A good entry I think you'll like this one

Dear diary,

After all that, my mother and sister paid us a visit. This was their first time ever seeing our new house. The place is as vacant and ugly as it’ll ever be; because we’ve only just barely finished the task of deporting the previous owner’s tasteful splendors, and we haven’t had time to unpack our own cornucopia.

So there’s a full-size bed tipped lengthwise, balancing backward on its head, against the wall in the front room. That’s the first marvel that you behold, once you dare enter: the underside of a flipped bed in a stress-position. Then there’s empty bookcases: fourteen of ’em.

And a bland white face clock peeks out from behind the top of the bed, so you can’t really read the time but it mercilessly teases you to keep trying. This represents hope.

Then, when we finished the house tour, we sat in our ugly kitchen at our ugly kitchen table and tried to converse. Which is to say: we conversed about politics. And the windows were open, because the outside air was pleasant, but our neighbors across the street were having a conclave in their garage; and their garage faces our new house directly; thus our conversation was accompanied by constant whoops and duck calls from the surrounding civilization. (Whatever they were doing in that garage necessitated frequent whooping and duck calling.) (Incidentally the reason we moved into our current neighborhood was to escape from our previous neighborhood’s noisy neighbors.) So, again, my mother and I butted heads over political perspectives, left versus right, while my sister stared at her phone.

In sum: One of my mom’s old church friends recently introduced her to a new program from a far right-winger, and my mom found that she really enjoys this program: it’s some sort of audiovisual show, where the host offers clear remedial lessons by way of animated illustrations to explain complicated subjects from the viewpoint of the ultra-rich. It’s the plainest propaganda, which is apparently my mother’s cup of tea. I was familiar with this program, even before she mentioned her newfound love for it, because I’d stumbled upon episodes of it while searching for other things online (in the great, gray ocean of the Internet); out of curiosity, I’d viewed a few of these videos, which are really advertisements, like infomercials: they astonished me by their smarmy preachy style; at first I thought they were a joke, a parody: I even showed a couple of them to my sweetheart and said “Can you believe how they twisted this lie into such a fine pretzel?” I presumed that no one could watch this show straightforwardly, but now here I find my mom is the target audience. So, when she mentioned it, I asked her immediately and sincerely what she likes about the program; and she answered:

“It’s so simple! They take these confusing topics and tell us clearly what to think about them. Plus the videos are short – I don’t like to spend much time on this kind of stuff.”

This kind of stuff – war & peace; life & death – it’s not worth spending much time on.

P.S.

Yesterday morning, my friend came over and helped us trim all our trees. He used a long pole that had a sharp jagged blade at its end. I was mesmerized, watching the branches fall: huge branches with masses of leaves on them. Then our yard, at the end, was covered in fallen leafage, so it looked like a landscape painted by a painter who never learned how to paint regular grass but instead paints branches and leaves all over the ground. It was surreal in the good sense. So I was sad when we had to gather all the trimmings into a pile at the back of our yard, to make the place presentable again. I guess I tend to prefer things that are not presentable.