02 June 2019

A botched entry deserves a botched explanation

I don't know what this drawing is, or why there's handwritten text penciled over it, or what it all means; I just found an old sketchpad that was filled with this kind of stuff, and this image was in it; so I decided to send it to you, along with the entry below, because their compound unattractiveness intrigued me.

Dearest diary,

I learned from Harold Bloom (tho don’t blame him if this isn’t what he was trying to say — I’m a bad listener and generally unteachable) that the art that ends up being remembered by futurity, the art which becomes the culture’s tradition, and that which stands the test of time, usually does either one of two things: it brings out what is alien in the commonplace, or it brings out what is commonplace in the alien.

I also learned that every poet is somewhat solipsistic, tho the danger is to descend into all-out solipsism.

Now, I myself am a dilettante, by which I mean that I’m always dabbling in the creative arts in an amateur fashion; & I quixotically intend each composition to become a classic, a masterpiece (there’s that maxim that says something like: You can’t plan to write a classic; it just has to happen, it just has to end up that way; an author can’t force it — but I never stop trying to strong-arm my way into the canon; cuz I disagree with that maxim, and I’ll cite anyone from Michelangelo to James Joyce as evidence that will land that maxim in prison); therefore naturally I went a little too far yesterday, especially in my postscript, where I fear that I descended into unadulterated solipsism.

This is OK: I forgive myself for doing this. Because, when you’re engaging in experimental prose, which I happily am, sometimes you’ll win and sometimes you’ll lose your gamble. If you’re always winning, you’re probably not truly experimenting. And the only reason I include that word “probably” is that it’s not inconceivable for an artist to win every bet, while the stakes are genuinely high and chance is still in full effect — our man might simply be, like William Tyndale’s Joseph, “a luckie felowe” (Genesis 39:2, Tyndale version).

What I’m trying to say is that my dream from yesterday failed, in that it baffled Joseph’s perfect streak of interpretation. (Some texts are just plain weird, & there’s no telling why.) So, what I want to do here is explain the memories that caused it to be so — for it was a memory-laden embarrassment. My hope is that by pulling aside the drape inside my mind and letting the reader gaze behind the scenes, maybe the ignominy will no longer seem problematic — maybe it’ll even appear intriguing to everyone and not just to me.

To reiterate: I shall attempt, by coercion bullying & intimidation, to get my last entry into futurity’s Hall of Fame. (Instead of stealing a painting from the museum, I’m breaking in & hanging up my work.)

But, now that I’ve said all this, it feels like too much pressure; so let me change the plan. I just wanna quote the parts of what I wrote that seem obscure, and explain my thinking, in hopes of letting the reader in on the blah. (I’m very stubborn: rather than learn the national language, I demand that the nation master my own private gibberish.) Now let’s begin:

Again, what I’m about to disclose concerns my entry from yesterday, which is titled “Why thou shalt not sleepwrite about old news”; but my focus is ONLY the postscript, because that’s where all the problems lie — every paragraph preceding it is clear as day.

I start out talking about the Mueller Report, because that was the latest national fad to be doled out by the Intelgate hysteria, which I had lately made the mistake of attending to. Let me break that term down: “Intelgate” is the US intelligence agencies (hence the prefix “Intel-”) trying to fabricate something like Nixon’s Watergate scandal (hence the suffix “-gate”) to trick the People of the United States of America into hating the People of Russia. Why must the United Statesians be TRICKED into hating the Russians? Because the US populace is stupid. If they knew what was good for them, they’d just hate Russians naturally: they’d be naturally prejudiced, naturally xenophobic. Don’t these United Statesians understand that their nation’s secret intelligence agencies have six ways from Sunday to screw them? If the rabble knew what was good for them, they (the US population) would prove their obedience by hating whoever their Stasi hints is hate-worthy. Russia’s a vast land: come on! get with the program; our oligarchs MUST out-swindle their oligarchs. We deprived them of communism, unfair & unsquare! Now we can’t let THEIR swindlers swindle OUR swindlers at the fine art of swindlism. Twould be a shame to lose at one’s own con.

Alright, so that explains why the thing is top-heavy with Mueller. What else did I say there...?

O! the “pub near the place where the Mississippi intersects with the Minnesota Crick” — that’s cuz we went on a bike ride with one of our neighbors on Thursday. Last week, we were doing some yard-work (weeding dandelions), and Bruce approached us from his house, which is diagonal from ours, afoot, saying: “Got time to talk?” and, to illustrate the concept, he held up his arm and performed the international hand-signal for “bird beak opening and closing”. So I said, “Sure!” Then Bruce handed me his business card and told us to call him next week if we wanted to go on a bike ride with him; for he had heard thru the grapevine that we (my sweetheart and I) enjoy riding bikes.

Now, fast-forward one week and we’re out biking thru Mendoda with Neighbor Bruce, because I believe it’s a good thing to get to know one’s countrymen; for, when the Russians attack, we’re going to be fighting side-by-side with the Smiths and the Joneses — we’ll all have to beat our ploughshares back into swords: warfare never naps long. And the place we traveled to with Bruce is the riverrun fork between the Mississippi Crick and the Minnesota Crick: it’s where those two cricks join into one yuge crick. And there was a pub nearby, with wooden tables; and a large man was loitering in the parking lot; and, as we passed by on our bikes, Bruce called out to the man, saying “Are you a cook?” And the man sorta half-shrugged in confusion at the question. So Bruce said, “We love your food! THANK YOU!” So that’s why I had the Bruce of my dream-text yell “Hey, cook! We like your food! Thanks for your service!” And the reason that I depicted this large fellow (who, by the way, was wearing a bright blue hat with some sort of company logo on it) as “trying to break into someone’s car using a coat hanger” is that he had the demeanor of someone who was standing where he should not have been standing, and doing what he should not have been doing — tho in retrospect I chalk this up to nervousness or shyness on his part: he definitely wasn’t attempting to accomplish what is known as Grand Theft Auto. I think he had simply stepped outside to have a smoke.

And I can explain that sentence that goes “Just over the horizon lies Antarctica, so the gush from the Mississippi is riddled with ice chunks that look like froth from an adult beverage.” This stems from the fact that, when we stopped to admire the merging of the cricks, Bruce remarked “See all that white gunky stuff on the crick-surface? that’s pollution! They call it ‘scoam’ or some term like that, consider how ‘smog’ means ‘smoke & fog’ since it’s an atmospheric pollutant — so that sudsy mess is like ‘scum’ plus ‘foam’, hence SCOAM.” And then I said, “I’m so bad at geography that if you asked me what country is just over the horizon there, I’d answer Antarctica, cuz all that thick fizzy beer head floating gently past us reminds me of the melting ice caps, or a glacier in mid-dissolve.” And Bruce looked closer at the bubbles of carbonation rising to the surface of the crick, which resembled so closely the wort protein, yeast, and hop residue that cause the collar to form in a glass of dry stout, and he exclaimed with a laugh “Hey, that’s ICE! not pollutants — that explains why all the major highways ahead were flooded! It’s a delayed winter thaw!”

And the reason I said, when Mueller answers his phone, “we’re all a little drunk this afternoon,” is that Bruce was telling us about the boats of our neighbors, cuz almost every house in our neighborhood owns a boat; and Bruce was saying that so-and-so likes to go out fishing in his boat, and this neighbor in question even enjoys ice fishing — then, at the mention of ice fishing, Bruce said “I don’t understand THAT type of fishing: it’s too cold; I don’t like it — it’s only good if you like to chain-drink (he used that term the way that one might use the term chain-smoke), because you sit there watching your fishing line dangle down thru the hole in the ice, and there’s nothing else to do.” So this comment also bled into a lot of the other parts of my postscript-dream, where I mention the types of shelter that people use when ice fishing. I’m just telling you why these things are part of the story.

Then at a certain point in our bike ride, my sweetheart turned to Bruce and asked “Are we in Mendota Heights right now?” Cuz that’s one of the place-names that the area where we were biking proudly owns. But Bruce said, “No, this is just Mendota. They call the area over there” and here Bruce extended his arm and pointed with his finger, “I say, they call that area over yonder by the name of Mendota Heights because it’s a highland, higher up, that is to say: nearer to heaven, which is the highest realm that exists; whereas this town that we’re traveling thru currently is lower down, near Hades or Tartarus. I suppose they gave this place the plain name Mendota (without distinguishing it from the upper region), cuz they didn’t wanna call it Mendota Depths. That name has an ominous ring to it: it reminds you of Satan petting you on your hair because you’re his plaything.”

And the whole scene where there’s confusion about whether or not I should pass the phone to Bruce, but Bruce keeps saying “NO, I don’t wanna talk,” and I insinuate that it’s his wife on the line, and I name her Samantha — that whole part comes from the fact that the reason we even accompanied Bruce on this bike ride in the first place is that his wife went on a trip to… Dang, now I forgot where she went. I think he said Arizona. Let’s call it Arizona. So Bruce’s wife went on a week-long trip to Arizona to go help their daughter with her child, which is Bruce’s grandchild; but Bruce remained here in Minnesota because, and here I can quote Bruce verbatim: “I can’t stand the heat.”

And when I asked him to explain further the reason that he chose to abstain from visiting his own grandchild in such a beautiful state, he said “My wife and I both like to cook; but I like adventurous foods whereas she’s more conservative. I’ll eat anything. I like different cultures. I go to the Farmer’s Market; have you ever been there? You should go. They have Hmong food there, it’s wonderful. The last time I went, I bought these mushrooms that were on sale at a Hmong kiosk — they were types that I’d never seen before. Well I made them into a soup, and it was the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.”

So you can see that there was no reason for me to assume that Bruce would not want to talk to his wife if she phoned Robert Mueller. And there is zero evidence in support of my scheme to christen her Samantha. I have no idea what Bruce’s wife’s name is, in reality. And I’m nearly certain that she is not a double agent. All I know is that she studied English in college; because, when Bruce asked us to explain ourselves, at the very beginning of our bike ride, so that we could get to know each other better as neighbors, and I revealed that my main interest is in poetry and art, and that my favorite poets are William Blake and Walt Whitman, and that I also love the movements of Dada and Surrealism, Bruce replied: “Ah, then you’ll like talking to my wife, because she majored in English lit.”

“And also,” Bruce continued, “I suggest that you volunteer to work at our local soup kitchen and homeless shelter, because there’s a lot of people who desire to speak English better: they’d love to know how to state things more poetically.”

So that’s why I named the double agent in my story Samantha: that’s a name that I’m fond of.

And I invented from whole cloth the idea that Bruce would prefer to avoid a long-distance call from his own spouse: it just struck me as funny, cuz Bruce is such a nice guy. (He even owned his own music store, which was shoved out of business by the music store where my sweetheart currently teaches. We learned that as well.)

And the reason why, in my tale, I caused the USSR to die at the same time as my father, and I named my dad “DOUGLAS TRUMPET SENIOR” just like so, in all capital letters, is that the fall of the USSR pleased my dad greatly, cuz he was a fan of Ronald Reagan, whereas I myself was sad, and I remain sad, about the USA’s role in that tragedy: how this country in which I was born chose to meddle in the elections of that foreign nation and cause them to have a puppet president who is answerable to our own oligarchs. That makes me ashamed, to this day. So, in my dream, I balance out the death of Soviet Communism with the death of my own earthly father, whose guts, for the record, I hated. And his real name was Douglas. And I called his middle name Trumpet, after Don John Trump, who my dad did not live to see elected Prez, but whose victory woulda pleased my dad immensely — my dad actually acts & talks so much like Trump that I’m convinced he never died but just transmogrified; & this is why I always shout at my mom when she’s weeping & mourning the loss of her spouse: “Mom, do you not see? Dad IS Trump: He is risen indeed!!!” And the reason that I added the word “Senior” to my dad’s name (again, I’m referring to my false history) is that I’m sick and tired of hearing about Donald Trump Junior, so I wanted to emphasize the opposite. Plus I found it amusing to brag that MY DAD IS TRUMP’S DAD. That way, I’m not only claiming the presidency for my archenemy, but I’m usurping the very line that made him Christ in the first place. It’s like saying: My old man is not Joseph the father of Jesus but rather Saint Lucifer the father of sin A.K.A. Milton’s God.

And the reason I made Mueller my longtime partner in espionage is that I graduated high school in 1995, & if I had attended law school, that woulda been about twenty years ago; as it is written, in the final section (VI) of the holiest scripture of all, Edward Lear’s poem “The Jumblies”:

And in twenty years they all came back,
    In twenty years or more,
And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
    And the hills of the Chankly Bore”;
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And everyone said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—
    To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”

So that duration of time is always the one that I choose, since it brings to mind the pleasant thot that someday the whole world might wish they could dream like I do.

Well, that pretty much covers all the bases. In general, all that stuff with Mueller is just my way of making friends with fate, shrugging and saying “If you can’t beat em, join em”. I’m trying to allow the facets of doom that most annoy me to have a role in my playtime, so that I can feel like I have some control where I lack all control. This helps me act friendly toward folks who don’t share my perspectives, and I avoid fighting with them. Cuz I think it’s more important to be kind and compassionate towards others, rather than to slam-dunk on them in an argument. Especially if a person is our opponent or enemy, I side with Jesus: I say we should try to show them love.

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