Narcissising between the Turkey Days

Dear diary,

No Turkey Day went well for my family. (I call it No Turkey Day because we did not eat turkey.) What happened is this:

My sweetheart and I met with my sister and mother. We talked for a while. Then we ate. What did we eat? The meal was not turkey — I already told you that — instead, we ate all new food that none of us had ever heard of before. My sister was the chef. We all agreed that these exotic dishes taste real good — I even want the recipe for the main course, which was something rice-based: I love nothing more than rice, not even God. Then, after the meal, we read aloud some passages from our favorite texts. Then we talked about these texts and about other things, and then we parted ways.

*

On the day after No Turkey Day, my sweetheart and I decided to hang up Xmas lights. We got out two ladders from the garage: a wooden one and a silver one. (I can’t remember what type of material the latter ladder is made of, which is why I call it silver instead of mylar or platinum.)

Hanging lights is scary because you must climb up to the top of your roof, and we live in a single-story rambler, so that’s more than six feet above the ground. You might think I’m joking about being scared about this, because a height of six feet is actually quite low, if you’re judging it from the perspective of that woman who does the window-washing for all the glass skyscrapers, but I genuinely suffer from acrophobia — “acron” (height) plus “phobos” (fear), from the Greek, means “fear of heights” — thus, to me, six feet up seems too high for a human. I’d far rather be six feet down, under the ground, in a comfortable bed.

So the way that my sweetheart and I power thru this challenge is that I myself hang the lights in the front of the house, where a gutter system is attached to the fascia which allows me to string the bulbs by simply standing on tiptoe; and then we switch roles and she does the light-hanging for the sides of the house, where the ground slopes off severely in either direction (we live on a mountaintop). — My sweetheart is not, I repeat, not acrophobic. She actually likes the feel of being close to the sky. The only thing she fears is fear itself. I bet she’d even have no complaint if God took her up to heaven; whereas I’d be pissed if He tried that — I’d bark and growl and bite His arm, and He’d have to leash me tight in order to keep me.

*

So now you’re all caught up with what I’ve been doing over this traumatic holiday season. And it’s not even over, for me; cuz, like I explained in an earlier entry, my family is celebrating Turkeymas again today, on Saturday, illegally and completely against protocol, cuz my brother’s family couldn’t make it on the divinely sanctioned day.

But altho I speak of this extra event as a chore, I secretly am happy about it, because I love to visit people. (Don’t all aliens?) When you gather together to celebrate any aspect of life — no matter what the specific aspect is that you’re congregating to revere, whether it’s the holiest animal (a meat-free turkey burger) or a jolly fat Christian (Saint Claus the Red) — it’s always interesting to hear what people say about themselves, and to note how they are dressed, and at least to make an attempt at propagandizing their children.

I’ve mentioned it a million times by now: the fact that my brother Paul had a child, all by himself, not long ago, and he named the lad Frank Booth Ray. Of course it was a virgin birth; but unlike Jesus, who was 50% goody-goody, this babe is pure evil. So I really like my nephew, & I enjoy trying to persuade him to join the Dark Side, even tho he does not speak any language yet. My hope is that I can open his eyes and ears to…

Actually I have no hope. I don’t expect that anything in this world will change for the worse; it’ll just keep getting better and better. How dull.

But I do enjoy…

No, I don’t enjoy anything anymore. I was going to try to claim that I really do take an interest in the outfits that people choose to wear, or that I get a kick out of performing small-talk with all souls, especially those who live in urban areas (country mice are always intrigued by city mice), but the truth is that…

Actually, I do indeed enjoy chatting with folks and noting the style of their apparel. I just don’t know how to articulate my… what do you call it. — I’m not handy with words. I’m only comfortable installing door-slabs.

*

Now I’ll just ramble for a while until this entry ends itself. I don’t wanna force it to quit before it’s ready. I already got my fingerprints all over it; the least I can do is let it expire at a time of its choice, in the way that it prefers.

*

So on the pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving, my mother and sister and sweetheart and I ended up talking a lot about spirituality, because… well, for whatever reason. And whenever we talk like this, I spend the next few days, in broad vague strokes, rehashing portions of our exchange which strike me as problematic. I keep obsessing over certain misfires or bad passes or disconnections that occurred in the conversation. No matter how much common ground we win between us, that territory proves a no-man’s land: individually, there’s a fundamental difference in the way that we think. We’re rival models of human, striving for an impossible reconciliation — it reminds me of the lines from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven & Hell...

These two classes of men are always upon earth. & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.

Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.

So my attempt at “getting along” with my mother and sister, in the realm of spirituality, is an instance of me succumbing to religion; descending into religious behavior. It is sinful. And, like most sins, it’s beguilingly pleasant to partake in, and probably not unhealthy — it’s hard to resist the temptation to balance and coordinate and be at peace and accord with those who are essentially antipoetic.

My mom was raised Catholic, but early in life she fell away from that system. She was apparently not part of any church or Christian sect for a while; but eventually, around college age, she suffered a traumatic experience which caused her great misgivings, whereon an evangelistic Protestant took advantage of her pain and hard-sold her some type of Orpheus-masked-as-Jesus. Who knows what my mom believes now; not even God knows. But this slalom from Catholicism to Worldly Fun to Evangelical Protestantism determines how she navigates her present state of unstable modern semi-Christian pseudoscience half-Fun.

& my sister observes my mom and notes how unhappy Christianity has made her, and she (my sister) blames this unhappiness on patriarchy and puritanism. I think my sister’s right about this: the patriarchal aspect of Christianity does indeed hold the majority of its believers down, extremely cruelly. (By puritanism I mean a distrust in the sensual, an aversion to physicality — specifically sexuality — and an idolatry for overwork. All this results in plain old boring masochism.)

OK so my sister diagnoses my mom’s disease accurately, according to Yours Truly: Doctor Bryan the Infallible Author of this Account. However, diagnosing your own mother’s spiritual malady is easy — what would be truly impressive is if my sister were able to fix upon a belief that I myself could lend support to. But what happens is that my sister goes her own way: she does not find herself valuing Edward Lear’s poetry, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman’s poetry, and Herman Melville’s famous epic, and the manifestos of Tristan Tzara, and the works of William Shakespeare, and the King James Bible, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Lewis Carroll, and Nietzsche, and Emily Dickinson, and Harold Bloom, and Franz Kafka, and Anne Carson, and all the scriptures that I myself love & respect — no: my sister finds herself embracing her own stupid values. So this is a wrong turn. Everyone should end up exactly on the same path as ME; and I should be just a little bit ahead of everyone, so that I can give my followers the answers in know-it-all fashion; like “There’s a bit of turbulence on the horizon, beware!” or “Up ahead is a sharp right turn on the road of life, don’t drive into your neighbor’s flowerbed, my little donkeys!”

I really do favor the dreams where I, even I, get to be the leader. So I hope that you all elect me president someday. Cuz I’ll turn the presidency into a KINGDOM again; as it should be. I’ll be a good emperor. I’ll expand the empire until it’s like an octopus with seven thrillion tentacles, and then I’ll make it invisible and disband it. I’ll shut down my own military and bring peace on earth. I’ll be like one of those translucent pink jellyfish that only shocks you to death if you sincerely desire this gift. That way, if you’re angry that the beach is not sunny enough; or, even better, if you’re enraged because it’s naturally TOO DAMN SUNNY, then you can curse God and die. For I will actually hear your prayer, unlike the current deity. I’ll strike anyone down with lightning from heaven — you won’t even have to ask. All you have to do is ask.