#348

Man, the last few days have hit me rough. What can basically be understood as post-emesis depression has sunk into my bones. A book has performed its egress from conceptual space in the dimension of my mind to enfleshed existence. I was so, so up when I was finishing that book, and I squeezed the brightest light I got into its pages. Gave it every particle I possess, all my warmth and power, draining the reservoir completely, apparently. Now I feel like cigarette ash in a wet tray.

Oh well! What the fuck you gonna do. I will try to get better, try to find traction, try to maneuver that traction into the next book. Gotta do that till I run out of traction entirely. 

Maybe it's time for Album Week 2023. But I gotta do something different for Album Week 2023. Only then will it be able to cheer me up, rather than make everything worse somehow. Had a lot of ideas about Album Week this year, lots of ideas about music. Could be ok. Could be all right. Only way to find out is to forge ahead, to weave a path, to give shape to the vessel.

Next time we'll know for sure, dear reader, whether it is Album Week 2023 or something else entirely. Oh, your breath! It's bated. Damn, baby, take it easy. I know how cool and incredible it is when I shit whatever crap lives in my head about music, making no valid sense and offending all good taste. But if it's something else? What madcap irrepressibility will seize me in its jaws and carry us all off into the nether regions of perception and commentary? What cloaks out of the past or signals from the future will drape our frames or dazzle our eyes as we journey into the thickets of description and hypothesis?

Who gives a fuck who gives a fuck who gives a fuck

--JL 

#347

Man, information. That's some fucked up drugs right there. 

Wishing to retain for myself the most neutral possible starting-point for analysis, I try to limit my daily informational intake, and I try to stick to sources that present their information professionally, source it properly, and provide various perspectives and contrasting commentary as well as a broad assortment of material in writing. One should not listen to people say the news if one can at all avoid it, in my opinion. I also regularly check sources and aggregates I know are ridiculous or obscurantist, so as to remain informed about those varieties of jargon and mindset. Least often, grudgingly, understanding that a lot of people read or watch their news and understand their worlds thereby strictly from materials provided by either msnbc news or fox news, with everybody referencing to cnn news when they're feeling broadminded--in other words, sources which make obscurantism blush--I take a look at what they're up to.

Visiting these nightmare websites this morning, as I do every few months because it is important to see what techniques corporate overlords are using on the news as part of their communications warfare, I am amazed as always, even shocked, at the naked brigandry, the boorishness of their techiques. 

Saw the word "bogus" in two separate headlines on msnbc--is that seriously how motherfuckers edit over there? The entire website bristles with attacks on a bewildering variety of fronts and moral postures, shame running a bright common thread through it all. It's a temple to the pointed finger, to the shrill note that sings in the voice when one is angry to be disagreed with by someone they believe less intelligent, less morally developed than themselves.

The fox news flow is like a hallucination, naked pyschology, not much content. Like experiencing a paranoid delusion firsthand. Larger type, headlines only, less targeted fury, a broader outrage, like a beast whose flank is pierced by arrows breathing fire into the air. Each headline a little angry blast on a cornet or the pleading grief of a fife.

Father to both and cynical heir to their innovations, cnn roars like the one and stings like the other, insinuates and declares and allows headlines whose syntax is built to make head-nodding sense to acolytes and make the outsider cock their head at an angle and squint their eyes. 

These motherfuckers are becoming churches. That's all I'm trying to say. Creepy churches.

*

Dang, I really bum myself out. This is why I adress the concrete matters of the world less and less on the blog. My insights offer me no comfort, and serve as a fairly mealy form of entertainment. 

Read Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alice Wong recently, not a planned book but a very excellent read. Other than that, reading has been mostly in service of school of late. It really does happen like that. I fight it, but the battle is indeed uphill.

Best wishes, dear reader. It's foggy today, that's pretty cool. 

--JL

#346

Have come to identify yet another weakness in my psychic constitution, and as I type that, I want to joke that I need a better hobby. Of course the truth is that the process of recognizing and adjusting in response to our failings, our shortcomings, those foibles of our personality that go so far as to embarass us or harm us whether we are aware of it in the moment or merely ignorant is what Socrates was talking about when he mentioned lives and the due examination of them. So, regrettably, it is more along the lines of an endless duty, this critical process of becoming alive.

Anyway the thing was that one reason I got into walking is, sure, I lost the last of a string of bikes which I have owned and was unable to replace it for years. But also I was partially unwilling to replace it all those years because I had become focused on a solemn convitction regarding the physical, psychic, and spiritual benefits of walking. Correct; walking is the bomb; I have set a great deal into the record to that effect. But there's another side to that too. 

I walk really fast. Locally, I may be the fastest. No one, in my memory, since the time I reached about the upper end of my physical development in my teens, has passed me on the street, the sidewalk, the trail, or the field while walking, unless they literally broke into a half-jog. And, as is evident in the record, I have walked a lot. I'm just gonna say it: I walk like a beast, I am awesome at walking. I've thought about it a lot and put those thoughts into a great deal of practice. 

But even though I believe my style and speed on the bicycle are more than adequate and have rarely let me down, I exhibit nothing comparable to the prowess I possess on foot. I like to ride fast, sometimes as fast as I fucking can, and a lot of people are faster bikers than me on faster bikes to boot; it hasn't happened all summer (this entirely due to the fact that I've had the streets I beat basically all to myself on my rides), but it did today; this wiry dude probably in his forties rode behind me very politely for a while when things were narrow, but as soon as the bikeway opened he lit me up and smoked me to the stub. It was pretty cool. 

At the same time, something deep inside me misliked the feeling, and I knew in my heart that the root of the feeling has nothing noble or sportsmanlike in it at all, coming as it does from a traumatized part of my animal self that hates being approached from behind, hates being outperformed. And as I thought more on that, I came to understand that this part of myself had denied the rest of me the pleasure of two wheels on that basis, when I was weaker and reconstituting myself. And yet, in this, was it not acting to protect me, to set me on a path that would serve me better than the exhilaration of speed? That may be part of it, and it is certainly true also that it was acting selfishly, and would have done the same if it had hurt me--maybe did hurt me. But that is not the important part.

The only important part of any of it is the next step, which is to laugh at myself and begin to learn to let that shit go. And once it is gone I will breathe freer and be more alive. On foot, wheeled up, who cares. We all go at our own pace, and that pace is what it is, and that is right and good.

*

We must be freer, and more alive; that is the point of philosophy, and life.

--JL

#345

First week of the new semester completed, and blessed with fine weather every day, I always rode my bicycle to campus and back. A privilege I have relished every moment.

*

It never fails to pique my interest, the kinds of people the universe holds and which the wheels of fate spinning in all molecules conspire to place on my path, and me on theirs. We are all such collections, such priceless artifacts, such works of art. To observe people and to learn from them more about this world is a privilege, too, even if it's not always as immediately relishable as riding a bike under the blue blue sky breathing the clean breeze all alone.

*

Guests have left, schedules have changed, the leaves at the very top of some of the trees have started to change color. On our Audubon Society calendar, the bird of the month is the Northern Harrier, a bird that is special to the household. The cats are healthy and lively. Difficult though it is, I marhsal social energy and see friends on occasion. The efforts are rewarded, though the process is draining. 

*

September! A month of many birthdays. The season of feasts has entered its first dance. 


--JL

#344

Keep coming back to it these days, so I might as well write it down. Elaborately optimize it. Trick it out, even. 

So, it can take place in a bus, since I know how to drive one, and why shouldn't I one day get my hands on one and cock it up to run on, I dunno, momentum. How's that for an optimized fantasy. My bus runs on its own momentum, and generates starting energy and impulse from running a charge sent from a switch connected to a bundle of 5-cell batteries powering electromagnets in the wheel wells and a mechanical man under the hood. It is this man who starts the engine, using a furnace that burns clean and runs on his own good cheer even as he does, and is never in short supply.

Ok. The bus runs. Silently. Maybe, sometimes, when everything and everyone is quiet, you might become aware of a nearly silent, humming grumble. And it plays this playlist I've been working on, and whatever else anybody wants to play no hassle, high quality sound. We'll call the bus Mighty Jake III.

All the highways and byways are empty of other vehicles. It's just our bus. The fields and towns and cities of the land remain populated, but only we drive. The transit is, as it were, sublimated. Otherwise it's all the same. Perhaps the empty highways are only an illusion, but we do not trouble ourselves about that, or about anything. The rest stops serve food as homemade and good as the diners, which use organic ingredients worked on by happy cooks well-paid and treated with dignity. Everywhere we go, we are treated with dignity, and treat everyone we meet with dignity. Everybody has enough money. Everybody's bills are paid. Nobody's got somebody back home who's laid up sick. Everything's tranquil.

MJIII's passenger area doesn't have to conform to safety standards or the rules of dimensional space, so usually it's sized more like a big van, everyone sitting comfortably, but not as comfortably as, say, in a given living room. The conditions and particular sensations need not be uncomfortable physically but adhered to; the body's sense that transit is happening, that everyone is closer together with fewer avenues of movement than they would be in most other contexts. But it's hammocks, it's beanbags, it's what you most need and the most you can get. When it's time for sleep, when some privacy is what's needed, the passenger area can be much bigger on the inside, TARDIS style. Need a shower? Not while the bus is moving, but whenever else, along with getting some laundry done. 

It begins with just me, rolling out in Jake all by myself. After I back the thing into the street, I open the door for Ezra and the cats, who live in a large, enriched section which travels with us without moving, MJIII's own extradimensional top deck. Ezra, looking forward to meeting everyone and introducing me to everyone, for that is the project--gathering the scattered handful of friends and family scattered through time and space whose faces we have not looked upon in for too long a spell, those whom we cherish no matter how long we must miss them. 

Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Miami, NYC, and that's just the big ones and that's just for starters. We have stops in Canada, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, and Japan, We have stops in Nairobi and Baghdad and Warsaw and Istanbul. 

After that it's just terribly personal invented dialogues concerning pieces of music and thoughts about life, an imaginary communion. Maybe someday I'll write it down, maybe as itself, maybe as something some characters are chewing on together. I'll try to make them beautiful, because in my mind, it is so beautiful, driving a pretend vehicle while I talk to absent friends and the dearly departed about what I really want them to hear, what I would give to relish in hearing them say.

*

Hey! Hop in. That all you're bringing? No, my dear, my darling--like our hearts, like our love, like our crazy-ass heads, this bug's bigger on the inside. 

--JL

#343

Ah, 343! Faithful, longtime readers--as opposed to you malodorous, scrambling NOOBS--welcome--will know how I feel about numbers like 343. You TINY NOOBLETS, slimy with amniotic fluids and slippery with vernix, would do well to peruse the archives, but I'll let you in on it here: I like numbers that are symmetrical, numbers that are palindromes. I like the numbers 11 and 7, and their combinations. I like numbers whose digits add up to another cool number--in this case, 10. Also, 343 Industries has made or helped make the best Halo games, so, y'know, hooray for today, and a tip of the pen to them. It may be true that they have also made some Halo games that are not so good, but that there are two sides to everything is part of the point of this paragraph. So there you have...that.

Most importantly and specially, at least as far as this blog and its author are concerned, this post is the one in which I get to announce to you all that I have at last, at long last, completed my next book, which I have so often stated was very nearly done. The case was simply that the completion of it was impossible until this last month and particularly these past couple of weeks, which have seen a galavanization unto finishing, editing, and creating the book, leaving me exhausted and delirious. 

Always I consciously forget--but apparently, my body does not--how profoundly exhausting, how great the physical and spiritual cost is for the conduit in order for me to finish a book. 

But that matters not! My new book, The Tetrahedron: Three Forms Towards a Complex Philosophy of Infinity is done, past the review process, and in the publishing process. The kindle version is already live, the paperback should be available for purchase, and soon, dear reader, you shall be able to hold it in your hands, read the words inside of it, and hate me for the rest of your life. That last bit is just a fear, not a design feature. Yet if it must be, it must be. Crammed full of my latest concepts and oldest obsessions, exhibiting the greatest scope and degree of my powers, The Tetrahedron is on some fucked up shit. Do give it a whirl.

If you are one of the strange few who enjoys it when I wax philosophical or make bold assertions in the blog, you will be well-rewarded. I believe I prove very handily that I keep the really good shit for the paying customers. It makes a good start. 

--JL

#342

Should I just write about my desk? Describe the desk itself in detail, the contents of its drawers, the geography of objects upon its surface? Factually Pointless, the blog in which Joseph Lidd describes his immediate surroundings in laborious and unnecessary--yet to his own mind, vastly incomplete!--detail.

They say that the devil is in the details, while God is present in the sweeping picture. A revelatory piece of wisdom which I have not made up my mind on; my operating parameters for being-in-the-world tend to be very apt to oscillate between the coarse grain and the fine in all things, so my predilection for details is always tempered and sometimes hampered by my adoration of the sweeping picture, and vice versa. 

Maybe we all have this condition, to some degree. I have known men I thought to be careless in the extreme when it comes to the attention to detail required to possess what I think of as a nuanced understanding of the world and the self which navigates the world, and their big-picture thinking was none too inspired, either. Further exposure revealed their attention to detail broad, deep, and almost manic when it came to fixing up and tooling out their car, with impressive results. There are many dimensions to every life, varying in size, vibrancy, and gravitational presence. 

Anyway, my desk. Strap in.

*

Made of a darkish, heavy wood, stained deep brown, it's about five feet wide and not quite two feet deep. Not perfectly rectangular, the surface bulges smoothly towards the front, and bulges and curves at the front corners. The top stands on two thick pillars comprised of the cabinetry; three drawers on either side, the lowest the deepest, the highest the shallowest. There is a middle drawer in between them below the top, just above where the sitter's legs go, between the other drawers. The handles are wood with a metal core. There is an ornate symmetrical inset of a stoppered decanter of some kind framed in vines, leaves, and flowers in paler wood, very faded and darkened, on the front of the middle drawer. The surface is much scored and faded, though still quite smooth and some time away from splintering. 

The right-hand bottom drawer holds completed works of mine that exist in looseleaf or stapled form only due to format considerations, as well as collected laser-printed poems and short works I have been taught with or I have used to teach. Also, fully inscribed notebooks and composition books, every page filled or used to satisfaction. As recently as yesterday this drawer may have also come to house a gift I received from an old friend of mine, a gift of special dried fungi.

Above that, the drawer holds partially filled or new notebooks and composition books, waiting for their time in the sun and subsequently sequestration one level below. Above that is the pencil, eraser, and colored pencil drawer, grouped in a metal divider by category and level of use. New Wood Pencils, In Process Wood Pencils, Colored Pencils, Mechanical Pencils (lead no finer than .7 mm), Erases & Utility Razors & Retired Pencils. There is also a pencil sharpener tossed in with the New Pencils, and a high-quality pair of scissors (gray, Fiskars, titanium) in front of the divider.

On the opposite side, the top drawer is given to pens and sundry tools. A calligraphy pen set, many ballpoints, a brush pen, Sharpie markers, a dry-erase. A collection of paintbrushes, mostly very fine-sized. My old-ass iPod I don't have the heart to get rid of, a USB computer mouse, a wireless computer mouse, my collection of flash drives, several drafting compasses, some random stickers I haven't found a place for, and some Champion pins from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in a little pouch I got from a pipe case I once bought.

Below that, my collection of bookmarks, which contains examples of such variety as to satisfy any predilection I might have, to suit more or less any book that I might get my hands on. Pinky-sized to postcard-sized, in metal, plastic, leather, cloth, laminated cross-stitch, made from scratch, specially designed--I got a lot of 'em, folks. This drawer also contains wooden and plastic drafting and regular rulers, and drafting templated with like the shapes all in 'em. Think I described them pretty well last time I detailed my desk. 

Bottom drawer on the left side contains loose notes in a yellow mailer which comprise seed material for a lot of future or never-to-be projects. Basically it's an envelope containing chicken scratch on torn paper. This drawer also contains fully used-up notebooks; actually, the bulk of them. It always catches me off-guard, how much nonsense and babble I have actually set to paper in this life. And to be published, to be shown, only a light skimming of the cream off the top; the rest, between me, God, fire, dust, the digital aether, and the landfill.

Finally the middle drawer contains life documents, stuff the government needs, medical shit, whetever. That drawer bores the shit out of me and I actually hate it. This aspect of me is well-known and documented. 

Arrayed on the desktop, at my right hand on the edge sits a planter gifted to me by a friend in which I never planted anything, but which holds a currently full mason jar of water, a paper bag with some trash and part of an eighth of weed, and this silly pencil case, a big soft printed school bus riding around a bunch of Marvel superheroes who are very dangerously sticking their recognizable torsos out the windows, setting a hell of bad example. Next to the case is a thing that came with my bike locks for securing them to the bicycle (I do not do this; if I plan to stop somewhere on a ride or am conducting routine business travel I equip my small Osprey camping backpack I got from my dad with the locks and all other necessaries, like a bandanna for wiping off sweat and keys and stuff), the electronic key for our van, a black Bic lighter, my currently empty Field Museum Sue coffee mug from the nineties, a tube of black acrylic paint, a loose zipper bit from my Zelda messnger bag, a roll of scotch tape, a stud finder, recently decomissioned metal keys, a 5/8 angled shiny blue painbrush, a roll of mounting tape, a plastic tray which is actually part of the package for the tape I am repurposing as a painter's palette, and a fragment of a Japanese poem written in Chinese translated by Burton Watson I hand-transcribed in green marker pen, by Isonokamu no Yakatsugu, called The Small Hills:

*

"Hills beneath Heaven;

On the broad earth, trees--

These things that the small man spurns

The wise shall nourish.

Though I want in the states of distress

How should I decline the defenses of virtue?"

*

My laptop rests on a tower comprised of a Thumler's Tumbler Rock Polisher box, with everything in it--my younger brother's old workhorse. I tried to tumble some of my collection, given that my mom wanted the thing out of her basement and I had it around, but the belt that the tumbler needs to run snapped, rendering it all something of a pointless mess. I guess the rocks got a washing, which isn't all bad. On top of that is a thick red plastic tray used to contain the tumbler in operation, and on that I have a huge boxing book and book of myths and legends from around the world, both very large in surface area and not too thick, together adding a crucial inch while maintaining perfect stability. Then the heat tray on which I rest my laptop, which apart from dissipating heat puts the laptop at a slight angle, better for typing. My elbows are bent to the perfect angle, my forearms perfectly perpendicular to the ground. It works, basically. 

Left of the work tower, the partially-filled and empty notebooks I mean to make use of during this next semester. In front of them, a currently empty hot/cold thermos with a school bus print I got as an appreciation gift from a parent. To the left of all that, flush against the left-side edge, a barely-functioning typewriter not currently loaded with a roll, stored in its large faded tan case. The case provides an altar for my reference materials: Complete William Shakespeare, on which is perched my New American New Catholic Bible, and next to them, my three dictionaries. At the moment, on top of my dictionaries I have my current reading material and a little sheaf of art that I mean to hang up in the office soon. 

*

Well, that was illuminating, yes? I guess I could mention that the carpet is thick, gray speckled with brown and black, not really to my taste, and the walls are, annoyingly, sponge-painted. Say-lah-vee. 

Time to set the day in motion, motherfuckers, and may the Lord be with us all. 

--JL