I snapped a photo and didn't like it; then I snapped another photo to replace it, but I didn't like the replacement photo either; so I put the one bad pic inside the other, because two wrongs make a right.
Dear diary,
I used to think I might be an angel because I could never sleep past 5:30 a.m. But now I can sleep all the way till 4:00 a.m. So don’t ever let anyone convince you to give up all your dreams.
The proper time to go to sleep differs, depending on where you live. I live in the heartland, where all the new weapons of warfare are invented by teams of nice people who work in large glass buildings; and we also are the proud owners of all the private health insurance companies that bar the nation from being able to…
What I’m trying to get at is this: Since, here in my valley, the sun always sets at 8 p.m., the best time to go to bed is midnight. That way, you have a solid block of hours of evening darkness, to help you dread the coming day. Now I hope you can understand how awful—in fact, how evil—is the hour of 5 a.m. That is the hour when I write all my thoughts down to you. It’s maybe the worst moment in the history of space and time. I know this because I am an expert on desolation: I have had much experience and ample opportunity to study it.
Where am I going with all this? I don’t know. I can’t say I had any plan, when I began, other than to inform you of my (non)sleepytime habits. And today I awoke in agitation, as usually happens after visiting with my family. Yesterday was my mom’s birthday, so we went over and spent some time with her. I vowed not to say anything about it here in this journal, beyond the general fact of our visit. I need to just let the fact pass. Let it fade like all truth, into the realm of myth and legend.
Because her highest value is material success—the things that money can buy—AND YET she wants the blank of a “personal relationship” with a deity who denounces these very things ($, etc.), my mother lives in a state of perma-puzzlement. She’s always reading books that advertise themselves as showing the way to “reclaim your faith in God” and to make his lousy church appealing again. I see these books and think: If you’re studying how to reclaim your faith, then doesn’t that mean your faith is gone—or at least that you believe you’ve lost your faith? OK, then why not let faith go? Why try to retrieve it? Faith obviously didn’t want to live where you put it, so it hopped the fence and is now grazing in some greener field. Let it be. Don’t go chasing faith down and lassoing it and returning it to a dreary church-imprisonment. If church life is unappealing to you, why not abandon it? (I speak as the Devil.) Church is supposed to be voluntary—that’s one of the things they always say, with pride: The difference between us, the members of The True Church, compared to, say, any false bad cult, is that a cult will not let you leave: cults are compulsory, church is a choice. Of course, when they say this, they’re wrong, because there’s zero difference between a church and a cult: they’re synonymous terms; but the point is that the church THINKS it’s different, it presents itself as a better option, so one can take advantage of this gap in an otherwise airtight security and run far away: escape like faith did.
Mistaking Jesus for Orpheus. That’s another church blunder, at least among the moderns. Instead of letting Jesus be a prophet who wandered around the countryside provoking the pious to buddhize their Judaism, today’s churchgoers make Jesus their inner child’s invisible worldly tour-guide.
No, the second I say that, I want to take back my negative tone, because it’s good to have a friend for your inner child, especially if that friend’s unable to be seen. That’s not something to make fun of. I do the same thing, almost involuntarily: whenever I’m anxious about Impending Event X, over which I have no control, I plead mentally “Make this go well!” Who exactly am I addressing, when I beg like this? The answer ultimately is myself, but it’s easier to believe in one’s own power if you give it a mask, so I say I’m praying to Whitman. Or often to Kafka. —I guess my complaint with modern Christians, then, is that they misemploy the orphic duplicity: they should update the program of their superstition and give the Lord a superior disguise.
The other subject my bio-mother talked about is the luncheon that she enjoyed with a couple old friends. The mothers of my brother’s two comrades, from back in Woodgate, the village of our youth. My brother and I, when very young, lived in a small village on a hill, and we had two neighbors who became my brother’s friends—real, visible friends, not phantoms like Christ—and these friends lived in houses, and each child had a mother and a father; so what happened is that OUR parents became friends with THEIR parents. (I myself had no friends.) Our house was up on the top of a hill, and our friends’ two houses were down at the bottom of the hill, so if you were to spray-paint a dotted line on the path between them all, it would look like a triangle, with my family’s house occupying the apex—this is just the reality of the situation; the layout was governed by chance: I’m not trying to say that our house was better, just because it was built so much closer to heaven, or that the people our house contained were more promising artists—I can prove that wasn’t the case, because our parents lived with us. Anyway, like I was saying, my own father and mother became friends with the fathers and mothers of the friends of my brother; and sometime recently the three mothers all met for lunch. People meet to eat—that’s just a weird custom on this planet: don’t worry about it; it’s not too important.
So, yesterday, when we took my mom for a birthday walk around a fish pond in Eagan, she passed the time by relaying to us all the scandalous rumors and gossip from her reunion:
In short, everyone’s doing bad. Everyone’s miserable. We’re all disappointments. Her children are rotten, your children are rotten; so are mine. The experiment of human civilization has officially failed.
Seriously, it was just story after story of horrid conditions, hideous non-careers, spousal fights, life-crushing debt, animosity between children and parents, smug judgmentalism…
The word “unhappy” is not harsh enough to describe the state of mind of the average person, here in this country, this Land of the Free. That’s my impression.
Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are, there is she.
God himself voices that boast, in the Book of Job (39:30).
What is it that people want? What went wrong, that people don’t have what they want? Should people get what they want? What is this concept of deserving? How do you know if you deserve something? Is there a record book somewhere, that we can reference? “Bryan deserves a small, single-story shack in South America.” If that’s what it says in the hypothetical Book of Just Deserts, then, is my current life actionable, legally speaking? Where’s the court that will give me the justice I’m due, if the judge is a God who brags of making blood-sucking cockfighters?
Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die.
Wise advice from Job’s wife, also found in the Book of Job (2:9). Why don’t people give it a try? Why do we assume that it’s more profitable to praise God and live? Maybe cursing God and dying is the way to “win the game” – like guessing the correct answer in Charades. The clues are pantomimed by the world until…
The only secret people keep
Is Immortality.
That’s how Emily Dickinson ends poem 1748 (“The reticent volcano…”) and this is how I’ll end this journal confession:
How does an entity bring forth its opposite? Is augmentation an error or an aim? If a creature does not join with a separate-equal but reproduces itself with itself
…the sick-gray faces of onanists…
then the offspring will be vulnerable to the same tribulations that its parent (its former “self”) ultimately succumbed to. So the variation in kind that results from sexual reproduction is insurance against the extinction of the life form. (That short phrase quoted above, by the way, is from “I wander all night in my vision” [The Sleepers] by Walt Whitman.) The general form survives at the expense of the peculiarities of its respective individuals. But is my super-severe deviation from my own progenitors a bridge too far? My mother favors comfort and repose, which she attempts to secure by obeying authority; whereas I’m skeptical of authority and favor difficult pleasures, hard truths, creative energy, provocation, mental fight. As I established in the eternal recurrence above (how many times, how many lives, how many lifetimes) my mother sides with material riches against my preference for spirituality (imagination), and she craves societal respect while I salute the happy few (of Stendhal).
Why am I so anti my originator? Is this an accomplishment or a catastrophe? Life is generally adaptable, and humankind is an extreme instance: we’re so prone to adaptation that we’re practically shapeshifters. True descendants of our oceanic forefather Proteus. But why do we mimic this mutability so faithfully? Why can’t we lose this faith?
Stability and permanence: they’re the property of the skeleton, signifying death. The ever-living mind flames from one skull to the next via the fleshy, comely parts; and now by voice, language, perhaps thru mind itself. And is that all?
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