Some early morning thoughts

O journal,

Does a spider ever get trapped in its own web? I’m so deeply enthralled by my own mad-scientific pursuits that I wouldn’t be able to answer, if you were to ask me what I want from life.

Today our favorite park was frozen solid. It looked like regular snow was covering the pathway, but there was a thick layer of sheer ice on top. Yesterday’s rainfall solidified overnight. We actually succeeded in walking our regular route, but we pretty much slid the entire way.

(It is unusual for our park to be iced over like this, but my pattern of broadcasting the event as a newsflash whenever it happens causes the oddity to seem the norm, at least to anyone who knows of our park only through the pages of this diary. The same happens with crime, disasters, plane crashes, etc.—these things are deviations from the standard workings of society, which is why they’re reported as news; but, since the typical ordinary common routine customary habitual average occurrences of life do not get reported, newsreaders like I myself think the world is ending.)

If we had been born as a female gorilla, I wonder if we would entertain a wordless thought that corresponds to the human phrase: “To what end or purpose do we keep generating offspring?”

Living creatures copy themselves compulsively, but the replications are inexact; so, over time, one species morphs into another. This reminds me: I watched a documentary yesterday, and it had a scene in a church; the man who was on stage yelled into his microphone “I did not come from a monkey!” And the crowd went wild.

It is my understanding that our planet was once overrun by giant reptiles. (Do people normally eat alligators? I wonder what alligator meat tastes like.) These thunder lizards that dominated the globe perhaps did not expect that their environment would someday be inherited by the ancestors of puny mammals. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that dogs will take over the earth, after humans die out. But they won’t exactly be dogs anymore, at that time. They’ll look like a cross between dolphins and flying elephants.

(I think a lot about evolution because I like to contemplate change.)

There should exist as many different types of sports as there are different types of people. Instead, however, that realm is mostly flat, and it’s all hostile: everyone engages in competitive team events like they’re making a pornographic film; the face of each participant is a rigid scowl. I wish that playing sports were more like worshiping; like praising another’s body by “reading” it, via touch, as a sacred text—the way that one caresses a poem with one’s mind. …But I’m sure that if I were to create my own brand of erotic entertainment, the public would find it as boring as my books.

A couple days ago, I mentioned that my brother and I were asked to help my mom recycle her ancient freezer. Now that the task is done, I want to let you know how it went. The word “dolly” can denote either of the following:

1. a child’s toy
2. a small platform on wheels used for holding heavy objects

That last definition is what I mean, when I say that the tires on my mother’s dolly were flat. Moreover, we could not locate my dad’s electric-powered air compressor, so we had to use an old plastic hand pump to fill up the tires. And the hose of the pump had a crack; so, to make it airtight, we had to wrap its base with the same grey duct tape that Officer Duke uses on David Dolores Frank in the film Wrong Cops (2013). Then it turned out that the dolly’s right tire was leaking, so we had to stop and refill it. Plus the freezer itself was so enormous that it barely fit out the sliding door: it made an awful screeching sound when it rubbed against the frame, as we forced it through.

Now I’m tired of writing, so I’ll go open up our kitchen cupboard and end this entry by naming the first item that I see.

It is a fresh new loaf of hazel nut bread.