Here's the next page from my book of 300 Drawing Prompts. (The last one appeared on the morning after Bloomsday.) The prompt for this current image was "Grappling hook".
Dear diary,
Why is “experimental writer” not a job? Everyone always says “these lazy people who are ruining our country need to get a job”. Well I am one of those lazy people who is ruining my country, but I already have a job: I experiment with words. “Yeah but how much does your job pay? You need to be gainfully employed, in order to make a living.” So I must admit that my experimental writing job only pays $75,000 annually; and it IS hard to live on that. That’s why our yard has very little grass (it’s mostly dirt). But I could always give up on my dream of trying to make the noun Honolulu mate with the noun Louisville and give birth to the coinage Honolouis-velour, a town known for its capes.
Yes, as a way to quit my dead-end career of hack writer, I should join the armed forces. Or, better yet, I should become a mercenary warrior, “a professional soldier hired by a private military contractor to serve the U.S.A. abroad”: a freelance adventurer. In other words: a lance-knight. THAT would be so much better than working in a cleanroom all day (“a laboratory facility free from dirt, grass, & other contaminants, used chiefly for the manufacture of electronics”), scientifically attempting to lure words to “play nice” together.
Who cares about the imagination? It’s the battlefield that counts. You’ve heard that phrase “Mind over matter”? Well I say “Let matter manhandle mind!” Cuz words couldn’t hurt a fly, but sticks & stones break bones.
Are we all lusting for battle? Seriously?—you, too, wish we could go fight somewhere? Ah, yes, but I agree with your point about swords. Nobody beats their ploughshares back into weapons anymore. I miss the days of swordfighting. Back then, you could literally saber-rattle; whereas, today, one only does so figuratively, by making telephone calls. O! how I yearn for the times of eld, when you could press a sharp piece of metal directly into the flesh of your foeman. But nowadays, even if we can get our fellow countryfolk to agree to let us go commit slaughter overseas, it’s all done by remote control: you just sit in front of a computer keyboard and look at a TV screen and hold a joystick and press a button, which shoots a bomb from a small robot-dove. How unromantic; I could do that at home, on my video game system, & at least THEN it would be fun cuz I would be playing online with my friends from middle-school. (By the way, WHY O WHY did we ever write the rule into our Constitution that gives our representatives the sole authority to declare Armageddon? That’s as stupid as the day is long. We mercenaries should be able to go fight for our country wherever and whenever we feel the urge. Don’t silver weapons beat mere written laws? Written laws are made of words, which we’ve already established are less important than a butter-knife. I guess, however, that brute force defers to order, out of politeness; cuz we’re the bigger man, and high-minded. Our actual goal is to become a writer. We’re composing a philosophical tractate at the moment which will undo everything that the academic world understood about TRUTH — & we’re completing this task even while fighting in the trenches of World War Blank!)
But yeah, regarding the idea that words never hurt anyone, that’s not exactly true. Words hurt people’s feelings every day. Little animals who are lucky enough to enjoy careers as movie stars are frequently injured on the set, during the filming of the latest blockbuster, when the director yells “Halt the cameras!” (which is just one word) and then turns to the living creature who failed to remember her line and declares in anger: “Because you are incompetent and obviously not a professional, I will probably ‘forget’ to include any of your scenes in the final cut of this feature film titled Super Opossum.” That’s verbal abuse, and it’s as dangerous as disembowelment.
This leads me to think: Are we indeed the Keepers of Life? Assuming so, what is our plan? Are we trying to bolster the idea that already existed before we appeared (I speak as an human to fellow humans), that “might makes right”? In other words, are we content to keep trucking down the same road as the pseudo-ethical dinosaurs, who bowed out of the production because they were more concerned with intellectual property rights than with…
Wait, the dinosaurs cared about sisterhood & togetherness: is it not written in some lost screenplay somewhere? Well then that proves it.
*
I just learned that the guy whose patronymic became the official title of my hometown owned many acres of land. And I’ve heard that the so-called founding fathers of this country were landowners, or land surveyors; or at least one of them was. This intrigues me: the notion of ownership. I’m not against it, but I don’t like who currently owns anything, whether it’s land or people. I myself would like to own all lands and all peoples. Because the first thing I’d do is try to get them to mate, so as to see if new confabulations might spring out of the…
No: nobody should condemn any surds to this dimension. Let them swim wherever they currently are and simply enter the matrix from natural causes. Don’t funnel them into new creatures that are half-man, half-horse. Because, once here, they’ll undoubtedly learn to cherish this conundrum, and if one doesn’t carefully preordain the amount of apples that shall appear on their tree of wisdom, it’ll cause unnecessary suffering to all sides. Warfare is untoward, obviously; but the reason I keep returning to my penchant for mercenaries is that at least THEY speed up the process. It’s like ripping off a bandage, instead of dragging out the agony. Unless, of course, our hirelings drag out the agony.
But I’m an optimist when it comes to torment: I don’t suspect our enemies are so barbaric as to resort to economic sanctions, which are basically siege warfare: a passive-aggressive way of slaughter. Only cowards do that. So if they murder us after that fashion, we can label them cowards, which is a very hurtful word.
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