Deep in a rabbit hole, I stumbled upon the proverbial one thing leading to another and ended up on Lung Leg’s Wikipedia page. Lung Leg is also known as Elizabeth Carr or Lisa Carr, and this is her fur-lined book titled Futility which features poetry and drawings she made in the mid-1980s and sent to me while I was living in Germany. The blur of time leaves me foggy, but I may have learned about Lung Leg from Nick Zedd and his Cinema of Transgression, or maybe from the Richard Kern video for Sonic Youth titled Death Valley 69, or it could have from someone in passing. I’ll never know.

During that age of Mail art and fanzines, it wasn’t always difficult to find the contact information for people in any of the nascent art scenes that were bubbling up, and it was that kind of searching that led me to Lung Leg, corresponding with Nick Zedd, and exchanging a couple of things with Costes, the French version of G.G. Allin. Through Costes, I learned about the work of Suckdog and a project called Psychodrama titled Something To Offend Everyone featuring the first (and only) projectile shitting I’d ever witnessed (on video).

Back then, the world was far away, exotic, and sometimes dangerous. At the fringe of society, I found others who were recording the filth, decay, and darkness that I felt was hidden behind a facade of fake normalcy. It turned out that while America is a hotbed for innovation where capital chases the fertile minds of genius, a vast underclass of people has failed to prosper. In that malaise, artists and creators find inspiration to document the horrors of their existence. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley, and Keith Haring, musicians such as Eminem, Kurt Cobain, and NWA, and filmmakers Spike Lee and Harmony Korine were just a few of those who emerged out of poverty with messages that resonated with a wider population. While the likes of Lung Leg, Nick Zedd, Manual DeLanda, Jello Biafra, and Hubert Selby may have failed to capture the popular zeitgeist, they no less managed to inspire many an aspiring fellow creator with their grit, tenacity, and ability to share their truths.

I have been approaching 2,000,000 words written on my blog, so imagine my disappointment when at 1,999,999 (yes, exactly that number by some strange quirk of the universe), I uploaded some images for what was to be my next post and recognized that the blog’s word tracker was counting images as words! When I glanced at the stats prior to digging into my writing session, I saw that I’m already over 2 million words. Now, I suppose I have to consider that I’m not over that giant number after all because some 20,000 photos or more are likely skewing the total number. No matter, the milestone has been met or will be soon enough, and it’s just fine for me at this time to post this point of bragging. By the way, don’t even consider reading the entirety of this blog, as it would take you a staggering amount of time, to the tune of over 133 hours.

Some days later, I return to the draft for this post looking for what else I want to say, and it all feels so arbitrary, aside from the fact that I do intend to change the focus of my writing. There is so much momentum captured here with what I put into my blog posts that there’s a sense of loss knowing what I have to curtail, at least for a while. However, I will not give up posting about our travels, and while I can only reluctantly slow down routine updates, I must. So much of this endeavor has lent riches to memories that would otherwise be pale compared to what the minds of the two of us would have retained.

There are over 3,140 posts spread out here throughout my blog, and while that is likely plenty, it still feels like I’m turning my back on a friend. Over the coming months, I’ll be scouring every one of these missives as I hunt for bits and pieces that must be extracted for my next big project.

Something else I’d like to see happen to these 2 million words is to have them fed into artificial intelligence to spit out a profile analysis describing what it can see and learn about the person who wrote it all. Maybe next year, AI will have matured to that point.

This post has been hanging out as a draft for over a week as I get ready to pass it over to Caroline for the old once-over, a pause during which I’ve grown ambivalent about posting it at all because it really means just about nothing. The bigger accomplishment would be that I love writing, and if I’m fortunate enough to dig in every day, I feel keenly delighted that I’ve committed something from my head and thrown it into the cacophony of other voices who write into the void. I looked with anticipation to the day I saw the word count roll over to 2 million words and only now realize that had I only ever written 100,000 words about Caroline and my life together, I still would have likely written 1,000 times more than the majority of humans ever shares about their life and love.

The sketch was a few-minute doodle drawn by Becca Wasylenko, the Barista at WeBe Coffee.

Go places or don’t, read or write, dream or die. The routine, sad to admit, is only mixed up when I opt for a different coffee shop, I’m in a different book, or I demand I do something I’ve been neglecting, such as writing a blog entry after a long break. Feeling like it’s been a long time is not the same as really having been a long time. I checked and saw that I posted a list of things just six days ago, but that was a list, not a blog, in the sense that I want to interpret it. Though this is easy enough to contradict even before I even make my point, as the blog post should share something personal to me, is that really possible? You see, the last post about our diet is certainly something personal, and among some subset of people who live in Phoenix, Arizona, and enjoy food diversity, it is maybe nothing out of the ordinary and then, on the other hand, the majority of Americans would consider us culinary freaks.

This last statement is based on empirical evidence gathered while observing my immediate vicinity when, in one tiny slice of time, I find myself in a situation in which I am in the minority, ethnically speaking. Of course, this is easily proven by taking myself to a “major” supermarket where I find myself in a sea of similarity.

Coffee shops are like seas of similarity, too. As I focus my photos on my isolated work setup, there are the obligatory tattooed baristas, man-bun-wearing big bearded hipsters, a homeless person, two people talking shit about the friend they each talk shit about the other with, the random man in a suit (I’m in Arizona where people don’t wear suits), four to seven computers open for work each with their white illuminated Apple logo, and someone like me (an arrogant wanna-be writer looking in disdain upon these empty souls trying to find a viable way to spend part of the day that would otherwise be empty and devoid of meaning).

And then the next day, I do it all over again, except now I’m further along in the book I’m reading, or maybe I’m editing the embarrassing piece of writing while I’m leery of sharing the same old thing I’ve lamented about 45 other times or maybe it’s 55. I am not sure because I don’t track my worn-out threads because admitting with precision how repetitive I might be could derail my efforts to fill a space so few eyeballs will ever discover.

Is it ironic that this act of attempting to blog is a disruption to reading The Age of Disruption? Well, maybe not if you consider that I’m also reading Radical Animism by Jemma Deer (it’s on-screen), and if I consider that my blog post is a kind of object in nature, then these words take on an animism; so maybe taking a page from her book to tell some story or other is in line with adding to the realm of our earth.

Should you, at this point in this pointless entry, be wondering what this has to do with the title of That Was Then This Is Not? Well, the beginning of this post about whatever I was writing then is not where I’m at now, so maybe you follow that what I wanted to say was I don’t really have anything at all to say.

Back in April, I was posting about a book titled The Plum In The Golden Vase and how we’d just started volume 4 of the 850,000-word mega-book. At the rate we’d been reading it, I figured we had until 2025 before we’d finish it; well, I was wrong. Tonight, we closed volume 5 and put to rest its myriad of characters that had lived with us for ten years. It was never our intention to stretch a title out for such a lengthy period of time, but now that it has happened, I think our fondness and familiarity with the story will have us grieving its end.

I believe that the reason we picked up steam was that volume 4 ushered in the demise of our central character while volume 5 took down those corrupt minions that lived off the excesses that were exemplified in the previous chapters of the 100 chapters this book covered.

So, the main takeaway from reading such a long work over many years is that I believe everyone should pick something of this extraordinary length and read it slowly enough that it lives with them for years. Sure, we get attached to characters in much shorter works, but to live with those featured on so many pages year after year, they grow over time in our memories and, in some way, become family.

While we’ll be jumping into The Water Margin, a.k.a. Outlaws of the Marsh, soon, we’ll take at least a short break from classical Chinese literature to indulge in French literature via Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, and once we gather some serious traction with its 1.2 million words, we’ll be folding The First Crusade by Peter Frankopan into the mix.