#146

There used to be a troll in the creek by my house. His brows were the long stalks of grass overshadowing his big old man nose, lapped by the extreme edge of the water so that the creek was his mustache, the steep banks his cheeks.

Now his nose lies on its side in the middle of a broader, shallower version of his former mustache. His brows collapsed years ago. Even back then I watched his cheeks begin to grow hollow.

If I didn't know better, that nose of his could well be just another big rock, half-buried midstream.

Once upon a time a girl and I smoked cigarettes on new platforms of smooth golden wood and talked and drank beers and watched the troll slumber. We worked together and lived together and squandered all our other hours together like young idiots do. For years. One of them, by the creek.

The platform's boards have gone gray-tinged mossy brown with weathering, all the angles and corners windworn. Nails gave out on one part of the walkway, and much of the ground they are planted in has sloughed into the creek. The troll is dead. Haven't seen the girl in a long time. Others have come and gone, some for years in their own right, and still I remember her as I drift my gaze over the flowing waters.

Or I think about other stuff. It's a toss-up. Often enough I get both. The effects of the world are not always consistent.

Creek by my house still flows. I am still an idiot, smoking cigarettes and watching it stay impermanent.


--JL

#145

Unlike the local rivers, which have by and large undergone no major changes in all my time observing them--some important transformations in certain areas, but they don't flow drastically different than they ever did--the creek by my house has done some pretty extensive morphing. If I had to judge by how things go around here, creeks are far more dramatic than rivers.

Creek used to run much broader, never too deep but ten feet across in some places. The banks were shallower near the source but climbed high deeper in the woods, before pooling decisively as it channeled into a pipe running beneath the highway, a second pipe presumably spitting out the creek's further course on the other side.

The construction of the pond, which diverted some of the stream's flow, thinned the creek to a trickle. Treeline claimed what had once been bank, then bed. But the trickle meant business, and cut new, deep banks close to the source and running by the pond, and even reclaimed four feet of bed at its widest point in the woods, where it had to find an entirely new, more circuitous course to the culverts. Regaining breadth even as it cuts ever deeper into the world, despite the school redesigning the ponds to curtail erosion.

*

Creek nonsense concludes next post! My youngest brother is in town and I want to kill virtual monsters and talk shit with him.


--JL

#144

What is up, the square root of twelve! A special and super cool number, for a variety of interesting reasons. I shall have to post steadily for another sixty or seventy years to get to the next square. We shall see. It is not a predictable reality.

*

My younger brothers and I used to strike out down the creek on mapping expeditions. As the oldest, I have always allowed my brothers what I thought was a normal but have found through comparison an extraordinary amount of license and autonomy while we spent time together and in cohabitational praxis. Basically, I did not act as a tyrant over them nor aggressively curb their behavior through punitive terror or emotional coercion, but treated them as equals under my care and protection, with rights and privileges no different than my own. I'm not saying I am a great brother, or that this made life easy or free of violent disagreement, but they are both smarter, more successful, and way less fucked up than I am, and when my brothers and I cooperate, it is as one three-headed organism.

The oldest of a brood can sometimes fill the role of icebreaker, nautically speaking. In gaming parlance, the tank. Militarily, the tip of the spear.

So really we would just go for walks and use our imaginations together, exploring and interpreting the natural world conveniently available to us, usually using the creek as a funnel for our spirits. We would join its flow into the woods, which allowed us to transform as we left the world behind.

Small woods. Small creek. But for us, an entire continent, laced with otherworldly fevers, and sometimes unspeakable terrors. There's a German word for it. 

*

When my parents and my youngest brother were living in a different country for a spell and my other brother was away at college, my first long-term ex and I moved into the house. We made a horrible mess of it and I disintegrated into level 9 alcoholism. I was getting ready to hit level 10 when I got arrested, so I didn't, but I did not stop making huge mistakes, nor was it the last time I would start drinking and eventually lose control of it.

She and I would leave the house to smoke, which is one of the kinder things you can say about how we treated the place. Cohabitational praxis indeed; we were disgusting shitty trashbabies, and it was still better than how we had treated the apartment we had lived in predating this period. I can't imagine who I would be without this woman, respect and honor her to that high degree you reserve for the cream, there is no one like her in the world and she is a down girl and the real business, but we were exceptionally bad together.

Awful. Nightmare shit.

We smoked cigarettes on the back deck more than we should have, especially in the dead of winter, but optimally we'd go down to the wooden platforms by the creek.

*

More about the creek...tomorrow! Hope you're digging this creek malarkey. Have a wonderful day.


--JL

#143

About a hundred yards to the immediate left of the back deck of our house, which is a condominium and therefore a big long building with other houses inside it and the deck is sandwiched between two other decks, the land drops a little and there lies the source of a creek. I have smoked a lot of cigarettes by this body of water. It springs up just past the border of the neighborhood on city land, which is wooded and separates us and the private school we share our main neighborhood road with from the next condo complex over, and marks the border of the private school's lands not directly facing us.

Some years ago the school dug out a pond on its side of the big field behind my house. The creek borders this field and strikes out into some woods further in that direction, before the highway cuts them off. The school buildings are on a rise beyond the field, their tall, square, white-tiled theater building a constant part of looking out the window. I used to catch a bus out at the front of that school, so it could take me to my school.

I thought it was a pretty arrogant thing to do, and it looked shitty for a long time, but they knew their business. A proper ecosystem now, in it and around it, native flora, flourishing algae, a colony of water rats, a relationship with the creek flow, all good stuff. They built wooden walkways out on their side of the creek and a big observation deck overlooking the pond and a little amphitheater for outdoor classes.

Anyway the morning sun was at a great angle and a couple of Canada geese were bathing, dipping their heads and jerking them back out like rearing snakes to water their backs and shaking it all back off with those great shivering wave-vibrations waterfowl employ so magnificently. Because of the bright gold light behind them, glimmering on the surface and making shining crystal out of every flying drop, they looked spectacular doing this, and the browns off-whites of their plumage shone tawny and warm, leaping out against the black, their white cheek-patches flaring.

Those birds suck to live with, but they have their moments, it must be said.

*

Also a couple of days ago I watched a water rat lazily chase a slightly nervous mallard around in the water for a couple of minutes. At least one of them was having fun.

*

The post that is actually about the creek is tomorrow's post. 

--JL

#142

"Dude, I heard you been reading in the office. You gotta cut that out. Can't have you doing that."

"Joe, man, if ___ comes to me again with a book of yours he found under the damn counter, this is gonna stop being funny to me, dude. I'm serious."

"You cannot read behind the counter, Joseph. What if customer come in? Plus you sitting down, people look inside, people not know we open. They not come in. You cannot do that."

"That is not a classroom text, mister Lidd. Put it away. I am tired of having to tell you."

"Is that a book? I am teaching. Give that to me immediately and see me after class."

"No reading in class. See me after."

"No, Joseph, you cannot stay in the classroom and read during recess. That is outside time, okay? Don't you want to play with your friends?"

*

Very, very boring stuff.

*

Could type for hours, quoting the ways I have been yelled at or criticized for reading at the table. 

Some stuff you just absolutely cannot for the life of you be obedient about, not even for your own mother. I would forget. After having had my ear off about it for the ten hundredth time. Literally forget. And when she said not to, it's like, I could hear her, remember that this was something I had been told a thousand times ten times over, and understand that it was serious, but I just cannot process that command. It is not a real part of the physical universe as far as my brain is concerned, so it was a war I was bound to win in attrition, since obeying a compulsion does not register as effort and defiance is immutable when protecting basal functions. Never did I say to myself "hell with mom and her feelings, I'm gonna bring this book to the table just to rub it right in her face". Rarely would I even think of anything at all. I would bring the book I was reading to the table because I was reading the book. I would grab a book to read at the table because I want to read while at table, a drive wholly undiluted by experience and untouched by any consideration or premeditation. Barely a conscious process. Nine meals out of ten, I have a book at the table. That's just how it is. She gave it up with reasonably good grace, after more than fourteen years of campaigning.

*

I read books in restaurants (though the ratio is three meals out of five), in lines, on buses and planes. Alleyways behind the restaurants where I have worked are a favorite, as is while standing up smoking a cigarette. I read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis on a walk home, years ago. When I went to bars, I read books there. At sporting events, weddings, graduations, assemblies; on camping trips and other vacations; figured out places to hide during recess; and there is a list longer than I am tall of random places I have had to wait and happened to have a book or two on my person, plus another longer than my arm of planned waits I was ready for and places I have had to wait at on a regular basis and was thus usually equipped, such as bus stops, or stairways, or creaky old bleachers at the edge of a scrubby, cleat-torn field.

*

Life is fucking hilarious. What a dweeb. Also I have been a real jerk to my mother in this lifetime. Very poor form. 

--JL

#141

Today marks the first truly beautiful day of Spring around here. No doubt there is still horrid and antagonizing weather to come; wet snow, frozen mud, skinning winds. This day, though. Cloudless, sky so blue it striates at the edges of vision, leaps at you out of the corner of your eye, and overwhelms any direct gaze. Perfect comfort in a leather jacket, open over a t-shirt.

*

What a complete paragraph, eh? Totally did all of my jobs today. I am going to go back outside.


--JL

p.s. haha, not just a leather jacket, which is black! I wear black from shoulders to toes most days, except for colorful stripy socks, because I am an insufferable sadboy--except for my colorful stripy socks. The socks represent my joi de vivre. The black represents that you probably don't want to talk to me because I am weird or dangerous or both. Apparently. Personally, I am just honoring Ian Malcolm (fictional), Johnny Cash (he's got a song about it, it's corny as hell but real as fuck so here I am, wearing lots of black), and the Specter of Death. Also I like to keep things pretty simple.

#140

Everybody wants recognition for their talents and ideas, which is perfectly natural and healthy. Seems like most people want a lot more recognition than they are due, though. Most people that end up as rulers of any description have a bad case of it. Basically a lot of demands for recognition are very premature, even if they are met. Actually it is worse when they are met.

Terrible as it is to not be seen for who you really are, to have your many fine qualities go underutilized and even squelched by those who could use them, it is worse to have your mediocrity championed and to reap adulation for simply having better-than-average teeth or excellent deception.

Harder, much less likely to be of any material use, and kind of embarrassing as it may be, it is better to stick to your guns and work on what you know you were made for deep down. To not morph into what people want to see, but to grow into what you are.

* 

In order to meet the expectations of a culture that capitalizes and enshrines the path of least resistance in all things, we become greaseballs eternally slip-rolling and wetly bouncing further from dignity and autonomy, committing to nothing except the performance that gets us the most positive reinforcement on social media and the most capital for the least expenditure. 

Those last two things are deeply intertwined. 

*

Not that I'm not into it. If you can make money off of eyeballs, you absolutely should, and if making your internet avatar dance and shriek to the tune of chaotic decay makes you a buck and gives you a kick, who am I to judge? Be a king or queen of whatever scene. Monetize your identity as you politicize your body. Be a thinkfluencer or independent "journalist". Cacophonize synergistically. Get into imaginary real estate. Buy domain names by the dozen and remember the Parable of the Sower. Troll for a disinfo farm and if you're lucky it'll break legit. Who gives a fuck.

As I said, it is natural and healthy to want to be seen. 

Gotta eat. 

*

It's not that it's not smart or adaptive, because it is, and it's not that it's not moral, because that is outside the question and a fake anyway. 

The problem is in gaming the world, which is interesting and tantalizing and fun, but attaching this kind of meta to history comes at something of a cost to our ability to actually play. When you have locked yourself into a game's language in order to manipulate it, you give up your ability to be creative outside of its constraints. The problem, then, is not our ability to change the world, but our ability to imagine it and how to live in it, becoming the people that we want to be.


--JL