I wanna apologize: below is a really awful Obligatory Image. This is the third totally phoned-in page in my book of 283 Drawing Prompts. ("Phone in" is an idiom that means "barely to fulfill a responsibility with a minimum level of effort rather than the appropriate level.") As I explained while introducing the prior page a few days ago, my art-making motivation has gone down the tubes. But I like good art as well as bad art: they're both interesting to me; so I keep stuff like the work below and allow it to see the light of day, in hopes that it might offend the virtuous. The prompt for this present piece was "Monkeys".
Dear diary,
Last night I heard eerie noises coming from outside our cracked bedroom window, and I got up to peek thru the blinds in expectation of seeing a scary sight, but I never could get a glimpse of anything but our still, dark yard. Yet these eerie noises continued while I was on the lookout, so I know that they were real — I didn’t just imagine them. And these disturbances happened two distinct times, and each instance’s racket was unique.
Judging by the sound, here is what I expected to see when I looked out the window the first time:
An injured cat battling a possum & two star-nosed moles.
And the 2nd strange noise, which happened a few hours later, made me expect to see:
A fawn hoofing a baby bear repeatedly on the head.
The reason my expectations were so specific is that the noises that I heard in the night were so distinct. There is no way that the first noise was not an injured cat whose body was bleeding from a number of lacerations running from its throat to its belly, & wishing to retreat into the bushes to tend to its wounds, but being required to continue defending itself because of the onslaught of this young opossum hellbent on mayhem, flanked by two star-nosed moles serving as accomplices in wickedness. And there’s no way that the second eerie noise was not caused by a fawn bonking an infant bear on his snout and between his ears, over and over, after the bear sauntered clumsily out of the brush unawares and bumped into the deer while she was grazing chokecherries.
The reason that I could not actually behold these events with my eyes or even photograph them to prove that they occurred is due to the fact that they were transpiring beyond my purview, which was my bedroom’s window-frame.
*
I guess I could end this entry right there, because I have nothing else to report. But then I’d feel that I hadn’t yet bored you to death, gentle reader; so I’ll keep on writing. My goal is to compile a diary that is so dull that it actually causes its reader to expire from lack of interest. And if you’re wondering how I’m going to coax my readership to continue reading something that they obviously do not care for, the answer is that I’ll provide them irresistible incentives:
My book will come pre-packaged with a compact version of one of those machines that measures brain activity, and I’ll offer a reward to anyone who affixes the device’s suction pads to their forehead and actually skims a certain amount of my literary masterpiece. If they follow the instructions of proper mind-monitoring, which are included in the machine’s operation manual, their perusal of my entries will cause the printout sheet from the brain-o-meter to show a series of gray flatlines (instead of a normal mental readout, which would display several colorful swoopy lines); and each reader who goes thru with this ordeal can mail me a copy of their results showing their progress in suffering thru my work, and I will honor the terms of our contract and give them a prize, which will lure them to continue suffering further; & this will go on till the reader gives up the ghost. And the prize shall be awarded either for enduring 100 pages or 4 full hours of continuous reading, whichever comes first: and, for this, I shall mail them one hot meal. Keep in mind that this all takes place in the near future, when hot meals are in far higher demand than precious metals.
*
And if it turns out that I’m wrong about my system being able to attract an audience, and nobody bothers to purchase or page thru my diaries, then I will simply get on my horse and gallop all around the country with my whip in my hand, and I will whip all my servants and citizens as I speed past. And this will cause them to retreat out further into the distance, away from my headquarters, to avoid further trouble. They will reason that by removing afar off, they might escape the sting of my punishment when I come back around again (for I always ride in circles); but they’ll be mistaken, as I am riding in an ever-widening spiral, thus I whip them again on the upcoming lap, and they must retreat even further out away.
This will be of great benefit to me, when I return to my desk at the center of my establishment, which I christened THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE; for all my servants and citizenry will now be so far away that they are totally out-of-sight, & thus out-of-mind. Then I’ll begin to pay them less & treat them worse. Cuz whatever is near to me tugs at my heartstrings when I behold it, and I end up pitying it; whereas whatever is faraway, in the outer darkness, can undergo hardship without even dinging my conscience. Heck, I might go so far as to reinstate full-on slavery and take advantage of it, as long as it only occurs in distant lands that I never visit, or if the slaves are kept imprisoned where I can’t see them.
*
What does all this have to do with my bedroom window, and with the noises that interrupted my slumber? Might there be some part of me that had a role in creating the present world and thus feels responsible for the maulings & predation that occur in the nighttime forest; and should I therefore be thankful that I couldn’t get a glimpse of the dying cat while our minions were abusing it, or the newborn bear who faced (literally) the wrath of the fawn? (And just wait until we meet the wrath of the LAMB.)
No, what all this has to do with my midnight paranoia, only my Official Interpreter of Things Unseen knows the answer. And this bureaucrat’s name is Zaphnath-Paaneah (Genesis 41:45). He holds the answer-key to all my moral hangups. So let me now ask him:
Q.) What does all the above truly mean?
A.) THE WORDS OF ZAPHNATH-PAANEAH:
Dear Bryan, your fearful nighttime adventure in window-shopping consists of two separate accounts; however, believe me, these accounts have one single meaning: God is clearly trying to show you what is about to happen.
The seven injured cats indicate that you will be able successfully to steal plenty of good ears of corn from the marketplace soon, and these corn ears represent a number of eons of time. And the seven thin and ill favoured mole-rats that attacked the feline and then blasted off in a space pod with an opossum into the east wind doubtlessly indicate that your…
Actually, that last part is a mystery even to me.
And the fact that you were standing by a river when you imagined yourself in your bedroom, and that the river had a solid crack down its center, which let in the sound of rushing waters, as the voice of the Almighty, is a significant plot development.
Now, the second attack that you suffered, where you came up out of the bulrushes of the reedy sea and met seven well favoured lambs and their fatfleshed mother, alias THE FAWN, and they served you a critical beatdown in the meadow, and then the seven other cats came up after you out of the weeds of the split-pea sea (for they were aqua-cats), walking as bipeds on their hindpaws, and choked you with their own exposed intestines, which were protruding from their chest-wounds, so the spaghetti-like strings of catgut became your piano-wire necktie (way too tight), and they stood on your corpse till you fell back asleep; then videotaped themselves dragging you like Monseigneur Paris Commune behind their Kitty-Limo, in the fiery “chariot race” scene from near the end of your ordeal; and all this they projected on a silver screen before the stadium of kine at the brink of the all-swallowing ocean, before they dumped you in the river — all this means that eventually the Pharaoh of the Americas shall resurrect to find himself transformed into the star-nosed mole of Bethlehem, and he and his doppelganger shall summon the wrong Messiah up out of the dirt of the Shulamite’s garden in Paradise, and, while they are hanging themselves, someone shall mistake them for piñatas, and this passerby shall fall so deeply in love with their images that it will seem unenjoyable to baton them any further, thus he shall preserve them in a protective coating and set them on pedestals, and display them in the town’s square, whose marvels no one will ever be able to yoink. So the candy treats that belong to the king and his shadow shall remain within their viscera, unlike the flesh and blood of the cats, which was shared with the working-class. And this man who does these things shall be named Gregor Samsa; but while he is bungling about the wrong cosmos like a demiurge, his sub-ego, K., an anti-platonic surveyor of Static Flux, shall stumble upon the sleeping corpse of Ameri-Pharaoh (the Grand Unified Prez of the Wild-Wild West), & climb inside of him like a sarcophagus, and sleep fitfully until the corn-ear of time is ripe for its ultimate shucking. Whereupon she shall awake to find herself in a cave, lying on her hard, armor-plated back. And she shall exclaim:
“What has happened to me?” while thinking: That was no dream!
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