#246

Hello! Factually Pointless do be coming to you today to tell you one thing, a singular thing that is on my mind, for reasons, and that thing is this:

I accept that adults need food and shelter, and no one provides these things for free. Therefore! Comics, like any other produced good, cost sweat of the brow and price of material, and the producers ought--nay, need--be remunerated amply for their efforts.

When I was a kid, on the internet, comics uploaded in jaypeg and other viable formats were free, because they weren't real. Now webcomics are confirmed as real, and I can't afford to read them--specifically, the ones from back in the day that are still producing new work, because I too am an adult, with food and shelter costs, and the legitimacy of these artists--who I was once able to support commensurately with the available avenues of support and my own income (simply showing up to the website, as my income was and has always been close enough to nil)--has led to deals with actual publishers, and holding back relevant content behind paywalls, and QUITTING YOUR COMIC TO START A FUCKING SODA COMPANY*. 

Also, I can't believe how much it costs to keep two cats and a husband alive. I can't really afford to support my favorite artists. Any of them. I'm thinking of the comics, but it's everyone. 

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Comics can't be free. Not forever. Not for always. Sometimes they are, and that is a wonderful thing that I understand cannot last. 

However, today, on this day and at this time of the morning, I want to take a moment to say two selfish and useless things that I only mean in a certain sense:

1. Fuck soda pop. I don't care how crafty and good it is. Screw that.

2.  Comics should be free to all. Go ahead! Keep charging money for shelter, which is insanely fucking criminal when you think about it! Keep charging money for food and making it increasingly difficult for any given individual to grow their own supply! Also and perhaps even more criminal! Go right the fucking hell ahead! I don't give a shit anymore. Just take a chunk of all those taxes and subsidize every comic ever made and every comic that will ever be made for free public use and reproduction. Pay everyone who ever made a comic strip and give that comic strip to the people. 

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If you make the bread fake and take even that away, the circuses better come directly to me, suck my actual dick to completion, and dazzle me like no circus has ever dazzled a man since time immemorial. 

Just sayin. 

--JL

*look. You can do whatever you want in life. Nobody has to make a comic if they don't want to. But while I enjoy a high-quality craft effervescent beverage as much as the next person--why, in youth, my friend Red and I were known as quite the connoisseurs, and indeed, I have tried probably hundreds of such tonics--if I have to make a choice, I would forsake ever to so much as taste a fizzy pop again for just one more Achewood strip.

I mean, at least any given strip will serve me for the rest of my life. All I got from pop tastin' is a working familiarity with empty bottle smell and an inability to even look at a bottle of coca-cola without retching quietly but intensely.

#245

Native Son is so fucking good, Richard Wright is such a fucking genius. My mind is fucking blown. I had a lot of questions concerning Richard Wright's interpretation of American life when I first read Black Boy and Native Son, but living in America this whole time since then has made me understand: this dude knew the psychology of it all cold, and he fucking told it straight, simple, and true. Genius. James Baldwin style. Oh! That's it. I read James Baldwin, and now I understand Richard Wright better. But could I have understood James Baldwin, felt him and reveled in his brilliance as I did, if I had not first read, and been troubled by, Richard Wright? Who knows! All I know is I am damn glad I have both their books around. The most basic fact and most important takeaway is that they are two of the most talented craftsmen in their field, ever, period. Those mothers knew how to fucking write. 

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If you have read Crime and Punishment and not Native Son, I challenge you in no uncertain terms: you oughta catch up.

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I think--almost sure--that I will read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain now. Could go a different way but that is what is currently in my mind.

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People who pretend to read, people who pretend to watch--see--and people who pretend to think, are capable of believing themselves brilliant, astute, correct, qualified, any number of fine adjectives that suit their vanity and ease their consciences. 

In truth, these nonentities merely serve as nodes on a memetic string they dance upon and propagate but do not comprehend. 

There is no stopping a meme--their power is too great, the willing nodes too numerous--but you don't have to believe them. You, personally, the brain that thinks. How memes might force you to respond to them is another matter, but your mind is always free to understand more deeply than a meme, to think and doubt and believe more freely than you are free to act--if you are able to muster the courage, the humility, and the faith in your own selfhood that this freedom requires.

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SMOKE WEED EVERY DAAAAAAAAY

--JL

#244

Reading through the Sinfest archive again. So formative. My brain was but a freshly pubescent embryo when I started reading the sinfests, just a couple years after the first Sinfest strip heralded the new millennium (how many days after the new millennium did it begin, you ask? why, seventeen! it's been awhile, but never forget: we love the number seventeen.). 

Sinfest is old enough to drink now, and the archive is a better, more informative public record than the stewed pork times, in my humble op. ed. 

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Ezra and I have been watching huge amounts of PBS streamed directly into our television. In the year 2000, televisions were inert boxes that only displayed broadcast programming. Heavy boxes, full of tubes and stuff. Now you can't find a box, they're all flat rectangles. In five years televisions will be transparent wafers, and in ten no one will bother because you'll be able to project lossless, electron-precise images onto a charged neutron "screen", anywhere, anytime. Because hardlight sculptures will dance for you, and you will be able to walk through and explore hardlight sets, and fuck and be fucked by hardlight puppets. Because your retinal implant will beam the images into the back of your eye. Because you will never dream naturally again; just keep watching whatever you want (or whatever you get) as you "sleep", the chip nestled in your brainstem singing quietly but eternally. 

Or finally because the shaman's drugs have made you believe, believe completely.

Anyway my dudes, public television is the bee's knees. PBS and HBO are good, and the cartoons on the cartoon stations are good.

I'm not kidding when I say that everything else is shit-ass god damned useless fucking garbage.

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Ok. BET. Some stuff on BET is good. I guess Jeopardy is all right too. I can make an exception also for Home Improvement because as an immigrant child in the nineties, that program really helped me understand the American psyche and its material continuum. 3rd Rock from the Sun too, actually.

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I mean, watch whatever TV you fuckin want, at the end of the day. However you choose to dispose of your time in half-hour increments, with whatever advertising load you choose to tolerate, it's all good.

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Today I finish The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy! How exciting and sad. Then I begin Native Son, by Richard Wright. Sad and exciting. 

Bam! Boom! Bingo! Watched all the Sam Raimi Spidermans and the Marc Webb Spidermens, and I guess we'll watch the newest Spidey's when we're ready for a break from Nova and Nature and Eons.

peace mother fuckerz yeeeeeeeeeeeah

--JL

#243

Reading through the archive on a whim, and saw that on the first day of 2019 I made a list of stuff to be thankful for, and one of those things was "a present lack of catastrophic plagues." And so I thank God and all the saints within time and all those beyond it that indeed, we didn't have a plague then, and I had managed to be openly thankful for this before we, of course--of course!--would.

This is why we are thankful. Because living is enduring just long enough to lose it all; one or two things at a time till there's only one last thing to let go of, or all in one fell swoop. 

Sorry, guys. But I also mentioned total war in that post, and things don't look great. I mentioned catastrophic plagues in 2019 because, well, things didn't look great. People really weren't washing their fucking hands or taking anything about the concept seriously, y'know? So, I dunno. As I am wont to say: strap in. I think our current governments may well be in the grip of the paroxysm. 

The process is slow, though. We might have ten, twelve, fifteen years yet before the gunpowder's ready for the spark. And the paradigm might well shift, the momentum drain. Always we must hope.

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Also, reading your own work is always cringe, but reading your own public diary is actual pain, a pain hard to describe. You know me, though: I'm about to try.

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Whatever. What a piece of work is man, indeed. Indeed.

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Still reading Tristram Shandy, thank God. I was starting to scare myself. Maybe it's just that I read more on the computer in the mornings the last couple of days and watching more than one movie a night a few nights in a row. Watched like thirty movies in the last two months or so. Every live Batman movie ever made, for one. I can't believe, in this whole blog, how little I have discussed superheroes. Especially Batman and Spiderman. I have so much to say about them both. 

Anyhow, Tristram Shandy is so, so good, so so funny--oh, how I have lol'd! I'll finish it soon, but I don't want to. Been doing other stuff too. Loss has given me the resolve to aim for a healthier and more responsible social life. As we move "past" this pandemic, opportunities are thicker on the ground than they have been, and I have been trying to make use of them.

Other people may be hell, but heaven is a place on earth--a place you share with people. So it goes and thank God. 

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Also, I talk so little about The Legend of Zelda, even though it's one of the most important parts of my life! No mention of Skyrim all blog, or Mario! I don't mention Mario?!? Thank God I babbled enough about Pokémon to sort of illustrate how much that means to me.

When I was two years old, not long after I had learned to read confidently without help, I played my first video game. It was new, the edge of gaming--Super Mario World, on my cousin's Super Nintendo system. I have played video games my entire life since, and my blood runs Nintendo red. I got a Nintendo Switch in 2020, on which you can play Super Mario World, and Skyrim, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which is the greatest game ever made and one of the greatest works of art produced in the history of producing art on this planet), and so much else that it boggles the mind. I'm playing a little Skyrim again, along with a couple of games by the same publisher of oddities(nakana): Journey of the Broken Circle, by Lovable Hat Cult (they are Danish) and Infini, by a pack of mad Canucks known as Barnaque. They are good. 

All things are good. 

I have to take a piss.

Have a good day.

--JL

#242

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this is the two hundred and forty second post, post two four two. The fun in the math of this number is huge. But something about it, I dunno. To be honest, not one of my favorite numbers. It's maybe too perfect, too even, too balanced. I prefer 2424242. The same, but better. Better, too, than 24242424. 2424 is kinda funny.

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m,    ≥÷

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That was the cat. One of the cats, the older cat. The deaf one. Ezra got her for free almost four years ago from a family out in the sticks. The other one, blind, Ezra and I fetched together from the shelter the day after we met her there, once we were somewhat settled in the current apartment. 

Certainly this is not the first case of sharing what a cat did to something an artist was in the middle of working on, or beginning, but it is the first time an animal besides myself has entered anything into this blog's text field, and that seems momentous. Especially as Chubbs is something of an artist herself. Love the way she knocks stuff down and covers stuff up. A clear and unafraid talent, sometimes poignant.

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Finished Jayber Crow. Dang. I wasn't ready for some of that, how hard and beautiful it would be. Wonderful, gorgeous, hilarious, bitterly sad, profound as fuck. Gotta get my hands on this dude's poems. The book was every-page good.

Reading The Lowland now, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Just about halfway, page one hundred and sixty two. Amazing so far. Beautiful and sad, remote and intimate at the same time. It's that dealio wherein no quotation marks are used to delineate dialogue, which seems to lend books and stories that special distance from the reader and that particular insideness and way of being folded into their own reality to the characters--more intimate for them, further away from you. Less performance, more innerness. More like a dream, a dream in some ways more detailed and clear than waking life ever is.

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Completed The Lowland. Tremendous. Started The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. I started this in high school because I loved the movie they pretended to make about it back in the day. Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story. I looked it up. Never did complete it, but I did buy a handsome green Everyman's Library copy. Now seems to be the time. 

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About halfway through that book, now. I'm gonna hit publish on this thing after I go ahead and acknowledge to you, dear, dear reader that yes: yes. Yes, I am grief-reading in a quiet frenzy. We all cope differently. 

Be good to your people and try to be your best for them and yourself, dear reader. It is a brief and precious time we have, to show that the sharing of it means a little something to us.

--JL

#241

Read The Hakawati, by Rabih Alameddine. Loved it so much. Classic shit. Then I reread the Digger omnibus. Unflagging quality. So fucking good and really took me back to what passes for some of the good old days on the wide world web. Now I have picked up Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer. I think the rule for awhile will be thick books, content and provenance secondary but at least every other book should be new to me. Want long trawls. Will definitely read War and Peace again sometime in the next couple years, I think. Completing that book may mark a milestone in my life, on par with The Silmarillion and reading Nietzsche. 

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Saw a red-shouldered hawk in flight above the car on a drive just now. 'Twas Ezra who spotted it. Its tail band was wonderfully stark, bright flashing cream arc across dark chocolate fan. 

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Left the post at that for the day and ended up finishing Here I Am the next. Now it is the day after that, and I have read the first few pages of Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry. Maybe I'd better publish this before I have to amend it again. Maybe I really should just shut up about what I'm reading for the rest of my life and amortize that time into reading more. It is not outside of reason to say that everyone should do the same with many, if not all the things they talk about and do. 

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Here I Am was excellent (it's laughable. I could never stop myself, so I why do I bother to think of it?). I want to read it again. I want to read everything again. Why can't I get a Guggenheim or something for that? Be good to cut, say, a nickel a word, keep writing for free. In this economy, you say? I can make it work, I reply. Life takes so much goddamn time and energy to live, setting aside how much life it costs to get money to sustain life (almost always most of it). Give me the money to live--just to live--without the sacrifice of this time, and I would read not twice as much, not four or five times as much, but ten at least. How ten? Out of one hundred and twenty-six waking hours in a week, roughly, at least forty are spent literally on the clock, but at least twenty more are spent around the clock, like traveling to and from, and thinking about it, and getting ready, and so on. It's fucking tedious just to consider it. Then, the cleaning, the care of cats and men, the cooking, the eating, the shitting and showering, the going out to get stuff or see people, the consumption of other media in other mediums, the creation of art, the listening, the seeing, and so on ad scholastica. By which I hope to evoke the pedantic listing of everything I do and perform.

Anyway as it stands I barely get to read ten hours a week, broken up and scattered. That's nothing, and pathetic. If I were able to read books the way I work shifts--eight-hour blocks where nothing else is expected at me, and slacking frowned upon--you would not see me fucking around with my paltry however-many books a year. I would not have just ten bookshelves and be pruning them when able. I would live at a library, and I would read its entire ever-expanding contents every five years or so. Fuck you if you think I'm lying. I'll read your stupid tits off. I'll read your stupid dick back into your body.

--JL

#240

Hello. I have completed War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. More on that someday.

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One of my oldest and most precious friends, an individual that stood out in my life like a torch in the darkness of the cave, is dead. Got the news a few days ago, no details, and have been reflecting on how I do not prize my friends enough. Involved deeply in our own relatively solitary lives, we had not spoken in over a year. I missed them, I thought of them, and now missing them and thinking of them is all I have. So it goes.

A former coworker is also dead; a sweet and caring person. Also no details. Neither of these people was past the age of thirty, not that it matters. I know some people, like my little sister, that lived for only a few seconds, or ten years, or twenty. We cannot understand these relative measures of time and value; we cannot inscribe worth on a hundred years over a day, but we tend to, it is our reflex, and we cannot help it. 

Really, there is no point, no saving grace at all, in details. My hunger for a narrative, for some sense, is an animal thing, unhelpful and blind. There is no sense to be described, mined, discovered, or applied. Just the main fact, which is the only sense there is.

God rest them both. What more can be said? What more could be asked for? We grieve, we pray our tears a blessing, a washing, a remembrance, and we live. We do not want to outlive our family or our friends. We do anyway.

So we live. 

--JL