Yet another medium hair day

NOTE. Most of the hair appears in the lower part of this entry.

About the obligatory image:

The artist Ryan Baldwin sent me a mystery box or DADAPACKAGE that had enigmas all over it, inside and out. This is a detail. The rest of the work can be seen HERE. (If you happen to be reading this introductory statement aloud to a boardroom of businessmen, when you voice that last word “here”, instead of making an obscene gesture, please simply explain to your audience that the term appears in the text as a clickable link.)

Dear diary,

What can I say? Is the world entirely good? Obviously not. Is the world entirely bad? No, I guess it’s not 100% bad either. So what’s the truth about the world? Here’s your answer: The world is so-so.

Now that we’ve got all our philosophizing out of the way, what do you wanna talk about? You wanna talk about “being itself”? Really? Why? Oh, because you don’t know what “being itself” is? OK well I’ll tell you:

“Being itself” is…

Now I just realized that I don’t understand this concept any more than you do. I wonder what you were thinking it meant before we sat down together in this meadow, two perfect strangers, for our picnic.

“Being itself” is a pretty philosophical topic to bring up, considering that I prefaced my question of “Where to next?” by vowing a total break with philosophy, by the way. You should be more considerate, in the future, when barging into people’s writings.

Sorry — again I’m just clowning around to cover up the fact that I have nothing to say and no reason to continue confessing. Here I am with my priest, in the booth, and he’s licking his chops, but I’ve committed no sins. (If this is a joke, it only works if you know that I’m thinking of this particular entry as a…

…on second thot, let’s just call this entry a bad joke that didn’t work on account of its obscurity.)

*

It’s hard to write well when you’re worried about stuff. Right now there’s this plague raging over the landscape, threatening to slay everyone; and this tragedy is complicated by the fact that all the leaders, the statesmen, the governors, the presidents, the prime ministers, the owners of the system, the Powers that Be manifestly do not care if We the People survive or not.

So I keep obsessing in the same sad circle: Where am I going to find food, shelter, medical help (etc.); where are my basic needs going to come from? This is a constant question because I live in a country that values money over people. If people came first, I’d have no worries: I’d just walk outside and say, “I’m starving to death here; could somebody toss me something to eat?” and I’m sure that at least a dozen bystanders would throw tomatoes at me. But in the current system, if I want to purchase even a single tomato, I first must cheat some poor sucker out of his retirement, then offer a percentage of the proceeds to the Tomato Monopoly. And then I die anyway, because the pesticides that they use to grow their foodstuffs are carcinogenic.

*

I like that we’re all quarantined tho, because that means that nobody can get a haircut, so all the men have really long hair now: down to their ankles. Now you can’t tell apart the sexes, cuz everybody has the same hairstyle…

I was going somewhere with that idea, but now I got sidetracked, cuz it reminded me of that place in his first letter to the Corinthians where the Apostle Paul talks about males and females needing to dress differently, or at least to distinguish themselves sexually, visually, despite there being “neither male nor female in Christ”...

Goddammit, now even before I give my diversion from Corinthians, I need to go over and quote the lines from Galatians, otherwise you’ll never believe that Paul said all this shit:

For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:27-28)

OK so I’m just following my train of thot straight off the tracks here. When an idea seduces me, I chase after it; it’s that simple. So after Paul taught his followers this message of sexlessness, his congregation in Corinth went nuts and had a big orgy, where men & women & all the other types & kinds of genders all quarantined themselves in a big room, which they later named a “church”, and grew their hair long, and made sweet love. Slowly and romantically. They all put on their uniformly tailored togas; then immediately they all put off these very same togas, which all boasted the identical cut to their cloth: unflatteringly homogenized: neither masculine nor feminine. And this pissed Paul off. So he wrote to the Corinthians:

Know ye not that THE UNRIGHTEOUS shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. (I Corinthians 6:9-10)

Now, of that list, let me just say, on a side note, the evils that I myself proudly own:

I’m not much of a fornicator (I’m more of a watcher, just like the angels), but I am an idolater — big time, cuz of all the poets I idolize; Blake, Whitman... — I’m definitely not an adulterer, cuz I’ve never done that, unless, as Jesus sez:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time (in fact, I myself came down onto a mountaintop and gave you this commandment etched in stone, since I share a threefold entity with my Father), “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. (Matthew 5:27-28)

So if that’s the case, then I Bryan Ray the Good Devil have never NOT committed adultery; because I’ve mentally wined & dined every spouse I’ve ever met. Every time a gentleman introduces me to his wife, I instantly begin my dream where she and I are having a candlelit dinner; and my manners always prove impeccable.

Back to Paul’s sin-list. “Effeminate”? Check. But “abusers of themselves with mankind”? —No, this is another unrighteousness that I’m unfortunately not guilty of. I have no knack for this type of thing. I think the folks who can manage it are perhaps even superior to us straight boring louts, but it’s just not my cup of tea. ...Moving on: “Thieves”? Nope — not except artistically, because one cannot become an artist without imitating: at least one begins by imitation and then matures into a fiction called originality. So I can say, from my standpoint as an author of much classic literature: my thievery is only literal, not literal. ...Now am I “covetous”? Yes. A “drunkard”? Proudly. Yet, last & least, I’m neither a “reviler” nor an “extortioner” (I never even worked at a bank).

Alright now I can move on to the passage about the distinguishing of the sexes. It’s one of Paul’s surrealistic masterworks, by which I mean it’s delightfully unintelligible. Paul is a true gadfly and his medium is offensiveness. He would have made a fine punk rapper.

Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. But every woman that prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.

Keep in mind now, as I recite this passage to you (it’s all from the same section of 1st Corinthians: chapter 11, verses 4 thru 15), that we were led here by the present fad of self-quarantining, which promotes the unity of hair length (ultra-long) among one and all:

For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered. For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. (For man came not from woman: but woman was taken out of man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.)

I gotta break in here to underline how absurd this all is: it almost defies criticism — it’s not worth responding to; so I’ll respond to it...

Actually, out of laziness, I’ll limit my reaction to highlighting just one thing that amuses me: Note that Paul illuminates the reason for that tale early in Genesis (2:21) which tells of Adam, the very first human, being put by God into a “deep sleep” so that the first female, Eve, can be made from Adam’s “rib” (as Paul argues: “For man came not from woman, but woman was taken out of man”; then Paul uses this absurdity to justify subjugating the entire sex! “Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man”) — seeing how Paul uses the Genesis farce as a prooftext for his zany bias reminds me that it was dreamt up by priestley poets as a way to circumvent the obvious fact of female seniority: for ALL human life comes out from the womb of woman, but this plain fact had to be reversed in order for guys like Paul to justify their male-chauvinism.

For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.

I’ll just let each of us make of this verse whatever we wish. Paul’s on the heights of his sanity here.

Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered?

(I say YES.) (I have a whole section on “nude mountain prayer” in my scripture Save the Lord.)

Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?

What the . . . How does nature teach this? Take even the first example that comes to mind: Yaks have long hair all over their body, and they’re the finest beings on Earth. (Plus, need I remind Paul that we’re all under quarantine, so none of us has access to our regular team of hairstylists?)

But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.

Yes, “because of the angels”, right?

Alright I’m done with this devotional bible-thumping session. Again, unless otherwise noted, all those verses were from 1st Corinthians 11:4-15. I’m sorry I bothered you with them. I wish I would have gone in a different direction with this morning’s entry. Now I ruined my own day, as well as yours. Now we’re BOTH starting off on the wrong hoof. Thanks for listening, tho.