Here's the next page from my book called 6,969 Drawing Prompts. (Link to last page here.) What happens is that you receive this book as a gift from your cousin, and you open it up and notice that all the pages are blank; but then you notice that the pages aren't exactly blank, for each one has a phrase written in its top left corner, urging you (Earth's finest artist) to draw a picture that brings that particular idea to life. As you can see, the prompt for this latest masterpiece was "Pac-Man video game".
Dear diary,
Why is it illegal to overwrite, and punishable by death to articulate harebrained theories? If I wanted to be perfectly rational, prudent, intelligent, and sensible, I’d have chosen to be born as one of the straighter animals, like an owl or flamingo. Look at owls: they have all the answers, but their canny knowledge comes at the cost of their posture; for they are very stiff, they stand in one spot customarily, with their hands rigidly at their sides, and they look around and blink sternly surveying the field, and they mentally criticize all of the mice for being too small and too dashing & tasty. What a bore. And flamingos just stand there for hours on one foot, cuz they’re scared to let loose and dive into the pleasures of conspiratorial theorization. You never see a flamingo writing a wild book like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, which tells about our world. Plus neither owls nor flamingos laugh well.
But if you pay a little extra in the spirit realm, you can get yourself born as a human. I think the human form is a gas. You can be wrong all the time, and yet it’s fun, cuz you assume you’re still right! I think that deciding to walk up tall by standing on two legs is what really helped us. Think about the disadvantages of four-legged travel: first, it’s degrading — how could you let your face come so close to the ground!? All four limbs relatively doing the same job, too: Why don’t you just take the next logical step and grow round wheels with rubber tires at the end of your paws. Cuz you’re basically just an automobile with fur. A hairy car.
The other place where humans have the upper hand is in the mouth and tongue area. Our mouth and tongue is not good for biting and chewing: that’s why we’re mostly fed intravenously or via nutriment baths, but because these facial features are vestigial, which is to say, leftovers from a previous age that have severely dwindled in their practical viciousness, we use them to lie. And so we end up talking a LOT, and many creatures care what we say.
This advantage of being a wily sub-genius among much smarter species is what got me into my house. None of the mice in the nearby fields could get into this house, and none of the owls that I hear in the night. They might have tried to open the windows or creep in under the shingles of the roof, and maybe they did infiltrate the attic area, but nothing of worth is up there besides insulation and a whole bunch of cobwebs. But I know how to turn a key in a lock, which opens the front door. That’s how I got the door open. And all the owls and mice looked on in jealousy as I moved all my junk into the house. Yes, I claimed the place as my own. And now I sleep in the bed, instead of out on the lawn. And here’s a fact you probably didn’t know: My house’s bedroom window overlooks a public street, and the street is on a steep hill, and I live in Minnesota, and we get a lot of snow here, and there are supposed to be plows that come thru and plow the snow away, but I don’t live in a very high-traffic area, so the plows don’t get around to plowing my steep snowy hill-street often or at all effectively. So, like I said, my window is seven meters from the street, and the panes are very thin, so I can hear everything that happens out there on the road. And I’m here in my bed, trying not to fall asleep, because sleeping leads to dreaming, and dreaming is like being born again. Now, along comes a truck: it’s a big truck, driving up the street. And its engine roars when it approaches my bedroom window; so now there’s this roaring truck veering all over the road, slipping on the snow and basically trapped just seven meters from my head (because it’s driving uphill on a snowy road that is quite ill-plowed). So this helps me not sleep. And soon this truck loses control and tears thru the grass of my lawn and crashes thru the closest wall of my house; so now there’s this vast grille of a semi truck in my bedroom; and it would be awkward not to attempt a conversation, so the truck’s pilot opens her driver-side door and says “Sorry — I lost control coming up the hill.” And I say “It took me a long time to figure out how to get in this house; and I ended up using a key; but you got in here pretty quick, using your vehicle as a makeshift battering ram.”
This dream’s going nowhere, so I’m gonna change the channel. Let’s talk about reincarnation for a spell. Do you believe that you’ll come back to spacetime as some other living thing, after you die? I sort of don’t. But I love to imagine what type of critters the personalities among my human friends would prefer to be reborn as, if they could care. I don’t like to imagine my friends being reincarnated as animals that they abhor: I’m not attracted to the punishment aspect of rebirth; I’d rather muse about the compatibility of certain existing forms that possess proclivities similar to those of my imaginary friends…
Like Cheri, who’s always plotting and scheming, but she’s very passive about her trickeries — I think that she might really enjoy life as a spider. Cuz she could weave her web and just sit there and wait. She could live in my attic. She’d love it. “Haha,” she’d think, “I got my web set up here, and tied down securely to the rafters. Thank god for this tiny boat-winch that the previous owner left me: that really helped to tighten the strings of my deadly web: now flying creatures will get trapped in it. So now I’m gonna just sit here and wait, and dream with pleasure of all the beasts that I’ll catch. I’ll probly catch an unsuspecting wasp, when he hatches from his nest. And I’ll catch one ladybug; and I’ll catch one cricket. I’m glad that I went to college and planned my future out properly. And if I find a husband, fine; but if I don’t find a husband, that’s fine too. I’m not gonna go out searching for a husband. Let the husband come to me, if fate demands that we bear two children together. We can snap a family photo on a Sunday, depicting the four of us happy souls all smiling together while raking leaves in autumn-time; and we’ll set this pic to display as the “cover image” on our social-network page. But if God has some other plan for my life, then I’ll not complain: I will take to my calling with relish. Even if he wants me to find employment as a social worker, and my job is to help people who have served time in prison (for committing armed robbery) rejoin society: I’ll do that, no prob. I’ll just be nice to them. Odds are, they didn’t actually commit the crimes that they were jailed for, anyway — they probably accepted a plea bargain cuz the cops set them up.”
Another dream down the drain. Apparently this entry is resistant to interesting thots. Maybe I’ll cheat and just quote another passage from David Graeber’s Debt. I say “another” because I copied a passage yesterday. If you missed that episode, what happened is that I proclaimed my deep love for Mr. Graeber’s book. It’s a real revelation. So here is an excerpt from the chapter called “Cruelty and Redemption” (p. 78):
...it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral laws: this is why we feel that the community has the right to react “like an angry creditor” and punish us for our transgressions if we break them. In a larger sense, we develop a creeping feeling that we could never really pay back the ancestors, that no sacrifice (not even the sacrifice of our first-born) will ever truly redeem us. We are terrified of the ancestors, and the stronger and more powerful a community becomes, the more powerful they seem to be, until finally, “the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god.” As communities grow into kingdoms and kingdoms into universal empires, the gods themselves come to seem more universal, they take on grander, more cosmic pretentions, ruling the heavens, casting thunderbolts—culminating in the Christian god, who, as the maximal deity, necessarily “brought about the maximum feeling of indebtedness on earth.” Even our ancestor Adam is no longer figured as a creditor, but as a transgressor, and therefore a debtor, who passes on to us his burden of Original Sin…
At this point, Graeber quotes Nietzsche, as he’s been doing throughout his text at this point in the book — one of the things I love about it is the choice of material that Graeber draws from: the Hebrew prophets, the biblical law, the Vedic texts, the Gospels, modern anthropological studies, and thinkers like Nietzsche. As I said, a quote of the latter immediately follows the above passage — Graeber cites my favorite Nietzsche text, On the Genealogy of Morals, so that’s a bonus — but because the topic is the transference of Original Sin, I want to return, here in my public-private blog-diary entry, to my nemesis St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus), who did a bang-up job of developing, or at least of disseminating, the idea of inherited sin in his epistle to the Romans; where he couples this Super-Debt with the concept of Super-Debt Cancellation; in a word: REDEMPTION, by his trademarked bloody Christ, son of the Super-Creditor:
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
[...] death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression [...]
For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.
[...] For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. [...]
As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:12-21)
I skipped forward over many parts of this passage, leaving it holy as swiss cheese, because I cannot tolerate an author as scatterbrained as myself. You can tell that Saul dictated his letters and neglected to read them over or revise them before pressing the “Send” button, because he’s constantly flying off on tangential details and then returning and repeating himself. If his epistle were a grocery list, it would sound like this:
Pick up vodka, yes, for vodka is what we’re going to be needing a lot of next Saturday when we meet with the in-laws for their celebration, and how unfortunate that we all must hide our adult beverages because the in-laws are sternly against all manner of enjoyment, yes, so we’ll also need something to use as a mixing agent, say, cherry juice, and a little tonic too, but vodka first, yes, that’s first on the list: buy vodka; and, what else do we need when we shop for food but black beans and whole wheat tortillas…
Actually, now that I’ve ventured to flesh out my analogy, I realize that my grocery list does not at all resemble the Apostle’s writings. I admit to having failed, this time. So the score is: Saul, one; Bryan, zero. But I’ll get his ass next time. (Watch out, Saulus, I’ll clobber your ass in round two.) But I do think it’s funny to learn that the Apostle’s favorite meal is bean burritos and vodka. I guess I won’t mind dining with him in the afterlife, when we find out that we’re related by way of celestial marriage and baptism of the dead.
All things shall be subdued unto Christ. Once this is accomplished, then shall the Son, Jesus, also himself be subdued and made subject unto the Father, Jehovah, who put all things under him, so that GOD can finally be made all in all. No more skulking about in the shadows and creeping and hiding as if nonexistent: GOD will at long last appear and be tangible, very huge on the horizon. Even Jesus will look like a tiny speck, next to GOD. For Jehovah is the only one who can collect on all the interest; HE’s the one who owns all the deeds to all houses, even your last house: the grave underground; HE’s the Big Caesar who’s face graces the obverse of ALL coins — all spiritual coins, that is: the only currency that’s backed by TRUE tax-power. For if the strength of your kingdom’s money is proportionate to the ruthlessness of your kingdom’s army, then think what it means to have your coins backed by the godawful HOST OF HEAVEN. That gang of angels. Eternal warriors. Yes, we have nothing to fear, if we sign our souls over to my Christ, for he’s the only form of payment that GOD will accept, to balance the sacred columns of debit and credit. My Christ is so alive that he paid off all death! If I’m wrong about this, then what shall all those poor souls do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead? (1 Corinthians 15:28-29)
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