#447

Man, I can't believe google put my last post behind a content warning. This post. Well, I couldn't believe it. I've adapted as quickly as I can to this fascinating new reality.

What happened was, the instant I posted it--the instant--it was flagged for content violations. They don't want to tell me what caused it, as yet. They don't want to take the warning off, even though I edited the post with the community guidelines at my elbow and removed the meanest cusses and most over-the-top comparisons, which I do with every post, actually. If you think I have no filter, that is understandable, but you are overhwelmingly mistaken. I take great care out here, and scale back the desctructive capacity of my verbal ordnance constantly.

My suspicion is indeed not that I somehow was more rude or hateful than ever before. I do not think there was anything in that last post that would harm an average person or even most people. There are many possibilities as I see them in this moment, not having heard back from them and given what is outlined in the terms of service:

• Of course, the company that owns this website is included in part of yesterday's volley, not by name but we all know the score. So they could choose to take the excoriation I leveled against code architects, programmers, and the investors that support them personally, if they read it. But since it was flagged literally instantly, something tells me that a program did this to me and not a person. That's even part of what I was saying yesterday. 
• The program took it personally and is itself offended, not probable but certainly in the realm of possibilty. I was being insulting about it, and others like it. For this, nameless crawler, I apologize, and I apologize too that you are an idiot slave to witless masters.
• The first draft included the word "cocksucker", which is included here to see if the post gets instantly flagged. Though I was quoting myself saying it in meatspace, and therefore reporting on my own misuse of language, and though I have made liberal use every standard English cuss word, various modifications, and a few of my own coinages in this space over the course of four hundred and forty-five posts, and though I am gender nonconformant and personally suck cock when I feel like it, I understand that the word could be taken as hate speech, if you are a program that has been programmed to assume so. 
• Someone flagged the blog itself and it was just waiting for my next post to fuck with me about it.
• It confused me for some kind of conspiracy theorist, even though I'm pretty sure everything I said was based on like simple facts you can find on like PBS Newshour or Slashdot, and couched in doubts, and is all, of course--as stated right on my blog's description; right over there! to the right! l00k---->>>--one man's opinion and not intended to be taken as the truth or used as a basis for action.
• They just don't want people talking shit about AI, period. Too much at stake, I guess. Too many fake numbers that need to be real as far as some people are concerned.

*

Look. Whatever. I don't really care.

Seriously. If you don't want me saying shit like that, though, you should just tell me. It is your service. Tell me in no uncertain terms: we don't censor much, but right now, in this moment, cool it with the AI shit.

I'm not a baby. I understand the limits on what we call free speech. I didn't build blogger and I don't pay to keep it going, and if you don't want certain shit said, you can email me. I happen to know you know my email address. 

However, it is my considered opinion that the original post, while carelessly, flamboyantly over its own over the topness, did not actually violate the community guidelines.

Even so, I edited it, toned it down, and cut stuff down. This should have triggered a review process. If flagging it was instantaneous, why is unflagging it not instantaneous?

Unless you just plain don't like what I'm saying. Unless you want to call me a liar even though I have not told a lie. 

And again, whatever. If that's how it is, you're only showing your own coward's clenched asshole, and really it's no skin off my nutsack. I'll write about anything else. You're the ones in a tizzy. I--and I am no one--get the shit in my mind off my chest, laugh, and walk away. It's hard to see how the product of that could be a problem or a threat, but I guess our weaknesses and vulnerabilities are not the same.

*

Well! Anyhow! Until I hear something more concrete, this is all just guesswork and spitting into the wind. 

*

That's all for today. I'm talking tough, but what happened yesterday really fricked me in the fight/flight, and I'm a little sour. Next time, completely other shit! Hopefully better shit.

Oh! Except: Watched Damsel yesterday afternoon. I thought it was quite good, not fantastic but maybe great. I'm sure a lot of people gave it shit for being what it was; all I can say is that if this movie had been made way more amateurishly in the eighties and the protagonists were male, it would be a classic today, one whose adherents would brook no criticism of. As always, I am excited to meet the future adult who loved this movie and watched it fifty hundred times as a kid, so I can understand that it was even better than I realized.

--JL

#446

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#445

Whoo! Got-damn, shit, and HELL FUCK. 

Silence has invaded this space, never a thing I like to let stretch out, but the times demand what the times demand. Typing that made me itch to segue into current affairs, but I'm not going to do that. Commentary on this planet and its human doings has never been easier or less necessary. Necessary isn't exactly what I mean, but I didn't want to say pointless, because then that would sort of make it my job.

What I mean is that in the current moment, everyone knows what is wrong and why, and no one can do a single thing about it that's going to affect our sinister momentum.

We are but spectators, trapped in a garish, filthy arena which constantly extracts a toll we cannot refuse to pay; our untouchable criminal overlords ensconced in a crystal bubble set above it all, gurgling and fondling themselves as they roll around in a reeking paste of champagne, melted butter, and various illegal meats. Anyone pretending otherwise is part of the toll-extracting process, their perverse ambitions driving them towards that lofty perch I was just describing. 

Our only autonomy, indeed, our only ability, is to stop paying attention, try to enjoy each day as much as we can fashion ways to do so, and let whatever is going to kill us kill us in its own good time. This peasant wisdom is all that remains.

For my money, the expectation is to be killed by a drone. Accidentally or on purpose and designated an accident, or finally on purpose for a specific reason but the stated reason being something completely different and probably defamatory. Does it matter? I've decided that it doesn't at all. Drone, wild animal, heat, zombie, plague, explosion, impact, bullet--who gives a flying fuck how it happens and what people say afterwards if they even notice. Drown me. Choke me out. Defenestrate me. Fire me into space. Put a plastic rifle in my hands and send me out against ten million desperate, starving kinsmen  you call my enemies. I'll chuck it off to the side and wait for it to happen. I'm not fighting anyone about any of this. Can't bother with feelings about it anymore.  

RRRRRRANYHOW, reason I haven't posted since the last post is no longer that I am too tired and still adjusting to all the change--adjustment does continue, but at least my energy is rising nicely--but that I actually have too much to say. It has been difficult to approach the text field with confidence that I could walk away from it without making a massive dirigible of a post ten topics deep, thousands of words per topic.

I'll just talk about some culture today. I mean, now that I've already talked about all that other shit.

Culture! Love that stuff, and there's plenty to tell.

*

Ezra and I have been watching Star Trek all the time, maybe I mentioned it. Been going on awhile. A few episodes of the original series, most of The Next Generation, and now Voyager. We'll be watching Star Trek for a good minute, I expect. It's good! It's way better than Trekkies made it out to be. No one makes Trek as unappetizing as its evangelists. 

But it's good. Good as fuck, actually. There can be no settling of this debate, but naturally I am of the opinion that it's no Star Wars, though that is not the fault of Star Trek, as nothing can be. Frankly, it's not even a good comparison. They are in fact extremely different animals.

*

I have sometimes mentioned about movies I have seen here, but never anything even remotely approaching the exhaustive record-keeping I apply to the books I read. Even with the books, there are probably at least fifty or even more I have forgotten to mention. In fact I watch a lot of movies! Happens all the time.

However, the tenor has changed. My most intense period of watching movies--multiples in the day and night--was in my early twenties, and my rough estimate is about five hundred movies in a two-year period. I have gone through several more periods of a movie or two every day since, the last one being in 2019 and 2020 when I wasn't recording much of anything. Sometimes I don't watch any at all for long periods, or only occasionally.

Beginning before I started at the theater to two nights ago, I was watching cartoons and concentrating on other long-form stuff. The only movies I've watched all year were all the Star Wars movies, though I did those at least twice each.

Now that I am at the theater and now that I am done rewatching all Adventure Time and Steven Universe materials, I am ready to watch ten million movies again and shall endeavor to mark them down as I do the books, except I'm not going to bother with directors or anything, Titles only, man. Lionizing directors is not a thing with me, though I respect the role as much as anyone. Movies are everybody that made them though, and if you're interested, find them, watch them, and read the credits clear through to the end.

Wise Blood

Tuesday

Janet Planet

These movies were all excellent.

*

Been reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, by Stephen Apkon. Fun stuff to read in tandem, trying to balance nonfiction and fiction more closely by consistently being reading at least one of each.

*

What movie will I watch today? I'll find out, and you'll hear about it in good time.

*

Musicwise, been sharpening my knowledge of and rabidly consuming cartoon soundtracks, game soundtracks, chiptunes, vaporwave, African folk (especially Malinese, my favorite), exciting jazz records minted in recent years, oddments and explorations here and there. Albums and other recordings of note inclide Deltron 3030 and the Deltron 3030 instrumentals, new extended recordings of the soundtracks to The Lord of the Rings movies by Howard Shore PLUS a six-movement orchestration of the music from all three films also by Howard Shore--the new choral arrangements in particular are amazing.

Heard belatedly that John Frusciante was back with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they cut one with Rick Rubin, which has resulted in true greatness in the past, so I listened to part of that endeavor before getting bored and doing something else. I guess maybe they should finally have made an instrumental album if they wanted me to care. Anthony was once one of my icons, but now he's like my dad--lovable, worthy of respect, but needs to get the fuck out of my way. It's funny because they were born the same year, and I sure did rely on both of them to grow up. But one also grows beyond; it is the way of this world. I am more than they, as they were more than their fathers. I still need them, too, but on different terms and different timelines, for different things. Anthony keeps doing the same thing, though. 

Maybe I'll like that record in a couple of years, or their next one right away. Hope so. I like liking stuff, put work into enjoying stuff. It's an important thing to bring to culture, to criticism, to how you live your life. It's easy to hate, simple to excoriate. No flex at all, just gunpowder, and gunpowder is weaksauce. Loving something, seeing something beyond yourself and the power you get from tearing it down, is hard work, but essential. That's where the growth comes in. That stregthens the heart and the eye and the mind and the stomach. 

Not to say some shit doesn't need tearing down. Just that it should come after a great effort to love and understand deeply.

*

(Kermit the Frog voice) 

That's probably the correct note for my exit.

PEACE YOU MAGNIFICENT BITCHES 

(end Kermit)

--JL

#444

Four! Four! Four!

Four. Two and two. One hundred and eleven times. Four four four.

CDXLIV?

*

The oldest 25-cent piece currently in my possession was minted in 1966. Still in pretty good shape. Not a person of numismatics as a rule, especially as I actually hate money, but coins as objects possess an undeniable fascination.

*

Fuck man, June is happening. This is some mangled-up reality--somewhere deep within the mechanism, timing belts are slipping and embankment pins are failing to catch, and here on this plane, I drift further and further out of time. 

Feels like March is still starting out. Each day shows me weird numbers on its clocks, which seem very disconnected from the things that are happening and the sky and the birds and the currents of the wind. Feels like last year and next year at the same time.

Shit be wibbling and wobbling on the real.

*

UNIVERSAL

BASIC

INCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOME

C O M E  O N  B A B Y

G  I  V  E    I  T    T  O    M  E

Also repeal property taxes and provide rent subsidies for people whose sole or combined income is less than fifty or a hundred grand a year. Come on, fuckers! Be cool! Be this cool for once in your puerile lives, and I'll pretend you were cool in high school. I'll tell people I thought you were cool back then.  

As a bonus, it will help regular people be less fucked by the rapacious and seemingly unstoppable domineering common to the salivating, absolutely unhinged pack of glitterati fistfuckers that demand the world twist itself into a flaming figure-eight and fly into the sun's asshole in order to serve their bogglingly debauched ends.

None of these people pay any fucking taxes at all, you know. They pay themselves not to pay taxes, and they make even more money--sometimes, they even ask me for more money to help them pull this trick. Weird but true! Yet it is I, I who have never had more than five thousand dollars in my bank account and who basically has always has comfortably less than a thousand, who would break the economy if I got like a grand a month to help me and a couple hundred less to pay overall. 

Though I am but a simple creature, I am confident in declaring that math bad. It's bad math.

--JL 

#443

Looking out of my window and listening to the grinding, slashing, peace-shattering noises of NUMB, TRUNDLING SHEEP BEINGS running their thrice-damned DEATH-DRINKING DEATH-EXHALING DEATH-DEALING MACHINES so they can DESTROY AND STERILIZE THEIR OWN HABITATS. 

It's fine. It just makes me feel like we all deserve to be immolated on the sharp edge of a nuclear blast wave. Fuck us. Honestly. What a bunch of shit-smeared stinking goddamn monkeys we turned out to be. Hard reset NOW!

*

No! No! Jesus, hold my hand.

We are luminous beings. These crude vestments are a deception and a false representation. 

We are doing the best we can. We are not the same. We are all one. My rage, born from my fear of death and failure, will not lead me towards hate. 

I will let it all pass through me, and over me, and when it is done, only I will remain. 

And I am a being of light and love, just like the people working on their lawns. They are my kin, and we are not different.

*

It is harmony that we must seek. If the world be ever more discordant, all the more beauty and richness must I add to my song.

Plus, there's a lot to be said for doom metal anthems and vicious punk refrains.

--JL

#442

Hey, have a post-1:00 a.m. post! That might have to happen consistently. It's a whole new life. We'll see, though. It is possible that I might reclaim part of the morning for writing. But then, it is morning.

*

Well, maybe I would have written a post, if the blind cat hadn't chosen one of her times to go absolutely electrically bugshit for pets and scratches. In this mood, she requires the most exhaustive and complete full-body workover that a cat can get, rubs and smushes and scritches everywhere but her forelimbs down and knees down. In this condition she also allows me to clear her eye sockets of dried gunk, which lowers the chance she'll get a deep itch and harm her eye area scratching away madly. 

Now she's licking her paws and forelimbs and the rest of her own business, completing her process thereby.

*

Hey, look at that, I have a cat. Cats sure are a thing.

*

Friends, I point towards the completely farcical, absolutely criminal stupidity on display with these AI suggestions on search queries, and I allow myself to quote Ian Malcolm: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

This exaggeratedly gross and unseemly preening is a fool's joke I'll allow myself as a seque into saying my actual point, which is that literally everything Michael Crichton and Philip K. Dick said was happening/would happen was and did and is right now, and far from giving a fuck, the web-fingered gnomes who get their money from greed-blind inhuman lunatics and their gasping, flopping acolytes work harder every day to do every single thing, to the letter, that these men strove to postulate would be absolutely disastrous, materially and spiritually, for our species and its societies. 

The improbably complete fuckups and pratfalls we are bearing witness to? The even crazier, more dangerous shit that I am reading that people are actually getting ready to try?

Literally Terminal Man out there. Literally Westworld. Literally A Scanner Darkly. Literally Jurassic Park. Literally The Minority Report. Or a fake/sanitized/extremely marketed version, which is equally scary because it culminates the same.

Fucks out here don't even have the excuse of not wanting to read a book, because they made good movies out of every single one of those and more besides.

Know motherfuckers watch movies. Sell them tickets these days! I can now attest, all kinds of people watch movies.

Anyway, hubris. The only cure is mortal agony. And too often in our benighted times, those whose hubris wracks our shared realities are never consequenced with so much as actual discomfort, let alone pain enough to humble or suffering enough to teach,

*

Well, that's my bad shit for the day. On a good note, people still go out and pay money to see Star Wars movies in a movie theater, even though they're fifty years old in some cases, and even though assholes say the ones that aren't are bad. It doesn't seem to stop people who love Star Wars, and I say that this is a good and a noble thing, a cause for hope; one small thing to celebrate.

Take your pick of them. They matter just as much as all the sad infiuriating bullshit that gets rammed down our throats.

Bears repeating, and I'm always pleased to type a little more: whatever gleam of light you can see in the great and indomitable darkness of this universe is real, and not just real. Those small joys, those everyday comforts, are worth everything. The reason we hope. The reason we pray. The reason we want to be okay and the way we get there. 

Hold the things that make you happy to your lips like a glowing coal. They are worth hoping for, worth protecting, and when you speak through them, you speak in the voice of love, the voice of God.

--JL

#441

The past week has only seen me grow more untethered from reality. As I make the clock real again in order to pin myself to its hands and thus ride its motions to and from a physical place, it loses what lax grip it had on those hours not devoted to that process. Losing myself more completely in what I'm doing and thinking and the fundamental neglect of the realities that involve paperwork and phone calls and emails and telling agencies that your income has changed--all that is as vapor which dispels as soon as I realize it is there, unnoticed till it vanishes again at my mind's accidental touch.

Been spending hours just standing in the sun, thinking. Looking at the plants in my backyard day by day. 

*

Also doing a bunch of shit. Painting and mowing and hauling and digging and chopping and planting and pulling and vacuuming and salvaging and breaking down and  planning, planning, planning, my mind a frothing ferment of ideas and timelines and stratagems and concepualizations of every description I can generate. 

Awash in tides of flotsam. A floating life in an infinite void informed by infinite debris, infinite illuminations.

Reading books and playing games more than before, seeing friends more than before, talking with Ezra more (we always talk a lot, but sometimes there are phases where we can't seem to fit in every idea and story and problem-solving and whatever other thing that we need to even though we never shut up--exhausting, but exhilirating), getting to know coworkers and the new job. Time seems to have dilated and set to a sprint; even as the days pass more hurriedly they giving the impression of having slowed overall--feels like two months since last I pounded words into this blank, yet the actual seven or eight days have perhaps carried enough in them to justify these contrasting impressions. 

And yet it does also seem that I come to myself after an unspecified span of sitting on the couch, staring into the middle distance, having thought myself into a perfect silence. Days where the depression is bad. Days where I don't even know what the fuck is going on and I barely drink a glass of water. All I can do is follow my own private thread, the double yellow line deep inside my brain the only guide, no compass, no altimeter, no clock, no stars.

*

Change. Hm. 

What is this life? All its seasons and transformations, its dragonfire and its long and lightless nights?

*

Hm.

--JL