The title of this blog post is just a description of what I was doing today; it has nothing to do with the diary entry that follows.
Now here’s a photo taken by Ryan Baldwin:
Because I am selfish, I never share other people’s images here on my public-private diary-blog, but I liked this one. So salutations to Mr. Baldwin. (Here’s the source link, which I stole from his fine-art gallery at The Bluebird Network.)
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Incidentally, the word JAMB (forgive an extra note on the title of this printable e-scripture) can refer to “a columnar mass or pillar situated within a mine, quarry, entryway, window, or fireplace”. That is the official definition. I myself, when employing it, intended simply to denote the frame of my door.
Also, because the words are similar-sounding, we should remain alert to the fact that JAMB, the four-letter term with a bee at the end, is often confused with the shorter, bee-less JAM. Do not make this mistake.
Moreover, BAMF, the vulgar North American slang term meaning “a formidably impressive person” (for example, take this paraphrase of an overheard compliment: “you are a BAMF because you did not back down from that catfight”) is a technical acronym for “Bad-Ass Mother-Effer”; and, according to the “Mentions Graph” on Google, this term was most popular (that is to say, it achieved its most frequent usage) around 1840:
In closing, we should never tire of pointing out the truth that the title MOTHER-EFFER is but a synonym for FATHER. It is the most offensive curse-word ever invented. Therefore, do not use it vainly; but whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. (Colossians 3:23)
Now I’ll start the entry proper.
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Irony is no longer with us. Nuance is no longer with us. I’m not complaining about this. The world can still be fun without irony and nuance.
Here’s a thot that’s on my mind right now: A king has an army; he tells his army to invade a faraway place; so his army goes and finds a winter wonderland in the realm of the…
So what happens is that the king now owns this place that his army invaded. And he says to its citizens: I could have told my army to kill you all, but I did not; instead, I spared the populace; therefore, you owe me your lives. And the people are like, “Yes, boss; whatever you say!” Which is an offensive North American slang variant on the timeworn Hyperborean lament “Your wish is my command.”
I’m probably wrong, but this scenario reminds me of the land where I live now.
In the Great Depression, people were poor and hungry: they looked wasted and worn when you snapped their image in photographs. Then came the Great Recession, about a generation later. In order to avoid looking wasted and worn, people took out loans on credit and bought makeup to prettify their physical appearance, plus they kept themselves fed and clothed and sheltered by sinking deeper into debt. So now the Credit Companies are telling the people “We could have let you all die, but we did not; instead, we spared the populace by dispersing plastic cards that ration assets; therefore, you owe us your lives.
So (I’m probably wrong about this) this is the reason that all of your neighbors are constantly rushing off to their second and third job, and their children are like hot potatoes that must be tossed from one caretaker to the next. All the houses are dilapidated cuz there’s no time to fix them, and no money to buy the supplies or to pay the handywomen to solve all problems.
Yes, people come and go at all hours of the night. There’s really no standard time when all mice are asleep anymore. It used to be that every gal would work from nine to five; and all gals had big breasts; then the family would gather at the dinner table and slice the golden brown turkey, and at least one child would always have polio.
The new fad is cancer.
I’m trying to think why you’d think it’s a good idea to raise a child in this world. I mean, look at your grandparents. As established above, they endured the Great Depression — therefore your grandparents starved to death and went naked & homeless on the streets of Rome.
Why did your grandparents bring your parents to life? Because they (grandpap and mam) got caught with their pants down, and actions have consequences. We live in a world where love-making brings forth suffering. So two sets of grandparents plug holes in some back alley and then endure mammalian birth (a wet, furry scene; not like birth from a caged egg): they push out two respective beings. These beings were your parents.
But the question remains: Why did your parents make YOU? It’s not because they fucked up; parents never fuck up. They made an informed decision to grow you in a petri dish in a responsible scientific laboratory. They saw how their lives were a massive improvement on the lives of their own damned parents (your damned grandparents); and they wanted to pass this incredible success on to you, their legal spawn.
I’m getting sidetracked. My point all along was to solve the mystery: Why should you yourself ever choose to procreate? For your parents are good, not fuck-ups; but you are an absolute fuck-up: a purebred foundling. (Have you ever done one thing right in your whole entire life?)
You must have assumed that the pendulum would swing back in the other direction again, like it did when your parents hit the jackpot and got to enjoy the spoils of the 2nd World War cuz they dropped the atomic bombs, and they firebombed so many cities, we’ve long lost track of how many innocents they incinerated.
(And babies are still born with birth defects, even still stillborn, on account of our victories.)
People talk about the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent: a small gang of the world’s population claims ownership of everything, and the rest of the people just go naked and starve and die. Yeah, what about it? That’s how this world was made. Have you ever watched animals do their politics? They scrape at each other with their claws, and they bite each other in the face, and some of their offspring are born with horns on their person to aid with slaughter, like a baby rhinoceros, and the worst always wins. The worst man, the worst jerk. That’s nature’s way. Always at the pile’s tiptop sits the vilest being. (And certain minds use Darwinian survivalist notions as a justification for their stance!) So if that’s what we see in unedited nature, then why should we expect any more from raw humankind? Humans are basically animals who learned how to lie.
So now imagine that we’re in a bar, which is to say, a pub or saloon: a place where adult beverages are consumed. (Adult beverages are to humans what oats are to horses. For every species is barred from the nectar of the gods: we’re all estranged from the eternal.) Actually, let me tell this as if it really did happen to me:
Alright, so I was at this bar. It was Tuesday night. Me and all the drunks were at the bar, drinking and singing together; glancing at each other homoerotically but never daring to take the first step on that path. Then in comes this city slicker: a businessman, wearing a nicely tailored suit. This jerk walks into the saloon and slams a wad of cash down on the bar and says “Gimme a Diet Coke.” So I pace over to this guy and pull out my gun and point it right at his face and say, “I don’t like your skin color, you better change it fast.”
Long story short: this bigwig flips out his pinkie finger and plugs the nozzle of my firearm; then he uses his other hand to pry my grip from the handle, and he takes the gun away from me and tosses it over his shoulder, and it lands in the recycling bin. And then he slaps my face and says, “I’ll be whatever color I want. And don’t you ever point a gun at me again.”
Speaking as auteur (now that my parable backfired, or rather refused to fire at all but proved a dud that got itself tossed in the spittoon, I’m going to try to let you in on the backstory; the behind-the-scenes stuff, like the director of a box office flop who won’t stop droning on the audio channel of a laserdisc’s commentary track), I was trying to make the smooth-talking businessman sorta resemble the current leader of our Great Nation (The #1 Geographic Boundary, I forget its name), but now I realize that I screwed up the tale in the telling of it: I meant to show how I the heat-packing bar-scribe outsmarted my foolish antagonist, but the situation got away from me and I ended up revealing how he outsmarted me. Here are the notes that I scribbled on the original storyboard:
What I wanna do is take Trump’s idea of “The Art of the Deal” and twist it so that I am the winner and he is the loser. I wanna work up to a point where the businessman asks to purchase my fancy footwear (which is singular, for my good leg terminates in a hoof); and I answer “How much are you willing to pay for this here shitkicker?” or alternately I might have my actor bray sexily & ad-lib “How much are you willing to pay to knock this boot?” Cuz it’s a ruby slipper, and it’s also a silver slipper and a glass slipper.
Then the dude says: “Ultimately I want to purchase the product for 500 U.S. dollars, so I will bid half of that ($250), expecting you, the seller, to counteroffer 75% of what you fear it’s worth, which is an even Cleveland (that’s slang for a grand); and three quarters of a thousand buckaroos equals seven hundred fifty.”
But I say to the businessman, “I’ll let you have this item for double the amount that you just offered, and if you ever find its companion piece, you can click them together and they will bring you home to your true love, the prince from the ball, who keeps a transparent stocking in your measurements locked in a vault.”
(Yes, I could make the sock into a horseshoe, thus implying that the man has a hoof like mine. Maybe I’ll do that when it comes time to film this scene.)
This confuses the businessman and thus I get the better of him, and the judges declare me to be the more beautiful athlete; because he (the jerk, my opponent) assumed I’d bid 750 so that he could talk me down to 500, whereas I simply flew straight there; now his only option is to bid lower than he originally intended, which he’ll never do, cuz this would be tantamount to admitting that his original guess about my willingness to go along to get along was off by an amount unquantifiable, and he does NOT hold the whole world in his hand, and he did NOT create my soul.
There was a reason why, as I’ve already observed, the words for “truck and barter” in almost all European languages were derived from terms meaning “swindle,” “bamboozle,” or “deceive.”
[—from Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber; Ch. 10: The Middle Ages]
I don’t know. I’m gettin’ bored. I haven’t been able to hold these blog posts together for some time now. Pretty much since the beginning. Maybe I’ll try making my own website with my own web address like Bryan Ray Dot Org or Dot Net or Dot Fun or Dot Rom-Com or something. (Rom-Com means Romantic Comedy, a classification of VHS cassette at our family’s movie rental store.) Maybe that’ll help. Cuz I’m tired of posting everything on Google’s Blogger network. And maybe I’ll try to go without any formatting or spell checker, so that I reveal how stupid I actually and truly am. Maybe that’ll be enough of a change to lure me to write differently. Maybe I should even forego the use of capitalization. Not punctuation: I’ll still use periods and commas and stuff like that, cuz I think they help to clarify one’s thots; and it’s not my intention to be unclear. But to have no capitals would be like how some people write text messages on their smartphone (phones are SO smart, nowadays). Thus I’d be cool then. Or at least I’d gain a certain amount of cool points, which I could use to pay off what I owe to the gods of uncoolness. If I referred to myself as “i” (small case) as opposed to “I” (upper case), it would help to facilitate the illusion that the auteur has, at long last, descended from his majestic throne and is now willing to live among the common folk. I could even drive my own folk’s-wagon. Or I could sit in a wheelbarrow.
I can’t figure out if i think too highly or lowly of myself. (I think i’ll keep the caps for the initial word of each sentence, but that is all. And no more italics, only BIG PRINT for emphasis.) I realize that i fall into the habit of speaking of myself as if i’m god, and then sometimes i speak of myself as if i’m just a clown (eirōn, ‘simulated dissembler’), and everyone else is divine. And often i identify with satan, the devil, but only john milton’s satan from his book PARADISE LOST and only thru the eyes of william blake, where he says in his MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, on plates 5 & 6, at the end of the subsection titled “The Voice of the Devil”:
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah.
And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the Heavenly Host, is calld the Devil or Satan, and his children are called Sin & Death.
But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is called Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties
It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss
This is shown in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the Comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire
Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
So when i say devil i mean THIS devil not ha-satan the prosecutorial attorney in the celestial courtroom, the accuser of sin.
That idea of the heavenly court is kind of a good idea and kind of a stupid idea. It’s good insofar as it helps you think about god and justice. It’s stupid inasmuch as god would never use our forms of…
Why do i always assume that god wouldn’t want to do things like we humans do them? Maybe god enjoys playing the games of mortal flesh. And also we should never forget that god does not exist. Only nothing and everything exist; and god is nothing, as well as a fair part of everything.
But if satan is the name of the lawyer on the side of the case that is being filed against you up in the sky, with god as the jury, then what should we call the other lawyer, the one who is on your side?
We should call him the redeemer... or the counsel for the defendant… one’s advocate… legal practitioner, legal professional, legal representative, member of the bar; solicitor, barrister; mouthpiece, ambulance chaser… and his name shall be Jesus.
So your legal representative’s name is Jesus, and god’s name is Jove, and the prosecuting attorney (the satan) is named Mr. Chretien, as in “good christian neighbor from Troyes who gifted me this hollow horse” or “onward! christian soldiers now let god assist us in making sweet love to our enemies” Eliphaz the Temanite; Bildad the Shuhite; Zophar the Naamathite.
I’m just trying to say that that whole judgmental attitude that is nowadays associated with a certain type of churchgoing believer is exactly in line with the way the biblical scripture such as the BOOK OF JOB presents the figure of satan.
But milton’s satan is totally different. I can relate to HIM, cuz he was wrongfully thrown off the cliff down into hell, just because he tried to bring democracy to heaven. Heaven in those days was basically overrun by bankers. And there’s this king who keeps his innermost circle rich by waging wars: he sends his troops from land to land (or in Elysium that’d be spacetime to spacetime) and makes everyone slaves to his annoying system of finance.
Are people simply too polite to fight back? Or do we actually believe in right and wrong? And what kind of morality permits this lousy formula to continue? Who taught us how to think about these things?
The problem — or rather ONE OF the problems — is that everyone trusts a different source of truth. Cuz you can’t get to the truth directly; it can only be trumpeted to you from afar by some mailman on horseback. So when the U.S. is in a foreign nation faraway, some people say “The U.S. is righteous for doing thus and so,” whereas others say “Stop! Leave now, USA! Bad god!” And the only way that we United Statesians can tell whether we should be happy or sad about the state of foreign affairs is if the messenger bugles to us on his pony seven photographs; and we break the seven seals on these newsworthy photos, and lo: they all depict happy people marrying and giving in marriage upon a gigantic iceberg. Thus we feel happy, becuz the souls who live in the pics appear half-satisfied.
But one of our fellow citizens is sad. That’s a fact. And when we ask him why, he answers: “I am sad because the Pony Photo Service just delivered me this parcel that contains seven glossy full-color ads of people suffering on a giant melting iceberg: all the economies inside the photos are cruel because they’re arranged by penny-pinchers, and the divorce rate is too low to allow for any hope to exist; and the last image seems to depict a cruise ship crashing into this iceberg.”
Now how can we know which messenger to scold? For this sad citizen is the recipient of a message that differs significantly from our own; our messenger’s message made us happy because it presented us with a landscape filled with the happiest inhabitants, yet this odd man’s messenger messaged him misery and madness.
There’s this maxim “Don’t assassinate the angel — he only brought you the news that was fit to print; he did not make up the news from whole cloth; We the Corporate News Conglomerate did that, we fabricated the revelations, and tailored and trimmed them; and we are financed by the same folks who keep bringing you the warfare.”
So we never kill the messenger we only scold him. But this brings us back to the question that I asked in the very beginning, two paragraphs ago: “How can we know which messenger to scold? the one who delivered unto us the propaganda photos or he who leaked us the ones that are real? And how can we know whether we’re right or wrong in our decision?” For scolding someone is serious business and should not be undertaken lightly.
P.S.
Last night we also screened the film National Bird, a 2016 documentary by Sonia Kennebeck. (“Three courageous whistleblowers break the silence around the U.S. drone war – a decision that will change their lives forever.”) I really liked it. If “liking” something can manifest as weeping in shame at the atrocities that one’s country keeps committing.
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