Dear diary,
Every morning, when awaking in suburbia beside my one chained friend, I reflect to myself that she is Beelzebub, and we are reliving the opening of Paradise Lost, here in our bedroom with walls of plain sheetrock instead of a flood of tempestuous fire. For this world is a Hell that has been exquisitely tailored.
As I write this, it is two days before Christmas. Until last night, I didn’t know if my family was planning anything for the holiday or finally willing to admit that they’d all rather skip it; but then my mother called and asked if we could come over on Wednesday afternoon. My brother and his wife and their two kids will be there, but my sister will not: she and her benefactor are vacationing in Jamaica. (On a scale where 1 means “Normal conditions” and 4 means “Do not travel,” the most recent advisory from the U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs rates Jamaica as Level 3: “Reconsider travel to Jamaica due to crime,” the official account says. “The homicide rate reported by the Government of Jamaica is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. Armed robberies and sexual assaults are common.”)
So Beelzebub and I will go to mom’s place and see my brother’s family on Christmas. He has two kids: a boy and a girl. The lad is six years old, and the lass is three. What does the world hold in store for them? What will they do with their energies?
Mammon: the word comes from the Aramaic māmōn, which means “riches.” Matthew’s Jesus says [6:24]:
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
What shall a child do then, who is born in a land where everything has been commodified? Do you serve God and die? Or do you strive for wealth, live long and prosper, but lose your soul in the process?
What about being in the world but not of the world? Is that like attending an orgy but not participating?
During these holidays, it’s hard not to want to examine the terms of service. Should I ask “What is Christmas, exactly?” or just let it be? – I’ll let it be. Who cares. Nobody knows the answer, anyway. It’s chaos.
So we gotta buy some offerings for the kids now. Wrap up some gifts. What do six-year-olds and three-year-olds want from life? Wine and women? Then I’ll buy them wine and women. I’ll buy them a jet airplane, too, so that they can . . .
No, scratch the airplane. That’s too expensive. I also hate when people contribute to children’s college funds. Fuck college. There’s no way that you can survive in this world, and there’s no right path.
No right path – that reminds me: I need to get something off my chest . . .
The one they call Buddha was wrong about everything; I’m sick of hearing about him. Christ was wrong, too, but all of us already knew that – that’s old news. Buddha is popular at present, so he needs to be exposed for the imposter that he is. I only like the story about how he first joined some ascetic monks and experimented with abstaining from everything delightful, and then he quit that nonsense and embraced a life of decadence. That’s as much of the story as I like. I don’t like the plot turn where he chooses the Middle Way. I don’t agree with either of the first two ways – at least, not how Buddha did them – but the Middle Way is even worse. His groupies try to sell it as the solution, but it’s actually a step backward. The pursuit of happiness is the better idea; but, like I said, Buddha bungled it. You can’t just follow your own selfish heart so fixedly. Base nature cries out for humane revision – he was too animalistic. Again, his lackeys will argue “But what you’re advocating is just what the Buddha himself proposed!” No it wasn’t – you don’t know what you’re talking about, and neither did he. If you all could use your faculty of imagination . . .
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” (Blake)
But each mind creates a different picture of Buddha, and some are better than others. So, could it be that the above criticism applies to my own misunderstanding? – No, I grasp firmly the truth about this, and let me say also . . .
The idea of God having a plan for each person – this, I reject. I think that aimless chaos is a reality; I don’t know how much of the world is comprised by it, but not everything is planned. And if you define God as omniscient and omnipotent, then God is absolutely alien (compared to human nature) since nothing remotely human could allow even a fraction of human history to transpire. I can’t believe that God has been poised there for aye, watching the whole show explode. The whole trainwreck. No, we must be the building blocks of God. (Atoms? Torn fragments?) God is either resurrecting adagio through all of us collectively, or God has never yet existed. I dismiss the statement “God is dead” only because the fact of our proclaiming it proves that God is capable of lying, which is a facet of playacting, which is the highest form of life.
But do we yearn for God because, on some level, we remember having been (having participated in) God; or is our yearning a reaction to a genuinely new desire? This might be a chicken-or-egg situation; it might also be the way that things get created: How does something go from “never before thought of” to “here all along”?
But now that I’ve had a few moments to smoke my pipe, I retract what I said about Buddha above – I’m sorry: I was just annoyed at having to hear so much praise of him from mallrats, as of late. So, here’s my true judgment: Buddha is fine. Take the Middle Path, for all I care.
I really meant to write about Christmas, and to make remarks on my family. Since my brother has kids now, I think about the plight of children even more than I used to. When I myself was a youngster, I hated school – there’s nothing I hated more, in fact; but now that I’m an adult, I feel trepidation on behalf of all youth, because the education system here in the U.S. is nonexistent or worse. . . . And I think of all the time I’ve had to spend unlearning. What a joke it all is, this way of life. I wish I could laugh.
However, talking about kids is boring. The kids don’t care, anyway – I myself never cared what grown-ups were fretting about, when I was a child, so . . .
But I had vapid examples. I shouldn’t write off all guardians just because my own were inept.
Jobs. These children better find out what type of work they can do, because . . .
This we commanded you: that if any would not work, neither should he eat. For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread. (—Saul’s 2nd letter to the Thessalonians 3:10-12)
Stupid kids, shut up and work. You little busybodies.
I don’t remember laboring very hard to manufacture my human eyeballs, my nose, my tongue, my ears, my sensitive skin. I did not need to read an instruction booklet to wire up my nervous system. My bones were not made in east Asia and assembled in America. I simply inherited all these aspects of my cadaver.
And my lungs never need me to remind them to keep on breathing, or my heart to pump rum; these things happen automatically. Mine organs just behave how they prefer; they follow their bliss; and I’m the result. A free spirit, a loose cannon. Utterly purposeless. No God to stop me. That’s why it’s important that I remain employed doing something “useful.”
I was put in this garden to dress it and to keep it. That’s my purpose in life. Eyes shut. See no evil. Wisdom, aroint thee!
At the beginning of the summer (I’m switching the topic now) my brother and his wife purchased a new house. It’s a spacious place: very imposing. I was surprised when I heard this news, because I thought that the place where they’d been residing till now was the best of all possible homes: “But isn’t your other house perfect?” I asked them: “Aren’t you living the dream? Why buy a new place?” And my brother and his wife answered and said: “Because this new house has a swimming pool. The kids wanted a pool.”
As I said, this happened at the beginning of the summer, in the year of our Lord 2024. To give you some idea of what that might mean to someone who is no longer quite with us, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified around the year 33; and he was born about 4 to 6 years B.C. (Before Christ). Incidentally, Christ was born in Year Zero, on the dot. Jesus was human; Christ was Saul’s idea.
Let me start over – I got sidetracked.
As I said, my brother’s family purchased a new house with a great big swimming pool, at the beginning of last summer. Now, about a week after this news was announced, my mother informed me that she had begun to go house-shopping in the bad part of Burnsville. When I heard this, my first thought was: Mom has flipped her lid – that is, she has gone mad – for, being aware that my brother’s family found a new house, she is now playing “monkey see, monkey do.” Therefore, I said to my mom:
“Dear mother, you own a nice house with multiple bedrooms in the suburbs. Why do you want to look at slab houses near the mall?”
And she answered, “Because I do not like the clutter that is in my current house’s basement and garage.”
So I answered and said, “Dear mom, if my sweetheart and I can manage to declutter your residence, will you give your current house a second chance?”
And she answered: “I will.”
So my sweetheart and I spent every weekend of our entire 2024 summer helping my mother clean out her basement and garage. We hauled away old, broken dressers; we hauled away large contraptions of rusted metal; we hauled away vast heavy chests and storage cabinets and shelving units and enormous wooden items that have no name and which take up copious space and do not smell pleasant. And all the stuff that was jammed inside or stacked upon all these containers and shelves and storage units, we either helped to separate out and organize, or to recycle or discard.
It took us several weeks to finish the basement, and then we moved on to the garage, which took several weeks more. It was grueling work; I almost lost the will to continue.
When we reached the end of our task, I said to my mother, “Well, unless you are willing to jettison more of your possessions, this is the cleanest we can make this place: It looks like we’re done. Can you think of anything else that you would like changed? Otherwise, we’ll bid you farewell and return to our own home.”
And my mother drew near, and said, “There is one more problem that I should like you to solve.”
And I answered and said, “What is it?”
And my mother said, “The dome light in the entryway no longer functions. It is not that the bulbs are burnt out; for I have replaced them all with fresh new ones, yet the fixture still does not respond to the power switch. I think that it needs to be replaced.”
So, the next week, we did tests on that lamp, and we found that my mother was right about it needing replacement. We therefore bought a new fixture and installed it. Then I said, “Dear mother, the dome light in the entryway is now operational. Is there anything else that you need help with? Otherwise, we will bid you farewell and return to our home.”
And my mother said, “There is yet one more problem that I should like you to solve.”
And I said, “What is it?”
And my mother said, “All the exterior lamps of this house are unsightly and old. And one of them no longer ignites. And two need to be remounted on customized base plates.”
I said, “If you will go and select and purchase new lights, we will install them. But only if they are frosted glass, not clear; because I know that you will use cheap ugly bulbs in them, and if the glass is clear, then they will look quite awful.”
So my mother went to the hardware store and purchased a set of new exterior lamps.
Then, the next week, we arrived at her house and said, “Here we are, ready to install the lights. Did you purchase a type with frosted glass, like I advised?”
And my mother led us over to the stack of boxed lamps that she had purchased, and she said: “Here they are. No: the glass is clear, not frosted. These were on sale, that is why I bought them.”
And, looking at the picture on one of the boxes, I said, “I told you that I would not install these types of lamps.” Then I shook my head and exhaled and shrugged and added: “But I will ignore my qualm and perform the work anyway, on one condition.”
My mother answered, “What is your condition?”
And I said, “You must continue living in this house – you must not sell it. That is my condition. For it is only worth installing these lamps if you yourself shall be using them; I do not want to labor for the sake of some strange new homeowners.”
And my mother nodded and said, “I am staying here. I have no plans to sell.”
So I spent the next weeks devising and building new mounting plates, and rewiring some of the fixtures, and installing all the new lamps. Then I said:
“This job is now finished. Is there anything else that you need us to do for you? Otherwise, we will bid you farewell and return to our home.”
And my mother said, “There is one more problem that I would like you to solve: The roof on the tool shed seems to have a damaged shingle, because it leaks when it rains. Will you perform this repair?”
And I answered and said, “I know nothing of shingles and roofs – I have never done this type of work – but I am willing to look at the situation, and I will try my best to fix it.”
So, the next week, when I climbed up on a ladder and inspected the shed’s roof, I saw that there was not one but several shingles in various states of decay, and a few were completely missing. There were also holes from woodpeckers in the shed’s side walls; and its entry doors had been miscut and misaligned. Plus there were nests of mice in all four corners of the interior.
Therefore, we spent the next few weeks working on righting these wrongs.
Yet, when the day was approaching when we should finally be finished with all these shed reparations, near the end of the week, I received a text message from my mother – it said:
Hey Bryan, I have news that is a bit crazy. I put the cart before the horse & went to look at a townhouse and then put in a bid on it. . . . I could cry when I think of all that you have done here & now I may sell. But I just wanted to let you know, and I’ll keep you posted.
When we met up with her that weekend, her bid had already been accepted.
So, that’s how our efforts to convince my mother to keep the family’s handsome home in the suburbs ended up helping her abandon that house for a one-bedroom slab near the mall.
And there were other diverting episodes that occurred in the aftermath of the bombshell announcement above; for we met with my mother many more times after that, to help her with various aspects of readying her house for the market, sorting and packing up all her belongings, and eventually physically moving her stuff into her new place. But I’ll save those reports for later.
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