Here's the next page from my book An Hundred Drawing Prompts. (The previous page was posted on your birthday.) This most recent drawing is titled “Magic kingdom”.
Dear diary,
To go against the grain. To swim against the current. To rebel. That’s what I’m most comfortable with: rebellion. That’s where I want to be. And that’s why the social network Twitter, which I despise, is a good place for me. No, you’re right; it’s not really a good place for anyone, but just hear me out: Twitter is where people go to berate each other, to spread hate around. Now, being a rebel, it’s my job to participate in this hate-fest by simply showing love. There’s no online activity more amusing than…
I actually don’t spend much time on Twitter. What I’m saying here is just a copy of what I heard a celebrity say about the network. But I agree with the…
& how about Facebook? Well, I don’t have an account on Facebook right now. I had an account there for a few years prior to 2012, then I deleted my account in a fit of rage. Now I’ve been thinking about signing up again, because I recently finally got myself a “smart phone” and I feel that I should join in on all the activities that the modern average citizen embraces. How rebellious of me.
And now let’s talk about Instagram. Instagram seems to be the most popular place on the web, at the moment. I have an account on Instagram, but I’ve never posted anything to it, cuz, like I just said, I never had a smart-phone (until now). So I would only see people’s Instagram posts if they shared them also on Twitter; and, since only a choice few souls deign to cross-pollinate their accounts (so to speak), my experience with Instagram is necessarily scant. By the way, Instagram is owned by Facebook. For our privacy counts. Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you what Instagram is, and why we need it in our life: It’s basically another way to share photos and videos.
We’re in the Age of the Image. You got the Ice Age and the Bronze Age; then the Pleistocene Epoch, with its rise of homo sapiens; then we skip right to the Eon of the Screen, where everything gets filtered thru computing devices and displayed via glitchy interfaces on miniature touchscreens. Now, before you correct my evil bias by proving that your phone’s display panel is not miniscule but contrariwise astronomical, I declare that even the vastest wraparound movie screen, or even that special triptych of screens that they fused together (if I’m remembering right) to show the finale of that old silent film about Napoleon, are nothing compared to our god-gift: peripheral vision. If you simply look around, with your naked eyes, in your natural environment, and consider all that’s there – the stuff that blanks or writhes “by default” (that is to say: without any laborious programming of pixels) – you’ll find that the most supposedly uneventful scene contains even more razzle-dazzle than an ’80s arcade game.
But nothing is more entertaining than politics. We poor souls of 2018 (I had to correct my typo: souls for sous – from the French for ‘under’; meaning subordinate, when used as a prefix, for instance ‘sous-chef’; also, as a noun, indicating a coin of low value: a very small amount of money; as in “he didn’t have a sou”), I say, we poor sows of 2018 just suffered thru the fiasco of the midterms, here in the U.S. Yes, I’m now pivoting from social networking to right-wing politics. I decided to write an anti-self entry today. My self, whose name is Bryan Ray, normally shies away from talking of modernity’s ills; but it’s important to kill your goals and dreams in life, since it’s illegal to kill your actual physical body. Like when Marcel Duchamp says
I have willfully contradicted myself, to avoid becoming a slave to my own taste.
However, I spoke at length about politics in last week’s entry, so I’ll let myself off the hook here: I’ll withhold my opinions (I carry so many, but it’s deviouser to abort them). Yet I would like to give one final note on the earlier subject, for which the ancient Germans coined the term computerfriendship – I began this entry talking about social media, and I allowed myself to use the proprietary titles of the companies that have captured our identities. Now, even tho I’m against doing that, I did that; and I told you why I did that; but I didn’t yet reveal the reason I’m normally against doing that. And by “that” I mean the act of referring to each satan by its true christian name. It’s cuz I fear that futurity will not grasp the merit of such contraptions; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram: these words will trigger no recognition in my readership (all my readers live in the future) since, by then, other “services” will have ousted our own age’s atrocities and established ministrations far more atrocious. But it’s really important to do things wrong. Therefore I should explain why I posted an update on Saturday which linked to the purchase page of my spiritual lifework yet added the caption “This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to become illiterate.”
This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to become illiterate: https://t.co/QkgyX4ZXC2
— Bryan Ray (@NotBryanRay) November 10, 2018
Yes, I realize that I should explain this, for, after I posted it, later that day, when I was walking home from the car wash, some scary businesspeople approached me on the street and reacted to my Twitter tweet above. They said: “Hey, dummy, we saw your ad for your stupid product that nobody wants. And it’s a bad joke, because why would you write a book for those who can’t read? Or who don’t want to read or whatever. That’s stupid. Because people who hate reading are already somewhere far away from books, like on the beach suntanning or being chased by seagulls. Therefore, no self-respecting gangster would add your lousy stock to his retirement portfolio, unless you tie it into a bundle with superior shams (and place an axe in the middle).” Then they held up this image and offered a quote from the encyclopedia:
The fasces image, with the axe in the middle of the bundle of rods, has survived in the modern world as a representation of magisterial power. The image is present on the reverse of the U.S. Mercury dime coin and behind the podium in the United States House of Representatives; and it was the origin of the name of the National Fascist Party in Italy (from which the term fascism is derived).
At which point, these scary businesspeople who had confronted me on the street unholstered their switchblades and sang two songs from West Side Story (1961); so I had to talk loud, over the top of their catchy dance numbers, in order to clear my good name. And here’s the gist of what I said, in response to their criticisms of my aforementioned book-advertisement – specifically the part where they cried: “Why would you write a book for those who can’t read!?” – I answered:
It’s not that people can’t read or don’t want to read; I said that they desire to attain the state of illiteracy. Those are my exact words.
Freedom of choice – that’s what you got;
Freedom from choice – that’s what you want.
This couplet, my dear aggressors, is a quote from the band Devo, unless I misheard their lyrics. What I mean is not this or that, but something else entirely. It goes without saying, if you check out my book from your local library, that you’ll need to learn how to read, first, in order to become an illiterate fool. For:
If you haven’t understood the alef,
how can you teach others the beth?
That’s the first saying of Jesus in The Logia of Yeshua as translated by Guy Davenport & Benjamin Urrutia. The Hebrew ‘alef’ & ‘beth’ are like the Greek ‘alpha’ & ‘beta’, or our own English letters ‘a’ & ‘b’; thus, being that no true man can count beyond three, the letter ‘c’ might as well signify Armageddon. For consider: A mole hill becomes Mount Sinai, which becomes THE VOLCANO: see my ur-gospel Rumors of Sarah, whose female christ keeps cracking wise to anyone who’ll listen: “The big one’s about to erupt!” That’s why I (not my authorial alter-ego or any literary character but I), even I, always say: The alpha returns after all, then eventually the omega doth uprise, like the kraken from the deep; out of the depths of the abyss, at the tail end of time, which is held secure by the jaws of super-time.
Time after time: it’s all spiraling out of control, beautifully so.
So, yeah, we’re basically born LITERATE, on account of intuition. An ability to read the unknowable comes with us, prepackaged. Batteries included, as it were. You intuit the thrust of symbols. You get at the meaning of poems by using your “takes one to know one” faculty, whose root is pride. Satanic pride.
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?[—from “Song of Myself”; sec. 2]
And if we’re born literate, in the sense that everything has already happened and thus is pleading to be revised, and all things have a meaning and a purpose that is intelligible to the creative intuition, then what is the most rebellious act unallowed? THAT’s what I’m after: becoming ebulliently il-literate. Reaching the dream of pure foreignness that is at once more familiar than your actual childhood; and attaining the now-but-not-always false realm of strangeness that is simultaneously more normal than your boring dayjob. You must sublimate mere intuition to reach the height of [coinage impending], whose base is post-literate. It’s like forgetfulness, after a traumatic event. And it’s also like forgiveness: by Prometheus, of Jehovah, for his sin of creating the world. For, finding oneself alive in any Infra-Fortunian Age, one’s sole desire is to hasten back outside the Pre-Cambrian Supereon, which requires a pretty healthy imagination. And I think that we aptly deeded such a botch in our aforesaid lifework (at least Volume 1 of its double-volumedness), beginning, as it does, with The Permanent Modes, and then ending, in medias res, with Mediocre Mountain. Upcoming cephalopods will comprehend what I’m talkin about (read: effervescing of), IF they prove prideful.
ENDNOTE
So this week I had to fix two sink drains. The 1st was in our kitchen: I had to buy a new part called a “sink basket” and install it with plumber’s putty; and I used way too much putty, so it oozed out from under the silver ring part; and there still exists, to this day, a cascade of putty continually gushing, which you can see if you look. But the thing doesn’t leak any longer, and that’s all that counts.
& also our laundry tub in the basement, which I’ve learned is more properly called a utility sink, needed a new grid strainer; so I had to purchase and install that as well. That was our 2nd of the two drain repairs. In this latter case, the old drain piping wasn’t even attached to the kilter-firkin’s underbarrel, which is my pet name for its anus. The mistake I made in installing it, when I undertook the task initially (it took me two times total), is that I didn’t tighten fully the rubber gasket beneath the blah-blah. So when we turned on the water to check for leaks, it was like Niagara Falls. Or Victoria Falls. Or Blue Nile Falls. Or Rebellious Angel Falls. Aqua·demons plashing whithersoever.
Moreover the P-trap was unconventional. Its dimensions grew from 1.5-inches on its intake side to a 2-inch pipe on its out-puke side. Apparently this is a non-standard size; for the sales clerk at the House Repair Mega Store admitted, after much soul-searching (that is, fighting with the computerized inventory database) that my heart’s desire is, alas, unavailable for purchase: “The part you are looking for is non-standard,” he claimed, by way of excuse. Thus, for the first time ever, the free market failed its consumer.
So I went back home and installed the old dirty ugly part that I had hoped to swap out, and I re-did my installation of all the other parts, and tightened everything carefully, and employed a superabundant excess of plumber’s putty (always be generous with the plumber’s putty; thou shalt, saith the LORD) – and . . . the center held! That is to say: the system did not drip, let alone spray, gush, or jet. It did slosh, admittedly, but exclusively inwardly. Then, later that night, purely by coincidence (no miracle), our water softener performed its regeneration cycle, and all the liquid that it purged into the utility tub was held by the drain’s main veins. Not a drop escaped. Yea, not a drop escaped alive to tell thee of its stint in the belly of the beast.
*
Also now today we gotta wrap all our windows with plastic, cuz our windows are all so dilapidated, so broken rotting & cracked that a marketing agency might advertise them as “Weather-permeable!” That is to say, they let too much cold air in. That is to say, they’re drafty. So we’ve been advised to put double-sided tape around the perimeter of each frame, and drape it with cellophane, and put bubble packaging under that; and also to fill the widest crevices with rope caulk (which phrase henceforward I will print in all caps, for emphasis).
So the last thing I’ll reveal about our visit to the House Repair Mega Store is that we wanted to buy ROPE CAULK, but their clerk didn’t know if ROPE CAULK even existed in the warehouse, so he kept repeating very loudly those two words ROPE CAULK into his handheld device – apparently this device was equipped with an application that could recognize the human voice and decode its speech, by way of electronic intuition, and then offer coordinates representing the point in spacetime where the product in question is located – I say, this clerk kept yelling ROPE CAULK at his device; but the device refused to answer. So, the clerk, in frustration, gestured vaguely to the rows of shelves in the distance: “Check aisle 28; that’s where all the window stuff is kept”; and he also said that it might be worthwhile to look thru the similar items of insulation, over in the drywall section; however, in his expert opinion as a Mega Store Research Scholar, the free market simply does not sell a product named ROPE CAULK. And he added: “I trust this app,” while wobbling the device in his hand, before our faces, like a high-speed hypnotism. So we went to aisle 28 and immediately saw a box with a picture of ropes of caulk on its cover next to a title in large white letters: Corded Weatherstripping. It was just what we wanted.
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