#388

Guess the thing for me to worry about right now, besides all the seriously material shit in my immediate surroundings and the world at large that demand strained thought, is to wonder if I don't merely have depression, but bipolar disorder. Suppose I should have wondered more about this earlier, but maybe it just morphed into this over time. 

I was a very happy child. Until I got depressed for the first time when I was eight, nothing got me too down for very long at all. Happy baby, happy toddler, happy little kid. Bad shit was bad shit, but you rolled on, found the joke, picked up a book, got a hug from someone, and time would go on under the light of God. The first intimations of a more durable maturity and the depression was immediate and tactile, and basically instantly, I wondered if it would not be better to be dead than to feel this way.

Got over it, but after I turned eleven I got depressed again and that never really went away till I was maybe twenty-three, though it turned inward and became a hot and accessible rage that fueled my teenage years especially. Then it was matter of riding out feeling normal and riding out feeling depressed, outside of those occasions in a given springtime when I'd lose my mind and hit the eject button on my life. Yes, manias. Sure. Mania is certainly not outside of my experience of depression. Neither is joy, nor satisfaction, nor feeling free of the extremes. Felt like I understood myself pretty well since I turned twenty-eight, and till this summer things were as stable between my familiar highs and lows as they have ever been. Maybe the lows have been lowering the last couple years, but in a way mostly grippable.

But the way it played out this summer and fall, I have to wonder if things are the same. The up was too up, and I didn't realize it at all until the crash almost killed me. Still skidding and rolling. Some days literally can't do a single thing outside the confines of my property and only a select few within. 

In this darkness there is still contentment and satisfaction, the happiness of accomplishments and love and play, friendship and ice cream, etc. There is still this here, this text field, and the other ones in which my service as a conduit brings me to life. Reading Martin Buber's I and Thou translated and magnificently introduced by my beloved Walter Kaufmann, and that has brought me feelings similar to reading Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, which is the highest compliment I am probably able to pay a writer of thoughts. 

There is no denying or leavening of the bare fact, though, that being that I feel as bad as I have ever felt in a life extremely intimate with bad feelings. As Kierkegaard would put it, I am deeply and profoundly ill with despair. 

*

The only way out is through, having become stronger, with time. Ah, time! But time is so precious now, here, in this maelstrom of irresponsible acceleration.

Nevertheless, I won't be rushed. Hate that. Clinging like ivy to the wall of this world is an act of patience. That's all I can say. Sometimes ivy grows and sometimes it doesn't. 

You cannot rush it. You cannot help it. It just has to hang on.

--JL

#387

Due to climate change, where I am it is as through we are stuck in the state of locking--past autumn, before winter--and will miss winter entirely this year, going from a long unlocking to a short unlocking before an even hotter summer. Naturally I am presupposing. Days in February that are almost sixty degrees Fahrenheit are something I am thinking about, but in a slippery way, the unreality of it clashing uncomfortably with the plain fact. 

It's an uncomfortable thing, this evidence that if just a few human beings don't change their behavior, billions of humans suffer, along with most other living things. The ones who don't change their behavior don't suffer, of course. It is an amazing quality in an organism: when the stomach is full, the danger response is dulled. At the Bellagio, the champagne still flows and the air conditioning still runs, and so, the world is as it should be. 

Those who are pressing the knife to our collective neck will not themselves feel the pressure till they reach out their hand and no one slips an alcoholic beverage into their grasp. Then they will look around, really look around, and see what has actually happened while they drank on a full belly all their days and never stopped trying to get more.

*

Ah, for a dark and quiet earth. 

But no. The dark and the quiet remind us of death, and on top of that it bores us. We must have such noise and such light that we cannot hear or see, and we pray we won't feel anything either.

We always do, though.

--JL

#386

It is such a mistake to live within industrialized society. What a trap. What a miserable cage we have built for ourselves, our masters delighting in rattling it and poking at our vulnerable flanks through the bars.

For the safety of the cage, we put up with it, and forsake our precious lives.

What fools. What tools. What anemic caricatures of ourselves.

*

We even fight wars for the privilege of this sterilized hell. We allow wars to be fought on our behalf.

We call it good. An even trade.

*

These so-called telephones, addictive portals into a nether realm of nightmarish engineering. 

This chimaeric hydra, capital. 

Infinite chatter. Hydrochloric acid on the limestone of our minds. Chlorine bleach in the soil of our souls.

We call it wealth, and leisure, and efficiency, and productivity, and connectedness, and the duty to be well-informed, of the immense importance of our opinionate display and the general good health of our intellectual array, by which we mechanically sort ourselves into absurd tribes and ridiculous hierarchies.

We call it common sense. We call it righteousness.

*

Someday they will tell each other that as Rome fell, so did her heir and the global empire she forged, fifteen hundred years later or thereabouts, after they have emerged from the consequential period of chaos and forgetting. They will tell each other a fragmentary but satisfying version of how and why it happened. It will have no bearing on their own inevitable disintegrations.

Like cancer, the same accretions always coalesce in the body of a society, a variety of corruptions of form attacking a variety of tissues and bones. It kills them, but never immediately. Slow, fast, painful, bearable. Bodies run down. It's what they do.

We never admit this, though. We say they should not. We say we may yet unlock the secrets of immortality. We say that our city of man will last through eternity.

*

If I am a doctor, I must be a poor one. Enjoy my diagnosis, for I know no cure.

--JL

#385

Curious about exactly how many words I have pounded into this text field over the years, I tried to search for a way to get a full archival word count without having to ask anyone to write any code about it. Instead I found out that I write this blog incorrectly on every axis of performance, according to the top minds; this goes a long way towards explaining my total obscurity, if one were seeking an explanation beyond those plain to the eye. Basically, I don't care about the things people care about. Story of my life.

Also, the amount of my work that I have made available for cheap or free on internet means that I am basically unpublishable, as it stands. Publishable material must be generated from scratch. Happily much is forthcoming, but still, disheartening, especially as the prevailing reasoning seems to be that all work needs to add prestige to its publisher through exclusivity, which seems to me an ungenerous way to put out art, but then, I am perhaps the furthest thing from a businessman. 

Though, it is an opportunity to reformat and tweak all my old work and leave it waiting to coalesce somehow. It is an opportunity to set off to new terrains unencumbered.

Still, the main point stands: I have amounted to precious little in this world, generatively speaking.

And so what! Let it be what it is. It's all just a kick before senescence completes its unerring work.

We stick to our labor for its own sake, such as it is.

*

The fuckin thing has to be like more than a hundred thousand words at least though, right? Maybe someone can find out. 

*

Wondering now if the answer is simply to just make a website, sit on a domain and give the shit away that way. Set up a tip jar. Fuck it, if it pays for itself and a sandwich once in awhile I'm basically one step up from where I sit now.

*

Having a lot of trouble finding even the most menial of jobs. This has never happened before. Do I have to consider going back to the Chinese restaurant I worked my first job more than a decade and a half ago? I mean yes. I do. Shit is that fucked. Paranoid that I'm on some sort of blacklist. 

*

If it is so, let it be so. Chart the course day by day and never let the demons beat you down.

--JL

#384

Here we are, the final post of Factually Masculine 2024. Haven't thought about it too hard, but pretty sure I've done an amazing job. That's what being a man is all about, sweetheart.

*

What then, by my lights, is this thing we call man, this measuring-stick by which we mark the lives of those before and who we are? What does it mean, if I call myself a man?

Man is that which stands with and apart from others that are called men. Man is that flesh of the thinking ape which knows it is not as fundamental as that which it is not, and fundamental to what is. Man is mother and child and that which cannot be mother or child. Man is alone in his flesh. Man is part of a great whole, flesh of one flesh. 

Paradox. That's all any of us are. To cleave to one side is to live in a dissonance, however servicable.

*

Man is the exploration of what man is in the positive--aspiration--and the negative--denial. It is the definition of two lies which contend in the service of a truth which cannot be apprehended. 

*

It's not like you or anybody else knows any better. The hero has infinite faces, infinite quests, infinite genders, infinite alternatives, infinite flaws, and each only the perspective which being-in-the-world as a subjective phenomenon grants the being which calls itself something in the language it has learned, imitating what was there to imitate.

If you want to know what kind of man you are, you have to understand that only you can decide what that means. You will have to deal with what you find and what the world makes of what your findings lead you to express.

Man is the universe perceiving itself through something. A membrane, a tissue, an accretion, a reflection, a refraction, a shadow. 

Just a dream.

--JL

#383

Fucking crazy. These American fascists are seriously down to Weimarize us and clean house. I can't believe the current administration didn't send word down to quietly dispose of a dude like Stephen Miller in the dead of night about early spring 2022. I mean, given the shit he did and said before he was in the White House the first time, the shit he did once he was there, the fresh shit he has now come out and said, the plans he has laid out, all the shit that's happening with the shit falling out of these motherfucker's mouths--doesn't it seem like justifiable use of deadly force in the name of national security? I can't believe these fuckers killed MLK and Malcolm X but Stephen Miller draws breath and says federalize select National Guard troops to deport whoever the president says, wherever they are. Pray tell--aside from all of the massive civil violence such a move would portend--where will you put these people, on their way out, since presumably you'll de driving millions of people like cattle and like cattle you'll have to process them somewhere, I dunno, some sort of camp maybe, where they might end up for longer than predicted, where a lot of bad stuff can unaccountably happen and we don't know just how bad till later.

How many dudes just went out and signed up for their National Guard units just on account of he said that? Somebody checking that data would maybe note little spikes in certain states and areas. Just hinting. Coyly, even though the game is getting pretty fucking easy to call at this point. 

If I had the native sense God gave a goose I'd leave the country right about now. But I lack even that, because I am a man. Still, maybe today is a good day to think new thoughts, thoughts that could maybe carry me far, far away from this place and these wretched dangerous fools. Oh shit! Wait! I got new windows coming.

Guess I have to die in this house. More specifically, in my front yard or atop my roof, protecting my windows and everything behind them best I can. 

Factually Masculine 2024! Bereft of good or common sense!

*

In the western canon, we have a personality test from back in Hellenistic times: are you a Stoic, an Epicurean, or a Cynic? These days: false, brittle, plastic, blank-eyed stoics can be found in significant numbers, blackpillers fail to pull off the point of Cynicism, and you have to have partcipated or accepted the secondary benefits of incredible injustice and human suffering on a massive scale to be able to successfully pull off something resembling epicurean lifestyle, since the values now necessarily entail a level of asceticism  beyond reasonable thresholds. All this is to say that a peaceful life is a privilege and by no means a cheap one, whose price is basically that no matter what you pretend to yourself you are, no matter how you enjoy your pleasures and the sense of righteousness that comes in "earning" and managing those pleasures, you are a tool, and a wicked one, wielded by--you guessed it--liars and thieves, the very liars and thieves I have harped on all along here.

I'm something of a Skeptic, myself, but everything in life is plotted on a spectrum, as Aristotle wisely taught. 

You can take this test with all kinds of three-dude, three-school combinations in order to define yourself and bare yourself thereby to the interpretations of others based on their interpretations of dudes or text or loosely-defined imprimatur. Western canon, Eastern canon, or tradition or whatever we choose to call a textual continuum/semiotic landscape/etc., doesn't matter. Mix 'n match. 

Do as you please. Read what you can get your hands on. Think whatever you want about it. Cinema works this way too. Interactive entertainment, like video games. Looking around at the buildings motherfuckers built where you live. What were they trying to accomplish with these buildings, these cars, these sculptures, these industries? What were they trying to say? Your guess is as good as anyone's, and you can even improve it. 

Anything that is culture is yours, if you go and get it. The more you do that, the less you can be told by some other motherfucker what the world really is and who you really are. You'll start to see for yourself. 

*

Dudes who see for themselves are worth approximately fifty million shitheads that take a liar's word for it. Hopefully the ratio of dudes to shitheads is more favorable than that, but this seems doubtful, even naive.

--JL

#382

Dang, it takes so fuckin long to buy new window for your house. To even agree that you have bought it. It also costs enough that I seriously considered abandoning my entire life and everything I have ever believed myself to possess, that I might better imitate Christ the Messiah in all ways. Then windows would not be a complication or a sword of Damocles.

Decided not to, though. Decided to buy windows. Do the next guy a favor, I guess. Do my part for the environment?

*

One of the things about me, which perhaps communicates a volume or two about how I think the world is-as-it-is and how the world would-if-it-could-be, is that every time I feel like doing that--rejecting the material, going full Siddhartha, man without a country, silent Wandering Age philosopher, etc.--and don't, I experience a keen and thorough sense of failure, to the point of unleavened guilt before the universe for going against my own good sense and the most powerful feeling about what is right that I know. This can be so painful it can make me want to die sometimes, but because my responsibilities and commitments are anchors in that sense--as well as the original reason I don't cut myself from the hated tethers of money and social obligations I consider unethical but if not met are punishable by state-sponsored violence--I am constitutionally unable to take my own life and have always energetically rejected the deed, though this has not made the feeling any less.

The only consolation I have learned is to reflect on the idea that the time is merely not yet ripe, and someday, I will be free of all tethers, whether the fulness of time sees me survive all that I owe my alleigance to, aged to perfection and free at last, or (also, eventually) because God will strike me down whenever in infinite wisdom and compassion so total I cannot comprehend it, except to say that the compassion of God is so total that God is me, and the time and place and way I die and under what conditions are correct, and nothing to actually worry about, even if it all hurts so bad and I don't fully understand anything. At least I can imitate Christ in that.

I could continue in this thought-braid for some time; it is a familiar one, as fending off self-destruction is something I have had to master since an early age. But you get the gist, and plus, everyone's need and cure is so different in this life. 

Factually Masculine 2024, folks.

Yeah, it's on topic. Look it up.

Plus, I mentioned a few dudes and kinds of dudes that are very different than the ones I've been mainly discussing. Perhaps something to note as we move forward into the future.

*

Think I get to hit you with two more of these? I've run around behind the scenes here quite to no purpose. I forget to look. Well, we'll both find out eventually.

--JL