Against Improvement

We received a postcard from the home-repair store where (for lack of other choices) we're forced to buy most of our...

Anyway, I just photocopied the ad directly; I only made one single juvenile change.

I'm not just sharing this to make a cheap joke, tho: I really do like how ominous it looks.

(Note that Saturday’s image was my own artistic rendition of this advert.)

Dear diary,

Take the word “orange”. Then swap the “e” for an “u”. Then add the word “tan.” That’s how you spell the word “orangutan”. It’s a type of monkey.

Actually I’m wrong about that: it’s a type of ape. I wanted to use the word “monkey” because I like its rhythm: the up-down syllables. “Ape” has just one syllable, so, when you say it, it’s more like a punch; whereas “monkey” seems more playful.

I had to look at the encyclopedia entry for orangutans, to find out if it is permissible to call them monkeys. When I found NO instances of them being referred to as anything other than apes, I tried to figure out, by reading further, what’s the difference between these two classifications: monkeys and apes. — It turns out that monkeys have tails whereas apes don’t.

Additionally the article proclaimed that monkeys “have much more in common with other mammals than apes and humans do.” (For consider that most humans also are born without tails.)

This made me imagine that some divine species of outer-space alien must have visited our planet, long ago, and found only monkeys here; therefore they mated with one of the monkeys and made an orangutan. Then, when they were preparing to leave, one of the aliens said: “Wait, let’s not abandon this experiment yet. It is not good that our only son should go thru life alone; let us create an help that is meet for him.” [Genesis 2:18] So the aliens went around mating with every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought the offspring of these illicit relationships unto their ape to see what rating he would give them, on a five-banana scale: and whatever Hal-1 the First Orangutan rated every hybrid, that was the score that the aliens would upload to their website: for instance, the dolphin gets five out of five bananas, because it’s so cheerful; and the octopus gets a perfect rating too, cuz it’s basically a figment of fancy that got pitched down until it turned flesh. Not many creatures got less than five bananas, cuz the aliens were really adept at fathering hybrids. (By the way, I should explain, cuz they’ve now gone extinct, that a “website” is like a cork board where you pin your most important notes-to-self.) Thus Hal-1 rated all cattle (5/5), and all the fowl of the air (5/5), and every beast of the field, such as serpents (5/5) and giraffes (5/5); but for Hal-1 there was not found an help that was meet for him. So the queen alien, whose name was Emily, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Hal-1, and he slept: and she allowed the royal garment to slip from her shoulders; then she earth-walked backward, and crouched before the nakedness of the slumbering soul; & her head remained facing away, thus her gaze was averted from Hal-1’s nakedness. [Genesis 9:23] And when Hal-1 awoke, he knew what the queen alien had done unto him; for, there before him, reclining on the sofa, was an amended hybrid: bone of his bones, and flesh of his flesh. So Hal-1 cried “Oh! I see that this masterpiece has been titled ‘Hal-2’, because he was derived from Hal-1’s source-code. Now that’s ingenious. I rate him 5 out of 5.” Then the alien queen Emily instructed this first couple that the nations of beings that they should bring forth, in imitation of her, shall be called “orangutans”; and she explained that this term is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words “orang” and “hutan”; lo: orang means “person”, and hutan means “forest”. So that is how the forest got its persons.

*

QUESTION
for book clubs:

Was it racist for the parable’s author to suggest that an orangutan would use the banana scale?

*

Sorry I told you that stupid story; I just was trying to avoid recording my thots about yestereven’s feast. For I feasted with my family yestereven. It wasn’t a bad time; it usually isn’t the train-wreck that I anticipate; but I shrink from recording my impressions here, cuz it ain’t fun.

Who wants to hear about the things that each family member said? All of us multitudes already experienced that stuff: it’s seared into our recollections like grill marks on a steak, or the brand on the hide of a cow – why force everyone to live thru the memory again! We’d rather repress it than relay it.

Ah, but you’re right: it’s not necessarily everyone who enjoyed, in space & time, the evening feast with me & my bio-fam; there might be a soul among my readership — of many, one [in this phrasing, I tried & yet admittedly failed to echo Wordsworth’s “Ode”, which I love; where he says “But there’s a Tree, of many, one, / A single Field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone...”] — a single reader, who hath not accompanied me on all my adventures, who does not spend each moment by my side, and who therefore would appreciate a list of general highlights from this event. So I’ll try my best…

*

RUNDOWN
of yestreen’s jamboree

When I first burst thru the entryway, I addressed my mom & sis, who were standing in the kitchen, with a hearty greeting of “Merry Christmas!” And my sister replied:

“It’s March 3rd. Christmas was months ago. Have you been drinking again?”

& I said, “Fine, then what are your views on Venezuela. Why did you & your boyfriend Erik fly to Columbia. Did you even know what was going on during your trip. Did you two have something to do with that attempted coup. Because it happened exactly when you two left the U.S. —Are you aware of these facts, or are you lying.”

& my sister said, “Erik mentioned Venezuela when we were boarding the plane.”

& my eyes got big, & I said, “Really! What did he say?”

& she said, “He said that there’s a problem over there: he says the old president won’t leave, because he doesn’t want to pass on the leadership to the newly elected president.”

& I shouted, “FALSE LIES. The most recent Venezuelan election was overseen by the United Nations, whose representative determined it to be among the fairest ever; and the guy that you’re calling ‘the newly elected leader’ never even ran for the office that he’s claiming! almost nobody in Venezuela knew his name until he stood up & declared himself the ‘interim president’ right out of the blue—”

& my sister interrupted & said, “Chill out; I’m not the one who cares about this stuff. I was just telling you what Erik said.”

& I said, “Then this ‘anonymous source’ of yours is a FALSE LIAR!”

& my sister Susan said, “He’s not lying: he just gets his information from mainstream corporate news, and he doesn’t question it. Then he repeats it to me, and I repeated it to you. I honestly couldn’t care less about any of this stuff. My own primary concerns are food and beauty.”

So I said, “Fine. Then tell me about your food & beauty concerns.”

And Susan said, “Never.”

Then my brother Paul & his helpmate Colleen showed up with their zero-year-old whom they named Frank Booth Ray. So we all took a long vacation from human conversation to interact with the little one, who, to date, only knows how to look around and weep. So my mom kept saying to little Frank Booth “Hi there, hi there…” And my sister provided a running commentary of her own momentary wonderings: “I wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder if he knows where he IS right now.” And I myself kept ostentatiously raising my arm, hoping that baby Frank would acknowledge my communicative efforts, by way of raising his own arm in similar fashion; but then I realized that this natural instinct of mine was indistinguishable from the Nazi salute, which is considered anathema by all modern fascists (again, I write in the Year of our Lord 2019), thus I abandoned my accidental propaganda campaign and switched to opening & closing my hand with mesmeric recurrence, hoping that little Frank would ignore the antics of his grandmother & aunt and instead focus his undivided attention on my fingers rising & setting, mimicking the rhythms of the sun in heaven, closing tightly into a fist at their lowest point; then expanding into a full bloom again at noon: which marvel is what they call the Blood Meridian as well as The Palm at the End of the Mind.

But little Frank Booth Ray hasn’t yet grasped the fact that he has hands, let alone that he owns a pair of sidearms. So he just sat there and grunted. According to his mother, “Frank hasn’t pooped in two full days.”

Then we all talked about other stuff. As a family, I mean. (I’m getting tired of writing this essay, so pardon my attitude.) I told my brother about the 6-part miniseries Waco (2018) with Michael Shannon in the role of the FBI negotiator. I tried to convey my admiration for that film, but I don’t think he’ll seek it out and watch it. Paul’s got a newborn to take care of. Newborns render the pursuit of intellectual sublimation inadvisable, unless you live in a system that values such things. But we live under capitalism.

My takeaway from the night is this: However much I rage against our awful system privately, I’m actually afraid to criticize it before the family; for I can tell that they all let the word “capitalism” connote their pleasant mode of basic-level existence, and their happy mood of continuing relationships, rather than what it means to me: an economic racket. So that’s why we can travel from monkey to ape but not from ape to god. For they built a big, beautiful wall between apehood and godhood, and it’s called humankind.