Everyone is where they should not be

Here's a toy bulldozer that I saw at the park. I didn't re-position it: I just photo'd the scene exactly as I found it. I like it because the toy is small but the tree is big, so it makes you think that the...

Dear diary,

The wrong people are hooting and hollering. You walk past a playground, the children are going bonkers: they should be quiet; and adults who attend sporting events should never cheer, they should just nod slightly and ruffle their brow when a point is scored; whereas the gentle, subdued souls, like the lady that I saw yesterday who was patiently planting flowers outside of her house, she should be hooting, she should be hollering: I want to hear her say “Yee-ee-ee-ee HAW!!” at the top of her voice. But the wrong people are loud.

I don’t wanna discover anything more about this lady that I saw, because the more that I learn about her, the more my vision of her will be ruined. She probably has all sorts of awful habits; but as long as I just remember her as I glimpsed her, for that flash of a moment while passing on my bike, then she’s the recipient of every fine trait that I can dream up.

First of all, I fancy that her name is Natalie. Now that’s a good name, very attractive: I like it a lot.

[Interruption]

Whoa, on a side note, what just occurred in my REAL LIFE was spine-tingling. Between that last paragraph and this one, I had to go extinguish our outside torchlights, and when I walked toward the kitchen, I heard a bashing noise coming from the garage. Now it’s necessary to walk thru the garage to reach the backyard torch; so I thought for sure that, while passing thru, I’d never make it back, for I would be mauled by some vicious creature. However, now I have returned, and no harm came to me: I was safe. But it sure was scary.

[End of Interruption]

OK now where was I? Oh yes, Natalie. I think that she should build her own saloon. Because, just like those who yelp and those who halloo, all the wrong people own saloons. Only Natalie should own one. The place could be called “NATALIE’S”, and we should go there after work. We could all work in the local coal mine, like in a D.H. Lawrence story. But in Lawrence’s world (I’m not referring to any specific work of his — I just have a vague memory of there being this town of colliers that informs a number of his tales essays & novels), because he draws from reality, the colliers are mostly men, and their wives are women; but in Natalie’s town, all the colliers are damsels and so are their husbands. So I’m maybe drawing as well on the movie Careful (1992), written by George Toles and Guy Maddin, where Klara ends up going to work in the mines, and, if I remember right, there are only women down there. Be that as it may: I’m just trying to write a diary entry, and all these facts keep getting in the way, because I’m too eager to give credit where credit is due. (That’s a major mistake.)

So anyway, NATALIE’S SALOON (incidentally my computer’s auto-correct function keeps begging me to change the sign to read “Natalie’s Salon” — this is why computers make bad writing partners and will never elevate themselves beyond the level of Master Poet), I say, NATALIE’S SALOON would be built entirely of mudbrick, as opposed to the traditional redwood. And, yes, there will be a piano, whose player will play a lot of ragtime; and there will be singalongs. And Natalie will swing from the chandelier.

I realize all I’m doing is revisiting my ideas from that entry where I told you about the new church that I wanted to invent. So I’ll wave goodbye to Natalie and move on to speak about other things now…

*

Here’s a secret. If you’re a prophet, and your prophecy fails to come true, you have the option of simply playing it off like it was actually supposed to regard the events of “The End Times”. Get what I mean? In other words, there are no false prophets: for, originally, when the rules of prophesying were established, it was supposed to be that when you uttered a prophecy, if your words proved true, you’d be considered a messenger from God; whereas if your prophecy did not come to pass, you’d be considered a false prophet and the congregation would kill you. (Actually the congregation usually ends up killing ALL prophets either way, whether true or false, because the real prophets often tell their audience something that it doesn’t wanna hear, like: If you continue acting selfish, the result will be disastrous.) That’s how prophecy was supposed to work, back in the days. But then one false prophet got smart — I don’t remember which one was the first to do this, but it was an ingenious tactic — when his prophecy failed, and the churchgoers raised their knives to slay him, he shouted “Wait, wait, I tell ye that ye are mistaken: for my prophecy about a virgin bearing a son was not supposed to come true in our time but rather far later, in an upcoming age, around the year Zero.” The same goes for all the “End Times” prophecies — they’re just a collection of failed predictions made by false prophets, all heaped together in a big bin labeled “Shall Happen Eventually, No Man Knows When”. Like the second coming of Christ. And that basically explains the entire Book of Revelation. (It’s actually a coded history of that age’s Powers that Be, but since modern Christians insist on treating it as a prediction of Fluxion’s Death, I will treat it accordingly — the customer’s always right.) So, yeah, this breakdown and takedown of so-called apocalyptic prophecy is something I’ve dealt with before as well (I’m to the point where all I do is repeat myself), but my hope is that maybe this time I put it in a way that appealed to you, that grabbed you, so that the point will now hold, and its seed will grow, and thus our world will improve by some fraction before it burns out like a match.

Take the deer in the forest, for instance. If they could just learn to embrace the flames, and become one with the flames, then they wouldn’t be so terrified during forest fires. They’d recognize every approaching conflagration as an invite to eternity.

And take also the notion of a beloved friend who gets taken to the hospital and now is gravely ill. If we all had just drunken ourselves to death years ago, we would not need to put up with all this fuss. If you’re alive, it means you’re liable to grow sick; whereas if you’re dead from an overdose of alcohol, sickness can’t find you: you have made peace with the elements. I’m all for harmony.

And when people give birth to babies, everyone loves the newborn and thinks it is cute. But ye who do so are living in the present instead of worrying about the future. I never live inside the present: I avoid it like the plague. I only worry about the future. So when a cute little infant is born, my first thot is: Here we have either one of two atrocities, a future bankster or a future disposable. And a disposable could be anything from a homeless person to a person rotting in debt-prison. Or an unskilled laborer or a soldier. (A soldier is defined as one who lives by the rule of “kill or be killed”, in order to enrich some multinational corporation, after which he is kicked to the curb and becomes homeless or imprisoned.) My point is this: Look at all the unwanted people in the world, the nasty people who abuse others — all these people were babies once; therefore, if we all stop having babies, we’ll solve the epidemic of unattractiveness.

“Yes, BUT,” you say, “if we all stop bearing children, then we’ll not only rid the world of all of its ugliness but also of a certain amount of its beauty. For beautiful people do exist — they’re not just mythical beings like the unicorn. Isn’t it wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater?”

I admit, you have a point. But it’s hard to know if your baby is going to be likable. Most babies aren’t, once they reach the age of two. So you’re taking quite a risk to produce human beauty. I say there’s enough plant beauty and animal beauty already: we don’t need to subject the world to all the awful things that humankind does, just for the sake of a couple Jesuses. Most Jesuses become Satans eventually, anyway, once they find out who fathered them.

But I wanna end this entry on an upnote. So what should we think about while we depart? I’m all out of ideas. I guess we could ponder shoveling rocks. That’s always fun. Or playing in the dirt...

Ah, dirt! Just add water and you can sculpture a muddy self-portrait; blow into its nostrils the breath of life so as to restart the nightmare. [Genesis 2:6-7] That’s a nice thot.

Let us maintain this positive outlook that we’ve summoned, while we head off in our separate directions to travel from door to door selling vacuum cleaners. And be thankful that no one builds a house out of dust, let alone a temple, or we’d be seen as the enemy.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? (1 Corinthians 6:19)

And the LORD God said unto mankind: “Dust thou art.” (Genesis 3:19)