Dear diary,
I’ve been told that children are miracles from God; that when a host is impregnated by the spermatozoa, it is a miracle in action: God has blessed this host with the task of bringing forth life. To be blessed with a task – that almost sounds like a jest, or like something a mobster would say to an underling: “I’m gonna favor you with the job of delivering this package.” Anyway, it’s not the first thing I’d pray to be favored with: a chore.
But apparently kids, or at least human babies, are miracles. They’re not problems, not dreams averted, not mistakes: they’re gifts from God. So now that we’ve established how precious little children are, let me tell you what to do with them once you’re burdened with their presence. It is very important to judge the little children. So the first thing a caretaker should do is send the child to school. The teachers will judge your child – teachers are trustworthy judges – they will discipline the creature, lest it go awry. (I myself went awry, and let me tell you: it’s not pragmatic.) And this is how a teacher should perform the judgment:
After an amount of learnable matter has been spewed, you should administer a test. Write down on a paper umpteen questions about what you tried to teach, and command the child to inscribe answers. Before the child dirties the test, however, you should photocopy the paper that contains these questions, so that you can use it to trap as many other kids as possible.
Look out over the vast expanse of your classroom: There must be at least a million children out there; and all are your students. One million miracles. Now that they’ve completed their tests and handed them back to you their teacher, it’s time to judge them. Take each paper, hold the test before your face. Look at the answers that the child has given; focus your hatred. Now give them a score. Use the letters “A” thru “F” to stand for your judgment. “A” is a shrug; “B” is less so; “C” is worse than “B”; and “D” is plain bad. Lastly, “F” means failure: you are stupid, unteachable; nothing can redeem you in the eyes of your creator – altho you were fashioned a miracle, your actions have proved that you are lower than . . .
I forgot the letter “E”, which comes between “D” and “F”. The reason I forgot this is that I did not forget it: it simply is not used in our system of judging. Now I’ll switch my tone to one more personal:
This is actually the whole reason I brought you here, to this point in the entry: I wanted to tell you about the alphabetical judgment scale that was used in my OWN elementary school. They didn’t employ the spectrum “A thru D plus F” but instead “E, V, S, and N” – just these four letters; no mark for failure:
The “E” meant “Excellent”; the “V” meant “Very good”; the “S” meant “Satisfactory”; and the “N” meant “Needs improvement”. I’m not joking about this: it all really happened. Isn’t it fascinating?
My memory of this strange technique of child-ranking was triggered by one sentence that I wrote in yesterday’s post, down towards the bottom of the entry, in the “Bonus” section, before the first Food List: there, I explain the three square meals that I’m accustomed to eating daily, and I offer a parenthetical judgment about each dish: For the sake of the present subject, I want to focus on my suppertime meal, “a bean burrito with brown rice” – I rated this as “satisfactory” (had I been using the more traditional method, it would have received a “C–” or “D+”).
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Why not begin to drink alcohol in the morning and continue all the rest of the day? This is the issue that has plagued humankind since the Blank Age. The official answer is that nonstop consumption of alcohol will not make you a productive citizen. But not making one a productive citizen is different from barring one from becoming etc. So does it bar one from X? No, it does not. And consider: Who among the sober classes (that is: Who among the non-winebibbers) is a productive citizen? Is anyone productive nowadays? The answer is no: not a soul is productive, any damn way. Everyone’s either slave-wage labor, or in debt up to their eyeballs, or rotting in jail. So why hasn’t the entire population become tosspots?
We’re all victims of hope. It’s the same reason we’ll never come together, all of us servants (the ruled, as opposed to the rulers… the “have-nots”, not the “haves”) – I say, it’s the same reason we’ll never sufficiently organize ourselves to achieve that grand event of exodus (by which I mean mass suicide but only half-jokingly) that the cult leaders everywhere have been trying to hard-sell us. We think: Well it’s dismal, and we’re all in full despair: the doom is inescapable – yet, even as we think this, HOPE springs up, like a beam of light thru a hairline crack in a prison cell, inexplicably. Why does this happen? Because, as children are miracles, so HOPE is a scourge from God. Some act we committed in the divine spheres, some crime before our birth into physicality, caused us all to be in need of (but apparently incapable of) enacting this lesson: Say NO to improbable potential and demand bliss NOW.
Stop saying, “I shouldn’t complain, because things could be worse – look how bad my neighbors have it, after all.” Just because the global south is suffering doesn’t mean that everyone else should cap their amenities at half-passable: We should help both us AND them. Your friend is sobbing in sorrow while you’re simply bored – the answer is not to frown a little more, no: you should strive, contrariwise, to lasso happiness: for its own sake, to improve thyself, and to share the treasure – now your friend can be happy as well. If this seems naïve and all-too simplistic, that’s because it is. I’m just trying to justify stealing more gems from your land.
Why do green plants grow leaves and take their energy from the sun? Why don’t plants wise up and learn to use combustible fuels like gasoline to meet their needs? This is why you’ll never see a plant holding a garden hose over its head to water itself. A progressive idiot will think (wrongly) that he is aiding a plant by positioning the plant near sunlight, say, on a windowsill; whereas a truly wise party-member will endeavor (quite ingeniously) to teach that plant how to manufacture its own plastic bottles, so that it can capture the sunlight and sell it for huge profits. Then rape its neighbors but don’t abort the fetus; let the fetus join the army. War will dispose of the fetus properly. Only God should terminate His miracles, the way that He deems just: via manmade conflict.
Sorry, this is low. I take the whole thing back. All I’m doing by arguing in this ironic way is mirroring the smugness of the preachers that I dislike.
And maybe I’m wrong about this, for I don’t believe that grammar is my strong suit, but the last few words of the last sentence of the paragraph above are an example of the importance of distinguishing “that” from “who” in English usage: for I wrote “the smugness of the preachers THAT I dislike”; so the term “that” refers to “the smugness”, showing that I hate the sin, not the sinner—for if I hated the sinner, I would’ve used the term “who”, like so: “the smugness of the preachers WHO I dislike”. (As I understand it, the word “who” can only refer to people, such as preachers and U.S. corporations, not non-living parasites like embryos.)
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When the evil days come . . . they shall be afraid of that which is high (Ecclesiastes 12:1,5)
Imagine walking on a tightrope between two skyscrapers: You might feel a fear of heights. Now imagine me myself, the author of this blog post, walking outside of my front door: I feel a fear of the world. Everything scares me, even ice cream.
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Paul Mariani’s Life of Wallace Stevens has transfixed me. In my last few entries here, I’ve talked about buying it and reading it. Now I’ve worked my way to the point just before Stevens published his first volume of poetry – he was in his early forties. That seems old to me. That’s how old I am now, and I feel it’s too late for me to publish my first book of poems. But it’s strange, because I find it easy to relate to all the details about his outlook, his inner world, his whole attitude towards life – I feel like this could be my own biography, except that I’m not a traveling lawyer for an insurance company who composes verse in his free-time but rather an expriest who vomits lukewarm prose.
As for literature, he didn’t really much care about that these days. After all, what was there to say?
But I care very much. But I have nothing to say. But I keep talking.
I need to set Wallace Stevens aside tho, or else he’ll dominate this whole valentine. The other book I’m reading right now is The New Human Rights Movement by Peter Joseph. I only recently discovered Joseph – I stumbled upon an essay of his which moved me (in the altruism department not aesthetics) more than anything has moved me in years; so I’ve been checking out all the stuff that he’s produced. Here’s a quote from his book (I’ll link the asterisks to the sources that are given in the endnotes):
. . . the ratio of empty homes to homeless people is troubling to think about. . . . in the US the ratio is six empty houses to one homeless person. [*] In the UK alone, there are ten empty houses for every homeless family. [*]
Like facts about nuclear arsenal or climate chaos, it’s hard to read this kind of stuff: the knowledge leaves me indignant as well as acutely aware of my powerlessness. But I keep at it, supposing that it’s good to strengthen my resolve and my stance about such issues, in case there’s ever a chance to ACT.
*
It’s very windy today. I can hear a constant whooshing thru the oven’s overhead fan-vent. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, a place I don’t normally write at; so the combination of the strangeness of my environs—I might as well be floating in a green pool on Mars—and the persistent, disturbing wind noise—directed by David Lynch—may be the reason this entry feels atypical and nonstandard. (I normally craft my entries to feel typical and standard.)
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
as Shelley says, in his “Ode to the West Wind” (tho mine’s from the south). And now I’m also recalling a brief poem by Stevens which will fit here—“To the Roaring Wind”—it’s very short; here’s it is in its entirety:
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
The last bit of news worthy of reporting to you today is that, when my sweetheart and I went for a walk thru the nearby woods, the mud-path was wholly overrun with creatures like gnats – or midges or whiteflies or aphids or mealybugs – I don’t know what they were, but there were THICK swarms of ’em, so that eventually we could barely even keep our eyes open to see where we were stepping… and I kept worrying that I’d breathe the bugs into my lungs; and that they’d lay eggs in my hair, which they kept divebombing. Just before we died, I exclaimed “Yuck!—they’re like infant maggots!” but then I recalled that maggots ARE infants: they’re the larvae of flies – so, feeling ashamed for choosing something so doltish to serve as my Famous Last Words, I quickly added: “Excuse me; I take that back.” Then I expired and they ate my corpse. But, if you think about it, that’s pretty disgusting too, actually—I mean, my original blunder: baby babies. Especially baby bug babies. Well, thanks for listening!
P.S.
At the end of each blog post, my habit is to share a rap track that I made long ago. So here’s a rap track that I made long ago. (I hope someday to break this habit.)
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