Dear diary,
My memory is not trustworthy, so when I say “I remember hearing so-and-so say such-and-such,” take my words with a grain of salt. Now I remember the filmmaker Werner Herzog saying “Every gray hair on my head I call Kinski.” Herzog was referring to the person named Klaus Kinski, an intense actor who was reportedly prone to throw tantrums during filming. (The former directed the latter in five movies, if I remember right: Aguirre (1972); Nosferatu (1978); Woyzeck (1978); Fitzcarraldo (1982); and Cobra Verde (1987). Later Herzog commemorated his experiences with Kinski in the film My Best Fiend (1999); also the two appear in Burden of Dreams (1982), a documentary by director Les Blank, shot during and about the making of Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungles.) The idea is that the stresses and difficulties of life are what cause one’s hair follicles to lose their color; so Herzog’s remark means that Kinski is the most stressful and difficult phenomenon that Herzog ever encountered.
The reason I mention all this is so that I can decide what I myself shall blame all my gray hairs on. What should I say? If you had asked me a few years ago, I’d probably blame them on my dad, cuz it was stressful and difficult to work for his stupid trucking business. I could also blame my gray on politics — but that’s too boring...
Here’s what I’ve decided. I’ll say, from now on: “Every gray hair on my head I call Kinski.” It’s the exact same thing that Herzog said. The reason I like this saying is that it makes obvious sense for Herzog, whereas, for me, its meaning is unclear. Am I intentionally being nonsensical? Or am I just repeating a phrase I heard, like a parrot, without fully grasping the import of my words? Do I not understand how serious life on this planet is?
It tickles me to contemplate being so angry at an actor that I never even met — like my hair is turning gray by proxy, on behalf of Herzog: that’s how loyal of a fan I am: his troubles are my troubles.
Ultimately, however, I favor the interpretation that says that I just don’t understand what I’m saying — that I’m just sort of an empty vessel; like a lump of soft clay that maintains whatever impression you push into it… or a mockingbird or something. (A long-tailed songbird with grayish plumage, found in tropical America.)
*
It was freezing outside yesterday. There’s already snow on the ground here in Minnesota. It was below freezing, actually. So my sweetheart and I decided to take a walk. So we walked around our neighborhood. We looked at all the houses, and noted their fine points as we passed them. I liked the shutters on one house. My sweetheart liked the color of another house. We liked the bricks covering the lower half of a third house. We liked the trim and the windows on a fourth house. The next house had a really pretty front door — it was a bold color, different from the siding of the house, which stood out confidently and thus appeared attractive. Every house we passed had excellent traits that pleased our eyes. Even the automobiles that were parked in each driveway were beautiful. One was shiny and curvaceous, and its color was bright orange. Another was shiny and curvaceous, and its color was pinkish purple. These cars were like drivable pieces of candy; that’s how wondrous they were.
Now I shouldn’t have let myself praise those cars above, cuz I only wanted to leave you with the impression that all the houses were good-looking: it’s the houses that I wanna stress, cuz I wanna compare their gorgeousness and splendor to the utter letdown that our own house gave us, when we finally turned the corner of our street. We looked up and there was our old shack: Brown as dust. It is a very ugly place. I turned to my sweetheart and said, “We really should do something to make our house look better.” And she said, “I agree.”
But how does one beautify one’s environment? I mean, how do you even figure out what will make your house look pretty? A house is just a big box lodged in the wasteland — how can you doll it up? do you just put lipstick all over its east side?
So I told my sweetheart that I’d like to get actual functional shutters for our windows; not those type of shutters that are fake, that’re just wood that’s nailed to the side of the house and they can’t move (why call them shutters if you can’t SHUT them?) — I want shutters that must be manually closed each night, so, every single time the sun goes down, I must physically exit my house and walk all around it, from window to window, and unlatch the shutters from their “open” position, and secure them and latch them closed over each window, and then return back indoors. Then, when it starts to storm outside, and the wind picks up, I’ll be lying in my bed terrified because the shutters will all be rattling loudly, making a racket. That’s the life I wanna live. (I’m naturally romantic and adventurous.)
So, anyway, if you have any further ideas about what can make our house look better, let me know. I understand that simple things like adding a fresh coat of paint to your home’s exterior can really make a difference; but I don’t know what color to choose. Like I said, right now our house is dirt-brown. Or dust-brown, rather. So I’m thinking of painting it neon orange, either that or neon pinkish-purple. Give it a wax job, to shine it up; and replace all its angular parts with parts that’re curvy.
—“This is not how we’re gonna fit in with the neighbors. Why’d you do that?”
—“Shut up, mommy; everything is fine.”
That’s an exchange between Officer Duke and his mother, quoted from the film Wrong Cops (2013), screenplay by Quentin Dupieux.
The last thing I wanna talk about today is what I would choose for a plot, in case I ever write a novel. I’d like to dream up some situations to escape from, so that I can inflict them on my main character when he befriends a posse and they go out to explore the landscape. Cuz the problem is this:
I’ve been trying to read one of these popular novels that everyone loves — the public loves this book, and they cannot stop praising it; and I don’t wanna be an outcast or a hater: I wanna try to fit in and be one of the crowd; so I’m slowly working my way thru this pop masterpiece. The thing is, the book is not very attractive to me — unlike the houses in my neighborhood (every one of which wins my heart), this novel that everyone calls “SO GOOD!” seems tedious to me. But I vow to get thru it. So I’m a little more than halfway to the end, and if I were to try to describe to you what I’ve read so far, I’d say:
A guy befriends a posse and they get themselves in one mess after another. That’s about it.
So this makes me conclude that I myself could write such a novel: all I’d have to do is figure out a name for my protagonist, some names for his posse members, also a name for the posse itself; then a whole bunch of sticky situations for them to extricate themselves from.
So let’s skip the names and just dream up some conundrums, cuz that’s the fun part. The names can come later. Those’re hard: you must decide if you want them to be weird fun and playful, like the name Tertius Radnitsky, or just normal, like the name Bryan Ray.
Alright, the first pickle or fix that I can imagine for our hero and his mariners to fall into is this:
They will be trapped inside of a waterfall. On one side of them will be hard rocks: that’s the interior wall of the waterfall, sort of like its support beam — it’ll be the lowest part of the cliff itself. And on the other side will be the rapids: the water that results from the cascade when it amasses at the base of the falls. And the way that I’ll have my hero and his friend escape from this plight is that a helicopter — a chopper that is made of pure gold — will come dashing out from the sun and hover before the plashing droplets, and shoot out grappling hooks from its underbelly, which the merry men who accompany my hero will grip, one at a time, and be hoisted to safety.
The next dire predicament that my hero & his gang shall face is that they shall get lost in a coat-room. There will be coats everywhere, and folding tables and bins and cubby holes with various items stored within them. And my hero will have to climb over many articles of attire, and so will his troops. Then, out of nowhere, evil clerks will appear who are employed by the dance hall (I’m thinking that this coat-room will belong to a dance hall: it’s the place where the patrons must check their valuables before entering the dimly lit chamber of the building to rollick), and these evil clerks will chase our hero and his friends until everyone is bushed. I will then have the evil clerks stop to catch their breath, and our hero and his mariners will glance back and see that the clerks have halted their pursuit; so they, too (my protagonist and his posse) will pause to regain their strength as well. Then, to end this particular episode, I’ll have a wizard descend from the ceiling lamp; and he’ll invite them to ride away on his thagomizer.
The third and final segment of my novel’s plot will be the most entertaining. I’ll have saved the best for last. What’ll happen is this:
A giant alligator will eat our hero and his mariners, and this alligator will also then eat all the clerks from Part Deux; so the clerks will chase our hero and his team thru the guts of the beast. They’ll begin at the tongue, where they were first swallowed, and they’ll go down the throat, and into the stomach, and then they’ll have a big battle: clerks versus mariners. And the mariners will win, cuz they will have sharper swords (it will turn out that when the clerks swing their swords against the mariners, the mariners use their own swords to block the swords of the clerks, and the mariners’ swords are so sharp that, instead of clanging blade-to-blade, the clerks’ swords get sliced in half when they meet the mariners’ weaponry; however, as the thrust of their jab is not impeded by the armaments of their foemen, and as a fraction of sword still remains in the hands of each clerk, the existing partial-blade ends up grazing the chest of each posse-member, which leaves an incision that just barely breaks the skin, like a paper-cut: thus, altho the clerks are immediately murdered after attempting what they hoped would be the deathblow to this retinue, the mariners themselves will suffer a minor setback and not emerge from the fray entirely unwounded: each warrior will be required to sanitize his scraped chest by pouring some sort of stinging substance upon the cut, and anointing it with a disinfectant salve, then gently swathing it with a bandage), and right after this royal skirmish concludes, our hero and his limping comrades will exit the alligator by piercing thru its armor: its scaly flesh. But this will be very difficult to do; and I have an idea for some lines that can be spoken by various mariners, while they are still inside the gator:
As they’re all trying to break out by slicing thru its tough skin, one mariner will shout:
His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal! (Job 41:15)
And his comrade will nod in agreement & add, with regard to these scales:
One is so near to another, that no air can come between them! (Job 41:16)
And a third, in a voice that sounds exhausted from trying so long to hack thru the alligator’s scales, will cry out in desperation:
They are joined one to another! they stick together! they cannot be sundered! (Job 41:17)
But, suddenly, all the blades that the mariners have been sawing with, all afternoon, trying to sever themselves out of the gator’s armor — all these swords at once will break thru and sunder those allegedly sunder-proof scales! This is how they will escape from their final quandary.
And that is how my upcoming novel will end (if I choose to write it). And there will be neither sequels nor prequels, nor offshoots of any kind: I will use whatever legal means are available, to prohibit the addition of sub-stories onto this story. No one may reuse my characters or continue their journeys. And no one can turn my book into a movie.
And the text will be one hundred pages long, exactly. And it will be printed in large type, in an easy-to-read font with big round serifs; and the spacing of the lines will be generous, and the margins will be thick enough for you to write notes in. And it will contain full-color illustrations on every other page, and also black line drawings (done with a felt-tip pen) on the pages between.
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