Morningthots on the very last day of May

Dear diary,

Can I ever get any sleep in this quiet neighborhood!? This neighborhood is dead quiet, it's so pleasant. But that means that the slightest noise disturbs me: therefore slumber is even more precarious than it was when I lived in the city. My dad used to take us (me & my brother), when we were mere tots, out for a ride on his snowmobile, which had a deafeningly noisy engine: therefore it was impossible not to fall asleep on that thing.

But back to the present, to the middle-aged me trying to get some shuteye in my ultra-silent neighborhood. The other night, I was awakened by a godawful shrieking: an explosive, threatening, combative, bloodcurdling call, very sharp and alarming. It occurred again and again, and it seemed to be coming from nearby, even extremely close by — it was not a distant noise. So I peered thru our blinds into the night, and, once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I espied an alien creature, right by the tree in front of our bedroom window (if I had lifted the pane and jumped out, I could have landed on the culprit; and if I were half my current height and had better dexterity, I could’ve saddled the thing and rode it like a mechanical bull) it was vaguely rabbit-like and yet cat-spazzy in its action, seemingly covered in golden lamb’s wool, with a long fluffy tail — it looked like a squirrel the size of an armadillo — a little ball of fury, more wave than particle, spinning and halting between these polar states repeatedly, and when I was able to decipher the outline of its appendages (at first it seemed only a blur, like an agitation of nonconsuming flames — as if the enraged sector of God’s mind fell from the sky and took flesh and grew curls, right here in our yard), I say, as soon as my intellect managed to parse this puzzle, I realized that the thing most resembled a canid: perhaps a fox, or a cousin of the fox. If I may be permitted to use the phrase “tasmanian devil” as a verb (with a nod to its namesake, the animated cartoon character), our visitor kept tasmanian-devilling around at the base of that tree: the one right there, directly in front of our window: look! the ur-fox is fitfully scrambling in circles; then halting to "bark" intermittently — I place that word bark in hooks to indicate that it's not quite the correct term to use: it was more like the sound of a housewife being murdered: the cliché "horror-movie scream" — and this went on for hours, from midnight all they way to two o'clock in the morning; thus its performance lasted the duration of a feature film, and it woulda been pure genius if it hadn't been real. However, because it was real, it was just terrifying.

And the wind last night was horrendous: I thought the roof would blow off.

*

Also we passed a guy on the street the other day, when biking home from a walk at the park, and this fellow was standing aside his vehicle with the door wide open, and he was holding a kerchief up to his head, so that the lower half of his face was veiled but we could still see his eyes, and he was waving his free hand slow like he was in a parade, altho we were the ones in motion (as we were biking past) and he stood stock still.

So, as soon as we were at a safe distance away from the man, I turned to my sweetheart and said, "Did you see that? That's why I always say that David Lynch’s films are not absurd but the opposite; they’re precisely realistic: Cinema magazine would recognize Lynch as the consummate neorealist." And my sweetheart answered, "But reality IS absurd." And I said, "Touché."

*

Now I wanna talk about whether or not all our heroes from the distant past would've deigned to use the Internet.

Topic 1:
Would ancient personages have been caught dead online?

The answer is YES. And I’m sick of having to explain this to you every day. Everyone always says that their favorite author from the past wouldn’t have used the Internet, wouldn’t have joined any social networks, wouldn’t have blogged, etc. But that’s incorrect. Ancient geniuses were just like the geniuses of today: they availed themselves happily of whatever technology their eon afforded them. (The alphabet is a technology, too, you fuck-knob.) Why bar oneself from any style of praying? If, by dialing it into a telephone, my message will reach its destination, why would I opt instead to bury my thots in the sand? Jesus never wrote in the sand. [Gospel of John, 8:6.] He found three agents, and ONLY three agents — a synoptic trinity: Matthew, Mark & Luke, who ghostwrit his tale to the publishing houses, thus inaugurating the Age of Advertising. The only person I’ve met who certainly would have abstained from using any online platforms was Emily Dickinson. She stored her blog posts in a shoebox locked in her closet. But we can’t all be imitators of Christa without diluting the potency of her stance. The only reason that Jesus took a sledgehammer to the printing press is that he didn't realize ("no man knows of this: no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but only the Father" — Mark 13:32) I say, Jesus didn't realize that just beyond the horizon, God was planning on re-gifting to us earthlings the comfort of literary criticism, which would sift out all the doubt and make everything Science.

Topic 2:
Governments vs. the people who are governed

The US government is entirely distinct from the US people. The US people are controllable; the US government has always been out-of-control. It’s like gangsters vs. shop owners: the gangsters offer mom and pop (the shop’s owners) "protection from abuse" — but it’s one vast con: for these gangsters are the perpetrators of the very abuse they’re offering protection from.

So the US, like a giant robot overlord, goes stomping all over the globe, throwing its weight around, which understandably angers the inhabitants of other nations; but instead of retaliating against the handful of wealthy psychopaths who man the cockpit & operate the robot’s control panel, they…

Misc: bonus topics

I like racist people, don’t you? I mean, I’m sorta trying to get a rise out of us by putting it this way; but here’s what I mean: Racist people are likeable, if you converse with them about anything other than race. You can meet a racist at the ice cream parlor, and discuss how mint is superior to orange or blueberry, and your argument will hit no snags at all. The problems begin to appear when you bring up a touchy topic, such as “Racism is Wrong”, for they’ll inevitably proclaim: I am a racist, thus I vote for the obverse of whatever. OK, now we have a problem. The air is tense. And, you, the narrator, only side with the correct aspect of any evil: the side that’s pro-race… or anti-race… I mean the slogan that we’ve been advised by our elders to parrot, until the next culture-coup.

What I’m trying to do is end this present entry. So let’s just agree to visit the US video-sharing website and click on the first masterwork that their site auto-recommends: “Why KFC Can't Compete With McDonald's In Israel”. Now let’s look to the right side of the screen and note that there is a long list of titles representing videos that the network guarantees we’ll enjoy watching, in the case that we enjoyed the present time-suck. I think that copying that list will be a good way to sign off. But first, a diversion:

One commenter notes that the acronym “KFC” in the title means not “Kentuckians For Congress” but “Genuinely Kosher Fried Chicken”; this is, I assume, a joke about the fact that the fast-food franchise had to substitute soy-based powder for powdered milk, in their colonel’s secret recipe, in order to satisfy the requirements of Mosaic Law; that is, the statutes from the tablets that Yahweh handed to Moses, on top of Old Smokey—A.K.A. Mount Sinai—all covered with snow; and these rules were written by the finger of God; but Moses smashed them, even before Jesus got a chance to smash them.

For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.

Thus saith St. Paul, in his epistle to the Romans (10:4), directly contradicting Christ himself in Matthew’s gospel (5:17):

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.

& as long as I’m sidetracked, I might as well give the proof texts for my above remarks about Moses smashing the stones of the LORD our God. First, the giving:

And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God. (Exodus 31:18)

Then the fumbled Hail Mary (“a very long forward pass in U.S. football, typically made in desperation, with only a small chance of success”):

And it came to pass, as soon as Moses came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the golden image that they had made, dancing and spinning, turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the foxes
Turned in the loud fire.

(For Samson had earlier gone and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails; and when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines.)

Seeing this, Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

That's Exodus (32:19), with a dash of Wallace Stevens ("Domination of Black") and the Book of Judges (15:4-5).

I repeat:

What I’m trying to do is end this present entry. So let’s return to the aforesaid video-sharing website, and, without succumbing to any further tangents, simply note the list of titles that appear at the right-hand side of the screen, under the heading "Videos that We, the Powers that Be, Guarantee that You Will Enjoy, Provided that You, the Viewer, Enjoyed that Last Video that Spawned All the Bible-Thumping Above." I’ll just paste the list without comment and run for the hills.

• Why McDonald's Failed In Iceland
• Why Taco Bell Failed In Dubai
• Trying to Stomach Burger King's Impossible Whopper
• This City in Siberia Could Become the Next Silicon Valley
• China Swims Upstream to Fish-Free Living
• Why Dunkin' Donuts Is Failing in India
• US Fast Food Took Over Kuwait & Made its People Obese
• Why Chicken Nugget Demand Is Flat
• How Walmart Conquered Bethlehem
• Why the US Has No High-Speed Anything
• How Brands Like Horseflesh Profit From School Lunch
• Trump is 1st Prez to Follow the Whole Law of Moses
• Why Asia Doesn’t Want Your Trash Anymore
• License to Ill: America’s Food Safety
• Why Most Orange Juice Comes From Brazil, Not Florida
• Why McDonald's Failed In Bolivia
• Fowl Seduction: How KFC Won Over China
• Why Texas Failed in the United States
• India Says What America Won't Admit: Netflix is Boring
• Why McDonald’s Flopped In Vietnam
• Why is Denmark No Longer Rotten?
• Hong Kong Surpasses New York as the Hot New Place to be Mega Poor
• Why did God Allow China to Purchase America?
• Inside the High-Tech Dystopia
• Why is McDonald's Struggling in the Philippines?
• How China Outsmarts U.S. Scammers
• Amazon Inc. Sues the Amazon Rainforest
• How Africa is Becoming China's China
• Cuban Cab Drivers Earn More than US Optometrists
• Why North America Loves Taco Bell
• The Hidden Gift of the Melted Ice Caps (Why Computers Went Extinct)