Brief brush with the pro

Dear diary,

I’m on the side of the sublime. I think that certain things about artistry can be taught, but they’re not the interesting things; so it’s not like one shouldn’t bother learning, but, in truth, it doesn’t really matter. Nobody’s interested in how properly you can execute your subject; all we wanna know is what’s weird about your soul.

Actually, I should speak for myself — that last opinion is not everyone’s: it’s only mine. For apparently everyone else actually does care about how properly you execute your subject. In fact, that’s ALL they care about. And that’s fine by me: I like everybody anyway, despite their flaws.

Some people are bored during this plague quarantine. I’m not. I have so much to do that I’ll never be bored. For instance, I have miles to go before I sleep; and, after that, I have miles to go before I sleep. Then, when the sleeping starts, things really heat up.

But my brother was bored during this plague quarantine, so he purchased a set of online classes — his idea was that he’d use this boring down-time to learn how to cook; but then he realized that in order to make fine cuisine, one needs ingredients; and the only ingredients that are available during a plague-time quarantine are canned black beans.

And my brother also was blest with this epiphany: he realized that he really loves canned black beans served plain.

So he called me up on my landline and said: “Yo Bry.” And I said, “Wut up.” And he said:

“I bought these college courses over the Internet, but I don’t wanna learn anything. Are you interested in them, by any chance? If so, you can steal my user-name & pass-code to log into the web-site. My user-name is HotMomDotCom (all one word) and my pass-code is pass-code. I learned that from watching the Clinton campaign from 2016, when their chairman got his emails stolen: it was cuz his pass-code was pass-code. So when I saw that, I said to myself: Man! I gotta do that someday; that’s a really groovy idea.”

And I said to my brother, “Cool people don’t use slang like ‘groovy’ anymore; they just say ‘awesome’. But yeah I’ll check out the site. I’ll hack into it. And then I’ll let you know what I think.”

So I called up the gang of foreign diplomats that I keep on my payroll, and they got me into the site. And then I began my learning experience:

The first thing I noticed was that the menu had more options than just “Salad Prep” and “Burgermaking”. They also had an “Arts and Entertainment” section. So I clicked on that; cuz I’m always trying to learn how to be more smart. So then there was this drop-down list of professors from the world of TV miniseries, and I chose this teleplay scribe whom I’ve admired since the days of my youth. I won’t reveal his name, cuz I don’t think he’s worth memorializing eternally in these pages of my public-private journal; but I’ll tell you one thing he said:

First, it was funny becuz he was trying to teach a class on “Creative Writing”. If that doesn’t make you chuckle, then nothing will except the regular nighttime talk shows. My point is that you can’t really teach creative writing; you just have to bumble into it, mistakenly, after umpteen lifetimes. But there’s nothing more edifying than to accept pay for trying to teach what cannot be taught, so I listened intently. Now here’s what the Master said:

He said: “Rules are what give the arts their interest. Think about it.” [These are the Master’s words, verbatim.] “Seriously, think about it: take for example the most popular sport in the world: Soccer, alias European football. It’s the RULES that make soccer interesting. For consider a hypothetical:

“What if you were permitted to pick up the ball with your hands, and run up into the bleachers where the spectators are sitting, and dash thru all those cheering fans; then hop back onto the field, pull out a gun & kill the goalie; then just walk into the net bodily while holding the ball to score tons of points. — Would that be interesting? No.”

So this made me laugh pretty hard, because he really seemed to think that to allow all these modifications to the game — free use of hands, no boundaries, concealed-firearm permits, plus the legalization of murder; and then you earn not just one point but “tons of points” when you spike the ball between the goalposts — I say, the Master genuinely appeared to think that this suggestion was NOT genius and that it would NOT greatly improve the tedious pastime!

Lo, I myself don’t watch European football at all; but if they changed it to THIS type of mayhem, I’d never miss a game.

And then it struck me: This frumpy old professor inadvertently just invented U.S. football.

Isn’t that neat? We think we must send all our prayers & thanks to the scientists of the past for discovering crucial modern technologies like gravity and the wheel; but we’re all secretly wired so that even if the original inventor of the wheel fails at his God-given task, one of us other simpletons will inevitably just reinvent the thing.

Thus the wheel is secure, as a concept; as are all the other important concepts upon which life depends, like the cure for the plague, or U.S. football. So we need not worry — the luck that we’re praying for is, this instant, trying to birth itself thru untold matrices, at once; and it will stop at nothing to save us.

“But what about the multitudes who’ve already died?” yells a heckler from the crowd.

Here’s my answer: I don’t know. I’m only writing a lazy dream-essay; just attempting to drum up something that will make us all feel better. The reason for its effectiveness, and the trick that allowed my spell to capture your attention so tenaciously that you felt the need to question its true wisdom, is that I completed a college-level course on creativity before composing it. If you’re interested in mastering the same type of ministry, it also helps to know all the persuasive techniques of the advertising world; these will enable you to debate with a killer instinct and win every argument.