Bones

I broke my toe at a Gogol Bordello concert & I broke my back in the ocean one time getting slammed down by a big wave. Both still crack on a good day. A friend, I am not friends with anymore, helped me learn to enjoy rainy days. They can repeat the story of how you’re a “dangerous person” for years but they can’t take away your love of Julia Cameron or your appreciation of rainy days.

 It has been an epically beautiful fall. Every football game & band competition has had beautiful weather. I guess…Except for that one day with the spontaneous rain shower out of nowhere. That the weather apps kept changing the forecast of dramatically in the moments leading up to. Laying off most of the people at NOAA left the weather a lot less accurate. We had a couple really advanced & accurate years happening right before what has happened now.

It’s a lot easier to control people when they’re hungry.

I read somewhere that people who serve food are going to be the least food insecure in the coming battle over our counties healthcare rights. I guess it’s because small business owners are never eligible for government aid in the first place. So we don’t rely on it ever.

Not to mention what just happened to Talia C. Teneyuque who used her food stamps to sell baked goods & feed Even More people with those measly “necessity” ingredients.

I raised a son in a household with no adults with a college degree. I know how to stretch a food dollar. When we were eligible for aid during lockdowns I turned every single weird canned industrial kitchen item into a delicious meal. I survived & thrived well in the years following Hurricane Sandy. Food was so cheap compared to now. I learned to rely on Farmers Markets & small local groceries. Back then you could coupon at some of the bigger stores like Shoprite or A&P & do insanely well but I don’t recommend that now. You can get some good manager’s specials sometimes at those bigger stores but be leery of their meat departments now that they outsource butchering. Supply chains have been damaged & interrupted. The people who inspect the quality of the meat & vegetables you eat have been fired.

“You’re fired.”

It is up to you to use your own eyes & ears to inspect what you eat, every single time & no matter how hungry you are… Don’t eat bad food!

I never really liked reality TV & I thought if I abstained it would make a difference. I don’t think what we want makes a difference when it comes to “reality” TV. It is reality in the way that “artificial intelligence” is intelligence. It’s what they want to sell you to keep you in the mindset of “a consumer.” Only now we don’t just consume products they sell at Target or Amazon or Walmart, now they sell us each other as well.

I did a social experiment because I kept seeing references to it this summer. I watched some more mainstream current TV. I didn’t learn anything good. Let’s put it that way. I still can’t get over some of the things I saw on Love Island. We had to fast forward through the most objectifying parts but there’s still references to those things constantly as the plot lines develop. The “games” people were made to play could be called nothing but dehumanizing. Spending most of my life consuming art in the forms of live poetry & music & an occasional art gallery, book store, museum, or historical park. Small coffee shops & one off restaurants often contain little tidbits of local history held only there.

We also watched White Lotus & 9 Perfect Strangers as well which was a different sort, of fictional, dark & disturbing. But nonetheless disturbing in a way I was not aware people were so desensitized to. In another era of my life I watched The Walking Dead & Game of Thrones but they were too much then & we’ve only gone farther now. I tried to rewatch Dexter with my current partner & couldn’t get past the first episode. How was this just what I was used to? I loved Law & Order in all its iterations at another age. I could never stomach that now.

One time we told a group of friends, “everything you watch is full of pornography & murder” they couldn’t imagine thought provoking emotional plot lines that just involve relationships, life & death. People who fantasize hard about living “off the grid” when they don’t spend a single day not sitting at their computer for hours playing video games. It’s a fantasy to ignore how dependent they are on other people, by nature. I’ve lived in the woods, with well water, & nothing good within walking distance, almost no one would like it they way they fantasize they would. It is lonely even with “the internet”.

I’ve started making chicken soup for my family’s deli out of an entire carcass. Calling it bone broth soup or Bone Brother Soup (iykyk) to make it more palatable to the less Uber Goth portions of our demographic. I have been baking a lot of high fiber muffins too. I have always loved taking care of people with my hands but I really love feeding people with my food. With skyrocketing food prices & employees whose bills have skyrocketed as well it is any wonder there’s any restaurants left in amerika. But we mostly have a service based economy.

77 percent of the GDP is service industry. 23 percent is government, ya know the thing mostly unfunded & shut down at the moment. And Zero Percent is whatever the fuck billionaires say they do to deserve 1 billion dollars. Crypto isn’t real & when that bubble bursts & it will So Hard now that they are diversifying people’s 401Ks into them. Just like before the economic collapse of 2008. Remember folks. It was them who got bailed out & it was us who cleaned up the pieces, went to work, & kept this ball rolling. We don’t need them. We clean up after ourselves. We cook for ourselves. We care for ourselves. They need us, not the other way around. Don’t let yourself forget it.

A few greedy bastards have made it seem like the world is Full of greedy bastards when By Far they are a minority. It is hard to feel hopeful right now but I keep the faith for all of us. Art has not died & neither shall we.

It’s very flooded today at the Jersey Shore. The 13 year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy & we flood almost as bad as it was then a couple times a year now. Many houses are raised. The army core of engineers keeps the dunes built to protect the million dollar homes. That doesn’t keep the water from flooding the bay side, the river & creek, & all the little estuaries. But we’re all so busy being distracted by this global cultural billionaire reality TV bullshit that we don’t have our eye on the prize anymore. Which is saving humanity, balancing the earth’s atmosphere, & saving as many species of plants & animals as possible in the process. Not everything is coming with us into the future. The way no one uses a phonograph to listen to music anymore & no one signs onto the internet today with an Apple Macintosh computer. Tales of what “AI” can do for humanity are not new. Siri was released in 2010, over 15 years ago. It’s lost is novelty & it’s promise. We need to stop waiting for something else or someone else that needs to do the work our society & culture needs done & just get to doing it ourselves. We don’t need them. They need us.

Learn about the black friday blackout going on. The general strikes I have been saying were necessary since Zack was a toddler are happening. There is already a grinding slow down for the establishment. I can see & feel it all around me. People are doing less because things cost so much more. But some of us have never & will never give up. We don’t need anyone’s permission to be the example of what we want to see in the world.

Love,

Jackie Lane

PS - Keep up the good work. I’m here for you. Somebody cares. Or in other words. Keep talking until someone listens.

PPS - Happy Hollaween!!! I coincidentally am posting this post on Halloween. Make sure you enjoy your family & friends. Have a safe good time™. 

Dear Friend

 Public Post from a Friend 

“lol yay funny meme

Just wanted you all to know that I'm getting indications that a lot of my posts are getting h.i.d.d.e.n from you. Also! Seems like every time I try to post certain tings that show the certain guys doing the certain bad things, the videos I'm sharing are r.e.m.o.v.e.d from my posts. 

Fun times!”

My Answer: “Yo that is f*cking Crazzzy. Nothing you posted was that crazy. I just scrolled through your wall back about 3 or 4 days & reacted to all the political stuff.

They encourage us to report & silence our own friends. Now they have “eh eye” to blame their bidding on. The oligarchs don’t want us talking about what they’re doing. I was very afraid for a minute there but seeing all the shining faces over the weekend reminded me, we’re not alone. They are just trying to brainwash all our friends with Eh Eye! I’m not having it. I keep it at a healthy boundary. Only using it when I Have to. Like Amazon. Some stuff is no longer in the supply chain any other way. Same with information. It’s harder & harder for us to fact check things. But I remain steadfast. Always researching things I read independently but I see mistakes. Bad sources. Mangled recipes. All the time.

I’m trying to remind myself that if I “Jackie F*cking Lane” felt the need to silence myself politically that it has to be a lot worse than my ultra depressed brain can get it’s head around. The streets are quiet out there on non-protest days. Parents have to go through the motions for their kids. But even that is paired back. Less kids getting to do extracurriculars than ever. They’re more expensive & time consuming on the parents part then ever. Easier to hand over an old phone or tablet.

There’s Less People In The Free Parks Keith & I bird at. Because you need gas money to get there & food is So expensive.

My “line” for people right now is witnessing that they have any sort of affinity for using AI a lot or talking to it often. Or saying anything openly racist now that this ish has happened & the nationalists again feel safe to tell us their bigotry.”

To Me from a Friend: “I h*a*t*e the "art"1f1c1al hmmm int SO MUCH. Literally everything about it. The invasiveness. No ability to opt out or avoid it. The artistic and intellectual theft. The dependence we're putting on it for ESSENTIALS. The UNGODLY resource consumption at the expense of The People. Not to mention the tech companies are being allowed to subsidize this egregious wasteful resource hoarding because the companies are passing the cost to US in OUR energy bills. I have at least 2 other reasons I don't have time to get into right now. 🫠🫠🫠”

Me: “i’ve been watching some good videos & reading up on it. Every “sore Ah” video cost five dollars for them to make. It’s not sustainable.

At first, I thought it was because I was old. So I sat around silently thinking for months now. Since I hit my head, thinking can take a lot longer. And as Douglas Adam said “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” 

I thought I was in “Phase 3” as it were but it turns out that this is in fact in the 5th installment of the HHGTTG. 

“The New Guide” appears as a bird that tells you whatever you want to hear & consumes all the information it wants & needs from you & then moves on because it has an ulterior purpose that is unbeknownst to the “user”. I never trust anything is truly Free. Whatever is going on has got to have a more powerful effect on our behavior than Traditional Advertising on TV & social media with how they are investing so much money into it. I definitely think it’s not to be trusted even more than Any of these experts I am watching can predict. People are living in fear of losing food stamps & medicare in a week. How can regular people safely spend what they have while there is no safety net to fall on? 

There’s no such thing as a billionaire. The dollar has just lost most of its value because of money hoarding. 

At least we’re smart enough to see these things. It gives me hope. 7 million people plus all those other people in countries around the world. We’re not going to let this happen to humanity. We still do all the work with our hands. People will get fed. Hairs will get cut. 

I watched every single video I could find of robots “cutting hair” the other day. Mostly eh eye bullsh*t but the ones with real robots were definitely death traps. It won’t clean up the earth & plant all the trees & flowers we need. We need to do that with our hands.

sorry, not sorry. You inspired an entire blogpost.”

Love,

Jackie Lane

PS - I copied & shared this conversation because it’s one of the few like it that I’ve had. Many people I was friends with seem to be lost to talking to themselves all the time. Even as they see how wrong eh eye can be they continue to use it & trust it more than wikipedia, search engines or social media ever was trusted. 

The men selling us all eh eye as a solution to all the world’s problems know that it’s just a trick with Smoke & Mirrors. When this bubble bursts it will be real humans picking up the pieces like Andy Kim cleaning the capital floor after January 6th. 

Rage Bait

 “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” - Desmond Tutu

“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict…[an individual] who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” – Elie Wiesel

Quote source - https://organizingchange.org/here-is-how-moral-leaders-approach-neutrality/

I watched a pile-on on a friend’s page & chose to remain silent but I wish I had had the courage while people were piling on the one person who stood up to the other comments & said simply. “I do.” Cause I do care about peoples politics. Another one of my favorite quotes is, “man is by nature is a political animal.” - Aristotle

Also “all art is propaganda, sometimes unconsciously but often deliberately propaganda.”- Upton Sinclair. Aka telling people to silence themselves via social media is a form of artistic political act. Especially now. 

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." - George Orwell, the context being that it is impossible to remain neutral as politics affects every aspect of life, even for those who think they can avoid it.

Not only do I want to hear your opinions. I Love hearing your opinions. 

*fb creepily auto input what I wanted to say just now & derailed the natural course I was taking. I don’t like that one bit. Not my iphone. Not autocorrect. It just typed an entirely different word it thought I wanted to use & there it was. I won’t succumb. I’ve been a natural writer since the age of 10. I walked Myself to the Silverton Pharmacy & bought myself a very fancy 5 Star Hunter Green college ruled notebook. I still have it, it’s not that full. It’s bad enough more of my thoughts & experiences are public than private these days & that the paper daily pages I write purely for me & my creator Julie Cameron & all the artists in my artists circle, even the ones who think they’ve cut their tie to me forever, are not the focal point of my life anymore. 

I will not follow rules made by completely unjust unelected leaders.

These are not our laws these are not our rules.- Ani Difranco 

I never should have given up the Jackie Lane Love brand. It was my strongest attempt of so many I think. 

I have silenced myself very much since I left social media & returned. Once by force but the second, more important time, by choice. Things are not as safe as they once were. Thought crimes are real. I mean, as I type this into “google keep” live, in real time, ultra corporations can turn my thoughts into chum for the AI processors to suck down. Before I even post it publicly. Sucking down our thoughts & accomplishments as humans so much faster than we lived those lives in the first place. What will be left of the humanity when everything that is read is written by what computers assume we want to say? I never thought I would be saying I lost some of my closest friends to AI. I never thought people who used to trust me would cast me aside because I disagreed with them. I used to be the person people came to for help. Or disagreement. Constructive criticism we used to call it. I Love constructive criticism. And I love to dish it out & take it. My mom inspires me. Her competitive nature keeps many around us going. It changes the lives of many. In the world of trigger warnings there is no room for tough love. You can be stern with someone. You can teach them discipline. It is utterly strange that I am so against ultra authoritarianism & at the same time I love discipline & made sure it was something I instilled in my son. Who at times may seem very undisciplined & rebellious with his appearance & attitude but is a dedicated musician & student which cannot happen without self discipline. He studied martial arts from age 2-5 & I studied martial arts when I was 30-32. It gave me a sense of calmness I had never had. I actually went through it 5 years After my son. It is not a part of our lives now but the teachings stay with you. It made me a smarter & less fearful person in many ways. But it also taught me the reality of my own strength & I believe that keeps me safer in life but without making me paranoid. I was at one time stupidly fearless. Online. But otherwise too. When we were young. Most of that time is not recorded online. We scanned Some developed photos or uploaded them from our floppy disks from the Walmart 1 hour photo. Photos were so cheap & so fast. I just developed wedding cameras that used real film. It cost 3 times as much money as it would have in 1999 & doubles would be double that. We didn’t even get anywhere near most of the shots because people don’t know the realities even, of Standard 35mm color film. The flash was not great but in most cases not used. Most of the best shots are by me in the bright sunlight, to finish out the rolls, of cool looking stuff I saw outside. It made us laugh though & was the most enjoyable thing I’ve seen in such a long time. Holding them in your hands had such a strange effect. Much different than, as Jorden Jensen pointed out & I can’t stop thinking about now, the endless photo scroll. It’s weird someone I relate to so much can’t smoke weed at all. Make it make sense. But the endless photo scroll. The unorganized life. I am so critical of the art I present on social media now. I’ll look back on the past & see Tons of photos that I took, from the future, that I am like, “this is So beautiful, why didn’t I post this when it happened?” Cause I felt it was so inadequate in the moment but so perfect with hindsight. Hindsight is why I started the JackieLane2020 brand, it is supposed to be my life with the clarity of hindsight. I was just lamenting my Jackie Lane Love brand. I am not just One thing as far as the history of the internet is concerned. I have had many personas & many brands. I have worn many hats. Shared too many bottoms. But I had a good time & now that I am 40 & still alive I can say I am Finally glad about everything I’ve done. Seeing how silenced & stoic even kids are on the internet. Tons of coded double speak just to vent our most difficult feelings & experiences as if the words we create to describe those experiences are what’s bad as opposed to the experiences themselves being bad & also worth human beings creating a specific grunt to express to one another that thing. We have so many words. So many specific thoughts & feelings piled into a relatively small set of letters. But really there are approximately 7160-7164 living languages in the world right now. It’s not just species & corral that is dying. The diversity in how we communicate is also. I see comedians I love traveling all over the world & having their jokes be understood. That is fucking wild man. Do you even know how hard it was for me to type that sentence knowing I intend for this to be my first blog post in a very long time & that I figure nobody will probably even read it, I still considered, “should I say it That way? the way the I would.” But I felt like a voice was needed. I am that voice. For me at least. I’ve been working on my throat chakra for quite a few years now & I still can’t seem to fully unstitch my lips. I used to have a vertical labret piercing in my lower lip that I got at a very strange time in my life to remind myself to “keep my mouth shut” about something I never wanted to share with anyone but eventually shared with the world thanks to the strong 💪 women of the #metoo movement. The me too movement was intentionally squelched. When you typed that hashtag into Twitter, well before the X debacle had even happened, it was auto inputing a little icon of multiple skin-colored raised little fists. But I always felt it was mockingly. No other hashtag has auto generated little cartoon symbols in it. Plenty of hashtags contain chosen emojis but not Forced ones. Eventually hashtags altogether didn’t affect engagement anymore. But women all over the world were at the time & are still now what we call “shadow banned” for misbehaving & speaking out against the patriarchy oligarchy. 

Now the best thing for engagement is called rage bait. Social media platforms seem to be particularly interested lately in trying to force feed us things that are grating. Things that make us wanna push back, I guess & eventually buy something. But I see people being sucked into it all around me. I try not to be gullible but I take after Douglas Adams. I always believe the thing or the possibility that the thing is true before the thing. But no matter how “convincing” it is, I seem to routinely be able to sniff out AI. It instinctively doesn’t feel right to me. In some ways I hope this blog post, for the handful of people who read it, feels like the most human thing they’ve read in a long time. I do not think as well or as fast since my concussion a couple years ago but I do find myself more patient & thoughtful. I may not be able to sling facts like I once could but I have a savantish level math ability left (thanks for the confirmation NYT PIPs & language app math) [I couldn’t right now even fucking remember the name of the app which to me is wild since I can remember all these quotes I’ve read & song lyrics of songs I listened to when I was young] {Duo Lingo, fuck} this post is already much too long. Longer than I ever intended it to be. It started as a FB status. But FB tried to alter what I have to say. Lately I keep what I post shorter & more concise than any of my blogposts ever were. I feel inspired by a few things. I saw a friend make an incredible accomplishment & cried because I was so happy she was alive, it’s a long story. We’ll get there another time. I have kept my side of things private until now to protect her because she is the type of person who deserves all the protection in the world. Anyway. That made me cry about another friend or 2 that I would give anything to have here. Even if they were mad at me sometimes. I still wish they were here. If this post was an album it would be System of a Down’s Toxicity & Incubus’s Morning View, I love a good sunrise, both of which came out within a month of 911. Toxicity was released September 4th, 2001 & Morning View was released on October 23rd, 2001. Which reminds me of Ani Difranco calling 911 “an almost too perfect day” in “Self Evident” a sneaky 20th track out of 24 tracks on an entirely live recorded double album. My favorite sort of album. It makes sense I still blog because when I was young my favorite sort of book was a Diary (some fiction) or an Autobiography aka a glorified diary. It’s not about your daily life but about your daily thoughts about what events made you into who you are as a person. I probably should have written a memoir by now. But if it doesn’t come out in the moment for me it doesn’t come out at all. There’s posts to make for social media for my 2 businesses & myself as an artist. There’s too many football games to go to, to see my son play saxophone. They play All the greatest hits of the 80s 90s & today cause that’s their parent’s music. It’s why we were singing & playing rock & roll & classic rock. For our parents & grandparents. Sometimes these kids are playing heavy metal for marching band like it’s Black Sabbath. & Someday they’ll be playing WAP. Like we played Wake Up Little Susie. Times change. The olds not understanding the youth is eternal but I try. I really struggle with how hard it would be when raised with the possibility from birth to always filter photos of yourself, we used to call it photoshop but that took so much more time & effort. Now you can just slap that shit into any “free” AI app & distort your body & face to your hearts content. We all learned the hard way that google & FB & Youtube were never really free & how valuable our attention always was, probably because of the temporary limitedness of a human life. It’s unfortunately all too quantifiable. I don’t like seeing weird blurred cartoon versions of faces I deeply love but they are cropping up everywhere. As a comedian I was listening to referenced, there is going to be no limit on what is done with AI, whatever is possible will be done, whether we like it or not. The intellectual property rights that have already been violated. And honestly that isn’t even what I care about. Who gives a shit if giant corporate art oligarchies are losing their revenue to AI? But it’s also cutting into the bottom line of every small business & artist you know. It’s fracturing people even more than “politics” already had. If you wanna call what the prez is doing “politics”, I guess you could if you had never heard of the word crimes. Watching my same friends who supported Occupy Wall Street & other protests against the global oligarchs throughout the years succumb to this relentless authoritarian thought control has kept me so depressed I could barely function. Which for me means, going to work, birding with my partner, helping my parents, seeing my son play music, posting on social media to let people know I am still here for them. So I’m active but my artist is whose silenced. The fearless girl who spent all those years typing whatever the hell she wanted into DeadJournal & then Both Live & Deadjournal for over 5 years. I stopped writing at all & especially publicly from the time Zack was born until he was around 5 & I read The Artist’s Way for the first time. I realized instead of being ashamed or afraid of what I’d said when he was a baby, I really felt I’d missed out on recording a significant & important part of my life. I had regrets when I started writing again but I have none now because I spent my son’s early childhood very present. I spent that time before he went to school totally devoted to making sure he had an awesome childhood & that he learned as much as he could & he certainly did & is much smarter than I ever was or will be. Now when I write I think to myself. “What would my son think, what would my mom think, what would my grandma’s Jackie & Jean think?” I still write for rebellion but because I want my nieces & nephews & son’s friend’s to look up to what I say & appreciate that some grown up out there is trying to understand what life is like for them. I made a pact with my best friend when I was 16YO getting bullied on the bus that we would Never forget how hard it was to go through our teenage years & I never will. We had no lock down drills though. No one taught us we May someday be shot in school & that was just a reality we all live with and accept. We didn’t grow up under a constant threat that “AI” would be stealing all the jobs. Except ya know anything of any importance. Teachers, janitors, priests, deacons, rabbis, imams, cosmetologists, masseuse, painter, poet, dancer, singer, chef, gymnast, swimmer, football player, baseball player, basketball player, tennis player, pianist, music teacher, EMTs!, firefighters, doctors, that is just off the top of my head the most important things I can think of & even computer programmers & security professionals can’t be replaced by AI because machines don’t have morals. We do. When you let the algorithm decide who will live or die it will never decide the same way as a human. AI has no remorse. Humans may live with many regrets but our capacity & ability to be compassionate is I believe our greatest strength. Humans together have built many wonders & befriended much of the animal kingdom. I think we can do better than 8 people ruling the world who we certainly didn’t choose & who only came to power because at an opportunistic moment they were willing to sacrifice people poorer than themselves for their own personal gain & the “investors”. As if investors in corporations are not people, just the corporations are. Investors who make/made their money off of the slave labor of Apple or the weapons sales of the “government contractors” that fuel global war. These aren’t passive acts. Investing in the stock market. The market on human capital is not neutral. Neither is trying to silence people when things like snatch & grabs of human beings are happening by an unjust militia established by our unjust leader. 

I have more to say now that the dam broke but I’ll just leave it there & let you start to process before I release my reactions to some other weather related & corporatist issues I am finding issue with lately & I think we need to consider. You may not want to participate in the consumption economy but there are still ways to keep the economy moving forward by spending money locally on what my partner & I call consumables, (ie food or stuff you’re gonna use, like art or your friends album, haircuts, etc). Go buy tickets to shows of the musicians & comedians & poets you know. It’s how they make money. 

We can’t be neutral on a moving train…

Until Next Time…

Love, 

Jackie Lane 

PS. Hardly any breaks or paragraphs. You’re lucky I used punctuation & capitalization at this point but I want to be well understood while still being defiant within my writing style.