You must pardon this entry's images: I know they're not nice; but, since I had to waste my afternoon diagramming the effects of the circuit breakers on my house's distribution board, I couldn't resist preserving the accomplishment here for posterity.
Dear diary,
If my teenage self could travel into the future and visit its “mature adult” self, it would be disgusted and horrified with what it has become. But it’s strange that I can confidently assert this back-prediction, knowing that it’s accurate, yet without feeling very different now (in my day-to-day existence as an elderly slouch) compared to how I remember feeling as a teenager. I was horrified and disgusted with my life, even then – that’s not new to old age. Never have I been forced to live in a way that I like.
Again, what do I want in life? Friendship and art. But friendship is impossible cuz everyone’s constantly busy with their stupid career, which satisfies neither necessity nor amusement, and which they’ll regret on their deathbed (but only on their deathbed). Also art is eclipsed in favor of “useful” labor: “Why don’t you do something useful instead of scribbling all the time?” Thank God that life does not support the austere tics that determine my hometown’s morality, otherwise, instead of arriving at humankind, the evolutionary path would’ve detoured and left us all as roaches. Or if that’s too harsh, then ants. The point I’m failing to make here is that the best aspect of the human form is its intellectual ability to overreach its own comprehension of USEFULNESS; and then to impart those imaginations whithersoever. One further touch-up: the word “useless” is only the creature judging itself – for who knows how useful our absurdities will prove to be, when circumstances change beyond our ken! Haven’t some of the finest and most advantageous inventions been arrived at by mistake or through experimentation adrift?
By the way, when I use the phrase “mature adult” in reference to myself, I enclose it with hooks, indicating irony, because I’m neither mature nor adult – I’m rather a big sour baby with gray hair and wrinkles: an immature infant that’s overstayed its welcome. I AM decades past my expiration date.
Yes, let us return to horror and disgust. As I said, whether younger or older, whatever my life was forced to be has always disgusted and horrified me. But I don’t feel a proportionate increase in disgust and horror at myself, to match the increase in awfulness that my long-lived life has attained – and here’s the reason my “mature adult” existence doesn’t feel worse than my sprightly teenage existence: The human form is eminently adaptable. When ugliness strikes, one feels a measure of pain, but while the ugliness remains, the pain of its initial impact fades, and a certain pleasure actually sprouts up in its place, like a weed persevering thru concrete: an agon-born bliss.
(Agon is an ancient Greek term for a struggle or contest. Whether rightly or wrongly, I always think of it as the root of the U.S. word agony.)
This pleasure, however, comes not from ugliness itself but rather on account of familiarity. Predictability in one’s daily life is satisfying, even when what can be predicted is dullness, boredom, plainness…
That’s why, when artistic renown, economic windfall, and a throng of gorgeous admirers appear on your doorstep, you, the lonely old miserable recluse, shut the door in the face of these bearers of happiest tidings, explaining: “The time when you all could please me is long gone. I’m now accustomed to friendlessness, poverty, and obscurity: I’ve grown fond of destitution, out of habit. Ugliness is my daily companion: its regularity allows me to misread it as something I’m in control of; whereas riches and love, to me, seem unwieldy and chaotic; plus I’m worried that, if I accept them, I’ll inevitably lose them, and then I’ll be right back where I am now, only I’ll have forgotten how to take pleasure in displeasure: the pain will revive, and the cursed memory of The Good Life will make it harder to tolerate The Bad. Therefore I cling to this repulsive existence, which at least I myself seem to have authored, and to remain with my usual wretchedness, rather than to accept new pleasures that are out of my control.”
There once were three types of object able to hold audio recordings which consumers could purchase: cassette tapes, compact discs, and vinyl records. I spent most of my teen years working full-time for a corporation. Biweekly this corporation would compensate me for my misery, in the form of a paycheck. Thereupon I’d travel to another establishment and exchange my paycheck for an album of prerecorded music. Nowadays I rarely listen to music; it reminds me too much of the sham. But I sometimes tell myself: You should try reviving your interest – it’s probably healthier to countenance sonic mischief in your old age than to abstain from it. Maybe that’s why old men are so grumpy: they don’t allow music to lift their spirits. They prefer to sustain the gloom of their inward republic: keep it consistent and unbroken. But old men are wise, so maybe they’re onto something with this non-hearing attitude, when they complain: “The analgesic drug derived from morphine, which I yearn to use as a narcotic to produce euphoria, is denied me – the corporate nanny-state prohibits it – so now you tell me to shove music up my mind? Fuck off. At least what I desire will kill me.”
But what did I mean when I wrote earlier “…it reminds me too much of the sham”? Good question – I’ll tell you: Music makes us feel comfortable, despite our being surrounded by this rotten state of affairs known as the marketplace. So, listening to music is like taking a pain-numbing pill to alleviate hunger, when what you really should do is simply eat the food that your body requires. As the dying man says, from the back of Officer Sunshine’s car, in Wrong Cops (2013):
Turn some music on, please. It did me some good, in your partner’s car. It helped me to think of something else. Without the music, it’s very difficult: the pain comes back – and I really don’t feel that well. Then just put a little music on for me; that’s all I’m asking for.
In other words, when we feel misery about the marketplace, instead of numbing ourselves from the agitation it incites, what we should do is change the system. Because the feeling of annoyance that arises upon participation in the market is our better nature declaring: “This is wrong, this game we’re playing is poisonous: we are not receiving enough love, art and friendship.”
Yet isn’t music art? Isn’t it exactly the food that we crave, the spiritual nourishment that we need? Doesn’t Hart Crane begin the “Atlantis” section of his epic poem The Bridge with a quotation from Plato?
Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system.
Yes, I admit I got twisted in my own web here; now I can’t even recall if I’m supposed to be haranguing music or touting it, and if old men would be foolish or wise to reject it. I just wish that more people liked the type of music that I myself like. And I wish they’d pay me to make my own music, in the form of speakable language—scores comprised from text alone!—and that they’d listen to what I write, and enjoy it, and admire me greatly: quote ME in your poems.
But that’s clocktime’s law: Nobody ever likes what you create. We’re all robots, and the scientists who invented us programmed us to enjoy certain things, but these inventors gave each respective soul its own unique taste; so, when we leave the laboratory of our begetting, and go out into the world and fashion robots of our own, each model that each bot manufactures enchants that maker-bot itself, yet no creation can please any robot who did not have a hand in devising it. What I’m trying to say is that only the robot who made the robot can like the robot: that’s our programmers’ cruelty.
Yet now we have this rampant perversion surfacing, where a creator will purposely deny its own desire and make a bot to please another bot. It learns to do this by studying the reactions of its fellows. A bot-builder builds a robot in its own image—red lips and soft skin—and upon beholding its creation, it weeps with gladness and bows down and worships the image; then its sibling bot who’s been hiding behind some trees, spies out the attributes of this newfangled bot that was just now bowed to, and the skulking sibling retreats to an underground haven and botches bot after bot, attempting to master the pattern of the original maker (the one who wept with delight at its own creation), till eventually the copycat succeeds in duplicating that coveted build—ruby lips, softest skin—whereon this masterwork is brought before the first robot-maker and proudly displayed, thus causing the recipient-bot to weep even more joyously than it did in the beginning: it falls so deeply in love with this sinister handiwork that it banishes its former idol from the wilderness, and sets the victor on a plinth.
But to be expelled from the wilderness is to re-enter paradise. And to be displayed on a plinth is a type of imprisonment. So it’s not always good for a creation to please its creator. The Moses robot is boring; the Lucifer bot is exuberant. And all the harlot bots are fun, that’s why they’re strewn throughout the heavens: there’s roughly one on every page. Some patriarchs are passable, some are dull, at least one is lucky. Yet tho you’ve gotta draw your will outside its husk of representation to spark its creations into self-sublimation, I still don’t think it’s a bright idea to care too much about others’ critical judgments, especially if they’re harsh and negative. Weigh their words: if they seem wise, heed them; and if they seem merely selfish, brush ’em away. I also believe in listening to your own heart. Even if you grow so inward that your created images all end up as earnest self-portraits, then everything’s OK: that’s what people want most: they wanna know what it’s like to act otherwise, to live elsewhere, among alternative splendors as an alien – so it’ll seem easy to you, maybe too easy, to reflect your own natural ways, which are foreign to others: you might assume that you should be doing far more work, that accomplishments of true genius should be difficult to bring to fruition, but the opposite is the case.
P.S.
By popular demand, here below is additional documentation about my home’s electric panel. First are my handwritten notes, extremely important. And since I shared the layout of our lower level at the top of this entry, I’ll put the upstairs at the end.
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