Blah blah who the heck cares

[EDITOR’S NOTE. Uncharacteristically I’m writing this introduction many months after the present entry was composed. I normally write this type of note at the same time as the entry; or, at the latest, maybe one day after the entry. But the text that follows was written in May 2018; and I’m typing this italicized note in August 2020, while proofreading all these entries for (physical) publication. My reason for breaking my own protocol like this is that I wanted to admit that the following composition is too cryptic. What happened is that my sweetheart and I attended a get-together at my brother’s wife’s sister’s house, and the occasion was to learn the sex of the baby that my brother & his wife were expecting. But then, after the event concluded, when I got home & began to recount what had transpired, I did so from a fantasy point of view, as if I myself was the one who was pregnant. I suppose the reason I did this is that I’m impatient when anyone else is the center of attention. So all the details of the entry refer to things that actually happened, like the breaking open of a piñata that contained a bunch of candies whose wrappers matched the color of the unborn babe’s gender (F.Y.I. they were BLUE, in my brother’s wife’s case) – that really happened; but my retelling warps the truth in my fancy’s favor. So you could call this “a false account based on real events”. I think the reason I coded everything so heavily is that it was too hard to face directly the fact that my brother was bringing a new life into the world while all I’m doing is fanning the fire of the mind.]

Dear diary,

What does the reader desire to read? That question is unanswerable until we specify an identity. So who is the reader? The reader is he to whom all datebooks flow: God – that’s the name pre-printed on the mailing address, when you finish your diary and pack it up and send it into the flames. It’s like a prayer, your diary. So what type of trash does God like to read? That would be easy to answer, if there were only one single God. Eloah wants to read about a pet rescue mission. But there’s not only eloah, there’s elohim, plural—the gods. So we have a much larger readership to please. And their tastes are diverse. One god likes purely imaginary constructs, or diary entries that read like vivid dreams; and another god only wants an accurate recount of one’s daily life—the things that happened in clocktime:

Slept well; fed the hogs; took a taxi to the office; wrote a tract proposing the replacement of all songbirds with unarmed drones; enjoyed a six-martini lunch; rode the ferryboat to the house of ill repute; returned home after sundown. —Bank balance: 16 lira.

These gods are all wrong. What the true God should want is a semi-accurate post that contains a few matters – not too heavy, not too light; just vaguely interesting. Thus the gods who chose the dreamy entry win. So I’ll try to half-do that.

Let’s say we went on a trip yesterday. Where’s a place that we’ve never visited but that everyone knows about? Minneapolis, Minnesota. OK, that’s where we went. What does it look like? what are its cultural submissions? how straight are its streets? Define the architecture, NOW.

Well, there’s only one street that leads to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and this road is straight and long, and it goes on forever. As far as the eye can see, into the horizon, this street continues, straight as an arrow-shot. And on either side of your buggy are New Gothic huts. They all have the same hammerbeam roofs; they all have fenced-in yards; and they all are spaced exactly twelve meters apart. This means that, if you stand with your back against the side of your own abode, and you extend your arm in the direction of your neighbor’s abode, and your arm is not a cent more than twelve meters in length, you will touch your neighbor’s abode with the tip of your finger.

What’s your neighbor’s name? Well, if by “your” you mean “my”, that question is answerable: My neighbor’s name is Tina. May we pay her a visit? Sure! In fact, she’s invited us over for a celebration. And what’s the occasion? Well, Tina got the results back from the doctor’s office—not her results but mine—I (Bryan) requested that she (Tina) intercept my medical results, because I wanted her to surprise me with their revelation. For I went to a routine checkup and the doctors discovered the gender of my unborn child, but I told them “Wait, don’t tell me! I want this news to be a surprise. Please write down the results on an index card and mail it to Tina, my next-door neighbor from Minneapolis, and she’ll build a piñata. Then we’ll invite all her family and friends, and we’ll fire up the grill and cook some guac-filled bratwursts, and everyone will solemnly aim their portable video-recorders at me while I swing a broomstick at the piñata, once Tina blindfolds me. And she’ll also spin me around to disorient me. And when I break open the piñata, various candies and confetti matching the color of my fetus will come tumbling out: pink for girl or blue for boy. And this pastime of candy extraction will serve as an apt illustration, since it approximates the process known as a caesarean section (a surgical operation for delivering a child by cutting through the wall of the mother’s abdomen).” For I Bryan recently got pregnant with a baby, by accident, after my trip to the house of ill fame (the one from my pseudo entry above, not the one that I held at arm’s length—that’s Tina’s abode), and the infant is gestating in my thigh, and there’s one in my forehead also, but I’m unaware of the latter—that’ll be a surprise extra, like an unlisted bonus track hidden at the end of a music album, when, sometime in the future, it bursts forth unexpectedly.

Nowadays most baby-gender piñatas are shaped like a question mark (“?”), signifying the fact that nobody knows the solution to the mystery of generation. But the reason that I chose Tina to be my neighbor is that she’s creative: she didn’t craft my piñata as the standard eroteme (that’s the technical term for the symbol that I referred to as a “question mark”, comprising a dot ’neath a curve), but instead she made it an exclamation point (“!”). My encyclopedia tells me that, in the printing world, the exclamation point can be called a screamer, a gasper, a slammer, or a startler. The only thing better than fashioning your baby-gender piñata in the shape of a startler, therefore, is combining the above ideas into a whackable interrobang (imagine a glyph that is a superimposition of the aforementioned marks: “!?”). But that’s enough pissing around with this technical crap – let’s play the song:

At the picnic, when you hear the noise “ding-ding-ding”, it means somebody’s tapping their spoon upon their schooner. Unlike elohim and eloah, “schooner” is not the English plural of “shoe”. Again, the source of wisdom says as follows: the copita, with its aroma-enhancing taper, is a type of sherry glass. And all spoons are metal. So when you hear the dinging, it signifies: Ding along with the sound, by tapping your own plastic spork on your own paper cup, until the din becomes deafening: this will cause the present uproar—not “the voice of the LORD God walking in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8) but the voices of the festivity’s guests enjoying private conversation—to die down, and all the visitants will turn their attention to the event’s keynote speaker, Bryan’s mom.

Now my mom approaches the podium. She is holding three pieces of paper. On these papers is contained her handwritten speech. She has prepared an address for this occasion and peppered it with quotations from Mister Rogers. (Fred McFeely Rogers was a TV star, musician, puppeteer, writer, producer, and Presbyterian minister.) And each sheet of her speech has been circumspectly bonded to a wedge of corkboard, so that it cannot blow away. For, suppose that Jehovah shows up, as he is known to do, on his mobile throne, within a whirlwind – that’s my mom’s greatest fear. No, I’m kidding – she just didn’t want her notes to get taken away by the summer breeze. Then she’d have to wing it: do an improvised show, ad hoc, extemporaneous: speak from her heart, the words of the spirit (Mark 13:11):

When they shall deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall say, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.

Thus, after a pillar of fire thunders down from out of the heavens and burns up her notes, my mom turns white as salt and begins like so:

Friends and family of Tina, I thank you for joining us today. But let us be clear about our reason for gathering. This occasion is not just another fertility rite, like Easter. Nor is it a remembrance of our escape from the slavery of capitalism, like the Passover holiday. We did not drive down that long straight road of equidistant huts simply to gorge on guac-brats and sip this top-rate sherry. We are here for something far more important than that. We are here to celebrate the unveiling of the sex of my only begotten son Bryan’s unborn imp. Now, when I speak of “unveiling the sex”, I do not mean this the same way that I do when speaking to a damsel of the night. I mean that we shall learn the gender of our redeemer, by way of this piñata. Note that Tina has handcrafted it in the shape of a shriek. Or the British slang known as Commonwealth Hackish might call it a pling. Anyway, what we’re gonna do now is have Bryan come up on stage – jump on up here, son. OK now Tina will blindfold Bryan with this here star-spangled banner. While she’s securing that, let me explain that traditionally our contestant should be handed a saber or cutlass, so that he may slash open the piñata; then, once its lifeblood spills out onto the battleground, we will be able to tell from its color what flavor the fetus is. If the hard-shell candies representing the gasper’s hemoglobin appear sky blue, like the expanse beneath my nemesis (Exodus 24:10 “And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness…”) this means the nude will look like David the Messiah, as carved by Michelangelo; whereas if the candies appear more rosy than the young dawn’s fingers in Homer’s Iliad, then the Messiah will not be a LORD like Jehovah Elohim but a LADY like Lady Macbeth, who, in Act 1 Scene V of her play, gestures unambiguously while praying to the Spirits: “unsex me here!” But that was already elucidated pithily above, in this blog that contains us, where my own son wrote “pink for girl, blue for boy”—I just wanted to stress that this would be the normal outcome for normal whackers of normal baby-gender piñatas, so as to cast into high relief the abnormal nature of my lone begotten, for, when Bryan eviscerates his oracle, the guts will glow green. And what sex is green? Toxic waste? Nuclear arsenal? NO: cash money; hence the term greenbacks. This babe is born rich: it gets whatever gender it wants. But we’ll substitute a handgun for a saber, once Tina gets that blindfold secure, to speed up the proceedings. (We’re running short on time, and we’ve still got a lot of ad space left to hawk.)

Thus ends my biological mother’s impromptu speech.

So, positioning me in front of the piñata, they spin me around and thrust a machine gun in my arms. I cradle the object, not knowing what it is, and give it a squeeze, thus causing it to project a smidgen of bullets, while the dinner guests scream: “Wrong way! the piñata’s BEHIND you!—aim the opposite direction!” So I wobble around westward and hug the gun again, and it rattles off another round of ammo. This time a shell lodges into the piñata’s heart, and green slime trickles out of the wound.

This means that my baby will be neither male nor non-male but rather malic, or male-ish; so, in its birth certificate’s “gender” blank, we inscribe demiurge (a being responsible for the creation of the universe, in particular); as Jesus says:

When deceased souls enter the resurrection, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. (Matthew 22:30)

But why make all this fuss over the sex of a demon? Because we must find out which style of muzzle to knit it. No, I’m joking again: The real reason I made so much limeade out of my gender dispenser is that I got carried away. I actually intended to write an entry about offering help to stray animals; because there were supposed to be two dogs at Tina’s picnic, and I had planned to ask her about them, and she would have answered that she found the poor creatures wandering the streets of Minneapolis: they had been abused and abandoned; now they were drenched in rainwater, homeless, scared, wasted and worn, both sleeping in and smelling of the sewer. So she rescued the beasts from this fate: she gave them a home. After shampooing their mangy coats, she mended their injuries; she fed them mutton... in short, she nursed them back to health. She even trimmed their claws. So I was going to react to this by saying that I am happy to know about such rescue missions: it is worthwhile to save even one stray animal from danger. Yet I have a heart for the entire kingdom, so I can’t help but think of all the other lost beings out there. After rescuing these two—who you’ve named Skripper and Chow-Chow—we should turn right around and go back out to the streets of Minneapolis and keep scouring the landscape. Hold high the lantern; keep an eye out for shivering poodles. Over the course of a month, we locate ninety-seven more strays. We take them in, heal them, pet them, water them; then we billet them in Tina’s backyard. Now there’s ninety-nine dogs who’ve been rescued from the terrors of owner·less·ness.

Let’s say that some tech genius invents a two-way microphone, like the kind that you see in old sci-fi films, that can translate dog growls into man murmurs, and man murmurs into grammatically correct dog growls. So we ask: “G-r-r-r, yip, yip, yip?” And our utterance gets broadcast to the congregation as follows: “It was bad for ye aforetime, when ye were barely scraping by, living in the horrific slums of Minneapolis; but I wonder: is your life better now; are ye happier here in Tina’s Canine Sanctuary?” And the congregation answers as one and says: “Bark!” Then three individual members stand on their hind legs and growl to us more specifically:

“I feel as though I am at Disney Land.”
—Petrushka, rescued dog #17

“I feel as though I am at Disney World.”
—Randy, rescued dog #20

“I feel as though I am at Euro Disney Resort.”
—Teeny, rescued dog #29 and #54
  (Teeny escaped and had to be re-rescued)

Here’s my point: Even tho ninety-nine dogs, which is to say, all dogs in the planisphere except one, have been saved from this hell-on-earth known as Minneapolis, Minnesota, and securely lodged in Tina’s Dog Haven, my heart STILL cannot relax: my heart will not desist from diastoling and systoling: NO: my heart keeps beating the drum of RESCUE MISSION: in other words, my heart will yearn to save that single holdout. I will never feel happy until I know that ABSOLUTELY ALL dogs are accounted for.

For, if even one canine remains in the outer darkness, beyond the bound of our Backyard Sanctum, then some quantity of sheep may end up shorn of their sheepdog. And what is a sheepdog? A dog trained to herd sheep. To herd – that is: TO FRIGHTEN. Deprived of such an affront, the sheep may prove fearless. Also, according to U.S. English, the word “dog” is roughly the backwards spelling of “god”. And note as well: there’s no such thing as “goat-dogs”. As Jesus saith [Matt. 25:31-46]:

The Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory. And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, “Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

And he shall say also unto them on the left hand, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”

And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

P.S.
(a closing prayer)

For this entry’s postscript, I will compose a closing prayer:

Dear God, you eavesdrop on everything that I do; you can even view the private contents of my computer; so you know that I’ve been continually re-using a certain word-processor file when I type up my entries, including the present one, and that this file contains a note-to-self that I always ignore because I’m never in the mood to fulfill it. So I ask you now: Please give me the wisdom to continue neglecting this self-note; grant me the perseverance to avoid addressing it, in upcoming entries. If you fail to strengthen my resolve, so that I end up writing about these things, and the writing proves lackluster, the fault will be yours, not mine. Now here is the note – I only copy it so that I can delete it from my hard drive:

Gay dude’s reaction to news personality’s bygone remarks: Relate to fave rap (from the id) as role-playing similar to late-night comedians’ parodying of Prez Tee Rump.