I got this sketchbook called 32,000 Drawing Prompts as a treat (or a trick) last Halloween. Printed on each page is a phrase that's supposed to inspire one to draw its subject. (My last masterwork featured a gathering of evangelists in an upside-down pub.) This evening's prompt is "Something 3-D":
Dear diary,
Why do people write diary entries? I wouldn’t participate in such a thankless, ill-favored act; but, for me, it’s like a mechanical tic – plus it kills time by rerouting energy that would’ve otherwise contributed to anxiety (my body’s preferred form of self-torment).
Someone please ask Science: Did you ever meet a songbird who hates singing but who continues to sing because singing beats perching there trembling in anticipation of the inevitable arrival of the pussycat. What does his song sound like? I’d be interested in making a prosaic translation of it.
No, literature will not “live on”. The only reason to write is for present gain. And what gain do you yourself receive? None whatsoever. So why continue writing?
Because.
Just because?
God’s pussy is gonna attack someday, that’s why.
*
Flies and mice. Wasps, termites, locusts, ants, roaches. What is the beauty of any of these creatures? I sort of relate to them. But I also am disgusted by them.
Whole industries exist for the sole purpose of destroying my life. (I speak now as a mouse.) You can walk into a store and they have a section containing nothing but products that kill me. But then this same species is so intrigued by me that they create artworks that refashion me in their image. Mickey Mouse; Mighty Mouse. I wish my eyes were as big as they are in cartoons. I wish I had muscles and could fly and rescue pussycats from trees instead of getting eaten by pussycats.
Will the lion really someday lie down with the lamb? What would be the purpose of life then? Right now, the purpose of life is for X to eat Y, and for pussycats to eat mice & songbirds & goldfish. Yet when the New Heaven descends, dragging the New Earth behind it like an anchor, and these places plop down on the present planet and subvert its existing landscape and destroy its oceans…
I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. (Revelation 21:1)
I say, when the lion lies down with the lamb, will we mice & songbirds & goldfish finally be free to pursue our deeper interests, since our predators, the owl and the pussycat, have been permanently sedated? What will we do with our time, then? Maybe we’ll end up creating forms of art tailored precisely to fit our species’ own unique interests. For instance, we goldfish really love laundry; we love the scent of the fabric softener and the feel of the silken garments that have been wept on. So we’ll be able to explore that fetish in filmstrips, which feature humans with distinctly fishy features. Fish men who fish men:
Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, “Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.” And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him. (Mark 1:16-18)
Ah you know my rule, self-inflicted arbitrarily, states that I must end my composition as soon as I quote from the King James Bible; so I’ll stop right here. But I will paste, as a postscript, the entry that I wrote yesterday & which I decided to discard. I decided to discard it because it is bad. And it is bad because it tripped on a current event. I hate when I do that. Only I changed my mind about discarding it because it’s hard to abandon your babe on a mountaintop in winter, even if it (the helpless infant, your diary entry) was prophesied to vanquish you someday, O Mickey you Mighty Mouse Messiah, and then marry the queen, your spouse, our popular songbird Josephine, the entry’s biological stepmom. So the following indulgence will probably come back to bite me on the heel:
P.S.
I used to be afraid to mention current events, like events in the news. I assumed that everybody’s already talking about, say, the U.S. Supreme Court Judge Debacle, which happens to be the big event of this day. October the second of two thousand and eighteen. So, if I opine on this, I’ll be no better than a common newspaperman. A hack. A stringer. A muckraking journalist.
But now I realize that these current events disappear so quickly, and everybody forgets about them so thoroughly—as if they never happened!—that if you include them into your diary, you sound like a madman who’s got an imagination of a superior monkey·chef. And that’s a good thing. People exclaim aloud, on the train, after reading your words: “Where does he get such superior-strength malarkey!?” And the surrounding passengers, sad travelers all, explain, “Bryan’s got an overactive imagination.” Because no one remembers nothing. (Ally or enemy?—I can’t recall; I guess I’ll just go with whatever thy money suggests.)
It now strikes me that I’m talking about “this event” as if I’ve already talked about it, when I haven’t even talked about it. I planned to mention it; but now I’m shying away from giving my two cents, because I realize that I’ve got only one cent left (for I didn’t even study the event in question). How this major event—again, I’m speaking of The U.S. Supreme Court Judge Debacle—I say, how the event affected me, how it got my attention, how it invaded my afternoon and some part of my following morning, is that an old friend obsessed over it when I visited him; and also my earthly mother fretted about it to me on the phone.
Here’s my imperfect understanding of the basic situation:
The dragon from the Book of Revelation is trying to fill the judge-shaped hole in its heart, but the candidate that its far-right wing’s angel puts forward for this position ends up proving to be a drunken abusive lecher, yet the angel on the dragon’s other right wing is reluctant to implement its forefather’s court-packing plan, whereby the balance of opinion on the Big Gang (A.K.A. the Supreme Court) could be augmented by increasing its size and then bringing in several new justices. So our poor dragon is left with this cavity in its hardened heart, and all the townspeople remain in the public square, to this very moment, arguing about how drunk abusive and lecherous we should allow a drunken abusive lecher to be before revoking his Christian licence. (A Christian licence allows one to judge others without having to fear being judged oneself.)
Alright I’m just screwing around. Seriously, all the United Statesians right now are like spectators at a ball game: they’ve all chosen their teams: if you’re for the far-right wing’s angel’s team, you must root for the drunken abusive lecher; and if you’re for the other right wing’s angel’s team, then you must root for an emergency-standby evil. And if you’re on the side of humankind, you’re rooting for Cassandra, whose testimony is what originally exposed the depth of corruption in this public figure.
As I said, I know nothing of the facts firsthand: I’m far more interested in the opinions of my compatriots. So when I visited my old friend from school on Saturday the Xnd, he talked for more than an hour, breathlessly and with righteous indignation, about THE EVENT (which shall hereafter be filed as forgotten). And then, the next day (Sunday), my mother left a message on my answering machine requesting that I phone her ASAP, because she’s having trouble with her television. So I called her back immediately, fearing the worst (“Perhaps she has lost reception!” I thought to myself); but instead, when she picked up the line, her first words led into an hour-long rant about the very same EVENT that my friend had discussed; and she was equally breathless and every bit as indignant.
Now here’s the funny thing. My old school chum is a man, and my mom (rumor has it) is a woman; so one who is simple-minded like myself would assume that the MAN would side with the drunken abusive lecher, if allowed to choose, and that the WOMAN would side with Cassandra. But no: as it happened, my male friend was on fire with hatred for the drunken abusive lecher, and he couldn’t stop praising the character strength honesty & courage of Cassandra. On the other hand, my mom, a self-styled Christian and aficionado of “family values” was ALL FOR the drunken abusive lecher. And here’s the strange thing about my mom: she wasn’t against Cassandra – my mom even explicitly repeated that she believes Cassandra is telling the truth in her proclamations about the drunken abusive lecherousness of the candidate, nevertheless my mom thinks the man is being given a raw deal somehow: my mom thinks it’s a low down dirty trick to have one’s drunkenness and abusive crimes and lechery paraded plainly before the public. A man who wants to sit in judgment of others should not be judged himself but simply waved in: “Welcome to power; you’ll be doing the LORD’s work now.”
I’m focusing more on my mom’s opinion than on the opinion of my friend, because I agree with my friend, and I’m shocked by my mom; I’m beguiled by the weirdness of her views: their incongruence lures me to mull them over. I’m like: “What went wrong here?”
My mom believes that the wannabe judge is a good man, a loving father; my mom likes the man’s family: he possesses beautiful children; my mom says that this man is a decent and upstanding Christian who believes in the Bible and attends church regularly, thus it’s a travesty that we’re embarrassing him by bringing up the things that he did when he was a schoolboy.
Two reactions that I heard said in defense of the drunken abusive lecher really annoyed me. One was “Everybody drinks too much alcohol in high school.” I myself didn’t drink alcohol at all in high school; I don’t have any problem with anyone who DID drink, or even with those who drank ‘way too much’—in fact, I prefer the super-indulgent over so-called responsible drinkers or teetotalers; I’m actually a little ashamed of my sobriety—but the fact is that I myself didn’t drink till about my third decade
Of thirty bare years have I
Twice twenty been enraged(—Tom O’Bedlam)
so, no “everybody” does not “drink too much in high school.” And the second thing that annoyed me is in regard to the sexual violence that that drunken abusive lecher perpetrated along with his cronies – I heard someone (not my mom, but a woman) say “All teen boys do stuff like that.” No. Not me, not ever. And I hope that at least a minority of males who are likewise, regardless of age (because “teen” is no excuse: the only teens who do “that stuff” are thorough obscenities – it has nothing to do with learning or growing up: those who act like that are spoiled to the depths of their soul: they’re the type of criminals who end up in positions of power, like judges and senators); I hope that, instead of saying “All”, we can say “ZERO teen boys do that” altho I fear that the actual number would make me sick. I can’t lie to myself, after reading the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson.
*
I wish I hadn’t sunk to such a serious height in this morning’s disquisition. Maybe I should lighten the mood by relaying the things that I did when I visited my mom, after the phone call.
Maybe I’ll do that in tomorrow’s entry.
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