Crossing Ferry

Here is a drawing by M.P. Powers — it’s after the selfie that I tried to take in my 17-August-2020 entry. I like the original photo but I very much LOVE this rendition of it, for a thousand reasons, all of which are apparent, if you have eyes to see:

Dear diary,

I’ve been re-reading David Ferry’s version of Gilgamesh to my household slaves daily, and I love it so much that I’m sure my favorite aspects of it will leak into this entry, just as memories of the 1985 film Teen Wolf leaked into my semi-automatic writing from yesterday. I only mention this so that you don’t conclude that I’m trying to get away with literary robbery, in either case — on the contrary, I intend my thefts as homages. No cat burglar returns to the scene of the crime, approaches the detectives who are there investigating, and introduces herself as the culprit, then offers the detectives a map showing the locations in her museum where she has stashed all the stolen goods, “Also, here is an essay elucidating why I felt that these particular items were worth heisting.”

So the first thing I wanna say today is that I enjoy vacationing in foreign towns, because I am twice the size of average mortals — tho it’s neither muscle nor fat: it’s entirely largesse. I am physically enormous and unimaginably strong. I also look ravishing.

Think about it: If you were as big as me, wouldn’t you enjoy visiting new towns? — walking thru the main square while the people stare in awe at your physical presence... “I could swear he was glowing,” one bystander will later say to her friend, who sadly stayed home to dust her cupboards that afternoon and thus completely missed my cameo.

I like to walk confidently right up to the first townsperson I see, and speak the cliché line: “Take me to your leader.” My voice is deep, loud, and rich — I command authority. The poor townsperson begins to tremble and then stammers a response while waving me on toward the City Capitol or Temple or wherever that nation’s Christ or Zar lives. The leader is usually about as big as I am, so we appear as tho we might be brothers — maybe even twins.

I’m kindhearted, so I like to break the ice with a greeting: I’d rather be friends than foes. Usually this works, and the Zar and I can spend the day together, visiting all of his domain’s most interesting haunts. I’ve found that usually leaders are eager to show off their nation’s finest attractions. And my favorite is always the whores. I just love fucking whores. They do what they do very well, and it makes me feel good.

Now once I met this leader who called himself Jesus the Christ — but he wasn’t really Jesus, I’m sure of this: I know Jesus, and this wasn’t him: this was an imposter; but I humored him anyway, cuz, like I said above, I’d rather be friends than foes. But this guy just wouldn’t accept my warmhearted approach. He took one look at my vast, robust body and muttered that old threat: “This universe isn’t big enough for the both of us.”

So we had to fight. I’m alright with that — it’s not that I dislike fighting; I’d just rather avoid it: but when it comes to that, I’m really an excellent fighter. I’m extremely terrifying: I can rage every bit as fiercely as a lioness who has been deprived of her whelps. When I hit you square in the face with my firm, large fist, you’re as good as dead. I can pick people up by their hair with just one single arm and slam them down onto the pavement. I sometimes break men over my knee, like you’d do to a stick. And when children attack me, I crush them in my bare hand like a pretzel.

So this Jesus (so-called) was unwise to engage me in battle. For twelve days straight, we shook the planet, and knocked its satellites all out of orbit, and even the stars in the sky were quaking, because of our fight. I kept bashing him, and he kept pummelling me: and we were flipping each other over, and tumbling and kicking, and biting each other’s flesh. Everything in the whole world involuntarily vibrated after every impact of our blows.

At one point during our clash, I looked over at the forest, and all the birds and the deer were just staring at me and quivering in fear — they were like: “What’s going on?—is this the end? Are we likely to survive this?” Then I smiled and shouted to them in my deep, loud voice: “Be at peace in your hearts, little ones; this will all be over soon.” And, as I turned back toward Jesus, I stuck out my vast arm and it swung it hard, and my huge fist landed right at the dead-center of his head. The collision made a sound like thunder, and I thought that his entire skull would smash like a mirror.

“OK, I give up,” the fellow cried. “You are definitely my equal. Let us make a truce.”

So we hugged and wept, and then we went back to his mansion, where his maidservants prepared us a meal of rice that was seasoned with some sort of broth that tasted delicious. It was a pleasant evening, from then on, because the sky turned jet black, and the whole night was silent. (Earlier, I had helped him solve all the crime that was starting to get out-of-control in his neighborhood: so now the whole community was happy.) We sat smoking cigarillos in the part of his estate that was like an exterior atrium built directly into the jungle. The scenery was gorgeous.

Then, on the morrow, we went for a cruise in his pontoon boat that has six(!) bedrooms inside. And of course after a day of mild carousing out on the ocean, this Zar admitted to me that his name is not really Jesus but Saul MacTarsus. He prefers the nickname Paul, however, since, in his country, the word Saul has an undesirable connotation, which recollects a certain carnal act that he is “not the biggest fan of” (as he put it). So I edited his contact info in my small black device.

My favorite places to visit, however, are those that lie on the outskirts of this dimension.

Also I like to step into a metropolis and offer its leader the gift of clear rum, and the Zar just sits there and stares in perplexity: he’s never seen any crystal glowing substance before, and the aroma has beguiled him — it’s so strong, one can even smell it thru the glass of its container — but he does not know what to do with it. He’s thinking “Do I rub it on my chest? Do I sprinkle it on my head like an anointing or a kingly anabaptism? Surely it’s far too potent to consume orally.”

Then I flip off the top, pour a bowl and say: “Drink!”

I love the look that they give me when I do this routine.

“Cheers!” I say, holding high my brimming bowlful: “To your health, Zar Gabriel!”

“It’s Gabrielle,” mutters Gabriel.

My point is that I fancy turning leaders on to things that are truly healthy for them but that, at present, they are absurdly afraid of.

But, man! let me tell you: Back in the days of mechanical warfare, THAT was rough. I got hit in the head with a bomb, one time, and it knocked me out. I had to sit under a tree for a while, to collect my thots. The bomb was shaped like an apple; so, since “A” is for apple, I nicknamed this short-fate “the A-bomb”. That really threw my world for a loop, tho. It took me a sec to recover from that.

But I did enjoy limping around town momentarily wearing those bandages on my head — it was like a royal turban: I think it made me even sexier. Occasionally priests would approach with wide eyes, and say: “Who are you? You look just like...” And I would wink to any prophetesses that accompanied the priests and answer: “I’m the one who lives in that cave, up on the mountaintop yonder. Just me and my goat.” And the prophetesses would usually come and meet me there afterwards.

Yet I like to arrange things so that everyone is content — I don’t like a lot of feuding: it’s too noisy. I’ve found that you can lure populations to sublimate their nastiness into games, or contests. Folks love to be judged.

And one question arises frequently during my lectures, so I might as well answer it here, to get it down for the record. (I recently began a lecture circuit, titled jokingly “How to be a big, strong man” — so far it’s proved massively successful; I’ve travelled around most of the known universe and spoken before every nation but God’s.) After my speech concludes and we enter the Q&A, inevitably one of the first few inquiries will be some variation of “But what specifically makes a good neighbor?” And, at first, I usually remark, just to get my heckler thinking: “What do YOU presume makes a good neighbor?”

Now, as replies to this provocation, I’ve heard everything from “Lend them sugar when they ask for it,” to “Pour oil on their wounds when you find them beaten up at the side of the road.” So it usually works for me to shout:

“NO! you fool! only blueblooded creatures would say such a thing. Here’s the hotblooded truth:

“Neighbors don’t need sugar; they don’t need their wounds tended to. All neighbors mean when they ask to borrow sugar is to join you in the bedroom for a eon or two of bliss. The sugar is a MacGuffin; or, as I’ve heard it called in Heaven: a MacTarsus — that is: an object or device in a film that serves merely as a plot-trigger. (And, as they say: All plots lead to love.)

“The wounded neighbor is trying to get your attention: she’s your secret admirer. What neighbors REALLY need is neither sugar nor oil but—” [Here I perform a gesture that commonly signifies an idea understood by all...]

“Neighbors want security, too,” I continue; “they wanna know that their kids can grow up in a safe community, and that they’ll be able to meet their needs without having to work.

“Real neighbors educate their neighbors, by reading Dante’s Comedy to them aloud. If you don’t understand it on the first pass, start over again. It’ll eventually writhe before you.

“Allow me to be your own Virgil for a spell (your own imaginary friend who will guide you thru fearful illusions)...

“Here, follow me up to the mountaintop. See that cave? See that goat right there, in back? That’s Blake: my best friend. I love that goat. But not with the love that I give to whores and to wives of neighbors. I mean the highest love: friendship. I’m a worshiper of genius.

“So when I move into a foreign or unknown hotspot for a generation or two, and I want to cast a spell upon the neighbors so that they all desire my presence, I first beget strong children upon their wives. Then I till their land for them. I raise up crops and feed their family. When their kids are grown up, I beget children upon them in turn. This process continues, because neighbors will never be born who do not want FOOD.

“So if you know how to plow a darn field, then you’re already halfway to victory. But there’s field-plowing and field-plowing, if you know what I mean:

“What I mean is that you can literally till the soil, like I just did for my main neighborhood in Manhattan, New York, and also for the neighborhood of my winter home in Burlington, Vermont; thus feeding millions of starving children with the crops that sprang up in the wake of my months of hard labor — but ‘plowing the field’ is also an euphemism for the act of fornication. I don’t mean to harp too strongly on this point, but it’s equally important to provide food for entire communities as it is to father entire communities. For you don’t wanna get stuck with a silo full of surplus grain and no mouths to feed. That’s hell, in my opinion. Nothing is worse than being the strongest human in spacetime yet having no one on earth to rescue.”