Diary entry accompanied by a photo of my table-spot saver from a recent event

The "event" described as "recent" in the title is the wedding that I attended last weekend, and the "table-spot saver" is actually an envelope that, as you can see, displays my name on a silver sticker. This envelope contained a card with another sticker (shown below) proclaiming the type of meal that I chose but which I did not end up eating. (See my previous entry for the full story.) SPOILER ALERT: the other dinner choices were "quail" and "lamb."

Dear diary,

What constitutes a long time? I want to say that I haven’t posted in forever. Does this mean one week, an hour, a few supereons...? How long does it take for a rumor to circle the sun?

I got that word supereon from the encyclopedia. It was the vastest term in the entry for geologic time scale. A supereon is bigger than an eon, of which, Science says, our geo has endured precisely four:

• the Phanerozoic;
• the Proterozoic;
• the Archean;
• the Hadean.

I only want to remark on the etymology of those last two labels – here is a quote from the source:

Archean comes from an ancient Greek word for origin or beginning; during this eon, the Earth’s crust had cooled enough to allow the formation of continents. Preceding this eon was the Hadean (from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld), which term describes the hellish conditions then prevailing on Earth: the planet had just formed and was still very hot owing to its recent accretion, the abundance of short-lived radioactive elements, and frequent collisions with other Solar System bodies.

What I gather from this is that, before the beginning, all was Hell on Earth. And rocks were the first living creatures to mate with death.

But as I was saying, I feel like I haven’t written a blog post since the Proterozoic Eon. The last thing that happened, in the sitcom that is my life, is the wedding that I attended with my sweetheart for my sweetheart’s violin student. Maybe I called the guy a piano student in past entries – the truth is that I can’t remember what instrument he plays. All I know is that I had to attend his wedding. And the priest said, over and over again, that the purpose of marriage is to raise up children for God.

Why doesn’t God have his own children? Oh yeah, that’s right, God already did have one child: Emily Dickinson. And then he let his imaginary son try to marry her, before abandoning the project.

That’s assuming God’s male. (Robots are sexless, unless you count the death-mating of the earliest sentient land masses. Magma equals rocks becoming one flesh.)

Why is it so important what God’s gender is? Isn’t sex mostly just for procreative stumblings? Does God possess a body with poles or holes, so that we can say HE or SHE doth blah or blank… & what about the gradations, infinite in number, between zero and one…?

Anyway, it was hard for the team of writers who compose the story of my life (so many gags) to figure out where to go with the series after the wedding episode. I require multiple days to convalesce from any social event. Although not a soul spoke to me at that beautiful celebration, I need to recover as if I had been forced to compete in a banjo duel.

And on Tuesday of last week we got our heater repaired. At least we assume it’s repaired; only time will tell. For, how can one KNOW that something is NOW working which once WASN’T working? And if it breaks down again, how can one prove that the fix didn’t take, rather than that, for instance, a new malfunction has occurred…

So the wedding was on Saturday and the repair was on Tuesday. In the middle of those traumas was the obscenity known as Sun-Mon. I recall using this Sunday-Monday supereon to walk and to rest. Maybe we read some scriptures. Who knows. You’ll have to consult the archives in eternity. Up around out back in the Archean period. Just past Hell.

When we all enter the afterlife of bliss (yes, ALL of us, even war criminals, because Saul’s Christ died for everyone) will there be a record book detailing the total earth-drama that we endured? Or is the Book of Life just a collection of names of those who are saved (because Paul’s Christ died for all, & YET not everyone accepts this gift of salvation; THEREFORE only some souls are named in the paradisal registry), and, if so, who reads such a text? For this Book of Life is just a reference volume like the old Yellow Pages, which contained people’s telephone numbers and which no one would ever think of reading cover-to-cover. Tis an anti-page-turner.

Or is the Book of Life composed like a movie script, with dialogue attributed to each player who acts in this tragicomedy, and all the setting and details of each soul’s monkeybusiness is italicized in the form of stage directions…

(By the way, is the Book of Life available in an audio version? I need a holiday present for my grandmother who has been blind for years and dead.)

Once you get to heaven and begin reading this Book of Life, you’re in the mode of someone who’s looking backward on past existence—you’re no longer living in the moment and creating shenanigans for futurity, beyond the stage direction “So-and-so’s dead spirit reads in the heavenly register…” So my question is: Is the afterlife more than a criticism of existence? Might the afterlife, which I assure you does not exist and thus is worth mulling over, possess possibilities as limitless as our old familiar earthen unknowns? And, if so, then can’t we look forward to a second “fall,” not of humankind this time but of our impending angel-souls?

& when I asked “Is the afterlife more than a criticism of existence?” I meant to refer to the well-known categories of “artist” vs. “critic.” Our life now, here in year 2017 on planet Mars (Earth stole that name from the famous red planet, because the famous red planet was not engaging in enough atrocities to justify being named after the God of War), I say, our life at present is like a collective artwork: Everything we humans do is going to be reviewed by our future selves, as our misdeeds are faithfully recorded in the great Lifebook; and once we’re done acting, and our acts have been duly recorded by poor deific Thoth (heaven’s lone scribe: an intern; unpaid), what will there be for us all to do but discuss our bygone deeds? For no soul in the afterlife will ACT anymore, since to act means to err, and all angels are perfect. Unless you believe we’ll be resurrected as half-human devils. I believe that the best of us WILL occupy that state, actually; but I’m presently trying to deal with the popular conception of the afterlife as a place where all souls are clothed in “pure white linen,” and no one is any longer “given in marriage,” (note that word given, as in bequeathed; passed on; handed down: for matrimony is not an agreement that one enters into voluntarily—like existence, one is THROWN into a deal that is good or bad by luck) everyone is immortal (hence the superfluity of procreation, which is why all angels are smooth like dolls in their privy places), and we dead souls all enjoy 99% divine wisdom—the single percent that we shall never understand belongs to the Mind of GOD: that’s why we praise him all day and night; we just can’t figure him out: WHY did he do it (I’m referring to the creation of mortal life and the resurrection thereof into paradise)… and HOW does his body allow for him to be anywhere OR absent himself (sometimes both simultaneously) while boasting ONLY a male organ and nothing feminine beyond the unspeakable…

So we live life as terrestrial martians until we expire, and then we’re shocked up into ghostly existence among the clouds, where we find a book that contains not just our names but every English word that we have muttered. And even all the thoughts that we ever did think. Everything was done for a reason and a purpose. Here they all are: the endeavors, the conflicts, the loves, the secret desires nursed yet unacted… our lies are exposed and we thrill to their perseverance, because we, as angelic translucent semi-flesh pure-bots, now lack that ability. —Will we weep when we read the gospel according to Huckleberry Finn, since we cannot even “lie to keep in practice”?

*

Dang, what befell during the asterisk here was that my owner took me outside for a walk. So I’ve no idea how the above train of thot derailed and got away from me – you’d think it’d not be possible for something that is fixed on a path to veer out upon its own route and get lost like a stray sheep, but that’s what happened. I don’t know where I was going with the text, but I’m ashamed that it seems to terminate almost properly… like I attempted to give it some sort of a formal conclusion, however extemporaneous. So, if you wouldn’t mind, gentle reader, please imagine that the above ends inappropriately—say, in mid-sentence, or, better yet, mid-word.

And the only thought that came to me on my walk is this: I like to see a house with a note taped to its front door, especially when I’m too far away to be able to read what the note says. I lack the courage to go close and look for myself, so I can only imagine. I saw three such houses today, on my walk. All of them had glass exterior doors, so it was easy to see the white paper of the note contrasted against the surface of the pane. I like to wonder whether each message was left by the inhabitant of the house, or by a passing solicitor... Or maybe a bank is foreclosing on the homeowner, and its representative stopped by to deliver some paperwork, which got left in the door because nobody answered the bell. Maybe the person who lives in the house was expecting company—perhaps an illicit lover was scheduled to rendezvous for a quick “toss in the hay,” but unexpectedly the resident’s spouse returned from a trip to some faraway land (he’s back three days earlier than planned: this is so unlike Jesus!) thus a note needed to be affixed to the entryway, in coded language so as to avoid blowing the lovers’ cover:

ATTN. POSTMASTER: leave all offerings near the mailbox or at the side of the garage, for the attack dog is resting in the bedroom where you normally make your delivery; and I, your secret patron, do not want you to get bit.

But now I wonder if, in the future, people will keep baboons and pigs for pets. I mean, I know that some keep such pets already, but the practice is not as popular as dogs or cats. I think that we should develop something like astronaut suits for sea life, so that squids and dolphins can live with us on land: they can then slip on and zip up a portable environment, as it were, and keep us humans as servants. And let us equip these suits with auto-translators, so that when we verbally address these creatures, our speech will be made intelligible to them, and when they answer us by squeaking or wriggling, the meaning of these acts will be rendered into words and transmitted audibly over their costume’s loudspeaker; then we will rejoice, saying: A true communication has occurred! It is like the first man stepping on the moon. The first prayer ever to be answered.

You will note, I said that they will keep us as “servants,” instead of we ourselves lassoing them as our pets. And I skipped from “baboons and pigs” to “dogs and cats,” then ended with “squids and dolphins”: I couldn’t get myself to treat that last clutch the same as the others, for they strike me as ultra-sophisticated (this, you will also note, is how Officer Sunshine describes the exercise equipment that he ordered, in the 2013 masterpiece Wrong Cops) compared to mankind, which is why I dreamt up the concept of an inter-…

Ah, I should end it right there, to make up for my earlier…

P.S.

I’m in the habit of sharing old rap tracks in the postscripts of these blog posts: below is yet another; it’s from a demo album that I made on a four-track cassette recorder more than a decade ago. This was back in the eons when gangster rap was the latest fad. So I made a mock-gangster demo tape, where each of the album’s ten songs ends with a guitar performance by my biological brother Paul; hence the album’s title: Slow Raps with Guitar Solos? At the time, I thought that guitar solos were anathema to rap music, which is why I made this decision to include them; but now that all art has melted into one continent of hotdish, the audacity of my decision is lost. And I’ll save you the search trouble—thus saith Wikipedia:

A hotdish is a casserole which typically contains a starch, a meat, and a frozen vegetable mixed with canned soup. The dish originates from the Upper Midwest region of the United States, where it remains popular, particularly in Minnesota.

One last disclaimer about my brother Paul’s guitar-work: I never let him rehearse or do more than a single take: I just forced him to play cold during his first time hearing each beat. More info here.

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/167610810021/a-track-from-my-uninspired-demo-album-slow-raps