Our tire-throwing escapade

My viewership should be thankful that my last two entries contained artworks by M.P. Powers (Exhibit B & Exhibit A) because THIS (today’s image; see below) is what you get when I am left to my own devices: a bunch of scribbly text with zero nutritious value. That’s because I haven’t had any time, as of late, to make any images of my own to accompany my daily writings (and it’s unthinkable that I would feed readers only words, for it is not good that text should be alone; one must fashion visions for speech to have and to hold, until clock-time unzips) — I’ve been spending the whole of my energies rounding up these posts of mine into physical volumes, which is what the cryptic formulae of the following notebook centerfold concerns.

Dear diary,

More & more I find myself in the mood for escapism, because more & more the days turn out so completely bad that I shrink from reporting them.

Yesterday was dominated by two unfortunate tragedies: One was a phone-call from my mother, and one was the purchasing of a computer.

Now, as I said, these misfortunes were so evil that I don’t want to relay their details: my only desire is to fly away into imaginary writing; but I’ll at least give you the gist of each terror, so that you’ll understand WHY the rest of the entry will ascend into Mozart-land. (Pardon my misuse of “Mozart” here — I just felt bored with the standard “Cloud-cuckoo” reference.)

First my mom called with bad news about relatives, and when I realized that the point of her call was not (as she claimed) simply to inform me of the goings-on in our family BUT RATHER to strong-arm me into attending a get-together in violation of the quarantine! — So I lost my patience: I ended up abruptly changing the subject and harshly nagging at her for the next few hours. My contention was that she’s a gullible dupe of our economic system, cuz even as it’s ruining our lives and we’re watching the entire country topple as Rome did (for identical reasons), she still holds out hope for the Return of Ronald Reagan (for all of you future-folk who do not know that name RR, just understand that he was a very tedious fellow, and the 40th U.S. Prez). So that was the first of the rotten day’s rotten fruits.

The second foul affair was that my computer malfunctioned. (First my mother, then my motherboard.) This type of thing always happens right when I’m in the middle of a vast endeavor, like this bookmaking venture — as I mentioned in the intro to this post’s non-image, I’m aiming to collect all my blog entries into one multi-volume set, which shall be titled The Public Private Diary of Bryan Ray, whose mass shall rival the encyclopedia — and, since there’s so much text to proofread (the thing will be at least 12 novel-sized books in length, and even bigger than Jupiter), and since I’m not even halfway done yet, moreover the world is crumbling around us as I speak, it is crucial that I lose no time. But just now my computer decides to break down, which sux away an entire afternoon and evening: the noontime I therefore was forced to spend searching for a replacement mechanism, and the evening was wasted wrestling with the device’s ULTRANNOYING (ultra + annoying) lawerly setup screens. — Yes, I sincerely despise computers.

Alright, so now you know the reasons that I need to let myself bask in surds and surds of supersense, to soothe my soul…

Mal Flowers from Here On

So this nude emerges from the darkness and offers me refreshments. I thank her profusely. She holds forth fresh avocados.

“Where’d you get these? They’re VERY good!”

“Come into my garden.”

There she offers me red cherries. They are very good too. And peaches and nectarines and apricots, all succulent. Cherub tomatoes and Athena cantaloupe…

“I feel refreshed enough to go play now.” I announce. “Do you know where I might find a deadly flaming sword?”

“It’s right where you left it,” sez the nude, “at the east of Eden, just above the tomato plants.”

So now I go on a spree. First I encounter the God of this World, and I yank him by the hair — he was poised to rape another angel — I shove him to the ground and hold my glittering sword up to the heavens, then I behead him. Now the angels who I saved all thank me, and they convert to devils; and we buy a used wood-pellet grill from a hermit who lives in the mountainside, and we grill the False God and eat his flesh with silver utensils.

“This meat is VERY good,” announces Gabrielle.

“Thanks,” I say. “I only started learning how to grill recently. I’m more familiar with the ranch fire pit that I have at my home in Eagan, but this grill here was easy to learn. I can’t believe that old hermit wanted six hundred bucks for it, tho. What a ripoff! But I guess, since money grows on trees here, it’s all a wash.” Then, after chewing & thinking for a moment, I add, “What do you gals wanna do with the rest of Eternity?”

“Let’s go to the tire shop,” sez Michaela, “& buy cartloads of tires and hurtle them at various things.”

“Sounds like a plan!”

So we all stand on the surfboards that are welded to the sides of my chariot-throne, and we hover at medium-high speed to Bill’s Tire Shop.

“These are cool. Are they skateboards?” asks Lucia.

“Nah, they’re boogie-boards,” I shout; “but I had them gilded.” (It’s quite windy because we’re cruising forward at a mid-fast pace; that’s why I had to raise my voice so commandingly.)

When we arrive at Bill’s, we all step down from the chariot-throne and lie down on the grass next to the parking lot and gaze up at the sky for a moment.

“It’s really pretty,” whispers Lucia. (She’s right next to my ear, at present — our arms are touching; that’s how close we are to each other — that’s why I was able to hear what she whispered.)

“It sure is,” I reply. “I manufactured all this, by the way,” and I nod upwards at the swirling galaxies of Dark Matter.

“Jeez,” swears Lucia, “you are prolific.”

Now Gabrielle grows jealous, so she rises up from the earth in all her pouty splendor and huffs; then murmurs curtly, “I thot we came here to buy tires. The shop closes at nine.”

So we all get up and enter into Bill’s Tire Shop. This place is paradise to anyone who love tires. They have mini-van tires, and tires with extra tread; and these tires are priced at $104 dollars and going all the way up to $145.99. So we put one of each type of tire in our cart, and then we toss in a car battery as well, plus a few pairs of Men’s Wrangler Jeans.

“All of this stuff is free for you angels,” sez the clerk as we approach to pay for our goods.

Michaela nudges me & sez in giggling-undertone “the guy thinks we’re still angels.”

I wink to Michaela and then address the clerk authoritatively: “Sir, we appreciate the kindness of your charity, but we have so much money that our billfolds are burdensome to bear. Please ring up our purchase, and we will haggle with you, just for the fun of it, and then pay you in full, with our cash. With U.S. dollars — good for all of Eternity.”

“OK, if you say so,” sez the clerk while bowing respectfully.

“Where’s Bill, by the way,” I shout (here I shout just for effect — there’s only a slight breeze inside the tire shop, no great wind like outside on the road — I’m just trying to intimidate the poor clerk); then I add thru clenched teeth: “Bill and I go way back.”

“Bill’s in the break room, smoking a cigarette,” stammers the clerk. Only now do I notice that his name tag reads: Will Cub, Jr.

“Thanks, pal,” I shout. Then we head toward the break room.

“Howdy, Bill!” I say, after we blast the metal door off its hinges. “Long time no see!”

Bill is sitting at a small circular table smoking a cigarette. He looks up astonished and his mouth opens but the cigarette still sticks to his bottom lip.

So after we throw a tire, which smashes his cigarette into on his face, we leave and dash thru the snow to the next corporate headquarters…

This one’s a potato farm in Wisconsin. We see a potato-vine extending up to heaven, so we throw a tire at it. Now the owner of the farm comes out of his field office while attempting to pull up his pants, so we toss a tire at him, and it hits him right in the gut. He falls over onto his side. This is one of those thick-tread tires.

“That’s gotta hurt,” I say.

“Ha ha ha,” sez Gabrielle, fake-laughing at my quip.

Then we go next door, to the manufacturing plant where they package “Kettle Cooked Potato Chips”. And we throw a tire at that.

§

Later, on the other edge of the universe, we walk inside of a Christian Church, and it’s filled with people who are listening to a pastor deliver a sermon. We take a seat in the pew at the very back of the church. We listen to the man’s message for a spell; and I turn my head to see if I can gauge what my fellow posse-members think of all this fancy-talk. They seem to be buying it; so I stand up and whisper:

“Let’s go. We got tires to toss at folks.”

So all my fellow devils obey me: they stand up and quietly follow me out of the church. Once we’re outside, we start hooting and hollering:

“Man, it was stuffy in there,” sez Uriel.

“You can say that again,” I say.

Therefore we spent the rest of our day throwing tires at different things. Sometimes it was people, but honestly most of the time it was just objects or insects. The reason I made it sound like most of our targets were people, in my above account, is just because I knew I didn’t have much space to tell about our tire-throwing escapade, and I assumed that my audience would rather hear about the tires that hit men rather than the ones that hit gas pipelines or little bugs on the side of the road.

Then we were exhausted, so we lied belly-down upon our boogie boards and programmed the chariot-throne to take us to a furniture wholesaler.

When we arrived, we flipped over and looked at the sky only briefly; then we entered thru the giant brass double-doors and took the escalator upstairs; then we stopped in our tracks before the softest king size bed. We just stood there and stared...

“Gals,” the manager of the furniture store now nervously approaches us, “gals, you can’t sleep here.”

But we just ignored that guy and let our vast frames crash down onto the mattress, and we immediately began to slumber. We were exhausted, after a full day of throwing tires around.

The rest of the scene consists of the manager vainly trying to tug our limbs to drag us off the bed. But he makes no progress. And we’re all sweaty, and our sweat smells like cologne, because we’re devils who’ve been laboring all day; and the place is air-conditioned, so the air feels crisp and refreshing. But, besides me and Uriel, all the members of my gang are female devils, who are all unclad; so, as we lie there sleeping the sweet sleep of the Hard-Working Class, the other customers in the furniture store can plainly view all the beauty of our women, sprawled there immodestly, which has an odd effect on the marketplace.

I’ll stop the play here, so that you can draw your own conclusion; but my own personal prediction of what will happen after the ending is that tomorrow’s stocks shall soar.