July 27 party and B.S.

Dear diary,

Why are parties so fun, & work is so awful? Why do people complain about having to go to work, but then they say “I’m looking forward to the big party at Bryan’s house last night?” For, if you think about it, everything that is done at a party can be done at work — let us therefore strive to make the two occasions indistinguishable. Ideally, everyone should be able to say, while at a party, “I’m looking forward to going to work tomorrow. It’s gonna be a blast.”

Yet infidels always say “You’re wrong, Bryan, cuz not everything can be done at work that is done at a party. Take just one example: I myself enjoy sipping martinis, because I am an infidel; and this is one activity that I can do easily at a party, whereas it would be frowned upon to drink martinis at work.”

Here’s what I say: My dear fool, you should find another job where martini-sipping is encouraged. I don’t understand what’s so difficult about this. You found yourself born in a world; now just decide what you want, and take it.

Another problem that I’ve run into time and again (for I’ve lived a long, rich life and gained much wisdom from my experiences) is that people don’t care about other people. Now think about how this attitude could influence your career: If you’re a nurse, and you don’t value people, then instead of helping to make them healthy, you’ll let your patients remain sick; and some of them could even end up dying.

The reason this concerns me is that I dedicate my own energies to experimental writing; thus, when I myself get sick, the nurse who’s granted jurisdiction over my wellbeing will consider the pursuit of creative art dishonorable; and nobody enjoys dying in agony at the hands of an indifferent tormentor.

And do people still read the news? — I mean, not online but actual physical ink printed on paper towels? Cuz there’s a deafeningly loud automobile in our neighborhood which I hear every morning at a very early hour; and this vehicle lacks whatever component is supposed to muffle the noise of its engine; and it is driven by someone who apparently accepted employment as a deliverer of newspapers. I hear the car’s racket crescendoing from a distance, and then it reaches a climax and pauses near our neighbors’ driveway; then I hear the sound of a smack, as of a body wrapped in plastic hitting the pavement; then I hear the engine rev up fast and then halt again at our other neighbors’ driveway, and after a second ground-smack sound, the disruption tapers into silence.

So this makes me wonder: Do people still read tangible half-truths? Cuz I have a suspicion that what is going on, with regard to the above procession of noises (which recurs exactly in this fashion, each day of the week) is that news-rags are being delivered to two of our neighbors. I never dare to look outside our window, lest I confirm this hypothesis and thus deprive myself of an unsolved mystery; but I strongly believe in the veracity of my guesswork.

What do people get out of reading the news? Do they feel more “plugged in” to space and time? Do they think that someone who owns a printing press and lashes writers with a bullwhip is more trustworthy than, say, that one dog on that one TV show? Or that horse on that other TV show? Cuz I’ve watched both of those TV shows, and I can confirm that those animals’ respective characters could either speak proper English or be understood by humans as if they had done so.

I got to spend the noon with my boss yesterday. When we finished our work, which was funner than the hardest partying, we had real work to do; by which I mean LABOR. I’m sorta half-kidding about this — here, let me explain:

My boss’s house has a wall that suffered water damage, so he wants to replace it. And since neither of us knows anything about replacing walls, we decided to tackle this job ourselves. We tore out the damaged wall, and then we plugged all its holes — we smooshed a special type of expanding, rapidly hardening substance over all the places where the water had earlier seeped in — I say, we mended these holes with cement, and then we painted the wall with an oil-based sealant (I add parenthetically that these are the same problems that I myself dealt with at my old apartment and also now at this new-old house that we recently bought — but I’m not talking about the same places now; they’re entirely different residences; it’s just a coincidence that every building where one tries to live in the State of Minnesota boasts evidence of water-damage and is prone to seepage & flooding; for our state’s slogan is “Land of 10,000 Lakes” and all our construction companies are incompetent frauds); then we bought a whole lot of wood for the new wall-frame, and also some panels of insulation, & glue & screws & other things. In short, we made a little more progress on this project yesternoon. But here’s what I really wanted to relay:

My boss’s computer system’s hard drive storage array and “server” malfunctioned this week, so he had to order all new equipment. This cost him thousands of dollars, and when the delivery guys delivered the stuff to his (my boss’s) house, they had to use special pulleys and palates and dolleys just to heft the boxes to the door. And when they completed their mission, their crew’s foreman said to my boss: “How interesting! We delivered this same exact stuff to a U.S. government agency just last week; that’s how I know that you must be doing some serious work here in this establishment of yours.” And my boss signed the paper to declare that he’d received the shipment of all the items, and he answered the deliveryman by saying “OK, are we done now.” (My boss is an asshole who abhors all human interaction — or rather he claims to abhor it, but my theory is that he just doesn’t understand humans. My boss can’t stand what he can’t understand.)

Anyway, so, after my boss got all the new computer junk unpacked and hooked up, it left a mountain of cardboard boxes in the front room — these were the packages in which the giant order had been shipped. Now at just this instant, my boss’s wife came home. She had been working out at the gym. And the first words that she yelled were “What the fuck is all this shit in the front room?” And my boss answered, “My order just arrived; I didn’t have time to dispose of the packaging yet.” And my boss’s wife said, “You better get this shit out of here.”

This is the point where I piped up and said, “I’ll take care of it!” And then I turned to my boss and said, “Boss, if you tell me where I can find a utility knife, I’ll break down these boxes and put them in the recycling bin.” So he pointed to a shelf at the far side of the room, and I picked up the knife and started cutting. It took me about half an hour to complete the task; and I was proud because, beforehand, my boss had predicted that I’d never get all those boxes to fit in the bin, yet, when I was finished, all the boxes fit in the bin.

The only other thing that happened yesterday is that we (again, I’m referring to my boss and I) went outside during the hottest part of the day and dug a tree trunk out of the ground. Actually it was a cluster of trunks from a lilac bush that we’d chopped down about a fortnight ago. My boss used a long metal pole, which he pounded into the hard soil using a sledgehammer, so as to pry with; whereas my own job was to sway nimbly around the base of the root-cluster, while my boss continued prying at the monstrosity, and shovel away any dirt and rocks I could reach. So I had to jab with the shovel repeatedly. It took a really long time, and we were drenched in sweat. (Remember: the sun was out, and I hate the sun.) I thot we’d never complete the ordeal: “We’ll surely die from thirst or heat-stroke,” I said; “and we’ll both have heart-attacks.”

But eventually we succeeded. Once the thing was finally exhumed, it fell on its side, so we could observe its lower extremities. There were many tiny roots all working together to hold the collective stump-mass to the earth; & the earth is our mother: that was the problem.