mean it was fucking amazing. Beautiful. Astonishing decision to bury almost all the payoff deep in the third act, all the buildup and rising tension so casual and masked in the long long hours of the grind and tinker. But when that game is ready to reveal its flourish--none are left standing. We all must bow our heads to what is on offer here. To what is being said, and how it came to be spoken.

Put it away in single digits over a hundred hours, about when I just wanted to stop doing endgame side content, which seems good for another twenty hours at least. So that's seven through twelve, with XIII, XII: Revenant Wings, X-2, replaying VII: Dirge of Cerberus (maybe), VII: Crisis Core Reunion, and I through VI on deck. Maybe that chibi version of XV. Oh, maybe Legend and that other one. Should I add the Mana series? I was also thinking about the Dragon Quest series.

However, all that stuff has to wait, because I got and will have to beat The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which is absolutely phenomenal--and I can say the basic reason why very simply. Link is a perfect hero with only one flaw: though he has access to spells and magical items and techniques aplenty in his capacity as the all-rounder of all all-rounders, because of this wonderful, apt-to-the-hand sphericity, Link is not a wizard. He couldn't just be a wizard. However! Princess Zelda has all the conceptual space in the world to be a wizard, ample precedent in fact, and thus, we have--at last--a Zelda game where you get to do a bunch of crazy fucking wizard shit and bonkers magical manipulations that Link can but wistfully dream of.

And even that is sort of in a holding pattern on the way to the second main area part in the quest because the other game I started playing for a palette cleanser after five full Final Fantasy games in a row is Unicorn Overlord which, well. It's absurd is what it is. Keep forgetting to eat, and I'm done wasting time here--gotta go play Unicorn Overlord right goddamn now.

--JL

p.s. for today's Factually Macabre 2024 feel free to consider that real-life grownups expose their own children to grasping pedophiles for secondhand fame and easy money. Well, for the concept of those things. Not even the promise of them.

That's pretty good, right? I don't know if I can come up with much worse. Child soldiers. Internment camps. The kind of cheap, cut-rate, shoe-polish-stinking dirty linoleum corruption that's barely worth remarking upon until its logical cosequences string out to an environmental disaster or a case of mass poisoning, with like enormous blistering lumps growing on the necks of schoolchildren and a whole entire neighborhood of babies with brain damage and dead dogs and cats and tall cancer rates for two decades. That's macabre. 

Oh, you mean like pumpkins and bats and candy-apple shits? Scooby-Doo? I dunno. That stuff's fine if you work for a marketing company that is jointly owned by a holding company whose controlling share is owned by a petroleum giant, and a food conglomerate owned by a company owned by an agricultural conglomerate that owns a separate company that owns about seventy percent of the all the corn grown in North America and, somehow, all the sugar cane on this side of the planet. But that's not what I'm talking about. Unless I am.

p.p.s. We didn't do ghosts today. I am, however, fairly haunted, so there is at least that. Ghosts soon.

#461

Returning to the subject of skeletons (yes! yes! Factually Macabre 2024 continues!), perhaps nothing is so iconically and universally used to symbolize the fearful and gruesome aspects of death itself, though it is in actual fact essential to life, part of a living body, and is merely the most enduring of a certain kind of organism's structure. A human skull should no more symbolize death and evoke fear than a seashell, or a dead leaf. 

And yet it does.

Skeletons could never hurt you, unless they were indeed animated by dark magicks or the like. They cannot in actuality hold themselves up. It's not merely a matter of nothing attaching the joints and bones themselves--the very cohesion we grant a skeleton, its human shape, is a human conceit, a deception. A skeleton is a pile of useless junk. The parts are nothing without the life of the whole. Bones do not support themselves just to make a shape, they are parts of how a leg is, they hold suspensions in a stasis, they change densities and temperatures throughout the course of a day, they are affected by the physics of the tendons and the unceasing contraction and relaxation of the muscle fibers. A skeleton does not walk; it floats. It is not wired together or marionetted like a puppet, it is flowing and falling and breathing and mostly water, and the dried-out husk that lives in the human imagination brimming with jealousy and evil intent is nothing more than persistent minerals reminding us that no one grows too old, and it really is no big deal.

And yet it is.

For some reason, most of us shudder. And indeed, given everything I have just said, to witness a skeleton standing on its own? Would shit myself instantly. I have destroyed probably hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million skeleton enemies in video games and I have trained my mind and spirit to welcome death as a release and an adventure, and still, in present tense and living color, a skeleton would freak my whole composure to pieces. 

Thankfully, they can be summarily destroyed. Not like a fucking ghost.

*

Ghosts next time? I'm thinking ghosts next time.

--JL

#460

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024

WILL MURDER YOU IN YOUR FANCY CAR

AS PUNISHMENT FOR YOUR LUST FEELINGS

*

A friend of mine reads new books; that is to say, almost entirely writers and trends that have surfaced not only this millenium, but the few years surrounding whatever screaming NOW we happen to inhabit should we bring the matter up again. A current reader, a reader of trends. I read new books, yes, but as anyone who reads this blog knows, a) I am into too many things at once to try to keep up with everything happening at the bleeding edge of anything, and b) my requirements even within the book spectrum are too omnivorous and exploratory to be satisfied by this model at all; I am as avidly curious about old books and dead people as I am about who the most interesting living writers are and what they're up to, according to my own metrics. Finally, c) things like books on tikkle tokkle and the best sellers on the argmazon merketplorg mean less than nothing and in fact anything that thrives in such an environment must penetrate my most virulent antibodies and craggy, hardened carapaces.

I am aware that I myself have had products on sale on the ahrizon mellscapelace, but they could never have succeeded in such an environment. I'd hoped to sell a few books more or less on terms I could live with and a few--a laughable handful--is exactly what I accomplished. 

Anyway. The horror stories that they read and send passages of in the group chat seem mostly horrifying in how they are written rather than their subject matter, and in this they achieve levels which must be understood as pure evil, though nothing like the spiritual corruption and total abandonment of human feeling and standards of personal quality on display in the "erotica" and "fantasy" I am exposed to in this way. 

These doses act very like inoculation. If I didn't see shit like that for ten years and then got blindsided by it? I might have a heart attack and fucking die. I might snap right then and there, on the goddamn spot like a sick cartoon, unrecognizable. Shitting pissing nutbag lose my grip and start gnawing on the nearest human face. 

So if I let this person administer tiny doses of lethal toxins, I can continue to live in this world, and try to understand the people I was born to share it with.

*

They got gross shit, these horror books, sure. Revolutionarily gross maybe, stuff that sure, traditional publishers would not acknowledge a market for--perhaps wisely, perhaps not. Not for me to say, though my basic stance on traditional publishers is that they are scorpions trying to cross a river. But they--the stories--are not, at the same time, exactly, what I would forthrightly call books. They are long-form pieces of writing, yes. People read them, this is true. However everyone knows that all kinds of evidence about the given duckness of a thing does not necessarily equate to a thing being a duck, conventional wisdom notwithstanding. Guess what: we live in an age where we have to discard a bunch of that shit, and rediscover much that has been forgotten or erased. So it goes.

Oooooh, graphic descriptions of skinning a penis like taking a sock off a foot. Am I talking about the horror or the erotica? Yes.

Dang, groundbreaking. The year two thousand and two AIM'd; they want their basic flame war threats back.

*

So boring. I know, nestled deep in the folds of the great beast's hide, great books struggle for air and will die smothered, some of them so scary that it's probably a good thing that no one will ever read them.

*

Still haven't watched the theatrical run movies I been meaning to! This is not optimal, especially re: The Substance. I just want to stay home and play video games real bad, is all, and there's always chores to do. The days go by how the days go by.

And then you die. Maybe in the room you're reading this post in. Maybe in the bathroom. Maybe somehwere you never could have guessed. What will your last thought be? I'm trying to get my house so that if it happens here, no matter where I happen to be within its envelope, I have interesting and beautiful colors and shapes and objects to look at and trigger my last thoughts. Something hopefully semicoherent, towards the ecstatic; something poetic and complete into and of itself that places the kind of punctuation I could marvel at and laugh with after all is said and told and told again. 

REMEMBER EVERY DAY THAT YOU GONNA FUCKING DIE

MEMENTO GOD DAMN MORI

PEACE

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024

--JL

#459

Alright, alright, I'm beginning to adjust to being a MANager again. The heavy investments, in time and currency, I have made towards video games have leavened the portion and granted me the necessary rise.

Boy, I'd hate to find out what full-bore description of maniac I would be without video games. The government would no doubt have me developing something gruesome, conceptually or experimentally. Or I would be a priest. It's hard to say with me, with the past, with the might-have-beens and probablies.

With the priest thing, I do not visualize the kind that messes with anybody but definitely the kind that drinks too much and turns up dead. At least, from the vantage point of the phenomenon I am in this universe, in this iteration, that is the kind of thing it is easy for me to imagine. We are all of course one of infinite versions of ourselves, including infinite shadow doppelgangers we barely dare and perhaps cannot imagine, let alone confront.

*

It's a good month to entertain spooky, twisted, maladroit, and outright horrifying notions. And what better way to celebrate this quirk of the human mind than by doing a thing here on the ole blog? Let us enjoin a brash and rousing session of 

FACTUALLY MACABRE

2024

yessssssss

*

One rather feels that, with the consideration of real beings, real persons, invaders from another universe whose familiarity to you and with you is as absolute as their proclivities and appetites and attitudes are abhorrent to you, I have already completed the mandate for the day. But perhaps we can drive our scalpel deeper, and observe how marrow will issue from a cut in living bone.

*

Haven't watched The Substance yet, but I'm gonna! Before it leaves theaters, I will do this thing. My buddy almost passed out! To lose consciousness right in a movie theater; imagine.

*

I will also watch the second Joker and F.F. Coppola's Megalopolis by F.F. Coppola. All of these viewings will take place near the end of the run of the film, maybe on or close to the same day I bet. 

Also I would like to see The Wild Robot,

*

We're gonna roll Akira this month at the old theater. Gotta catch that shit; never seen it on the big screen. If that is not factually macabre piece of art, man, I dunno. I guess the scope of "macabre" is to a certain extent whatever you decide it is, so "macabre" might define a fairly narrow band of light. I think of it more like a vein of substance that runs through many different sedimental layers and types of bedrock, and is component to many alloys and composites. 

*

Oh, skeletons. Yes, the simple skeleton is macabre, natural and of a piece with something as basic as shitting or eating or having sex. One does use one's skeleton for all these things, after all. Don't you ever think about that? The way your skeleton looks underneath it all, as you wait in the elevator with a bunch of other flesh-sheathed, organ-laden skeletons? As you grind your flesh into the flesh of another in the heat of passion, do you imagine two skeletons having come together to perform a bizarre mummery in which they pretend to but never quite touch? 

How ridiculous your skeleton looks as you fuck. As you wipe your ass. You fool! Cover that thing up!

*

Cool. Cool. Some food for thought, eh? I mean. Some maggots to devour your brain even as you stumble from horror to horror here on

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024 

--JL