When you read the Old Testament God is a whiny spoiled brat demanding that His toys give Him attention and follow His every rule, and if He's not happy with the way it turns out He will just flood it out and make new toys.
Then by the time of the New Testament, God is a teenager. He gets all angsty, comes to Earth as a dude with long hair, preaches about love and tolerance like any idealistic adolescent would, but at the same time He gets mad and starts knocking over the money-changer's tables. He curses a fig tree. Tantrums. Then his toys kill Him, acting out His teenage emo self-destructive fantasies.
Today God is an adult, all grown up, and he's finally realized that the only thing he can do with us is leave us alone and let us find our own path. That's how come God directly interfered in human affairs seemingly every five minutes in the Old Testament, then He came to Earth manifested as a human in the New Testament, and now no one has heard from him since. Except for the occasional odd-ball. Or schizophrenic.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
A Bonus Track: Pissing In The Stream Of Consciousness
The CEBP week 9 assignment had us writing a few pages of stream of consciousness and then remixing it. My heavily remixed -- and frankly, much better -- version can be found in Heroes And Hierophants, here as a historical oddity is the original, dated 3-1-9:
PISSING IN THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Original Mix)
Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness? I type so much slower than I think and by the time I have travelled a thought to its conclusion my fingers have begun to stumble over the keys and it all comes to a screeching halt, the train of thought has slammed on its brakes so I can fix the typo and begin again and then what? Where was I? I am lost and confused and don’t know what I was writing. Reread the beginning. Any ideas? Only that this whole thing is ridiculous. I hate stream of consciousness. Pause, hit pipe. I hate stream of consciousness. This is all a fraud anyway. I am not writing everything that goes through my head. Worse, I am editing it as I go along. Some would say, screw the typos, fix ‘em at the end. I can’t. The typos, they sing to me, siren little songs of woe and despair, they are like blinking red neon dots on the screen. I must fix the typos, they are like errors in the genetic code, bringing only monstrosity and death to the table. Do you understand what I am getting at here? I am trying the best I can to get through this assignment and it is going to be really difficult. I’d rather pontificate about something profound. “In the future we will all be silver shiny bodies of intelligent nanospores, a hive-mind Godling transforming the universe into the One Mind it already was, is now, and ever shall be. World without end.” “In the future we will taste the succulent karma-free shrimp and float in the space between outer space and cyberspace.” “In the future Dippin’ Dots will be called the Ice Cream Of The Present.” I can see the future, you know. It says so on my business card. That means it’s true! I love to be profound. But instead I am writing stream of consciousness, excluding this sentence which I went back and inserted later to express a thought I had but forgot to write down. No doubt while fixing a typo. Also, I am multitasking. “No. But I thought I remembered seeing it somewhere.” I just said that in a chat with a friend. What chat? What friend? Only time will tell and if you know time you realize that since time is an abstract concept it is incapable of verbal communication. So there! Also, time is an illusion. Which means that when I go back and edit this in the future, it will really be the present I am writing of now. Which means there is no editing at all. All writing is stream of consciousness, written out four-dimensionally and looping back in over itself. Everything is happening nowhere all at one. It’s a metaphor for God, clumsy words prefiguring the transcendent deity that no words can speak of. But is behind every syllable.
Pause. Start over. I just deleted an entire line of text. Is that stream of consciousness? My stream said to edit over the last line and I followed it and did. A technicality? Of course. I love technicalities. Live my life based on them. Only live at all because of a technicality here or there. Pause. Start over. “Write a two-page story where Peter Gabriel is being tortured and murdered.” I wrote stream of consciousness once. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. This was during a period I called my Mad Poet Period. I was doing a lot of nitrous oxide at the time. I was also smoking a bit of PCP. Not nearly enough, actually. I remember this one night I had smoked dust and I was watching A Fistful Of Dollars and I was imagining these lizard-like beings rising out of the white mud and building cities. I guess you had to be there. So, weird drugs, stream of consciousness, Mad Poet Period. It’s all in my book. For sale wherever those sorts of thing are sold. And also from the trunk of my car. Shameless plug. Filler space. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. Is this what you’re hoping for? To open up the door to randomness and let God walk through? I am anti-randomness. I am editing as I type. I am crafting the sentence three from now as I type this one. I backspace over mis-steps and pull them from their space in time. Time is an illusion. I would edit the Akashic Records if I had the time. But time is an illusion. Repetition. Hypnotism. You are getting sleepy. The sound of the teakettle is pure Americana. I don’t even know why I typed that. I had a story once I started and it began with that line. Then my hard drive crashed. I lost it. It was unfinished and never had its chance to shine and now it’s as if it never was. No trace. But I remember that line. Like 9-11. Never forget.
Backspace, backspace, return. I already decided how I am going to end this piece. I have the perfect ending line. Does that mean I can’t use it? It’s not stream of consciousness. I mean, it was just now when I thought of it, but it has already stripped into the pre-manufactured as I write about it now. By the end it will be schemed, planned, pre-meditated. Hatched. So should I give up a great ending because I thought of it before the end? Half the time I come up with the ending line before I write the essay. I wrote this essay about how they’re tearing the woods down in my backyard and I came up with the last line a full day before I wrote the rest of it down. A metaphor for God, the omega point that casts shadows backwards in time and those shadows are us. I am a metaphor. What’s the point of an ending line when this is to be mixed up anyway? The point is the point of being a craftsman at all. I am writing this now. It must be able to stand up on its own. Stream of consciousness or no.
I started writing this yesterday. Not this, but an attempt at the same thing. I got interrupted, I had to put it down. By the time I picked it back up I was too far removed from that stream of consciousness – you might say I had detoured down a tributary and been dumped back in the great untamed ocean of my mind. Pause to look up the word tributary. Does it mean what I think it means? Close enough. So today I sat down, angrily, and began typing. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness?
Period.
PISSING IN THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Original Mix)
Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness? I type so much slower than I think and by the time I have travelled a thought to its conclusion my fingers have begun to stumble over the keys and it all comes to a screeching halt, the train of thought has slammed on its brakes so I can fix the typo and begin again and then what? Where was I? I am lost and confused and don’t know what I was writing. Reread the beginning. Any ideas? Only that this whole thing is ridiculous. I hate stream of consciousness. Pause, hit pipe. I hate stream of consciousness. This is all a fraud anyway. I am not writing everything that goes through my head. Worse, I am editing it as I go along. Some would say, screw the typos, fix ‘em at the end. I can’t. The typos, they sing to me, siren little songs of woe and despair, they are like blinking red neon dots on the screen. I must fix the typos, they are like errors in the genetic code, bringing only monstrosity and death to the table. Do you understand what I am getting at here? I am trying the best I can to get through this assignment and it is going to be really difficult. I’d rather pontificate about something profound. “In the future we will all be silver shiny bodies of intelligent nanospores, a hive-mind Godling transforming the universe into the One Mind it already was, is now, and ever shall be. World without end.” “In the future we will taste the succulent karma-free shrimp and float in the space between outer space and cyberspace.” “In the future Dippin’ Dots will be called the Ice Cream Of The Present.” I can see the future, you know. It says so on my business card. That means it’s true! I love to be profound. But instead I am writing stream of consciousness, excluding this sentence which I went back and inserted later to express a thought I had but forgot to write down. No doubt while fixing a typo. Also, I am multitasking. “No. But I thought I remembered seeing it somewhere.” I just said that in a chat with a friend. What chat? What friend? Only time will tell and if you know time you realize that since time is an abstract concept it is incapable of verbal communication. So there! Also, time is an illusion. Which means that when I go back and edit this in the future, it will really be the present I am writing of now. Which means there is no editing at all. All writing is stream of consciousness, written out four-dimensionally and looping back in over itself. Everything is happening nowhere all at one. It’s a metaphor for God, clumsy words prefiguring the transcendent deity that no words can speak of. But is behind every syllable.
Pause. Start over. I just deleted an entire line of text. Is that stream of consciousness? My stream said to edit over the last line and I followed it and did. A technicality? Of course. I love technicalities. Live my life based on them. Only live at all because of a technicality here or there. Pause. Start over. “Write a two-page story where Peter Gabriel is being tortured and murdered.” I wrote stream of consciousness once. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. This was during a period I called my Mad Poet Period. I was doing a lot of nitrous oxide at the time. I was also smoking a bit of PCP. Not nearly enough, actually. I remember this one night I had smoked dust and I was watching A Fistful Of Dollars and I was imagining these lizard-like beings rising out of the white mud and building cities. I guess you had to be there. So, weird drugs, stream of consciousness, Mad Poet Period. It’s all in my book. For sale wherever those sorts of thing are sold. And also from the trunk of my car. Shameless plug. Filler space. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. Is this what you’re hoping for? To open up the door to randomness and let God walk through? I am anti-randomness. I am editing as I type. I am crafting the sentence three from now as I type this one. I backspace over mis-steps and pull them from their space in time. Time is an illusion. I would edit the Akashic Records if I had the time. But time is an illusion. Repetition. Hypnotism. You are getting sleepy. The sound of the teakettle is pure Americana. I don’t even know why I typed that. I had a story once I started and it began with that line. Then my hard drive crashed. I lost it. It was unfinished and never had its chance to shine and now it’s as if it never was. No trace. But I remember that line. Like 9-11. Never forget.
Backspace, backspace, return. I already decided how I am going to end this piece. I have the perfect ending line. Does that mean I can’t use it? It’s not stream of consciousness. I mean, it was just now when I thought of it, but it has already stripped into the pre-manufactured as I write about it now. By the end it will be schemed, planned, pre-meditated. Hatched. So should I give up a great ending because I thought of it before the end? Half the time I come up with the ending line before I write the essay. I wrote this essay about how they’re tearing the woods down in my backyard and I came up with the last line a full day before I wrote the rest of it down. A metaphor for God, the omega point that casts shadows backwards in time and those shadows are us. I am a metaphor. What’s the point of an ending line when this is to be mixed up anyway? The point is the point of being a craftsman at all. I am writing this now. It must be able to stand up on its own. Stream of consciousness or no.
I started writing this yesterday. Not this, but an attempt at the same thing. I got interrupted, I had to put it down. By the time I picked it back up I was too far removed from that stream of consciousness – you might say I had detoured down a tributary and been dumped back in the great untamed ocean of my mind. Pause to look up the word tributary. Does it mean what I think it means? Close enough. So today I sat down, angrily, and began typing. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness?
Period.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The Ground Zero Mosque Thing, or, "Wait, No, Really?"
- Adrian Veidt
Okay. So let me make sure I understand this now. I'm a little slow on the uptake and I try not to pay attention to the news because it's a bit like being trapped in the primate house at the zoo. So bear with me as I recreate the facts here. Apparently, like ten years ago, certain elements, certain people who proclaimed to follow a specific religion, committed a devastating terrorist attack in New York City. I think maybe it happened in October or something? September? I'm a little hazy on the details. Now today, or recently rather, or whatever, some people that follow that same specific religion want to set up a place of worship two blocks away from where this attack happened. And there's some sort of controversy about this. Do I have the facts right? Good. So now we leave the world of facts and enter the world of opinions. And in my opinion this whole thing is ridiculous. No, I take that back. An elephant fucking a dachshund is ridiculous. I don't know what the fuck this is.
When I sat down to write this I was going to get all eloquent and explain in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington Jimmy Stewart style why this is the dumbest fucking controversy EVARRRR but the fact is I don't have the patience or the attention span, so instead here is another classic numbered list of bullet points.
- "Muslim" does not equal "terrorist."
Follow me through this cipher, folks. Same way "Christian" does not equal "Inquisitioner."Same way "American" does not equal "Stupid fat fuck." Yes, there have been Muslim terrorists. Bad scene. Don't approve. There have also been non-Muslim terrorists. Which brings us to number two...
- Timothy McVeigh was a Catholic
But if they were putting a cathedral a block away from the Alfred P. Murrah building, these same assholes talking about how "insensitive" and "bad taste" this mosque is wouldn't be making one fucking peep. Almost like the whole thing is a smokescreen for some stupid American fat fucks to display their racism and xenophobia without overtly branding themselves as stupid fat racist fucks.
- The First Amendment
Guarantees the right to worship. There is no asterisk after "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" that says "unless it's the same religion some terrorists claimed to follow." And do you know who wrote the First Amendment? The Founding Fathers. It is central to American values, so central to American values that you really can't have the one without the other. It'd be like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no bread. If you do not like the First Amendment, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY COUNTRY. If you want to live somewhere where there's no state-protected freedom of worship, maybe move to Iran, you unAmerican piece of shit.
- George W Bush said that the terrorists hate our freedoms.
So if you hate our freedoms, you're a terrorist. Q.E.D.
- I don't even understand why we have to waste our time on this.
I don't. Seriously. There are people dying out there. There are people starving, people suffering from illnesses that haven't been cured yet, people suffering from illnesses that could be cured but they can't afford it. People are in prison unjustly. People are being raped. People are being robbed. ACTUAL shit that ACTUALLY causes people to ACTUALLY suffer ACTUAL loss. And we're worried about whether or not a mosque is going to be "sensitive" or not?
- History is going to mock us for this shit.
Remember when we studied the Salem witch trials, or "Irish Need Not Apply," or the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II? We look back at that kind of stuff and we shake our heads. It's hard to believe people back then could be so narrow-minded, so trapped in their own tiny flatland world-views, so constrained by their own petty prejudices and biases. THIS IS EXACTLY HOW FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL LOOK AT THIS. Me, always unfashionably ahead of my time, I already look at it that way now.
- Wait, no... seriously?
What the fuck does a mosque have to do with 9-11? Even if it IS insensitive, which I dispute, so the fuck what? Who gave you the right to go through life without having your feelings hurt or your sensibilities offended? Because believe me, if we were going to suspend Constitutional rights based on what I find offensive or insensitive, most of you would be spending the rest of your life in prison. But in a sane and just society, it takes a lot more than personal whim, even the personal whim of the majority, to upset the basic rule of law. So basically if you disagree fuck off and die.
- Newt Gingrich is a fucking moron.
I find it amazing that I should even have to point that out in this day and age. I find it amazing that Newt Gingrich is even still around or that people pay him any mind at all. But Newt Gingrich is a fucking moron. I know dude was like a college professor and he wrote some really awful novels so maybe he's not a retard but he is definitely a moron. I have an article here where he says that building a mosque by Ground Zero "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.” Except that it's actually nothing like that at all. You fucking moron. See, the Nazis were a specific group of people that specifically brought about the Holocaust. Muslims are a wide group of people, of all kinds, around the world -- some of whom specifically brought about the World Trade Center attacks. (I will avoid any Loose Change style debate on this point for the time being.) So really the proper analogy, Newt -- and seriously, what the fuck kind of name is Newt anyway? It's a lizard! -- would be like opening up a bratwurst stand next to the Holocaust Museum. Get it? You fucking moron? Because not all Germans are Nazis, and not all Muslims are terrorists. Note that I avoid the "You automatically lose the debate when you bring up the Nazis" argument, because....
- I'm Bringing Up The Nazis
Know who else didn't approve of free religious worship? I'm just saying.
- The Other Mosque
Did you know there's another mosque within spitting distance of Ground Zero? Been there since the seventies. Been there since before the World Trade Center was even put up in the first place, let alone knocked down. Now that's neither here nor there, the point is, there's been a mosque real close to the World Trade Center this whole time, and not one of you stupid fat fucks noticed or cared or worried about its "sensitivity" or whatever. So even if the argument made any sense (which it doesn't) it still wouldn't make any sense because THERE'S BEEN A MOSQUE IN THE AREA THE WHOLE TIME and no one made a big deal about it. Know why the rest of the world stereotypes Americans as a bunch of rude and ignorant fat-asses? BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT WE ARE. Or rather, what you are. I barely even consider myself an American at this point.
- Stop the world, I want to get off
Instead of building a mosque next to Ground Zero, let's build a big space ship instead. Actually, it doesn't need to be that big. It really only needs to carry me. I am willing to concede this world to the rest of you stupid fat fucks. I can roam around the galaxy in search of higher intelligence, and you guys can call me when the Dark Ages are over. I'll be with Bill Hicks, waiting at the finish line. Chirp, chirp.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Parents lie, teachers lie, but Uncle Noelie will never lie to you.
Kids:
Adults will tell you that lying is wrong. They will probably even chastise and/or punish you for lying if you are dumb enough to get caught at it. But, as you may already know, adults lie to you all the time. Ever hear the one about the fat man in the red suit at the North Pole? Or the giant bunny with the basket of chocolate eggs? Odds are, yes. So you might be feeling a bit confused when you realize that adults are lying all the time. You might think that they are awful hypocrites who aren't fit to be the authority figures they have imposed themselves as. The truth is, you'd be right. The truth is, lying isn't wrong. Lying is a crucial part of adult life. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. All the time. The only reason adults don't want you to lie is because allowing that would threaten their monopoly on falsehood.
Adults will tell you that lying is wrong. They will probably even chastise and/or punish you for lying if you are dumb enough to get caught at it. But, as you may already know, adults lie to you all the time. Ever hear the one about the fat man in the red suit at the North Pole? Or the giant bunny with the basket of chocolate eggs? Odds are, yes. So you might be feeling a bit confused when you realize that adults are lying all the time. You might think that they are awful hypocrites who aren't fit to be the authority figures they have imposed themselves as. The truth is, you'd be right. The truth is, lying isn't wrong. Lying is a crucial part of adult life. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. All the time. The only reason adults don't want you to lie is because allowing that would threaten their monopoly on falsehood.
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