Dendrophobia, etc.

Dear diary,

It’s true: In this life lie hid moe thousand deaths. (That’s a thot from one of my favorite poems, spoken by the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.) Every time you change your mind, it’s a type of dying. So I’ve died plenty, because I’m always changing my mind. My complexion shifts to strange effects, after the moon. (Another phrase from the same place.) But the one thing that remains constant in me, despite all the mental morphings that are mini-demises, is that I wish I were elsewhere.

Whether things are good or bad, going well or poorly, I always wish I were somewhere (anywhere) else. I can’t stand where I am. I do not like what is. And the reason I want to escape from even the finest moments of life is this: APPREHENSION taints them. If we think of every episode as a meal, then fear is a drop of poison added to all. If I’m visiting a beautiful country and staying in a first-rate penthouse with gorgeous companions, I cannot lose myself in this splendor, because I think: Perchance an illness strikes me unexpectedly! And this worry itself IS the toxin that it aims to avoid. And it taunts me by declaring not “Et in Arcadia ego” but: “Especially in paradise I exist.” Mine evil thrives on pleasure, like termites on wood; it devours bliss to remain in the ascendant.

So I can’t enjoy a goddamned thing in this world. And here I am, whining to you about it. Now what. Maybe I’ll try to expire up into a better attitude.

But my first thought is apprehensive, as usual. But I’ll note it down anyway:

The offer that we made on the second ugly house, which I told you about in my last entry, got accepted. So I’m half-glad about that. But I prefer to look at my glass as half-depressed; therefore I’ll focus on only the awful aspects:

I’m anxious about this place’s yard (or lack thereof): for I’m going to inherit umpteen giant dead trees. So now I have to learn how to chop them down properly, so that they land on all the nearby houses.

“This is not how we’re gonna fit in with the neighbors. Why’d you do that?”

“Shut up, mommy. Everything is fine; no one saw anything. Fate wanted this, not me.”

That’s an exchange between Officer Duke and his mother, from the film Wrong Cops (2013). Moments earlier, Duke had discharged his firearm and accidentally hit a bystander, while aiming at the teen who was escaping from his impromptu Lesson on Good Music. (Spoiler alert.)

So, yeah, I’m worried that I’ll introduce myself to the neighborhood by damaging everyone’s houses. The reason I’m against letting the trees remain standing is that I fear their roots will invade my home’s basement. For roots are like the tentacles of a cephalopod, thrashing in ultra-slow motion underground, as tho dirt were firm water.

“But if the trees are dead,” you argue, “then their appendages can’t attack.”

Well the real estate agent’s son, who accompanied us on our viewing of the house in question, informed us that he possesses a degree in xylology (from the ancient Greek term for wood-master), and his expert opinion is that, although these trees are leafless and thus appear dead, the look of their bark proves that they are still alive, albeit unhealthy, and the reason their branches are bare is that the surrounding trees have grown taller and expanded their network of branches over the top of the trees in our yard – in other words, the neighbors’ maples are hogging all the sunlight away from our evergreens, leaving them never-green. It’s like that time when the mortals vanquished the gods.

So I’m left with the worst of both worlds—it’s a lose-lose situation—for my yard’s trees appear sick ugly bare and leafless, yet their roots can still thrash around and knock my basement to shreds; & they’ll probably be whipping their roots even wilder than a normal healthy tree, precisely because they’re starving. They’re probably in panic-mode right now; desperate, flailing their limbs blindly in terror; except so slowly that they appear nearly motionless to us spaz-bots.

By spazzy I mean rapid-paced; sped-up comically like an old movie reel. (I’m assuming that you own a manual or hand-cranked cine-camera, which you under-crank when recording yourself chopping down trees, and then over-crank when projecting your evidence to the courtroom, thus causing the action to appear to transpire faster than it actually happened. And it’s a bright idea to spool the filmstrip in reverse, so that it looks like the trees are all leaping up off of the neighbors’ rooftops and jumping into your yard, where they lodge themselves illegally. This will shock the jury and help you win your lawsuit.)

So insects seem spazzy to us humans; and we men appear spazzy to trees. Only rocks are the most mature and patient creatures who possess true dignity—compared to them, even GOD is a spaz. That’s why lava is so interesting to me. Molten rock: the stillest and wisest substance grows animate. It begins to recall what it was like in the beginning. The Big Bang, the hottest point in universal history, when everything was liquid – all things, including the firmest metals & gems: lo, diamonds were gooey; adamant oozed; even Chinese steel was bendable...

Did you ever notice how glass appears transparent when it’s cold, but then, when you heat it till it melts, it becomes bright orange? I wonder what this means.

And I’ve heard that you can use the word silver as a verb. Apparently you can silver the back of a glass panel, and this produces a mirror. So the glass, when it’s at normal-human-room temperature, can be seen straight thru; but when you melt it, it’s like thick dull sluggish sunlight; and when you silver it, it reflects you.

I used to wonder a lot about what would happen if two mirrors were placed face-to-face, so that they ape one another. Like Moses & God. You can never know what’s being depicted; because not even an atom can shuffle between them, to glimpse the result, without becoming part of the show. But now I believe that mirrors are just a metaphor for something superior. I say the mind is many mirrors pressed together. Maybe multiverses of mirrors. Cuz there are endless dimensions.

And dreaming is the silver of the mind’s glass delivering its automatic speech: “Waves of being, I bat ye back.” (Like Captain Ahab: “Defyingly I worship thee.”) With waves standing for sights and sounds, etc. Experiences. FIRE. “Hereby do I augment these imperfections.” Or perhaps it’s perfecting them. (Like Hamlet: “to take arms against a sea of troubles.”) Now here’s a quote from the encyclopedia:

The most familiar type of mirror is the plane mirror, which has a flat surface. Curved mirrors are also used, to produce magnified or diminished images or focus light or simply distort the reflected image.

So everything’s constantly changing, constantly dying into a betterment. Or worse-ment. Or same-ment:

A substance used for construction that sets, hardens, and adheres to other materials to bind them together.

And if there’s a binder, there must be a looser. A substance used for destruction that unsettles, softens, and abandons other materials to undo them. (I’m just attempting to invert the above.)

Would any moralist urge us living, breathing creatures to forsake exhaling? or tell us that we should abstain from inhaling ever again? Our gills mimic the great wave of existence that keeps coasting up and down. We understand intuitively that respiring is a decent and still-legal practice, whether the gas that’s being drawn goes in or out.

And if someone feeds a wild horse or tyger, and that animal returns the next day, and that same person feeds the stray again, so that this act becomes routine, then an observer might remark that a certain type of friendship has occurred. But this is different from a pet being yanked around on a leash. Or a dinosaur tethered to a pole.

It bothers me to witness a pterodactyl undergo eons of labor and finally give birth to a modern drone-bombing mechanism. Then the drone lays an egg; however, instead of this ovoid exploding into a whole new world—yet another Big Bang—what happens is that its exterior cracks and an aquatic mammal emerges: it is a male hominid who enjoys playing video games, and this youth becomes employed by the U.S. military to pilot its parent, the mechanical pterodactyl, via remote.