At the left is a note that I taped to a box of wine, after accidentally bending its nozzle. At the right are the "bombillas" that I installed in our yard lamp, photographed next to the one that burnt out.
(This image has nothing to do with what follows.)
Dear diary,
Aren’t you glad that everything turned out the way it did? Why wouldn’t you be; are you against the world? You can’t live life that way: you’ve gotta be positive; you’ve gotta accept whatever outcome that Fate hands you.
No you don’t. You can battle Fate if you want. You can be against the world. You can go out in a hail of bullets, with Fate chasing you. You can even slay Fate.
I advise making Fate into something much more attractive than it is now. At present, Fate is acting like a badly trained employee of the Pantheon; it’s not accurately representing the high standards that our world was once known for.
But was this world ever as good as we have branded it? Have we, the members of the existential marketing team, been practicing truth in advertising? Of course not. This world was always a death trap. Think about it: how many creatures that have ever lived were able to avoid dying? That’s right: only a handful.
And there seem to be at least two types of people: those who have a desire for humankind to enter an unprecedented state of harmonization, beyond countries, borders, money, property (etc.); and those who play the game as it’s always been played, who hold anyone who doesn’t do likewise as foolish. It seems to me that most people belong to this latter group, which is not stupid altho I’m against it. So that’s why we humans keep repeating the same old cycles over and over: masters and slaves, warfare of empires, unsealed pandemics, decline and fall…
I believe that the biblical Book of Revelation (which I loathe for its inhumanity, by the way) is a coded history, written from the perspective of early church-folk, of the end of old Rome, rather than a prophecy of future events; but the reason it reads so convincingly as a prediction of our own time is that almost everyone on Earth has been forced to play this same game by the same rules, then as now (it’s hard for me to avoid adding extra adjectives like “wretched” and “needless” before the word “rules” here, but I leave them out for the sake of smooth-styling), so of course we see the same results.
*
I don’t like this entry, up to this point. As I write, I can tell that I’m sermonizing poorly, weakly, dully. However, I leave it as-is, because the point of this journal is not to offer magnificent compositions to my successors (tho about 85% of the entries I’ve written here have turned out to be spellbinding masterpieces; plus, we all now know that I’ll have no successors) but to provide snapshots of a changing mind:
It’s like shooting a documentary film, with text instead of celluloid; and instead of a subject I have my subjectivity; and instead of editing the results into something that people could enjoy watching over a couple of hours in a theater, I cut nothing out: I leave all the boring parts in so that the feature is lengthy & insufferable—it makes no money at the box office; but all the ushers & staff employed by the movie house are reclining in the otherwise empty theater, eating popcorn and partly attending to the curiosities on the screen instead of doing their jobs. So I say I’ve succeeded.
The only line I like in this present failure is the one near the start, way up above, where I say: “You die in a hail of bullets, with Destiny chasing you.” I like that idea.
*
Now this is a little off the subject, but the house that’s directly across the street from mine has colorful chalk drawings all over its driveway right now. The couple who lives there has a little daughter, and I assume she is the one who drew on the asphalt. I like when people do this: when they allow children to beautify their establishment. Maybe I should put out a sign in our lawn near the pavement that sez:
Kids, listen up! Go get some chalk and draw pictures here on Bryan’s driveway! He won’t pay you a living wage to do so, but he won’t call the police on you either, IF he likes what you create!
Cuz then I’d probably get a lot of passersby who’d stop, read the sign, and choose to participate; and I myself could stand by the drapes at my front window, waving & mouthing the words “Thank you!” to all the contestants. The idea would be to communicate my endorsement of their actions without having to open the windowpane, which would let in fresh air. (We live in plague-time, remember.) Also I could make the thumbs-up sign, or the “OK” sign, so that the kids would know that I approve of their hard work. (The “OK” sign is the one where you curve your forefinger until it touches the tip of your thumb, thus making a circle, while your other digits fan out like the tail of a peacock.)
My favorite driveway picture that I imagine the children would draw for me is the one that depicts an astronaut floating next to the planet Jupiter. You’d know it is Jupiter because of its red spot, which was made by dripping genuine blood on the asphalt; and the astronaut has a puffy white suit with a round helmet, presumably made of polycarbonate coated with mylar. And this suited fellow has a speech bubble encompassing the word “Hello”; and beneath his boots there is a legend written in all-caps: “BRYAN RAY SPACE INVADER” cuz the kid’s parents probably told her my last name and how to spell the word “invader”. Maybe they even told her how to spell “space” as well, because you’d think it would have at least two esses (instead of a sea); maybe even three esses.
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