Is the act of assimilation unavoidable?

This picture may strike you as either disgusting or appealing (no reaction between those poles will be permitted) becuz it was made from ads for food.

Dear diary,

Poverty keeps one hovering around the basest concerns. You WISH that you could concentrate on cufflinks, loafers, glassware and chandelier styles, but instead fate demands that you make repairs to a certain shelf in the Cow Room. (It’s not that you live on a farm — you’re in the city-like sector of the suburbs where your land can grow nothing of worth, and you keep no pets or livestock beyond a herd of cattle — but you built a Bovine Library in your front yard and called it the Cow Room, which has become so popular that its shelves are wearing out; hence the need for repair.)

But if necessity were to be prohibited by law from demanding what you should do with your time, then how exactly would you spend your time? This is the question that everyone tosses usward, as if it’s rhetorical, and as if it proves some point about human will. I hate this question and I reject its premise, for I have plenty of things that I’d like to do with my time: I just stated about fifteen of those things above, in the section labeled “Areas of Interest” on which I plan to concentrate intently, if given the chance:

• Cufflinks
• Loafers
• Glassware
• Chandeliers
• Movies
• Religion & Philosophy
• Painting (Art)
• Brass, Iron, Copper, etc. (Stone & Sand)
• Ruffles
• Balls (as in Ballrooms not Sports)

What does the world boil down to, tho, when you boil it? When you put the whole world in your hand, like they say that God has it, and you ignite a burner and hold the world over the flame and observe it till it simmers; then it starts to boil — what do you get? Is it like alphabet soup, where the letters rearrange themselves and spell out the meaning of life (“I will not smell in your solemn assemblies” Amos 5:21)? Or is it all really about love, as the Scientific Priesthood has proven? Or perhaps we don’t want to know the answer, because it’ll frighten us — maybe the world really does just boil down to a whole bunch of creatures trying to eat each other up.

Is this the only way that things could’ve turned out? I’m trying to wonder about the possibilities — is it inevitable, this tendency towards consumption? I imagine the Big Bang looked like a firework, and all the glittering pieces of coal that resulted are the building blocks of life. Now I’ve heard the phrase “carbon-based life forms”, so I imagine the pieces of coal coming together and melding themselves into a vaguely human shape, like a man made out of coal, and he is hotly glowing: this is the first recorded example of a carbon-based life form.

And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about. (Ezekiel 1:27)

Now this coal man, who is made out of embers, is just floating in space with nothing to do but think. So he thinks: and this is not a bore; it’s actually quite fun (you should try it). Meanwhile the zillions of glittering pieces of coal that are swirling around him (I’m talking about the remainder of the detritus from the Big Bang, which hasn’t yet coalesced into a human form, or even into an eagle lion ox or orb) begin to knock into each other and meld, just like the Man of Embers did — or rather his constituency did — mere moments ago. Soon manlike beings are formed, which have the head of an eagle; & others form and have the head of a lion; & others have ox heads.

As for the likeness of their faces, they had the face of a man, and the face of a lion… and they had the face of an ox; they also had the face of an eagle. (Ezekiel 1:10 )

And a certain amount of the coal pieces come together and agree that, as they don’t possess much imaginative value, and are generally lacking in vision, they should form a giant orb within the darkness. Do you see how stupid these people are? For what is an orb: it’s just a piece of coal, yet bigger. No arms, no legs, no genitals, no fancy beast-head — just a big blob of light. This is the sun. The stupidest idea since the Big Bang itself.

So now we have this glowing orb in the sky — and, yes, we have a sky now, because we’ve achieved blue-atmosphere, since one stupid idea deserves another and misery loves company — and thus our original Man of Embers is interrupted in his imaginations by this cacophony of all-too-obvious LIGHT, which has flooded the proximity. And there’s nowhere to run to, because the nearest Alt Bang is at least a universe away; so our Coal Man must put up with it.

Have you ever had a similar experience? Your day is going fine, you’re just daydreaming about marvels and wonders, but then you hit a snag: the world intrudes and you’re forced to try to make the best of misfortune. Well then you understand exactly how Coal Man feels. He’s accustomed to floating in nothingness and dreaming of exuberance; but now he’s kinda attracted by gravity to this earth-sky-sun situation, so he says to himself aloud:

Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life. (Genesis 1:21-22)

And the waters start to boil, just like the world boiled colorfully in the heat when it was being held by the hand of God over the Bunsen burner (“an adjustable roofless gas furnace used in laboratories”), and the waters bring forth

Horsemen in pairs—
Riders on asses,
Riders on camels—
(Isaiah 21:7)

& also

Leviathan the Elusive Serpent—
Leviathan the Twisting Serpent
. . . the Dragon of the sea.
(Isaiah 27:1)

Plus the waters bring forth (in abundance) great whales, and every living beast that moves aquatically. The waters of the sea went above and beyond their call of duty; they overproduced these monstrous life forms. And our Coal Man saw that all this was not as bad as he’d anticipated; thus he tapped his spoon on the side of his glassware, to get all the creatures’ attention (for, in the beginning, the raging world was like a wedding celebration, where it’s hard to get yourself heard, because everything was like one vast orgy of pleasuresome toil); and, once the newly created sea-creatures had quieted down and were able to concentrate on what the Man of Coal wanted to say to them, Monsieur Embers began to glow brighter, and he voiced the following proclamation:

My dear monsters of the deep, proceed to splash around in the waters with your reckless behavior. I rather like it; I can tell that you take after me, your surrealist imaginer. (Genesis 1:22)

But then the Carbon-Based Humanoid with the Face of the Ox showed up and informed our Coal Man that his Underwater Sea Adventure must come to an end, because he (old Ox Face) had stolen a few of Mr. Embers’ lives aquatic and modified them into Land Dwellers, also known as Landlubbers.

So our Man of Coal felt at once affrighted and angry; for, initially, he took this turn of events as an affront to his original creation; but, eventually, he calmed down and gave a closer look at the cattle, and the creeping things which Ox Face had handcrafted, and all the above-water beasts that were roaming the earth, and he couldn’t help but like them. He saw that these landlubbers were, in their own way, just as weird as his deep-sea monsters. So he said, “It’s alright; I forgive your stroke of genius.”

But then what happened is that Leviathan, which was the biggest whale in the ocean, kept diving upwards onto the dry parts of the globe and teaching the cattle about Jesus Christ, and how they too could be saved and enjoy eternal life. So this pissed off old Ox Face, and he shouted in thunderous rage at the ocean itself:

Are you the one responsible for conceiving Leviathan, king of the waters and most elusive among the Whale Class?? Because I’m sure that I remember you once saying, “I have gotten a babe from the Man of Coal.” (Genesis 4:1)

And the sea rippled within its liquidity and declared:

The stronghold of the oceans does hereby solemnly swear:
I am as one who has never labored,
Never given birth,
Never raised youths
Or reared maidens:
Only Lucifer, your son, have I made real;
Never in 1977 did I bear Leviathan for thine adversary.
(Isaiah 23:4)

Whereon old Ox Face said to the sea:

OK well if you’re lying, then beware, for in that day, I, even I, the landlord Ox Face, with my sore and great and strong sword, plus many bombs & knives & poisonous herbicides & runoff from Factory Farms & mountains of plastic trash, will cut you down and take your life. I’ll make your oceans a dead zone, and all art shall suck.

P.S.

I know that I’ve not even dealt with Eagle Face and Lion Face yet, but, like the man said, the creative juices of the planet, which are dependent upon the life inside the ocean, will soon dry up; and lo, there comes a day when soon is now.

So what I’m trying to admit is that this entry went to a place I wasn’t prepared to go. I only wanted to think about why everything is always eating everything else; so I began to wonder if it might have something to do with the way that quarks and atoms and molecules first decided to organize, after the catastrophe. But instead I got this boring story about Coal Man and Ox Face. That’s cuz I made the mistake of imagining the building blocks of life as pieces of literal charcoal, like the kind that you use in the grill, when it’s a holiday and you’re making hamburgers and hotdogs for your extended family, in celebration of the various slaughters of faraway wars that everyone assumes were necessary but nobody can justify our country’s having partaken in; and these coal embers are able to join with each other and communicate, as if they’re a loyal posse, and wreak fancies upon the world.

No, what I wanted to observe is this: When you chew something and eat it, you break up a nation (an organism, whether plant or animal) into its individual citizens (its molecules, atoms, and quarks; all of whom are innocent), and you attempt to persuade them to join your own side (their former enemy), on account of it being the dominant force — you address your food as follows: Shift your loyalty from your former espionage agency to this current one, in whose guts you now reside, for my nation has sharp fangs and bristling fur.