Here’s the flipside of the postcard ad that I shared two days ago. Again, my only edit was to place a pillow over the children’s faces. (Their kidnapper was already atomizing in the original.)
PROLEGOMENON
After finishing the initial draft of what eventually became my latest published confession, during the process of reading it over; that is, while revising it; I offered myself a bracketed suggestion:
[EDITOR’S NOTE. Maybe clean up these intro paragraphs a bit, to clarify your intent; for I fear that, if even I myself am confused, then no reader will understand what we are getting at.]
Now I want to title this present composition (the one that I’m currently writing ) “I will not accept free love; I insist on paying for it,” but, if I do so, then I assume that the reader will expect the entry to contain some matters of interest, and I cannot do that. Therefore I’ll name it whatever I name it.
Opening Remarks
Before I begin today’s sermon, I need to explain a mystery about yesterday’s sermon, which began with an italicized paragraph that, in hindsight, I realize makes no sense at all. What happened is that, when I was writing the body text, I began to daydream about being the owner of a sporting franchise; and one of the guidelines of my daydream was that I had enough money to purchase seven players; so I did a bit of lazy-research, that is to say, I navigated my computing device to an online search-engine and typed in the question “Is there an official sport whose teams have seven members or less?” And the Internet, which is basically like a crystal ball with a keyboard, spat back this answer:
Redacted Pastime uses teams that consist of six players: five attackers plus one goalie (or six attackers if the goalie is ‘pulled’).
Of course, here, I’ve substituted the phrase “Redacted Pastime” for the actual name of the sport. If you want to know its true name, you must read that part of my entry.
JULIA KIEFFER: “Why are you being so mysterious?”
OFFICER DE LUCA: “I am not being mysterious. This is standard procedure, ma’am. I’m not gonna go ahead and tell you what the problem is, here in the parking lot like this. That’s not how we do things.”
[—from Wrong Cops (2013) by Quentin Dupieux]
Dear diary,
So after I finished writing the rest of my daydream, I glanced back at the “Team Requirements” section of the encyclopedia article for Redacted Pastime, and I noticed this sentence:
Each team must have a minimum of two men and two women playing at all times.
Now this shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. Why did it bother me, you ask? Because I had populated my imaginary team with females exclusively. So I began to worry that aficionados of the sport, upon reading my entry about it, would grow infuriated and possibly cancel their subscription to my diary — they might even change their Political Party Affiliation from “Believer in Bryan Ray” to “Believer in the Arch-Nemesis of Bryan Ray, that is: the Apostle Paul”. And I didn’t want this to happen; so I tried to play off my miscalculation as a joke:
For the sentence beginning “Each team must have a minimum of two men and two women...” I changed “men” to “ohs” and “women” to “exes”, thinking this to be a clever transposition, as the latter term could then be interpreted with the additional possible meaning of “ex girlfriends”... tho since the total number of girlfriends I’ve been blessed with in this lifetime falls short of six, I had to make up the difference by legitimatizing crushes (I’m talking about the bulleted note about teammates at the end of the masterwork in question) — and I still am in love with all these people, by the way; but when I last knew them, we were all adolescents in school, whereas I’m now in my mid 40s (and, in all probability, so are they): therefore the thot of us reconnecting now, after all these years, is enough to make one recoil in horror, on account of the harsh toll that time takes on a mortal human’s appearance. Yet this is perhaps to focus too much on bodily beauty; for my MIND is more youthful now than it was back then — and I think it’s even attractiver. But, despite speaking as someone who owns a strong bias for spirit over flesh, I must admit that there’s nothing like the magic of physical attraction. I mean, there’s a reason that God manufactured the world out of matter and then stuffed it with forces; rather than creating everything the other way around, and then filling each force with matter. If the visible were on your inside, and all your thots and invisible aspects, your energies and drives, were wrapped around THAT as an outer layer, like a royal robe, the world would be different. — Unless it wouldn’t signify: cuz there’s always the chance that no one would even notice. For a colleague once swapped lab smocks with me, on accident, back when we worked at the eyeglass factory, and neither of us had a clue that we’d donned each other’s coat until some 3rd party pointed out that my name tag said “Becky”.
But what I really wanted to focus on, with regard to the lamentation about time’s ravages, is that it wouldn’t even work to travel back into the past, & to inhabit your earlier teen frame yet keep the conscience you have now. Because the mind you have now contains memories of pleasures that your past self would yearn to experience, the way that your present self yearns to return to past pleasantries. The only solution would be to split yourself into two distinct entities, like Jehovah & Jesus, while permitting the same genius to inhabit both the past as well as the present fleshly placeholder, and this genius would be two minds at once, and their oneness would look like a communication tunnel, or warp zone, betwixt their respective soul-hoods; that is: an eploxasm (ectoplasm + epoxy: a supernatural viscous adhesive) called “the holy ghost”.
All I am trying to say is that, when I yearn for utopia, it’s proof that I am a transplanted future mind, but that my connecting spirit, or daemon, is being stretched thin. If that thing snaps, I’m stuck in this life forever, looping like a skipped record (a vinyl disc that contains an audio recording). In other words, utopia truly exists: it is waiting for us; and we have experienced it — we are experiencing it NOW, albeit as our other “us” (our unsuspecting Becky) — and the desire that we feel for it to be so, to come true, to be present, is, as it were, the prophetic memory, folding together its temporal discrepancies, like the wings of an eagle. Or a phoenix, rather; because the being is on fire.
This is why, once you win back all your old girlfriends with your new future mind & end up performing every do-over correctly (avoiding all of your former mistakes), this doesn’t yield you any more pleasure than the first time around; for the process of revision is not only an energy-suck but it instills every act, every precious moment, with a haunting somber foretaste: literally a miasma of déjà vu. The only option, if you wanna let loose and love life, is to sever ties with your phantom-future informant. But I myself don’t condone deicide unreservedly; ignorance may be bliss, but it’s a low bliss; that’s why I remain semi-omniscient and sad: I prefer the difficult pleasure of sustained apotheosis. As the musclemen always say: No pain, no gain.
But actually, on second thot, I’m kinda getting tired of striving toward divinity and ultradimensional intersection. The reason it’s hard to kick the habit, tho, is that this age we live in is so hectic. What I mean is that I’d like to invest myself in the present, to couch myself fully in the instant, in this creature that I am, & wholly to “tend my garden”; but I live not in a generation of gardeners but of gamers. I mean gamers of systems, money exchangers, cheaters of brethren. So everyone’s constantly wed to their computing devices, and daily life is all about the grind. Electrons flash thru wires, from circuit board to circuit board, and nothing much human gets done: we just all pant faster and feel more nervous. — But the same cuisine still exists, and the same marvelous beasts, and the same love & friendship; these things are just relegated less attention; the mind has only so much bandwidth and must multitask itself toward social acceptance and the amassing of fortune.
Can somebody build a better potato? I only ask this because I believe that potatoes are the first living organisms to achieve perfection.
I’d like to hug my time, the year 2019, but everybody’s preoccupied with X. (“The variable X stands for whatever everyone’s currently tweeting on Twitter,” as Wikipedia always sez.) I’m not trying to disparage this hypercommunication: on the contrary, I wish to join it, and I keep trying incessantly to find its attraction, to learn what’s so beguiling to others about the e-life. (The sacrifice of one’s soul to the Internet.) It’s just not naturally all that rewarding, for me. It’s not my cup of tea.
What IS my cup of tea, you ask? My cup of tea is manning the mast-head. As it is written (by Melville’s narrator Ishmael in Moby-Dick, ch. 35):
There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner — for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
That, to me, is the perfect contrast to this present age, which Jesus calls “Generation Spaz”. (Actually his term was “Generation Viper”, and he was talking about his own age — Jesus didn’t write anything about our time: I was just lying to you, when I said that he did.) Apropos the above quotation, however, the only thing that I dislike about living on a boat is that I’m terrified of the ocean. All those monsters under the water… or even if there is relatively scant aquatic life remaining because of mankind’s frequent oil spills & poisoning & pollution, which extincted most things that move, I still can’t stand the thot of falling into the waters, which are purple & murky & cold. I imagine it would be uncomfortable to die down there. That’s almost as bad as dying in outer space, after being jettisoned from your rocketship because your crew is fed up with you:
Lo, they lured you over to the trash chute by telling you that they had carefully positioned a gift for you there; then, as soon as you walked into their trap, they collectively pressed the big bold “Eject Waste” button, and off you went. The reason they all joined in and each crewmember contributed his or her finger to the synchronized act is so that none of them would have to feel the guilt for your extradition: it was a group decision.
Now you’re floating in your astro-suit and slowly spinning aimlessly. If something finds you, it’ll probably eat you.
Thus you take your phone from your purse and note that you’ve got about an hour and a half of battery power remaining. So you check what’s happening on Twitter. People are talking about the president, and about different ongoing wars. You make a call to your brother and ask if he can come pick you up:
“What, did you wipe out in your Pontiac Fiero and end up in a snowbank again, on highway 35E?”
“No, my team just kicked me out of the spaceship.”
“Hey, did you hear the latest news about the infighting between the factions of the U.S. government?”
“Yeah I saw that.”
“That’s messed up, huh?”
“Yeah, if you look back in time and read about the history of all the countries of the world, it’s all pretty serene and harmonious until you reach this present epoch, which began in 1977.”
“Agreed. I’ll come get you in fifteen minutes. I gotta finish eating. The wife made spaghetti.”
“Roger that.”
“You want me to bring you a serving?”
“Nah, I’m cool; I still got a couple tubes of astronaut food in my attaché case: one’s labeled ‘duck a l'orange’ and the other is apparently ‘fritters’; plus I got a whole plastic bag filled with protein bars — you know those kind they sell at the gym? — which was a parting gift from my shipmates, quote-unquote.”
“Sure you don’t want spaghetti? I can bring you some spaghetti…”
“No, I hate tomato sauce; you know that. Just eat & come get me.”
“You sound concerned…”
“Well it’s a little scary out here! And the tank says that I’m down to just thirty minutes of oxygen.”
“Alright, see ya in a sec.”
“OK, thanks bro.”
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