Dear diary,
Over the last days, I got a lot of hate-mail from my cult followers. They say that my previous couple entries were too frivolous. They say they tune in to my writing to see my soul, my truest inner thots; not to watch me pose and juggle words. They dislike words, in fact; they’d prefer if I could bypass written language entirely and just hook my mind directly to the reader’s mind, using wires and suction pads – or, better yet, a clear tube filled with softly tinted lights – that way, my readership would be released from having to wade thru all the chaff (my literary sashaying and run-on pataphysical histrionics) and get right to the wheat (my failed life and personal fears). So today I’ll begin by relaying my genuine feelings, right in the very first sentence. This way, we save the reader the time of having to wade thru an opening paragraph with all sorts of lengthy explanations that don’t even blank.
OK, so here are my genuine feelings, which (I’m told) I promised to deliver when we signed our multi-entry purchase agreement above:
I feel nothing more than scared. Every day I wake up scared; and every other emotion or mood I feel is simply fright with the slightest tint. Take a feast of the finest foods and drown them in ketchup, so that each dish ends up tasting like ketchup soup with just a hint of some other flavor. That’s my constitution. And the ketchup is fear: Yes, I am a lengthy table whose grande cuisine has been prepared to perfection lovingly, presented exquisitely, & then uniformly doused.
But this is why I stray from revealing my feelings: they’re always the same; I know that I’ve whined about anxiety here, frequently. Is it really better to keep repeating oneself? How much fun are we willing to trade for truth? So I feel fear: who cares? That’s the thing about being a subject in the world, as opposed to being the world itself which contains all subjects: as a fragment, only YOU can know your perceptions; if you want to know how others perceive the exact same set of thunderstorms, your only recourse is guesswork. That’s why drugs are attractive: they help you take in the world with calm, or confidence, or interest that you might not otherwise have had. But the downside of drugs is that they become their own dead-end; I mean, in the beginning, you employ their service as a seasoning – a salt or spice – for the main dish that is the common world; however, soon, the drug itself becomes your desire, and this world that you share with others seems just a nuisance to shove aside so as to reach that ACTUAL world: your own private world-beneath-the-world: sur-reality: the drug.
If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. (Genesis 4:7)
But, since no one can share your subjective drug-bliss, you appear, from the outside, like some tailor’s dummy swaying in the breeze.
And what do you do if your mind is wholly ketchup, like MY mind? In order to give its contents some proportion, you must dip so many French fries into your skull, so many baskets hot & crispy, that not even all the farmland in Eurasia could generate the requisite glut of potatoes to export.
But here’s the rub: God will never curse you with a predicament that cannot be rendered much moe amusingly tragicker. So you hear the rumor that vodka is a potato-based salvation. Is this true? It doesn’t matter. All that we need is an excuse to say: One serving of vodka equals seventy-seven thousand baskets of curly fries, golden brown. You see where I’m going with this? If you drink a shot of vodka every few hours, you render the ketchup deluge void and formless. You dry up the flood. But what’s left, after the red sea recedes? One big empty ark with twelve couples of animals. But just one GOD. Now you gotta perform wedding ceremonies for all these…
Alright, I agree, it’s getting too jokey, to imagine yourself as Noah dressing up like a priest to enslave the cows & bees in marriage, cuz then their offspring would all be inbred anyway, and the land would positively FLOW with milk & honey. So hold your hate-mail; I will change gears now.
How serious need we be about our world? Are you enjoying this life of yours? I’m not enjoying mine. What I hate most, tho, is that I have no good reason to backup my hatred of life. And, worse, as I always must admit at this point in my stupid repetitive mull-session (it’s the same one always), I don’t hate life I love it; but that phrase “I hate this fucking existence” is idiomatic – it really means: “I wish that we gods had not systemized ourselves into dystopia.” Cuz it’s the way the game played out that I dislike; not the game itself. I wish we could start over, and be nicer this time.
But everything eventually brings about its opposite. Didn’t we learn that from Ralph Waldo Emerson? So if we were to go back to the first granule of human life and pet it and treat it kindly, so that it could echo compassion forth into futurity…
I don’t wanna say that this hypothetical paradise would end as bad or worse than the present eon. I don’t even wanna think about it anymore. I just wanna be able to wake each day and welcome its struggle. Currently I recoil from the struggle. The best would be if one could look forward to fighting whatever battles lie ahead.
& I love mental fight; so if we could alter the world so that I could wake each day and grab my bow of burning gold with its arrows of desire, and speed my fiery chariot chaos·ward, then I’d be content. But, as it is, I’m forced to struggle in a mere physical fashion and undignified. We all must make and then exchange money in the marketplace; and this causes us all to value routine and dependability. We opt for the sure bet that yields small but stable dividends, instead of daring to go in for our chances and spend ourselves for vast returns (“Song of Myself” sec. 14):
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that
will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.
If you’re not allowed to experiment, you cannot innovate; and without innovation, your profits shrink. They’ll eventually dwindle to nothing. But experiment necessitates failure – losses, repetitious and continual – and success that’s unprecedented is by definition unmeasurable, perhaps unpredictable. So the huge corporations that dominate us (paradoxically, like mice dominate elephants) operate by valuing certainty and safety. (Safety for them; danger for us.) This is why everything seems so stale and flat in 2018. We’re supposed to value our personal computing devices? Is the “smartphone” really an improvement over the brothel? (I’m choosing a rude example purposely, to make a bad point.) Would you rather touch cold hard glass or soft curvaceous flesh?
No, you’re right tho. I can admit when I’ve lost the argument. Why did I even imagine I could compete!? Look: you’re a businessman wearing a decent suit; I’m just a gal in a toga.
But I admire your tie: it’s got lime checkers on it, against a purple background. My words can’t do justice to its appearance: it’s in very ex taste. It makes me dream of a video game about a big yellow kisser that’s insatiable: it goes up and down the obsidian streets of heaven searching for linen-clad saints who claim to have received the holy spirit; then it greets them with a smooch, and they give up the ghost: they melt with love and get sorbed up into their savior.
Salute one another with an holy kiss, as the churches of Christ salute you. (Romans 16:16)
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