Dear diary,
A little while ago, I started reading Tom Paine’s “Common Sense”. I got a few pages into it, then put it down and wrote a quick reaction, because the part where Paine makes his great argument against kings got my goat. After stopping at that point in Paine’s pamphlet, I never returned to it. But then yesterday I returned to it and finished it. And immediately afterwards I turned to my mirror and said, “Well, I’m done with ‘Common Sense’; now what’s next?” And my mirror answered and said, “The fifth primary debate for the Democrat party happens tonight: they’re still trying to decide who they shall run for U.S. president.” And I said, “O? Wow! Alright, I’ll suffer thru it.” So the funny thing about my day was that, without planning to do so, I got a hefty dose of Paine’s anti-Great-Britain rhetoric, and then was able to contrast that stance with the stances of modern Democrats. It was borderline fascinating.
The thing I can’t get out of my mind is that everything Paine says about Great-Britain could be said about the modern U.S.A.; and then everything he says about the “FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES OF AMERICA” of his own day doesn’t seem to match up with anyplace I know — I’m tempted to say that Paine’s America is more like X, Y, or Z, and to fill in those variables with names of countries that are struggling at present to get out from under the thumb of the modern U.S.; but I feel that that would be too reckless of me, and I am wary of gusto and exuberance — those things only lead to ecstatic falsehoods. I favor measured, properly weighted, scientific falsehoods.
Hey, this next thot will be off-topic, but I just thot of it, so I wanna share it here, cuz I do not possess a very large thot-bladder. I noticed recently that people have begun to use the word “houseless” or “unhoused” instead of “homeless”, when referring to people who live on the street (say, because they lost their residence during the latest market crash). The reasoning is apparently that a person can lack a house without necessarily lacking a home — for instance, you might refer to a damp nook under a bridge where local philosophers convene as your home, thus it would be inaccurate to label you homeless, despite the fact that you are house-less, or at least temporarily un-housed. But here’s my idea:
When we speak of animals, we say that a creature who resides in the zoo is “captive” or “living in captivity”; and we call the beings who are leashed and enslaved in people’s abodes as “housepets”. All this is in contrast to those animals who’ve remained free hereto and somehow sidestepped being captured — these latter animals we label “wild”.
So here’s my idea: Instead of using the terms “houseless” OR “homeless”, let us call the people like Jesus who live on the street and have nowhere to lay their head “wild humans”; or alternately “wild folk”: “wildmen & wildwomen”. So when I lose my house in the next recession, I can announce to the world “I’m a wildman” instead of muttering “Now I am homeless.”
A certain scribe came, and said unto him, “Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.”
Jesus saith unto him, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:19-20)
But back to Tom Paine. I really just wanted to say two things in this entry: first, that Paine’s “Common Sense” throws into high relief the difference between Infant America and our current Teen America; secondly, on account of this phenomenon, I find myself as a reader more tempted than usual to change around the words in Paine’s composition — like, whenever Paine writes “England” I wanna do an experiment and change that place-name to “America”; and, where Paine writes “America”, to change that term to one of these lands that the present-day U.S. continues pestering; and then re-read the composition to see how the meaning is augmented (or even IF it is augmented — cuz what I fear is that the U.S. has become the very thing that Paine desired to gain independence FROM; and, if that’s true, then the meaning of Paine’s text would remain stable, were the terms to be swapped as I suggested). But I don’t wanna waste time making points about reality — I’d rather just goof off and be merry before I die; therefore I refrain from performing this textual experiment.
However, I’m still left with that general yearning to fool around with Paine’s text, so let me choose an excerpt from the section about “THE PRESENT STATE OF AMERICAN AFFAIRS” and do something different with it; because I fancy that the text might improve if I edit in the names of my own neighbors who I’ve met over this last year, from my Thief River Falls community — for I’ve been living (non-wildly) here in this dust-brown house for long enough to meet a few of the locals: we got Joe and Bruce and Tim and Jim and Tom. All monosyllabic. (And if it weren’t for Bruce, they’d all be perfectly tri-letteral; that is, containing no more than three letters.) Maybe I’ll add my own name into the mix as well, Bryan Ray (tri-syllabic and octo-letteral), but maybe not — I’ll see how I feel about it, as we go. I’m just playing this entry by ear.
Part of an Epistle from the Good Folks of the Thief River Falls Neighborhood in Favor of Evicting its Lazy-ass Tyrant
Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual. Our prayers have been rejected with disdain; and only tended to convince us, that nothing flatters vanity, or confirms obstinacy in false surrealists like Bryan Ray more than repeated admonishment — and nothing hath contributed more than that very measure to make his artistic movement in Thief River Falls so annoyingly persistent: Witness Bruce and Joe, whose collective pleadings have gained nothing but the same unsightly lawn from Bryan Ray’s property, whose grass somehow manages to be at once patchy AND overgrown. Wherefore, since nothing but blows will do, for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation, and not leave the next generation to be cutting throats, under the violated unmeaning names of parent and child, since Bryan has threatened to bear infinite spiritual offspring by way of his wicked propaganda, which should be removed from all the free mailbox-libraries in the community and burnt forthwith.
As to matters of philosophical influence, it is not in the power of Bryan to do this neighborhood justice: The business of it will soon be too weighty and involved to be managed with any tolerable degree of convention. For Bryan possesseth a brainpower so alien from ours, and so very ignorant of ours; that we must resolve: As he cannot interest us, he should not exist with us. To be always thinking three or four thousand thots, and writing tall tales and nonsense, and then waiting multiple months between trimmings of his yard, and never using a proper lawnmower but continuing to push that stupid non-motorized device whose blades just whisk over the grass-top ineffectually, resulting in a landscape that puts a devil-fear into our children — we say, there may have been a time when it was proper to tolerate such behavior, as when the ne’er-do-well had just moved in, but the proper time has come to chase him away.
The other homeowners in this neighborhood have manifested such a spirit of good order and obedience to suburban propriety, as is sufficient to make every reasonable person easy and happy on that head. No man can assign the least pretense for his vexations, on any other grounds, than such as are due to the abhorrence that is known as Bryan Ray: his presence is making our neighborhood full-on suckworthy.
Where there is no attitudinizing to poetic superiority, we need make no aesthetic distinctions; perfect equality in philistinism affords no temptation: thus, ditch this prig. He’s a snob, we presume. The houses in Thief River Falls are all (and we may say always) well-kept. Tim and Jim have decent yards; their siding is neither rotten nor in need of a paint job. Tom is never at rest, pruning his bushes and watering the curbside. Mac and Sal are outdoors every day, either weeding or planting or clipping; and their landscape looks fantastic. Moreover, as has been mentioned repeatedly, Joe and Bruce are never long at rest; tho Bruce is retired, and Joe has the week off right now, both are rather neighborhood warriors: they can frequently be seen, each upon their own roof, holding a leaf blower, for hours on end. And I don’t believe that any of us votes Republican.
But why must Bryan Ray claim that he’s the King of America? I’ll tell you where the real U.S. leadership resides: they reign above, in Washington; they are our representatives, and our hopes to heavenward. True lawmakers do not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute Bryan. Therefore, here is what we propose:
Let a day be solemnly set apart for humiliating our “King”. Let Bryan be brought forth and placed upon a ginormous Law Book, within a seat affixed to a lava-filled dunk-tank. Then let a crown be placed upon Bryan’s head, not made of gold but one of those paper crowns that one receives gratis with the purchase of a children’s meal at that fast-food joint where Bryan formerly labored, and this paper crown shall be fraught with unforgettableness, so that the community may know, that so far as we approve of surrealistic claptrap, in America ONLY CANT IS KING. And then toss a football at the target of the tank, so as to dunk him. The ball shall depress a lever, causing the seat to give way, so that Bryan may plummet into the lava. Cold lava would be best to fill the tank with; as our purpose is not to administer capital punishment, but only to offer slight discomfort. Yea, those who aspire toward spiritual heights should be mocked, as it teaches in the bible. For responsible neighborhoods honor neither realism nor surrealism, but something in-between, which is hard to describe: we only know it from the fact that we all like it: it grants us repose. Finally, at the end of this dunk-tank ceremony, let the crown be again removed from the forehead of Bryan, and let an upstanding member of the neighborhood pilot a gas-powered riding-lawnmower over the crown, and bag it as yard-mulch. Then scatter the scraps round the base of one of the trees, in the midst of the neighborhood. (We recommend the tree of knowledge.)
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