Dear diary,
Do some people wake up and read the news? Is this news that they read presented in a paper form or an electronic form? Do some folks check the social networks and read their news there? I wonder how many people just wake up and begin to write the thots of their own mind, fresh from sleep, untainted by any reading of news. If there exists even one man who does this, who avoids reading the news before writing on his blog in the morning, that person shall inherit eternal life.
The American word inherit means
to receive something (money, property, a title) as an heir at the death of the previous holder.
Thus, in order to “inherit eternal life”, the previous holder of eternal life must first expire. Now, if you inherit eternal life from one who is dead, it tells you something about the quality of the inheritance. (You’re receiving from a dead man a gift that clams to save its owner from death.) This reminds me of those days far in the past when, if you paid for an item at the market, the seller would bite your coin with his teeth, just to make sure you weren’t trying to pull a fast one on him; for fake coins were made of chocolate and wrapped in gold tinfoil: very tasty. Yes, we’re always trying to avoid being paid in counterfeit currency. This is why I do not bother avoiding the news before composing my blog posts.
Actually, I normally do avoid reading the news, at any time of the day. But today I happened to wake up feeling fragile; so I turned on my computer before picking up my quill pen, and I searched the Internet sites that sell the news. Then I visited the social networks and saw that people were posting news items, and I read them all. So now I am informed. And the good thing about being informed about modern events is that, in order to populate your blog post, you don’t have to rely on whatever your brain was thinking when it was sleeping: no, instead, you can react to the news that you just read.
So I read a few posts about Vietnam. Can you believe that people think about Vietnam? Something must have happened there, once upon a time. I should mention that I live in the U.S.A., which stands for the United States of America. I live in Minnesota, which is practically Canada, which is in North America. There is also a South America, where various places respire. So when I mention Vietnam, it has the glow of a fictional place. I sometimes wonder if it even exists. Maybe it’s like the lunar landing footage, and the whole place is a fabrication by some genius filmmaker and his competent art department. If that were the case, I’d really be proud of the human species. Because what other creatures can dream up moons and paradise, and make us assume we saw them!
I don’t doubt the lunar landing’s authenticy, by the way. I just think it’s more amusing to subscribe to the doubting Thomases who say that the event never occurred. They won’t be satisfied until they can clack their own talons upon those ill-famed craters of cheese. For the same reason, even tho I know better, I’d rather agree with the Flat-Earthers, who deny that our planet is spherical; and those who insist that the sun orbits us, not the other way around. As Captain Andy explains to Officer Rough at Sunshine’s funeral in the movie Wrong Cops (2013), in answer to Rough’s objection to offering an upward salutation to a soul that is damned, on account of Hell being located underfoot:
It just seems more natural to salute the soul of the departed towards the sky, rather than toward the ground. Don’t you agree?—It’s more poetic.
But the whole Vietnam thing bothers me, as do all wars in general; especially those wars that I’m familiar with from my lifetime. Anything that transpires, which you yourself can be a living witness of, seems more important than the stuff that you can only read about in textbooks. It’s not true, but it seems that way: that’s apparently how we were built, we humans; it’s a flaw in our manufacturing, but the Creator would rather blame this shortsightedness on our own lack of initiative than to admit that he was a lazy engineer. (Seriously tho, I love God, and I believe in Jesus, and the latter’s blood WILL nab me a condo in heaven.) So anyway, since I was born between World War One and World War Two, I see those sibling fiascos as the majorest problem, and all the foreign wars that followed in their wake (again, I speak from my own perspective as a U.S. citizen: for I’ve never been allowed outside my kennel; nor would I ever dare escape), I say, I view WWI & WWII plus Korea and Vietnam and all the U.S. wars since then as a series of bad moves. (But less like wrongheaded chess tactics that lose you the game, and more like desperate acts that a junkie does to obtain the $$$ to supply his addiction.) And I stress that the only reason I choose the First World War as my starting-point is that I’m consciously limiting my scope to what I witnessed with my own two eyes. My timeline is admittedly arbitrary; but, again, that’s not my fault: they don’t make vampires like they used to. Vampires used to be able to live through countless ages: powerful empires would arise and decline, before the vamp was even a teen. But now, because of the inferior mettle that they employ in the construction of our physique, even fourth-rate Valleys like Silicon outlive us. And then we must bequeath our immortality to whoever tickles our fancy, via the current global hegemony’s legal system. It is demeaning; but what can one do?
Silicon Valley is a nickname for the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area; which is home to many of the galaxy’s high-tech corporations, as well as thousands of tech startup fux.
So anyway, these books about Vietnam really bug me. There’s a whole bunch of them being published in the U.S. right now, and there’s documentary films and all sorts of audiovisual claptrap being centered upon the subject. My main problem is with their stance. (If they were a fellow mannequin, I’d sneer: “Why are you posing like that!?”) I have an almost philosophical objection to the smarmy tone of all the titles, and of the perspective of each work’s so-called author. This species of underling tends to refer to our nation’s evil buffoonery as “fighting an unwinnable war” etc... Here, let me try to explain why this makes me irate:
I look at each country like a house on a block; just a regular house with a family living inside it, sharing a road with neighboring houses. The U.S. is one house and Vietnam is another. So it’s like we hear the family inside the Vietnam house arguing one day, and we say: Let us go over to the neighbors’ house and break inside with guns blasting — that’ll stop their argument!
Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying the situation, but remember: this is MY blog and therefore I determine what is right and what is wrong, and you are the student who should try to glean wisdom from my composition. So let me speak for a second:
OK, so we go & break in & blast our guns at our neighbors; then we spray sickening chemicals on all their houseplants (these neighbors happen to have TONS of gorgeous houseplants), to make the beauty melt away, so that it’s easier for us to move thru their rooms and shoot at the residents in attempt to “solve their argument”. Is this picture that I’m painting a fair depiction of the situation? Good. Now who in their right mind would call our action, our home-invasion and murdering of our neighbors, “unrequited love” or “rejected aid”? They didn’t require us to intervene. Nobody asked us to come and help out. Nobody said “Please save me from my fellow roommates in this house; and bring guns and chemical poisons too: it’s that bad!” So I propose that we rename all our books about Vietnam something more like A Reflection on One Point in our Career as a Bonkers Collective. Or: We’ve Been FULL STUPID for Some Time Now; Here’s an Example from an Ever-Increasing Array that One Can Only Hope Does Not Prove Endless. (May Our Heartless Doctrine Croak Like a Poorly Built Vampire.)
I’ll stop writing now, even tho I’m barely warming up. I just wanted to prove to you why it’s a bad idea for me to write blog posts after reading the news in the morning. I saw two or three headlines about book-length Vietnam studies, and their titles alone made me stammer out seventy-seven sentences. Mature blogs should never exceed sixty-three-and-a-half sentences.
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