Or like series of springs in an upholstered frame

Dear diary,

Let your mind do the dead-man’s float. Remember swimming lessons? They taught you the forward crawl and the backstroke. They made you bob: that’s when you grip the side of the pool with your hands, take a deep breath, then plunge your head under the water and forcefully exhale – bazillions of bubbles tickle your face – and then you come back up again. Rinse and repeat. But your favorite act was the dead-man’s float. Shayla, your swim coach, said that if you’re ever lost in the ocean, and there’s no land anywhere, and no other beings are in sight, you should lie on your back with your lungs fully inflated: the air will naturally buoy you up, so you’ll save your energy and live longer – soon you’ll spot an airplane, and this plane will eventually come and rescue you. It’s called the dead-man’s float because you look like a corpse, hovering motionless out there in the Great Gray Ocean of the Internet, doing nothing, bored stiff, neither socializing nor playing. You might as well be dead. And, realistically speaking, no one ever gets rescued.

(I realize only now, after relaying the above, that Shayla probably taught us wrongly; therefore, please, all ye aqua aficionados, send your nastygrams to Swimming Instructor Shayla Screech-Owl at Bee Mail Dot Com.) (And the Bee stands for Weblogger Bryan Ray.)

Yes, your imagination performs the dead-man’s float, when you write down your thots in this journal. You have no purpose, no aim. You’re other-than-mobile; you’re neither communicating a message nor composing poetry. You’re a dead man, floating in his grave, simply passing the time. You don’t dare exhale, lest you sink down into the depths...

And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them:

And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, with all that appertained unto them, and all their goods. And they went down quick into the pit.

So the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. (Numbers 16:30)

As you know, my rule is that I must stop writing once I quote from the Bible; so I’ll end this here. But first I’ll tell you what I was thinking before I started talking about swimming lessons:

Every interpretation is a misinterpretation – even one’s own impression of one’s own assertions’ intentions – because nobody really knows what they’re saying or doing.

Therefore let your mind tread water.

P.S.

Also, I should record, for the eternal record, the events of yesterday, before I forget them; for they are worthy of rebuke:

We woke with a plan to purge our garage of all the former owner’s sinisterism. And by sinisterism I mean junk. (Everything from old hutches to vanity dressers with mirrors to rolling coffee-stained office chairs.) In the previous episode of the tragicomedy that is my life, I sold my apartment and purchased a new house; but the joke was that, before moving all my belongings in, I had to move all the god-blessed seller’s belongings out. For he had left all his old heavy furniture behind, just like a Benevolent Deity abandoning his Creation. He apparently presumed that the next Devil who tries to populate this experiment will meekly clean it up beforehand. For a sucker is born every minute, and I’m number nine eleven twenty eighteen. (That’s the date when I’m writing this: September 11 of 2018 Anno Domini Dada. A big day for the U.S.A. It’s also the anniversary of the birth of the son of the guy who fetched our mattress for us. I’m not kidding: Yesterday, after renting yet another moving truck and packing all our flotilla’s jetsam into it—yes, I am aware that the noun “flotilla” is the diminutive of the Spanish word for “fleet”, so it denotes a group of ships or cargo boats, but here I misuse it to stand for our new abode, which is a house founded firmly upon the sand, because I’m tired of referring to things by their most correct label—I say, after renting a truck and packing it full of the ex homeowner’s castoffs, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and purchase a mattress in the process: we figured that we could utilize the moving truck to exchange our old boxspring and haul back a fresh replacement, as we’ve been lately spending our nights on the fold-out cushions of our cheapest-ever couch, which is not much different than sleeping on the grass of a hillock and using a boulder for a pillow; but, anyway, the guy at the warehouse, who did our exchange, told us—or rather declared at us; for his speech seemed as prepared as a stand-up comedy set—that his son was born on the stroke of midnight exactly seventeen years ago tomorrow; so that’s the only significance that the date 9/11/2001 holds for Mr. Tuwhoo of the mattress factory.)

CHAPTER THE SECOND:
Things that pissed me off about the day.

While at the showroom, the salesman assured us repeatedly, for we inquired repeatedly so as to make absolutely certain, that, although we were only buying one single mattress and not any accompanying boxspring, we could indeed discard both our old mattress AND our old boxspring at the warehouse when we pick up our purchase; HOWEVER, once we positioned our truck at the garage, the aforementioned Mr. Tuwhoo, proud guardian of the warehouse and sternest of gatekeepers, informed us nasally “It’s one for one, not one for TWO,” meaning that they’ll only discard a single mattress or boxspring for each item that you’ve purchased; thus, if you want to get rid of more than one item, you must purchase as many items as you discard. Plus they were playing really awful moody brooding rap over the factory’s loudspeakers, during our spat.

So it appeared as tho we got caught trying to game the mattress exchange system, and all because the showroom can’t communicate with their own warehouse.

Plus all the furniture that we had to haul into the truck was extremely heavy. And when we were driving down the road, the road was bumpy; and each bump made the furniture jostle; so, in the cab, we kept hearing thuds crashes & bangs, which sounded like the trailer’s contents were being wholly annihilated. Yet when at last we stopped and opened the huge sliding panel, behold, there was nary a scratch on anything: it was all pristine. So we must have done a good job packing the stuff.

Only when we removed the metal headboard of the bed, it crumbled in our hands like a cracker. Or like a tortilla. So I’ll name this entry: A flotilla of tortillas.