Too, too something

Hi Mike!

It makes a big difference how you position your bed. We positioned our bed facing the hallway, at first, and it caused slumber to be a... Long story short, we rotated our bed ninety degrees last night, using the rotater tool in our computer art program, and boy did I sleep fitfully. Also we installed these blue nightlights that automatically turn off when daytime arrives; thus they never shut off, because the sun can’t reach our house. So that’s good too.

(The above was just for our loan officer Mike. Or alternately the other two Mikes that I know: the one who works as a manager at the music store, and the one who recently quit working at the music store. Now I’ll start the entry proper.)

Dear diary,

OK here’s my history; in case you need to know all the crimes of my past, when you appoint me to be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice:

At one point, I didn’t have a house of my own; I just lived with my parents. Then I moved out from there and split rent with a friend; we lived in a condominium, which, as far as I can understand, is just a fancy word for apartment. After that, I bought my own split-level townhome, which was connected on either side to the surrounding townhomes: six homes in a row; four rows in a squad; three squads in a drive; and four drives in our district (we were also the fourth district in our association, hence the name that we had to write on our monthly dues payments: Brown-myrtle IV [pronounced “ivy”] Townhomes c/o Mad Cow Management). Now, after all these lousy living quarters, I’ve finally achieved the Good Life: my sweetheart & I (with the help of loan officer Mike) got ourselves our own house. It’s made of wood, like Pinocchio.

The nice part about having your own house is that…

Actually there are no nice parts. The mind is never satisfied: never. So the awful aspect of homeownership is that you find yourself caring about things like moulding. Base moulding… bed moulding; cove moulding; crown moudling… keel moulding; neck moudling; cable moulding… and trim moulding such as shoe moulding.

So I was searching for “how-to” videos yesterday on MeeToob (that’s not really the company: I’m just trying to avoid mentioning the rancid name YouTube), and I discovered this film where a master craftsman was displaying his finish-carpentry skills while talking about moulding options.

None of what I mentioned above is interesting; but this next thing I’m gonna say is of great interest:

This guy was, as I said, a master at his craft; he could cut and drill and join and fit boards snug. He practically single-handedly managed to Make Moulding Blank Again. But the rub was as follows. All his ideas for good-lookin moulding were just plain gaudy. This isn’t merely my own subjective opinion: it was, in fact, the critical consensus; for on MeeToob, viewers of finish-carpentry videos can leave comments on what they’ve watched; and this Master Moulder’s film had accumulated billions of comments (that’s billions, with an M) from half-satisfied viewers, who left replies like

yr skillz is topnotch, but NEVA put board X w/trims Y & Z + add quarter-round on toppa that --- its 2 gross/crowded; just stick w/1ST type-a trim = elegant cuz simple n' much-easier.

Also viewers said things like

You’re an expert at board-cutting, that’s obvious by the way that you cut the boards. But these options that you offer for moulding are too busy; you engage in the finish carpenter’s equivalent of literary overwriting: you’re like the hack author Bryan Ray, who piles words upon words without any taste or reserve or aplomb or eloquence, and whose works resemble an explosion in a shingle factory.

So this last comment made me realize how much I, Bryan Ray, have in common with this sinful carpenter, whose name happened to be Jesus of Nazareth. The only difference is that Jesus wrote nothing at all—zero words—whereas I commit to papyrus (or, as Jesus would say, “e-screens”) EVERY gol-darn thing I do – which is to say, only the BAD stuff (in hopes of getting a seat on the sooPreem COURT!!); I even tell ye about the hour I wasted watching baseboard videos.

— Truth break —

If I were a doctor, I would give each patient a thorough examination and then tell them sincerely, while shaking my head “You need more alcohol in your system.”

— End of truth break —

But I wish I could pull a moral out of this experience, which would cause my naysayers to bury their heads in the sand. If you wanna build a McMansion that has umpteen types of trim spangling everything in sight, who’s to say you’re wrong? And if I myself wanna write a big pile of words and then add more words on top of those words, and post the whole steaming mess online, the whole lurid tacky mess, and call it a “public-private diary”...

*

The thing is that me and Jesus aren’t content with marching to our own offbeat drummers. We additionally desire the mob’s respect. So we never stop whining about it. (Well Jesus never whines about it, technically; but I like to imagine us—me & him—as nearly identical, so I say that he whines all the time about the people’s rejection of his antichristian message.) The mass audience doesn’t appreciate irony: they want rude loud obviousness, like a bearded glowing storm-god. But we’re the subtlest beast in the garden.

I’m not really on par with the devil, tho. He’s a master craftsman AND ALSO a genius of style. Just look at his creation: this world. It’s pretty good (as Officer De Luca remarks to Officer Holmes, in the 2013 film Wrong Cops, about the “old fag rag” that he stole from Gary’s bathroom). When the devil employs techniques of mannerism, it’s like a wild stallion being kept under finest control by a streetwise wrangler. Wish I could do that.

So what have I established today, tripping & bumbling thru this here thot-blob? I’m determined to squeeze some value from the exercise. Tho that’s unlike me. Normally I don’t care if my entries go nowhere. So why is this one different? I think because of its subject: the great gulf fixed between “A” and “B”, with “A” standing for ideas of great pitch and moment which are far ahead of their time, and “B” being the present-day populace’s perception of such ideas and also SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS.

Who do you gotta pay to get the multitude of scientists on your side? That’s what I should do: I should bribe the pantheon to announce “Bryan’s blog is the best.” Then I could write, on the back of my blog (as a blurb, to advertise the product), the foregoing quote, which I could truthfully attribute to ALL SCIENTISTS. And in television ads, Bathsheba (my ad’s spokesperson) could assure the viewer that «Scientists agree: The Public-Private Diary of Bryan Ray is more fuckable than NASA» – with “NASA dot gov” standing for “the National Aeronautics and Space Administration” (an agency of the U.S. Government responsible for aeronautics research). And my blog would be sold in a shrink-wrapped package. And it would be pink, and it would be plastic. Just like a diary, or those notebooks used by professional journalists to cover the Endless Wars of North America, which never take place on American soil, except for South American soil. And “fuckable” is a gaffe; it should assert the opposite: ineffable (Bathsheba’s a strong misreader).

But if blogs are now sold in stores, as physical objects, don’t you think that they should glow? Otherwise, how can they compete with the storm-gods in the garden? I say my blog should be wrapped in plastic and illuminated by an LED that’s triggered to ignite when the darkness reaches a certain level; like that aquarium nightlight that I saw yesterday at Menards which had fake fish in it. Pink plastic fish. Like Christ.

---

See, now, if I knew when to stop with this moulding-atop-moulding-atop-moulding, I’d say to myself, at this point: “Self, look what you got here: you got an entry that ends with the two-word sentence ‘Like Christ’ – a disyllabic proposition; ya can’t do better than that: throw in the towel and call it a day.” But I happen to live in the bad year 2018, and, in addition to YouTube and Menard Inc. (“a chain of home improvement centers located primarily in Midwestern USA”), there’s this sticky trap called Facebook, where I used to try to pace; now, when I would attempt groping to and fro in those confines, I’d notice that their programmers had programmed into their product this mocking function whereby the victim is lured to click a button named “LIKE”, thus indicating approval of whatever visual assault (family or food) happens to appear nearby. This is why corporations often add to their ads the affronting phrase “Like us on Facebook!”

I poured all the words of the above paragraph on top of the words of the previous paragraph, in order to make one more joke and ruin my own ending. My original ending was “Like Christ.” My new ending is “Like Christ on Facebook!”

(NOW this entry’s dead. NOW we can go get drinks.)

Additional alternate italicized optional square-bracketed
stage direction:

[Bryan & his readership meet at the local brothel to consume the body & blood of Facebook. Bryan distributes free copies of his blog to all, explaining that its luminescence allows it to double as a nightlight; & everyone loves the vulgar showy girth & sheen of the blog so much that they purchase multiple copies and use them as lawn ornaments.]

P.S.

Oh & before I forget, the other neat thing that happened yesterday is that I had to discard the first of three batches of ice, as per the instructions on our refrigerator’s ice machine; so I poured all these ice slices (they look sort of like clear segments from an orange, but they’re very cold & hard not soft & juicy) into the sink; then, later, when my sweetheart came home, I yelled: “Hey, look!” and I held aloft the sink-sized iceberg by its rainbow handle – for all of those icy slices that I discarded earlier had, during the interim, partially melted together and fused around a rainbow-colored mug that was sitting in the sink beside them. So I said, “Hey, look!” as I held this huge conglomerate up. And my sweetheart said: “Wow.”