Here's my latest oil painting, which I just completed. It is priced at an affordable $7 million, and its title is "Rough the mount on the road to town special to the star":
Dear diary,
Well my last entry was about the Ray Family Turkey Feast, which went well. If I were planning on making these journal entries into a book, and I wanted to end on a positive note, I could stop right there, because there’s nothing better in life than a social get-together that ranks 100% on all the Fun Dials. A perfect score, like thermometers in Hell which remain peaked at pure red, which is the hottest temperature possible; or like when the entire council of judges at the Winter Olympics gives your ice-skating performance straight tens. That’s the highest score; thus you pass to the next ordeal.
Did you catch the catch? Your reward for success in any endeavor is to encounter further endeavors of increased difficulty. There is no “happily ever after” except in the fake land of literary characters. That’s why it’s my goal to become a work of fiction; and that’s why I’m writing this diary: I get to take everything that actually happens to me in the world and translate it into the realm of children’s stories. But the problem is that, being an echo of life itself, I find it impossible to end. That’s why, instead of closing this public-private journal with the preceding entry, by adding the final sentence “And Bryan lived happily ever after,” I’m here to report that, after the fine food and fellowship of Non-Chicken Day (which incidentally is only beneficial for the non-chicken, since the non-chicken gets to become about fifteen new minds, which is what happens when a family devours you, blood feathers and all, whereas each one of the feast’s human participants must play forward the endless flatline of this dystopia), I say, after the blessings of a successful social engagement, I had to wave goodbye to all my family and friends, and return home, and go to sleep; then wake the next morning in terror at the thot of the upcoming holiday:
“When God closes a door, He opens a window.” This is the taunt that my mother crocheted on a doily and framed and hung before my childhood bed. It can be interpreted thusly: “The same blaze that the LORD ignites to incinerate Thanksgiving sparks the short fuse of Christmas, beware.”
But before I unzip my feathery fowl costume and don my Santa suit to beguile you with all the details of our Xmas prep, I need to preserve in stone the lyrics to a little Thanksgiving Day chorus that I wrote when I was just 3 years old. (Note that all the line ends sound vaguely similar.)
Turkey turkey gobble gobble
When it walks it always waddle
Cook the turkey in a bottle
Read the turkey Aristotle.
You simply repeat this rhyme ad nauseam, till the festivities cease. (When we were teenagers, my boyfriend and I made a rap record of it, which we uploaded to the Library of Commerce.) That’s my sole contribution to our national tradition. Now, on to Christmas:
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I’m too tired this morning to tell you absolutely ALL about my X-day preparations; nevertheless, I’ll try. But I’m just warning you: this’ll probly be boring.
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First, because I’ve gone mad, I decided we should string Christmas lights on our house. So we did an online search for “How to buy the best Xmas lights and display them properly.” It turns out that the first thing you should do is take a tally of your living quarters. So I constructed a pulley system that allowed me to hang down from the roof in a special harness, and I measured the perimeter of our foundation. It turns out that it’s a perfect square of 33-by-65 meters.
Once you know how big your house is, you should find the right lights for the job. I learned that, instead of buying one large spool of bulbs that can reach around the whole entire house, it was pleasanter to buy sixteen small sections of scented candles and then attach them to each other by their e-plugs. This way, you maximize the amount of anti-nature taping that you need to do. For, each place where one cord plugs into another, there is the danger of snow and rain seeping in; and when water comes into contact with electricity, they give birth to Jehovah, whose name in Hebrew means “Fire Hazard”. But if you wrap each point of connection tightly with black tape, the rain and snow might not be so quick to breed with the flames inherent in all living things.
So I also bought these plastic HOOKS that you’re supposed to jam in between the shingles on your roof, and they also fit inside the mouth of the gutters, like fishers of men, and what they do, besides damage your house irreparably, is support the Christmas lights.
Then we had to plug the lights into the exterior outlet at the front of the garage. This sounds simple, like religious salvation, but, like religious salvation, it’s nearly impossible. What happens is that first you choose the wrong tool for the job. You need an extension cord, so you rummage thru the junk that the previous owner left in the back of your basement, and you find a fitting specimen, light tan in hue, that is exactly the size you need. You dash outside with a smile on your face; you plug in the cord; and then you tape the connection with black electrical tape, as explained above. But then you go to sleep and are plagued by visions. And here’s the content of your nightmare:
You dream that the elements (snow and rain) come and visit and look around at all the connections between the Xmas lights that you’ve responsibly plugged together. Lo, they cannot infiltrate those connections, so they (the snow and the rain) decide to pay your light-tan extension cord a visit. They notice that he is an interior-only cord, which is to say, he doesn’t have the power to resist the evil elements; so the elements invade him: they take over his soul and he expires. Then, in your vision of horrors-to-come, the snow and the rain slink down the dead extension cord and find that the outlet in front of the garage has no cover on it (a cover would have protected the plug from the advances of the elements); so the wind and the snow charge directly into the prongs of the cord that’s exposed, and they summon Jehovah up from his dreamless sleep, and your house explodes.
So I woke the next morn in a cold sweat and screamed aloud “I must take a trip to the hardware store and purchase a cover for the electrical outlet in front of the garage which will allow me to leave a cord plugged in while simultaneously shielding this cord from the elements; for God MUST remain asleep, or else we all die! Moreover, I need to purchase an outdoor extension cord: not a light-tan cord, but one that is yellow or orange.”
So I did that. I did everything right, in the end. The part that suckt was that I had to unwrap the glob of black electrical tape from the previous wimp-cord (the light-tan indoor-only cord, cursed be it till Christ returns) when replacing it with the hefty neon-orange cord. Incidentally, this new cord is way too long: so most of its form remains curled up like a snake at the base of the garage in front of the outlet. I wish that this cord had a rattle and venom and willpower; then I’d let it sleep indoors. As it is, however, the new weatherproof outlet cover allows us to leave our Christmas lights on all night, which means the orange snake remains drinking e-nectar from the garden-side outlet from dusk till dawn.
Throughout this entry, I’ve been using the prefix “e-”, pronounced “ee (dash)”, for any item or entity that is powered by electricity. I hope you don’t mind.
But now I have the feeling that I left something out of the above affidavit. Hmm, lemme think...
Oh, yes: I forgot to report how scared I was when I got up on the ladder. My sweetheart had to step in and relieve me from Christmas-light-hanging duty when I got to the peak of the roof, because when I stand on the last two rungs of our rickety ladder, I begin to tremble uncontrollably, inadvertently, unintentionally: I lose control over my own damn body. My mind keeps shouting “Jump! Jump! Jump!” and my gut keeps countering “Stay alive just one more moment!”, so the result of this civil conflict is that my whole frame oscillates (that is: it violently trembles; which is to say, it enacts the jitterbug dance involuntarily). So, like I said, my sweetheart had to perform an intervention: “I can see that you’re quaking,” she said; “shouldn’t I rather finish the topmost parts of the house?” Cuz for some reason her mind and body remain in accord even at the highest heights: she suffers no conflict of impulse from within: apparently both her mind & gut agree: “Let us continue existing, day by day, in happiness and harmony with our surroundings, unlike Bryan.” I wish my maker had been as adept as whoever created my sweetheart. Her maker must have had access to superior tools.
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