Here is the next page from my book of 843 Drawing Prompts. (I shared the last page on the 27th of last month; don't look now.) The prompt for this current pic, as you can tell, was "Mad Hatter".
Dear diary,
I’m not jealous when it comes to people or possessions; I’m jealous about personality traits, dispositions… Here’s what I mean:
If someone has a nice car, I’m not jealous: I don’t say “Ooh I want that car for myself!” I just admire the fact of a good match: owner and object. I like the look of a man who’s proud of his Porsche. (That’s the only car brand name I know.) Very simply, I’m happy that other people are happy. I feel no need to paint myself into everyone’s realized dreams. My only concern is that I don’t upset the harmony. And, as much as I can, I’d like to add to the general good:
That’s why I DO feel jealous of other people’s intelligence, or their easeful manner of speaking, or their effortless beauty. These are things that money cannot buy; they’re attributes that cannot be transferred, harnessed, shipped overseas. One must be born sassy; you can’t just pay for a plastic attachment of sass. So I’m very jealous in the realm of personality, inner beauty.
Actually external beauty, too – even tho the splendors of the flesh are closer to the class of purchasable items; and one can always buy eyeliner or wigs, ruffles, war paint, knee socks…
I’m jealous of the good looks of others, because I was born physically repulsive. Plus I’m evil to the core.
What I’m trying to get at is this: my love never stops burning for past girlfriends, because I’ve always experienced really fine relationships. I have even been blessed with excellent involuntary crushes. Now, by that root word CRUSH, I don’t mean “to deform, pulverize, or annihilate by compressing forcefully,” such as the act of mashing a pill between spoons, or when a blogger, mid-sentence, gets crushed to death by a train; I mean, rather, “an intense infatuation for someone special.” And that someone, in my case, is always a woman; and my love never dies. I think you could add the concept of secrecy to my version of this product, because (to let the name Sarah stand generically for all women; as in my "Gospel According to Bryan Ray": Rumors of Sarah) I never tell Sarah when I have a crush on Sarah. I’m just too shy.
Yet all my ex girlfriends preside over shrines in my mind: I still hold each individual in highest esteem; and all the women I’ve secretly admired, & dreamt about blowing a kiss to, are just as magnetic as they ever were to my heart. (I have a heart of gold which boasts the peculiarities of a lodestone – it’s like nothing that Science has ever before dissected: it keeps vainly pulling all femmes to its yearn-horizon.) And, if I forgot to mention it yet, the whole reason I can declare my endless love for all past loves is that my current love is so strong:
My sweetheart, my soul mate, is so satisfying, so inevitable, that all talk of "infra-fancy" and "ultraffection" is proof of our bond’s hale nature. For how can one know that adamant is indestructible? (HINT: You don’t have to build a little fence around Truth, to protect it from being eaten by the rabbits.)
So I still love all these old flames. I carry tens of torches. But that’s also funny: I’m no Don Juan. I’m fascinated by guys who can hop from affair to affair & have thousands of lovers. If you were to do so, I bet you’d meet a lot of interesting people. But I was cursed with a prude nature. All my promiscuousness is solely inward. So the number of girlfriends I’ve officially been able to declare on my taxes is small. In other words: my crushes outweigh my matches.
But the only purpose of this lengthy discursion was to set the scene for a rub. And here’s the rub:
I cannot relate to those people who, after a breakup, grow jealous of their ex. For, as I explained, I’m still fond of all my exes. But if we abstract the feeling of frustration from the realm of relationships, and refocus it elsewhere – say, in the realm of TIMESUCK (the phenomenon of wasting one’s energies on things that do not matter) – I can then begin to sympathize. For instance:
Imagine a girl named Jen. Let’s say that Jen has a boyfriend named Bulk Male. OK, so, one day, while walking down the hallway of our grade school, as we’re heading to math class, we overhear Jen remark to her best friend Rachel, “I’m so sad and hurt and angry because Bulk Male just dumped me; that is to say, he terminated our relationship; so now I’m frustrated with myself for ever falling in love with him; and I’m annoyed with my feelings, because I can’t stop mulling about him! Every time I sit down to write a blog post, all I can think about is Bulk Male, my ex boyfriend; so all my posts end up being about HIM instead of the poetic aspects of life which are my truest loves (and far more worth my concern)...”
My point is that, in place of all the references to Jen’s boyfriend in that last text-blob, you could swap out the plague of POLITICS and it would match my state of mind in 2019. I’m so angry at myself because I hate politics but I can’t stop obsessing over it, and all my diary entries get ruined cuz I can’t get stupid politics off my mind. And even this whine about my inability to shake my political addiction is becoming repetitious. But I’ll try again tomorrow.
P.S.
I add this one thot, cuz it just now struck me: Since the processes of politics apparently determined the present level of harmony among living creatures, and since that level of harmony is faint and low, the act of abandoning all concern for future politics seems tantamount to letting go of the steering wheel of a speeding ship: a prerequisite to doing so is the acceptance of one's mortality. If I'm right about this, then my inability to abandon political argument reflects my unwillingness to mute my present existence. It's easy to see my error here: Life is not identical to politics; altho politics has an effect on life, it is not consubstantial with life the way that art is. If I accept this line of reasoning, my new problem becomes: How much do I abandon myself to true life, to the whims of the imagination, without altogether negating the possibility of pragmatic change that could only come via political activism?
(You’re right: I should have ended this entry before the postscript.)
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