5

NOTE: I named this entry “5” because its obligatory image comes after one, two, and three/four in my book of 555 Drawing Prompts!

Incidentally, the prefix five-five-five is the one that you often see in movies (like when a detective offers the phone number of his agency to a sultry female client, or when a spy searches thru the pockets of the topcoats that are hanging in the hotel lobby and finds an ad for a risqué nightclub whose number he hastily copies down), because the area code 555 usually doesn’t connect to any actual phone line: those digits are fake. Apparently when audience members see a number flash upon the screen, they immediately grab their mobile device and dial it; for they’d rather be anywhere else than here in this theater screening a motion picture. If a gruff voice answers the line, you say, “Look, I don’t care if you’re the one who committed all the murders that the officers in this film are trying to solve; just drop what you’re doing and come get me out of here pronto.”

And now I can’t resist sharing what I found on Wikipedia, during the instant of lazy-research that I just performed:

The prefix 555 is widely used for telephone numbers in fictitious media. Generally, in North America, a number with that prefix is inoperative. This prevents practical jokers and curious callers from bothering real people and organizations.

Got that? I just wanted to prove that I was right. (You know you’re a true prophet if your utterance matches the words of Wikipedia.) But admittedly this next part was news to me:

Not all numbers that begin with this prefix are false; in fact, only 555-0100 through 555-0199 are now specifically reserved for fictional use.

So, if you spot a number outside of that purview, call it immediately: snap yourself out of your cinematic spell and GET SAVED. Stop suspending your disbelief: phone for help: return to reality.

[Only now do I realize that everything I’ve written so far is just in explanation of this entry’s image and title. Now I’ll start the actual body text...]

Dear diary,

Yesterday we received a blizzard, here in southeastern Minnesota. That word “blizzard” sounds scary, but all that happened was that soft white snow blanketed everything. It started in the morning, and it kept falling steadily throughout the day. Persistence: that’s all you need. If you’re a single snowflake and you think you can’t make a difference, consider this storm: the first fallen flake just phoned a friend, who followed suit (“Dial 555-SNOW!”): thus, each flake that fell persuaded two or three of its comrades to join the descent, and, by evening, they had taken back their country.

The inconvenience of having to shovel the narthex (for that part of our igloo is dome-less) bothers me not, when I consider how lovely and pure is the silence that follows in the wake of any blizzard. For snow clogs all the roads, so no one can drive on them; and one of the most barbarous offenders in that class of “things that drive” is the bass-mobile. I’ve explained before how I despise this type of car that has giant subwoofers installed for its sound system so the dance club fad rap beat from whatever dance club fad rap track its driver is playing disturbs the abodes of those who live nigh. On normal days, when the streets are clear and there’s NOT six feet of snow blocking the passage of traffic, you can hear lousy annoying repetitive bass from vehicles passing your house, for hours on end. But during a blizzard, the land becomes silent and holy. I love when it’s quiet.

Seriously, I could drop this quill pen out my window, and you’d be able to hear it kiss the cloud-cushion snow-scape below; that’s how peaceful it is.

But not for long. At cockcrow the city plows will come thru and render all our public roadways passable. Then by noon every local business, mall, apartment complex, etc. will have cleared out all their parking lots. So, by rush hour, I’ll again be enjoying the full industrial concerto.

God I hate modern rap. I know I’ve complained of this before, but the thought of all those Big Bass Cars returning soon to plague me with their soundtracks – it boils my blood: I really hate modern rap. Yet I’m not just a standard anti-rap cranky-man: no, as I said before, I LOVE the old rap, especially the stuff from around the late 1980s. That’s my favorite audio art: that’s my entire adolescence. (With regard to personal taste, there is nothing more potent than a modicum of aesthetic interest mixed with a heavy dose of nostalgia.) BUT as much as I cherish my precious 80s rap, I’d stop at nothing to destroy the modern rap travesty. If an angel from heaven were to visit me and announce that God is willing to grant my wish: that God has agreed to eliminate all modern rap, BUT that God intends to destroy all the other ages of rap music AS WELL, including all my favorite albums from the 70s & 80s, plus the scant tracks I like from the early 90s (& maybe a B-side or six from post-2000), I’d say: Fine, take it all. That’s how much I loathe this present style of dance-club trash that I hear coming from every passing...

[I recently took a solemn oath to try to be more stupid in this blog; therefore, instead of finishing that last sentence, I will share my first draft of the words that I wrote to be spoken by the angel above:]

Bryan, hello, can you hear me? OK now listen: I am an angel, a messenger from heaven: I come from the sky, from the place where Yahweh God lives (he retreated there long ago, after he got tired of wrangling humans; but he’s taken an interest in you, for the same reason that a child traps a bug inside a jar); now here is my message: Yahweh sent me to tell you that he has heard your prayer—apparently you pray every night asking God to obliterate all of the modern rap music, and to vacuum it away from the face of the earth—indeed, Yahweh hears your prayer, and he is willing to comply (this is the first time, since the flood, that I’ve seen him perk up); only there is a catch—don’t worry, that’s normal: God does nothing without a heavy dose of deceit (Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus... you get the picture)—Yahweh is willing to answer your prayer, yet with an addendum (truly he’s under no obligation to negotiate terms with anyone; after all, he’s omnipotent; but he savors the way you squirm when faced with hard choices): the LORD has agreed to annihilate all modern rap, on condition that he can throw the baby out with the bathwater (he used that phrase exactly); in other words: with the stipulation that he can ALSO slay your beloved “late-80s” rap; for God hates ALL rap, old and new. (He charged me to stress that.) The only music he really gets into is the later Pop Country-Western songs, like that one that they play at the beginning of the televised presentation of U.S. football games…

[And the following is my original reply to the heavenly messenger – now that I read it over, I find it too involved, jokey and overwritten; I’m confident that I was right to cut it from the entry.]

I hope that God enjoys this pained look that is on my face while I give my answer. So the terms are that he’ll expunge either nothing or everything, so it’s either no rap or all rap? Ultimately, my answer is: “I do”; – for I agree with the LORD, at least on this one issue: I hate modern rap so much that I’m willing to cast the entire genre to hell, just to be free of it. In fact, the only way I’d be willing to save modern rap from this eternal punishment is if I, even I, were to beget a talented offspring who becomes a Rap Master just like my favorite emcees of eld, & then I inexplicably order some mobsters to slay the lad, right when he’s at the peak of his career; then I declare: “If you modern rappers pray to the ghost of my dead boy, MCB Jr., asking him to blot out all your rap flaws, just like I myself asked Yahweh God to blot out your discography, I’ll allow your albums to remain on the shelves forever; yet your overall style, your beats and flow and lyrics, will all be perfected by me, and they will therefore please my taste, for I will produce all your tracks myself, I’ll even edit the project, and my son will re-do all your vocals; then I’ll have one of our interns engineer it (I’ve always been an incompetent audio engineer—I prefer the more creative, artistic decisions; all that sonic fine-tuning, compression and equalization is boring grunt-work to me: thankless and menial; yet important nonetheless, which is why I delegate the task to one of our earthly host of sub­contractors); do I make myself clear?” —And after finishing my speech, lo, I gaze out over the multitudes and see a touching sight: All modern rappers are praying to the ghost of my departed son MCB Jr., so as to avoid a fate worse than blank itself. This solves the problem: we no longer need to let the LORD exterminate our classic rap, the golden oldies, just to mute the modern stuff. Plus now, with me producing it, all the modern stuff would genuinely sound good.

And by “good” I mean weird; maybe even kinda bad, yet interesting.

One last item:

I know I’ve written too much already, but I planned on telling you just a handful of words about one more topic, which will make this entry total exactly five hundred words, and have five topics with five paragraphs each. So here it is:

“Language historian. Desert island reading material vs. death row reading material… etc.” These outbursts surrounded by quotation marks were preserved in a note that I wrote to myself last week. Having unearthed the note from a mound of papers this morning (the papers, by the way, were all overdue bills), I am now determined to explicate its meaning:

On Sunday, I streamed an online video. The editor of a prestigious collection of texts from an ivy-league college was delivering a lecture on the history of language. I found it fascinating, but I yelled at the screen the whole time. You can ask my sweetheart, if you want a reliable witness to back up this claim: for she was there, she heard the lecturer’s measured statements and my frenzied criticisms. I was an armchair quarterback. I could pen a whole nother entry about what the guy said, and about where I agree and disagree with his views. He spoke a lot about how the forms of writing, for instance a type of messaging that dominated ancient China for an epoch, resemble modern day “online status updates”—he meant the short ones that are limited to 555 characters; not the limitless ones on that creepy-family network that everyone hates—and the man also spoke about how early writing, before the invention of the Greek alphabet, consisted of pictograms, which evoke our modern emoticons and emojis; and also how such early writing was done on clay tablets, which bring to mind these ultramodern touchscreens that we also christen tablets; and lastly how another ancient format that was utilized for lengthier instances of text was the paper scroll, or rolls of papyrus, which eventually got replaced by the invention of the codex, which we know today as the familiar physical BOOK, howbeit, now that computing devices have thrown their vast wet blanket on the imagination’s parade, we end up scrolling again, just like the old pre-book days, because electronic screens prayed to God and killed all the paper pages. But forget all that. Those concepts are for another entry. All I wanted to do is quickly explain the second sentence in my quoted note: the memo about “reading material”. After the scholar’s speech, he stuck around for a Q&A session (I explain what “Q&A” means in my Sat morn mull), and a lot of intelligent auditors offered stimulating comments. I couldn’t help thinking what Yours Truly would say, if I had attended the lecture in person. If I could summon the courage to approach the microphone, which was set up in the aisle that divided the audience, I wouldn’t berate the lecturer as I was doing throughout his speech in the comfort of my home; but I also wouldn’t fawn on him like the rest of the attendees did when they voiced their reactions. I would simply thank the man for his lecture and offer a personal question about reading:

What is your favorite type of literature, I mean, having studied all these obscure and antique texts, what do you like to read for pleasure—novels? essays? poetry? Do you prefer prose or verse? Who are your most loved writers? Is there a period of time whose literature you enjoy more than other eras? What would you yearn to read if you were trapped on a deserted isle? No, wait, don’t answer that last question: I have a better one. A desert island lures you to choose a text that will replenish the population of your mental world so as to palliate loneliness – that’s a fine motivation, but I’m curious about a slightly different angle; I’d like to know instead: What would you choose to read if you were on death row, in one of our glorious U.S. prisons, and your execution was scheduled to take place just a week from today! —See, that’s a much better dilemma, because now you have to think about which authors will fortify your soul to endure THE GREAT CHANGE.

So that’s what I’d ask the guy. And now I’m out of time, so I can’t do what I wanted, which is to end this entry with my own answers to the inquiry above. But I think I’ve revealed my bent elsewhere in the e-screens of this journal, so it shouldn’t be too hard to guess what I’d say to myself. Just get out your clay tablet and scroll. But I’ll still try to remember to copy that last paragraph on the back of a bill of service, so that I can prompt myself to reply to it in the future. That’ll be a good way to begin, yes: I can use it to jumpstart my next blog post. Plus it’ll leave this present entry with a cliffhanger ending. That, in turn, will help increase my readership. I won’t be surprised if I gain at least one new reader in the city of, say, Everly, after this. Area code 712. Or maybe Le Mars.