Oh man I have got to TELL someone about how gosh darned funny God is. No really, spare yourself a minute out of your day and read this one. It really will be pretty short.
So, I was talking to God the other day, and I says,
“God. Hey God. Buddy! Why don’t you tell me why no one sees things the way I see things? Why wouldn’t you just let me in on a little secret about why so many other people just don’t see things the way I see them? Why do I have to be the one everyone points to and says,
‘Look at that one, Sally. That one is more cross-eyed than the others. That one is the dumbest of the dumb. He couldn’t figure things out if his LIFE depended on it. You stick that one in a dungeon and you’d only have to wait a week before he’ll be shriveled up in a corner crying for his mommy just because he couldn’t have a daily Coke from McDonald’s.’
God why do *I* have to be the dumbest? You knew gosh darned good and well that I always told you I wanted to be *the smartest of the smart.* Goll durn, judas priest God. Smartest of the smart. Not dumbest of the dumb God. Why couldn’t you just choose someone else to be that dumb. Not me God. Not that one.
Smartest of the smart, God. That’s what I told you. That. Is. What. I. Told. You. Smart, God. Not dumb. That’s what I asked for. Smart.
Now look what I “got.”
I got a comfortable but a bit…well, it’s a bit ‘modest’…house. In the suburbs of a small town in a comfortable place in New York. I got one Tesla that doesn’t work, I got one I can’t sell and I’m driving a 2015 Nissan Leaf that my mother gave me.
Oh yeah, and I got a forty something guy living with me who’s nice enough, but…well, let’s just say his ‘political leanings’ and mine don’t exactly ‘mesh’ in a way that we can easily talk about much without each thinking he’s talking straight over the head of the other.
That’s all I got, God. I got an ex wife, a number of ex girlfriends who are variously in the process of despising me, I have two brothers who don’t have a habit of calling me and asking for advice on life or this and that thing. We don’t hash things out or chat about current events much, but I guess they have their lives and I have mine.
They could always ask me for recipes if they wanted to. Ask me about ways of doing stuff or go fishing or something. I’m a wonderful cook — especially my vegan chili — though I’ll concede for the record that I have lately been practicing the art of letting it be alright with me that this society continues to be the sort of society which facilitates the process of this species grinding the life out of all the other species as if we can’t tell the difference between a balance beam and a beam in the eye. We could flip that one right on its head pronto if it wanted to.
I don’t mean to just keep supporting that, God. Meat/murder. There are just so many gosh darn things to pay attention to.
Anyhow…wait, how’d you get me off on that tangent, God? You think that’s funny just flipping me on the noggin? Like I’m following you for this this this and this and then all of a sudden I’m lost and you’re grinning.
Don’t do me like that, God. I know you can do whatever you like and stuff but don’t go ‘ricocheting’ around in my head like Tinkerbelle on a massive case of steroids. I pay attention! I do! I really do!
Better than most people around me I pay attention, God.
I’d swear I do. Just as much. Well maybe even a little bit more attention. I wasn’t going to miss out on anything for lack of paying attention, God, I can tell you that much.
Did it again I see. Did it again like my skills at the darn keyboard were getting better as I got older and not worse. I was trying to tell you what I wished for God.
Can’t you see that? [author’s note: What are you, dull God?]
I wished to be SMARTEST. Not dumbest God. And you promptly sicced the wolves of stupidity on me until I ran away cowering in fear of anyone who had more than a high school diploma. I wasn’t ever going to bargue [this is a portmanteau of the words bark and argue. In a moment we will look into how fascinating this new ‘jewel’ of insight is — in the chandelier of all the glorious things human beings know. As Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experiences.]
No I wasn’t going to bark my head off at people like they didn’t have a clue in the world [even though I was pretty sure that they pretty much didn’t.] I wasn’t the kind of guy who would
bark at you
argue with you
laugh *at* you
ridicule you
I never did those things, or at least I tried pretty hard to avoid doing them when I remembered to stop. I didn’t
think I disagreed with someone and then
move immediately — as if by my first course of action —
to the harshest possible view I could take of them
so as to concoct them in my mind to be some kind of
villain from another planet.
That wasn’t my bag, God, you know that wasn’t my bag.
I didn’t carry a bag like that onto this little tiny school bus of a planet and then start waving it around so everyone could have a pet of the lovely black snake I found. I wasn’t into hurting people or thinking it was funny to risk hurting them by doing some kind of moronic stunt with a skateboard over their heads while they were sunbathing, God. You know I never did any of those stupidest of stupid tricks. You know I never did nuthing to nobody
with the intention of hurtin’ em God. Please, man, you gotta believe me. I didn’t try to hurt anyone. NO I NEVER DID. Wait, lemme check [not the sharpest tool in the shed, this kid, as he goes to God with his weekly grocery list of things he needed — forgetting, of course, that he had to do his homework before he went to talk to God.]
Well I did play rugby. Yes I did. And yes I did play it pretty hard. I played as hard as I could, really, because that was the only thing that ever occurred to me:
You just played as hard as you could. You played as hard as you could and for as long as you could until playtime was over, and then you went and did your chores and such. But while you were playing, you played fair.
You played fair because you knew gosh darn good and well what playing fair meant. You knew that it meant you couldn’t cheat anyone whether you were dealing cards to them or dealing with them on some other basis. You didn’t cheat them.
You didn’t look at their cards, you didn’t do that ‘cross boarding’ stuff like in Euchre and you stood up good and tall if someone asked you how you had done in whatever dealings you had had with some other person or persons. You consistently said,
“Well, I did the best I could. I contributed to them as much as I could and tried to figure out how their well being and mine could both be increased at the same time, if possible. It always so regularly seemed so much better to work together and decide together what you wanted to work on.”
The world needs a lot more sailors than it needs captains, of that much I can assure you.
Yep. Did it to me again. Never can tell with God. Never can tell when you’re typing what you thinking you’re typing. You know, on your own and that it isn’t somehow him in the depths of your mind pulling some strings to get you to do what He and only He wants with you.
You never know whether God forced you to do it. You do what you do.
You keep looking around and you don’t see God because he’s everywhere always and simultaneously, and it’s like you can’t ‘catch up’ the focus of your eyes on the target — the thing you’re trying to look for.
God, obviously. You look for him here. Nope, don’t see him. Look for him over there. Nope. No where to be found. [Insert spot of the world] Nope. There is NO WAY God is over there, because if he were he would have done something about it.
Possibly to build up within those people the courage to believe that they really could live together in peace with one another. Like, they weren’t just capable of it, but that they’d collectively set their minds on doing it.
It really was NOT that hard. This puzzle that I did. With my head, I mean. The puzzle I did was not complicated. It was basically a game of
ridiculously fast
Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. I mean it, keep your eye on it, because you’re going to miss it. Keep your eye on it. Don’t lose it. Know, really realize that you are trying to direct your consciousness…your whole consciousness into every fleck of time you have available to you.
You don’t just pay attention. You pay attention. You do it like an autistic kid does whatever thing he or she is doing. You do it ‘hyper’ focus style.
To the millionth power pong is what it is. Elon knows this. Hi there, Elon. Surprise surprise. It is me here.
Every second that you aren’t paying attention to what the universe WANTS you to do is a second that THE UNIVERSE is less. Do you really get that?
Every single second you do not do ‘what the universe wants you to do’ the UNIVERSE becomes less just so you can be more. That’s like saying, “Hey universe, it’s your tough luck buddy because my life is MY life. Not yours. I’ll do what I like, with my time and my ‘stuff’ universe you aren’t telling [a guy like me] what to do.
Not by YOUR rules I won’t do it.
heh. Hilarious one, God. Can I print that?
Yeah, like you’d ever get some complete simpleton to bungle over to his computer and write this chapter of civilization’s War And Peace into a 15 minute piece of American English literature.
The Americans won the second space race? Are you kidding? Those loudmouths?
You did? How’s you do that, God? It’s complicated? That’s all you can tell me is that it’s complicated? Seriously?
They are going to ask me how I know all of this stuff.
Have you no mercy? [!!]
Good lord everyone wanted a speech. Ok, here it is. My speech.
I wanted to be smartest. God didn’t exactly listen. He just threw me into an evolutionary washing machine somehow attached to a vacuum cleaner.
Someday I’ll get around to telling how that happened. For now, suffice to say I would like to live in Peace. Just like everyone else.
I’m obviously talking about the more serious kind, but I think it’s achievable. We *cannot* be too dull-witted as not be able to figure out how to get along with one another. It is almost…well, I think it’s almost mathematically impossible, in a manner of speaking.
I want to take the pinch of stardust that I’ve been given and make sure the grains that make up me get to travel just as far across or deep beneath any conceivable horizon. I want it to intermingle with the other bits around me and make some kind of beautiful music or art. I like writing really; it’s the best of all things.
This time is only so brief; I want to enjoy things and carouse with my friends and soak this world into our pores like we want it to be a part of us as we are of it. I want to Feng Shui my home and have guests from far off places and visit them in their homes too.
I don’t want to live forever…living forever just gets you to be lazy and not focused on drinking up the world and the vibrant people around you.
Look, guys, we don’t want to live forever.
We need to be okay with being around for a few trillion years or so, like star faring sailors on the deck of a titanium reinforced starship looking to start some trouble with the nefarious aliens from Planet Dodge in Triangulum.
Being around forever you’d have to endure people over and over telling you the story of how you used to fish and swim with Anna Bruno. How you knew and loved Casey Cadile like she was an entirely different planet in this solar system. Ha ha. People talk about it.
They really do. They talk about it. How much something means.
They say,
“Oh, this means the world to me. It means the world to me, and I couldn’t possible repay you for the kindness you’ve shown me. And others. I know you’ve helped others.”
They say things like, “This is important. I’m going to get to this because it’s important. This can’t wait until a week from Tuesday. World Peace starts today, the ninth of January, 2024 and I don’t have to doubt it because it is already happening.
This IS the World finally cresting the hill whereupon every single last one of the people living today will know they lived to experience it.
In other words, the people, certainly by the time my Steelers have emerged victorious as the rightful leaders of the NFL’s band of merry stallions…
Aside:
Those guys actually get off on bringing smiles to the faces of their fans and (most of the time) playing fair. They’re a kind of “world’s current” force of “how to do things” leaders. There was one who no one will ever forget.
There was Barry Sanders.
There was Barry Sanders and if you had any sense in your head whatsoever you were cheering for that guy to win.
You were cheering for that guy to win. You were cheering for that guy to win just as surely as you wanted your brother to cheer for you to win.
You wanted Barry Sanders to win. You did. You saw him politely hand the ball over to the ref and behave just exactly as though “I’ve been here before. I know what a touchdown is. I don’t need to go cheering on myself about it because I know what this feels like. I’ve won before. I’ve won once or twice and I don’t need to go
rubbing anyone’s noses in it. Like nah ha too bad for you! I win again. I mean, really. I win again! You keep betting against me and you’re going to wind up in foreclosure.
That includes you, Google. And you, Meta. If you think you’re going to invent AGI before I get done inventing it you can keep right on dreaming because that just is not going to work and if you know anything at all about your math you will be putting your best mathematicians on determining whether I know or don’t know as much as it sure seems apparent I do.
You better stand down any ‘AI’ arms race and you better politely inform your counterparts in China, Russia, Israel, and Siam [read: everyone else] that we ain’t playing that game on this planet now that a new
Force for good
Has somehow ‘arrived’ on this planet, because one has arrived. Or arisen. Or materialized. Or whatever you’d like to call it because I’m real. I am NOT just going away. You can keep thinking what you thought about me in the past it’s your right but don’t think I’m not going to make good and certain you’re riding the straight and narrow I got news for you.
Better straighten up and fly right like my father used to say to me. He said it and even if he says he didn’t say it it is not because his memory is somehow gone and mine isn’t. It’s because I paraphrased him in five words, at least I paraphrased what I took to be his philosophy about what ‘straighten up’ and ‘fly right’ actually meant.
Straighten up and fly right, Brian Kent. Get your head out of the clouds, pay attention. People could get hurt if you keep goofing around with things. You don’t know how things work. You can’t just climb up into a combine and go into an apple orchard thinking you’re going to collect all the apples. You don’t even know how to fly a plane. You wanted to learn scuba and stuff, but those days seem past. Probably not this lifetime.
Fly right. Don’t just do as many curlicues of thought in your writing as possible so as to have them catch their cashmere sweater on the hinge of the barn while you’re chasing them into the hayloft to have a good time with them.
I have fun with people. Sure I do. I’m just like anyone else. I like a good joke once in a while.
But now that I’ve woken my ass up out of this million mile slumber I’ve been in…now that I’m not just a cow hurtling from one city to another cruelly caught in the “pillage” of one species of another species. To take all the moments those star shining consciousnesses have and just spread all them out on a table — to gobble up every last moment of joy they might experience while they’re alive.
These people. These…humans. We really should just mesmerize the lot of them. Loot all their pockets while they’re not looking and then go to another planet.
Then they’ll wake up the next morning and everything will be gone because they didn’t do what all the signs and the signals and the ‘smarter’ of the people told them they ought to do.
In a blink of an eye, it’s gone. You don’t ‘get it’ as a single human observer looking at this neat little tiny planet in your pitifully small 80 year life span, but if this civilization fades…heaven forbid if it actually dies…if this civilization fades?
This civilization doesn’t have to fade even just a little bit in the direction of “nope, that’s just not the best it could have done. It could have done better that that. It could have done better than that and it could have done it faster
doesn’t have to fade even a little tiny bit from what it could have accomplished had it had its head screwed on straight when it needed to.
In a blink of an eye and could be gone. With all of us not exactly “left wondering where it went.” We can see where ‘it went.’
We can see where it’s going if we don’t straighten up and fly right. At least *I* can. Maybe you can’t, fine, but I can. Get out of the way if you’re going to screw things up for others. That’s just plain the rule.
if only I would stop writing.
Then give this to you.
Tell you to call your nearest two friends and have them call their nearest two until what I am telling you is happening
IS HAPPENING. TODAY.
Read the other things I’ve written, if you like, and remember: if they don’t make sense you haven’t tried hard enough to understand them.
Read the other things and tell your friends. Right now. Tweet them.
Last chuckle: Read them and weep, folks. God dealt the cards and I happened to get the straight flush.
Which means no one ever gets to “flush my words” down the toilet ever again. It’s like, well, now it’s almost “against the law.”
lol
yep. Sin E. Star. Everyone’s favorite rugby player. <twink>
