There's the purse now here's the entry:
Dear diary,
Wow that was a raging storm we had last night! I could barely sleep, cuz every time I began to drift off into dreamland, there would be a billion booms from the angelic machineguns, and the flash of the end of time outside our window (or, even worse: the rebirth of time), which would illuminate our bedroom, and it would sound like a train was careering down from heaven and aiming straight at my head. So I was like a damsel bound upon the tracks, with no savior in sight.
I would also liken this uproar to Jehovah God’s two-handed engine or Giant Space Cannon,
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more...[—from “Lycidas” by John Milton]
whereas this heavenly cannon that attacked us all thru the night was undoubtedly rapid-fire, thus it smote us repeatedly. (So it was even worse than Jehovah.)
And, of course, once awake, I couldn’t stop fretting about the potential for basement seepage, which is like flooding except far less severe, since we had that problem when the winter snow melted. So I’ll probably have this recurring worry every single time it rains. Indeed, I won’t be able to relax and simply live in this new house, until at least a full year has passed; for only then will I know all the shortcomings it has to offer.
But I’m sure I’ll find something new to agonize over, even if all the other problems get solved. So the trick would be to learn to love the evil that awaits.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
—Jesus (from Matthew 6:34)“Evil, be thou my good…”
—Satan (from Paradise Lost, 4:110)“Shall there be evil in a city, & Jehovah has not caused it?”
—Jehovah (from Amos 3:6)
And I might also add this couplet spoken by the young god Uriel in the poem named after him by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.
Uriel’s point is that there are no true lines in nature, as nature is wholly curvaceous: therefore any time you try to be a “straight shooter” and fire a bullet out of heaven, the path of the ammo will inevitably curve around and hit you right in the back. Hence the saying “She winged me.” And that’s also why the highest gods are gentle and compassionate towards all other beings, but they only become that way after having died out of eternity & put on mortal flesh in clocktime. Hence the name “fallen angels.” For:
“...all true Poets are of the Devil’s party.”
—the Devil(from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
But I didn’t summon you here this morning so that I could teach you all the ecstatic truths that I know. I just wanted to lay out an argument for why we should privatize the Fire Department.
Why We Should Privatize the Fire Dept.
Back in the present, all the fire trucks, and all the firemen and firefighters (there was no such thing as firewomen, for they were all either burnt up or drowned by the ancients), even the file clerks who work in the office at the station; in short, the entire Fire Department was public and shared alike — that is, it was considered a municipal affair and financed by an yuge pool of local funds.
Now this fund-pool was a mountain of banknotes that was piled in the midst of the city. Each city kept a pair of twin money-mountains: one was a pile of banknotes given freely by every citizen who desired to contribute — this was the aforementioned “pool of local funds” — and the other pile of banknotes was where the wealthy citizens hid all their superfluous cash, and it was called a “tax haven” or “tax shelter”. For purposes of clarity, I’ll refer to these two Mounts of Funds henceforth as simply “Public” and “Private”.
OK, so, in the beginning there were public funds and private funds. And the private funds were good, very good in fact; and the public funds were a free-will stash, a collective voluntary offering — I guess you could think of them as a soup kitchen, or those “have a penny, leave a penny; need a penny, take a penny” baskets that they place near the cash register in stores that sell racquetball supplies.
And there was always fire crackling on the outskirts of town, in the burning dump entitled HELL which roared continually but never managed to consume its treasure. Also there was fire in all the electrical outlets of the town’s residential sector, so every time you turned on an appliance such as a lighting fixture or a hair curler or microwave oven, you ran the risk of burning alive forever. Moreover the old gods in the sky, up in a place called HEAVEN would routinely use the town for cannon practice, and they’d stand at the doorway of the sky, called “Heaven’s Gate” and empty the ammo cartridges of their two-handed engines into the rooftops of the populace. And they’d usually wait until nighttime to do this, so as to maximize the citizens’ terror. (For it was a law, back in those days, that every heavenly corporation must jack up the amount of anxiety in mankind as high as divinely possible: “Thou shalt NOT throttle fear” — that was the exact wording of the statute.)
Alright, so what I’m trying to establish in this pericope is that all ancient towns were basically walking fire-hazards albeit immobile. And that’s why the citizens agreed among themselves that they would use the public money-mountain to fund the Fire Department (contrary to its name, this department was founded to eliminate fires, not to create them — sorta like how the U.S.A. in later eons would have a Department of Defense, which was established to vanquish the defensive capabilities of other nations by way of instigating war — it’s counterintuitive, as my lawyer always sez). And their reasoning looked like so:
If we privatize firefighting, then only the rich folks will be able to afford it; thus the poor folks’ houses will catch fire and burn to the ground. OK, that’s all well and good — it’s just as the Monotheistic God wanted everything to be when he created our wasteland, and all the angels agree with this assessment — HOWEVER (and here’s where things get tricky), what if some poor person’s house burns down, and then the mansion directly next-door to that house catches fire? This is a serious concern, for that adjacent mansion belongs to a rich man; therefore I suggest that we fund our Fire Department from the PUBLIC mountain of cash, so that the poor houses are protected as well as the rich houses. In other words, we protect the rich houses by protecting the poor houses, therefore the minor annoyance of giving the poor something that will benefit them is outweighed by the godly act of protecting the rich.
So this is why, for a very long time, all firefighting was funded from the public money-mound. In fact, it might even still be this way, to this very moment — I honestly haven’t checked on reality for a while, as I am he who dwells within thick flames, in the devouring fire, among the everlasting burnings (Isaiah 33:14). But from what I’ve heard, the Fire Department is either still a voluntary affair, so it’s somehow run as a common charity or nonprofit-type-of-thing, or perhaps it’s even financed via state taxes. I don’t care about the details. All I’m here to say is that we should switch back to the first idea: We should privatize the Fire Department. Here’s my argument:
All the basic needs — food, shelter, clothing, and medical attention — are a private affair for each citizen to acquire for himself. If you can’t finagle a way to get food (etc.), you die. It’s just that simple. The world doesn’t care: your loss affects us not in the least...
“But” a heckler might ask, “don’t the rotting corpses of the poor folks who expire in the streets, naked homeless and starving, who were denied all medical attention because only Bad Samaritans populate futurity (Good Samaritans went extinct), I say, don’t these rotting corpses clogging the highways and byways, and the diseases that infect those who cannot afford proper medical care, and the theft and violence that result from poverty — don’t these misfortunes just as severely threaten the rich folks who live among us? I mean, don’t these bad things that stem from the poor being denied their basic needs affect the lives of the rich just as much as the fires from poor houses threaten the mansions of their betters?”
Now here’s where I get to deliver my ingenious answer to this fool:
“NO,” I argue: “for you have not considered the progress that the luckiest winners have made. Most billionaires are progressive in this respect, as are multi-millionaires and even some millionaires: We now live within gated communities, corralled away from the herd. (If your mansion isn’t secluded, then you’re just not wealthy.) Do you understand the implication of this? This means that we no longer suffer the physical presence of poor folk. We neither see them nor hear them. Not even rumors about the trials of poverty can reach our ears. We muted their downfall. Their misfortune is now literally imperceptible. That’s why, for years, we’ve denied contributing to the public funds for healthcare, or any other type of welfare: we are categorically against ending starvation & homelessness. These things simply do not affect us. We are insulated from the world’s non-lavish aspects. That’s why I’m so irked by this oversight: that the Fire Department is apparently still considered a Public Good rather than a private affair. And, adding insult to injury, they use totally outdated arguments to justify this affront. No longer is it possible for the flames that burn down the house of a poor man to reach any rich man’s mansion. Thus, it is an outrage that we have not yet re-privatized firefighting. To do so would only cause poor folks to suffer in hell; which, as we’ve already established, suits us fine.”
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