What I tell you three times is true.

Photo of the top of the back of a book. Note the absence of interest. Note the abundance of interest.

Dear diary,

Brace yourself for a boring post, because this’ll be one. And when I say dull I mean dull like nice people are dull. Nice and safe.

Yesterday I awoke with allergies: scratchy watery eyes and nonstop sneezing. Don’t most people have allergy attacks in the summertime, when it’s hot and all sorts of new growth are…? Anyway, I get my allergies during the first COLD days of autumn. Probably I’m allergic to death and decay.

So I took a pill. Two pills. Anti-allergy medicine. Its package claims it’ll make the taker drowsy, and it does not lie. I spent the whole rest of the day feeling like I needed to sleep but couldn’t; because the thing about drug-induced drowsiness is that it…

I don’t know anything about drug-induced drowsiness. I just hate losing a day to an overactive immune system. (Did I phrase that correctly? I am not yet a doctor.) And then when I complain like this, I begin to feel guilty; I question myself: Shouldn’t I be thankful that my immune system works so well, rather than whining about its occasional overreaction? And the answer is: NO! everything should be made easy and perfect and harmonious. Thankfully my mind is still robust enough to answer its own self-inquiry with a…

And the day before, we rode our bikes to some parks. We bought lunch at an eatery, which is unusual for us—normally we bring our own homemade meals; but this time we didn’t plan well. My sweetheart said, “There’s this diner that I’ve been wanting to try: it looks really good, like a mom-and-pop sandwich place.” So I said OK; and when we got there, it proved to be an knockoff fast-food burger joint.

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The joy must be in the making of the thing, whatever it is; otherwise you’ll only dig yourself deeper into debt – not dollar-debt but soul-debt (nothing is got for nothing, and it takes energy to create even lousy diary entries) (plus, keep in mind that I have no clue what I’m talking about) – and the creditor is your former self who is unavailable ever after to beg for a reduction in payments…

What I’m trying to say is that the external reward will never come, O underground artist. (I’m thundering at myself again.) If you’re not enjoying writing this claptrap, then stop—it’s that simple: for nobody will ever care more than you…

Some days I believe in this ship log, and some days it seems a dead end. I love typing on keys, I love drawing with a pen, I love talking; so those are the reasons I keep composing entries here, and sharing visual abstractions, and uploading rap tracks. Isn’t that pathetic, tho? What should an old man do with his time? The answer is to start an orphanage and spend the majority of the daylight hours praying on your knees, preferably on a hard, wooden floor so that the weight of your body impresses grooves into the floorboards over time: this way you’ll have an actual, physical abnormality to exhibit on Judgment Day, when the new-improved Jesus lightnings forth to nitpick. You can point to your worn wooden grooves and say: Look at that, Christ—there’s hard evidence of my righteousness; so you better unlock the gates of that fast-food funhouse…

When uninspired, I always descend into jokery. But the idea that fast-food franchises populate paradise was indeed put forward by a deacon from my old church during a casual conversation. By the way, when I call the church “mine” I only mean that I attended it: I did not own the majority shares of stock in it—only God can do THAT; that’s why churches serve the Christian Deity, who is their bottom line (I’m only kidding again; the church’s bottom line is the root of all evil). This Baptist church of mine had a program called “soul winning,” where every Thursday evening believers would go out in two-person teams to knock on doors and “spread the gospel of Christ.” I don’t know why they chose Thursday to do this. And it’s really the gospel of Paul, not… Never mind—I can’t let myself wax critical, otherwise this entry’ll never end. (By the way, didn’t I tell you all this in a previous post? I feel like I’m repeating myself again. If so, it’ll be interesting to see how my accounts match up—it’ll be a good proof of how avidly I fabricate, how masterfully I help to “improve” the truth.)

So after an hour of pitching our evangelical product door-to-door, Mr. Deacon drove us to his favorite burger joint. He loved this joint. He looked me in the eyes and said with cold sincerity: Don’t you think for a minute that there won’t be fast food joints in Heaven; because Heaven contains all the good things that everyone likes, and I like these burgers, so they will undoubtedly exist in heaven to eat.

But I started one of those paragraphs above with the words “When uninspired”—I just want to correct a potential misconception: I don’t believe in inspiration; I just use the phrase because it’s convenient.

This will not fit here, but I need to quote a passage from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism because its author André Breton had words to say on the same topic (inspiration). We encountered this section just two days ago, at our daily session of public-park readings-aloud, so I consider it a sign. For the LORD speaks to us in clunky ways that make us cock our head and squint, as though we’re trying to decipher illegible handwriting.

Surrealism demands that those who possess the “precious faculty” we are referring to, bend their efforts toward studying in this light the most complex mechanism of all, “inspiration,” and, from the moment they cease thinking of it as something sacred, however confident they are of its extraordinary virtue, they dream only of making it shed its final ties, or even—something no one had ever dared conceive of—of making it submit to them. There is no point in resorting to subtleties on this point; we all know well enough what inspiration is. There is no way of mistaking it; it is what has provided for the supreme needs of expression in every time and clime. It is commonly said that it is either present or it is not, and if it is absent, nothing of what, by way of comparison, is suggested by the human cleverness that interest, discursive intelligence, and the talent acquired by dint of hard work obliterate, can make up for it. We can easily recognize it by that total possession of our mind which, at rare intervals, prevents our being, for every problem posed, the plaything of one rational solution rather than some other equally rational solution, by that sort of short circuit it creates between a given idea and a respondent idea (written, for example). Just as in the physical world, a short circuit occurs when the two “poles” of a machine are joined by a conductor of little or no resistance. In poetry and in painting, Surrealism has done everything it can and more to increase these short circuits. It believes, and it will never believe in anything more wholeheartedly, in reproducing artificially this ideal moment when man, in the grips of a particular emotion, is suddenly seized by this something “stronger than himself” which projects him, in self-defense, into immortality.

I never really want to be anywhere, up or down, for any span, mortal or immortal; I never really want to contribute anything to any realm, lasting or ephemeral; sometimes I get lost in what I’m working on, because I kind of like it, but there’s always a percentage of annoyance that accompanies each act: so it seems wrong to say that anything I do, even if I feel mostly happy while doing it, and even if I am satisfied with the result, was ever inspired. But the difference between the non-inspiration of this diary entry that I am writing at present, compared with the lack of inspiration that I’d normally label “God-breathed” is this: I don’t even have hope for this entry; it’s like a child that the parent abandons before it is born.

Pre-birth. That makes me think of the abortion debate. To be upfront, I’m firmly on the side that they call “pro-choice.” But I like the debate for abstract reasons; I mean: I’m fascinated that there’s an argument at all, since the issue seems a complete no-brainer to me; but I’m even more fascinated by the fact that neither side of the argument ever sinks below a certain level of decorum when articulating their view. Everyone becomes a politician. Careful, careful! (Words are so much more important than deeds.) This game of prude-speak affects me the way that whatever killed the cat affected the cat. I’m saying it makes me want to sink low… do some dumpster-diving…

Pro-life and pro-choice. Everyone wants to have the prefix “pro” inside their name. No one wants to be called ANTI-anything. Well I’m anti-everything.

• If the child was brought to term, I say that that child should have been aborted: you might as well give up on them before they develop—let them live in poverty; reroute their prospective happiness to the ultra rich.
• And if a child was aborted, I say that that child was intended by fate to be the universal despot; and it’s because that spirit’s fleshly appearance was cancelled that this world remains semi-functional.

No, I am against that last point. I like the first point, about the soul that made it into this world alive being therefore consigned to poverty, it is good that their portion be allocated to the upper class; but I renounce the second point: I can’t tolerate the notion that any abortion was wrong. That’s how pro-choice I am. When people shout at me “Hey anti-lifer, you hypocrite, how would you like it if your mother had aborted YOU!?” And they think they’ve got me on the ropes with this one, they think they’ve cornered me and that I’ll confess that their stance is righteous and mine is “of the Devil” because I must be as ignorant as they are about the secret of eternal life that nature keeps hidden in broad daylight. But instead I say: I would have LOVED if my mother had aborted me, because then I wouldn’t have had to endure this broken world; for decades I would have been enjoying a more perfect union of friendship in a more perfect dimension of love.

Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? …For now I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest… as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light. There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master. [Job 3:11–19]

Even better: if my grandmother had aborted all her children. Or if the ape that gave birth to the first human being had aborted that miracle. Because the place where aborted children go is a fantastic pleasure-land. It’s much better than Christian Heaven. There are no burger joints.

Don’t you hate when you’re writing along in your paragraph and then you stumble upon a phrase that seems proper to end the thing? It looks so self-satisfied, so clever. It’s like a shot in a movie that is framed in accordance with the so-called rule of thirds. This would be desirable if you were trying to please the audience, but if the goal is instead to unearth your most despicable aspects, it’s a nuisance to have a decent ending appear. Out of nowhere, so unexpectedly, like a gift from God. It makes you want to repeat the perfect phrase in a less proper context, to punish it for being born so lucky. There are no burger joints.

Once an author starts wrestling with her words, she loses me. Criticizing your composition right in front of us, your readership – this is like parents arguing in front of their offspring, broaching the intention to divorce right in front of their children’s eyes. An author should always pretend that everything’s going on just fine behind the scenes, that every word and phrase that she decides to write is correct and replete with intention. Nothing is left to chance. There are no burger joints.

P.S.

Here’s another rap track that I recorded more than a decade ago which I recently got around to uploading online. The beasts of futurity will remember me more for these raps than for my literary writings, just as the present knows my prior existence more for its childlike doodling than for its ornithological sketch-work.

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/166090671671/syrup-forest-is-an-uninspired-rap-demo-track