#167

Saw a headline tweet that began with "synthetic speech programs that use facial tracking to..." and I scrolled right the fuck down because I don't care which way that sentence ends.

At this point I don't want to be forewarned about any of this shit. Confront me with its grim realization at the supermarket checkout line. Make me take it in stride. Force me into a state of hyperadaptivity.

*

I want to wake up with the nanobots already in me.

*

In an excellent mood, feeling quite all right, just swimming on down the stream. It rained some yesterday and the creek by my house is running real deep and quick, flashing glass and silver in its bed. 

Really appreciating the flow of water in my life lately. Blessings and blessings and blessings.


--JL

#166

Yo, as of now, this ole blogomatic has 77 posts for this year, 88 posts for last year, and the tworter account has tweeted 222 tweets. This delicate and incredible situation will cease to be as soon as I smash the "publish" button on this, the one hundred and sixty-sixth post.

Life is so fucking rad. Why are numbers so cool? People say fuck math, I have said it myself, but like, I wanna fuck math.

*

You know. Do it.

*

One plus one equals two. This is the third-most basic framework for reproduction and also pornography, preceded by one plus one equals (x) ones, itself preceded by one divided by half. 

Yup, 1(0.5)=2 and that right there is where fucking begins. The math that supports that moment in possibility is more complicated and murky, but still hot, probably.

Bet it feels disgustingly good to engage mitosis, ugh. Just...splitting. Mm.

*

Haha okay I'm done being gross for today.   

*

Well, on paper, anyway.

*

Let's see. Read Fear and Trembling by SK and got most of the way through The Sickness Unto Death (both translated by Walter Lowrie), then decided to break it up a little with Roaming Foliage by Patrick Kyle and I should finish up Tezuka Osamu's Ayako before I go into work. Then back to Kierkegaard. Planning on reading his Philosophical Fragments (translated by David Swenson including commentary by Niels Thulstrup, translation revised and commentary translated by Howard V. Hong) and after that I'm thinking of rereading Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, but I've also been eyeing King Kong Theory by Virgine Depenthes, No Disrespect by Sister Souljah, The Death of Truth* by Michiko Kakutani, and frankly, I don't even know why I'm bothering to plan because I'm also feeling the pull of Hannah Arendt, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manning Marable, Carl Jung, and William Shakespeare, plus a couple anthologies. Just to name a few.

Literally anything could happen, including none of the above. Chaos reigns!

*

Point is, I'm done with this, gonna go read.


--JL

*I complain about people saying shit like this, titling their books and articles with shit like this, but y'know, I always feel compelled to investigate the claim. I sneer at "the death of this and the death of that" but I'm always like "oh, whatup, you said what died? Tell me allll about what you mean by that." Probably I'm just chasing the dragon of how I felt when I read that God is dead. Nothing ever measures up even in the remotest sense. 

#165

Game of Thrones is in the process of happening for the last time in its form as a premium television program. Tonight a climactic battle takes place.

For real, my money is on everybody surviving. I expect no main character will die tonight. They will ride out this darkest hour only to die later this season.

While I'm dropping predictions, Cersei's about due for a monstrous stillbirth, also. I expect this to happen. I do not expect them to confront the audience with it in too extreme a fashion, but one can hope. Yet one cannot help but notice that typically, however, entertainers who dish out hypergore and ripe tits like they're going to become illegal soon are rarely willing to show even the successful birth of a healthy baby head-on.  

*

Leaf-clusters are growing larger, opening further, beginning to be their own leaves or form trios, starting to give the branches of all the trees and shrubs that fuzzy green screen when seen together in their clusters of angles and tangles from a slight distance. Flowers are open on most of the trees that bear them; magnolias all looking excellent this year, very strong. The musky, somewhat disturbing scent of the Callery pear trees is beginning to waft. Saw a little tree with russet leaves and delicate white slender-petaled flowers and little tree with acid-green leaves beginning to blush dark red and full round-petaled white flowers beginning to blush the lightest pink.

Gold light fell all over everything. A cool breeze blew gentle over and through, over and through. 

A chaotic universe. Truly beautiful.

*

It was a great day at work today! I laughed so much. It was so fun. I work with some truly fine people. Some lovely folks. 


--JL

#164

It may be that the darkest secrets we possess are unknown to us, that to even approach them in thought is to shy away. Sane people do not, after all, ride their horses off the edge of a cliff just to see what is at the bottom. 

Gravity will take you there nonetheless, if you let it. But what kind of person lets it? It seems to me that these secrets come to you, fall upon you from above or rip the ground from underneath you. The bottom of the cliff comes to get you. Your horse takes you over as you desperately yank at the reins of an extremity beyond self-preservation.

Perhaps those we call the insane are simply those who know the most secrets, and are not able to keep them. Seems to me what distinguishes those we call sane from the insane is merely secretiveness, what one knows to keep hidden.

*

Hm. Spooky shit. Kinda grim. 

To bring it back to ground a bit, apropos of nothing, every time I tell a secret I feel that I have done a crazy thing, and madness lies not far away, probably interested in my scent and thinking about a meal. I keep a lot of shit to myself and I still think I spill my guts way too much, in way too real a fashion. 

Some secrets can change everything. Picture a mountain range the size of the Alps shouldering out of the depths of the Pacific in one gargantuan violence, displacing lord knows how much water and disrupting lord knows what percentage of every current in the ocean, and creating an entire new ecosystem for plants and animals and people to fuck in and fight over. Some secrets are like that! And some secrets just explode like you never even imagined, the Yellowstone caldera going fully critical in the space of a second.

You never really know till the thing is said, you know? But to flip that coin has something of madness about it. I have a tricky relationship with reality as it is, and my temperament is precisely that which is curious enough to let gravity find a way to take me to the bottom. That kind of curiosity is certainly flirting with insanity, more so when mixed with another crazy thing I can't control, which is hope. 

*

Pretty good day, all told. Laughed a bunch, cooked some food, got two books (also seven yesterday), and took a jump with both feet. That might have been kind of a crazy thing to do, but after all, the hope is that at the bottom, the water is drinkable, that facing your darkest secrets is a trial one can master and when you climb out the other side of the canyon, you're looking at new territory, something huge and unsounded to explore.


--JL

#163

Oh wow, people don't believe in demons? People are fucking hilarious.

"Well, I don't believe in anything that isn't real! Fuck you, Joseph, you damn retrograde pill. I thought you liked science."

"Demons are just an excuse. That's a justification people made up for their own bad behavior or to explain away their weaknesses. Keep blaming your shit on demons, Joe, see where it gets ya."

Cool, so that's me cut down to size, and that will have learned me, and now I know better. 

*

People don't understand at all what is meant by the word demon, far less by what is meant by saying that something is demoniacal. Confusion about angels also abounds; listen. Demons are the comforting ones. They're just like us! Angels are terrifying, impenetrable aliens. Every angel carries a terrible swift sword. Mercy, justice, love--all wielding the hardest, sharpest objects in all creation.

But the point here is not qualification but existence and reality. So are demons real or not? 

Shit man, I dunno. But if you've never been fucked with by demons, it may be that they see no need for it.

So thoroughly do you already meet their needs.

Or maybe you were born with a kind of armor on, a cloak of invisibility, a heart so totally pure that it cannot be seen, let alone touched.

Perhaps what protects you is an indifference so complete, a self-narrowing so total, that you have actually become one, and everyone in your life is afflicted by you. Indifference is hella demonic, perhaps integral to the concept.

*

What I know about demons is that if you can see them and smell them, well, you might be crazy, or you might be beyond sanity, which is very different. I cannot. I do know that if I think of something, it is as real as anything else. Metaphors do not describe reality, they elucidate reality in relation to reality to reveal an unreal that is real. Angels and demons are metaphors, and metaphors are real. I know that everything is real in relation to the absolute because the absolute contains it, and thus the absolute contains all unreality in its suprareality.

Ghosts don't scare you because they aren't real and they don't scare you because they are real. You don't think of a tiger the way you think of a ghost. Tigers are real. They can really kill you, but you have to be near one and it has to actually happen. Not so with ghosts. What scares you is the unreality, the unrevealable, the not real which  has a real effect on you nonetheless. 

A ghost can kill you without being real, and it doesn't have to actually happen in order to happen.

*

Demons aren't real. They are just you, us, me. Sure. This is a fact. Nothing more than nightmares, which aren't real either. Just ideas, which aren't real, and never have any real effects on real reality. Just metaphors, which don't really exist, and don't affect real life. 

Glad to have that settled.

*

Look. I don't pretend to be anything other than an idiot. But if you don't think demons are real you are a concussed and tiny moron, which I'll just go ahead and say is very different from being an idiot. You can laugh at me, and people who are smarter than me can laugh along. You and Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse-Tyson can all touch dicks and crack some cold ones on some lawn chairs as you laugh at me struggling, my tiny brain shooting steam as it groans under the weight of such stone tablets, such ancient cruft, such superstitious nonsense, in this day and age.

Y'know, it'd be great if y'all were right. I remember believing there are no such things as demons, that the shadows on the cave wall are nothing more than shadows you can get away from. But out in the light? There's a lot more shadows than inside. 


--JL

clarifying postscript: Unreal affect has real effect. Unreal things are as affective and effective as real things because in fact there is no barrier at all between the unreal and the real. To be certain that something is unreal is murky at best. To be certain that the unreal thing does not exist is a hard misread. To be certain that only real things are real and only real things matter is nothing more than lucid, rational stupidity, a stupidity with its eyes closed, far more complete and embarrassing than ignorance. Certainty itself is a kind of petrification of thought.

Truly it is as though y'all motherfuckers really didn't read a page of Plato, really never looked at a word Socrates said. And far, far worse, by several orders of magnitude, forgot everything you ever knew as kids.

#162

Seared my right wrist down low and to the outside against the edge of a hot pan a while ago. Still open, peeling, occasionally suppurating scab in the center of it. Two days ago the corner of a hot tray pressed into my left bicep high up and to the inside. The worst part about taking an induction burn like that is the pressure aspect, where you get not just burnt but speed-cooked on the outside and deep down below, so that the burn has a deep ravine structure, inflammation from the lowest point pushing up increasingly dead flesh, itself inflamed. 

Also you can hear them very clearly, the fats in your skin and meat hissing as they burn away.

It is also bad when the top layer eventually sloughs off, leaving naked glistening unskin that cracks and twists as it dries and festers. 

Eventually, though, they'll both just be shadows on my skin. Reminders.

*

We are who we are because of what has happened to us and how we have dealt with it or not dealt with it. At each moment we are the single result of the accumulation of our time as a phenomenon, and the next  moment leaves that phenomenon behind, where it no longer exists and also stays with the phenomenon that is in the moment, this phenomenon which trails an ever-expanding tail of past forms of itself. 

The self is an equation constantly subject to new variables, whose result is accordingly in constant flux. An expanding sphere. 

So, you grow. Older. When the variables stop changing, that is death. 

*

When you're dead, the past is all there is (for the phenomenon which was itself in relation to the moment, not for its trail of selves, which tend to stick around to varying degrees and cause trouble). 

Not so when we are alive; however, I have this tendency to act as though this is so. I live as though the past loomed over the present with such power as to close it down entirely, to freeze me and bury me. I act as though the past has spoken in a voice of judgment and that the tale is told, the math is over, and there is nothing to add, and if there is more content, it is just a shitty appendix to a squandered story.

This way of interpreting the past and of letting it work upon me is a death-aspect, a demon.

How does one defeat this demon?

*

Well, I'll start like this: the past may be the future only two instants too young, but it is also the fucking past and however much power it may have over that future, the future it is not. Only the future is the future. The past cannot see or know anything about the future, only the moment which is becoming the future, the self in the moment of the equation having a result in one moment, only that has an apprehension of the future, as it is happening, and as it recedes into the past.

If you look back, you die. It isn't just that you lose Eurydice. You die. You missed the whole point and now you're dead.

They'd be justified in burying you with your head on backwards.

*

With demons, you don't riddle. You don't wrestle. You don't take up arms or charge or trick or gamble.

You turn away and you take the steps of faith. Forward. Into what, you know not. But away from this demon shaking fistfuls of your own ghosts at you, shoving its tongue into your ear night and day, singing skeletal, endlessly repeated dirges over the live music that's playing right now. 

*

I don't forget a lot of stuff in life. I forget to turn in pieces of homework, among other stuff that is expected of me and stuff I said I would do, but I don't forget life, the living part, the stuff that happened, what I saw, heard, tasted, felt. I forget names, I forget the exact placements in a linear geography of time, but I don't forget the prevailing light and the way the wind was blowing; I don't forget the words or the signs, even if I can't quote them verbatim. Nothing is perfect and every translation transforms. But my memory is insistent and insistently clear. The past is very real to me. Life has been fucked up and very beautiful, so bad and so wonderful I could tear myself apart trying to feel it all at once.

Memory has its uses. It's what makes us human. It's what makes the math work out to something that expands and climbs, rather than merely iterate. Remembering how I have acted, what I have said, what I have done, and attempting to exceed myself as I was in hopes of remembering myself one day as I had hoped to be--it is the past that we use to imagine ourselves into existence, the impetus we have to will our lives into a shape, the stone from which we push off in our endeavor. 

What does not work is trying to jump and hang on tight at the same time. In this bodily/psychic contest, hanging on always wins.

To be ever engaged in the act of pushing off the rock and onto the next movement, the next rock to push off of. That is how you fight the demon that has you clinging endlessly to the same stone.


--JL 

#161

Spring is a time of such soft delicacies springing up everywhere. All the newest, rawest things resurfacing the world. Trees dropping their tiny, brief buds, their work already done, as little white flowers start springing up in the deep uncut grass. Frogspawn in the still pools of the creek, small toads on the sidewalk at night. The big dying willow put forth more branches and blossoms than last year. New growth all the way around.

Is it really dying? Yes. Everything is. Even as it is born.

That is the great wonder and opportunity of this existence.

*

Taking an infinite multiverse as writ, the death of the universe is just the end of a symphony, one symphony among infinite symphonies. Every note ends, the piece runs its course, but the music is eternal.

*

One note sounds out, one voice singing one tone. It begins, and ends, and though there exists not a trace of its passing, it was; it sounded. Thus it sounds eternally, will always have sounded, and the truth of this endures beyond the end of all things.

Nothing needs to do anything to be. And to be is to possess universal significance, whether anyone knows it or it goes unnoticed, stays secret, exists only beneath text.


--JL