Dear diary,
God damn, I can’t even leave my apartment complex for half an hour without the cops throwing a big party. Yesterday we (my sweetheart and I) were restless, having been cooped up inside our living room for the entire morning, on account of the freezing weather; then, at a certain point, we’d had enough of this cowardly avoidance: we decided to brave the dangerous cold and to go for a walk; but all the nearby paths of travel, from our driveway to the sidewalks and even the main road, were iced over, because the private plow company that takes care of this area is lazy and incompetent: that’s why we had to drive our snow-white hybrid a little ways down the street, just in order to be able to step our feet on the level, dry ground without slipping and falling. For when you slip on the ice, you fall on your head; and when you fall on your head, your cranium breaks: this allows your brains to escape, which is good for your brains but bad for the rest of the body. The brain is always trying to exit the skull, which is like its jail cell; but it’s too stupid to know how much it NEEDS the other physical aspects of its collective, like the backbone, claws, and epidermis.
So anyway, we drove to the nearest park by car; then we got out and stood upon our own human legs. We walked around a lake, which was frozen. Part of the snow on its surface was disfigured by tracks: some creature had waddled back and forth in zigzag fashion, many times. So, to strike up a conversation, I asked my sweetheart: “What do you think made those tracks over there?” And my sweetheart answered, “I don’t know.” And I said, “The answer is: a duck.”
Then a little later in our walk, just before we came to the woods, we noticed a more severe disfiguration in the snowbank alongside the path; so I said: “And what do you think made those big tracks over there?” And my sweetheart answered, “It looks like some little kids were playing in the snow.” And I said, “Wrong. Again, the answer is: a duck.” And my sweetheart said, “But the tracks are far too big to have been made by a duck.” And I said, “It was a massive duck, indulging in a fit of euphoria.”
Then we arrived back at our snow-white hybrid, and we drove home.
Now, here is something that you need to know about the location of our home: We live at the end of a street—it’s not really a cul-de-sac but rather a short strip of dead road that has no purpose but to lead into our apartment complex. So as we were approaching our dead-alley impasse, we noticed the entire place was congested with huge police vehicles, all militarized and menacing. Their presence bled into the common drive and looked like it was blocking the way to the complex; so my sweetheart slowed the car down and said: “What should I do?” And since she was addressing me with her question, I answered: “Just keep going; observe the stop signs and drive like normal, into our garage if you can—they’ll obstruct you if they don’t want you to pass, believe me: they won’t be too shy to address a music teacher in an electric hybrid.”
And just as I said this, all the hulking vehicles of the police squad began to disburse; they poured out into the main roads, helter-skelter, without using their blinkers or stopping for either of the two stop signs.
So that’s my scary story about the cops. I wish its ending were a little more melodramatic; but, after all the above, we simply entered our house in safety. I did, however, spend the rest of the day feeling acutely paranoid.
“Here there was a space between the lines, as though the old man had put down his pen to think a while.”
—from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
(Part 2, Chapter X; translated by Francis Steegmuller)
Thot:
Why is whipping outdated? I mean, with regard to the way that employers treat their employees? For that matter, why do we still use those terms “employer” and “employee”? This is propaganda on behalf of the manager class. Let’s get real: what we actually have are masters and slaves. Look into history: say, ancient Egyptian times—that’s always a nice place to start: If you’re a taskmaster, you’re going to incentivize your workforce with a whip. But I suppose that nowadays, the master class doesn’t want to have to do so much moving about—that is, physical exercise—for whipping is hard work: you have to lift that thing high, to get enough power so that it stings its recipient, and the motion of whipping itself, thrusting the arm down rapidly, is a cardiovascular workout. But I’d think that our nation is advanced enough to invent robotic guards to do our masters’ whipping for them. Gas-powered motivators.
This topic was on my mind because I sympathize with labor—I mean the laboring class—and in my impatience with the glacier-slow pace of ethical progress, I deem that not enough people care about safe conditions or fair compensation for modern workers. So my mind races to make an absurd statement about slave-whipping, in hopes of waking up the present time (as if the present time is listening – I wish I could get it through my thick skull that nobody cares): I think, if the general populace considers it important to treat laborers humanely, then maybe they’ll be shocked into caring if we present them with the logical conclusion of their aloofness.
I hate that phrase “logical conclusion” – I also hate the idea of a “slippery slope”. I dislike arguments & debates: they’re all so stuffy.
The loss of money is a type of pain. Or is it? What’s worse: (A) having to work hard to “put food on the table” while still remaining malnourished and on the verge of homelessness; or (B) having a high wage and the best benefits plus a guaranteed pension for early retirement, but occasionally having to endure being punched by your boss?
One of my favorite movies is Stroszek (1977) directed by Werner Herzog. In the beginning of the tale, its protagonist Bruno lives in Europe; he suffers beatings from some local thugs: they punch him and kick him. So he and a couple friends decide to migrate to America. They end up in the U.S., in the state of Wisconsin. (That’s my own birthplace, incidentally.) Bruno gets a loan from the bank and purchases a trailer home. One of his friends who makes up his little family is the lovely woman Eva—she contributes to paying for the trailer, for food, etc., by taking local jobs. However, no matter how hard they all try, they can’t quite “make ends meet”. So, to earn extra cash, Eva engages in less-reputable employment. Meanwhile, the bank’s representative pays repeated visits to Bruno. It gets to the point where the bank threatens to repossess the trailer. (I’m giving all this setup just to frame a small quote from the film: only two lines of dialogue – I never claimed to be an efficient writer.) Eventually Bruno can’t take any more; this money-centered existence has destroyed his dream of America: he complains at length, bitterly: he even regrets leaving Europe. At this point, his friend Eva tries to remind him of the good side of the U.S.—now here’s the brief dialogue that I wanted to share:
EVA: “But no one kicks you here, Bruno.”
BRUNO: “Not physically – here they do it spiritually.”
I think that Bruno’s comeback is justified. Yet, in the span since the date when the film was released, which (as I’ve told you a thousand times) happens to be the year that I was born, the U.S. has significantly increased the amount of its contributions to the realm of physical harm.
But it bores me when I reach this point in my claptrap: carping about the corruption of my country. There have been many countries and much corruption over the ages, and we’re all going to die someday no matter what; so why would future people want to read about how bad the U.S. was when Bryan was alive? They don’t care about that, do they? More than 20,000 eras beyond the present, the U.S. will either be still existing or fallen. If fallen, then no one will be interested in anything that arose out of this place except the weird poetry that we wrote. And if still in existence after so many generations, then the U.S. will either be bad, far worse, or a bit better. None of these gradations will sway the future to care one way or another about the country’s past antics, because…
Pretend I said a lot of stuff about marketing, spin, public relations, patriotism, etc.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I always hated that adage. But I see the wisdom in it. Or maybe it’s not wisdom but some sort of obviously pragmatic advantage that appeals to the coward in me.
Near the end of my entry where I tell about my trip to renew my driving license, my sweetheart and I volley back and forth a few quotations, which all stem from the same source: Roger Shattuck’s introduction to the Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. It’s a good intro: it still sticks in my mind. Anyway, talking about my anti-violence stance and about desiring to join the “unbeatables” even if they’re wrong, I’m reminded of Apollinaire’s attitude toward war: he seems half naive, half healthy to me—I wonder if he could guide me to change my perspective. Apparently Apollinaire loved & respected uniforms: he highly esteemed sporting official garb. Maybe I can use this as a point of access: I can understand caring for costumes. Taking pride in one’s uniform, yes. Maybe I can learn to love war after all.
. . . in 1914 Apollinaire was at the peak of his career—the man who had led Bohemian Paris from the Montmartre to the Montparnasse and who directed the movements of the avant-garde. When the war broke out, he could as an Italian citizen have continued his work undisturbed. However, he decided to become a French citizen and he volunteered for service as soon as possible.
During the war, Apollinaire trained and fought with the enthusiasm of a convert and with his own natural ability to enjoy any rôle in life. He began in the artillery and two years later he became, upon his own request, a lieutenant with the infantry at the front. During all this period he continued to write, reproducing on gelatin a sheaf of verse while he was still in the trenches. In March, 1916, he was wounded in the head by a shell fragment while reading a new issue of the Mercure de France. Two operations on his skull were required to return to him the full use of his limbs, but he recovered soon and was proud of the impressive bandage around his head.
I quote this only as a first step in attempting to fulfill my whim from a note-to-self that I wrote on a scrap of paper and have been using as a bookmark: “Change mind from anti-war to pro-war (why not?)”
P.S.
Below is the next track from my mini-demo album called Ten Bowls. As I explained earlier, this more-than-a-decade-old project was just an easy way to test the digital recording equipment that my producer-friend handed down to me.
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