Leftover Tee-Day thots halfbaked or overcooked

In this entry, I will toss out my leftover Tee-Day thots; but, first, I must offer a note on the image that accompanies it.

NOTE
on this entry's obligatory image

The affront below is a combination of two junk ads: one is taped on top of the other. The ad serving as backdrop has the phrase "THE BEST TRUC" written on it; and the ad that is taped over it consists of equal sections that are labeled "BEFORE" and "AFTER". (In an early stage of production, I tried superimposing different pics on each half of this latter ad, but, in the end, decided against doing so, because it seemed blanker just to leave it as it is.)

Dear diary,

Well now Turkey Day is officially over for our family — the second of two celebrations happened yestereven. This alternate dinner differed from the first dinner in that we had no text-readings this time, but we did get the chance to consume an actual turkey. Also since there was a baby present — my little nephew Frank Booth Ray — most of the attention was focused on him. That is as it should be. I say: It is good for children to lead adults, rather than the other way round.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

That line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” sums up our get-together. A handful of adults were enticed to act like monkeyfolk for the evening, by the babe in attendance. It was fun.

*

Alright, now I’m done talking about Turkey Day. I’ve already dedicated three entries to puzzling it out, and I’ve gotten nowhere. And that’s not even counting all the reports that I published about it in eons past; like the eon of 2018, or the respectively excellent eons of ’17 and ’16: I think I must have reflected upon it, back then, too. I don’t remember exactly when I started writing in this journal, or how many arguments I’ve won against Thanksgiving, but I bet it’s an impressive number.

*

Oh, and one more thing: As our family was gathered around the dinner table, we partook of that tradition where every attendee, in turn, stands up and declares what he or she is thankful for. — Actually, the way I phrased it just now makes it sound too voluntary; it was more like we were each prompted at gunpoint by the party’s officiator to fashion a platitude... Yes, it was more like being stopped and frisked by a cop, who then commands you to show him your papers...

Now I don’t recall what everyone actually claimed to be thankful for, because I was daydreaming; but I’ll give you a reenactment that I swear is half-passable:

What the Members of the Ray Family
All Claimed to be Thankful For

My sister Susan went first: she said, “I am thankful for this food that I just made. For I cook good.”

Then Colleen my sister-in-law said, “I am thankful for little baby Frank Booth Ray, because he is a child, and children are the future, and the future is either bright or doomed; full stop.”

Then my brother Paul said, “I am thankful for all the microbreweries that have proliferated in recent decades within the U.S.; also I am thankful that the Minnesota Golden Gophers defeated the Wisconsin Badgers today, Saturday in the Year of our Lord 2019, November 30, in the college football game that was played at TCF Bank Stadium. The final score was 40 to 12 because my team (the Gophers) scored five touchdowns at six points apiece, and, in all instances, instead of opting to gain an extra point by kicking the ball through the uprights in the manner of a field goal, they (the Gophers) chose to attempt a two-point conversion by running a play from scrimmage, and, each time, they successfully advanced the ball across the goal line in the same manner as if they were scoring an additional touchdown; while, contrariwise, our enemy (the Badgers) only managed to score two touchdowns, earning six points apiece, and they missed each conversion try. Thus they suck and we rule.”

Then it was my mom’s turn to be thankful, so she said: “I’m thankful for the blood of Jesus, which blinds the giant eyeball of God in the sky so that He can’t see all the fucked up shit that I’ve done in my life. What a relief! Cuz if He could clearly spot all the sins that I keep committing, I have no doubt that He’d damn me to Hell for eternity. So I’m lucky (and thankful) that Christ Jesus duped His ass.”

Then it was my sweetheart’s turn, so she stood up and said: “I am thankful for Bryan because he wears a leather jacket and rides a motorcycle.”

And finally I myself, Bryan Ray the author of this epistle, climbed up and planted my two dirty boots atop the table; then spat in disgust and began to bellow: “Why should I give thanks? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious? I’m thankful for NOTHING. — I deserve everything that I have, and in fact I deserve much more!!! I should even file an official complaint in the celestial sphere, leveling the accusation that I’ve been ripped off in this here lifetime, rather than whimpering and truckling halfhearted thank-yous with all of ye conformists. Would you give thanks if our Blind God threw you in prison and tormented you day and night? Cuz that’s what this life is: a prison of continual torment. I am not thankful; I am indignant.”

And then my whole family answered me as one, and their combined voices were as the sound of rushing waters:

“Bryan,” they said, “you cannot admit that you’re not thankful on Thanksgiving. You MUST acquiesce. Now show us your papers.”

So I frowned and decided to just lie and assert that I’m thankful for the next random thing that I behold — like how a baby bird, when it hatches out of its egg, determines that the very first being it espies shall serve as its true parent — and my eyes happened to alight upon the silverware that was sitting to the side of my dinner plate; so I murmured: “Fine, then I’m thankful for knives.”

And everyone then replied, “Are you serious? Knives? That’s your answer? Are you trying to ruin Thanksgiving?”

And I stood firm and proclaimed even louder, “Yes, knives. That’s what I’m thankful for.”

Then they gave up. Therefore I sorta won this battle.

*

And I also keep obsessing over the religious talk that I had with my mother and sister on the earlier Turkey Day, alias Turkey Day 1 of 2. I keep mulling over the main points, and trying to get at the gist of it all. It seems that the major difference between THEIR spiritual stance (on the surface, it might seem inaccurate to group my mom and sister together under the same philosophical umbrella, because they believe such very different things — my mom being a Christian fundamentalist, and my sister styling herself as a pagan mystic — nonetheless I see them as essentially two twigs of the selfsame tree, whereas I myself am not an offshoot of any plant, or even a species of vegetation: I’m rather some neo-mammal from outer space, like a cat who pilots a saucer that is propelled by antigravity technology, and who can speak American English), I say, the difference between THEIR stance and my own is this:

My mother and sister subscribe to a literal heaven, or a spiritual “elsewhere” that can be reached after death, and they believe in the continuance of personality beyond their present body. — I, on the other paw, accord with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

There will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is right now.

I say that heaven and hell are aspects of this current existence. And I say that God is not some phantom haunting a cloud in the sky, but (quoting Blake) God only acts and is in existing beings and humans.

*

But it is amusing to consider this other stance, that heaven is real and awaiting us. What would that mean? What could it mean for ME MYSELF Bryan Ray of Thief River Falls, Minnesota, to end up in heaven? Could I breathe the air there? Or would they have to install weird new gills on the side of my neck, the way that God requires an ether tank to stalk us? Cuz God cannot digest our thin earthly air. God can’t even materialize out of thin air: he avoids Earth like the plague. And God hates sin, so if we visit him at his mansion, he’ll force us to remove our free-will, the way that certain cultures require you to remove your shoes, cuz they don’t want you to track stardust all over their fake wood floor.

I’m saying that God would need to augment our soul so much, to make us “sin-free” in order to tolerate our presence, that what would result would be more like an android version of us, or like a figure in a wax museum. He’d have to amputate the most interesting part of our personality. It would be as if a scientist were to scan the image of our body, and then use a computer art program to reproduce our exterior (not our mind, mind ye), and then add hydraulic piping and all sorts of other bells and whistles so that our replica could move; then paint the outside of us so that it resembles our individual traits, as they are listed on our driving license: brown for the hair and eyebrows; brown for the eyes; and too much rouge on the cheeks — makeup more appropriate for a stage play than for an up-close and personal relationship. That’s is how I imagine we’ll all look, on the day we storm heaven. And here’s what we’ll say:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

That’s from “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens. But still I wanna take the idea seriously:

What if we really DO meet God in the sky, and we’re not just robots — what will THAT be like? Here’s my best guess:

God will be glowing. God will have big bangs. God will look loving. God’s embrace will be gentle. God will show us how animals are made. God will let us make an animal of our own. God will then re-christen our animal. We will object to the name that God offers to our animal. God will then say: But when I handcrafted the beings on your planet, I generously allowed your ancestor, Man, to christen them; therefore it’s only fair that I should now be allowed to christen your invention. Genesis chapter 2, verse 20:

God let his replica, Man, christen all of his creatures: all mammals, and all the aliens of the outer spaces, and every insect of the bell jar; but for Man there was not found a creature that was eligible to marry.

I don’t know; I guess I can’t take God seriously. If the idea doesn’t distress the bottom line of my balance sheet, it doesn’t really seem worth brooding about.

Coda

Businessmen are nothing if not canny. They can tell plainly, when they gather at their watering holes, that whoever is not concerned with items of commerce is only wasting their time. They finish each other’s sentences. They plan whole futures into the present. If you try to ask a businessman to contribute to the wellbeing of any art form, such as poetry or video games, he will answer: “Never! — unless the concept rouses my gut sense; which speaks the language of business, exclusively.”

We should all try to earn more money. Our society depends upon us. Our children need to learn the value of a sale. The church has let these little ones down. The church has abused children sexually without instructing them how to turn a buck therefrom. These kids then end up in the various nations’ private intelligence agencies, doing the LORD’s work, extorting the powerful.

Ah, moneymaking. We’re all willing to learn how to merge our interests with others’: that’s agreed upon. Some of us were trapped in one church (or law firm) and then escaped to another; some of us have never been down-and-out enough to need a job (or a faith), and therefore we can only see the lighter side of religion or any other form of busy-work (business).

The important thing to remember is that everyone is always right and wrong about God. If you’re talking to them, they’re right. And once you finish your conversation and leave that person, they’re laughably wrong — even pitiably so. It’s common sense, like physical exercise: You do as much as it feels right to do. If you overate during the holidays, get on the stationary bike. Take advantage of the bench press. Join a workout club, get some binoculars and do some mall-rat watching. As it is written: Mall-mice are simply mall-songbirds who became mall-bats and then lost their wings.

What I’m trying to say is that altho Santa does not share the same soul as Christ, they’re both here to do the right thing for our empire. (They both mastered Basic Gibberish.) Their plans for mankind will please both the business and the religious communities, by keeping poverty hovering at an acceptable level. And what is the acceptable level for poverty to hover at? After so many generations, we vipers should know this.