Aimless ragbag

My dear, dear diary:

I feel scatterbrained this morning, so I’ll allow myself to fill this electronic screen with phrases that come to mind without bothering to connect them in any meaningful way. (Normally my entries are heavy on meaning, and very cohesive in argument; well organized, with spellbinding interrelations.)

Father’s Day is coming up this weekend. The commandment keeps echoing in my conscience: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” I have no reaction to this.

Two days ago I was walking on a woodsy path, and I heard a rustling in the leaves. A young deer bounded out of the forest, crossed right before me, and vanished into the other side of the woods. There were only a few meters between us when she passed, and, during that instant, I gazed in her eye; but I couldn’t tell if she was concerned with me at all. Deer eyes are pure black. Or if there’s white in them, it’s all hidden behind the eyelid. Plus deer never speak. At least not English, audibly. Or let me put it this way: I myself have never seen the whites of the eyes of any deer who could speak my native tongue.

Last night, at long last, I was able to see the most recent Charlie Kaufman film Anomalisa (2015). I loved it: LOVED it!

I own too many books. I’m looking around my room and seeing bookshelves filled to brimming. I think it would be better to own just five or ten books than hundreds of thousands. For if you only had a handful of books, you could read each one, and proceed to the next, and then return to the first and read that book again; and you’d get to know these few books as if they were your family: you might even end up memorizing them, without intending to.

I love food. Kind farmers who grow healthy crops should be the most respected denizens of our planet. And the highest paid. And I have no vested interest in saying this, because (alas!) I know no farmers.

Once, when I was producing an “urban beat” for a pop song, I wanted the sounded of maracas for the percussion, so I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a box of cereal and shook it rhythmically and recorded that with a microphone and it worked just fine.

I dislike waiting. I dislike when people tell me what to do. I dislike bosses.

I like to reflect. I like to mimic. Things scare me, so I repeat them, to master my fear.

By the by, the full commandment (Exodus 20:12) from the scripture that I respect and love and whose success and longevity I covet, but which I do not “believe in” or consider holy (except in the sense that every sublime text is holy, so that even Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the Word of God), reads as follows:

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Again, I have no reaction to this. …But do I detect a covert threat: If you fail to honor your parents, you won’t live long?

P.S.

While my sweetheart and I were walking in the suburbs yesterday, a pair of robins were fluttering and bumping about the sidewalk just ahead of us: they were lovemaking.

I observed that the robin is a creature that can do no wrong. What I mean is that their general behavior, the way that robins move, and the way that they look—it’s all so endearing. They go hop-hop-hop and pause, and then hop-hop-hop and pause. That’s what they do all day. And, even when they tug pale worms out of the earth with their beak, the endeavor looks charming: even this they manage to render delightful. It’s like they’re cursed with cuteness. And everything they do has a boing about it. (Next time you see a robin, note that its eye is shaped like an Egyptian hieroglyph.)

The other thing I love about robins is that they are all female. There are no male robins.