Deplete this

The next page from my Book of Drawing Prompts. (Link to last page here.) This one's called “Aurora borealis sky”.

Dear diary,

Upon waking I immediately begin to write. What do I write – my dreams? No, I never write down my dreams; but I wish I were in the habit of recording my dreams — that idea appeals to me greatly. But no, I just wake up and go downstairs and start to write any old thing, without premeditation. So the thots that get preserved are a certain type: they’re sluggish because I’m just awaking from dreamland; and they’re stupid cuz God shaped my brain that way (in his likeness); also they’re full of fear becuz I’m always faced with a new day, which demands to be lived, there’s no escape, and the world is shit.

The world is not shit. The world contains shit; shit is an aspect of the world. What I meant tho is that everything is shitty: all things are infused with a propensity towards (or an essence of) shittiness. And yet all things are also infused with a glow of…

Yes, some things are not shitty at all. Like mice: all mice are gentle and cuddly. Mice don’t shit (there is no English phrase that means “mouse droppings”). Mice are compassion personified, or rather mousified: they just scamper around trying to escape The Danger, and they eat practically anything, and they raise up their young and send them to work in the workforce. The family reunion in mouse-world is one mouse boasting to his cousin: “Here are my fourteen children; they all work in the factory.” And this mouse whose name is One Country Conquered Another, Now We Own ALL…

Sorry, I got caught up trying to name my hero and forgot where I was going with the story. My brother-in-law Will came to visit us yesterday, all the way from Colorado. This was his first time seeing our new-old house. He said “I want to take you out to eat.” And by you he meant me and my sweetheart. So we went to a place nearby our house, just down the block from here. Then, when I awoke and began to write this entry in my diary, and I reached the point where my mouse needed a name, I thot to myself: “I should name him after our server at yesterday’s meal.” But I couldn’t recall the guy’s name. So I turned on my computer and typed in the search terms “Places to eat nearby zip code such-and-such”, and right away a map appeared indicating the place where we had dined. I noticed that it had its own website, so I clicked the link and visited it. When I scrolled down the page, I came to a section with a photograph of the owner; and there was an official biography printed (about six paragraphs long), which I read with great pleasure. By the way, a restaurant is a place where people pay to sit and eat meals that are cooked and served on the premises. People need food to survive, in this life. After sleeping and waking and writing in your journal each day, food restores the power that got depleted. If that which intoxicates is an intoxicant, then that which restores is a restaurant. Think of it as a headquarters for the reinstitution of energy.

The owner’s bio calls his establishment a “community kitchen”. (Henceforth I shall refer to this owner has “he” or “him” and his bio as “it” or “the bio”.) It tells how he emigrated from Mexico to San Francisco, California. It describes him a lover of Italian cuisine. The bio details how he spent fourteen years at Franchise Alpha, “steadily working his way through the ranks.” Then, after being sent to Minnesota (which is where I live – I, Bryan Ray, the one who is plagiarizing this scripture), I say, after being sent to Minnesota to help open new locations for Franchise Alpha, the man jumped ship – he leapt from one horse to another, in midstream of his life, and began a career with Franchise Omega. He spent nearly seventeen years with the company, “rising from line cook to Executive Chef,” and “honing his skills along the way.”

The official biography begins a new paragraph here, so I guess I’ll begin a new paragraph here as well. In 2011, “after thirty years of hard work,” it says, he “finally achieved his lifelong goal”: he opened the Sitting Room of Pizzazz Replenishment, located in the stripmall off Highway 5. “Today,” it concludes, his thriving kitchen is “a local favorite, with growth and expansion on the horizon.”

And printed at the end of the evangel is a quote from the owner himself. It consists of two sentences. He is said to have cried from his heart:

It is an indescribable privilege to share my passion for Italian food with our wonderful neighbors.

And here is the second and final sentence of his testimony:

My professional journey has made my dreams come true.

I copy this declaration verbatim, because I find it worthy of…

Oh and now I see that there’s actually a little note printed after the quote from the owner. It says “We proudly serve gluten-free food and are flexible with nearly any dietary concerns.”

OK, so let us say that you decide to dine at this establishment. After you finish your meal, I can vouch from experience, you will find that you are welcome to take a free peppermint from the basket near the podium of the spirit guide (here I use the title spirit guide instead of seater, which is to say: she who seats the people). The mint helps your breath remain fresh, so that you can return to work and kiss your co-workers holily. (If your breath smells unattractive, who’ll want to kiss you?) And if you’re scheduled to give a presentation at a meeting, and the boardroom where you’re presenting is small, your audience might appreciate a pepper·minty scent, rather than the smell of pork and beef, red sauce and melted cheese, plus crispy hot fries that were dipped in a metal trough of ketchup. (And you can substitute a salad for the fries, if you are a dullard.)

So my mouse’s name from the beginning of this entry originated in a reaction to the aforesaid biography. My mouse’s name, you will note, consists of eight English words separated by a comma. Let’s take four at a time, starting with the first half. One Country Conquered Another: I was inspired to include this idea after learning that Mexico won a big bloody battle against Rome in the late 20th century. Actually it won TEN big bloody battles. As it is written:

Italy is the only Mexican-owned country with a long Mediterranean coastline. Since 1980, when Mexico gained full control of Italian culture and cuisine, the capital, Rome, which is home to the Vatican as well as landmark art and ancient ruins, was moved physically to Minnesota, down the road from Bryan’s house. (All roads lead to Bryan’s house.)

I’m sorry I keep talking about myself and adding my own name into all the true facts. I can neither help nor escape myself: I am trapped in this body. Every day, as I said before, I wake up as the same protagonist. And the only plot of the story is that I keep trying to stamp my name onto my surroundings. That way my surroundings seem less threatening.

But if my overseers ever attempt to make me transfer to the Midwest from their San Francisco office, remind me to quit while I’m still in Cali: grab me by the lapels, if you must, and argue earnestly: “Bryan, listen; don’t move all your stuff to Minnesota & then cut ties with your feudal lord and start your job hunt here. It’s too cold here! Even if California gets drowned in saltwater, when the Kraken rises, I’d still rather live where the sun is your friend, and there’s the ‘magic hour’ of light every day which is a boon to moviemaking. Honestly not even death itself could take me away from California. I love this place.”

But one might also make the argument that if Californians never deigned to translocate to MN, then the people in the snowy suburbs wouldn’t have a place to eat. Their energies, once depleted, would never get restored. Or they’d have to restore them alone, at their new-old house, by boiling potatoes for their own sad self, all alone, with spinach and Greek dressing, and no seaters to seat them or servers to serve them. Only one sweetheart for company, instead of a whole bunch of strangers creating a dull roar with their chatter. Instead of a corner booth in proximity to the kitchen, their blessing is limited to a padded sofa near a bookshelf.

Well, that was fun. I pretty much phoned this entry in. (To “phone something in” means to perform a deed with zero enthusiasm or effort.) A couple stillborn thots and then I ransacked that bio from that website. Let’s hope this does the trick. All I should need is to write down some words, to expend the surplus energy from my public appearance. For, instead of restoring any lack, the dining experience left me overcharged: supercharged: turbocharged. In other words, this kind of normalcy makes me nervous.