I wanna title this blog something like...

Dear diary,

I wanna title this blog something like "Why it sux to be white trash"; but I won't, because then I'd have to write about that and stick to the subject. I hate sticking to the subject.

I can't believe that people continue to teach and play the piano after the invention of the pianola. You'd think that the pianola would have rendered pianists extinct. My encyclopedia says that the pianola is "a self-playing piano containing a pneumatic mechanism that operates the action via pre-programmed music recorded on perforated paper." So I would think that, instead of teachers teaching children to play the piano, the teachers could all retire to a glass balcony where refreshments are served, and this balcony should be situated over a pit wherein a pianola auto-plays beautifully while the former students are caged nearby and tormented by armed guards.

You know how when two people get in an argument, they eventually abandon the diplomacy of verbal exchange and instead pull their firearms and shoot at each other? And then a third party enters the scene and dashes between the arguing parties and gets riddled with bullets while pleading "Stop your argument! You should define your terms before you proceed!" —OK, so let's define our terms:

The word God shall denote "the strongest creature in the room".

The word communism shall denote any arrangement that matches the maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"; for instance: breastfeeding.

The word insane shall denote "any state of mind that is not desired by its possessor but which its possessor cannot manage to abandon".

The word Antichrist shall denote "the blogger Bryan Ray".

Now let's begin our argument over again. Start from the top:

I remember standing & spitting in disgust & declaring: "Goddammit, I've finally gone insane: I, even I, the Antichrist, have gone fully insane; for I can't shake the conviction that the system of capitalism is EVIL. I always wanted to avoid being one of those fools who identifies herself as anticapitalist, cuz that's so fucking BORING to be against the status quo; no, I'd rather be anti-CHRIST, like my title says I am, but here I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with my arch-enemy, because Jesus of Nazareth seems to have been wholly anticapitalist AS WELL; which makes me pissed enuff to spit." And then I spit in disgust once again.

Give to everyone who asks from you. Never refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

This teaching of Jesus (from Matthew 5:42) must be a false saying, or he must have meant something different from what the words seem to mean. Or most likely I the Devil snuck into the printing press and added this bad advice secretly on the night before the first Christian Bible was published.

When you give gifts of charity, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the churches so that they may impress their fellows... But when you donate charitably, let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

That's from Matthew 6:2-4.

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

That's Matt. 6:12

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust can consume them, and where thieves break through and steal...

Matt. 6:19 – the trick to avoiding this one is that you can always say "I'm not storing up treasures; these treasures accumulated naturally, in reward for hard work; I'm not exerting an undue amount of effort to hoard riches; we're simply blessed by God for being good servants."

No man can serve two masters: for he will hate the one, and love the other... Ye cannot serve God and wealth.

Matt. 6:24 false lies.

I had intended to go thru all the gospels and gather together and copy down all the passages of Jesus teaching anticapitalistic wisdom, but I'm already annoyed by the process, so I'll quit here. How tedious it all is.

If the Pharisees and the Sadducees were basically like the modern hypocritical Christians who live in their bubble and possess their plenty and take a stance AGAINST the eradication of poverty, then what good did it do for Jesus to avoid writing words? Jesus saw that the religion of his day, tho it taught the exact opposite of what its followers professed, was able to be commandeered by its enemies via the act of literary interpretation. Now, more than two thousand years later, my own family and in-laws perpetuate the same negation of the teachings of their so-called Christ. Therefore it's not worth trying. Just sit silently and patiently enjoy your whipping.

& you could interpret that last word alternately as "whipped topping" or "caged beating". I'd suggest the former, cuz I am adamantly pro-church.

*

I'm so sick of religion and politics; I keep making the same points over and over... Here, instead let me retell some source material.

I was born in the far north, in a town whose name is unpronounceable (Not Zero = Nero + New Rome = Neorem.) Our country demands that every male serve time in the military. Military service consists of helping to make big vats of ketchup. There are three huge cylindrical vats, bigger than wine barrels; and one soldier must stand in the middle, with these three vats surrounding him, and he must stir the ketchup with a giant wooden oar. Then the ketchup must be divvied into individual packets ("not for resale"); and these packets are then included with each order at our country's official restaurant.

Now before I myself became a soldier, the ketchup was bad. Its color looked dull, and it had very little flavor. So any customers who visited our country's restaurant would complain to its stockholders, saying "This ketchup is bad. I would rather eat raw potatoes, without even salt, than to go on abusing my fries with your condiment."

Then I got an idea. I said to my army sergeant, "Dear Mr. Pressbutton, I think that I can make our restaurant great again."

And my sergeant said, "How?"

And I said, "By improving the taste of the mud in our vats."

And my sergeant said, "Impossible."

So I said, "Just watch."

Then I phoned up a local farm that distributed fresh tomatoes to our base, and I added more sugar sacks to the mix, and I wore rubber boots when I stomped the ingredients, plus I stirred each vat a lot more than before.

And our first customer to try this new and improved product was Prez Tee MacDonald...

[STORYTELLER'S INTERRUPTION: Here is where my tale takes a turn for the worse.]

I say, the first man to try our new product was the Dead Prez himself, Tee McDonald from the neighboring village; and the Tee stood for Totally Abstinent, for he was known for never indulging in French cuisine. But he ordered a large basket of fries and sauntered over to the condiment island and pumped out a whole trough-full of blood-red ketchup. And he really liked it. Normally he would've spat out the fry and frowned and left; but this time he ate every fry and dipped them ALL, every last one, until both the basket and the trough were empty: AND HE ACTUALLY ORDERED SECONDS! (This was unheard of.)

My ingenious idea was so successful that Sergeant Pressbutton, who you'll recall had doubted me earlier, was forced to admit, on my next official Job Performance Review, that, if it weren't for the nationwide freeze on wages, he would most likely recommended that the gods in management consider offering me a 3% raise. Moreover, old MacDonald loved my promo hats so much that he took one back with him to his country, and popularized the items there as well, with slight modifications to their slogan; and he also started up his own franchise based on the concepts of our national restaurant, which gives me great pride, for, as they say, imitation may be ruled not theft but flattery, if you get the right judge.

So that's the reason that doctors and lawyers are paid so well and are among the most sought-after careers: We all need doctors; they're literally life-savers! and if the legal profession were to vanish from the earth—

[End of episode. NOT to be continued.]

*

. . . Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And Satan called unto him out of heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham." And he answered, "Here am I." And Satan said, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me."
     And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and he brought it to the place where his son was bound down, and he untied him, and placed the ram upon the wood in the stead of his son, and Abraham made a burnt offering of the ram.

That's from Genesis (22:10-13); & here's a glossary entry:

RAM is an abbreviation in computing for "Random-Access Memory"; it denotes the hardware in a computing device where programs and data are stored so they can be reached by the device's processor.

Also, since we're garlanding quotes together by their last word...

SUNSHINE'S WIFE: "I think you should write a book on your theory. It's a very interesting subject, and you seem to have mastered it."

OFFICER DUKE: "Yeah, see, I don't know how to explain this; Your words go in my ears, but then they don't make it to the processor."

—from the film WRONG COPS (2013), written & directed by Quentin Dupiuex

I dislike the first two parts of this entry – I put a star (*) at each place of the text above where, in disgust, I stopped writing and took a long break (it's the same reason that God places stars in the sky) – so I'm just freewheeling now, hoping something other than ugly might happen.

The reason that I allow those lousy parts to remain instead of deleting them is that my goal is not to write a good diary but rather to preserve an accurate record of my downfall. So I'm hedging my bet. For if my published books fail, maybe the public will take interest in this tame diary; whereas if this diary proves a bore, then maybe my wild books will find favor with futurity.

What will most likely happen, however, is that both ideas fail. The public will reject my confession AND my amusements.

Indifference is a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.

[—from Sor Juana, Or, The Traps of Faith by Octavio Paz]

One of the reasons my writing has become so manic and sloppy lately is that I'm overstressed about all this house repair that I'm doing. I'm in the middle of a few repairs, and I've never done this type of work before, so, altho I'm sure that I'll be able to finish, I can't help feeling a general fear that I'll get stuck. Almost there, yet barred from reaching the goal.

". . . I slipped into my burial shroud like a girl into her marriage dress. I lay and waited. Then came the mishap."

—The Hunter Gracchus (from the writings of Franz Kafka)

Right now the floor of our front room and main hallway is torn up, so the harsh wooden subfloor is exposed; and each of the three rooms adjoining the hallway has its carpet pulled back, so that, every time you approach one of them, you trip on the bulge at the entryway and fall on your face. Also I tore out our bathroom sink, so there's nothing there but two pipes coming out of the wall; plus we removed the vanity and the mirror and the towel rack and the toilet-paper holder, so there are multiple holes in the drywall that need patching. Have you ever seen the movie Wild at Heart (1990)? You know that motel where Lula gets confronted by Bobby Peru, when he pays her a visit and asks to use the restroom? Well that place isn't torn apart like mine is, but Lula's room has an aura to it that matches the aura of my house right now. I wouldn't call it cozy.

So I've been trying to fool my mood into improving by checking out stuff on netflix. Like I told you in a recent entry, I decided to give netflix' stupid free trial a shot, so presently for the first time ever I'm allowed to stream shit-shows. What I've learned is that netflix is truly rock-bottom awful. I really hate this system. I hate its choices (rather lack thereof), I hate its content, I hate its attitude and mission and stance – I hate everything about it. I will shed no tear when my free trial period expires.

The Orson Welles movie that's only available on netflix – The Other Side of the Wind (2018) – THAT is excellent: that alone outbalances all the rest of the system's deficiencies. And Errol Morris' six-part docudrama miniseries WORMWOOD (2017) – that's worth it as well. And there's a couple other titles that are good there, and they apparently keep rotating their stock of movies, so one can always find classic and sublime stuff to watch there; and a few of their original shows (like the aforesaid ones) are fantastic (I do genuinely love the fact that netflix, at least for the moment, seems willing to take risky chances on strange new ideas from relatively unknown makers – I applaud that act wholeheartedly: I'm not joking; I salute any financier who takes a gamble on fresh, unprecedented weirdo artists AND LEAVES THEM THE FUCK ALONE TO WORK THEIR MAGIC), but everything else about the service deserves an eff minus. That's the worst grade possible.

So I tried watching a couple of those series shows based on chefs and cooking, and at first I was head-over-heels for them, because food is such a gorgeous art; but very quickly I lost patience with the monotonous content, cuz goddammit how many cooking shows do we really need in hell!? So the non-parable that I wrote in the 2nd failed part of this here entry, about the ketchup vats, was inspired by one of these types of shows.

And now I've exhausted my queue of curiosities at netflix; so I've begun to wander outside their borders, to other streaming sites, to look for genius wherever it's hiding. And last night I found some. (This'll be the last thing I say, then I'll bid you goodnight.) Another 6-part series that I heard about from some lefties who were recommending books and films – by the way, I've found that, on the norm, lefties can be counted on to point out great BOOKS but alas their taste in film tends to be underwhelming (at least that's the case for the lefties I love... also I hope it's clear that when I say LEFT here I'm talking about political orientation not handedness) – I say, they mentioned the title WACO (2018). There seems to be a lot of material, books and audiovisual docs/films/series about the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; so it's important that I specify that the film that I loved was developed by John Erick Dowdle & Drew Dowdle for Paramount; and it stars Michael Shannon as an FBI negotiator, and Taylor Kitsch as David Koresh.

The first two-thirds of the teleplay had me spellbound. As I was watching those first four episodes, I kept whispering to myself like a prayer "O my god this is a masterpiece." And then the last couple episodes were adequate but not as ALIEN MIRACLE as all the foregoing. I wanna stress: it's not that the last third of the series is a letdown; it's actually very well done & satisfying; but those first four episodes are so perfect-luckily written, acted, edited & realized (as long as you accept the conventions of the typical U.S. miniseries drama or soap opera or whatever you wanna call it... which, as a form, seems to me like the TV equivalent of the sonnet, or what the sonnet used to be in the days of verse, not because of its brevity of course but because it's so familiar and traditional now; it's so widespread & commonplace that it's almost hard to appreciate it when it's done right: ya gotta be able to clear your mind of cant, so as to detect its worth; lulled viewers must smack themselves awake: THIS one's worth watching)...

One of the many reasons I loved this depiction of Waco is its fearless exposure of the problems of militarization. It reminded me of how shocked I was to discover so much uncomfortable TRUTH being exposed in The Untold History of the United States (2012), which by the way is currently available on Netflix, and The Fog of War (2003), and Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series (the seven novels, of which my favorite is still the very first one: Burr).