Dear diary,
Yesterday proved hectic. My sweetheart and I woke at our normal time; we ate our normal breakfast; but just after I walked over to the bookshelf to grab the volumes that we routinely read together, my sweetheart yelled “Halt!” – I turned around and saw that she was poised on the click-clack (that’s an item of furniture: it’s like a futon on steroids) with her laptop computer open; one of her hands was using the touchpad to navigate a used-car website, and her other hand was aiming a pistol my way: with a nod toward the screen, she clicked the hammer and said “Don’t make a move—I think I found a good purchase.”
My sweetheart didn’t actually threaten me with a gun; I’m just trying to make our life sound interesting. What really happened is that she found an automobile that she wanted to buy. She’s been scrutinizing the market for more than a year now, on the lookout for the perfect vehicle to fit her needs; and yesterday she found it. It was a decent price, and the seller’s lot was nearby. We had enough money in the bank, and our current car—the silver hatchback with hail damage and shabby interior—has been something we’ve wanted to transcend since we acquired it. The car that she owned before that was a silver sedan. Or rather a coupe: “an enclosed carriage for two passengers and a driver.” (Note that all our ex cars are always silver.) We liked that old coupe, but it broke; and we had no backup; plus the repair would cost as much as the vehicle’s total worth. This was a daunting situation. We had to ask ourselves: Should we pay to revive this dead motor-coach, knowing that we’re gambling our very life to do so, and, once the thing’s fixed, we’ll probably never be happy again; OR should we rush out and try to buy a sub-par vehicle, as a temporary replacement, to keep us going until we can find something better?
I realize I’ve stumbled into lamenting the flaws of our past models instead of trumpeting our glorious futurwagen. Please bear with me. (What I tried to do there is take the word volkswagen and swap volks for futur. You guessed it: I’m a U.S. monoglot.)
So we opted to fork out seven billion dollars on the repair job, plus then we forked out another ten billion on a used hatchback. What I’m saying is that we chose to take BOTH paths, to savor all evil. So, for a spell, we owned two dud cars—one sick and one ugly—and we had to shuffle them in and out of the street and other parking lots always after snowfall, so that the plows could do their duty. But eventually we sold the repaired, eldest flop to a punk teen who was desperate for any form of operational transport; and yesterday we traded in the hatchback and bought a new car. And by new I mean used. But at least it’s not silver. When purchasing motor-coaches secondhand, you are denied the privilege of choosing the color of the carriage. But you may rejoice that its exterior is different from what you’re accustomed to. This new car’s bright white. And our other two were powered by gasoline only, whereas this latest one is what they call a “hybrid”—that is, it guzzles not just gas but also batteries. And it has solar panels on the sunroof. And there are other features that my sweetheart says she fancies—she was telling me all the specifics last night, but I forgot most of the stuff: I don’t care about cars. I’m just glad that my helpmate finally has a sturdier and trustworthy…
But, again, we used up all our savings. Now our account is drained: If you open up the bank vault that has our name on it, you’d probably see an old apple on the floor, and maybe a hair clip and a couple pennies and some dusty spiderwebs. And one tumbleweed. All the gold ingots got hauled away. Where are they now? I guess they’re on a pontoon heading to Burnsville. (That’s the name of the place where the sales transaction occurred; it’s very near Eagan, where we live; our cities are neighbors, in fact: there’s no ocean separating us—I just like the thought of treasures afloat on the wine-dark sea.) But anyway, the point is that, now, as of this day, we too are officially among the countless citizens of America that cannot afford the inevitable emergency. (All aspects of life, from comic to tragic, sport a price tag, under capitalism.) And I bet that the market will tank again within days, the bubble will burst: but this crash will not result merely in the loss of security for 99% of the populace, in the form of wages being frozen and pensions being zeroed and families being evicted from their homes (while the banks receive socialized redistribution, as they rob from the poor and give to the rich, in true anti-communist style), no! it’ll be MUCH worse: now we’ll not be able even to withdraw what little cash we have from our ATMs (Automated Teller Machines: devices that perform banking services when an account holder inserts a plastic card)!!!
But this probability doesn’t alarm us at all, because now that we’ve spent our last dime on a hand-me-down car, my sweetheart and I have nothing to lose. Even if the market fails to crash, our ATM will dispense only bubblegum.
And I mean those hard rectangular pinkish strips of gum that, in bygone days, were found in packages of baseball cards. Very tricky to chew. (Hey, wow: did you know that they still sell baseball cards!? I just checked and found that there exists an up-to-date website for the sports-card company that I remembered from my childhood: you can order packs of their 2018 product online. I didn’t think that anyone even played baseball anymore.)
Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Those are the words of Jesus, according to Matthew (6:21). I feel like I should say a lot more about the costly earthly item that we snared, which rust can corrupt, and which thieves might break through to steal (every morning now I tease my sweetheart, when she wakes up – I point out the window and say: Oh no, someone stole your car!); but I only want to talk about heavenly things from now on. I should let this exhausted entry end itself; and, if, afterwards, I still feel the urge to strike out in another direction, then I’ll start a fresh post to make up for this one’s shortcomings.
But the present entry still feels like it’s missing a certain something. Maybe I’ll try adding a quote from a book, and then sharing another old rap demo. This way, at least it’ll be like the reader received a Mystery Bag, whose contents are too varied to register their respective mediocrities. Sound good? Alright, since we’ve reached an agreement, let us implement our exit strategy:
Below is a quote from the volume that, all the while, has been sitting here before me on the table. (It is a formica table. Green is its color.) Some words of Ovsyanikov to his nephew Mitya, from a story by Turgenev:
This Garpenchenko – may the Lord forgive me – is a sharper: he buys up bills of exchange, and lends out money at interest: he acquires properties under the hammer . . . What ill wind brought him to our part of the world, I’d like to know? Oh, I’ve had enough of these birds of passage!
I like this because it shows that the type of financial speculation that has choked my own home country is not only known but detested in faraway lands.
Now I’ll lock the rap track in the postscript, so it can’t molest the main text and spawn blog babies.
P.S.
Here’s another stupid demo track from the album that my childhood friend produced for me on his then-new computer. Please remember (as I said in my last rap-disclaimer) that I find such computerized "digital" backgrounds and beats cheap and silly, so I approached this project with a semi-jokey attitude. However, everything I make is cheap and silly, so this offering is truly very serious.
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