Irk down

What to expect from the following entry:

I woke up a too early and thus had time to kill, so I decided to write in this weblog. Before writing, however, I looked over the last couple entries I posted this week. Two entries ago (Dec. 3) I wrote a post that I considered, even at the time I was writing it, to be boring and repetitive—it contains the same stuff that I’ve said elsewhere; so I was frustrated with my lack of creativity when I published it. This influenced the way that I wrote my next entry (Dec. 6) – I overcompensated: my attempt at appearing to be clever and flamboyant backfired, as it always does: the reader can tell when a blogger’s trying too hard. The best policy is always earnestness. So, this morning, when faced with the blank page, I knew that I wanted to write differently from my recent attempts, but I also knew that there’s no way I’d manage to achieve an honest style, let alone an earnest one, with two strikes against me already; so I let my over-soul advise my soul like so: “Just hop from thot to thot; let this entry embrace miscellany; & if you fall short, I’ll beset you with anxieties.” So I jotted down my musings for a while—specifically, to the point where I give the Wrong Cops quote below: all of that was composed quickly, according to my supervisor’s order, like a brain-bird flitting from branch to branch. Yet, then, when I opened up my royal purple laptop to key the entry (that is, to transfer my hand­written manuscript onto the screen), I noticed, in the folder where I store my indiscretions, that there was a recently saved file named “BAD END FROM PREV BLOG”; so I opened it and saw the (former) conclusion from yesterday’s post (Dec. 6) which got blotted from that entry because it felt dull. (I replaced it with the ending that is there now: the one where I lament that Edward Hopper never painted me on a ladder installing weatherstripping & illuminated by our local mail truck; for Hopper’s depictions of humans are usually a little off, if you know what I mean: thus maybe he could’ve improved my natural whatness.) So, after the movie quote, I inserted that old previously slain paragraph: it’s the one that starts “But we still haven’t finished replacing the border…” However, I didn’t really like it as an ending here, either. So I thot: Maybe I’ll just write a couple more text blobs and end this thing without method. Because, ever since last night, when our neighbors’ car was idling and revving and leaving and returning VERY LOUDLY, I’d been annoyed and wanted to address this public nuisance; and my state of being in need of a weblog sendoff provided a motive to voice my complaint. But, when I began trying to articulate my frustration, wholly unsummoned, my Genesis-tick kicked in: I couldn’t stop referring to that early story with Adam and Eve and Yahweh. As I think I eventually explained, it’s because the commotion from automobiles reminds me of the fact that people are hustling to make a U.S buck so as to support their families (such beautiful families), and that means not just parents but children and pets; thus Genesis comes to mind because that’s where all the trouble started: the first parents, the first child, the entire animal kingdom. I do believe I clarified all this below, in the place where I deal with these subjects; so I don’t know why I’m telling you this right now, up front, at the top; unless I am harboring a secret desire, unbeknownst even to myself, to heap words here till they outdo the Tower of Babel. (By the way, I hope, in giving all these sneak peaks and previews of today’s post before it begins, that I didn’t spoil anything.) To be clear, that last part, which conflates those early biblical passages with exasperation about working families and transport, starts with the sentence “Let me change the subject.” And now I have reached my final disclaimer: For the sake of variety, I was moved to start the following composition differently than by using the standard “Dear diary”; I wanted something more formal-sounding, maybe even a bit tyrannical; so I wrote “My dearly esteemed colleagues,” but that wasn’t enough: I needed something lengthier and borderline obnoxious; so I performed a search online and almost instantly saw a phrase that I liked, but it happened to come from Vladimir Putin’s speech to a committee presenting “the bid of Sochi to host the Olympic Winter Games in 2014,” and my writing has nothing to do with that topic – at least I don’t think it does. So I tried deleting the O-word, and messing with a couple permutations; but, in the end, I liked the original wording so much that I stole it outright: Who cares if it makes sense. OK, that’s all. Thank you for listening. Now, on to our feature presentation…

---

Esteemed colleagues and members of the international
Olympic Committee,

What the masses call sanity is simply insanity that’s unobtrusive. That was my awaking-thot this morning.

We’re all called to be Christ, aren’t we? I mean, to suffer ignominy in this world. But the difference is that Christ got some biographies written about him; he got some religions built up around him, some theological flora… What do WE get? A paycheck? Not even a paycheck.

I have all the answers, but I’m cursed with obscurity, so it doesn’t even matter if I can solve all the problems of our political moment: because nobody hears me. I mean, a happy few hear me; but the rest of the norms—especially the movers and the shakers—think I’m a candle in sunshine. Yet the key word here is “assume”; or now I see I wrote think; for I am NOT a candle-in-sunshine: I’m a new type of fire. You can tell because the sun is gold; and my flame is lime green.

Sure, you could call it toxic green as well. Radioactive green. Not that I’m for atomic weaponry: contrariwise, there’s no one more opposed to war than I am; all I want for Christmas is nuclear disarmament. But I’m green because I represent life: the continuum that looks at leaves of grass and says “I can be that” yet also sees a ruined world, contaminated by fallout from H-bombs, and says “I can be that.”

A haunting feeling of déjà vu imbues the above words, for me, like a spice. I’ve just spent the last few minutes lost in thot, trying to puzzle out its source; and now I think I’ve found it: A few years ago, I made peace with modernity’s noxiousness by channeling Whitman in one of my books. First, here’s Walt:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless...

That’s from near the end of “Song of Myself.” And this’s from near the end of my “Introduction to New America”:

. . . I want to augment an aspect of my former message—or maybe instead of ‘augment’ I should say ‘emphasize,’ because I don’t believe I’m exactly augmenting anything; I think that what I want to say is implied in the original wording—it’s just a minor concern: Not under your bootsoles but within the materials that comprise them is where you should look for me (or rather in both places)—to be clear, I mean to indicate the bootsoles’ ingredients (I am assuming that your soles are synthetic, that is, ‘unnatural’)—for, at present, I am toxic: I am nuclear waste. Yet, as the sauroids of yesteryear became you, you will in turn become your own monstrous successors. All the same, therefore, I will “remain good health to you.”

So now that this poison is out of my system, I wonder: Did I have any other awaking-thots this morning? Yes I did. Here’s the next thot that stood up and sang, after the above...

Think of the ocean: What is behind it? There is no “backstage” to the ocean, because it’s not a sheet of paper that you can lift with your hands and flip over. I find myself wondering: What’s behind me – what’s going on, on the far side of self, of mere being? And then I remember that my soul is like the ocean: it’s all around, every which way; all obverse, no reverse; there’s nothing behind it.

Yet why do I want to go backstage in physicality? It’s because WHAT IS is too far gone. The things that are shouldn’t be the way they are; other things should have happened; and I’m trying to get to the bottom of the problem. I assume the Real Me knows the answer. I’m thinking about some more lines from Song of Myself:

(From here on, I’ll avoid stopping to tell you when a new thot comes. I’ll just let the thots flow from one to the next, without warning.)

The conflicts between countries can be solved the same way as the conflicts between people. That’s not because countries ARE people, but they consist of people, and therefore they contain all sorts of echoes and refractions of people’s ways of being.

I always wonder: What fixes one to one’s molecules? What locks one to precisely this consciousness? Because I assume that we all feel as I do, that we have one single mind, when we think, as opposed to many minds to choose from. But if the mind is a blossom of the body, and the body is an admixture of atoms, then why cannot our mind retrieve memories of its prior atomic adventures? Perhaps it can. Perhaps that’s what imagination IS. But I’d like to go beyond that, even. I’d like to be able to select which mind I’m going to think from this morning. I’d like to perceive the world from the brain of the President.

But if I were to successfully “hack into” this other man’s mind, what would be left of myself, of this “I” that’s now enthroned within the Prez Head? If we imagine me as a teenage girl sitting in front of my desktop monitor, we can answer that the Royal Palace’s computer is still in the billiards room, with the President sitting before it, and the essence that has undergone the actual infiltration is the electron. Or I should say electrons, plural; because it takes more than one single electron to repossess the President. It takes a village. Also maybe I’m using the wrong word: Should it be photon? Who does all the work, on the subatomic level, when it comes to consciousness? (And when I say work I mean dirty work.) All I know is that we are all offspring of lightning.

You see? I can’t get too far into the scientific side of this issue – it bogs me down. I need to remember the wisdom of Officer Duke, from the film Wrong Cops (2013), which we memorized in Sunday School:

Don’t piss around with all your technical crap, just play the song.

But we still haven’t finished replacing the border line of our small bedroom. We tore off the gypsum panels (which term I was told is a fair substitute for sheet rock – I just mean we destroyed the interior portion of our outside-facing wall), leaving the bare cinder blocks exposed, which leak water when it rains so it appears that the wall is weeping. This is not a miracle, so I am not worried that Christ shall soon return to cause mass mayhem. But I AM worried that, since, at all hours, we keep the entrance to this construction zone closed and its vents blocked up (to prevent its air, which I assume is befouled with mold and rot, from circulating into the rest of the house) (& if the gentle reader is wondering where we sleep while our bedroom is suffering such a “repair,” the answer is: upstairs, on the light-gray klik-klak), this room will grow so cold during the winter that its pipes will burst. In short, the note that I found in last evening’s fortune cookie speaks the truth: “You will soon be living the dream!” For by “dream” it means nightmare.

Let me change the subject. That last paragraph is the point in this composition where inspiration abandons me. I’m only kidding, of course, for this entry was uninspired from its inception, but there’s a feeling of luckiness having left. Yet I’m determined to continue. So now I will harp on modern families:

I don’t know a thing about modern families, but I have to live near them; so the perspective that you’ll get from my harping is one of an outsider. But it’s good to receive criticism and feedback from aliens, especially unsympathetic arbitrators, because otherwise you might get too close to the masterpiece you’re building and accidentally seal yourself inside. That’s why the LORD was careful to remain strictly on the outskirts of his mud man, while fashioning him; and only when the form was finished did the LORD deign to breathe himself in thru the statue’s nostrils—yet not the whole of himself; only a part. For as it is written (in Shelley’s Epipsychidion), “True Love in this differs from gold and clay, / That to divide is not to take away”; and God is much more like gold and clay than love.

The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. [Genesis 2:7]

And we all know, for Duchamp taught us well, that art is just an addiction like any other; so after God sketches his first study, he begins again, fleshing out his ideas on a subsequent piece, which he derives from elements of the first, making amendments toward perfection.

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Man, and he slept: and he took one of his curves, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the curve, which the LORD God had taken from Man, made he a Woman, and brought her unto the man. [2:21-22]

I fancy how one artwork titles another:

Man said, This is now flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. [2:23]

But I’ve fallen into my old obsession again – I only meant to comment on the wild and woolly child-rearing that I’m forced to witness daily in my neighborhood. Lamenting children leads me to bewail parents; and considering their acts as problematic made me wonder where the problem began, so I traced the entire human experiment back to its first couple. They were childless at the starting line. The kids appear only after the fall. Original sin. The initial transgression. Set the precedent. (“Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.” —That’s from DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.) But I do not call it a “fall” or “sin” or “transgression” – in fact, I don’t even know what we’re talking about: is it an act that we’re trying to label, like when a traveler aiming to visit Tahiti ends up in Tehran; OR is it like an event, which has no known individual culprit, like a volcano eruption that inundates the globe?

The last verse of chapter three says:

So the LORD God drove out Man; and he placed at the east of paradise Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to block the way of the Tree of Life.

Then the very first verse of the next chapter says:

And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said: I have gotten a man from Yahweh [the LORD].

I’m staying on track, don’t worry; my intent is not to quote the whole rest of the book of Genesis, chapter by chapter and verse by verse. My focus is children: Where do they come from? (Not “How are they made”—I explained that in yesterday’s entry, which my sweetheart tells me I should have given the title Stripped and Screwed, but rather “What was their origin?”) God kicks out the original humans from his Heaven-on-Earth, and the first thing these humans do is copulate. Eve bares Cain, the first-ever infant borne via humans. Or maybe I should say: borne via human, singular, as the scripture hints at the possibility that Cain is a hybrid. For what’s his mother’s take on the event: does she declare “I have brought forth a beautiful baby boy from my own husband Adam”?—NO! instead, Eve shrieks: “I have gotten a man from Yahweh.”

Does this mean that Eve was impregnated back in paradise, by the Almighty himself? (Then Jesus wasn’t the very first “virgin birth”!) The timeline works out—Cain was born roughly 8½ months after the land-LORD personally evicted our ancestors…

But now I really am getting off-track. We don’t need to re-litigate our Heavenly Father’s paternity suit. What we need to do today is examine the parenting techniques of Minnesota residents. Here is what we find. Genesis 2:24. A child leaves its parents, and cleaves unto the nearest spouse it can find: and they become one flesh. A new Cain is born unto them. The first Cain was male; so what. This new Cain is female. Now our married couple buys a house in Eagan, Minnesota, where they live with their child.

Soon—give it two years, say—this couple “knows” each other again, and Cain 2 is produced. It’s like a vending machine: after inserting your coin, you pull the plunger mechanism, and a babe is dispensed. Simply reach in and retrieve it with your arm—that metal delivery door swings open, giving you access to the take-out port. Do not bother trying to hunt about upward in the display chamber: future treasures are off-limits. Remember the angel thugs and their ever-turning sword? They’ve installed a security baffle.

Cain 1 and Cain 2: both girls. What can you do to raise your kids right? You have to work. Get a job. Become gainfully employed. Join the ranks of the labor force. Sell yourself: offer for sale your time, your body, your talents.

If your wages are low, you’ll note that your family is hungry, because you have not purchased them food. Why not grow your own food, in a garden? Food comes from the dirt, and dirt is free. But good dirt is not free. Your soil is contaminated. Don’t you remember where I said above that I am the toxic flame, the green one to take the place of the sun that was once yellow and is now orange? That’s cuz the big U.S. corporations poured their industrial waste all over your land. You wouldn’t think a relatively affluent place like Eagan, Minnesota would fall victim to this type of misbehavior. But the free market spurs innovations.

I don’t want this to be too depressing, so let’s say that Cain 1 & 2 avoid getting any debilitating illnesses. I mean, they steer clear of these things when they’re young. For doom will catch up to us all, sooner or later; but it’s too much, it should be against the rules for children to suffer cancer. But that’s the world we live in. Yahweh made it. Jesus tried to stop him, but he got demoted. That’s how he got the nickname Lucifer. Then Lucifer followed in the steps of his brother Prometheus (or was it the other way round?) and earned the title Satan; then eventually ended up…

We all know how that story goes. The point is that Man is working two jobs while Woman cares for the Cain girls (I’m not advocating this setup as the ideal—I’m only reporting on what I see my neighbors doing), and the double-job situation requires a lot of driving around; and by “driving” I don’t mean horse-and-buggy, the charming wooden wheels, the satisfying clip-clop of the hooves, and the eye-blinders that save the horse from perceiving the constant peril that he’s in—that his employer puts him in (for the coachman is his LORD and those blinders are the awesome “Thou Shalt Not!”) …I say, with regard to my neighbors, when I speak of “driving,” I mean a gasoline-powered vehicle, a chariot with a combustion engine, NOT a donkey. This is an important clarification, because only the former possesses an exhaust manifold.

Now you drive on the Minnesota roads all winter, which are heavily salted (this process supposedly melts the snow from the pavement, thus making travel safer). The salt infests the slush that flings up onto your exhaust manifold during travel, causing rust to form. Soon the rust eats a hole in your tailpipe and muffler.

But what is a muffler? Many non-US English speaking countries call it a silencer. But I think of a silencer as an accessory device that is attached to the muzzle of a firearm to reduce the noise signature. On an automobile, a muffler is a device for decreasing the amount of noise emitted by the exhaust of an internal combustion engine. The point is the same, in either case: DAMPEN THE CLAMOR. Now if you’re working three or more jobs, you’re driving incessantly; thus you’re on the salty Minnesota roads enough to assure that your vehicle’s silencer will corrode. And when we multiply this effect by the number of fellow earthlings who share the neighborhood, what’s the result? Everyone who is struggling to put food on the table, so as to raise their Cains, is going to be driving longer hours in very noisy vehicles. If you place a sound-recording device next to a beehive, and then play back the noise at a greatly reduced rate, so that the audio sample of the buzzing is slowed down yet still deafening, you’ll get an accurate notion of how my neighborhood sounds at all hours. Because nobody can afford to fix their muffler.

The only moments of peace that I am allotted are between 4:30 and 4:45 a.m. – never has any racket disgraced that interval. I wonder why. Perhaps there’s something intrinsic to nature, from which not even my neighbors can escape: a bent that transcends taxonomy and makes siblings of disparates, which moves all humans to observe the traditional naptime of tree sparrows. It’s my understanding that not even Science Himself knows exactly when that species sleeps, if ever.

P.S.

Don’t forget to ogle all my rap cassettes at Bandcamp and YouTube.