#375

Know what? Double post today. Post #374 was insufficient for this day's needs. Started okay, but my justifiable rage became unbanked and resulted in tomfoolery. It must stand, for I hit that publish button and that's that, but I can double or even triple post if I want to. I'll write posts all day if I feel like it. 

Anyhow, I hadn't had a smoke. Trying not to have a smoke. But now I've had a smoke, and now I want to write a nice post, with fun jokes. 

Fucking pathetic.

*

Had an idea for a deconstructed pizza resturant. Oh, it's so beautiful in my mind. 

Picture this: you are drawn towards a modest little building. The sign out front merely boasted the letters "PZ", but it is clearly a pizza place--there is a picture of pizza on the sign, and one on the window, which looks beautiful and hot and crusty and does not obscure the red-and-white checkered tablecloths and little tabletop waiters full of dressings and bottles of red pepper flakes. 

You enter. There is no such classic scene. The window was some kind of blind hologram. There are only bare formica tables and hardbacked wooden chairs. The walls are glaring uninterrupted white; there are no plants or other decorations. Only the tables and chairs and the double doors leading to the kicthen. There is no music. An impeccable "mater d" glides you to your table before you can turn around. 

Once seated, the server offers you a list of the pizzas of the day, Relaxing slightly, you make your selection. 

In a trice, a plate is brought out from the kitchen. On it, in spare yet artful arrangement, are one of each of the uncooked toppings that would have been on the pizza you ordered. A glass full to the brim of steaming pizza sauce is placed next to it in front of you. As you process what is happening, the smell of hot, melted cheese is piped into the dining room.

After almost two whole minutes have elapsed, a bill totaling one hundred and eighty-seven dollars with gratuity included is placed just within reach of your hand, opposite the glass. 

God, it's so pure I could cry.

(insert joke stolen from Jeremy Clarkson marveling at the circumference and unflagging tumescence of my genius)

*

I also have a plan to save America with a nationwide network of federally subsidized diners--a freestanding, unkillable diner for every single neighborhood, every housing project, every town too small for much else. Carbon-neutral buildings surrounded by carbon-fixing native groundcover, serving better-than-organic and sustainably farmed produce, animal products, and grain preparations, available to the community at fixed prices twenty-four hours a day.

Delicious grits and eggs served with top-notch butter and real coffee all for a buck fifty. A well-paid server with a pension and all the health insurance they will ever need is happy to top you off, calling you "hon", or "darlin". Later, you can come back for a big delicious sandwich made to order for four bucks; the cook remembers you and tips you a wink and a spatula salute. Sheeit, you'll splurge today: return once more for a chicken dinner of half a bird, roast potatoes and green beans, and a piece of pie homemade the night before. Seven dollars even. Take the drumstick home for a snack tomorrow.

Nice. Oh, and kids under twelve eat free off the actually legit and thoughtful kid's menu. 

*

That second part wasn't a joke, just a dream too beautiful to live, I guess. It's funny, everyone I've ever told about it loves it, some people even cry a little bit. I bet if we took one of those so-precious nationwide polls, this idea would meet with approval so universal it would break records. But we live in the world that we have. Not so much the one we'd like to have.

(insert stolen Jeremy Clarkson joke about how my genius triggers seismographs and immaculately impregnates fertile organisms that draw too close to its magical influence)

--JL

#374

Well, good job the state of New York, this is a step forward. Expanding the definition of rape is good and overdue.

Of course, any wild-eyed lunatic of any gender sitting next to me--on, say, a bus--could still shove their hands down my pants, grasp the base of my penis with two fingers, massage my testes with two more, send the last one exploring, and the legal definition would leave me out of the rape equation as long as it didn't find my actual anus.

I hate that. I get that it's all about protecting women, and that is essential. I want to more than anything, basically. But we will continue to have to protect women from a disporportionate amount of masculine assaults and the rhetorics designed to buttress it for as long as the problem of the rape of men and boys continues to be diminished and invisibled in the conversation and the collective psyche.

You couldn't--you seriously couldn't consider the word "genital", rather than the word "vagina"? Rape can only happen to your junk if it's coded female in your primitive-ass, lie-worshipping, fucking sub-monkey society? Nonconsensual cock touching = what? A boyish prank? Natural curiosity? What are you going to tell me--that it's so much easier to grab, we don't want to get into that can of worms?

Fuck you people. 

*

It is time...for me to stop reading the news for awhile. It's like every few months I go from eating a little slice of lemon with breakfast for the important benefits to squeezing double handfuls of  halved lemons into a bowl and shoving my face in, both eyes open. Why? No fucking reason. Helps no one, least of all me. It's how I am. 

Oh, I'll have a puff, just part of this one cig. Ope! I'm smoking three at once? Hm. Well, better finish 'em. 

*

And yet, do I have more sour, vicious things to say here, now? I do! Oh jeezus howdy, do I ever.

-If you read the words "human-grade" on some pet food, the only possible way you can come over all "oh, how good, this will be a good thing to buy" is if you have no fucking concept, no idea what we will feed to one another and legally call it food, nowhere more than here in the U.S.A.

-Why am I still recycling plastic? We have known since the nineteen nineties that this shit is fake, Magic School Bus Special notwithstanding (it is indeed possible for the Magic School Bus to lie--the nineties Lost in Space movie told more truth), and does more harm than good, and it has been proved more conclusively and publicly in the last two years than ever, and still, here I am, having to listen to someone tell me how important it is to wash and sort your plastics to make it easy for the poor heroic fucks running the PLANET-KILLING WATER-FUCKING MICROPLASTICS ENGINE that knowingly and in full possession of the actual results bills itself as a "recycling" center. Is it still better than a landfill? Is it really? where the fuck did you hear that. same place you heard it was going to save the planet? well???

-Jesus, what a waste of both our times. Fuck me running at a rolling donut. Fuck me to the moon. I need to be ashamed of myself today, dear reader, that is certainly true, but you know, maybe consider that if you got to these words here, you waded through many you could have easily lived without, and ask yourself why you spent precious seconds that way. I dunno, maybe you're a kid or teenager and this kind of counterculture pissing and bombast is blowing your mind. 

Well, lemme tell ya something. After even an extended and standout career being angry in a cool way, sadly, you will still live in the same world. So it's kind of a waste of time, and all you've done is train yourself to be reflexively outraged at what you are powerless to change, raising your cortisol for nothing. That's why trolls grin so smug when they piss you off good. They raised your cortisol and kept theirs low. That's why your parents are so unforgivably boring and same-as. Raising your own cortisol indefinitely is no way to live. They represent the finished product of a system designed to grind human beings into uniform, homegenous paste, and nothing gets sanded down or covered up like anyone trying to stand up or out. 

I'm not a bad example actually. I don't even know how the algorithm let you get on here. Even my facebook friends back in the day, all seventy of them, used to not get to see the posts I made to my own wall. I checked and tested. It raised my cortisol, and somewhere deep in the bowels of that devil-haunted ass-company, a troll smiled. 

My advice is to stop reading this blog and learn to grow and wildcraft your own food all by yourself or with a partner. Also make and sustain various kinds of shelter. Consider a nomadic lifestyle. Way things are going, people capable in this sense of things will have to repopulate our vicious colony of virus-brained apes from scratch. It's not the best advice, but it's kind of reasonable. Alternate take, don't repopulate shit. Let rats or cockroaches take a shot at dominance; maybe octopus or squid.

Best advice, reserved for myself, is to write into this blog and other text fields while the world burns around me, as my house collapses, as my asshole falls out of my body. It's not fine, and I know it's not. But I do not care, mind, or think of it as a bad ending.

--JL

#373

Fucking losing my mind over here. But what else is new? This is Factually Pointless, the free and easy ravings of a madman undergoing existential mastication. Rejoice, brethren! We are the eternally digested, breaking down together in the great roiling stomach of this universe. 

*

You see a lot more fake bullshit these days, but that's a) kinda relative and b) if you are of any kind of advanced age, say, older than fourteen, and have ever so much as looked at internet, you should have prepared yourself well for this level of saturation. I get that this is not a very reasonable outlook. We are all built to pay attention to very different things in very different ways, from the obscurely particular to the embodied universals.

My policy is to assume that if an institution--let's say, a governmental organization or representative or representative body, or if you prefer, a media outlet--is putting out deepfaked shit or is addressing the social issue of fabricated content less than adroitly and intelligently, then they know goddamn well what they're doing and projected ignorance must be construed as feigned. I don't accept the kind of fucking incompetence I see out there as legitimate. Safer in the long run to consider it a manipulative stratagem.

*

I may be a no-name idiot with no standing at all in this world, but I don't have to be a fucking sucker into the bargain. If I am tricked, let the trick be justifiably sophisticated. If I am subject to powers I cannot resist, let them at least have to exert their irresistibility. I'm not here to make things easy for anybody that wants to fuck me up or own me. 

*

Feels good to write that, but what hope do any of us have? 

Only hope itself, I guess, and whatever paths our particular hopes can illuminate. Only what keeps us going.

Whatever we do, we are not lost if we hope. In hope, nothing is in vain, and no defeat is total.

*

We cannot know the mind of God, so I would say that my actual leap of faith as Kierkegaard would have it is throwing myself as completely as I can, all my life, into the truth of the prior two sentences. It is easy for me to believe the inscrutable universe has no regard for us whatsoever. I can accept that and understand life, having lived, as an even trade. In context, however, in the human particulars of what it is to have lived as part of a narrative--a narrative, that is what is crucial here--I cannot and will not accept the narrative as shitty. I say it's a good story. I say it was worth telling no matter how it ends, how many fucked up evil details make it hard to stomach. That's my leap of faith. That is what I am a knight for, again, in Kierkegaardian terms.

--JL

#372

Man, not to be a downer or inflammatory, but like, it has to be said. Yeah, Israel's doing a genocide, and that's pretty difficult to swallow. Nobody likes that. Nobody wants it to be true. But that's what's happening.

Sure the main dude says it's not a genocide, and sure, the people carrying out the genocide in real time say it's not a genocide. But that's true of every genocide. Even the Nazis didn't do a press conference being all "hey, we've decided once and for all to wipe out every last Jew we can get our hands on. Our goal is the extinction of their race." No. There was a whole process. There's always the justification, and guess what: the justification is always that we have to protect ourselves because these people are a threat to us, and that threat is in the form of their very existence. 

The subject of genocide has fascinated me since I was a little kid, and how could it not. The concept of genocide flies in the face of every idea we espouse in order to justify our existence as a species, yet genocides happen all the fucking time, quiet ones and loud one, little ones and big ones. The death toll of  genocide has little to do with how big and loud it is, incidentally. The genocide happening right now in Pakistan is big and loud because of the players and particulars, not the death count or the methodology.

Typically for me when I'm fascinated by something, I read everything I can find about it. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, is the case study par excellence in my opinion, a book so complete and unsparing that its production destroyed its author. Ordinary Men, A Long Way Gone, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Long Death, The River of Lost Footsteps, Not on Our Watch, A Human Being Died That Night, Carnage and Culture, The Femicide Machine, First They Killed My Father, Blood and Soil, and Howard Ball's Genocide are the other actual books I have around or have checked out on the subject. It's a pretty grim set of titles. But they've given me as much to think about as whole other shelves of less grim books combined.

*

The thing to remember locally is that the average person thinks there's been like, three big, or "real" genocides. Really, just one (which a lot of people say is fake? I dunno, it's getting longer and longer ago, too), and a small group of others that float around the consciousness, and stuff that shouldn't reallly count, like the kinds of genocides enacted on First Nations and other precolonial American civilizations, or Aboriginal Australians, or the Ainu, or on Māori people, or the African diaspora. I mean, how else was I supposed to have a correct life? Live with these other fuckers? I think not.

The character of a lot of early warfare was genocidal the way chimp bands are genocidal in their warfare. The wiping out of bloodlines is coded deep in our behavioral ancestry. And all warfare is inherently at risk of taking on a genocidal character at outset, no matter how virtuous and noble the principles involved might seem.

So without getting bogged down in stuff like soft or chronic or collateral genocide, let us concentrate on genocide as a corollary to warfare. We begin with the distinction between total war, which is the strategy employed by the Israeli Armed Forces at the moment, and other forms, such as hybrid warfare as employed by the Russian state, and indeed, by Hamas and similar groups. Total warfare has proved a bad matchup against hybrid warfare for the past thirty years, and there are really two main reasons it is still around: because the hardware to wage it exists and the manufacture of that hardware is a massive force in the global economy, and because you don't give much of a fuck what happens to your enemy or the ground they stand on; because all collateral is acceptable on the path to total and unconditional surrender or whatever economic or proxy issue the war was actually fought for, if not over. Military strategists will tell you that they are employing total warfare tactics with the intent of preserving innocent life in the process; this is a lie they are comfortable in telling because it salves their humanity. It is a lie, though. They will say that it ends conflicts before they can escalate; a lie. They will say that their tactical deployments minimize risk for civilians and their own personnell; a half-truth that bites like a lie. 

If you wanted to actually do that, you would employ counter-soft power tactics, make a point of visible and provably resultant humanitarian amelioration and civilian protection, and engage in precision attacks on as many hardpoints and nerve centers as you can by training a large amount of small, efficient, well-equipped surgical strike teams and providing them with next-generation up-to-the-minute communications, adaptive reconnaissance, and tactical analysis.

That would work on every axis that I can think of. That's not what the Israeli government wants, because if it wanted it that it would completely have that plus drone support and god knows what stealth shit I don't even have a clue about. I mean, that's what you'd be seeing. They have the money and the experts. Maybe I know jack-all, but that's my position.

You drop bombs because you want to fuck shit up. Because you've got them and you want to use them. Because you want to show these fuckers that they are fucked if they don't fall in line. And you do it for weeks and months because you want everyone to know that this is how shit is and can't nobody stop you.

Call me a liar.

*

As for the fact that they suffered an attack, as for the hostage component--genocide is all about overwhelming, seismic reactions to grievances invented or legitimate. The operations in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East under the banner of the so-called War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks is an excellent example. The amount of people killed in those attacks and all coalition forces over the course twenty years of war in the Middle East compared to the direct and indirect civilian casualties suffered by the populations on the ground--not to mention the material results of the conflicts vis a vis establishing stability in the region or whatever you wanted people to think you were doing out there--tells you everything you need to know about legitimately aggrieved warfare as it is waged in the modern age.

Sure, the state of Israel has excuses ready to hand, and their state history places them in a unique position re: genocide and ideas about responses to the perpetrations of genocide. The idea that this history makes them immune to genocidal ideations and genocidal intents, that any nation or people's history protects them from becoming genocidal, is nonsense. Countless nations and civilizations have risen and fallen in response to tyrannical regimes or genocidal attempts. Human cultures all around the world have flourished in soil watered with the blood of those killed and exiled. More recently, a modern nation which defined its independence from its mother empire as based on the principles of freedom and humanism enslaved human beings and and did genocide constantly, legally. It's still happening!

What we say, where we came from--it's fucking nothing. What is it that we do?

That's the key bit.

--JL

#371

Can it really be that a rapist and a liar, forced to pay millions of dollars out of one hand for being a rapist and a liar, simultaneously exerts undue influence over the processes of one of the key branches of our government with the other?

Turns out the answer is yeah, no problem. Guess this is what some people think of as swingin' big dick. To me it is just like, annoying. It has nothing to do with dick energy or the size of dick energy, but if I were calling it, I would say that this behavior is tiny dick big yelling energy, you know, like that shitty little wife-beater guy in Of Mice and Men. But that is more than what you need when so many people have been bred and trained to have gaping asshole energy. Born to be fucked. Born to grease your own cornhole and bend over, simpering and wiggling your hips, hoping you get dragged to the woodshed to be ministered to.  

That's what fucks me up and keeps me up at night. A land salted heavily with wicked and devious bottoms, simping for their daddy. With their giant trucks and their shame and their war weapons and the books they wanna censor and the history they want to erase and their Punisher stickers and all the rest of their precious little symbols, their mealy banquet of putrid ideas written by losers who only ever have lost in order to appeal to smaller, bitcher losers. 

And yet before they lose, they do manage to ruin everything and shock the uninitiated with their ability to improve upon the damage prior losers wrought. That is because people are scared of monsters, but what they should really be afraid of is cowards.

*

What the fuck everrrrrr

--JL

#370

Reflecting on the origins of this blog: a way to strengthen the case for purchasing one of the texts I was putting out on kindle direct publishing, something that receded quickly in importance, surfacing occasionally and even recently with the completion of The Tetrahedron, but which I have decidedly abandoned in the interim. It has never helped me sell so much as single copy of any book, which is lucky because the books as objects are not that great. I made a lot of mistakes because I am an indifferent jackass and did not repair them all for the same reason.

Getting them off the store and closing out my account is bothersome and I haven't done it yet, but I will. For now, The Tetrahedron and my first collection of short stories remain, as these texts and the books that contain them are relatively unblemished. Anyway, the blog is as important in its own way as what I have heretofore referred to as my serious, actual work. How did the blog come to be, and how has it become what it is?

*

Well, first, what it is might be the purest and most clownish form of staring into my own navel. A friend, not disparagingly, refers to it as my diary, and I have jokingly referred to myself as a professional diarist at some point. I guess it is both these things and I sort of am, but because I set myself very specific constraints and aims when I approach this text field, and have generated work that I find worthwhile thereby in a literary sense. The public nature of the act lends writing a high-wire act feeling which galvanizes me, and has driven me to produce far more involved and dense prose than I ever thought I would give away for free, more baring of myself as a person than I thought I would ever dare to make clear--and now it strikes me that this corpus, unwieldy and patchwork though it may be, is a valuable contribution to the "free" content available on internet. It pleases me to have given this away and to have it stand, free to all, and I am excited to continue.

Initially, as I said, it was something more on the order of a free sample cart, which would entice readers into paying for my stories and poems. I was out of work and holding onto a bunch of credit card debt accrued over the preceding three years in an effort to have some quality of life and treat my partner right, which was simply outside of my means. This situation cut through my distaste for commercialism and my horror of having to try and sell myself to other people. 

Longtime readers will remember that I used to write a lot more about the weather, about walking, about the sky. These things are still important to me, but they made their way so insistantly into the blog because I was walking five miles a day to work and five miles back constantly in an effort to accrue the capital to work off that debt--almost $6500--back to my dad, who had paid it off for me so as to rescue me from the interest. It took a long time and a lot of work. And in that time the blog, too, was a sort of life preserver I could cling to when I had lost my boat. How did I come to lose a boat? Hard thing to lose. It's basically you; I mean, we are our own boats on the sea of this existence. 

*

Not long after I broke off my first engagement, leading to the fraught, complicated, and misunderstood end of that relationship, I sank into despair and the beginnings of familiar drunken oblivion. The end of the engagement, the putting off of marriage, I had wanted, for many discrete and interconnected reasons--including guilt over that debt, which she knew nothing about, I suddenly realize. Hilarious.

Losing my partner, that I most certainly and firmly I did not want. I have, in other posts, said that I ended things, and that is a simplified version of things but not the truth. As we would both learn, you cannot always get what you want, not even when you were so close and everything seemed so great. Sometimes getting what you need means losing what you want, and vice versa. These are simple things every child alive experiences over and over, and we all spend our whole lives learning it again, because maturity may or may not be a myth, but the notion that it comes in stages with the crossing of abritrary thresholds or grows steadily with time is certainly bullshit. 

She was a great person, a brilliant person, wonderful, iconic, and I am certain she still is. I was a fool, broken and falsely mended. Brilliant, if you like--she thought so, and that must count for something--but any alleged greatness and wonderfulness I may have shown was the imperfect product of a vast effort on my part, predicated and founded on a lie. More on her and that another time.

*

A scant couple of months into my aforementioned despair, I found myself gravitating towards a particular customer at the place attached to the kitchen where I worked. Something about her; her extremely conservative, masculine clothing (this works for me--a lot of things work for me--though I am a being of fickle appetites, and what works for me in one person may not work in another), the way she carried herself and smiled and spoke to me, though calm and ordinary, unmistakably intimated extremely great sex. I began to feel that the time might be ripe for a passionate encounter, to remind me that life was not over and to get me back into some form of regular existence. At least, so I reasoned to myself, at that time. 

Also ever since I started having sex, I've had a problem with stopping for any length of time. Weird!

So we smoked some weed once when I got off work, this led to that and the other thing, and couple hangouts later we were fucking savagely on her apartment floor, eminent examples of the frenzied, thoughtless beasts we cerebral chimpanzees so easily and joyfully become in the throes of that seal-fresh-popped sex.

Our thing wasn't romantic at that stage, and much grief would have been saved if we had possessed the critical wherewithal to keep it that way. That is not how life tends to run its operations, I have found. 

Grief, it turns out, exists to be spent. Its veins are there in the bedrock of things, like seams of metal waiting to glimmer when the stone surrounding it gives way to the probing of human beings in pursuit of whatever they think it is they want, to be torn out of the earth, twisted into new shapes, and passed around as currency or beauty or utility, to be alloyed with other volatile, gleaming things pulled out of the darkness.

It's a fucking hell of a thing to be alive, is what I'm saying. I'd rather stick to bragging about how incredible she was at giving head, the only person who has ever brought me actual pleasure by playing with my balls at the same time; about how we fucked in her apartment and my house and in Alabama and Florida and the mountains of North Carolina and in the duplex we moved into after all that, but grief eclipses these simple joys. 

Anyhow. The sex was absolutely bangin'. Yes, she was, ultimately, a narcissist who made extensive use of me, and sensing this, I began using her to kill myself, to reduce myself down to something easily destructible. But while we were fucking, all of that was all right by me. Fuck drinking myself almost to homelessness, insanity, and death, I later thought. Prolonged intercourse with a narcissistic sex worker is the better slow suicide by far. Drinking is fun, but how could it ever compare to sex? Shit, most motherfuckers in this life learn to drink in hopes of getting to try sex, or get ahold of the fucker again.

*

She specialized in older men, particularly older men whose interest transcended the merely routine and sexual. She liked to be taken out, treated well, presented with gifts. She was a genius in many ways, a very masculine, Aspberger's genius, which permeated her personality and aesthetics. She was fascinated and passionate about illumination technology--flashlights. Dear reader, I know shit about flashlights and what the best flashlights can do that I would never have imagined previously. I have been in the workshop of a mad genius, whose technological breakthroughs in illumination have him in dialogue with national security agencies who wish to make use of his achievements. 

She also loved knives and was into independent blacksmiths before Forged in Fire, especially that dude Liam Hoffman, and she bought one of his knives made from like decomissioned battleship steel plating and a mahogany handle salvaged from the same ship. She was into a ton of shit--crazy high-grade herbal supplements from Sun Potion out in California, highly advanced nutrition, such as powdered vegetables from Dr. Cowan (read his book about how the heart is not a pump; pretty good) and other biodynamically farmed produce (she was, as some readers may have alread recognized, educated in the Rudolf Steiner system), blue glass, perfect German water bottles made of tempered glass--glass was a thing, basically--structured water filtered through no-plastic systems, no-plastic everything except these indestructible bags, metal containers to keep shit fresh without plastic, especially trail mixes composed primarily of sprouted almonds and Turkish mulberries (she was Turkish), ferments, traditional earthenware vessels, turned wooden bowls, dark instagram with like the crazy comedy snuff movies and devastating injury reels. 

Yeah, she was batshit out of her mind, but brilliant, with range most people lack. I wanted that crazy at the moment, and everything else she was offering. She took all the room I willingly gave her to drive, which meant I did all the driving. I served as her chauffer and aide-de-camp, essentially. Didn't have to work, she paid the minimum balance on my credit card for awhile (she had lots of money), and though I threw out the bulk of my possessions, we did hold on to all my books and shelves; in fair exchange, I cooked and cleaned and did most of the rest of the labor of living, drove her to whatever town she had an appointment in, be it profesional or optometric or to whatever store, and on whatever odyssey struck her fancy. It didn't matter. I was down. She kept me in weed, and it was on her indulgence that I began a three-year span of being high every waking minute. We ate basially exclusively amazing, clean, well-crafted foods. Most importantly it was great for awhile, running around to wherever every single day, never stopping to rest or think. She wasn't one to let the dust collect on her. We climbed mountains in North Carolina, checked out the Jim Beam factory in Tennessee, drove some of the Appalachian Trail roads,  jumped into the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, watched the surf lap the docks on the Saginaw Bay, screwed around for awhile in Chicago. We drove back roads and country roads, rarely using any highways. I got to know a lot of our home state and a few of its towns in new and intimate ways, wandering around, surreptitiously consuming marijuana, praying to myself as I wandered.

*

Sure, the way she was at restaurants, with customer service in general, was a kind of nightmare. There were warning signs, which I happily ignored, in how she dealt with having a problem with her landlord early on, which led to us getting a place together. A maneuver, in hindsight, but also a characteristic element of her being-in-the-world--post office drama, server drama, doctor drama, this bitch motherfucker that asshole--all to create the frame that she had been cheated out of what was her right by the incompetence or aggression of a fundamentally innocent workforce. I mean, the fucking entitlement of a narcissist in service situations--it's aberrant, but keyed into the routine. It serves them well because it breaks the social norm so completely by using its mechanisms legitimately, so no one ever has time to adjust--you are pinned in their deft manipulation of what ought to be regarded as normal. 

She taught me finally how to deal with that, where to draw the indelible line that they can never cross. Draw it without passion, with a peacable smile, without letting yourself become drawn into the weeds or the particulars. Do this implacably, and they will recognize that they are known, and look for easier prey. I had a customer, long after after it was all over and I had done the first part of my processing, who hinted at me in our first interaction, which was very successful and normal-seeming--they always are, but it was something in the eyes, the smile, that spoke of having found a mark--that she was going to do the narcissist runaround.

The second time, the instant she became unreasonable, I drew the line. She didn't like that, and the change in her demeanor let me know that I had read and drawn correctly. She would have killed me right then, I wager, were it not for social consequences. And she never fucked with me again. She tried it with my staff, but I'd given out instructions to just come grab me or someone else who can hold their ground if I wasn't around. After a couple of instances coming up against the unscalable wall of unmoving politeness that I had built, she moved on to easier hunting grounds. 

Yeah, I cuss a lot and talk dirty here. But that's because we're close, dear reader. In meatspace, I prize the burnished chainmail of my courtesies very highly. It is rare that I use my real voice in the real world--one only deploys armaments when defenses have failed to repel, or when duty calls and there are no other voices to be heard.

*

Most every narcissist knows that they're fucked up, but the arguments they are wont to craft for the case of everyone else being the fucked up ones can be quite compelling, and of course are ironclad to the craftsperson. They're usually instinctively extremely intelligent, and usually intellectually savvy on top of that. They know they're built different, and are dangerous. But they're not monsters or anything. They balance it with generosity (they keep score on this generosity, but they cannot help that) and other ameliorative acts, they do their best to be as human as they can be, just like most other people. They bestow, engage, educate, try to share joy. But they are fundamentally gatherers and hoarders, owners, and their feelings of safety are found easily in the wielding of power, over strangers, conditions (particularly economic conditions), and loved ones. And their successful wielding of that power can create feelings of nausea and guilt, which they combat by doubling down or making themselves more unbearable than ever, until they are rebuffed, and then, relief, more guilt, remorse, and editing the past to make the future possible because ultimately you gotta be yourself.

It's not anything any more sinister than most other personality types. I can personally attest to theit humanity running as deep as any other human's. But the trauma that they cause is acute in its own special way, and since I possess this trauma, my thoughts on the matter tend to be somewhat more rigorous and label-determined than my wont.

What's fucked up about my personality type? I'm easy to get along with but almost impossible to know deeply, keep my own counsel basically always, and disappear into myself regularly. I vanish. I do not attach myself to the lives of my friends or even my brothers. I am the wandering fetus, and I am a different kind of narcissist. We all are. The mainstream application of the term as it stands now is in reference to high-ability manipulative grifters who specialize in capitalizing on vulnerabilities and structural inequalities, which makes them good at gaining and managing power over people. We've had quite a few presidents and hundreds of other government officials like this. People like this often pop up at or near the top, in world history. It's just how it is.

Explicative, huh?

*

Later on, when things started to dismember and disinitegrate--she took a trip to Turkey and when she came back, the shine had worn off me, apparently--and the question of my finances became pressing and front-facing, I made the books out of my collection of poems and the stories, which existed as a group and had been shortlisted for an award and publication but did not make the final cut. I created the blog and began typing into the blog, as I said on the advice of the kdp website, which stated that a blog would help attract readers. Whatever, I said. And you can read the blog from the beginning for an obscure yet revealing account of my days from there.

You can pretty much tell when it ceases to be a mere exercise and starts to become a way of surviving, albeit practically against my will. Did Factually Pointless save my life, a little bit? I'm going to say probably.

*

Pre-hiatus and Post-hiatus blog, the hiatus being the entire year 2020 for reasons I hardly need detail, are two different works, it seems to me, as 2020 changed me quite as completely as it changed the world. We all went through a lot then, or at any rate the vast majority of us here on this planet. Since 2021 the blog has been more difficult for me, my ability to engage with it more sporadic, but this is shaping to be a standout year for Factually Pointless, and I am excited to bring these ideas to you, dear reader.

Talk about navel-gazing! Let us hope for something a little more stimulating to the general public tomorrow, dear reader, though I know you don't mind reading my diary.

--JL

#369

Triple sixty-nine. Hilarious. Also known as the Isosceles Lock.

*

Man, you know what I hate? The only thing, object, phenomena I really actually in all seriousness hate, besides hatred itself? Money.

Folks, I fucking hate money. I hate that stuff. I'm coming out as saying I was born with a suspicion around the concept, my childhood grew thick with further doubts about the stuff, and ever since I was a teenager, I have just plain fucking hated that shit. I hate money so much that I'm trembling slightly.

As will inevitably happen with hatred, money hates me back. Good! Screw that nonsense. So my life is more difficult. Maybe that's the price I'm comfortable paying in a world that fucks the shit out of itself for money.

*

I don't want any more money than I have, and I could stand to have less. What I want is to not need money to stay alive. I think that in this day and age that is fucking insane. I know I talked about this pretty recently, but it's the first month of a new year. A ripe time to call stridently for what is needed in the future, to start great works. 

Take the necessities of life off the market and provide them universally to every living human. Provide scientific endeavor the funding you provide the military-industrial complex--we need next-level globally applicable materials and energy options faster and more completely than we're getting them. Weapons are something we have enough of, I should think; I know the people who make billions of dollars crafting weapons would beg to differ, but somehow, I don't trust their testimony. We need to go Bio-Coruscant* if we don't want that Road Warrior shit.

Everything else can continue as the luxuries market, where motherfuckers can destroy themselves and everything that makes them human for imaginary gains all they want if that's their blue heaven--as long as they can prove sustainable and not planet-killing, since not having that will destroy us all anyway.**

Give me the option to stay out of it, and live a simpler, more peaceful life in the knowledge that my having it doesn't deny anyone else their chance for theirs. 

*

Doesn't that sound ok? Fuck, man, you'd think I was asking people to eat a plate of raw dicks. 

"What about my riiiiiights?" Bitch, you simped those away a long time ago and I'm not saying I want to take more. I'm saying we need to sort out the basic shit before we worry about getting you your own gold crapper like the one Donald Trump uses to help himself convince himself he's worth a tinker's damn. 

"What about logiiiiistics?" Do you seriously mean to tell me that with the worldwide circus of mental gymnastics and indecipherable riddles that is the current state of economies, currencies, supply chains, trade--if that somehow grinds on, built with no plan and cobbled together in motion ever with an eye out to allow grifters and thieves to ply their wicked trades, we can't design something better on purpose that works towards reasonable equity and the material advancement of the species, rather than its degradation and self-destruction?

Probably not? Fine, whatever. A man can shit his dreams into whatever hat he likes, though, and this is mine. 

--JL

*this is an idea I have played around with in my head for a long time about how we could shrink human-occupied space on Earth while increasing quality of life for all humans and achieving optimal harmony between human and nonhuman biospheres. This could eventually become a project that is holistically entwined with the maximum possible planetary surface, a fully symbiotic relationship with Terra. Hence, Bio-Coruscant, credit to George Lucas. I also think of the Chozo, from Metroid, as an interesting model, and the Forerunners from the Halo universe. Look 'em up if you care. 

**I get that the game with some of these shitty little pigs is to survive the anthropocalypse and define the new postdiluvian world as gods, progenitors of Human 3.0. They're playing a game they don't understand, but if we let them win, I guess that doesn't matter; we won't be around to raise objections or point out their failures. And time will roll on with all our dusty bones in its wake. But here, now, I say fuckem. That's all the power I have? Fuckem anyway. Regulate these assholes. Fuckin write a new book to throw at them. Consider that a formal request to whom it may concern.