Dear diary,
Forget the Iran situation; forget global nuclear arsenal proliferation and climate chaos; forget about the continuing attempts at an anti-democratic U.S.-led coup in Venezuela: forget all this; the real problem of our world is that there’s a floodlight positioned directly outside of my bedroom window, and this floodlight is movement-sensitive, so that it turns itself on whenever something moves within its field of sensitivity; now, like I said, this floodlight is affixed to the soffit directly outside my window, right where I sleep (the pillow on my bed is just meters away, albeit indoors whereas the light is outside); therefore, whenever its bulb automatically ignites, the whole front yard is flooded with artificial moonlight – it really does look just like the light that beams uniformly over the landscape and paints everything bright pale during a full supermoon – that phenomenon whereby the new moon appears particularly large in the sky owing to the coincidence of its closest approach to the earth – and even tho I keep my blinds closed, this light is so intense that it seeps in between the slats and infects the entire bedroom; in other words, it bathes my room in an eerie silver glow; so this of course wakes me up, because I think that either the sun has finally imploded OR the extraterrestrials have attacked; but then, after blinking and panting for a moment, I realize that it’s just the effect of our oversensitive floodlight – something in the yard must have triggered it – so I go back to bed; YET now here’s the problem, which outweighs all the other problems of the world: it goes without saying that, in bygone days, after climbing our wooden ladder to inspect the floodlight’s control panel, I set all its dials so that it’s only monitoring the smallest possible locality, at the lowest sensitivity, for the shortest duration; but lately I’ve noticed that, say, whenever a motor-car drives in front of our house, and I mean nearly every time, the floodlight ignites; so this made me assume that its sensitivity purview, despite my having reduced it to damn near zero, was still so broad as to react to objects passing in the street (this street abuts our front yard, therefore, technically speaking, it is nearby, but not close enough to justify triggering our security lamp). That’s the predicament. And here’s my conclusion:
Like I said, at first I presumed that, because our floodlight switches on with each passing vehicle, its zone of perception is obviously too vast and too sensitive; for it’s apparently monitoring the space beyond our yard, out in the street, which is wholly unnecessary (robbers never approach from the distance; they always tunnel up from under one’s lawn); but now I think differently – I think what’s happening is as follows: the light is obeying its settings just fine; it is “watching” only a small area directly in front of its sensor; but what I failed to consider, in my first hasty assessment, was the fact that there’s probably a peacock that hides by our house, just outside of the purview of the floodlight, no more than a stone’s throw from my bedroom; it probably waits there in silence, bothering no one and triggering no lights anywhere; however, once a motor-car appears around the bend & continues to travel up the street in the direction of our house, the peacock grows frightened and dashes out into the lamp’s monitoring zone, thus triggering the device & causing all our fancies to explode. This would explain why the floodlight is still affected by street traffic, despite its low perceptive threshold. Yes, I’m sure it’s the peacock.
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Now I have nothing else to say, but my biological mother has voiced an intention to pay us a visit this morning; so I must continue writing, to ward off dread. So here I’ll paste this passage that I cut from an earlier entry – I had hoped to weave it into some future blog post, so that it’d appear to fit smoothly as the piece of a puzzle into a greater organic vision, but right now I just need to keep things moving, so I’ll bang it down without ceremony, like the ante of a gambler:
Think of the army. You join it, cuz you’re poor. Then you fight, and you either die or get injured. Now, if you’re dead, at least you’re not in poverty anymore, unless there’s poverty after the grave.
BUT I forgot to tell you the third option, just now when I spoke of the outcomes of joining the army: I only gave paths 1 & 2: death and injury; but there’s a 3rd possibility: regular continued existence. For you may also choose to make a career in the army, without dying or suffering any injury; or you can leave the army for a job in the private sector — perhaps you want to start your own business: in that case, you’ll have to fill out some forms, and think of a name for your corporation.
I wish I could’ve found a way to end a post with the above, cuz I think it works better as an ending than here in the middle. But such is life. As Orson Welles always sez: The definition of movie director could be “one who presides over accidents”. I myself, Bryan Ray, the lowlife journalist, have always dreamt of being a motion-picture-maker. The reason I chose to remain as an accountant instead is that I couldn’t afford film school. What happens (if you choose the film-school route) is that first you pay a million dollars to Paramount Studios, and they photoshop a birth certificate proving that you’re related to some famous director who’s already proven himself profitable; and then you’re ready to go! Basically anyone will hire you to direct your own script, at that point. You can write a movie about a family sitting around the dinner table arguing politics, and the financiers will jump at the chance to…
I’m just pulling your leg. The only way that one can become a movie director in Minnesota is to work hard and vote for the Democratic Party.
The ONLY reason that war has been on my mind lately is that we just got finished watching all the films on Steve Bannon’s Top Favorite Movies List. There were exactly five films, and they were all about warfare. About being a disgruntled soldier. About being a disgruntled general. About being a disgruntled bomber pilot. Lots of war, and lots of disgruntledness. Uniformed bureaucrats. I wrote an entry recently where I gave a short reaction to each of the titles, but I had to skip one movie because it hadn’t yet arrived—it was an interlibrary loan, which had to be transported from afar to our local branch—and just last night we had the great pleasure of suffering thru this film, called Twelve O'Clock High (1949). Altho I’d seen it before, I hadn’t remembered it; so I was glad to refresh my repressions:
It’s a film about aeroplanes. The dastardly Germans were practically begging to be defeated during World War 2, and a small squadron of U.S. air-pilots were told to fly very low missions over THE ENEMY during broad daylight when it would be easy for THE ENEMY to shoot them down, because if each mission succeeds then many good bombs will obliterate THE ENEMY and this may even destroy the building that THE ENEMY uses to manufacture ball bearings for its army tanks.
The thing is that if I were an United Statesian in the Air Force during WWII, and my commanding officer were to yell at me, saying, “Dear Bryan, go and drop six bombs on Goethe’s Mom-&-Pop Ball-Bearing Shop!!! Do this pronto!!! Why are you standing around looking at me with that vapid ignorant expression on your ugly mug: GO CLIMB UP INTO YOUR AIRPLANE VIA ITS TUMMY-DOOR & FLY OUT & BOMB THE EVIL GERMANS WHO WE’LL BEFRIEND IN THE VERY NEAR FUTURE… THE TIME TO BOMB THEM IS NOW!!! THE TIME TO BEFRIEND THEM IS LATER…”
Etc., etc… I’m tired of typing in all-caps, just to signify that my commanding officer is yelling at the top of his voice and calling me names like “maggot” and “vermin” because this motivates tender souls to do a better job; so if your job is to drop bombs, you’ll drop bombs more effectively, if your boss berates you.
The thing that I hate is this: I don’t have anything against a German company that manufactures ball bearings. I think ball bearings are a fine item. Kinda pricey, but well worth it.
Yet I understand: We gotta destroy the plant that produces these goods, because ball bearings are causing not only the U.S. tanks to run well – they’re also powering THE ENEMY’s hideous tanks. Thus we must fly missions in broad daylight at low altitude, which is basically guaranteed death: since it’s so easy for THE ENEMY to spot us, we’re heading into sure danger when we set out. One could almost call these missions “suicide missions”, and thus I feel fear, and thus I object to such orders, but then immediately I begin to question my reasons for objecting – I murmur to my overlord:
Perhaps I’m just a coward. Perhaps I do not care one fig about my country. All I want to do is watch television and sip Diet Coke and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). For the fast-food franchise KFC was a big deal in 2019, when the Prez was Great Again just like the Golden Age back in the days.
Scrap that last paragraph when you etch this entry as my epitaph. I’m seriously just typing rapid-fire cuz I hate this day and I wanna teleport directly to the afternoon and skip the morningtime entirely.
P.S.
Did you ever hear anyone in the U.S.A. making a big deal about the Ten Commandments? Like when certain self-styled “Bible believers” say that they want fake stone idols representing the tablets on which these Commandments were written (by the finger of GOD) displayed prominently in every U.S. courtroom. Well the story of Yahweh God appearing on top of old smokey (Mount Sinai A.K.A. Horeb) to have a face-to-face teleconference with Moses and deliver to him these Commandments (in their first edition) occurs in Exodus 19:19 – an easy number to remember. And the account continues to the end of the chapter; then chapter 20 gives the boring rules themselves... let's skip back to the fun stuff: Here I'll copy the part that precedes the grand reveal, because it’s exactly what comes to mind when I think of having to meet with my mother this morning:
And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice. And Yahweh God came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and Yahweh called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up.
And Yahweh said unto Moses, “Now that you’re up here, I command thee: Go back down! and warn the people: give them a great warning, and charge them severely, so that they understand the terms of our meeting, cuz I don’t want them to BREAK THRU unto Yahweh to gawk at my appearance; for many innocents will perish if they get too close to me. The priests also, which draw nigh unto Yahweh – let them sanctify themselves, lest Yahweh BREAK FORTH upon them.”
& Moses said unto Yahwah, “The people cannot come up to mount Sinai: for you already warned us, saying, ‘Set bounds about the mount, and sanctify it: cordon it off with yellow tape like a crime scene.’ So I will stay right here, with you, O God, and invite the people up, because we’ve already made the requisite preparations against you BREAKING FORTH upon us. We know that you’re volatile.”
& Yahweh said unto him, “Away with thee!! get thee DOWN!! and only then shalt thou come UP – thou, and Aaron with thee – but let not the priests and the people BREAK THRU to come up unto Yahweh, lest I myself BREAK FORTH upon them!!!”
So Moses shuffled back down to the people and apologized.
I only quote this passage exactly as it appears in the King James Bible (I changed not one syllable) because this imp, this godling Yahweh, feels exactly the same way about having a meeting with his chosen people as I do about having to meet with my biological mom. I’m really worried that I might BREAK FORTH upon her because she’s always been wrong about absolutely everything. All parents are incompetent. And I really do love my mom, like Yahweh loves his people; that’s why I don’t want to be provoked to affront her, like I did last Christmas when I yelled at her after the church service. And the mere sight of my mother provokes me; the mere THOT of her makes me contemplate lashing out: BREAKING FORTH! my nostrils dilate, mine eyes expand, & fire sparks in my lungs...
I just don’t understand why she insists on pretending as if we’re a family who enjoys each other’s company and has interests in common. For we’re obviously opposites, even ENEMIES. We should be raid-bombing each other in daylight, from semi-low altitudes.
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