Dear diary,
What is purified water? I just saw that phrase written on a plastic bottle.
They could not drink of the waters, for they were bitter; thus the people murmured against Moses, saying, What shall we drink! So he cried unto the LORD; and the LORD shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet. (Exodus 15:23)
But forget this nonsense about water purification; for I feel that the composer of a diary should only tell about the things that happen to her... the things that are daily, quotidian...
Just now I looked outside (there are windows to my left) and saw a plastic lawn chair. Before this moment, I never realized how much I hate plastic lawn chairs. I hate them almost as much as I hate plastic bottles and quotidian information.
Instead of lawn chairs, I would prefer that the world would use only divans, settees, and daybeds; and all should be made of brass, instead of plastic. I would specify pure brass, but I doubt there exists such a thing.
But the WHOLE world would have to follow suit, otherwise my plan wouldn’t work; because if even one establishment chose to keep their white plastic lawn chairs displayed outside the main writers’ window, then one might set eyes on them.
Also, yes I am aware that brass furniture would be less comfortable than…
But, who cares about comfort, when there’s a war going on? The war of perception. Ugliness is making headway all around us. We need to fight back, stop resting: no more cushions.
We need brazen lawn furniture and much stonier landscapes. Mountainier (more mountainy). We need brazen deer. Fake deer, that is, which look like they’re grazing in our front yards.
What if we replaced all wildlife with sculptured animals? Tame·wild non·death. Genuine faux brass fauns chasing a life-sized cartoon Bambi. With fangs.
I saw this yard yesterday that had two handcrafted wooden squirrels positioned near the base of the trunk of its tree. I wonder what the purified squirrels think of these motionless mockups. I bet they worship them.
Another thing that doesn’t matter is if anything ever gets done. Because something always gets done, whether you like it or not. Say that you’re supposed to take out the garbage – that’s one of your daily chores. There’s a bucket with a plastic bag inside, and people have thrown trash into the bag; so your job is to wrap up the bag by its handles and toss the detritus into the waste vat, which you keep at the side of your house. Let’s say that you fail to do this. Now what happens? The garbage does not get taken out: it remains in the kitchen; its toxic juices eat thru the bag and the outer walls of the bucket. The evil oozes onto the floor and eventually consumes the rest of the environment. Instead of a globe floating in space like a drop of blood on a clear glass slide (the kind that you can look at under a microscope), there’s just a squid-shaped toxicity writhing in midair. And by midair I mean nothingness. It’s now asking itself “Which planet shall I grant salvation next?” Those are the words of its speech balloon. We’re apparently either admiring an artist’s rendition of the Final Judgment, or a commoner has vandalized our photograph.
I told you in an earlier entry about the tree cricket that found its way into our apartment. Well, now we sold that apartment (“Cricket included!”) and we’re staying at my mom’s house until we get settled. And by settled I mean ironed out (we’re presently wrinkled). So where are we looking to settle? In the used shack we bought. We went to two closing meetings with bankers and lawyers and various professionals last Tuesday. I thought that it would be hell on earth, but it was only daunting stressful and frightening, plus terrifying.
But even tho the meetings took place at the same headquarters, they were two separate events. One dealt with our old apartment which we sold; and one dealt with the moldy mushroom palace that we bought. I could go on forever relaying the plot points of both meetings, but I’ll just give one detail from the selling chapter of our bio: the part of the story where we sold our former residence. This is the part I’m most proud of:
We met the woman who bought our old place, and, at the end of the lawyer-fest, she presented us with a cake that said THANK YOU! because (she claimed) she was happy with our housecleaning job. For we thoroughly cleaned our apartment before we abandoned it, and our beloved buyer said that this saved her three full hours, which is how long it would’ve taken her to do that job herself. Her sister (she claimed further) was the maker of the cake: she is a professional cake maker, and her business is called something like I forgot my company’s name cuz I’m not a team player. (I don’t know. I’m getting tired of talking about businesses.)
What do frogs do all day? I hear them, but I never see them.
Oh! and, like I was saying, there are so many tree crickets outside at my mom’s house that, even if you shut all the windows, you can hear their constant eerie shrieking chorus. It makes you fear that you’re perpetually on the verge of having a stroke. Cuz I’ve been told that, when you’re gonna die of a blood clot or stroke or aneurysm, you hear a continual screamy noise inside your head, which is due to the high-pressure circulation of your murderous bloodstream. But, in truth, no one knows what death’s door sounds like. I’ll bet you a million dollars that what I’m saying here is wrong.
So you’d think that after finishing our dreaded closing meetings with all the lawyers and officiators and administrators and title clerks and executioners grimacing our way, we’d be happy to have our own house to move into. But the problem is twofold:
Firstly, you must move into your house. That’s a hard proposition. To MOVE the wealth of the Caribbean basin, you must be able to LIFT the Caribbean basin. And we possess so much wealth that it’s a bore to shuffle it around—a pure & true bore.
Secondly, our new house stinks. It has a musty smell like wet wood. It’s the exact same smell that our family’s old cabin in Wisconsin always disgorged.
So we’re dragging our feet on the actual moving of supplies. Instead, we’re simply loafing at my mom’s house. She’s gone till Saturday. Last night my sister went to visit her beau at his own parents’ house, so we (Spousie & I) decided to stay here yet again. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day of suspended translocation.
Also when we suffered our walk-thru of our new place, the weather was storming. Earlier in the day, we had moved all our belongings into the truck and then parked the truck outside of my mom’s house; then we drove to the new place and met our realtor and did the walk-thru. When we got to the garage, the storm began. It was a violent storm, undoubtedly caused by the Storm God Jehovah, and our next-door neighbor’s cherry tree got slapsticked by wind and lost all of its appendages (we found this out later, from the testimony of the groundskeeper himself); and I am certain that we witnessed this event firsthand from one yard-length away, albeit while sheltered—for, like I said, we were in our garage.
Then after the walk-thru ended, we manned our snow-white hybrid and drove back to mom’s. But, on the way, we had to navigate a stretch of road where 27 traffic controllers in a row were inoperative. Their lights, which should have been directing the flow of vehicles from all four corners of the earth via green and red lights, were, each & all, pitch black: not even the gold at their center dared caution us to proceed in any direction. But it gladdened me to see that the long lines of stopped motorcars were voluntarily governing themselves: they were treating the dud lights like four-way stops; and every vehicle was orderly taking its moment to go, when it was its turn. This proves that humankind can get along, and that we’ll all eventually make it back into heaven. It also reveals that reincarnation is a lie dreamt up by think tanks in Washington, designed to coax us to believe in karma, so that we will allow the profiteers to preemptively “defend themselves from everyone” (read: attack everyone) and steal all the resources; for we’ll be reasoning: “I guess they deserve to do so, otherwise the universe would surely conspire to stop them.” As if we ourselves are not the brains of that universe.
IN CLOSING
Here’s the closer. This is what I’ve been trying to get at all along. It’s the only reason I even began to write this stupid entry.
When we finally turned the corner on the street that leads to my mother’s sky-blue mansion, we noticed that, right in the place where we had parked our moving truck, which contained all our personal belongings and the furniture we own, there was no sign of the truck but only a vast tree the size of an ancient cedar blocking the entire road. No joke: the road was impassable, unnavigable, impenetrable. So we had to go around – back up and reverse our path around the neighborhood’s perimeter and try to enter from the other direction. So we did this, and when we got back into range, we saw that our moving truck was intact, but that mere centimeters from its enormous (read: gorgeous) ass-end was the largest cedar tree ever planted by the LORD, and this tree had been split by lightning – it was still on a smoke, with flames sparking out of its ravished innards – and its fallen half had landed in accordance with the mega-adverb roadblockingly. So we almost lost all of our earthly riches; cuz if the tree would’ve opted to die in a fashion even moderately southwest of the way that it chose, it would’ve smothered the rental truck that contained the total effects of our upcoming kingdom. (In retrospect, I kinda wish that would’ve happened. But I forgive this tree for its sins.)
And the tree that almost killed all our belongings is the same tree that Solomon used to construct his presidential library, the Floating Temple of Idolatry in Half-Paris-Half-Texas.
Also I should add that, because we’re stuck at my mom’s for so much longer than we planned, I’ve been enjoying our delay by going on exploratory bike rides; and, for the last one, I took two long paths, just to see if I could bike from this here mansion to our lately purchased shack using only park walkways. It’s like trying to form a sentence in Broken American using semi-verbs only: “Go God U.S.A. lovehate!!!” And the weird thing was that I found two snaky paths that did the trick, but when I actually got my bike tires onto them, I kept running into detours & orange makeshift fences sporting stern signage (PATH CLOSED: KEEP OUT), apparently placed there by construction personnel. For there were giant yellow vehicles, vacant and scattered all over this blockaded zone’s dismal dirt-scape; and the surrounding land was void-chaos’d, which is to say: tohu-bohu’d. Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is that, at one point, I dared to disobey the fence’s orders; and, after hopping the barrier (by hefting my bike above its spiked crest, then struggling to climb over & down the far side while tearing my pants in the process), I pedaled forward into the restricted territory, expecting to stumble upon a crash-landed spacecraft with alien corpses strewn about; but, instead, I saw, up at the top of the nearby hillock, a parcel of six baby deerlings grazing the weeds. (Deerlings are newborn fawns: the kind whose fur is still shiny cuz they were just birthed.) And they didn’t seem alarmed when I approached. They lifted their heads and surged their wet nostrils inquiringly, but they did not flee. So I passed by politely, because Jesus always sez: “Be passersby.”
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