OK,
I’ll tell you what I like. I like persons, places, and things. I also like verbs and adjectives, and other aspects of this world.
But the culture that I inhabit (I was thrown here by chance) has a tradition about marriage that I hate. It’s the diamond ring tradition: When people wed, they go buy a diamond ring. I think diamonds are pretty, I like them in general; but I wish that we would change this arbitrary custom. Even if a diamond mine weren’t an awful place to work, I would want to initiate a different convention: just for the sake of newness.
Certain traditions truly help people—those, we should keep in place (or try to augment them so that they help even more)—but the ones that are either neutral or harmful, we should abolish. In their place, we should implement ideas that are innocently enjoyable.
I hope that what I just suggested does not sound too schmaltzy. I’m really just sick of seeing diamond rings associated with marriage. Marriage should be personal, less expensive, and more creative.
This brings me to the next item on today’s agenda: Why have I been writing so much recently? For it has been brought to my attention that I have been posting new diary entries almost daily (I skipped Friday) for about one week now. The reason for this is that I write to ward off sadness. Recently I could feel a bout of sadness coming on, so I chose to occupy my mind with webloggery instead of engaging in whining and moping.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before—I have the feeling that I’m repeating myself; but I still want to tell you about this dirty secret from my past… As a child, I would often get angry and throw fits—I mean huge tantrums, kicking and screaming on the floor. My outrage was on account of my will being thwarted.
Oh, my suffering, my suffering!
How I writhe!
Oh, the walls of my heart!
My heart moans within me,
I cannot be silent…
Those are the words of the prophet Jeremiah (4:19). The reason I mention this keynote (my tantrums) again is that if I weren’t an upstanding member of our world’s aristocracy, I’m sure I’d be throwing another fit today.
I’ll change the subject now. Just for a moment, I want to address all the terrorists. Dear terrorists, I think you have the wrong idea. How do you know that you’re not depriving our age of the next humane genius who’ll rejuvenate Earth as a garden of pleasure? Consider what happens when you destroy, for instance, a building with many people inside of it. This type of random killing is liable to end the life of the very soul who might bring your best ideas to fruition! You’re using randomness wastefully. I’m all for randomness in art; but I loathe random violence.
God forbid I sound pat—I meant the above sincerely: it just came to mind, that’s why I wrote it. I’m not trying to pose as holier-than-thou. If I had been born to terrorist parents, and brought up in a terrorist household that taught terrorism as truth, perhaps I myself might have ended up as a terrorist. But it happens that I was raised by Bible Thumpers; therefore I rebelled and became a Freethinker. (My favorite poet is Walt Whitman.)
I was at my friend’s house last night, and his wife was watching TV when we walked through the living room. We paused in front of the screen just long enough to get the gist of the show. It took place in the back lot of a Hollywood movie studio. A producer (or director?) was talking to an actress. The man was handsome, and the woman was gorgeous. Then a puny, unprepossessing fellow came running up and addressed the couple with some concerns about the film’s script. So this guy must have been the writer. It struck me that he looked just like me myself. I know that this probably doesn’t seem like news to YOU, gentle reader, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it; for I don’t want to look like a writer—I want to be eye-candy.
But men in the direst poverty of the imagination buy finery and indulge in extravagant moods in order to piece out their lack with other matter.
(That’s the last sentence from the 3rd section of part III of Kora in Hell by William Carlos Williams.) (I wanted to share an ambivalent line about writing, which I half-remembered from Spring and All, but I couldn’t find it; so I’ll quote it sometime later…)
Now it’s almost time for me to take my afternoon walk. So I’ll end this entry in a very simple way: I’ll jot down a prediction of what I think will happen on my walk; and then, when I return, I’ll tell what truly happened. This way, we’ll see how accurate my guess was.
PREDICTION
I think that the path that goes through the woods will be mushy and soft, because the temperature outside has, just now, risen above the freezing point. This will make the snow difficult to walk on—it’ll be like quicksand. And I predict that I’ll encounter just two passersby, and each will be walking two dogs that are not on leashes.
ACTUAL RESULT
Now I’m back… As it turns out, I was mostly wide of the mark. About the path, I was wrong: I thought that the higher temperature would cause the snow to melt and become soft, but the whole forest floor was like a skating rink. The top of the snow apparently melted a little but then instantly froze again. So the path was slippery instead of mushy—I was able to “surf” down the hills, via sneakers on ice.
Also, instead of meeting two passersby with two dogs apiece, with each beast unleashed, I met one tall gentleman—I’m guessing that he is employed as a family counselor, because he greeted me with a voice that sounded soothingly smooth (family counselors all speak with a soothing, smooth voice)—and he was walking a pair of Alaskan huskies, and both were on leashes.
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