Chapter Eighteen – Pascal’s dinner: Mutton with Dressing on the Side

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Chapter Eighteen – Pascal’s dinner: Mutton with Dressing on the Side

525

I tried to Loki-trick myself into believing in the simplicity of love.  As if love was a comfortable jacket I could slip back on, fit the sleeves and motorbike into an endless sunset highway.  I wanted to hear emotions emanating.  I yearned to defy gastronomy that my stale-mold bread did not spawn nausea.   

Saying no to Elyse and her company was like going back into a coffin and not the certainty of the regenerating en vogue aughts-decade vampire-kind.  Maybe Elyse had hundreds of Facebook-friends or voices to converse.  I had Penelope, freshly painted walls and curtain-less windows.  I had words to write.  I sorted intangibles.  I pretended to heal in solitary confinement, praying for malleable-mutable bars. 

I wondered how lonely did I have to be before the longing registered as a matter of productive function?  Parts of me wanted to carve my carcass like a pumpkin, scrape the orange spaghetti-squashed strands to the marrow of this gourd, spit out fertile seeds for other orchards and damn the consequence of hastily-hoed gardens.  Smash this jack-o-lantern façade with his missing rectangle teeth face first into the concrete to smithereens of harvest.  There was no Thanksgiving here, only Halloween subterfuge.

I could become the mountain-climbing man.  Spike my piton into this Himalayan doubt and shatter the range as if I was traversing a skyline of glass.  I could breathe thin air to find a fresh mode of dopamine and serotonin manipulating high.  Such fragile-goat steps of oblivion and ecstasy, I was willing to fall yet unwilling to bring anyone with me.  So I spoke these Sherpa journeys to myself. 

In Elyse’s worst she reminded me too much of Ashley’s lashing out and flight response.  No one has ever fought to keep me; injured animals obey nature.  It would be nice to feel the reciprocal of want, if only to pretend for a few hours, to know I was worth more purchased than returned to the store. 

There was acceptance in the cycles of grief.  I needed to put the few pictures I had of Elyse out my nightstand.  I might as well pawn the wedding jewelry I kept in a Ziploc bag in there while I was at it.  I replaced the image of her face from my t mobile-my-fav phone icon into a brown ying-yang swirl.  Digital images were heroin for the abstinent. 

I knew Elyse’s scent would summon pheromone drawings like a bee defending his hive.  These un-severable memories left unmitigated would pilot my libido and my sentimentality in a longing for a gerrymandered woman around the landmine truths I could not step upon without extricating one of Elyse’s vital organs.  I could not live in such post-war zones and retain the strength to where I needed to go. 

I was accepting that I was another number, a passing man.  I happened to slip one past the goalie.  Elyse’s detachment made me question if I should have been able to spit the bit earlier.  I also knew the black hole me.  I was gravitational destruction.

526

In mathematics, my romantic happy memories fell like a silver glass Christmas ornament shattered on that rented tile floor.  The onion-layer square cells breached.  My eyes watered for a manufactured never-land.  I reflected on what I have never found.  In the futility, I resorted to prayer.

Elyse presented a divide burying me with religion.  Good was clouded in logistical mandates of God’s will for Elyse.  How could Elyse be so faithful to believe that God had a plan, that there was a divine hand at work promulgating better?  Maybe if I mediated on the Torah on a prayer mat while balancing a wafer on my tongue I could find existential equilibrium?  Maybe I could stand in front of a video screen and sing closed-captioned lyrics about saviors?

My faith was in the freewill granted by God and the natural physics of matter itself, the consequences of which God neither has control or a preference.  God’s concern dwells in other matters in our rejoining on a level independent of such human paradigms.  To admit God had a plan for me would imply God had doubt or an uncertainty in the outcome dependent on my volition.  I was becoming an agnostic deist.

527

I can not dance in that parade to rationalize medical failures of our flesh-machine carriers of bone and muscle, organs and cells as God’s plan.  I can not second-line to associate warzones, corporate fraud greed-hungry Enron’s, ethnic cleansing, ACORN, Glen Beck Mormon cults, or abortion protestors with their hush-hush rogue special-force deadly viper assassination squad as God’s plan.  Beatrix Kiddo is coming to get me with a Hanzō sword.  These are just choices of human beings that we assign God as manifestation of purpose to appease our own bobble-head sense of order. 

Evangelist politicians horde funding away from “family planning” clinics to pregnancy crisis centers.  Three percent put kids up for adoption, the other ninety-seven got tricked into thinking they were calling the abortion clinic.  Church pews billow with complaints about free-loading minions cramping up kindergarten classrooms, E.R.’s, and jobs Americans are unwilling to take.  Dogmatic hypocrisies resonate from untaxed Texas-labored roofs feeding Guatemalan migrant workers risking kidnapping on the hope to send a pittance home.  Extortionist Mexican police demand slave-trade bribes to drug cartels for the souls suffocating in sardine tractor trailers to enter our America. 

Catholics and Protestants start a neo-Gen X-Boomer combat zone.  Wafers imbibed like Nancy Reagan Say-No circle lifesavers for Hispanic fetuses.  Perry-Bush mandates cut medical care for prophylactic-shots for sixteen year old ferried Selena’s.  Keep the kid and if you can’t support him; no hands offering life jackets in a barrio gutter.  Go build a room for Pulte. 

Don’t Ask.  Don’t Tell.  Sins are bowling for four-hundred dollar abortions.  Set up the pins for two-hundred thousand dollar lifetime commitments.  Fiscal and social conservatives salivate to roll the ball and let the devil pick up the pins for an entitlement for self-righteous bitching from a pulpit of debt.  Protest an abortion to save one’s soul to validate the grandstand to avoid health care, housing, food or education for the poor.  What does a middle-class American say when we can not afford the thought either?

528

I would rant to myself.  Religion feels good like a doctor rationalizing a surgery you never needed after the fact because you are no longer in immediate peril.  Let the tail wag the dog.  God made the palindrome.  Man made the religion to try to put a voice of God into a human construct and got carried away.  Every religion seems insane unless you were raised in those traditions.  Drink the blood.  Sam Harris said “take away the hair dryer.”  Talking into a plug-in appliance by yourself is insane.  Remove the appliance and its prayer.  Reverence is beyond scrutiny.  

Anyone can be named Mohammed, but fear death to dare to take God’s name in vain.  No one can be named Jesus.  For Christ’s sake claim your salvation by hanging a half-naked man in a tree in every abiding home.  Judaea is chosen for creeping-death exodus, German Holocaust evisceration, and a battleground-homeland bartering for drinking water, burying under Islamic homes for Jewish relics to claim territory in subterranean land-grabs.  The chosen-state proliferates with U.S. donations like a bastard of some six-day work week in June 1967.  There is no grand strategy.

Buddhists sequester treaty-peace teeth in mountains.  Hindus dodge sacred cows roaming the streets pimping tonsure hair to fuel African American women’s vanity to appear European.  Shell games of Democratic Greek-thinkers and Republican Roman-doers perished in empires in excess.  Vatican men in dresses over-compensated with guilt like the progeny of lush parents pissing in bedazzled jeweled latrines.  The world is in the inception of a top spinning and what is real in God’s creation in man’s dream-hand? 

Where does reality put words in a human mouth God never owned?  Where does humanity hang a face portrait on the wall mirroring their country of origin; Anglo Saxon Jew fathering Christianity in a brown-haired hippie yellow aura?  Do we need a squinty-eyed Jesus for the Far East?  How condescending do we narcissists have to be?

Each religion is its own ant hill in a common field.  The universe is the continent.  Border tunnels are set up to justify non-contradictory statements.  Dirtier hypocrisies are set up like scaffolding for a simple thought that never required such superstructures to pile the mound.  Each hill attacks the other with righteous fervor.  The mutual interconnection is trampled.  God made each ant.  We made the hills and try to set the others afire.

Arabs and Jews maintain peace in local hospitals.  A truce is called to remove shrapnel from limbs and the birth of offspring only to be taught before leaving to despise the boy sharing the other side of the sickbay.  History bled a bombing every other day in 2002.  The burned out mind-lamp fueled rage in flames in another numbered year in an un-numbered length war Ingersoll warned us about.  Who can keep track?

Suicide bomber fallout leaves token human responses.  Who was he?  Investigate and set up heightened security.  Why?  What can you do by talking about symptoms and documenting the what, when the why is obvious, yet is universally ignored because the solution is an insurmountable collection of free wills pre-decided en masse to act in a revised social contract that conflicts with the provisos of an opposing group’s dogma? 

How do you find communality?  By attacking the idea of a group and feeding the humanity of the individual free wills.  He is human, your brother; if he dies and you are on the transplant list, his heart will function in your chest; common-color blood.

While I am at it, I am for rebellion against the use of “bless you” after sneezes.  The use of this colloquial reflexive utterance is a preposterous denotation of personal ignorance and mental slavery to ghost-devil folk-lore and religious military consignment.  The ballyhoo allowance towards civil deportment laced with polite politically correct acknowledgment of another human’s bodily function is in every way ancillary to a proper functioning society.  If anything we would be better fit to cackle upon flatulence or cry, “Heave ho fowl demon!” upon eructation.  It is therefore with most zealous dissent I cry a pox on all well-wishing blessing towards those entertaining nasal and sinus cavity spasms as you await thine own enlightenment.  Asking me to continue such rituals is to once more veil an attempt to shovel a Eucharist down my gullet and label me scarlet for defying to partake in dinner at your naked emperor’s table.

Jesus, Mohammed, John they are all a different cultural human construction to put God in a physical form like Chris Cringle, except most people do not ever get around to the thought to tell themselves when they are old enough that Jesus does not exist in a white robe, jingly-red jacket or beard.  To me, Santa-Jesus is just a simplified-construct to make a ubiquitous constant apparent in the clarity of calm meditation appear in a pre-packaged form available for merchandizing opportunities.   But God does exist.  He is present in all of us, but not in the tangible.  The true journey of boy, to man, to universal being is to find God, find religion, drop religion and yet still hold onto God in our commonality. 

529

My life was in reassessment mode.  I was working and trying to find normal.  The rest of the world seemed preoccupied with signs of chaos and society falling apart like a sandcastle that was being detonated with a pipe bomb from 2001 to 2011.  We were in a decade of planes into buildings, housing stock markets tumbling, rumor-mongers, hurricanes and oil spills.  California and Florida real estate markets tanked every state in between the left and right coasts.  The Middle East was on fire in democratic revolutions to spring despots.  Africa was still weeping in her shadowed corner.  Victoria flooded.  A nuclear tsunami swiped Japan.  Indonesia and Haiti were put back up for adoption.  China was amassing.  London was burning.  Turkey was quaking.  Our own politicians were bickering for re-election rather than solutions.  I was beginning to accept a lack of concern to the temporary nature of life and questioned the relevance of worry. 

All of these hells were ablaze comingling and intersecting on the world stage.  Sage Francis was asking, “I am at the fire.  Where are you?”  Man and God are at war.  Fukushima Fava beans started showing up in Taiwan with radioactive traces.  I could not help thinking to Japan, “Your country is a fucked leaper-pariah like Gulf seafood.”  Mocondo, Katrina, Haiti, Fukushima, Sidi Bozid, Mohammed Bouazizi burning effigy of a man in the street.  Man and God had to be at war.  What was God trying to get us to listen to religion or love?

Sage Francis was speaking, “No one wants to talk.  No one wants to touch.  All we want to do is text too much.”  K’naan, Sage, Rancid all said it better than I could project it.  W avenged two towers for “makeshift patriot” dogmas.  RPG black hawk down “lion heart” Rwanda, New Orleans’ “pride was not drowning.” Afghan anti-Soviet helicopter U.S. backed surface to air missiles boomeranged past Kandahar.  The explosions leapt over African rebels and “pirates with torpedoes and it is all so weird yo.”  “Now it is kind of hard to make sense.”  “Wave your flag.”  Is it for a country, family, a corporation, or humanity?  “Civilian ways are foreign to me.”  Man and God are at war, and God was bellowing peace talks.  Somalia starved.  Americas were complaining about the store-brand.  No one was listening.

I have traveled the parties by donkey, by elephant and now I am just hitchhiking with a middle finger standing in the median.

This virus of greed was bigger than AIDS.  Where are our ribbons?  Greed awareness day, so called Republican Christians, did you actually listen to Jesus?  Shit on specifically-applied socialism.  Who needs multi-layered constructs?  Patients do not have to chug the whole bottle of a medication to heal.  We can supply the prescribed dosage if we bothered to read. 

Glenn Beck keeps endearing mixed-up schizophrenic fascists.  Can anyone translate Italian?  Would Woody Guthrie even know a fascist if he saw one these days; left or right? All I know is it sucks to be the asshole smeared with shit in the middle.  The system is attempting to eject this waste.  The left and right cheeks keep butting heads.  The power-grab collisions produce a creamed-cluster traffic jam of constipation, because each side refuses to budge.  This probiotic-bacterial yogurt is not fucking helping!

Love your enemy.  Why are the off-tangent versions of today’s NRA homophobic pew-squatters, war-thirsty fear-mongers, anti-welfare groups, and the pro-torture proletariat the same ones that bullhorn Jesus?  How can a group so pro the freedom to bare arms, be so against the legalization of marijuana?  Legalize all of it.  Who doesn’t love a farmer?  Why are we not all alcoholics?  What does it mean to be a Christian again?  Maybe Martin or Mohandas can tell us? 

When a state or a parent mandates religion; religion ceases to be religion.  I have finally realized that God and religion have not a damn mandatory thing to do with each other.

I feel the sensation of phantom limbs, like minefield victims in war-torn Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Haiti, Niger, Iraq, Pakistan, Serra Leone, and Indonesia under the Global Medical Relief Fund run out of a former walk-in closet.  The invisible toes and the fingers undulate in a wave of tickling air.  I had a wife gone, a future asunder. 

“Cheery oh” have an English breakfast of cucumber sandwiches and honey drip in “the Importance of Being Earnest” tea.  Oh, what is that little insurrection down in Tottenham?  White riot, London’s calling the guns of Brixton in a clash on class war.  Yemen’s gone yelling at Mr. Saleh.  Syria is vomiting genocide at an underground railroad of defected soldiers.  Al-Assad denies castration executions.

Where are the passports for wounded children and tag along adults?  Where is our humanity in this vexing life?  Where is our recognition of God in us?

530

I got a chain email forwarded from my mother through someone who like Ashley thought that capitalizing entire words made one’s argument irrefutably credulous.

Subject: FW: LUCIA REVEALS THE THIRD SECRET OF FATIMA

Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011

Hi Guys, 

I am not sure of what you do or do not believe, if fact, I am not always sure that I know what I believe, but I do believe this is worth reading.  I would appreciate it if you would take the time to read it also.  I love you.  Mom

Not to scare, but to be inspired.  This is for every religion.  LUCIA REVEALS THE THIRD SECRET OF FATIMA, regardless of whatever Creed or Religion, it is better to be prepared and be in good terms with GOD, who created us; for we never know when we will be leaving this world.....LAST SECRET OF FATIMA.

The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three children in Fatima, Portugal in 1917.  This is a proven fact; one of these children was Lucia, (died 2/13/2005).  Lucia was a cloistered nun, who disclosed the message to Pope Pius XII.  Pius sealed it.  Later Pope John XXIII realized that once revealed; the words would bring desperation and panic to mankind.

The Virgin told Lucia: “Go, my child.  Tell the world what will come to pass during the 1950's-2000's.  Men are not practicing the Commandments of God.  Evil is governing the world harvesting hate.  Men will fabricate mortal weapons that will destroy half the human race in minutes!”

“The war will begin against Rome.  There will be conflicts amongst religious orders.  God will allow natural phenomena like smoke, hail, cold, water, fire, floods, earthquakes, and winds to slowly batter the planet before the year 2012!  Everywhere there will be ‘Peace Talks’, but punishment will come.”

“A MAN IN A VERY IMPORTANT POSITION WILL BE ASSASSINATED AND THIS WILL PROVOKE THE WAR.  A POWERFUL ARMY WILL DOMINATE ALL THROUGH EUROPE AND THE NUCLEAR WAR WILL COMMENCE.”

This war will destroy everything; darkness will fall over us for 72 hours and the one third of humanity that survives this obscurity and sacrifice, will commence to live a new era.  On a very cold night, ten minutes before midnight, A GREAT QUAKE will shake the earth for eight hours.  This will be the third signal that God is who governs the earth.  The message of the Lady of Fatima is:

ONE SHOULD NOT FEAR, DO NOT BE AFRAID.  Pray five Creeds and the Rosary which is the secret to my immaculate Heart.  All those who believe in my words, DO NOT FEAR! FEAR NOTHING DURING THE LORD'S GREAT DAY. 

Talk to all, now that there is time.  Those who keep quiet will be responsible for those souls who will perish in ignorance.  Those who humbly pray the rosary will have the protection of heaven.  Those who are bound to die, I will help them die in peace, and they will be holy when they enter the other world.

I wish all my children to attend mass every first Friday and every first Saturday of each month; to confess and receive Holy Communion; and in doing so, save the world from its TOTAL DESTRUCTION!  When the earth shakes no more, those who still do not believe in our Lord will perish in a horrible way:  The wind will disperse gas everywhere.  Then the sun will rise.  Maybe you will survive this catastrophe.

Do not forget that God's punishment is holy and ONCE IT HAS STARTED YOU SHOULD NOT LOOK OUTSIDE, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE!  GOD DOES NOT WANT ANY OF HIS GOOD CHILDREN TO SEE WHEN HE PUNISHES THE SINNERS.

You must understand that God allows all this to happen.  The Pope and Bishops are awaiting another message about repentance and prayer.  Please reproduce these pages and send them to all you know. 

If you don't believe in this message, at least send it to others, it costs you nothing.  Those receiving it can have the opportunity to judge and decide for themselves.  Remember, we can avoid evil if we practice the Commandments that Our Loving Father gave us.  Just ten simple ways, that if we all put into practice, we can obtain His pardon.  Amen.

531

RE: LUCIA REVEALS THE THIRD SECRET OF FATIMA‏

To Mom, Tim Baker, From Ethan Baker (ravingloony242@gmail.com)

I love you too.  I guess you are forwarding this out of a mixture of Catholicism and an affinity for God.  Trying to sum up what I do and do not believe is a verbose and conflicting task, but at the root, I do not believe that God rewards or punishes mankind through human constructs.  God is restricted by mankind's freewill and the forces of nature are reactions of scientific variables.  God controls neither. 

So with stuff like this that says, “God will send an earthquake to destroy us.”  I call bullshit and the same with a world war over some political leader.  If Obama gets killed by an Islamic terrorist or if Obama takes out Osama and nuclear war ensues, then man did that.  It has nothing to do with God or anybody's sins.  God is not going to save us from ourselves in a human paradigm of flesh in the converse of this herald’s projected divine wrath either.  We would be screwed and just as humanly dead.

God does not seek our worship through direct exaltation, but through our treatment of our fellow man and world, which we are all God.  I am. You are. Tim and Dad are. Millions of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, and Christians all are.

I believe in a common God for all universes, not just our Earth.  Rants like this that proclaim the world will recognize the common God and he will be vengeful and he happens to be the same religion as the messenger, I think are narrow in vision.  They focus on pandering to a base-human response.  People get too worked up over what we can not control.  (Not you, but a lot of people do.)  In doing so I think we are grasping for a human construct to put God into when we should be seeking the reverse.

We will very well transition to a paradigm beyond our human comprehension or tangible interaction in a means by which we may benefit or suffer based on factors of measurement we can not pin down.  Religion tries to pin them down.  Religion prints a punch-list to put names, actions and prohibitions in a structure to appease the masses. 

Religion should be taken with the addendum that man created religion to do our best to have man speak for God and a bit of God speaking through man, but it is more the former than the later.  In this understanding man is fallible and religion does not have to be perfect to serve a good, but religion may negate its good by professing an infallibility that is only spoken in an emperor-with-no-close-on pulpit.

Membership of most of any religion knows the faults and struggles of its leadership.  Do we talk about them in service, rarely, but we do.

I think the key with God is to recognize that however we connect with God, this connection is not an isolated proactive action.  It is for our self and for others. Religion can be part of that.  Religion to me is a time of peace to connect not for instructions, but for the recognition that there is a nexus of life greater than myself.  At that same time the other constructs piled on organized religion is why to me religion is now the vilest word in our lexicon, because these man-made mandates have become un-severable for society.

The nexus of God is not one I owe a debt to or to earn an eternal reward from, but one of mutual benefit through humility and kindness and mutual detriments through selfishness and fear.  God’s connection to us is a win-win concept that our humanity often spits out as a prisoner’s dilemma impossibility.  Religions like Christianity want to deem hell as a gouging torture, when hell is actually the absence of our connection with God.

I think that is similar to what most people believe, but human paradigms of language, birth origins, culture, media, family history and apathy segment us into ignorant factions empowered by the assumptions of selfish differentiation.  We all want to be special, to think we have the answers.  I taste the hypocrisy in my words.  We want to believe that we sense God through a human construct: sight, sound, or touch. 

Maybe each religion created a God on earth to do that.  Maybe God really did come, I really do not think it matters which is right or true, because I do not think humanity or me need a physical representation of God.  I do not believe it is possible to have a physical God.  The thought violates so many of my beliefs about whom and what God is for that to be possible or warranted. 

I see God in all of us.  I live based on the complexities that make sense to me knowing I have responsibility to each being.  That I find simple.

I do not believe the world is going to end around the corner.  We might screw the Earth up environmentally or have wars over oil we call humanitarian.  If the Earth becomes uninhabitable for human beings, than so be it.  Life on other planets will go on without us.  Humanity is just not that crucial.  Whatever we collectively did or did not do then all we collectively can do is take responsibility for our role and be at peace.  Ethan

532

I contemplated to myself the average intelligence of the people who wrote the Bible.  What was the average intelligence of the spoken-word carriers who talked to people, who talked to people forty years later to describe the course of events to the people of wealth and common tongue who could put oral history to written?  What stage was the world at in education, ignorance, gullibility, political awareness, science, violence, psychology, communication?  This is the literature we base existence on?  Was it all a ploy?

Jews, Christians, Muslims, federal foreign-aid and war budgets financing modern day crusades.  God does not desire the prejudice or this bigotry and dehumanization under the claim of blasphemy to books written in his name beyond his interface.  In our souls we know this to be true.  If only we could call out each of the emperors who raised us. 

We fill ourselves with irrational pointless questions of distraction with religion.  What color is the emperor’s public hair?  Young man, what color?  Old lady, what color?  Bigot, what color?  Free man, what color?  How many answers?  How many emperors?  What name is acceptable?  What story is palatable to our precepts?  Why would God wish this interface to be divergent when we are all of a common cloth?  Then ask yourself, why would man?

Sometimes when I prayed I questioned why I was looking up for God?  I am nowhere near the center of this universe.  God should not be on its perimeter.  It was all so expansively ecumenical.

533

I would go to church every Sunday; one week with Penelope and one week alone.  I noticed the escape routes.  Catholics backed into parking spots more strategically for mass than for any other public event.  People had to position their vehicle ready for an expedited eventual departure. 

Is the placement of a vehicle between these lines an adjudicated prison sentence or a free-willed act?  I made a no backing-in policy at church.  On some rudimentary level it felt like an affront to God.  Maybe those fish, forgiven, halo, or dying abortion-baby bumper stickers are like the special parking handicapped tags to indemnify such automotive parking violations.

In church, I would look over at Ashley when she had Penelope.  When I had Penelope, Ashley was never there.  Ashley had her seat in purgatory with the man she chose in the front row.  Ashley gazed and gripped Penelope to hold down the buried Poe-truths festering in procrastinated rank steaming from the kneeler; her problem, not mine.

We would sit and stand at two opposing-angled pews in the church.  I was on the left.  The Bastions-to-be were on the right.  Christmas 2010, Ashley and Ben became engaged and put a realtor for sale sign on the porch house.  I took the digital online open house tour to see my daughter’s bedroom.

These were our voluntary parking selections.  This was no stare-down nor contest at the OK corral.  Ashley had no interest in looking at me.  I had no Count of Monte Cristo-aspirations. We each walked from our left and right to the mortal-sin-free prerequisite required transubstantiation buffet.  Mmm, endocrine, pancreas, lungs, marrow, coxcis, palm, cerebellum, actual Jesus to the body!  Drink the blood vampires for Christ! 

534

All of this religious ceremony began to seem arbitrary.  Each group’s silly hat or ideological hymn selected could be entirely different depending on the country, planet, or background, whether read from left to right or right to left.  Crucifixes are paradoxical reminders.  Where’s my noose, atom bomb, bullet, barbiturate or marriage contract?

The purpose of religion to me was to show a membership linking all creation in God, independent of clan or division.  In the forest-view Catholicism seemed trivial and irrelevant in all respects to the loving interrelation of that which made me human, under the microscope it seemed like a vile indoctrinated regime.  I saw a delineation to embrace rather than make divisive our relationship with God. 

I would rant to myself. God does not care if we are happy.  It is not his concern.  Happiness, hell survival, is a human construct bending on choices tethered to freewill of mankind and laws of science, not God.  How we treat each other matters, but God does not bestow blessings, curses or illnesses.  All prayers for health, safety, or fortune are moot.  Lugubrious or emphatically exuberant God declines partiality.

God does not decide who our grandparents mated with to construct the faulty or sound rungs of our genetic ladder.  If we smoke, make fast-food a heavy dietary rotation into our routines: these are choices.  So is walking into the path of a falling bullet. 

It felt good to pray for salvation or security.  Praying in such a manner was once a drug of comfort for the unknown what-if.  Praying in this way was crawling back into the fallacy of innocence and bedding down in the illusion that father or mother was holding me in their all-powerful embrace assuring a cocoon of forgiveness, salvation, love, and reassurance.  Prayer is the crucible lottery ticket of Pascal’s wager.  Correlating granted-protection with obedience was questionable. 

I reorganized who God was to me.  God does not get angry or joyful.  God simply is in all of us; the epitome of being in recognition of our communal oneness.  There is no wrong in this world except that which we choose to bring into it.  A hurricane is not wrong.  It is obeying the science of atoms.  How could a tornado or tsunami sin?  There is suffering in reciprocation with the joys, but the suffering is not wrong.  The joy is not right.  Neither is a consequence, but a reaction to the flow of the choice and nature.

God is the how we deal and react to the flow.  God is in the patient moment of our calm approach, the tenderness of our understanding, and the love to our enemy.  God is in all things.  God is us.  We do better to shed our selfishness to simplify the blanketing reality in our human constructs.  We can pray to better recognize the universally-present God.  We inherently know morality absent religion.  To request to gravitate the ubiquitous constant towards us is a perverse narcissistic myopic act.

Just as this small Earth is not all about English speakers or Americans, this universe puts humanity as no more than a molecule in a single drop of water.  Size is irrelevant.  Physical space, matter, all of it is constantly expanding in this universe and the universes beyond in a constant total of God, independent of length, width, height or time. 

God is the difference between fault and perfection, oneness and absence.  Life is not about our joys or sorrows, but our how’s.  In loving anyone, we are simply and purely loving God.  Our reward is the exaltation of our best self mimicking the unattainable.

Heaven as a conceptual reward is an image we manifest to validate the collective selection of freewill benefitting our social contracts.  Heaven is not carnal pleasure or an endless seven-year-old American summer.  If paradise exists, it is the rejoining in the aggregation of the one in a paradigm beyond our human paradigm.

Ultimately it is irrelevant if heaven does exist in any form, for the logical benefits and detriments of our actions in correlation with who we are exist whether or not heaven exists.  We do not raise our children to behave well for candy.  The form in which heaven may exist, either comprehendible or conceivable by humanity, does not matter.  Our humanity has no control over such parallel paths beyond our five senses. 

Just as the ability to conceive the thought and concept of God generates our ability to sin, maybe such a lack of a true conception of what we think we call heaven is what segregates humanity from witnessing what we think we call heaven at all. 

Odds are my head is shit.  Earth is hidden in an ass pimple on a gargantuan moribund sixty-seven limbed fuchsia colored insurance salesman living on an ordinary planet in a universe that makes ours a speck in a carton of packing peanuts.  Who knows, but what if we are God connecting in love and idling in isolation through fear?  The end game is not the post-death consequence, but the internal choice in an of itself.  We suffer or exalt here inside our selves in one interconnected being.

535

I did not think I believed in prayer anymore, at least not in the sense of asking for favors or worshiping.  I believed in something I called prayer, but I assume most people asserted divergent intentions with their prayer.  What does another man speak in his silent of silences, in fledgling awe or as brother shoulder to shoulder? 

I believed in God.  I believed if I wanted something to happen I needed to make it so in my life, but I was not alone in its fruition.  Generic prayer seemed lazy.  I felt like the prayer first taught to me was like asking God for a shortcut.  I thought by the nature of our freewill God would never be able to do or wished to do my intention because in the end those were human constructs not God’s. 

Is God really there to give us peace, love, sanctuary, isolation, or a buffer from those who assail our souls?  Is God really there punishing others who defy him?  Is God there to increase our happiness?  To all I said, no, yet I believe in God.

It is a pleasant wish to believe God wants good to occur, for a surgeon’s hand to be steady, a bullet to miss a Rwandan kid’s skull and plow into a wall instead.  It is beautiful to imagine divine providence behind a plant growing to feed the hungry and the weather patterns to assert our continuation.  All of that seems selfish to ask of God.  We have a greater and simpler purpose, we either acknowledge or ignore.  It has nothing to do with surviving or dying. 

The act of prayer is a communal act, humans or with God, God may listen, but he will never interfere or interface through a tactile construct.  For the only measure of communication is intent, not sound or the movement of mouths or waves bristling across cochlear hairs.  Listening is done universally through the reverberations our how bellows into the all.

Those wrapped up in sleeping-bag faiths wanting the Tinkerbelle-touch of guidance upon a bedroom window, for a time, I was you, for another I envied you.  Now I just love you whether you ever wake up or not, hoping you will love me back with my ignorant-rant hypothesis.  I do not assume to be right or anything more than a man barking at train tracks.

I pray to see God in others, in their choices.  I pray to see the inertia of my systematic framework of decision making on how my elections affect the web of truths which are greater than I can conceive or complete on my own.   I pray to recognize our interconnection.  I pray for the choir of humans who farm the food we are blessed to eat, the scientists that experiment to harness the medicine, the discernment of our leaders; in the work of others we find existence, without which we are islands of futile barren torment.

I believe God loves each of us, even my dark arthritic bones, wholly, in a comprehensive manner seamlessly without effort in a parallel manner in which we are called to love ourselves.  By the nature of our creation God is self-restricted from expressing this love by manipulating our surroundings.  I find a hypothetical solace that if God were allowed the time for a sentiment, I believe God would not take satisfaction in our suffering.  However, a sadistic or merry deity is a goose chase towards a human construct.  The possibility exists for us each to live in a paradise of free-willed bliss shared, engrossed in human elation and kindness; that bounty exists all around. 

That conception gives me hope.  It gives me the brave purpose to pray.  I pray not because God will make it happen, but that I can find the strength to harness his want of that emulation of him in each of us to experience that bliss.  When I say his want, it is not the want of the deity outside of existence, but the collective God, we are each a member of inside of existence.  Innately our beings strive for this.  That is why I pray, even after losing all belief that God will ever tangibly alter this world directly.  I pray for that which is present in each individual as a component of the collective to surface in an uproar of our pinnacle.

If I was sitting in the pulpit of the deity I do not think I would want humanity’s fucking praise; bowing down sucking my God-dick with Sunday morning fellatio.  Just be a good fucking person to the world in which God is so present.  God is not some far-off legislator that requires lobbying efforts.  God is us tangent to our own volition concentric in infinite numbering beings in revelry of a singularity.

Help people.  Stop being greedy-selfish-fearful-petty, emotional fortresses where empathy, love, or bonding with someone you do not have a vested self-Darwinian interest in is ostracized from your daily behavior.  Fuck people, it is not that complicated.   Religion is not needed to see this and is so often a blinder and the grand divisive wall.

Why would God insist on a bureaucracy for a one-being government?  Why complicate our consciousness with minutia and politics of restriction?  Why invite some saint, some chosen lamb pulling apart the muscles to feed the masses in a ritualistic dinner party where all we do is erupt in eructation? 

I do not participate in these Kool-Aid caucuses any longer.  I am rescinding my ticket to this stadium seating in a sixth-inning walk-out.  I can no longer watch some dead man’s skin get stretched like sailcloth up the mast with dead-man talk.  This neophyte exploration of the psyche and our grand purpose of existence truncated and neutered by religion’s papyrus and demagogic ink is not enough for me!  I quest forward beyond! 

I see this bloody drink as a concoction to quell the prepubescent from maturation!  Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Voltaire, Einstein give me these before Mathew, Mark, Luke and John!  None is right in the absolute, but which claims to script the infallible, the irrefutable, and drums the beat of war!

How much better would it be if everyone spent those hours doing instead of worshiping a faceless cell-less deity in arch-roofed clearing houses?  I want planning, doing, and simple collective actions to parade a fresh avenue of our faith.  Yet I am a bum, a transient whore of a man, sitting in a seat, listening to talk so rarely doing.

I searched and came to ask myself a single question.  At times I thought it was the question, the one real question, others I felt myopically insane.  I thought most people prefer not to contemplate such entrees as the meaning of human existence, the purpose of a quark, a leaf, a planet, or a star. If we do, we quickly move on after creating a maze for ourselves. We enrapture our psyches in parachutes of God, religion, or whatever happy-childhood answer to basic philosophical pondering a fifth grader could percolate. Such quandaries break apart the eggshell of our present realities.  Fissures appear in the trips to the grocery store, the traffic commute rodeos, the tally of bank accounts or the numbing tranquil excursion of monitoring professional sports.

When one ventures beyond the routine, the grand chaotic melee of holding one’s spiritual identity inside the shelf of an individual thought becomes possible. Once this is accomplished an individual finds both true freedom and culpability.  The token do and do not’s of organized religion and governmental legislation wither like arthritic-bone crutches in the impertinence of physical stimuli, including our own bodies.

The beauty and danger of the how we do what we do emerges like glare in a mirror that is was and is still not visible, but always present.  When we have a cognizance of that which has eluded us in our haste to perpetuate the illusion of routine, we can alter or ensure that routine does not deviate from that we now know we are called to be.

I asked myself, “Look inside you now. Pause. Examine.”  There is no book or pulpit required to inform our intimate unshelled self of the parameters of the proper harmonic replenishing nature of our actions.  In turn we are blatantly aware of what choices we could make that prosper a dissonance to the whole at the long term disadvantage to that which we belong.

We see beyond limbs, beyond time itself, into the perimeter of existence, fluxing on the sands of where we are ceasing to be a singular organism and a collective being.  We see this, yet the shell is comfortable, placating, a hardened scab cushioning us from such inquiries.

The world is open.  Fear has no home, simply dead weight in a pack upon a back for the journey. Liberation lives beyond the loneliness, the stark nothing, the flip side of a self to see in what is not a nadir, but a portal of singularity expanding from infinite density into an magnanimous and ever expanding universe of possibility, beyond time, beyond touch, beyond anything any one of us could ever imagine.

I thought the answer has always been there, all we need is to ask ourselves the question.  Then again what did I know?  There are surely more questions than one.

536

I was bleating to death for Sage Francis’ “fair-weather pimp.”  Church became a submission mutton butcher’s shop; eating God.  Take this body into our own.  Open a hole for him in public testament to encourage mutual submission.  This sheep has starved out here in this wilderness.  This meat is scorched over famished to a rack of bones, emaciated for the carrion feeders.  The ants stripped every sinew.  These bones rattle, slump dusted over and lost in wait.  There is no train, only passengers.

I searched for a sound; a call from the Shepherd.  I scanned for the sight of the crook curved over the horizon beckoning me.  I smelled the tar bubbling oil-baked ancestors fallen into fern and Cenozoic crude.  How long is waiting deemed necessary to say you missed carpool dad?  There is another subway tunnel, another tracked path, a silent tax-credit jet-stream.  I see blind, no shepherds here only dry bones for stock.

I felt rebellious, yet sometimes fearful of the populace tracking me down.  I reverberated such insolence.  How can one claim to hold God, to speak of God without the consensus of religion to support the platform of his audacity?  Only in concert with those one never sees, can such fervor be tamed into the tacit acknowledgment of a taciturn and quelled lip and stoic and placid faces of a hundred pews of human bodies signifying their agreement through recurring attendance in ritualized ceremony. 

To arrive at any form of declarative assertion independently is universally viewed as blasphemy.  It is an effrontery to the throne.  It is a call for excommunication and all around poor form.  The coffers, the garments, the gilded bowels and vessels will clamor in an inanimate uproar bantered out through the divine speech of the ordained.  Quell such insurgence or suffer the ache of purgatory and the fury of perdition!

Some people believe we are God’s vessels, waiting, asking, “What is it that you wish me to do?”  Lord, have your will be done.  If there is only one will, I hope it is that to spend each minute we have manifesting that common peace and elation in this world.  That is our purpose our Frankl-meaning, simple and honest, as one being in God.  Help me see your will for what we all inherently want by being part of you.

537

Just writing that made me feel so much better, it was liberating.  When I taste those words on the tip of my soul, I do not sense a flavor of religion or culture in the bitter or the sweet.  I taste what feels like what I am supposed to be doing, sharing this, my life, our life, with the few that can hear my words in the vast expanse that is God.

God did not make us.  God is us.  God is everything.  We are the only train coming.  We pray for the ability to release control, to allow God to be in us to fuel what is that beautiful path.  This reprieve is not one of self-jurisdiction; it is a selection of faith, of acknowledging our own vast ignorance of that, which is beyond our human paradigm.  God’s presence does not come in a voiced lyric, a starry sight, a pheromone-laced scent, a pull on the shoulder, or a taste in the water.  God’s presence comes in tandem: our faith and our freewill acting in unison for that beautiful parallel path.

All this love, these times, these faces all running parallel that seem meaningless and futile, indiscriminately obtuse as we bask in the infinite nothingness of an answerless God, they are all important.  In the confluence the lines converge.  The lines of the life of these other souls intersect.  The windows in the why shine out like beacons of reason, of what we needed in place of what we wanted. 

We see God everywhere, absolutely everywhere.  The nexus confluence of all returns beyond the faces, the bitter trials, the abandoned excuses and in the conjoining all these parallel paths are connected.  We are there under a rainbow of names, as Christ, mother, Allah, as the source confirmed.  We are love for one another.  Nothing is meaningless, each kiss, each friendship, each conversation, each story: we never know the ripples we create, but we do know there is a purpose beyond our own in why we make them.

I do not have the answers only the flat-line conjecture of my heart, but this is where I was on this day at peace in the fire and the snow, lowered and raised expectations in love with all of you in each and every and no way at all.

538

Faith in Jesus, Mohammed or She seemed like a subterfuge for greater truths staring us in the face.  Imagine if we could see past the commercial human-paradigm masks to see our connection?  How could I believe in these logistics of this Catholic, of this marriage and have it roust me so vehemently?  How could the substance be of anything outside free-willed jurisdiction?

Thomas hand-inspections fingered my context like an index-insertion into a jar of peanut butter to taste during times of required fasting.  These requests pushed me out into desert.  I saw all this sand conjoined in a spectacular looking-glass.  I saw God, not just under the jurisdiction of Catholic nomenclature.  I saw God in all this welcome life and death.  I was told to be not afraid and yet asked to grasp at God’s thousand-piece box of tooth pick crutches in my own Cormac McCarthy novel

I stare.  I see.  Do you?  What would you call your Muslim brother?  What would he call you?  Do our feet not walk upon the same sands despite how many verses we have memorized?

What if the devil you despise was hiding in plain sight of the shadowed structured politics of the one true religion you claim that shields you from Beelzebub?  What if you were a moth pent under glass, rather than a butterfly protected in your chrysalis?  What is this golden-domed prism?

This Catholicism is a franchised corridor to find you, but surely there are other operable veins.  Sometimes it’s easier to just drink the local-brand with all our neighbors.  Spit that shit out and you stand out, ostracized like a freak show.  Who drinks Maotai in America, Caipirinha in Russia, Budweiser in France or Fosters in Saudi Arabia?  What do we really need saving from except our own free selves?  Aren’t you ground water, un-bottled and un-labeled?

539

I grew a beard to look like I felt.  I felt like my life was meant for another time zone.  I resented this bored, rural mundane.  It encapsulated me like an acid-water oyster with undulating occasional anger.  Like Twain advised, I prayed to jettison this anger so that it did not do more damage to the vessel it is held in than its uncertain target.  This deterioration of the pear that I could have been bled fire like a vampire in the sun into gritty bacteria.  I am no hero. 

Ashley condemned her former spouse as a social miscreant in mutated adultery.  She abandoned me in a land foreign to my upbringing and native to her own, prior to divulging her fresh engagement to the partner of her Tuesday-night sojourns.  Is there even a name for a male mistress?  Is it a mister?  As if this belated announcement could somehow find itself immune to such a fetid stench by the latency of its herald. 

How do you best hide from being beaten by the husband of the woman you are fucking? Hide in plain sight behind his trust.  Shroud in the shadow of a spot so glaring in the sun berating his eye sockets that he never imagined that behind the water spots, pollen, and cracks in his windshield that he could exist blatantly cunt-slurping his wife.

Ashley lied like a wolf in lambskin, a broken condom pumping out the acquired immune deficiency virus knowingly.  Her love was virulent.  I was no Edmund Hillary.  I was simply cuckolded, an ordinary bird.

540

Elyse was gone.  Our child was dead.  I was finally in my house trying to conjure hope.  I looked everywhere for God inside the radius of routine.  Sometimes it was easier to put God and religion in its own chapter like salad dressing on the side and pretend God was not the whole damn meal, the utensils, the plate, the table, the building, the all.  Humanity was just some speck of pepper cracked on a crouton.

I was exhausted from unpredictability.  I wanted someone to rely on besides my own volition.  I wanted to believe in a God, in a love, in a margin for error beyond my own frailties.  I wanted the faith to pray to a fallible God; screaming help inside my own skull louder than any bomb-raid siren. 

I made pasta for myself alone.  I ate to the sounds of rural crickets and the train passing through town blaring that horrible Jericho blow, blasting like Johnny Cash’s cry at Folsom prison.  I did my own dishes for the thousandth time and retreated to count the ceiling tiles in my bedroom.  My faith was in crisis.  I was alone in the house holding my own conversation with God.

Lying here on this mattress I am staring up and at who with this gray ceiling and no curtain on the window.  The suburban forest is sprawling.  The rye grass tries to grow.  The soil is still intact.  A trillion stars and ours is exploding on China.  Eleven p.m. again, no hobbit dog and my daughter is at her mother’s.  These sheets insinuate stark-white despite the wrinkles.  Detergent is miraculous.  Nothing seems to change.

Where are you?  Questions are like hornets.  I am numb from stingers contemplating being done in faith that you even exist.  The mythologies, the trinities, the sacraments, the obscenities parade on a landing strip.  I feel bombarded in capsules of tin-pharmaceutical chug-down.  There is no medication to find solace, logic, or repose in those words.  Were you really ever here?  Why would you give a shit about us?

Primordial ooze for millions of years and complex life is a blip.  We are a single protozoa in an ocean of a universe.  We have this self-granted-grandeur imposed importance to allocate a human construct onto our genesis-engine to rationalize our purpose above that of every other life-form on a gel capsule of a planet.   I nakedly ask, “Did we create you rather than you us?”

Our bodies, our diseases, our fragilities, all of it staggers aghast at the dump-truck load of ordaining human life as randomness rather than to a master work of intelligent design bartering on Pascal’s wager.  The might as well times concede to faith like both a blanket to comfort ourselves and a pass-card from your wrath.

How do I come to peace with the dichotomy of literature promoting your mercy and vengeance in a duality of a line that says, “No matter what I do you will forgive me if I request it,” and “If I cross you will smote me into an eternal damnation in a netherworld hell to be tortured by your nemesis.”  Internally I acknowledge that you are more powerful than Oz.  Thus by your lack of action God, you must be complicit in allowing any vacation days in hell to occur.

Are you a passive-aggressive fuck exhausted from flooding babies and families that drowned worse than Katrina casualties to save some Noah-drunk?  Tired of raining sulfur and stacking human salt-pillars and sending your only son to create a human battlement obsessed with the virginity of some semi-statutory rape case to flog and hang your kid on a tree in a really bad weekend to prove a point that you are a righteous Lord?

Has there ever been a religion more about sex than Christianity?  Hypocrites!  The DNA of Catholicism is mapped in lust fueling the magnetic denial of penis to vagina consecrated in the vat of a virgin birth.  Without sex, there is no God on Earth.  The Church never discusses the ensuing orgies of the virgin mother and Joseph, ravaging her after a boy is born amongst the feces of sheep and cows.  Dirty and immaculate are stitched together.  Without lust the Church would have no substance to gather its constituents in an “eternal tumult.”  The internal friction from the sexual implications of the virgin birth have fueled the narrative for centuries like a damned river rotating a grind stone.  Aggh!, just stick it in already.  Do it, blow the damn!

541

What the fuck God?  Couldn’t you just make a you-tube commercial or put one of these miracles that substantiate the actions of billions for generations in a communicated form more reliable than some dude wrote down what happened forty years later and we retell what we think the gist was and all of humanity is based and reliant on this oral history?  That is sadistic and wholly unnecessary given how easily it would be to call time out, and lay down the ground rules if you wished to intersect our paths.

Oh that’s right; religions had a deadline to register; it is called photography.  VHS was the great divide.  The Mormons got right in under the wire with planet Kobold. 

What was the average intelligence of these mailmen to humanity herding goats in their side-jobs?  All these crumble-step languages of absent vowel Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek, German, English, Spanish; how do we even know these indisputable nouns and verbs even resemble the telephone game of what any one present ever heard if it ever occurred?  What about China, India, Peru?

But no, we are here committing genocides and murdering in your name to prove points that can not be proven.  We have a city in Italy prompting hard-line stances staunch with an escalation of commitment with a slipstream of criticism alienating people because the absentee landlord is letting the human constructs of sex, gender, race, orientation and wealth bastardize what was supposed to be Jesus’ message to begin with?  How much gold could be smelted in Vatican City?  How much of it was purchased on the backs of a tax break, slaves, or a crusade?

Catholic Church wealth war-lords banned lending from toilet-thrones for vigilante J.C.-assassin Jews to usurp Vatican-Christ’s usury laws.  Florentine first currency had a John-the-Baptist façade.  Interest, but let’s not say the world sodomized in bribe-contribution tributes spur the Renaissance to enrich the celibate illuminati for Jesus in gilded statutes and blood-murals.  Kiss the golden-cock ring of murky wealth buried in dirt basements for Solomon judgment.  Banish unforgiving servants.  Parable of talents over buried wealth, God condemns our deficient internal rate of return to afford our divine retirement 401k.  Murk the blur into Schedule B itemized deductions!

542

I am pissed that you are not here, that you will not give us some kind of hug; that I feel like I will live out this life here and die alone into nothingness.  Pascal’s wager has a down side.  It is the same as a loving soldier’s spouse spending the remainder of his days devoted to his assumed-fallen wife, only to discover her secret sins of infidelity, a second family and wrath on his own deathbed.  The assumptions of gender, the personal nature of unspoken faiths, they betray in the contrapuntal contraptions of Thomas and are cast like lots of bad seed for the crows.

I want to love you.  I want to believe in you.  Life is easier and more comfortable like that blanket believing that you exist.  It is more comfortable believing in a counterweight to atrocities and our individual pains.  I want to believe that Hitler and Gandhi have divergent eternities. 

I want to imagine our moral code is more than a social contract, but a down payment on our salvation.  The human yearning for justice in me gets giddy thinking about magical Christmas-land heaven.  As if in our lives we are purchasing a fragment of an amusement park ticket each day.  One Sunday we can have the whole document to pass the turnstile.  In heaven we can see Willy Wonka, Oz, and the Magic-Marker Jesus like a fulfilled social security nest-egg.

The trinity can perform in exalted glory on the seesaw of a human constructed justice to reward us with our missing limbs, refurbish our broken hearts and circumvent that damn freewill.  Freewill precluded you from answering our prayers like the syntax of opposing council’s legal arguments to promulgate your own Disneyland paradise of love, sex, and rock and roll for all the kids who obeyed your rules. 

The dichotomy between how ridiculous it feels to hope for indulgencies we were “supposed” to deny ourselves on Earth as a reward for pleasing you is froth with hypocrisy.  Why not melt all the guns and knowledge to make them? Why not give a heart attack to anyone in the process of murder with your will like a six-year-old squishing ants?  Why not put the cure for aids in a dandelion seed?  Why not infinity?  It all boomerangs back to me that we are here for something else.

543

I am lying in sheets wrapped up alone, starring at a treatment-less window to a night sky of countless stars and speckles of planets dotted with other primordial ooze developed and contemplating mirrored-thoughts.  These beings blessed with the proper concoction of oxygen and carbon feel closer to me than you are right now.

I am praying to be wrong.  I am praying for a renewal of faith in justice, in love, in hope in even the energy to be angry again.  I pray to not pray out of routine or Pavlovian dogma.  I pray to use elucidative and exegetical language to impress you into paying attention and then feel guilty later as a mandatory subcomponent of sanctimonious revelry. 

I pray because my parents pray and their parents pray and their parent’s prayed.  I pray to not disappoint them as if penitent to an absentee God for contemplating the avenue of atheism.  I pray for my daughter and son.  I pray to see God in all things as an interwoven web into the subtext of creation, that we are connected and undeniably interdependent.  In death we return to the nexus that is God. 

I pray that the trivial tragedies and joys of marriages, of cancer, of sporting events, of planes colliding into buildings, of lottery sequences, of Somali famine, of tsunami’s, of the Tamils and the Sinhalese, Darfur and Dachau are all negligible in comparison to the burgeoning in the returning to our place as part of you.  I pray that the paradigm of human eyes is obliterated by the consciousness of that which is greater than all of us.  I pray that we each can transcend this yearning for a rationale to conjoin in that which is beyond our human constructs.  I pray.

544

I am flawed, not saintly.  The father in me is grateful.  I am a vagabond, estrange me.  I am clawing for simple stark answers.  I am afraid to complain.  “Just keep your mouth shut and live your life son.”  My life preserver is cut loose.  My boots are weighted with interrogatories that can not be asked with a tongue.

I am the tin man anesthetized to the metronome kaleidoscope of emotions.  I am walking away from the Emerald City after chopping my enemies and melting that witch and seeing some wrinkled cantankerous asshole slink out from beyond the curtain.  You offer me a puppet kingdom in his funhouse-land instead of the heart I asked for.  I want love back.  Fuck this Winkie Country consolation prize.

I will walk that golden-brick or muddied-stick road for you axe in hand.  Just give me a task, a purpose a direction that comes from you and not some mysterious curtain with a flaming-green mitre-head.  Me, the girl in the silver bling-bling shoes, the stuffed-bellied straw man, the homosexual pussy cat, and the little hobbit dog could all have a place in this universe.  Not in some DXM poppy field of surrogate-matrix life, but we could have a real place leveled with and knowing the true consequence of fault. 

The cake is not a lie.  The inception was genuinely conceived by my own cerebral and cardiac sperm and egg conjoining.  The oxymoronic aphorism was my tardy recognition of your infinite doing.

545

I am exhausted.  I am barely over thirty.  I have lost my job, my wife, my child almost stripped from me.  Unnamed bodies lie dead.  I have been uprooted from your flood.  I am calling out.  The only life raft you gave me spun like an asp and tried to poison me after holding her dry in the mountain of my confidence. 

I have stood firm and replanted the roots of my faith in this rationalized existence out beyond thunder or Superdome only to see the nature of these constructions make me feel incompatible for all the love that would ever rationalize a sense of purpose to justify the wake of these waters wrapping at my door.

I am alone in this bedroom beckoning, exposed raw and making onlookers uncomfortable.  Pleading with you like a siren, come to my rocky isle and take this infection and vaccinate me from this crisis of faith.  Stir the vials and inject the syringe of explanations to bubble in like the space that fills the gap of air that would otherwise be infiltrating my veins like a bomb on track to my heart.

I do not want to see this explode.  I do not want to admit this holy war is over.  I do not want to think by dis-acknowledging you I am somehow allowing your Beelzebub, Iblis, Mephistopheles, Lucifer, Mara, Satan or Bob counterpart to declare victory over my eternal soul, “Wa ha Ha!!!” 

Such sacrilegious defiance would be tantamount to slitting my eternal throat on this Damocles pendulum of Occam’s razor.  The idea that neither you nor the devil have ever existed sits like a duh on my kitchen countertop starring at me.  Fuck you.  The devil is just the antithesis to a monotheistic paradigm for an “It’s all good new world.”  Thank you, Judaism! 

Egyptian pharaohs with supermarket-aisle deities demanded perfect forty-five degree angled pyramids facing east to capture the sun to have the pharaoh reborn from death each day.  There were no aliens, no divine reasoning to these architectural anomalies just slave labor, narcissism, and later union strikes in the form of plagues.  Moses was the first Jimmy Hoffa with raised victory hands like Nixon over a Watergate Amalek.  Men battle under banners for pensions funded in prayer, blood, and teamster dues.  It’s all related, either extreme infected with infallible answer-givers of authority besotted drunkards!

I do not want to believe in “pick your cereal box” faith.  I do not want to believe you do not exist just yet.  I shave every morning with Mr. O’s razor and the hairs grow back.  They continually break the surface into a field no matter how much trimming or slicing.  The roots of this conjecture erupt and you are nowhere to be seen or heard from except in books written by men who stared at goats. 

546

Maybe I could be one of those who purport to feel faith in you, I must worship you.  I must dedicate and open my carcass for your entry like a spiritual rape victim.  I must bend my asshole over for you to come visit me in the night, impregnating me without insertion and preserving the virgin birth of my faith.  I would be full with the ejaculation of your salvation with grandiose clarity like Mary.  I would feel your presence.  I too would have that glorious personal relationship with J.C.

I am so glad for this sign.  I can suffer contently.  My confusion has been solved.  The crisis is over.  I will never get to see my faithful family, my brothers and sisters again or the ghost of a wife.  The members of life will drown with my inquiries.  This would be my reward from a God finally coming clean, like a deadbeat parent showing up for college graduation.

Prodigal Jesus could return immune from recourse to the ramifications of his absence and finally get to speak for himself to say that nobody’s perfect, not even me.  We can stare under the rug for the additional explanation that would have been of infinite assistance to well-intentioned souls.  We barter on the meaninglessness of exposed purpose to neutralize freewill like a blanket gag-order. 

Our mouths are stuffed with this sadomasochistic ball bit that if we mules spit out we would invalidate the jury.  The gag is a specific name we read in some text and we shoved the words in there to shut ourselves up, to quit the task of searching.  The world is trillions of bodies locked in a warehouse, mouths gagged, with a label tattooed on our foreheads in a tumult of unending muffled clamor. 

Who is righteous?  Who has the right name?  The mumblers argue in an insipid prolix polemic foaming rabid with effusive prattle!  The real answer, the real issues never gets out.  It is all slathered in gagged camouflage!

The reticent do not need such idolatry as a name to sacrifice to their individual ego.  The meditative do not need the victory of assurance or the excursion of a miracle to quell a collective conclusion.  The few wander within themselves aware of the impertinence of physical distance; for distance like words is a human praxis.

The court could never arrive at an independent verdict in conclusion if our informed heads verbalized your one-to-one directions.  So we are stuck at this mistrial impasse with me in this bed with my eyes starring for you awaiting my court date.

I feel like one of trillions of orphans, contemplating everyday, to shave or not.  Should I feel the scruff?  Should I cross so much of this off as, to do or do not, to the simplest answer, to what is or what is not, to see the consequence of freewill in absolute? 

547

You are a God powerless to move the pendulum except in story books of miracles counted on and performed as one time shows in years ago.  Only in the pageantry of oral history could you confide in humanity to see miracles like modern-day stop signs.  Today we are bypassed by distracted drivers chatting on cell phones.  We see tragedy and death circling.  We hear political police sirens bereft of hope that this was the course of an accident.  Will you come out of your nowhere and reverse mortality like a number-two pencil eraser?  Would you allow a bystander's iPhone to record it all to go viral?

The officers could be there.  The witnesses could be in place to see your hand heal some boy just walking along the side of the street, someone’s child dying.  Lazarus estranged come back to us.  Coincidence could step aside for faith. 

I could find a place to hold you like a newborn infant in my arms.  I could see you again anew a miracle imbued and yet, I blow you off in dandelion petals like a lover who has wronged me.  I acknowledge that we are simians as infinitely alone as the cockroaches or the butterflies.  Evilness and holiness and right and wrong will exist even if you do not.  There is no blanket or pass card, winter is coming, but spring will follow, and I pray.

Continue to Chapter 19 part 1