Here is a carboy and a demijohn.
Dear diary,
I hail from a stupid family. Of stupid fools. That’s what I learned this tax season. My mom needs help with her taxes. Again. I used to work for my dad, doing his company’s taxes (wrongly). My mom married my dad (wrongly), and they created me (wrongly); that’s why they…
My dad inherited money from his dad. With this money, my dad started a trucking company.
I am not a dad, and I will not inherit money from my dad. The buck stopt heretofore.
Anyway, as I was saying, in the beginning my dad himself did the taxwork for his trucking company, but then later he asked me to do it. (I think this was when he had started to lose his mind – he could tell that something was wrong with his thinking, but his instinct was to hide from, drape over, abandon the problem: stick his head in the sand like an ostrich, rather than face the music.) I said: I don’t know a thing about taxes. My dad said: But you took accounting class. And I said: My accounting teacher was trying to salvage his job by giving bad students like me a passing grade; I should have flunked. But my dad said: Don’t worry, I’ll teach you anything that you need to know.
My dad taught me nada [North American, informal: nothing] about corporate accounting; but, to this day, all carbon-based lifeforms, that is: friends and family (which is to say: enemies and adversaries) expect me to help them file their taxes.
I like this topic; let’s continue.
Inflation. Wheelbarrows of dollars for a loaf of bread. That’s the propaganda. Why don’t we just distribute bread gratis? I once witnessed a churchgoer argue against a charitable policy by saying that money doesn’t grow on trees; and she added that if we were to “implement socialist government,” then all the wealth would vanish and everyone would starve to death. But if the notion of growing from trees is supposed to insinuate ease of access, then I wonder: Where’s the problem? For money is only important because it can be exchanged for fruit; and if fruit grows on trees, then to heck with money. That’s why I said we should distribute the Host free-of-charge, as an inflation-antidote. (I write “Host” here sarcastically: I just mean regular bread and wine: the body and blood of Christ. The free gift of salvation from our Lord the cannibal hangman.)
(Forgive my irreligious attitude; I know not what I do this morning; I must have resurrected on the wrong side of the sepulcher.)
Every day one wakes up and finds oneself forced to act. What if one actually desired to act? What would that be like?
What if we changed everything so that it benefited everyone?
I want to slam my furniture against the wall, just to teach my neighbors how loud things can get around here… I assume the reason they’re so noisy in their daily routine is that they have never heard a peep from me – in other words, they take for granted that I must not be able to hear THEIR racket because THEY are never able to hear MINE; however they should stop to think that maybe the reason MY region of the complex remains peaceful is NOT on account of the thickness of the divider but because I am deliberately COURTEOUS REFINED CULTURED SOPHISTICATED ELEGANT moreover scrupulous; accordingly I refrain from throwing furniture at our shared partition, whereas THEY (my dirty pig neighbors) are constantly…
You have heard it said of old: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” But I say: We should send all neighbors to prison.
I’m only kidding again, of course. If I ever say anything unpopular, it was a joke.
What if Science Itself were to invent a machine that enabled each individual to feel everyone else’s pain, and yet this machine would make one’s proxy-pain intensify in proportion to the distance that one strayed from its origin?
What I mean is that you could reduce your annoyance by drawing nigh unto the sufferer. This way, to avoid extra pain, one would be lured into proximity with the areas of society that are hurting the most. For currently the reason that no true aid ever comes to the poor is that those who possess enough wealth to eradicate poverty lack the genius to impel their finances into action.
However, with my new Empathy Mechanism, the problem of sadness is solved: for the rich no longer are able to hide behind their unimaginativeness. They are now obliged to feel the pain of the populace. And the farther they try to run away, the more intense the discomfort… It’s like Chinese handcuffs. The only way to escape is…
But what if the rich are masochists by nature?
Now I’m worried about my use of that word “Chinese”—I fear that the above phrase might be impolite in origin. It’s a term that I learned as a child: maybe I am the product of an insensitive environment. A Chinese finger trap is supposed to denote a sort of woven cylinder that has an opening at either end in which you slide your forefingers, and then the harder you try to pull them out, the tighter the thing clings.
I hope I explained that right. After searching the dictionary from alpha to omega, I couldn’t find an entry and so had to concoct one myself. By way of ending this post, here are some terms that, en route to failure, I enjoyed scanning:
- Chinese anise (an evergreen tree)
- Chinese artichoke (a perennial herb)
- Chinese black mushroom (see shiitake) (I’m not joking)
- Chinese checkers (a board game)
- Chinese chestnut (a chestnut native to China)
- Chinese date (see jujube)
- Chinese export porcelain (see Canton porcelain)
- Chinese gooseberry (see kiwi)
- Chinese houses (any of several chiefly Californian plants of the genus Collinsia which has several widely spaced whorls of purple and white flowers suggestive of a pagoda)
- Chinese ink (see India ink)
- Chinese kale (a Chinese vegetable)
- Chinese lantern plant (see winter cherry)
- Chinese parsley (see coriander)
- Chinese pear (see sand pear)
- Chinese puzzle (a very intricate puzzle)
- Chinese radish (see daikon)
- Chinese red (see vermilion)
- Chinese wall (a barrier, especially one that seriously hinders communication or understanding; after the Great Wall of China)
Now I wonder about those symbols that usurp the very sense that they purport to convey. Why does everyone eschew a certain style of mustache (which never hurt anyone, presumably) while yet acceding to the stratagems of one who sported such a facial accoutrement?
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