THE UNWITTING MEMOIRIST
November 21, 2021
Pocket Sax
Much to my surprise, I bought a pocket saxophone in 2012. I don’t remember this. I don’t remember getting it or receiving it but it’s right there in my Amazon orders. I bought a Didgeridoo in 2011—I remember why I bought that—for my ex-boyfriend, but it’s all so ridiculous because I’ve never been musically inclined. As if, let me now buy the most far-fetched musical instruments in their greatest and least sized proportions.
I’ve never known anything about saxophones but Kenny G. I remember a picture of him riding a bike with his arms crossed over his chest with the caption: My hands are for one thing only: playing sax. I took my ex-boyfriend to a jazz fest one year and he described the saxophone as ‘sexy’, not the sexy woman playing it, but the instrument. He was German so he also once described shoes that I liked as being very ‘robust’. But I can see that. When I think about it, the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the saxophone is ‘serenade’. The sax is also quite phallic. It climaxes in a crescendo of honks and squeals. I always had daddy issues back then so maybe that’s why I bought it.
Fela Kuti could play the hell out of a saxophone like on “Don’t Make Garan Garan”. There’s a video of him floating around out there sitting in a chair with nothing but his underwear on surrounded by like 15 of his “wives” and, of course, his saxophone. It’s sitting just left of his knee, and he’s wearing the saxophone strap around his neck. The wives all look very stoic while seemingly passing around a joint of some kind, while Fela gives an interview about art and music.
Maybe I bought a pocket sax in 2012 because of all this: some phallic tempting bizzarro world where people reject handlebars and wear no clothes. Is this the serenading sexiness of the sax? Anyway, none of this makes sense. Or why I bought a pocket sax in 2012, but it’s right there in my Amazon orders.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
P.S. For more stories from The Unwitting Memoirist, click here.
For the Unwitting Memoirist Blog Archive 2019-2021, click here.
November 12, 2021
Jamaican Ethiopian Rastafar-i: Black Supremacy, White Supremacy, Yakub, Esau, Rebekah & Isaac: The Devil is in the Details. Raasclat.
Leonard Percival Howell, also known as “The Gong”, was a black Jamaican-born man who was one of the first preachers of the Rastafarian movement. He wore no dreadlocks and promoted black worship of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, or Ras Tafari Makonnen, who he believed to be the Messiah. He is known by many as “The First Rasta” and is credited for the term ‘Black Supremacy’.
‘Black Supremacy’ is defined as a belief in the superiority of blacks over other races, and is espoused by organizations such as the Nation of Islam that evidence this belief with the story of Yakub, a sort of mad black scientist who created white people in a lab—as a sort of science experiment gone horribly wrong. The Nation believes Yakub to be the biblical Jacob.
The story of Isaac, Rebekah, Esau and Jacob is most interesting because of its confusion of details. The birthright began with Esau because he was first born. Yet he traded it for a bowl of stew that his twin brother Jacob made and offered for the birthright.
God had prophesied this to Rebekah before Esau and Jacob were born, that a nation from Abraham would be fulfilled through Jacob and not Esau. When Rebekah questioned God about the discomfort of her pregnancy, God told her that inside of her were two nations. Esau would become the leader of an enemy nation to his brother Jacob, who would become ‘Israel’, meaning “he struggles with God”.
For when Esau was born, his twin brother also grabbed his heel and became Jacob, literally meaning “he grasps the heel”, figuratively meaning, “he deceives”. He tricked his brother out of his blessing again when he pretended to be Esau in front of his father who could not see.
If we work backwards back to Leonard Percival Howell, then we get to his 1935 book The Promised Key, which is supposedly a rip-off of the angry, rambling, surrealistic polemic, The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy written in the 1920s by preacher Fitz Balintine Pettersburg. We could probably keep going back and back and back until we get to “scientific racism” and ‘The Curse of Ham’ and ‘White Supremacy’ (which Howell believed should be replaced by ‘Black Supremacy’), but I think this is quite the mess already. I feel like Dr. Yakub has grafted my arms onto my head and my legs into my arm sockets like a mangled Barbie, which the NOI would probably call the white Jew devil 12-tribe abomination that Jacob made.
I used to think I could figure things out, and I could, before I had to figure again. Now I just ask, how can you ever give away something that will always belong to you? Then I close the books, stop thinking and surrender myself back to the only truth that is God, for the origin point of hate and confusion and destruction is always the knowledge of man possessed by Satan, and its worship.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
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P.S. This post comes courtesy of ‘Bible Study’ here.
November 4, 2021
The Re-Education of War
I.
One of my favorite books in my late 20s was Mind is a Myth, by my favorite anti self-help guru U.G. Krishnamurti. The “other” Krishnamurti, may he rot in hell. People from all over would come to visit him in India, Switzerland just sitting there on some pillows. And he’d say what the hell do you want from me? Leave me alone. And still they would come. I’ve always been, even before God, an Occam’s razor kind of person. A Tetris busting things down to their essential components kind of person.
II.
I’ve always been fascinated by this idea of “re-education”. Whereby a defector of North Korea will cross into the West, into the United States and immediately commence being re-educated. They will have spent years obsessing over adoration of a leader, of a philosophy of communism. Then they will be shown videos and materials telling them that all of this is wrong. This is a wrong way to think. Imagine that. René Descartes is famous for the line, I think, therefore I am. When it is really, I think, therefore I am not.
III.
One of my favorite short stories is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, who himself was a Union soldier during the Civil War. It’s about a hangin’. A well-to-do planter and slave owner is visited by what appears to be a Confederate soldier, adorned in a gray uniform. The soldier upon his horse asks for water, and the planter’s wife goes to fetch it. The planter himself has always entertained fantasies of the adulation of the glory of war and being a soldier himself. The soldier tells him that the Yankees have issued an order that any caught fooling with their stockade built about 30 miles up at Owl Creek bridge will be summarily hanged. We are not told that the planter fools with the stockade; but we meet him at the beginning of the story in a noose. The Confederate soldier, it turns out, was really a Union soldier, a Federal Scout of the North appareled in the enemy’s uniform.
IV.
A well-known American axiom is: ‘The first casualty of war is the truth’. And do you know why? Because war is confusion. The nonsense gobbledygook overemotional hysterical and egotistical mind of Satan. Where enemies mean friends, war means peace; and all is lost because the mind is lost.
V.
A well-known word in war is ‘propaganda’. But it will mean nothing to you if you can’t identify that that’s what you’re seeing.
VI.
I watched a pretty cool interview awhile back with Jesse Lee Peterson and Sargon of Akkad. Sargon is an atheist but not exactly anti Theist, and he made a great point. He said, if you could describe God or religion like that, in a secular way that I can understand then OK. And that is amazing!
VII.
God is many things, but we start with the foundational principle that the world is upside down presented right side up, and God is right side up presented as upside down. That God is really a secular concept. God is many things, but we start with the secular principle that God is objective reality. God exists only above and outside of the human mind and understanding, and so only in surrender of it.* One of the first non-believers in God I met when I came alive in God was a Christian. For that reason, an atheist may be the closest thing to God you find at times, for they, unlike many Christians, can admit that they do not believe in God.
Sincerely,
The Unwitting Memoirist
*2 Corinthians 10:5: casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ,
*Isaiah 55:8: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.[“]
November 1, 2021
A Jive Turkey Thanksgiving
There’s nuthin that spells Thanksgiving in New England more than a bunch of crazy wild turkeys chasing residents to their cars. Worse than the COVID shutdowns, many of the residents of my aunt’s senior complex can’t come out because of some weird chicken prehistoric dinosaurs standing on the hoods of their cars and grazing in their hedges. They make a mad shuffle for it, and have to use their umbrellas like some Penguin Batman character opening and closing it in these turkey’s faces, beaks? Sometimes in the twilight of evening maybe you can see them up on a roost, hung over branches like a pair of sneakers hanging over a telephone wire marking gang territory. I’ll take a shot of Wild Turkey please. Ah it burns so good goin down.
Have you ever seen that documentary, My Life as a Turkey with Joe Hutto? You should, it’s pretty cool. It’s about a guy—Joe—who finds a bunch of turkey eggs and they hatch and the first thing they see is Joe so they imprint all over him and he’s like their turkey mom, so he lives with them for over a year. Well, until he gets to know what makes a wild turkey a wild turkey and his son “Turkey Boy”, perceiving Joe as a mating competitor, attacks the shit out of Joe nearly poking his eyeballs out. Joe went to live with mule deer after that.
His relationships and friendships suffered, Joe said. He hardly ate or slept. He lost his turkey family to mating season, disease and predators; and fell into a depression.
“… What it made me feel was, ‘OK, I don’t want to go back to being me.’ He says.
“You’re left sort of empty after that, and that’s what I felt.”
‘My Life as a Turkey’
After all that, I thought he’d say, ‘My Life as a Jive Turkey’. But, really, isn’t this what American tradition, family gatherings and holidays are all about? Fending off attacks from immigrants and some feral anti-Christ, wild jive ass turkey government robbing you blind and trying to kill you, as you try to convince a bunch of brainwashed family members and friends at the dinner table wearing masks with embroidered turkeys on them?
A Jive ass Thanksgiving indeed.
Happy Thanksgiving and keep up the fight. We have dominion over the wild turkeys!
Sincerely,
The most thankful Unwitting Memoirist
Works Cited: Matray, Margaret. “Wyoming naturalist reflects on experience as a parent to wild turkeys.” Casper Star-Tribune, 24 Nov. 2011, trib.com. Accessed 30 Oct 2021.