Here's the next page from my book of 300,000 Drawing Prompts. (The previous page appeared yesterday.) Today's prompts were "Boiling cauldron" and "Crystal ball".
[By the way, the title of this entry is clearly metaphorical; it's a way of informing the reader that the following text could contain foreign particles, which may present a potential choking hazard.]
Dear diary,
Did you ever see a really awful movie that was so bad that you could barely reach the end of it? And then one of your friends pays you a visit at the golf-supplies kiosk where you work at the mall, and your friend greets you & sez: “Seen any good movies lately?”
And you say: “No. How about you?”
And your friend says that he saw a pretty good one this weekend, it was called [name of blockbuster]. And you wince because that’s the very title of the film that you hated so much.
How can people like movies that you yourself KNOW are lousy? The answer is that they don’t absorb as much from these artworks as you do: your perception is keener than theirs.
Returning to the situation above, with your friend at the mall, let’s say that a couple months pass, and you see your friend again, and you ask him about that film that you hated which he loved; and he answers like so:
“Yeah, I don’t like that picture anymore. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said that it was good. Maybe I was high on drugs when I saw it with my wife at the theater, and my altered state of consciousness caused the elements that were subpar to feel passable. Also that day was such a good one in general for me and my wife, since she went into labor and gave birth right there in the theater, and the babe was a boy: just the gender we wanted! I say, the joyfulness of that event, combined with the drugs, perhaps colored my experience of the film and made it seem better than it actually was; like how, when we first viewed our newborn, there among the popcorn and empty snack cartons on the floor of the theater, we were wearing rose-tinted goggles, so our bald baby looked just like a fuzzy bear cub, thus at first we were scared and began to suspect that its true father must’ve been Santa Claus; as he’s the only employee at the mall who has enough fur on his coat to have produced such a woolly offspring, among the staffers with whom my wife can recall being intimate. But now that I’ve watched the film in question again, I realize that it sux: every criticism that you leveled against it, that last time we talked, rings true to me now: the movie was badly directed, badly acted, badly scored, badly edited, and badly written.”
I think that life itself is a lot like that film. It sux in every way, but people are always drunk & high while living it, and having babies left & right, so they miss the awful parts of the experience. And it’ll take many years for them to gain the requisite savviness to see this world for the sham that it is. Worse, by that time, you’ll be in your coffin; cuz not even vampires can stay awake forever; so you’ll not even have the consolation of receiving the apologies & confessions of wrong-opinionedness that all your past acquaintances finally will admit to you, by way of their thots & prayers, once they figure things out.
I’ve been using the pronoun “you”, in the above words of wisdom, but I really mean me — I assume this was obvious; but you probably didn’t get it, because you’re distracted. Lo, who’s the one that works at White Balls Golf Salon, in the Mall of Draconia? Not my boss’s brother Jamie, that’s for sure. The only true subject is myself. (I think I just paraphrased Montaigne.) My own brother Paul had a baby last year, in a cinema palace, and he sorta still likes the films that the Free Market force-feeds him; so let us conclude that he & his wife influenced my writing of the scenes above: OK, admittedly there is a fair amount of Paul in “your” nameless “friend”; but one needn’t stick to facts when writing a script; so that character (like every character, in truth) is ultimately a blend of various people I know. When you reach the age of forty, you accumulate a pretty vast bank of knowledge about humankind. I’ve met probably upwards of fifteen, twenty individuals. And out of that pool I’ve even formed bonds of friendship with a handful: say, two or three, give or take. And I’m also on cordial terms with a number of online personalities, whose conversation I value so highly that I’d continue to interact with them, even if they turned out to be not human users but “artificial intelligence”. (I should write a novel: I Married a Bot!)
So the real question is: Why am I not jealous of my own brother’s fatherhood? Shouldn’t I be jealous? For he has a child and I don’t. There’s grounds for jealousy there, am I wrong? Why don’t I feel that I’m missing out? Why do I still dislike the sound of crying babies, & why do I recoil from the thot of having to change dirty diapers? Why am I thankful that I won’t have to attend my son’s boring sports tournaments?
I bet my son would want to play football. I mean U.S. football, not the non-vulgar kind. Then I’d have to have the old Serious Chat with the lad; I’d have to say:
“Son, there comes a time in every man’s life when he must decide between a head injury and teen pregnancy. Your own grandfather, Doug, Bryan’s dad (I’m Bryan, your father), opted for the head-injury route — now, mind you, he didn’t get his disorder by playing U.S. football; no: he decided to drive his motor coach too fast, one stormy night. He lost control & swerved into the ditch & banged his head when the vehicle flipped & landed upon its ornamental canopy. Fast forward a number of years and Speed Racer Doug was awarded the spiritual trophy of dementia — he was my current age exactly when the unfun began — and he had to live in a care facility for folks with memory loss, where he met a big hunk who played pro football for the Minnesota Vikings (I forgot the player’s name, because I prefer real war to fake war), and your granddad actually got himself kicked out of the care facility because he kept coaxing the ex Viking to punch the fellow patients right in the kisser. Therefore I urge thee, my son, to renounce this path to destruction via U.S. football, which leads to brain trauma and memory impairment, and choose teen pregnancy instead. For when you’re a teenager, you’re basically a youthful adult. Now grown adults look old, and their skin is distressed, which is considered unattractive. But when you’re young, your skin is healthy and your appearance is radiant: all young folks are beautiful, even the ugly ones; thus it should be easy for you to fall into lust with your peers, and the ecstasy of consensual bodily exploration will result in countless unplanned births, if you’re lucky. New life may be conceived as well as delivered inside a multiplex movie palace. Just make sure the films that you attend are good ones, made by maverick poets like Orson Welles or John Ford; however, if you must watch some corporate trash, then at least align your review of the picture with mine: if I panned it, then pan it; but if I wrote that the project is uneven, then praise those parts of the film that I called strong, and rip to shreds any aspects that I frowned upon. But I gotta warn ya, kiddo: your grandmother is still alive. She didn’t waste away like her husband Doug, from softening of the brain; no sir, she’s no quitter: she’s like a female version of Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian: she never sleeps and she’ll never die. And she don’t take too kindly to preteen pregnancies. She’s a right proper Christian. If you enjoy fornication outside of wedlock, you’re literally effed, according to her judgment. So hide your kids from great-grandma. She thinks Jesus died cuz sex is cursed. She doesn’t understand that Jesus taught forgiveness of all debts — financial as well as existential. If someone owes you money and they cannot repay you with ease, forgive them, just as God forgives you for accepting the gift of life despite your being unable to pay back infinity. What is more difficult: To forgive a genius the debt that he owes to a billionaire, or to forgive that very billionaire for being a billionaire? My speech is now ended.”
Yeah, that’s what I’d say to my infant, if I had one. So it’s probably better for both of us that he doesn’t exist. I’m not drawn to continue my lineage. I’d rather let it end. That word lineage consists of “line” plus “age”. Well age is just decay with regard to clocktime, which I yearn to counteract; and no line is perpetual but a circle; that is: the noose.
P.S.
I’m not trying to be a voice of reason; I just don’t understand why anyone would want to dominate all aspects of agriculture; and that dooms my entry to conclude itself on an ur-note. Last night I read about how one multinational corporation is trying to force every last farmer on earth to buy only its seeds. And these seeds are patented. So if you try to buy a different type of seed from another tyrant, or if a farmer dares simply to gather seeds from the natural environment (don’t worry, by the way: I never forget for an instant that nature is evil), some rep from the corporation will come slit their throat. The farmer’s throat, that is: I don’t want to leave you with the idea that this multinational would try to dissuade potential customers from shopping elsewhere by sending a representative to commit self-slaughter upon their front lawn, like some cryptic mobster message. And I’ve heard that these seeds that the corporation is vending will, when judiciously watered, expand like sponges from about the size of a gnat to the size of a caesar, & they then transform into octopus-shaped androids, & all their appendages are plowshares, so they just spaz around bothering everyone in the village. This, I fear, will cause the unemployment rate to loosen its necktie; the effect of which will ripple across the planet and result in all countries dropping one full rank on the “National Happiness” index, leaving the #1 slot entirely void, like the tiptop of a pyramid; & the all-seeing eye shall open up.
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