Dear diary,
Earth is a good place to become a creature, IF you enjoy the acts of eating and pelletmaking. Most creatures live in cupboards. You find a dollop of peanut butter: you eat it; your body converts the peanut butter into pellets, and then you place these pellets wherever you think they look neat. I myself, being a private investigator and not a proper creature, dislike the acts of eating and pelletmaking; therefore I abstain from these indignities. This is why I’m so pure. If you don’t eat, you don’t need to keep dollops of peanut butter on spindles atop buckets or in other styles of traps throughout your cupboard. More importantly, if you don’t take in any food, you don’t create any pellets; so not only is your abode devoid of dollops but it’s also wholly undecorated. So you can enjoy the look of the natural woodgrain, and its unbroken, flat expanses. The only drawback to choosing to forgo the fad of digestion is that the cells of your body are thereby deprived of evil, and they begin to phosphoresce. This makes you extremely attractive to enemies, thus you are more likely to be worshiped — the worst case scenario is that you get made into a pet, for this lengthens your time away from the abyss. (Try leaving the world when a family thinks they love you! You could end up buried in a shoebox: it may take eons for your essence to evacuate.)
Seriously tho: I was looking at this website last evening, and it keeps coming back to my mind. It was the website of an angry scholar, and it had this subsection that was dedicated to the celebration of ugly buildings. It made me sad; not solely because my own house was featured there, but cuz I often found these buildings genuinely attractive. I guess I have a taste for ugly architecture. It’s the same problem I noted months ago, when I tried to learn about the phenomenon of McMansions. I mean, of course I understand, when you place a photo of a structure that is considered conventionally beautiful next to one of the aforesaid eyesores, that the former is “finer” — but I can’t explain why I feel that way; and it bothers me that all I have is a vague feeling (rather than a moral certitude) about this “fineness”: the so-called ugly structure jars my sensibility and causes me to brace up and breathe faster, like I’m liable to be attacked; but how do I know that this complex, negative reaction isn’t the result of a superior perspective beckoning from above, urging me upward, as if to say “It must get worse before it gets truly better… no pain, no gain… you are being invited to experience a portion of eternity that is too great for your existing intellect… for, as the antihero of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis assures us, ‘Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.’” — This persuades me that McMansions are actually pretty, and if we feel disgust at the sight of them, the lack is within us — the fault is OURS for being unable to decipher the tastefulness of such distastefulness.
I enjoy thinking this way, because it helps me navigate U.S. politics. For many politicians seem to be saying “There is a great need to deny people healthcare. There is a great need to keep people suffering and homeless. We need more conflicts: Don’t forget to feed the War Machine!” I’m sure that these politicians know what they’re talking about; I trust them with our children.
But I wanna return for another moment to the idea of ugly buildings, because I have a confession to make. I’m proudly able to find value in most of these horrors; but one thing I cannot do is enjoy the look of top-heavy skyscrapers. Architects are beginning to build these high-rise apartments that are wider at their top than at their base: and I don’t mean just slightly, but sometimes these things look like an upside-down pyramid. Even when I enter the top floor of a regular tower, I mean one that has a large and firm foundation, I’m still terrified that it might topple over if I lean against one of its sides, because although I’m aware that these things are designed according to the safest and soundest principles of engineering, I know that the actual company that constructs them is incapable of following instructions; so, where they’re supposed to be using steel, they substitute tinfoil; and when the blueprint calls for concrete, they use hollow plastic toy blocks filled with oatmeal.
And I don’t trust glass windows, either — if you just touch them with your finger, they instantly shatter. That’s why I’m glad that I don’t work in one of those all-glass office buildings like the Big Insurance Companies have — for, even if a goose flies by and whispers “ya-honk”, the vibration from the sound of her voice will leave the building utterly destroyed. As it is written in “Song of Myself” (section 14):
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk he says…
...and thus all five high-rise headquarters in the vicinity (Anthem; Cigna Health; Aetna; Humana; & United Healthcare) come glittering down in a cascade of shards.
I’m also afraid of ALL bridges. There’s this bridge near my house, which I travel over whenever I bike to my boss’s place, and every time I’m on it, I yell out: “Friends applaud, the comedy is finished.” (I’m told that those were Beethoven’s last words.) But my comedy never ends. The bridge hasn’t fallen yet. But I’m sure that it will, one of these times — and when it does, I’ll be on it. And the more I use it, the greater the chance I have of being its victim. But I don’t want you to get the idea that I actually desire this outcome: on the contrary, I’m always relieved when I make it across alive. Actually I harbor a superstition that if I predict an event, that event cannot occur; because God only acts in wholly mysterious ways, and he hates when you guess correctly what surprise he’s planning, so he changes his attack if you call him out; moreover, a true prophet’s predictions always come true, but I’m a false prophet, therefore all I have to do is predict Event X and then God cannot perform Event X, lest he validate my prophetic allegation.That’s the real reason I worry aloud about death & disease nonstop: I’m simply trying to protect myself.
Darn!
Just this instant, I remembered what I wanted to talk about in this entry, now that it’s over! Yesterday I was reading in The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, and on page 175 there is this list of topics, which, when I encountered it, struck me as excellent ideas for an essay. Here’s the list in the context of its passage:
. . . On the campus, the girls looked as if they were in such a hurry, rushing, rushing. Nobody, except a few faculty members, sat around talking in the coffee dives or the corner drugstore. We used to sit for hours arguing what-is-truth, art-for-art’s-sake, religion, sex, war and peace, Freud and Marx, and all the things that were wrong with the world. A cool junior told me:
“We never waste time like that. We don’t have bull sessions about abstract things. Mostly, we talk about our love interests. I spend three days a week off-campus. There’s a boy I’m interested in. I want to be with him.”
So my 1st instinct was to jot down these subjects & compose an essay for each and every one. But that would be like more than four essays, total, and I can’t handle that type of pressure. Therefore, instead, I think I’ll combine all the topics on the list into one single diary post, and write just a tidbit about each one, and put their names in bold (that’ll help the text to look a little more formal and impressive). Are we in agreement? OK; then I’ll title it exhaustively: “What-is-Truth; Art-for-Art’s-Sake; Religion; Sex; War-vs-Peace; Freud-vs-Marx; & Tips on Dating”. I’ll try to remember to write the thing tomorrow.
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