#498

It is not beyond me to grasp the same handles on this existence as one who has realized that violence is inescapable, an ineluctable part of our cosmos, its warp and its weft, and that this being so, there is no way to reach heaven but through violence, if heaven is a place at all. Therefore what matter how many lives are ground to dust under my heel? For the truth of this universe is power, which is beyond good and evil, and wills itself whether you accept all this or no.

That the world will grind us all into dust is beyond dispute. 

That I should act however the fuck I want is also simply true. There is no special virtue in holding yourself back from power and pleasure merely because you are convinced it proves that you are somehow better than those who do not. It doesn't.

What we choose--choose--to do is what sets us apart from one another, and it is my way--no better or worse, no purer or more corrupt than any other way--to use my power in ways that minimize suffering and maximize pleasure, beauty, coolness, and other things that are dope--not only for me, though I come first--why trouble to deny it? Those of us who truly put others before ourselves are rare as hen's teeth and too busy to read this blog, since their sisyphean task is infinite, so I need feel no shame--but for everyone in my vicinity and, whenever possible, beyond. 

Some of us don't care who we hurt in our quest to ensure our pleasures. Not built that way. That's not a worse hero's journey or whatever than what I do, it just runs counter in principle and, if successful and endemic, creates conditions that make my way difficult to survive in. So it goes. These are functions of power. This is not a complaint. Some of us have far less choice in far fewer matter than others, by dint of birth, position, or the waters and winds of fate. 

*

Perhaps at least a few of scales have fallen from my eyes! I have remembered that my duty lies not in raining calumny down on those who I would call sinners, in my hierophantic aspect, but in simply working to be their opposite in all ways, to the extent of my scope and my ability in this life. Better a vagrant than a hierophant, after all; though admittedly I hope for a better compromise with society than that. It's not off the table, of course.

Also, why do eyes grow scales? And the fuckers grow back, they do. Personal hygiene never ends.

*

Ok, listen. All this is by way of saying that I can barely fucking move over the guilt I feel over the genocide in Palestine, over and above other ongoing genocides I guess--this one seems the most, I don't know. Personally and nationally aimed at the heart. Seeing these dead children is agonizing to the point of paralysis.

How do I get a job and help, however minimally, an economy and a tax base that contributes to this? How do I continue to benefit from it every day? I always have! Everyone around me, we all do! But where does it end? Oh, where does it fucking end? How do you ever divest completely from something like this, other than the obvious self-abnegation (vagrancy as I have mentioned today, living in giant jars as I have mentioned before, etc.)  or the obvious waiting around to be deported?

It comes back to power. I don't have the power to stop this, and if offered, I could only accept this power in a form that in in line with my aesthetics and principles of being-in-the-world. A thorny issue and a narrow, switchback path to walk. But one must walk one's path as it is set, not as one would set it.

Tolkien condensed the strictures and truths of the matter in the form of Gandalf and what he had to say on the subject: that to reach out one's hand to take the power of your enemy with the desire to be different, to do what you know to be good in your heart, is to become first your enemy's mirror; then, something worse.

Gandalf also said, aptly to another part of the idea at hand, that it is not given to us to choose what times we live in; all (all) there is to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. This decision is what defines us, showing the world and ourselves who we are, or, at least, who we were allowed to be and to what extent we allowed that to influence us in the span of time allowed.

*

As superpowers go, shooting scales out of your eyes is superficially not the most radical thing--but what kind of scales are we talking about here? What do they do? Could be something interesting. Plus the whole trick is a worthwhile hero first--someone, in this case, who sees things in life, the world, and existence more and more clearly? And is able to put these lessons into some form of creative action--making the world a better place. Not merely fighting crime, now, not saving the world from some crazy problem from the outside, but making it a better place in the here and now, materially, durably?

Crazy talk. Who even am I? Laughable.

--JL

#497

Prohibiting myself from writing or even thinking about current events--after this one broadside I am allowing for.

• It's fine to destroy Teslas and whatever--anything that hurts any corporation above a certain size and evil-to-utility ratio is fine--but we need to go harder and broader at the same time. Smash our vile, disgusting smartphones with a hammer. Destroy our corporate personal computers and start building our own or supporting local silicon-heads instead of that Ruined, Accurs'd Vale. Why did we never get a garden, boutique economy going around personal computing? We obviously, obviously need local blacksmiths, but for code, and hardware, and cybertronic upgrades. Anyway, stop buying stuff from massive online retailers, stop using paypal, uber, venmo, streaming services, social media--every digital cancer metastasized by a flock of cretinous salesvampires, every pustule on the face and ass of our society, economy, and body politic we have allowed to become an angry and infected pressurized geyser of pus and befoulment in the name of our own ease and convenience, in the name of saving a buck today using slave labor and cheating and lying and bullying and warfighting and pretending tomorrow was going to be ok. It never was. Chickens always, inevitably come home to roost. But if we all stopped all at once the world would change the next day. Prove me wrong.

*

In emulation of the great sand painters of our global cultural heritage, I've been doing chalk art on the sidewalk basically the same afternoon or evening that it's going to rain. It seems to release something in me of its own tone and texture apart from painting or drawing, but akin to both. And I don't have to store it, which, believe me, is a huge plus currently.

*

Last night as I was drifting off to bed I realized that my truest, oldest, most personal and most total ambition, such as the word can be applied to my temperament, is to be like Dick Van Dyke in the old Mary Poppins movie.

Bert and Ian Malcolm. Them, and Madmartigan from Willow, who is played by Val Kilmer. My protean, formative masculine ideals. The drifting, indefatigable workingman artist, the cynical, analytical trickster-intellect with a side of strong ethics and jokes, and the wild, diamond-in-the-rough fighter who is not the protagonist. All men queered in interesting ways by their characterizations and roles in their narrative, just by the by.

Plus, y'know, Batman. Also Val Kilmer! But more Mask of the Phantasm Batman, with the miserable, guilty, weeping, basically insane Bruce.

Wow, it really is all very complete and turnkey! Sometimes it can swing around to seem that we as individuals are not really very complicated phenomena after all. 

*

PAX EGRESS

PAX EXEGESIS

PAX EMESIS

--JL

#496

Can't understand politics anymore. The reason for this is, while it was difficult for me to understand what President Trump was saying back when the only half-loaded cock in his mouth was Vladimir Putin's, it has become absolutely impossible now that Elon Musk has improbably wedged his insecure penis into that ancient craw. The Three Amigos, as it were.

So I have no idea what people are talking about anymore. Is it because the president cannot possibly make himself understood that there appears to be no government?

No, it is because his opposition is as useful as a dog that was shot three days ago and not been moved from the spot where it lay down to twitch and die. 

Glitterati fistfucker ultimate victory, with technocrat chaser on the back of the christofascist and mindgamed masses. Hell yeah, boys. Peak civilization. Should we call it the Reverse Arab Spring or simply the Suicidal Reflex?

*

At this point I'm even prepared to entertain the idea that I am wrong, and that this monstrous crazy horseshit really is the best thing for the country and the world, after all. Just to make myself feel a little better. And, look. I mean. I am not privy to classified data! Try to read a lot of history and keep up with current events, but all of our knowledge is so incomplete in the face of the vast complexity of ten billion human stories which are sequels to fifty billion other stories, set in a world made out of stories. If some of the internet I read in my youth was as prophetic as some of the other internet that has proven prophetic, at the end of all this chaos and destruction we will see that there was an endgame all along, and that endgame will be good, Good, even Real Good--The Fuckin' Tight Sweet Redemption of Western Civilization or something. 

What the fuck do I know? Maybe, man! Maybe.

Anyway I would be prepared to entertain that notion. If there weren't individuals like Stephen Miller running around actually doing shit. If you know what a person should know about that piece of work, you know how deadly-ass close we are to the kinds of genocide and extralegal uses of military force that really stick with you, maybe make it into classrooms all around the world. Stuff dudes get tried at the Hague for--but not before they get away with it.

So there's not a lot of fun penis jokes I can write around that. Steve Bannon didn't pull this double-barreled blitzkrieg to make DJT the president. That would be funny and I would barely care to comment, frankly. He did it for Stephen Miller and the people like him currently hard at work with no apparent holds barring them, which is decidedly not funny and I am remiss in my duties as keeper of record, a writer, an artist, and a human being if I don't say so plainly. This will be tragic in the extreme if it truly runs its course.

*

Shit though, what do I know from funny or tragic? What do I even know about shit? Maybe I want to feel better. Fuck it. The alternative is to meditate on all the years I spent enduring being the immigrant, all the work I put into becoming a citizen, all the taxes I've paid and the work I've put into my communites, all for the twist of having to witness democracy collapse and the killers and thieves rule the roost--the same reason I emigrated in the first place. 

Wow. Yes, it is a little bleak written out like that. I guess I don't regret it, though. I love being an American, and I have loved being an American and living in America. It has not been perfect, but it has been fun and extremely generous with freedoms and privileges. I tried to do a good job, give back, earn my keep, all the stuff they say is right and proper.

Ah, but killers and thieves have always lolled in the sun while I worked the night shift. There was always a blood price being paid for the fun I had and the ease I took. Should I resent it when it comes due?

You know what? No. In fact. It strikes me in this moment that I don't have the right. 

When things looked good for us--according to my perhaps optimistic perception, all of us, a human family with all its flaws and glories, marching bravely into an egalitarian future that would transcend poverty and hatred--I said to myself that things were working well enough to that end given the realities of this weary world, and anyway I could expect them to continue to improve while doing my most basic civic duty and tending to my garden as virtuously as possible. I thought that by speaking the truth and setting a good example, that by merely living a life for its own sake, it would all come to pass--right before my very eyes! Global truth and reconciliation, hossana in the highest, etc.

Well, that wasn't enough, and to let myself think so was perhaps a kind of delusion. Not that there is anything wrong with just trying to live a simple life trying to be a good person--on the contrary, it is the highest attainable goal. I just mean that maybe I should not have shipped my oars and chilled to the music of the spheres. Should have joined model U.N. after actually accepting that invite to Cranbrook Academy, gone to MIT or somesuch, and accomplished something major in order to be most useful to my fellow citizens. Instead I opted to get really good at wearing leather jackets and cultivating an ultimately unwieldy body of (perhaps excessively fiction-based) knowledge and non-utile principles. Also drugs.

Service, when necessary, must come before self-cultivation. Perhaps I have failed to live up to this truth. That of duty, and rising up to meet it. Such is the tattered attraction of a degenerate culture, I suppose! Service in the service industry, I suppose, lacks the necessary gravitas that is granted to say, a diplomat.

*

Really, though. End of the day, fuck these people. Fuck them. Cretinous poltroons. Dog-livered cowards with cockroach minds. Fucking cuck simp bitches. Look to your own houses! That's all I have to say to you wretched, thrice-damned afterbirths. The cowards doing violence and the cowards letting them.

Because, see, it's not fuck red, or fuck blue. It's fuck the Man. Fuck the whole Man, that whole guy. Not half of him. The motherfucker himself, always. These are the optimal times to say it loudly, perhaps even feverishly. Screaming it might be appropriate, or typing it out as if you are screaming; perhaps, even, screaming as you type.

--JL

#495

There are but two main sources of comfort and useful counsel that I find are able to supply me with anything like the peace necessary to get through these days without flipping my lid.

One is to simply ignore the outside world and throw myself completely into my stuff. Stuff lately has included many layers of spray paint added to existing works, as well as a finishing or in-process coat of lacquer. That lacquer is some interesting stuff. It has also included finally getting seriously into NieR: Automata: The End of YorHa Edition. An experience I am glad to have squirreled away for these troubled, muddled, times. A world wiped clean of this too-human life--the perfect place to be right now.

The second thing is the retroactove consolation that even though the country I emigrated to in my childhood has fallen prey to the exact same breakdowns in civil society as 

a) the country I was born in, so, delicious, sweet, horribly painful irony. Venezuela! Yes! These fuckers can just say whatever they want about me and ship me to El Salvador for nothing! For whatever! For typing these very words! Who gives a fucking shit!

b) the Weimar Republic, so, just ugly and exasperating and exhausting and stupid, but

corollary consolation: the cake was a lie, and the country's propaganda about itself was crazy overdeveloped and self-defeating. It was an empire of genocide, lies, graft, brute force, and total bullshit. This is karma for far, far less the due portion merely than for what was done to the varied peoples of this continent in the name of "civilizing" it; but the project was a lie told by uncivilized peoples, whose stolen time is finally ending in a futile, repetitive, cacophanous fart. 

Sometimes the fact that doom is logical and consequential is the best thing we can cling to. The last bulwark. Who are you going to complain to, when two plus two came out to four yet again?

*

So let it all fall down. Best you can do is hold on. Hang tight. As I like to say, strap in. 

Because this is it, people. I want to say it clearly in case anyone need to hear it from me, for some obscure reason.

American fascism is no longer creeping, no longer covert. Democracy has completed its course, as useful and real as it was useful and real, and as much a sham as it was a sham. American fascism is now open and rampant, and the entrenched political forces are unequal to the task of containing it--even if it corrects itself, they have shown they are unfit to govern. 

Shit is real.

*

Hey hey! Let's try to eat lunch today. 

And.

*

Let us try once again to inculcate and nourish the best power we have: to love our fate; the higher the stakes, the better.

--JL

#494

The digits of today's excellent post number, the number 494, add up to seventeen! Yes. Yes. That is fantastic.

Probably it is Sesame Street what made me think numbers are concepts you should ritualistically celebrate through art and a kind of meditation that hovers between analysis and worship.

Thank you, Sesame Street. Without Jim Henson, who would I even be? It's a profound question. He stands tall among the cultural progenitors of my psyche-forme.

*

It amuses me to imagine some generative language model being used to offload cognitive labor somewhere making some poor individual suffer by trying over and over to make "psyche-forme" a real thing that a psychologist or someother might be using seriously (unscrupulous users would probably be happy enough to roll with it). It is merely one my own many improvisations upon a concept broadly used and applicable in the cultural continuum, which is as always and along wih everything else on this blog presented in good faith for honest use and also as a pointless joke. This kind of coinage is prevalent enough on this blog that it may be quite difficult someday to tell what is common usage all around me and what is merely my proclivity to play around with things, at any rate if Factually Pointless is among your primary documents. 

Well, maybe, maybe not. One thing I think it is safe to have confidence in: I have correctly and incorrectly--in the latter instance almost always for comedic effect!--deployed a great and manifold variety of real words on this blog, a vast and legitimate array, and I think this lends a deal of credence to my personal modifications and inventions.

Now, as to the efficacy of these arrangements, their power, beauty, and pleasure-giving ability--well, hash it out amongst yourselves, dear readers. For my part, it is my part to be transfixed, to be conduit and mouthpiece whether I will or no, essentially, and my meta-input should only ever be considered a kind of curiosity, probably. I know I have a separate, closed drawer in my mind for what authors and artists say about their own work; important, but just as important that it not be mixed in with any other paperwork at all. 

I have also used a lot of metaphors in my time on here. Some approaching the reader more obliquely than others, it is true.

*

Painting the bathroom pink. Might do personal fitness instruction for an elderly person. If I could earn even 20 bucks a week doing that I'd call it a great start to self-employment. My outlook is pretty favorable towards extremely incremental and perhaps incredibly uselessly slow gains. I am neither harried by impatience nor goaded by ambition. 

As far as I'm concerned, I am perfectly happy to live and die in total obscurity, having done the least harm and as much good as I could do with my own two hands with what's in front of my face, making art the whole time--my art, without compromises because why should I.

*

Thank you for reading my blog post about me and my thoughts and my blog. Thanks. Hope you got a smile or a thought out of the deal. 

Have a the best possible day under your prevailing circumstances.

--JL

#493

I am extremely happy in my room. My room is a place that fills up steadily with works of art that please me in their execution and completion. The walls are green in here. I have Pokémon stickers and pictures of birds and animals and landscapes scavenged from a number of those paper calendars nature conservancy societies send people all over. The carpet is shitty, but who cares about that. Just means no need for stress about getting paint on it.

Frankly, it's so good that leaving my room is something of an imposition under any given circumstance, but when I am forced to, at least I am still in my house, which is another place I am extremely happy. The house has improved immensely since we moved in, both aesthetically and in terms of functioning elements. The real issues begin when I have to leave the house, but that's more psychological than anything to do with any real problems out there, except bright headlights, poisoned air, and maniacs with easy access to a variety of killing machines (including that two-ton missile attached to each set of those hellaciously bright headlamps).

Every biosphere has its hazards, and each of its residents must deal with their multitudes in their due portion. So it goes.

*

There was a serious fuckton of law enforcement on my street today; yea, right up close to two houses down. Also the house directly across the street. State police, local city, sherriff, and even a car from a different city. Plus a few city trucks and an unmarked white van. Wuuuuut? Nobody liked that.

Pretty much missed what it was all about, though I did infer that it was two separate municipal tasks rolled into one so as to facilitate the whole process; a more complete show of force benefiting both. That's all the commentary I have, I guess, except that there is simply no way for a reasonable person to feel at ease of any kind of with the amount of firepower represented by those vehicles in proximity.

Moments like that--though to be fair I have been thinking about this a lot recently apropos of nothing--one really meditates on how purely symbolic the shelter one is provided with at my economic strata. If anything went wrong on my street and bullets started flying, any one slug could pass through probably up to three houses, maybe a lot more, maybe less depending the caliber and what might impede one. You would not have to ransack the black market to secure rounds which could easily pass through my wall, me, my back wall, my back neighbor's wall, and still hit my neighbor. Because our walls are, for all intents and purposes, made of paper. I can throw a baseball into one and it will stick. Maybe fully knock a hole. I don't really know how hard I can throw a baseball, but I am confident it would stick.

Like I was saying before. Maniacs, of all levels and descriptions, are a serious problem in this environment, all the more so due to their access to tools designed to do nothing but kill as efficiently as possible, and their propensity to cut corners until there is nothing but a dirty knife.

*

Anyway, I like my house and I like my neighborhood but it could all be more durable and sustainable and set in a much, much better society, as far as I can assess. That is the breakdown. You might say that I am wrong to criticize a society as the beneficiary of its mechanisms, and it may be so to a certain extent, but identical as well as superior formats could exist under a wide variety of such sets and norms as call themselves societies, so I don't see why I shouldn't ask for better. 

As a tax-paying citizen under the terms of our particular constitutions and parameters, asking for better, it was always my understanding, was to be the whole point.

Noplace was ever the kingdom of heaven merely because people declared it to be so. 

*

Events even more current and specific, yet sociopolitical commentary even more abstract. Hopefully by next post I will be fully buried in my navel once again, and the world will not present as even so much as a dull roar. It is not really my place to be useful here. The blog is not "the news" or "useful opinions". The blog is "factually pointless". This is how it should be.

Till then, dear reader. My task these days is to find a way to generate income and maintain sanity. Simple things, maybe, but my ability to rise to them by no means certain. Faith and hope! Courage, and to screw it to the sticking-place! That's all we got.

--JL

#492

Well, it's almost two months into the year. Interesting year so far. Eventful! Personally and on a global scale.

Yes, a post about current events. Perhaps they are to some degree inevitable. Feel free to check out and slide away to more rewarding internet locales. I would. But it would perhaps be unwise, if I am able to offer any kind of useful insight. And maybe I can. That's why I bother to type it out and put it where people can see it, I guess, even if no one looks. Even if people did look, and it caused problems for me, I would still do it. 

Everything, of course, is to some degree inevitable. Arguing about it won't change that.

*

Well, look. I know that Americans reading this, generational Americans specifically, might think they still have a country. Shit, this country technically did survive Andrew Jackson and Warren Harding, two points in history in which the executive was overrun with trolls, gangsters, and petty thieves, and that's not nothing.

The country was much younger and the world much older in both instances. Young organisms are in key ways more resilient than their mature counterparts, and the world has been made anew five or perhaps eight times over since 1923.

But factually we probably don't have a country left. Every 24-hour period makes it less probable that we will be able to return to democratic norms. That's how it works in other countries, and if this past decade and a half has proved anything, anything, it is that the United States is no mythical example, no blessed fluke, no modern utopia, no nothing in any way special. Just another country full of humans.  

If things continue as they have been, then they could very easily just replace the courts with implacable algorithms and congress with a consumer panel overseen by a board of directors. 

Naturally nothing these bodies produce will have any effect on the CEO. That position can and only could ever be decided internally, using machinations whose inputs are completely severed from the public sensorium and indeed, reality. 

Once it has happened, you will see that such has always been their dark vision. They would never have said so! But it will be extremely obvious in retrospect, when you review the lies they told vs. the actions they took, that having a government was never really the plan. 

*

As I have said before, and as was quickly made manifest--they can just deport people wherever the fuck they want. They can make it happen by making it legal by being--it is very simple--bullies. They get it. They have always been bullies and they understand that being a bully works just as well when it's countries and laws as when it's toys and rules.

The reason for having governments is to prevent bullies from ruling the roost. Goverment fails when the bullies are in charge. It is...pretty simple.

*

"They" in this whole screed, by the way, should be understood as the brigands and profiteers whose aim is open and omnivorous theft of the highest possible magnitude, breadth, and scope, as well as any and all ideological maniacs who wish to vent their fear-based genocidal urges. 

As is so often true, the above are entwined in a very profitable and pleasurable position. Indeed, the former have historically found it useful and expedient to maintain in every way they can the conditions to create as much genocidal fear as possible--to embed it deeply in as many subcultures and across language and law and moral commandment. This trick has been key in accelerated forms of societal formation and collapse.

Building slave empires on foundations of total nonsense and thus creating the conditions for their own dissolution. Toppling monarchies with populist movements only to install a regime more brutal than previously thought tolerable or even possible. Coming in to gut existing companies and flying away on a helicopter with all their money. And so forth. That is the basic game.

People do it to themselves and allow it to be done to them. It is hard to hope for change when you see how willing and eager we are to spill the same innocent blood over and over and over again for completely made-up reasons each and every time. Always to the sound of applause, at first.

And believe me--there is always money in it.

*

All the truly useful solutions lie in the realm of fantasy. Such as: if I could magically give these people what they wanted without the human cost involved.

Do you understand? If I could just give these crazy fucking quasi-religious fanatics and twisted race scientists what they were after--a society comprised only of their described acceptable monoculture, inviolable and pure and legitimate in its closed-border holdings, by magically, intstantly withdrawing everyone they would like to fucking murder to a safe location, then I would.

Why? Because they wouldn't know what to fucking do. They would fucking starve. Those fortunate enough to survive the riots and outbreaks of disease, anyway. These people have no fucking clue what they're really after. They don't remember or realize that if there's no one around to be their slaves, then eventually, someone's going to have to lift a finger.

Who cleans the human feces? Who grows the food and deals with it and cooks it? Who gets to sit around all god damned day and point fingers? These questions have answers that they like, for now. What happens when suddenly the basis for those answers is completely gone?

It would even be immoral. To give them what they want. Wouldn't even want to watch that gruesome farce play out. Like the martyred socialist said, they know not what they do. They understand nothing. And to reveal to them the magnitude of their ignorance in this way would be cruel.

But it would probably be better than letting them kill us.

*

Letting them kill us seems to be the plan, as far as I can see. Very Christian of us and I approve, in a sense. I would also like to die later, from other causes, but no one gets to pick how they go, except all those who do. We say they are bad, I guess, but you know what I think about what "we" say en masse without thinking deeply about it.

Who fucking cares. Ballot, bullet, bullshit. It'll all kill you. Don't have any better plan and even if I did, don't know of anyone more socially dead than myself. Might be cool if someone had a strategy and I could trust it. Not from where I'm looking.

But I am seeing something I have seen before: a united and determined political minority has bamboozled the agitated public into giving them the government, and the political majority is too fragmented, inflexible, and fundamentally ineffective to stop them or do anything at all useful, really--just the same ritual genuflections that have been failing thus far, their power drained as though founded on a dead god.

*

So that's the pessimism. Do we have another angle?

Well, another fun fantasy is like, just being able to change someone's mind. Like, if I could, I dunno, concentrate real hard and pull my left earlobe while snapping my fingers and just watch someone let go their fear and their hate and their anger. That would be one fucking hell of a superpower. Better than Superman; fight me.

But, no. No, I don't really have much optimism. Only that this wretched world is visible to us, limited creatures that we are, as through a glass darkly, and to be freed from its bounds and sound what has been hidden will be to see and know one another and this world as it truly was, as we truly have been, as we are and will be, and faith that this veil is drawn over a perfect universe beyond my microscopic and human-all-too-human comprehension. 

In a good way. Guess that's my optimism. We are small, the present brief. Soon all this mess and tension will be of little consequence to whomsoever might walk this weary globe in another thousand thousand years. 

*

Thinking of finding a big giant jar to live in. Could be fun. Could be a novel career move after all this shit burns down around me, if I'm not shot to death in the street or put on a work crew in Nicaragua or wherever the fuck.

--JL