Before I start writing today’s entry, let me share the next page from my book of 700 Drawing Prompts. (For completionists, the previous page appeared yesterday.) The idea of the book is to inspire artists to draw pictures by printing a prompt in some corner of each blank page (in a font that seems deceptively handwritten). This prompt is supposed to serve as your subject. For this present drawing, the prompt was “Something abstract”. Its price is $16,000.00.
Dear diary,
After completing the sale of our old apartment and the buying of our new abode, our realtor gifted us this beautiful wooden cutting board with a rhyming couplet engraved upon its surface:
A house is built with boards & beams
A home is built with love & dreams.
So, tho now successfully housed, my joke is: Thus I am homeless.
Every day I awake with a yearning for friendship, for community. And I never get it; I never get enough. There’s never enough friendship, and the friendships that are formed are never intense enough. And there’s no community anywhere in the U.S.A.
Sure, there’s community if you join a church, or go to war. There’s also community in sports: if you play sports or watch them. And if you have a hobby, like gluing together model airplanes, or collecting stamps, or birdwatching: then your fellow hobbyists form your community. But I don’t like church, war, or sports, and I don’t want any hobbies. I’m interested in thot alone, and most people hate thot.
So I go seeking out conversations that have happened elsewhere, between others, in the form of online videos: this way, altho it is denied me here & now, I can still enjoy conversation and community remotely, from a distance, like someone in jail who looks out from between the iron bars of his cage and enjoys the sight of the squirrels and the rabbits gallivanting about the meadow and imagines himself among them.
So I found this video online that had two guys conversing. And the reason I chose to watch it was that I vaguely recognized the name of one of the guys. It was a name that I recall being associated with a political bent that is very different from mine. I like to listen to people who hold opposing views. I like to change my mind. So I thot to myself: “I’ll watch this video of these two guys chatting, and maybe their talk will teach me a new form of contemplation. Maybe they will convert me to their religion!”
Now that I’ve gone to the trouble of setting the scene, however, I’m no longer interested in relaying what I witnessed. But, just so you’re not left in suspense, I’ll give the gist of my gleanings:
The main thing that stuck with me was this: People play fast and loose with terminology, especially the political categories “left and right”. So the lesson that I took away (sadly, the arguments on behalf of their particular viewpoint left me unconvinced) was that I should henceforth avoid saying that I’m against the political “right”, and I should stop identifying myself with the political “left”; because it seems that too many people use these terms to mean simply (for instance):
RIGHT-WING = “What I myself think is correct/proper/moral”
versus
LEFT-WING = “What I hold as incorrect/improper/immoral”.
Because much of what this supposed opponent of mine said about the “right” are views I naturally and wholeheartedly embrace (for the ideas, in my usage of these terms, are truly leftist, tho the speaker was not aware of this), and almost ALL that this same antagonist said against the “left” I too renounce utterly (for, to me, these bad ideas are plain right-wing). So I should drop the rotted names and stick to concepts and ideas alone. And as much as possible, I should thingify my ideas. The vivider the better. One should always feel that one can touch, taste, hug to one’s chest one’s philosophy.
A philosophy should impress you like it’s a living breathing creature, not just a bunch of flimsy airy abstractions. My philosophy looks like the most resplendent sasquatch. It’s OK for my philosophy to stand before you nude, because my philosophy is covered in fur from head to foot. I’m sorry if this offends you, but I have a perfumed blonde female sasquatch philosophy.
But now that I’ve forsworn using the words “right” and “left” with regard to politics – now that I’ve retired them from my vocabulary forever, and I will never utter either of them again – let me show you this thing that I learned from the encyclopedia (I did one instant of lazy-research and found the following quote, tho I used one of those Internet encyclopedias, and the passage was followed by a note that said “citation needed”, so its trustworthiness should be doubted; nonetheless, I found this interesting):
The terms ‘left’ & ‘right’ first appeared during the French Revolution when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. One deputy, the Baron de Gauville, explained: ‘We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp’.
Like I said, this isn’t necessarily the last word and ultimate truth about “right vs. left”; and I’ve taken a solemn vow to abstain from using those terms ever again—I won’t even use them if you PAY me (“Prostitution is wrong,” as David Dolores Frank always sez, in the 2013 film Wrong Cops); but still it’s fun to imagine what the world would be like if its inhabitants could communicate with each other; so consider yourself in light of de Gauville’s explanation – what do you think? how do you label yourself? are you a right- or left-winger?
The right wing is “loyal to religion”. I say fuck that. The right wing is “loyal to the king”. I say fuck him. And, on the other hand, the opposition camp or left wing stands for “shouts, oaths, and indecencies”. Count me in.
Opposition is true Friendship.
That’s from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. Also the following:
One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.
To be clear, since this is the last time I’ll ever mention politics, here’s a summary of my “leftist” view, or whatever you wanna call it:
I heart democracy – that is, every soul gets an equal say: one person, one vote. And I heart transparency – that is, everything occurs in the light of day, no meetings behind closed doors by secret groups who privately manipulate our lives at midnight from the underworld; instead, all citizens can see what’s hitting the fan.
Democracy and transparency. That’s it. That’s my own personal “leftism”. But I won’t call it by that name anymore.
And the reason that ideas like communism and socialism sounded so scary for so long within the U.S., is that, despite all the bloviating platitudes and propaganda from its politicians, the U.S. has always had a secret fear of democracy—true, direct democracy, where the people get to decide for themselves how they want to run their system, NOT the parody of this, wherein Ye the Populace are forced to choose, from two disgustingly likeminded uglinesses, just one rich goon whom you’re willing to suffer abuse from.
& communism & socialism, if you think about it, are like injecting democracy into the economy. Everyone gets a say in every aspect of the process of production: machines, labor, surplus, goods… we all work within the system, and we all decide what to do with the results of our work, instead of just one owner or a small group of shareholders deciding what to do with everyone else’s efforts, which latter way has dominated us hereto and is a dictatorship or aristocracy not a democracy. The U.S. is averse to letting democracy cure its economy. It prefers to nurse on its poison: it’s addicted to capital.
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Sorry for the rant – I offer this apology to myself: I hate when I do that; but I’ll let it stand, so that I have something to rub my snout in while facing the mirror & singing the “Bad dog!” song. For the record, I don’t know anything about politics or the economy. I’ve heard people say that capitalism works – it’s the best system, they assure me. So maybe they’re right. All I know is that, at present, to me, the alternatives seem better. So that’s the opinion of a self-proclaimed ignoramus: I know not whereof I speak.
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