TILT

Dear diary,

So much for sleeping. It's four in the morning and I was awakened by a loud storm. Hard rain and constant flashing light. Electricity in the sky, and no electricity in our house: the power went out.

Immediately after I typed the above, the storm stopped. It's as if it was only waiting to be acknowledged, and now that I've preserved the fact of its existence in this mega-popular weblog, its wrath is appeased.

But when the chaos was still in effect, I was looking out the window at the trees. They were blowing in the wind. I always think about the wildlife, the squirrels rabbits crows and even the insects like wasps and ants, which must suffer through the violence of the weather without the benefit of modern amenities like battery-powered calculators (royal purple laptop) refrigerators ACs (air conditioners) or even candles to light when the sun expires...

...and just NOW all outside is absolutely quiet. How eerie.

It's not hard to see why God was invented. The world is a frightening place. Bad things happen, and in a sense they seem random (not planned); but, what's worse, in a sense they seem planned (not random). Is it more unnerving that terror occurs with the approval of a humanlike force behind-the-scenes, or that terror occurs without the approval (etc.)?

In what way would it alter our blank if, when praying, instead of "Dear god," we said "Dear..." (I forgot the point that I was trying to make here, so I'll leave it unfinished, in hopes that maybe whatever end a given reader dreams up will beat what I had in mind.)

I am mental illness come alive. I mean, I don't believe in mental illness, but what this present eon labels illness is not just a tendency or attribute of my mind but my mind's foundation. It's like if vodka were told: be water. What is vodka supposed to do? It possesses characteristics in common with water, like clearness and wetness, but it is not and never will be contaminated water.

Imagine your favorite biblical prophet, Isaiah Ezekiel Jeremiah Amos Hosea, and place them in what we call modernity. (If you're reading this in the far-far-faraway future, just consider that things were, once upon a time, pretty dismal.) So place your prophet in an apartment in some uninteresting area that is up to its ears in X. What does your prophet do all day? The ancient humans lived in the same cruel creeping spacetime, did they not? Or at least the same SPACE if not the same TIME? All the things that WE do moment by moment THEY did moment by moment. —What I'm saying is this: It's not that our age is devoid of prophets, it's that our age precludes the possibility of prophets. Or we jail our prophets. Or kill them. Or mute their spirit.

I was telling my sweetheart the other day that on my deathbed I'll have different regrets than your average soul. From what I can gauge, this generation's usual sufferer's deathbed-regrets are: I wish I had spent more time with loved ones, and I wish I had read more poetry; I wish I had not focused so much on my career and money and ownership of things. But I myself am centered smack dab amid these blisses, life's all-too-normally-missed bullseye; so when death approaches ME like a lover long-sought, MY regrets will be only and exactly threefold: (1) that I didn't disobey my parents from the get-go and consistently thereafter; (2) that I didn't blast the church of my childhood and keep resiliently monkeywrenching its con job; and (3) that I didn't JUST SAY NO to the farce of "employment" while yet diligently organizing inventing and working for society outside of the system.

Wow that scared the living heck out of me: all the electronic devices just turned on and screamed their piercing beeps, as the power got restored in this apartment which is no home for a prophet. Why do they beep when they come alive? And why only once? We humans do not bleat one lone cry upon getting born: we never stop bawling. But with these machines, it's like their initiation noise is their name, and they are declaring: I AM BEEP (before Abraham was). And since our repressed eon censors impolite words (yet has no beef with perpetual, physical warfare), I imagine that the devices are unanimously cursing their begetter. The tone of each beep is slightly different, too, I noticed. Individualistic, automated, intricately varied shades of destrudo...

Blue language. Red district. Off-color remarks. Roy G Biv: the visible spectrum. A bow in the sky to remind us that God hates our guts. And yet infra and ultra. The tubes of the Internet. Pileup on the superhighway. Beyond the infinite. Lightspeed (mis)communication. Pinball machine.