Just plain fair

Dear diary,

Are you the secret diary of Laura Palmer? No, you are the public-private diary of Bryan Ray.

Now that we got that cleared up, what’s next on the agenda?

Well it looks like we’re scheduled to tackle the issue that you and I have been meaning to address for eons, which is this:

Henceforth, I want all my writing to be simple and beautiful. As it is, everything that I’ve written has been complex and ugly.

Here’s what I mean (I’ll draw an instance from this very journal) – just yesterday I wrote an entry that contained the perfect example of “complex and ugly”:

I can’t find the passage, now that I’m looking for it; but it had something to do with robots & science, life & death, light waves, rockets, moonwater, & coconut-scented flame.

In contrast to this, here’s an example of “simple and beautiful” which I just thought of:

The little lamb came up and licked my hand.

This is the type of material that I want to master, because it makes you think of being in a green field, and you can imagine the little lamb trotting up, and you can feel the tickle of its slimy tongue on your palm. It’s just a simple scene with no purpose beyond the beauty of its nature.

The reason I like simplicity is that everyone can relate to it. Complexity is only for the brainiacs out there. And only 10% of the population are brainiacs. So if you strive for complexity, you’re actively limiting your audience to just a sad few. Why would you do that? You’ve gotta make a living, thus you need to reach out and gain the hearts of ALL people. Or as many people as possible.

But it’s hard to please everyone. That’s why you need to limit your topics of discussion to those items that are familiar to the masses. Most people have been a shepherd at some point in their lifetime; and most people have been licked in the palm by some creature, at least once. Even a deep-sea diver will be able to see the beautiful simplicity in the above passage (the 2nd, NOT the 1st), because she will translate the green meadow as a purple reef of coral, and the lamb will become a little baby squid. Maybe she substitutes biting for licking – I can’t say, because I’m not a professional swimmer: I don’t know if squids have fangs within their suck-hole.

Another idea that’s simple is this notion of decluttering. Show me a person who doesn’t have clutter in their house! So if you write about the disposal of anything, it’s automatically attractive. That’s why I say: Get rid of money. But then my interviewer gasps and says “God forbid! How will we survive without $$$?” So I say: “Well, what do you assume will happen, if we let go of money?” And the interviewer answers, “Everything will be screwed up.” And I say: “Everything’s already screwed up. Money only screws it up MORE. That’s why 90% of the rich folks are in poverty, and one single family of flowers own all the gourmet meat. There’s just a mountain of meat in their backyard. And they have twelve yachts, all filled with meat. How’s a bouquet of flowers going to wolf down all that meat? It’s gonna rot, I tell you. And all because we failed to travel-ban finance.”

It’s like a nightclub singer who’s enjoying an abusive relationship. Her boyfriend is the manager of the club. This boyfriend beats her. The singer, bruised and battered, runs away: she quits her job at the club, and hides out at the park. Along comes a forest ranger – a man who is entrusted with protecting and preserving the parkland. He says to the battered damsel: “May I help you?” And she consents. The forest ranger thus hefts the ex-singer back to his apartment; they fall in love and live happily ever after. But then, one night, while they are cuddling in their bed of holy matrimony, the ex-singer whispers into her beloved’s ear the unsafe phrase: “Hit me!” (This reminds us of Dorothy Vallens from the film Blue Velvet.)

The problem is identical to our modern addiction to money. When our boyfriend, the manager of the nightclub, beats us up, we feel intense pain; but, instead of deciding “I neither like nor want this feeling,” we misinterpret our tragedy, saying to ourselves: “The pain probably represents how much this businessman cares for me; so, the more severe the beatings, the more I am valued – this pain therefore is a proof of my true worth!” That’s why we find ourselves with this stupid system that allows a bankster who spends his day shuffling numbers on a computer to live like a prince, & meanwhile a full-time mother can’t meet her basic needs.

My new spouse is kind to me, he never beats me, therefore he must not love me very much. His love is mild. I want a love that is intense, which is to say: violent. I want a shepherd who will FORCE me to lie down in green pastures. I will fear no evil, I’ll only pray: “Bring the pain, my love; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Hit me again! I will lick the hand that strikes me.”

& something similar happens with slavery & employment. Everyone nowadays is expected to work at some official job. What’s your profession? What do you DO for a living? In the past – just look at ancient Greek literature, or look at ancient Hebrew literature – there are slaves everywhere: it seems that all the noble work is done by slaves.

Yet the ancients use that word “slave” without fully registering how ugly the concept is. At least this is how it seems to postmodern fools like me. Today, no one can even think of the idea of a slave without wincing and shuddering. But words change their meaning over time. When usage changes, meaning changes. I wonder if there is no difference at all between slavery and employment. If Aristotle could return to earth and enjoy a “second coming”, and even overlap his reappearance with Jesus’ return, I’m sure that, after looking around at all the hard workers who sustain our high employment rate, he’d exclaim: “Wow you guys got a lot of slaves!” And Jesus would agree & say: “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Ari. It’s almost as bad on earth as it is in heaven.”

But of course a heckler will interject: “NO!!!!!! Slaves are owned outright and paid nothing at all; that’s very different than modern employment, for your employer doesn’t quite OWN you; and you are COMPENSATED for your work, in accordance with a contract that you voluntarily sign.”

This type of argument pisses me off. The same heckler objected to socialism by saying that people mistreat what they do not own: If they own a book, they’ll treat it well; but if they borrow a shared volume from the communistic library, then they’ll trash the hell out of the book, because it’s not their private property, and because people are essentially sadistic: each newborn infant is a pugilist, born swinging its fists in all directions. Yet then when we introduce the concept of owning a human, we assume that the human who is the heckler’s property will be maltreated by the heckler, in contrast to the employee whose soul is merely rented by a business. This rental situation results in physical AND mental abuse, which proves that capitalism loves you passionately.

In all seriousness, there is no such thing as a voluntary contract. Nobody even reads their contract: they can’t afford to. All contracts are signed under duress, and there is no alternate choice: no place to flee for a fair and just deal.

And the wages paid for so-called voluntary labor are simply siege-warfare.

As opposed to an hourly wage-rate for my incremental suffering, I’d almost rather know the dollar value of my entire being; at least then I might be able to steal myself back. As it is, I’m compelled, simply in order to live—that is, to meet my basic needs—to enter into debt with the evillest institutions. Whether one attends school, secures a dwelling, or visits a hospital, (etc.), one is bullied into a contract that results in owing an exorbitant sum to Big Credit – more than one will ever be able to earn: the system funnels us debtward. So it’s like being a slave, being the property of someone else, except your entity is not worth X, and no single human owns you: instead, an abstract entity owns your future potential; thus your life is worth “X plus interest,” which grows so that your debt is kept at a level that is faithfully unreachable.

CONCLUSION

All paid work nowadays is inherently involuntary. Instead of asking each other “What’s your profession?” we should say “What kind of slave are you?”

But, without having to admit that I’m kidding about all the above, I can say that I LOVE work sincerely, so long as it is FREE. I love unpaid work. Work itself, when done willfully, from the heart, is a form of pure bliss. Work is bliss & rest is bliss. Play is bliss. To fuse work-rest-&-play into one grand harmony: THAT’d be truly surreal. So much so that the multitudes’d eventually grow desensitized to its splendors, and it’d end up seeming merely real. Then only those with “eyes to see and ears to hear” would be able to sense the magic that perfuses our world, so these types of freaks would be in high demand. I could then finally land my dream job as a facilitator of pre-death resurrections.

CONCLUSION OF THE CONCLUSION

I wish we would all ditch boredom and join my cult.