The Gospel According to Gotchya

Last night at work I petitioned Glen, the bartender, to make a list of his five favorite comedy films of all time. This is a game we play to pass the time during the slow hours of the early morning; we take turns naming categories and then after a few minutes compare our respective selections. In this case my list looked like this:


Monty Python’s Life of Brian


Year One


Idiocracy


Dodge Ball


Napolean Dynamite


But when I approached Glen with my results I saw he was conversing with a customer and in the briefest of moments realized the topic had to do with the Son of God. The customer used the expression, “his only begotten son.” And unable as I was to restrain myself, I blurted out the text in which that phrase appears , John 3:16. The fellow acknowledged this but then emphasized the difference between this reference and the one in Genesis that mentions the pluralized “sons of God.”


“Oh, you mean in chapter 6 where it says that the sons of God knew the daughters of men!” I exclaimed. This chapter fascinates me personally inasmuch as mythology has dubbed the offspring of these copulations as the nephilim. Interpretations vary regarding all of these characters… some have the sons of God being angels… some have the offspring being giants… and in my own epic novel (a work in progress) I have the daughters of men being vampiresses.


The fellow seemed slightly unsure about what I was saying… possibly disconcerted that I had twice cited the texts he was borrowing from… but I was just getting started… I went on to contribute a third scripture in which a son of God was mentioned… this time having to do with the story of Daniel in which his three appellatively famous friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were unharmed in the fiery furnace and the Babylonian King descried a fourth person resembling the Son of God.


Then I asked our customer if he was a Trinitarian. He said no, he was just a Christian. Not a Baptist or a Methodist or anything like that. I explained that Trinitarianism is not a denomination, but rather a theological philosophy. “Do you believe in the Trinity?” I asked and he confirmed that he certainly did. “Most Christians do” I reassured him.


This is a topic with which I am somewhat familiar mostly because my father is of the radical persuasion that the concept of the Trinity is an invention of Satan to corrupt the faithful into believing in a confused version of God. Whereas there is only one true God, Trinitarians, the argument goes, kind of believe that the Holy Spirit is God too and that Jesus is God along with God the Father. It occurred to me that this customer may have been pondering just such a debate with his attention to the Son and/or sons of God.


Having shown off that much I was obliged to attend to some of the responsibilities in the poker room for which I am employed, but when I came back to the bar where the conversationalists were still engaged, Glen said the gentleman had a question for me which turned out to be this, “Why did you read the Bible if you don’t believe in it?” Apparently Glen had apprised the customer in my absence of my skepticism toward religion. And I was happy to answer, “I believed in it when I read it. I began when I was seven years old and finished when I was 14. I didn’t quit believing until I was 17.


And this is where the discussion became blog~worthy in my opinion. Usually a person would have followed up by asking what happened when I was 17 to influence such a drastic change. But instead this fellow inquired if I had read Nietzsche which I hadn’t, but of course I blurted out what little I did know about him… something about the super man and something about “Thus spake Zarathustra.” But my audience was not impressed in the least and exhorted me to read Nietzsche, “He was an atheist, you know.”


“Was he a Nihilist?” I asked innocently.


“No, he was a German philosopher” I was told. “Of course, he went insane.”


This is when it became clear to me why our customer had no interest in why I’d become an atheist myself. He already had a perfect conclusion to our argument… the only point he wished to make was that a famous atheist had gone insane. By extension I imagine it’s fairly safe to assume I shall meet with a similar fate. I wouldn’t be surprised if studies support the notion that nearly every case of insanity on record probably began with someone questioning God’s existence (sarcasm).


This fellow upon learning of my deficiency in faith, had pretty much no inclination to witness to me with Christian love or kindness. The prospect of dialogically ambushing me with this loaded feint of recommending a notorious atheist was far more tempting for him than any sincere demonstration of Christianity could ever have been.


His final parting shot was the remark that “they love Nietzsche in all those atheist colleges.” What atheist colleges? What constitutes an atheist college? Is it a college for atheists? A college run by atheists? A college featuring a board of trustees the majority of which profess atheism? Is it at all possible that there really isn’t any such thing as an atheist college in the United States?


Any way… the communication between us, while amusing, was not especially worthwhile. Here he was supposing… almost hoping that I’d based my skepticism upon Nietzshe whose writings I am basically unacquainted with, while I think I had provided a far more relevant indication that my doubts about God have more to do with the Bible than any other literary feat.

Related links:

Does God Have Hormones?

How I became an Atheist

Destination: Life

Yesterday I watched A Few Good Men again and it kind of caught me by surprise to realize it is now 19 years since the movie was first released.  It got me to thinking about the way life passes by seemingly with increasing velocity. 

My reflection took me back to a summer afternoon in North Carolina 1983.  We had been to the beach with the Skeltons, close family friends.  On the way back we kids rode in the back of a pickup truck and enjoyed the thrill of warm wind rushing past us as we sped along the roads and highways.  And for some reason my mind latched onto the concern that it was taking me entirely too long to grow up.  When you're twelve years old it takes forever to become thirteen.

So today I did a little math.  If you dismiss the first three years of my life as being irrelevant because I can hardly remember them... then at age twelve, a year constituted about 11% of my life.  But now at age 40 a year constitutes about 3% of my life.  That's why a year seems so long when you're a kid and so short when you're an adult.  In 1983 I could remember celebrating eight birthdays.... now I've forgotten about 20 or 25 of them.

How many times has someone told me they've been married for 40 years and I've exclaimed, "Wow, I haven't even been alive that long!"  Not so anymore.  Now I have been alive that long.  I now have a fairly decent grasp on how much time must elapse for 40 years of life to be recorded.
So on I walked pondering life and the rapidity of its consumption, as it were.  And I asked myself... should I be driving instead?  I mean if life is so short... I could get where I'm going much sooner if I drove.  But that begs the question what is more important... my destination?  Or the manner in which I get there?  Because today I was going to my favorite Thai restaurant in order to devour some tasty fried rice with tofu and to read from a couple books, Ulysses and Outlander, but it was a nice day and I wanted to enjoy it... so I went on foot.

I wonder if I'll eventually reach the point where I panic so much about the limitations to life, that I'll actually drive more often and walk less so as to save time.  Preserving more time to do whatever I plan to do when I get wherever I'm going.  And it occurs to me I might ought to upgrade the things I'm planning to do at the other end of my traversings.  Beftter to write a book when I get there than to read one.

Should Anyone Ever Wonder

Sandwich in hand I went outdoors and around the corner of the house, heading for a big stack of lumber recently deposited in the driveway.  While the purpose for this lumber eludes memory, it certainly promised an excellent location for eating sandwiches, but then something effectively changed my mind.  A buzzing bee spastically harassed me and threatened the tenuous balance of the precious sandwich I meant to protect.  I deftly executed an about face and returned hastily to the safety of the indoors.

Why do I remember the bee?  How many bees have lived and died since that day in 1974 when I was little more than three years old?  And yet this one is immortalized, though nameless, in these opening lines of my autobiblography (how carefully that word was just invented).  I was infant.  I’m guessing the bee was even younger.  But today I turn 40.  Bear with me while, for the sake of acclimation, I say that again.  Today I turn 40.  Almost one third of the way to my goal, January 29^th, 2092 at which time I would have broken the record for the oldest man to ever live according to the Guinness Book of World Records, except that they recently decided that Shigechiyo Izumi had been using an older brother’s birth certificate and name and that he died when he was a scant 105 years old rather than the 120 he professed.  So the true record for a man is 115 years held by Christian Mortensen (1882-1998), but I digress (something I hope you see a lot of as you read on).  Anyway… so my original plan was to break the record in 2092, but apparently I will have to break it five years earlier than that, but I’m still going to go on kicking and breathing (no necessarily in that order) until 2092 because in all of my morbid artwork depicting my eventual grave marker, that is the year inscribed… what can I do?  It’s set in stone.

I met the bee in Norridgewock, Maine, home of my earliest memories.  I had a dream while living there in which I was pulling my cousin Melanie up a hill in a red wagon and stopped at a service station for gas, but once I’d paid inside the attendant motioned me to leave through a different door designated for the exit.  This second door was not made of shiny glass like the first, this other door was dark and ominous… very much what you expect to see in a haunted house and just as I pushed it open I realized there were, stuck in the door, long bony fingers with claws protruding where fingernails might ought to have , and when it was opened they belonged to the Devil who grasped me by the throat and pulled me into a dungeon-like room and threw me onto an altar where there roared a savage lion… I scrambled to the edge of this sinister construction and dove headfirst off the side and into a barrel of orange goo in which I would surely have suffocated were it not for the discovery of my beloved pillow in the bottom of this receptacle signifying a return to consciousness. 

I don’t mind remarking as humbly as possible that it’s a rare case for someone to remember so vividly the details of a dream from infancy.  But there’s a reason for it.  I was lying awake one night a couple years later and was troubled because I couldn’t remember the house we lived in when I was born.  Couldn’t remember the one my little brother was born in either.  So I initiated the practice at bedtime of reminiscing about everything I could still remember from my earliest years including the bee and the dream.  And Easter when my dad hid jelly beans all over the house and then carried me piggyback to find them.  To my older siblings this represented an unfair advantage because my transportation knew exactly where they were hidden, but I didn’t seem to mind.  My dad made Easter magically fun for me that Sunday morning just as my mother has always had an incredible talent for making Christmas feel magical.  Remembering such moments makes me wish to have children of my own. 

To celebrate my 40^th birthday I am submitting a timeline of my life so far:

1971     Born in Jamestown, New York

1974     Earliest memories of Norridgewock, Maine

1975     Moved into the basement of my Uncle Bob’s house in Blue Mountain Lake, New York where my cousin Becky became my first best friend.

1976     Parents divorced.  Mother remarried and moved to Clinton, North Carolina with her two youngest (including me).

1978     Began reading the Bible and was baptized a Seventh Day Adventist.  Also watched Gone With the Wind for the first time which became my favorite movie until 1992.

1979     Moved to West Virginia to live with my father and older siblings and new mother and sister (Connie).  My first girlfriend was Julie Jacobson.

1980     Moved back to Garland, North Carolina and went to school in Clarkton.

1981     Developed an obsessive crush on 8^th grader Julia Kinlaw and wrote on the inside of my Bible that I would love her forever.  My mother removed the oath explaining it had no place in God’s Word.

See how the left page is slanted at the top?

1982     Became an avid stamp collector.  Took home school.

1983     Moved to West Alexander, Pennsylvania and on the last day of school before Spring Break got lost and had to walk home about twelve miles.  Before the week was over I had also survived a tornado and developed chicken pox.  Also developed fanatic enthusiasm for NFL football.

1984     Fell into a deep case of puppy love with Tammy (Kitty Cat Eyes) Coon in Fletcher, North Carolina. 

1985     Back in Garland again taking school at home.  Got a kitten that I meant to name Touchdown, but all the way home he kept falling off the seat so his name quickly became Fumble instead.

1986     Moved to Nashville, Tennessee so my mother could be closer to her high school sweetheart who resided in the Tennessee State Penitentiary.  Pet Shop Boys become my favorite music act.

1987     Obsessed with Song Baek at Madison Academy.

1988     Became an atheist on March 12^th while praying.  Dropped out of high school.

1989     Went to the movies for the first time and saw Rain Man.  Passed my GED.  Moved to Elmhurst Illinois and began journaling the next day which practice I have maintained ever since.

1990     Convicted of a misdemeanor while working for Blockbuster Video and assumed it was the end of my life.

1991     Living in Addison, Illinois and fell helplessly in love with Maggie Bashqawi while working at Ken’s World of Video.  Went to school at EIU for two semesters in Charleston, Illinois.

1992     Moved to Madison, Tennessee and became infatuated with dear friend from high school, Ivy Dawn Farler.  Platonic friendship with Tricey (she is to friendship what cheesecake is to food) officially commenced on April 11^th.  Unforgiven becomes my new favorite movie.

1995     Moved to Murfreesboro and went to school at MTSU where I met Mercedes and Pauli (My best and most devout friend).

1998     Procured a bachelors degree in English and Literature with a GPA of 3.86 which I think is respectable for a high school dropout.  While studying for the GRE I begin compiling what I refer to as $5 words (prestidigitation, ubiquitous, floccinaucinihilipilification).  Also decided to read every classic and to assemble them in the order that I read them.

1999     Returned to United States from vacation in Europe and developed obsession with chat rooms for atheists.

2000     Arrived in Washington on the first day of the new millennium without a job or a home or any acquaintances.  Began dating Carolyn Marbas in November.

2001     Developing a movie project which prescribes watching movies in the order in which they are set… so for example you would begin with movies like Ice Age and 10,000BC and end with movies like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek.           

2002     Become commissioner of the End of the World fantasy baseball league which is still thriving.

2003     Problem gambling.  Began working at Muckleshoot Indian Casino.

2005     Coldplay becomes my new favorite music act.  Perform my first amateur comedy routine.  Perfect first date with Wendy.

2006     Wendy and I break up which takes several years to recover from because there’s simply no one else like her.  But I don’t think everyone is meant to be in a relationship and I’m determined to prove I can be happy on my own.  Well not completely on my own... there are amazing friends like Lindsay to help me along.

2007     Broke up a fight in the Poker Room between two drunks by throwing one of them over a side table.  Found an enchanting friend on MySpace.  She uses the alias Alyssa Shane.



Nocturnal Desperado and Alyssa Shane Halloween 2008



2010     Completed 243 days of gambling abstinence and, thanks to the world's awesomest brother, have a cool TV mounted on my wall.    

2011     Working slowly but surely on a novel about Lilith and the origin of vampires.  40^th birthday.

It's happening again...

If you've followed my blogs at all.. you know I have an uncanny way of talking about famous people just hours before they die.  Today my mother asked me if I've seen Invictus and made me promise I would watch it in the next week or so.  It's about time to call it a night so I logged onto Amazon and found the movie which is on sale for just under $11 and added it to my shopping cart... then I thought... what the heck... might just as well check msnbc.com to see what the stock market finished at today... while there what do you think I found... Nelson Mandella hospitalized.  Here's hoping he makes a full recovery, but no matter what... they can't touch his soul.

The Perfect Girl (if there is any such thing)

I thought I would try to straighten out in my own head what it is that I'm looking for in my next romantic companion.  Insofar as I have a tendency to dream of a girl that is so virtually perfect that she could only be found in a distant land far beyond the river we call reality... I thought I would make an effort to prioritize as well as I can what is essential to me and what is merely preferrable...

Essential

Niceness/Kindness ~ Not just toward me.  I will be proud to claim her partly because she impresses everyone with the beauty in her heart.

Intellectually Provocative ~ One couple I know brags about the way they will cook dinner together and get so engrossed in a conversation that they forget to eat the dinner they're preparing.  I want that too.

Adoration ~ She loves pretty much every thing about me... my face, my kisses, the way I talk... the way my nose moves while I'm talking... my sense of humor... my imagination... the way I sing... she likes for me to read to her... she hungrily awaits the next product of my creativity.

Creativity ~ I want to love her and encourage her for what she creates... Whether it's photography or poetry or painting or prose or even something that doesn't begin with "P" so long as it hasn't been done before and she loves doing it.

Reading ~ I'm not looking for someone who wishes she had time to read.  She finds the time.

Movies ~ She gets lost in the movie she's watching... and it's easy to persuade her to watch one almost every day (and she still has time to read)(this is my fantasy... don't opress me).

Tolerance ~ She is not a racist or bigot... and even though she's very likely a Liberal... she tries to understand opposing points of view without judging anyone to the point that she begins foaming at the mouth.

Affection ~ She loves to hug me... to feel my face against hers... and she doesn't necessarily care if we happen to be in public at such times.

Active ~ I'm not into skiing or fog~boarding or sky~cycling personally... I'm not talking about that... I just mean it's relatively easy to convince her to go for a walk or a hike.  Maybe she likes tennis and ping~pong and bowling and darts and jogging and dancing and karaoke and racquetball and volleyball... or at least a few of these.

Self Confident ~ She's not worried that I might cheat on her because she knows I'd be a fool to take her for granted.  And she knows I'm not a fool.  And she can say thank you when someone compliments her instead of manufacturing tedious explanations for why and how the compliment is not valid.

Voice ~ Soft and sweet and delicious.

Sense of Humor ~ She makes me laugh and I make her laugh.

Preferrable

Perfume ~ she wears enough so that I notice it... I'm highly susceptible to sweet fragrances.

Jewelry ~ I think some jewelry looks really nice.  And by God if I give her a necklace or a ring or a watch... it is sacred to her and she wears it sometimes.  It does not reside perpetually within the confines of some silly storage device awaiting a perpetually elusive special occasion. 

Makeup ~ Some girls wear it and some don't... I'm in favor of a little makeup (as opposed to tons). 

Animals ~ I'm not looking for a girl who doesn't like animals...

Disney Movies ~ She loves them.

Kids ~ she wants them... pretty much as many as possible... even though she's also concerned about the population explosion on Planet Earth... so we might opt for moderation eventually.

Finally

I reserve the right to enjoy my own company and the company of my friends and to remain single until I find someone like this.  So what if I don't quite deserve her!  I'll worry about that when the time comes.

A Spoonful of Morphine Helps the Reminiscing Go Down

I recommend another glass of wine
Before you open up that old valentine
And wade into obsequious mendacity
For only about the billionth time.

Happily Never After

No music sad enough to serenade our sad farewell
You gave me love
For which I have no use
The warmth we shared
We exchange for a freezing winter of isolation
In the end I feel things I should have felt before
No one anywhere cares at all...
And so adroitly I keep it to myself...
Almost...