Boring daylie chorse

[A tedious rundown of the details of this forenoon, plus one quote from a book that I am reading.]

Sorry I don’t have a real decent image for this post today, so I’m sharing two indecent pseudo-images:

1. (above) a screenshot of my computer’s “desktop background,” which is normally plain black but recently I superimposed a note-to-self in yellow letters to remind me not to get swindled by Corporation So-and-So (the word “Spet” should be “Sept.”);
2. (below) a photo of a library receipt that I beautified; and to the right of this is a map that I drew by hand, which looks similar to but I swear is different than the map from my June 30 entry.

ATTN: Whoever

Today, after we awoke, we ate breakfast. Oatmeal and a banana.

Then we read our books. Four suras from Alcoran; one chapter from The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler; the end of “Prose of Departure,” from James Merrill’s book The Inner Room; a section of Soluble Fish by André Breton; and two pages of manuscript poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Then we went shopping. Our first stop was a store that sells office supplies; I looked high and low for headphone extension cords and wireless keyboards. My current cord reaches only barely to the sofa, so the headphones get tugged off my head if I do not remain in a position halfway between sitting and standing, which position I hate. Plus my optical mouse stopped working, so I’d like to replace it with a keyboard-touchpad combo, to cut down on the electronic clutter that is ruining our forecastle. Then, after the office supplies store, we went to a mega retail outlet and looked for the same stuff there. We didn’t find good deals at either place.

Next we walked up to the front of a super-giant computer store, but we stopped dead in our tracks instead of entering, for there was an armored truck idling at the curbside, and its driver got out and manually forced open one of the outlet’s automatic sliding doors, and he stepped inside and closed the panel behind him. That’s how we deduced that the store was closed. Then we noticed the sign that said they don’t open till 10 a.m.

So then we went to whatchamacallit and looked for footwear. I tried on a bunch of weird ugly training shoes and mountain boots, but, after all, I ended up purchasing a new pair of the same type of plain white sneakers that I bought last time. My old ones are worn out: a piece of the plastic frame is jabbing into my ankle.

But I got to take out a lot of wadded paper from the boxed-and-shelved footwear that I tried on, and I got to walk around the store modeling different styles. MORAL: The uglier and less comfortable the shoes are, the more money they cost.

Then we went to a hardware store and browsed floor planks, since we still need to replace the other half of our house’s evil carpeting. We are not going to buy an imitation wood pattern this time. We are probably going to choose a light grey waterproof drab uninteresting non-style, just to be safe. (White walls in my house, white shoes on my feet. What a bore.) There were gross weird golden marble faux-stone boards that mimic the look of ceramic tile, which I wish I were daring enough to try. The picture in the sample display showed this type of flooring installed in an old '50s-style drug store that featured a soft-drink bar with silver stools and a very happy soda jerk. I’d love to have that setup in my bedroom.

And I regret that we did not choose neon blue wood patterned vinyl for our upstairs floor. When I saw that we’d overlooked that option, I envisioned my true self weeping two big pearl teardrops.

Then we bought a manual impact driver—“Guaranteed FOREVER”—which you “Strike With A Hammer To Loosen Rusty Or Frozen Screws,” because we have these extra boards that formerly held up shelving which are fixed to the studs in our garage and which I’d like to remove. But the tool didn’t work. It just made a lot of racket when I pounded it. And I’m sure it woke my neighbor up, assuming that he sleeps during the day on the floor of his garage.

Finally we shopped for drywall screws, joint compound, and self-adhesive fiberglass mesh tape. There are so many choices for these types of supplies, you will never strike upon the proper variant for your project: you will certainly make some mistake and thus have to do the job all over again. Should you buy powder and stir in water, or just use the pre-mixed gunk that comes in a bucket? And do you need screws that are 2.5 or 1.625 inches long? You think to yourself: “What does it matter; it’s just drywall: it’s not a moving entity: it’s just gonna sit there.” But then you think to yourself: “Unless...”

And today is rainy. I have a meeting with the big boss this afternoon at corporate headquarters, and I wish I could ride my bike there, so that I could put some of this nervous energy to good use, but I don’t want to show up soaked and dripping, with windswept hair.

In conclusion, it’s worse than banal to limit your weblog entry to talking about your day. Nobody wants to know what you ate for breakfast. Nobody wants to know what products you shopped for. (By the way, for lunch I had a boiled potato and a salad; I always eat a potato for lunch, to show solidarity with the 2011 film The Turin Horse.) Nobody wants to know about your house-repair projects. And no one gives a fig about your boss or what the weather’s like where you live. Ride your bike into the ocean, for all we care. The only thing that people are interested in nowadays is politics. And the new GOD is the marketplace.

Anyway, I’ll end this post with a quotation from the page where I left off in Gore Vidal’s Empire. It’s been a while since I made any progress on the novel, because I had to return it to the library, because I held it for too long, because I didn’t have time to read it, because we were trying to reroute all four chambers of our house’s stomach... (Sorry again, I’m just trying to keep this interesting for myself; now that’s not even working.)

In the following excerpt, “the Ancient” refers to Abraham Lincoln, who was the 16th U.S. president; “Theodore” is Teddy Roosevelt Jr., prez #26; “Hay” is John Hay, private secretary to Lincoln and also Secretary of State under W. McKinley and T. Roosevelt; and “Bryan” is either me myself OR William Jennings Bryan. Now here’s Vidal (from part 3 of chapter TWELVE):

As usual, there was the problem of the people—those famous people that the Ancient had so mysteriously exalted that hot muggy day at Gettysburg; government of, by, and for the people? Had ever a great man said anything so entirely unrealistic, not to mention, literally demagogic? The people played no part at all in the government of the United States in Lincoln’s time, and even less now in the days of Theodore Rex. Lincoln had tended to rule by decree, thanks to the all-purpose “military necessity” which gave legitimacy to his most arbitrary acts. Roosevelt pursued his own interest in his own surprisingly secretive way; he was for empire at any cost. The people, of course, were always more or less there; they must be flattered from time to time; exhorted to do battle, or whatever the Augustus at Washington wanted them to do. The result was a constant tension between the people at large and a ruling class that believed, as did Hay, in the necessity of concentrating wealth in the hands of the few while keeping the few as virtuous as possible, at least in appearance. Hence the periodic attacks on trusts. But labor was a more delicate matter, and though Theodore was as hostile to the working-man’s demands as any Carnegie, he knew that he must appear to be their tribune, and so, to Hay’s amusement and annoyance, Roosevelt had given, in 1903, a Fourth of July speech at, significantly, Springfield, Illinois, where he had declared, “A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.” This breathtaking announcement had caused rage in the better clubs of the republic and less than euphoria amongst those to whom the mysterious square deal had been promised. They would vote for Bryan anyway.