In this entry, I shall first briefly admit to having done a bad job on a house repair; then, for the remainder, I shall fantasize about more desirable situations, in hopes of beguiling my conscience from this shame.
Now here's the obligatory image — it's an ad for seafood combined roughly along the halfway diagonal (bottom left to top right) with an ad for pet stain remover — I like the way that the fork almost interacts with the vacuum:
Dear diary,
Well, I purchased a pre-hung exterior door, and I waited more than a year to attempt installing it, because I’ve never done this type of thing before, and I was scared to begin. But yesterday I finally tried and completed the install, and now the door works pretty bad. It also looks pretty bad. It does function, but it functions reluctantly. It’s the door equivalent of a donkey that does not desire to carry your ingots. It’s really hard to get him to start trotting uphill towards the marketplace of your town...
I could detail all the problems that resulted from the botched install, but I don’t even wanna think about it; I just wanted to confess the fact here at the top, and then move on to some sort of escapism.
Alright, so what can I imagine that will help me get my mind off of this failure? You’ve gotta help me today, reader — I’m too weak and disappointed to dream very well. You’ve gotta make up the slack. You’ve gotta bring your “A”-game. Since I’ve got nothing but despair at the moment, your interpretation of whatever I come up with here needs to be genius.
How about we start by envisioning ourselves enjoying the most pleasant scenery. Let’s place ourselves in the most attractive backdrop possible to be conceived — that way, no matter who reads this confession (or your own critical interpretation of it; which is, I trust, forthcoming) will be powerless against the intensity of its charm.
OK: so I see us in a motel, somewhere in South America, on a warm and rainy night. It’s not midnight, it’s just evening; say, seven o’clock, or just after dinner, but the sky is black. I’m a handsome man wearing a gray suit, and you’re a gorgeous woman with voluptuous hair wearing a sparkling light-gray dress. —Unless you wanna be the man, and I’ll be the woman. You prefer the woman? Fine, then the scene stands as written.
What should we do, now that we’re at the apex of our pleasure-pyramid? Should we write some dialogue for us to speak? Should we have our driver drive us to the ball?
I say we have a shootout. A good old-fashioned shootout, like the kind that they used to have in the days of prohibition...
(For readers who do not yet know, I should inform you that the U.S. prohibited alcohol for a number of years, more than a decade in fact, from 1920 to the early 1930s, and the mythology surrounding this time is that gangsters rose to power and had glorious shootouts with the cops using weapons like machine guns — but, for the purpose of this fictional dream that we’re presently co-dreaming, instead of battling the police, I say that we imagine ourselves being attacked by a rival gang of thugs: that way our plight can remain maximally ambiguous, morally speaking.)
Alright, so sweaty, ill-dressed henchmen begin creeping up the stairways to our villa-motel. There are two spiraling stairways: one on either side of the hillock that leads to our room. (We have the best room available: it has bamboo blinds.) Now, espying the threat, we both (while holding hands) dash over to the cabinet where we keep our limitless arsenal, and we each grab an AK-47 (which is our machine-gun-of-choice because it makes us feel in solidarity with the working classes of the Global South). Together we kick open the French sliding doors & pose on the balcony & mow down the intruders.
I receive multiple bullet-wounds during the invasion, and so do you; but, when the battle ends, the ruination that pervades the atmosphere is photogenic. All is silent now. We lie there, breathing a little faster than usual, because we’re losing blood from our wounds. We take a moment to savor the sight of the landscape: panning slowly from east to west, we behold the jungle expanse, misty with gunsmoke.
(This is really a fine fantasy, by the way. You’re almost helping me forget the door-install fiasco.)
OK, so what’s next? How about let’s have a doctor come bursting into the room and hasten out onto the balcony to help us. “I heard shots, and I came as fast as I could,” he might say. “I live two doors down, in room Green Double Zero.”
(Ultimately we might replace that figure with the room number of Dorothy Vallens’ apartment in the 1986 movie Blue Velvet, just to pay homage; but we’ll keep “Green Double Zero” for this draft.)
The doctor continues: “Here, I brought along gauze bandages and brandywine.” Then he wraps us up, covering most of the blood spots on our attire. We both take lengthy sips from his metal flask.
Now after the good doctor gets us up on our feet, we take a cruise in our automobile. It shall be a large steel, shiny old contraption: we’ll have to do some research to find out what is the most iconic motor-coach from around the mid-twentieth century, and rent one of those for the sake of filming it. It’ll probably be a “collector’s item” and thus very expensive; but, remember, this is a dream, so I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to cover the cost. If I must earn a little extra cash to help with the financing (and maybe, in the process, earn a ‘producer’ credit), I could even get a part-time job working at the Bronx Library. Then you could visit me on your lunch-break (you’ll probably end up as a human-rights attorney, in this life), and we can read rare books about Satan. But this last fact will not offend our Christian church-going audience, because they’ll understand that we’re merely performing research on some new mystery that we became entangled in, as part of a subplot, rather than engaging in devotional study.
Yet now I sense that our romance must sadly wind down. Unless we wanna commit to making a sequel in the future (and we most definitely DO NOT), we should tie up all the loose ends of our story, so that its running-time can end up under umpteen momentos:
So let’s say that the drug war is explained away by the fact that my earthly father and your biological mother were difficult to get along with because they themselves were damaged by their own neglectful parents.
And the doctor who, after the bloodbath, bound up our wounds and offered us wine, then permitted us to convalesce for an additional fortnight in that same luxury suite for no charge, and took care of us, and later allowed us to cruise around in his own prize automobile, the ’57 Studebaker Golden Hawk — let’s say that this doctor actually turns out to be the owner of the villa where we are staying (which would explain how he was able to grant us extended use of the suite) — and not only does he manage this motel but also all of the inns in the surrounding wasteland. Till now, he never let on to this fact, due to a mixture of pride and humility. And that’s also why he’s so shy.
Anything else to address, before we wrap? — Ah, right! good call: the Satanic subplot.
So it turns out that the Devil, alias Lucifer, was slain by his own son Jehovah when they met upon a mountaintop to play a game of chess, the outcome of which was to determine who was to inherit the copyright for all the intellectual property of Moses. And Jehovah lost, which caused his temper to flare, and he slew his progenitor. This is something that sounds horrendous on paper, but, when you see how the dream presents it, it wins you over. (Dreams contain stimuli that are hard to translate into audiovisual media, like aromas and anxiety.) Anyway, so you and I, the stars of this movie, uncover this truth by pure chance one day while walking in the woods, and we agree to meet at the library on your next break to discuss it, and to research it further. Then the credits roll, and we’re out.
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