This website here, where I publish these semi-daily blogs, is being manhandled by its owners behind-the-scenes, therefore I’m opting to archive offline (IRL = In Real Life) the total contents of this diary, so as to save my thots from oblivion — that is, in case the corporate programmers fail to prove to be our salvation.
So I’ve been rounding up all these entries that I have written; and I decided, while I’m at it, that I might as well bind them into a bunch of physical books; thus now I’m working on covermaking. And, since I am “he that is without sin” (The Gospel of John 8:7), I thot I’d kill not just two but THREE birds with one stone by sharing, for today’s obligatory image, a snapshot photo of my oil-painter’s palette (my oil-paint is newspaper clippings):
Dear diary,
Today, when the clock struck 5:51, everything turned stupid. We were living in a beautiful world until just now. Now everything’s ruined. At 5:50 a.m. — one tick before the fatal change — there were palm trees outside, the temperature was always comfortable, neighbors greeted each other by tipping their fedora and then approaching to hug each other warmly (tho they never would engage in this latter action, as each neighbor would separately shy away before touching — yet with a look on their face that meant “I really like you, but, sorry, I can’t go thru with this embrace,” and there was always tomorrow), all the house-pets were happy and pranced around like they owned the place, wild bats would fly at night and come hang underneath the eaves of one’s house voluntarily — it was great! But then at 5:51, the church bells went off and all good things came clashing down into a heap, and everything became totally stupid. Now everything’s stupid. (Did I tell you that already? How did you know? It just happened, not more than seven minutes ago.) So now instead of wearing lipstick, everyone wears a facemask to cover their attractive features, so that we don’t accidentally lock lips when passing strangers in the street; cuz that might lead to prolonged hugging sessions.
But that last-mentioned fact is actually one of the good things about this new Stupid Age. The bad stuff is as follows…
Goddammit, I had a whole list of bad things that I was gonna tell you about, but now I can’t find it. Here I have my purse open, where I swear I put the list right after I wrote it, and it seems to be nowhere amid this rubble. I am frantically rummaging thru the items that clog my purse, looking for the list: I find a canister of lipstick, which is now totally unusable because of the mask-fad; I find a bunch of receipts for car washes, even tho I don’t own an automobile (I like to ride thru the auto-wash on my bicycle, since it also counts as bathing); I find two yo-yos (one’s for backup); and six silver handguns, plus two canteens of lemonade and one glass slipper, half empty with vodka (I’m a pessimist). But no bad-stuff list. — Oh, wait, here it is: I just found it; it was right here in my hand all along…
Alright, so the bad stuff that’s happening, now that it’s officially THE EPOCH OF STUPID is that people are having birthday parties, and men are walking around with their shirt off.
Lawns look great now. Politics is back in vogue. Hair is kept short. Dresses are mid-length. Stocks are up.
The future is bright.
The sky’s partly cloudy. The sun is out. There is no more night — neither weeping nor dying; everyone just parties all the time. Even tho it was 2020 AD only eighteen minutes ago, it’s now permanently 1999 — that’s what all the calendars proclaim.
There’s no more computers: they all went up in smoke, inexplicably. Actually, they’re still here among us, but, at the very same moment, every single one of them, all at once, made a zap noise, like something electric malfunctioning, and a little puff of smoke came out of each soul and ascended into heaven. And people now are continually in the temple, praising and blessing God for this.
We don’t even know what it means, yet. Computers did a lot for us — we shouldn’t be so happy that they’re dead forever now, even if the world is totally stupid, officially, from this point on.
*
I built a lemonade stand, to see if I could earn some profits, and I priced my product at one dollar per cup. And I got one hundred customers in the first four minutes, so I earned $100 USD. There was no cost for the sugar or the lemons or the water (those are the ingredients of my lemonade: I just combine them all in a pitcher of ice and then pour); so the entire amount of each crumpled-up bill was ALL MINE.
What did I buy with theese proceeds? – I bought a sweater. It’s either brown or light tan; I can’t tell for sure (I’m slightly color-blind). All I know is that the thing doesn’t look good on me, so I just hung it up: I displayed it in a prominent place. “Pass it off as modern art,” I said aloud to myself; then I began to construct the frame, which has a glass cover, like those homemade rigs that they use to showcase U.S. flags. But, next time I buy a shirt, I’ll make sure it has a collar.
All the labor unions are having a big party tonight, because it’s 1999. They’re having a pig roast. They used this dog-whistle to call some rich lady out of her mansion, and she agreed to supervise the feast. (I can see her, carefully monitoring the meat at the barbecue.)
And all the seating in airplanes is much, much roomier now. And they hired robots to do the job of the stewardesses, so now you can trip them and they don’t get back up to slap your face. They don’t even get up; they just remain face-down and their arms and legs keep moving like they’re still walking. And then someone usually comes down the aisle after using the lavatory, because nature called, and they’re of course carrying an ax, so now they notice the robot walking in place on the ground, prostrate before them, therefore they use their ax to split the bot right up the center from pelvis to neck and then spit-roast the thing. But it falls off the spit every time they crank it, when they try to rotate it over the charcoals, because they rented one of those stupid manual-crank cooking beds, cuz all the electric ones were sadly deceased, and they shouldn’t have divided the carcass of the droid prior to burning it: you’re supposed to split it afterwards. Moreover it smells like burnt plastic.
Dave and Martha found a firefighter in their fireplace. He fell down there and broke his leg. Who knows how long he was waiting — he sez he was too embarrassed to call for help. He sez he went to the wrong house.
And now there’s no crime, because the crime rate plummeted down past zero. Here’s how they did it:
Back in 2020 there was this national argument in the USA about policing. The cops were using chemical weapons on everybody and following a “Shoot first, ask questions later” policy in general. So the people rose up & changed the channel on their collective television: they asked the police to kindly disrobe. Once the cops were devoid of their outfits, there was nothing that set them apart from the rest of the populace, except for the several firearms strapped to their limbs — cuz they had those Velcro holsters that you can use to carry a concealed weapon on your person; and they had one strapped to each arm and each leg, also a few around their chest and lower torso, and sometimes an extra pistol taped to each shoulder. In short, their argument was: “If you get rid of us, you’ll see a sharp increase in robberies.” But the people called their bluff. And the robbery rate shot up. But every robber was stopped in her tracks and asked, in a very friendly voice by whoever she was robbing:
“Why are you doing this? What’s mine is yours: Do you need food? Take some food — we can even eat together, get to know each other and have children together. Do you need books? Here, have a look at my collection; take any volume you like.”
And so the robbers all got fed and educated, and then they were given houses of their own, and the houses came pre-stocked with food and books. And the cops remained naked yet heavily armed. So all turned out fine; cuz then the year switched from 2020 to 1999, like I told you about, on 5:51 this morning.
So, once the robbers had all their own possessions and lived a comfortable life in the suburbs, they no longer wanted to visit the houses of other people and steal their stuff, because the food at other houses was less good than the food that the robbers always cooked; and the books that other people read were far less interesting than the personal library of surrealistic poetry that each robber acquired.
And the robbers would go out every day and perform free readings of their favorite books at the local park. And that’s how the cops got to know them & befriend them; cuz the cops would attend these readings. And the children that the robbers engendered upon the cops turned out to be a mixture of rule-enforcers & rule-breakers. So that was interesting as well.
Yet probably the most lucrative idea that I had, after my lemonade success, was to convert all the old, abandoned Factories that were littering our landscape into snazzy, fun Amusement Parks. So here we had all these vast buildings sitting around unused and unloved, and there was strange machinery inside them, which nobody knew how to use and no one remembered ever inventing. Some people wanted to tear down these treasures; but I said “No!” and then I slew them. Yet then the times changed, at 5:51, and suddenly a light-bulb flicked off in my mind:
“I now know what I must do,” I said aloud to my lizard cage (Hill-Bill, my little lizard person, had recently escaped) — “I must repurpose those vacant, unused Factories that are currently sitting around collecting dust and losing money. I must open their doors to the public and sell tickets and make a fortune.”
So the public flocked to my grand-opening, which featured more than fifty-five refurbished Factories (by “refurbished” I mean that I opened their doors and put signs outside with pricing info on them), and some kids even enjoyed eating the paint chips that were flaking off the equipment.
During their family’s outing at my Amusement Parks, most of the fathers were able to meet many mothers from the other families, and they were able to conceive children clandestinely, because of all the shadowy corners of my factories (the lighting was on the poor side of adequate); and they would leave the children to haunt the factory’s interior, as neither father nor mother wanted to admit to engaging in adulterous acts on my premises. So these orphans became part of the attraction: customers interpreted them as the vengeful ghosts of bygone child-laborers; so they would shoot at them with crossbows that were provided gratis at the entryway. And this led to the Labor Union Pig-Roast that I told you about above. (NOT the Airline Robot Rotisserie — that was a strictly non-union affair. US airlines, even in the re-unimproved “STUPID 1999”, are forbidden from unionizing.)
And all the necktie murderers no longer killed anyone anymore, because they all got lazy and neglected to do their hand-exercises, so they lost their strength of grip and thus could no longer effectively choke folks to death. Instead, each attempt turned into a farce:
After greeting their victim warmly, the culprit would wrap the signature necktie around their neck, and pull for dear life, but the intended victim would feel no discomfort at all, while the strain of effort would be apparent by the would-be murderer’s facial expression. So the victim would giggle at this, and then the murderer would give up and begin to laugh as well. And they’d become friends. Often they’d choose to share life together. And their children were decent people. One of them even became the president!
Hmm, what else? I believe that’s it.
Oh, yes: people bike only uphill now. Pretty stupid, huh? And church is back in full force. But also the Devil is up to no good again. So it’s mostly a toss-up.
I actually don’t even get why we label this era stupid — it seems relatively smart, to me. I mean, the people are happy, the children have jobs, and the fascists and nazis are all tame and cuddly now: they’re not even dangerous — they just talk like regular corporate TV news-readers; plus they made all sorts of amendments to their constitution, so it no longer advocates for horrors & death-camps, etc. — they changed all the offensive phrases to other terminology.
In order to own a living animal or human being now, you must fill out a huge stack of paperwork. So that’s inconvenient, and it really cuts down on the amount of people who want to get rich. Only those who can afford a whole team of good lawyers are able to do wrong or commit evil anymore; and that’s a positive thing. If you own that much clout, you really should be able to do what you like. You’re not a threat to the people who matter — and that’s your guardians and schoolteachers: People who were with you when you were conceived & brought to term during the course of that hot-air balloon trip.
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