Dear diary,
If you build a shelter for yourself, like a tent or a temple, it might help protect you from the rain. But, once you stop living outdoors, you miss the interesting noises sights & feelings that the world has to offer; like the sound of lambs baaing around you; the sight of fireflies at midnight; and the feeling of a field mouse scampering over your chest. Plus an indoors environment doesn’t have rain, reportedly. The interior equivalent of rain is a sprinkler system, which is installed in the ceiling. But, in order to activate THAT, you must set your house on fire. It’s not the same in the unedited outdoors: rain comes & goes whenever it wants to. You needn’t ignite an inferno to summon its presence. In fact, if you set the forest aflame, chances are that nature’s sprinkler system—the windows of heaven—will not respond. So the outdoors is like an abode whose thermostat is mis-wired.
I was thinking of tents and temples because, in the Bible, according to my memory, God first lives in a tent, which he calls a tabernacle, and which is portable; then he later moves into a temple, which is relatively stationary: a permanent residence. Then God’s temple gets destroyed a couple of times. And that brings us up-to-date. I don’t know where God is living, now; but I wonder if he misses the great outdoors.
Our own house, which we recently purchased—or rather the bank purchased it and is allowing us to live there, so long as we pay the bank back ten times the original loan amount—I say, our own house was manufactured erroneously: Downstairs it had large rectangular fluorescent lights overhead, the exact same size & shape as angel-coffins, which buzz when turned on. So we (my sweetheart and I) saved the day: we unscrewed the bulbs from the fixtures, and then unscrewed the fixtures from their wallboards.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs![“Song of Myself”; section 24]
What I’m trying to say is that we replaced these bad lights with good lights. A good light is defined as a small thin circular wafer-like panel that emits a soft yellow gleam: luminescence without heat. Three of these we installed in hell’s heaven. (“Hell’s heaven” is North American slang for the downstairs ceiling.)
And for more than a week now, we’ve been shopping for exterior lighting fixtures. What’s taking us so long? Well, it’s hard to make a decision, when you don’t know what you’re doing. Neither I nor my sweetheart have ever wasted a single thot on, for instance, garage soffits; so now that we’re responsible for prettifying the outer shell of our house, we must weigh all the pros and cons of each possibility:
On one hand, exterior lights cost a lot of money, and money is fun to spend, so we look forward to that; but, on the other hand, exhibiting competence in this realm will require us to develop a lifetime’s worth of aesthetic partialities in mere days: an herculean task. For example, we must solidify our opinion to land solidly on the side of big over small entry lights; that is to say, instead of caring nothing about the size of the fixture that flanks our entryway, we must learn to be genuinely offended at the suggestion of purchasing any light whose length is not at least one third the height of our front door.
What makes this especially challenging is that, when we rode our bicycles around the neighborhood yesterday and carefully scanned the exterior of every house, we noted that 98% of the residents have chosen to display entry lights that span less than one fifth the height of their respective doorways – can you believe it! We’re trapped among philistines, here.
Making a moral decision, therefore, in regards to exterior lighting, is an uphill battle. But, if necessary, we’ll drag our town kicking and screaming into civility; into good taste and refinement. We have no choice: the LORD demands that we help righteousness to suffuse our world; and, this time, for whatever reason, it has chosen us (my sweetheart & me) to be its vessels. We’re forced to be trailblazers. For leaders are made, not born:
They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
& I just learned from the encyclopedia that that quote is from Vince Lombardi, an American football player and executive in the National Football League, best known as the head coach of the Green Bay Packers during the 1960s, where, in addition to winning the Super Bowls at the conclusion of the ’66 and ’67 seasons, he led his team to five total NFL Championships in just seven years.
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ALSO: the previous owner of this house left us his stereo system, and I finally got around to hooking it up. It works pretty well. So now I need to develop an ear for music.
This brings up another memory from our recent family get-together. My sister was broadcasting some songs on her mobile jukebox; and I recognized all these tunes instantly: they gave me a feeling of vertigo because each and every track in the series was popular when I myself was a teenage heartthrob. Now, my sister is more than a decade younger than me, thus she should not share the palate of my contemporaries (my contemporaries, back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, would play these same few songs repeatedly in the radios of their automobiles which my sister was now broadcasting via wireless technology) – and let it be emphasized, for the record, that I myself disliked all these pop hits back in my tot-hood: I only liked rap – therefore I said: “Susan. Why are you playing this crap. This crap is what all of my adversaries trumpeted in school. I hated it then, and I only barely can tolerate it now; because music has devolved so severely that this crap actually sounds less crappy than it did when it was first released; but it’s crap nonetheless. And I shouldn’t have to re-suffer the vulgar proclivities of my erstwhile foemen. Seriously, why are you playing this crap.” And Susan answered, “I like how it sounds.” Then mom piped in and asked, “Is this heavy metal?” And the rest of the family said, “No, it’s hard rock.”
Now there’s a scene in my favorite movie Wrong Cops (2013) where Officer Duke, while relieving himself in public, spots a teenager nearby listening to music on headphones. After a brief exchange, Officer Duke asks the kid, “What are you listening to?” And the kid answers, “Something cool.” So Duke says, “Come here; let me hear it.” So the kid reluctantly hands over his headphones, and the officer listens to a little of the track that’s playing and then says: “Where’s this shit from? I’ll bet it’s German.” And the kid says, “I just like it ’cause it’s cool; I don’t care where it’s from.” Then Officer Duke, still listening to the headphones, nods and exclaims: “Yeah, this stinks of Germany.”
The reason I relayed that film scene to you (Wrong Cops, by the way, was written by Quentin Dupieux), is that it provides the perfect segue to a comparison of quotations that I wanted to make. I’ve been trying to think of a decent way to end this entry, and an idea came to mind: to compare the passage that I recently read in Moby Dick with the funeral speech from Wrong Cops). But I couldn’t just lunge right into these two quotations, and simply shoot them at the reader, straight out of the blue, without any warning. Then I realized that one way to wed my desired ending to the foregoing composition would be to take the scene where Officer Duke talks with the teenager about music – this would perfectly bridge the conversation about music that I myself endured with my sister. By sticking to this plan, the reader should be wafted forth smoothly and easily from one section of the entry to the next, as tho in a self-driving cloud, or magic carpet or wheelchair ramp. And reason predominates.
So, since we’re already on the subject of Wrong Cops, let me feather us prudently into the other sequence that I love (I’ve quoted it here before, tho not in this context) – Officer Duke’s impromptu outburst at Sunshine’s funeral:
I think we have the wrong idea about Hell, just exactly like we have the wrong idea about Paradise. ...In reality, Hell is here – this world that we walk around in, that we live in every day, is Hell. ...I mean, we are just miserable slaves to Nature. I think that [the recently slain Officer] Sunshine left Hell for a better place. I think that we are the dead, and he is alive.
Compare this speech by Duke with the observations that Ishmael offers in Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s evil epic – the following is from Chapter 7, “The Chapel”:
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the less of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
Isn’t the similarity of these passages remarkable? Also when Officer Duke says
You can’t see them, but we all have invisible flames around us...
This reminds me of the famous line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake:
I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity...
But I don’t want to go on quoting all day; the whole reason I copied the passages above is so they’d preoccupy the reader while I dashed for the exit. But then I forgot to leave. So now I’ll just have to depart with all of you watching me.
[Bryan paces toward the exit but slips on a banana peel and falls. His head hits the floor, knocking him unconscious. A pool of blood begins to expand onstage, beneath his body. The audience remains seated and offers no help.]
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