Here's the next page from my book of 302 Drawing Prompts (the previous page appeared in early September); the prompt for this current drawing was "Bowl of macaroni and cheese".
Dear diary,
How should we judge whether or not a diary is the best ever? (I’m asking you because you are a diary; I would assume you’d know about such things.) Why does everybody read MY thots, in this public-private diary of Bryan Ray, whereas the diary of, say, my brother or sister or mother goes unread? Their diaries are lost to history: they are utterly unimportant. And the same thing happened to Jesus; his diary got the stamp of approval from futurity, whereas the diaries of his mother and sisters and brethren and followers were cast into the Fires of Gehenna. Except his brother James wrote one good diary entry that was saved in the King James Bible. (No relation between these two Jameses, by the way — one was a regular king whose domain came and went, and the other was the sibling of a secret king whose domain is not of this earth.) Actually, Jesus didn’t write a diary; as I never tire of shouting: Jesus wrote nothing. And James wrote an epistle “to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad”, not a diary entry proper. Only I Bryan wrote the first diary to be canonized by all religions.
The answer to your question is as follows. A diary shall be successful if its contents are diverse.
Good, then this present entry will contribute to the general welfare of my ongoing text-heap, because it is misc. I haven’t had any time to write lately because I’ve been working on dull tasks like installing curtain rods. Plus I am fighting some sort of infection of my upper respiratory tract which makes me need all the rest that I can get. (Normally I go to bed for only a couple hours and then get up and write for the rest of the night. I hate allowing myself to sleep.)
Since I last wrote to you, I’ve been able to finish reading two excellent books. One is by David Graeber, my favorite modern thinker; his book is called Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. I loved this book from beginning to end, and the last two chapters made me jealous because Graeber manages to sum up with clarity, in just a few pages, the political-economic gist of our time; which is something that I myself have been fumblingly failing to articulate for the past three years over numerous journal entries.
The other book that I just finished reading is called Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State, which collects a number of Vidal’s conversations with Paul Jay (filmmaker and senior editor of The Real News Network). I was already an admirer of Vidal, from his Narratives of Empire series; but I decided to read this particular title because it’s the book that Julian Assange was holding when the officers carried him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy. I assume that Assange was attempting to send a message to the watching world, by so obviously displaying this book with Vidal’s face on its cover. I’m thankful that I sought out the publication, because it accomplishes even more concisely what the aforesaid series takes several novels to do. It offers the same truth-shock that I got from The Untold History of the United States, the 2012 documentaries by Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone; but this Vidal title is slim and quick to read, so it can enlighten all those who lack the time required by the sets above. Vidal summarizes the key elements of U.S. history (untaught in this country’s schools, even in so-called higher education) which made inevitable the present phase of our nightmare. When one passes like a rapid roller-coaster from the nation’s inception thru the wars till now, in Vidal’s deft recital, all the modern perplexities come clear and make sense.
So both of these books assess our age in ways that I find masterful. They are pleasant to the mind: these texts are to be desired to make one wise.
Now, what else should I say, to give this entry variety? Up above, I trumpeted it as “misc.” — if I allow this to remain simply a report of two recently read books, I could be sued for false advertising.
I like the idea of being sued. I will leave this as-is.
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