Archive for January, 2007

Uniform Religion

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

So the upcoming Superbowl got me to wondering about something. I got to wondering what makes the football players outfit a uniform rather than a costume.

God cleared it up for me. He said that when you wear distinctive clothing as part of being something, then that’s a uniform. If you wear distinctive clothing as part of pretending to be something, that’s a costume. Uniforms are always about taking away individuality and making the wearer an interchangeable part of the group. Costumes may do that, but they may do the opposite.

He went on to tell me that the same concept can be applied to things other than clothing. For example, when people attend church services because they sincerely believe in God and believe that their church helps them to communicate with God, then their religion is a uniform that makes them the same as their fellow churchgoers. On the other hand, many people go to church for reasons other than a sincere belief in God; for them, religion is just a costume.

So uniform or costume? When it comes to religion, it’s up to you.

Commercial Interests

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Today God turned the tables and had a question for me. It relates to what I was talking about yesterday, about how I make a point every year of watching the commercials that are shown during the Superbowl. He wanted to know why I avoid commercials the rest of the year but set aside time for them this one day.

I told him that it really comes down to two things. During the Superbowl I can count on the advertisers to bring out new commercials. The rest of the year I’m more likely to see a commercial that’s been run a hundred times than one that’s new. The other thing is that I trust that great effort has been expended to make the Superbowl commercials entertaining in and of themselves. I try not to watch mediocre TV shows, and I definitely try to avoid reruns of mediocre television.

Then God asked me why I didn’t seem to care if the commercials were informative, why I didn’t care if they educated me about the products.

And the thing is, I gave up on that notion long, long ago. Even ads in magazines don’t usually try and be informative. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs. But hey, who needs informative when you’ve got talking chimps.

Another Roadside Distraction

Monday, January 29th, 2007

Well, Superbowl Sunday is coming up. For me that means fast forwarding through a lot of football to get to all the new commercials. I’ve got nothing against sports, I just don’t want to watch them. And most of the time I don’t want to watch commercials either, but I make a major exception this one day a year.

When I was younger, I made the same kind of exception for church. Once I became an adult I didn’t go to church, but for several years I made an exception once a year and headed down to the Hollywood Bowl for their Easter Sunrise Service.

At the time, I felt that if anything could make you feel the presence of God, it was watching the sun come up over the top of the Bowl, while listening to a sermon punctuated by gospel singers at the top of their form.

I talked about this with God today. She said, yeah, sometimes church can be a great show. But she also told me, sometimes it’s like looking at an accident by the side of the road, it’s a little bit of horror that just slows you down on the way to wherever it is you’re really trying to get to.

Adventure

Friday, January 26th, 2007

There’s this notion out there that our entire lives are recorded even before we’re born. Call it destiny, or call it God’s plan or call it something else, but it all boils down to the same thing. Now, I’ve talked to God a lot about free will but it’s such an important notion to me that I come back to it again and again. Obviously pre-destiny is pretty much antithetical to free will, so I’m generally against it as a notion. So far God has done a good job of backing me up in this, siding in favor of free will and against things that go against it.

But I like to push my luck sometimes, so I asked about it again. I asked if God knows in advance how each of our lives will end.

God seems to know that if I ask about something that I’ve asked about before that there was something that I found lacking in the previous answer, so she always manages to come up with a new way to answer me each time.

She told me that she doesn’t know how our lives will end but that if she wants to she can figure it out on a case by case basis. And usually figuring out one person’s future shows her a lot about other people’s futures, too, so she tries not to do too much prognosticating. Here’s an analogy that she gave me. Imagine that you’re at some roadside restaurant and they give you one of those children’s menus that’s chock full of activities. You flip it over and see that there’s a maze. You don’t know the path through the maze but it doesn’t take a whole lot of looking for you to see which paths lead to dead ends and which route will make it through. Our lives are kind of like that maze to God. The path through is our life and the dead ends are parts of other people’s lives, sometimes the final part.

So I guess the old computer game, Adventure, gave us a pretty good metaphor for life when it told us, “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.”

Communication

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

One of my favorite movies is Harold and Maude and one of the reasons is this exchange between the title characters:

Harold asks, “Maude, do you pray?”

And Maude answers, “Pray? No… I communicate.”

Now I’m lucky, or blessed, or whatever else you want to call it, because I actually get to talk with God. She comes to my house or joins me wherever I am and we get to have real conversation. So I asked her, what about everyone else, how can they not just pray but communicate?

She told me many of them already do. People that go out and sit among the trees and get a sense of calm from it. That’s God touching their soul and telling them that things are okay. People that talk to someone they trust and feel better just from the unburdening, that’s God talking back to them.

People that hear their dog telling them to kill their spouse… well, that’s something else.

Blasphemy

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

After yesterday’s talk with God about what happens when we die, I got to thinking about the scales of justice as they apply to sin. For some reason, my mind focused in on blasphemy. I got to wondering just how serious a transgression it really was. I mean, surely committing murder is a lot more likely to send you to Hell than venially invoking the name of God.

What God told me is that unlike the penal code, there’s no letter of the law he has to adhere to. So the importance that he applies to taking his name in vain varies. And yes, it’s usually a lot more forgivable than murder. But more than manslaughter? Maybe not as much.

He also mentioned that he does have something of an ego, so he doesn’t really like to see his name misused or slandered any more than most people.

The final thing that I remember from the conversation, though, was he told me that not every time we think someone is swearing are they really taking his name in vain. Sometimes when somebody says, “God damn it,” they’re sincerely asking him to damn something. Even if they don’t realize it consciously.

But don’t think he does it, just because they ask, though.

Look it Up

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

I haven’t done a thorough rundown with God on what happens when we die, but we’ve discussed some aspects of it, or at least touched on them. Today I decided to try and flesh out some of what I knew.

There’s the basics that I was taught growing up: We’re born, we live our lives being as good as we can, given our human frailties, and then we die. Once we’re dead, our souls go rushing off to Heaven where Peter takes out the big book of our lives and figures out the final tally. If the final tally is bad enough, to Hell with us. If it’s good enough, we continue on through the gates and enter Heaven. If we’re somewhere in between, we go off to Purgatory to work off our debt to God.

After I explained that that was what I knew we never really did get around to the questions I thought I was going to ask.

Right off God pointed out to me that Purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible. Now I already knew that the Bible is a relatively short compendium and so all the religions that rely on it have to make up a lot of stuff to fill in the gaps and edges, but I thought Purgatory, at least, was in there.

So I asked her if she told me that as a way of telling me that Purgatory doesn’t exist.

She told me that everything exists and nothing exists, all on her whim. She just pointed out that bit of Biblical trivia to try and see if I had any thoughts of my own on the subject or if I was just going to regurgitate badly remembered stories from my youth.

I told her I’d get back to her on that.

Road Rage

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

Like a large percentage of men, I can be a fairly impatient driver. I was making some rude comments on the social standing of the driver in front of me when God decided to join me. I don’t mean join me in disparaging my fellow road warrior, just that he joined me in the car, he slipped into the passenger seat and told me that I wasn’t being particularly charitable.

Now, I should have taken a deep breath and composed myself, but I was angry and instead went on something of a rant. My pet peeve, for the moment, is driver’s that don’t use their turn signals. You’d think with the number of traffic fatalities on our roads every year that people would do anything they could to better coordinate with the other drivers on the road.

God did concede that most people don’t really get the concept of enlightened self-interest, but told me I should spend more of my time on improving myself and less on berating others. Even if I don’t berate them to their face.

Oh, and God wears his seat-belt. I’m not sure why.

We Won?

Friday, January 19th, 2007

One of the things I like to do is play poker. One of the big skills in poker is looking at your hand and figuring out the likelihood that your hand will be better than everyone else’s hand when all the betting is done. Now God doesn’t have to make educated guesses like we do, she can just peer into the future and see what the final hands will be. To her the whole universe is like a marked deck.

So I asked her if she understands the fun of gambling.

She understands it and even has engaged in it from time to time. Apparently the state of the current universe is in her mind all the time, but the future is really only there if she actively thinks about it. Some things are pretty straightforward. The same way we know the sun is going to rise tomorrow, she knows things like what global warming is going to do to the weather over the next century. Things further out? Well, the more important it is to her divine plans the better she knows how it will come out.

So does humanity go extinct before the destruction of the Earth?

She knows (but she’s not telling).

So, getting back to her comment that she’s engaged in a little gambling herself… She did give me one example. It seems she had a bet with a couple of angels over what species would first evolve to the point where it was worthy of being imbued with a soul. Apparently we weren’t the only ones in the running, though she wouldn’t tell me who the other contenders were.

She lost the bet.

She thinks the angels may have helped us along, though she wouldn’t say that they actually cheated.

The Future of Drinking

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

It still catches me by surprise, the aspects of my conversations with God that butt up against the rules he established at the start. Things that are perfectly normal to crop up when I’m talking with friends end up running into a wall when I’m talking with the creator. I mean, it makes sense and all, but it just, well, catches me by surprise.

I was reading an article about the music industry when he showed up today. The article talked about how technology in general, and the internet in particular, are causing the recording industry to scramble to reinvent their business plans and models. So I asked him whether or not he thought the record labels would be able to keep signing artists to long term contracts when they no longer have a stranglehold on the ability for people to find new music acts. He said, he already knows how it all plays out, but he won’t tell me, that it wouldn’t be fair.

And that’s the key thing that I’m talking about. The kind of rampant speculation and prognosticating that we all do all the time, the give and take forecasting that we do with each other, I don’t get to do any of that with the guy that’s become one of my closest friends.

Imagine that you had a friend that you talked to every day and you could talk about anything you want but if you ever mention drinks or drinking he just clams up. It’s kind of like that. Heard about that new brand of bottled water? Nothing. I’m heading out to the liquor store, you want me to pick you up something. Blank stares. It’s just not the kind of thing that I think you could ever really get used to.

Pinball

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

I was watching some televised poker the other day and they spent some time talking about the superstitions of some of the players. That got me to wondering about the belief espoused by many atheists and others that the universe is like a giant pinball machine. The idea is that the universe works according to a fixed set of physical limitations and if we can just figure out the current position and velocity of everything we could predict with near certain accuracy where all the balls will go in the future.

I asked God who was closer to the truth, the people who think that everything is predictable or the people that believe in the magic of superstition. She told me I was presenting a false dichotomy. The people that wear the same “lucky” shirt to every poker tournament believe even more than scientists in a predictable universe, they’re just making guesses about where the paddles are that they can use to push the ball around.

We bandied about different ways of playing with the pinball metaphor for a while, and unfortunately it was late and I went to sleep when we were done, so I really don’t remember a lot of the conversation. I do recall a couple of things though.

Take it as a given that the universe is only the area inside the pinball machine in which the balls can travel. The universe ends at the glass ceiling and does not dip into the guts. There are some pinball machines that have electromagnets beneath the table top that the balls race across. Depending on targets that you hit or other actions within the game, those magnets will activate and exert unusual influences over the trajectory of the balls. So, in our metaphor, the magnets exist outside of the universe but sometimes extend their influence inside. I think she said that black holes are like those magnets.

Or was it angels?

Anyway, the most important thing, the thing I want to leave you with, is that while the flippers are inside the universe, the buttons that activate them are not. So who’s controlling the flippers? She just smiled. And twitched her fingers, just a bit.

Bible Stories

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

I was looking back over my notes of previous conversations with God and I noticed another dichotomy. When I talked with him about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the Garden of Eden, he gave me a pretty straight answer. He told me that he kept Adam and Eve from eating from the tree for as long as he reasonably could but that it had been an inevitability. Yet time and again, God has talked to me about how he didn’t create the world out of whole cloth, but rather set in process the great engine of the universe with a design that would lead to the “natural” creation of man.

So I asked him, was there really a Garden of Eden? Was there really a Tree of Knowledge? Or were these just fairy tales?

He didn’t seem to like the apparent disdain I felt for fairy tales. He told me that rarely is something “just” a fairy tale. Those tales are the way we teach each other important lessons. The story of Adam and Eve may not have been a documentary, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hold truth. There may not have been an apple or an apricot or a kumquat or whatever that some early man bit into to have the veil of innocence pulled from across his eyes, but there was certainly a period where our early ancestors began an accelerated path of learning. That was the time when we first began to tell tales to each other. Those early narratives were a way of encapsulating lessons so that they could be memorized so that prior to the invention of writing they could be passed down from generation to generation.

Those early fairy tales formed the first hint of the shoulders of giants that mankind has stood upon ever since.

So God told me not to discount the power and worth of a simple tale that children want to experience over and over and over again to teach us valuable lessons. That might be a good thing for video game makers to think about.

Splattered Paint

Monday, January 15th, 2007

Thinking back over some of the conversations I’ve had with God, I thought maybe I’d caught him in a lie. There seemed to be a basic contradiction in what he’d told me. He’s described his creation of the universe as one of designing processes and letting them run. He’s said that he took great care to set up the processes like evolution that eventually created man. But he’s also said that he’s not above tweaking things every once in a while along the way.

So which was it? Do things just evolve, or does God direct them?

He told me it was like this. Imagine that you’ve got a can of paint and a giant canvas laid out on the floor. You have in mind a general pattern that you’d like to see splattered across the canvas and you dip your hand in the paint and flick it. (God’s very into tactile things, so he figures, why use brushes.) By the speed and direction that he shakes his hand in, there’s a certain predisposition for the way the paint will array itself, but the tiny details of it are still pretty random.

That’s kind of what the Big Bang was like. God cast the stars across the universe in a fractal explosion, that gave birth to reality itself.

Then God, his hand still dripping paint,, approached the wall and began to look at the details. Here and there he would see patterns in the paint that appealed to him but that were not quite complete. At some of those points he holds his hand over the canvas and waits for a drop or two of paint to fall from his fingertips and fill in the final details. That doesn’t invalidate the original splattering of paint and doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong or useless about trying to figure out the direction and velocity of the original globs of paint.

So to bring this back around to evolution, just because every once in a while, one of the random mutations that do the work of evolution might have come from the roll of a loaded die, doesn’t mean that the laws of probability don’t work or that natural selection is wrong.

Negative Good

Friday, January 12th, 2007

There’s a theory that gets tossed around a lot, that there must be evil, because without it we wouldn’t be able to recognize good. I asked God about this and she allowed as how it was an interesting idea but she didn’t really buy it.

She went back to looking at humanity as an art project. One of the important things in successful art is that there be a balance of elements, but balance can be achieved in many different ways. In an abstract painting the balance might be in the use of different colors. In a still life, it might be in the choice of what fruit to place in the basket. I’ve got a t-shirt that simply has an image of the sun on the front and the moon on the back. So it might be that good and evil are there to balance each other out just for the art of it.

But, there’s a niche in the art world, in images that are optical illusions. One of the more famous of these is the picture of a vase that is formed in the negative space between two silhouettes of faces looking at each other. The beauty of that image is that it can be looked at purely as a picture of two faces or purely as a picture of a vase. So is that what good and evil are like? Just different ways of looking at the same picture?

Or is good and evil just a way of labeling the ends of a spectrum. Since there must be a spectrum of behavior, would we inevitably label one end good and the other evil. If every action that we took was, by today’s standards, good, would we consider it evil if we said something nice about someone but it wasn’t nice enough?

Season’s Leavings

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Well, Christmas is over but still, somehow, it lingers. Okay, “somehow” is a little vague, let me be more specific. We’re at that point where the stores have mostly taken down their decorations but not quite everything is gone yet. I was in a hotel this weekend that still had their miniature village in a fake snowscape on display. I had lunch this week in a fast food outlet that still had a holiday pastiche painted in the windows. There’s a house down the street that still has its lights up, though it no longer turns them on.

And God looks fondly into my empty cookie tin and picks at the crumbs of homemade goodies that are now long gone.

I asked him why he doesn’t just wiggle his nose and refill the tin, or at least just recreate the cookie whose remains he’s picking over.

He told me that getting the cookie isn’t really what he’s after, getting the cookie wouldn’t complete the experience. Part of the experience, part of the holidays, is the nostalgia, the stirring up of still fresh memories. In this case the memories of recently-fresh baked goods.

Most of the time nostalgia is a dish best served cold, best experienced after the rough edge of time has sanded off the burrs and filled in the nicks and gouges, but God reminded me, while picking at the crumbs, that sometimes even fresh nostalgia can be pretty tasty.

Suffering

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

A lot of people have said that we suffer in this life so that we might be rewarded in Heaven. Now I’ve certainly had times where I suffered, but, overall, I think I’ve had a pretty good life. I’ve never been homeless. I’ve never had extended periods where I couldn’t get enough to eat. And I’ve always been able to amuse myself, one way or another. So I thought I’d ask God if I’ve suffered enough, enough to make it through the pearly gates.

God told me that suffering isn’t how we get into Heaven. He said that would be like working for a company that gave out raises to the employees that had the worst time during the year instead of to those that accomplished the most. The way to get into Heaven is to be a good person, to do good things and not do bad things.

Now somewhere in our conversation I also got the impression that people that seem to have nothing but bad luck, people that just never seem to get the breaks, that those people might actually have souls that are serving out their time in Purgatory for their past lives. Of course, I could be reading between the lines a little too much, so don’t quote me on that.

Citrus

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Yesterday I spent some time talking about the creation of the universe and telling you that Young Earth theories come largely out of human hubris and ego, but that’s not all God had to say on the subject. There was one other thing that he said that I wanted to tell you about.

It has to do with the mechanical aspects of the creation of the world. Another way to look at it is as a lack of imagination on the part of the Young Earthers. God gave us our brains and expects us to use them. The universe is so complex that even to just understand our most local part of it is more than a single human mind can do to any great depth. The best way we have come up with to extend our knowledge, then, is to follow the scientific method. What this does for us is nicely summed up in Sir Isaac Newton’s famous line, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

The Young Earthers will go to great lengths to support their notion. They will explain that the Grand Canyon was created by the Great Flood of Noah. They will tell you that God created the fossils in the ground to test our faith. They will cling to ever smaller gaps in the evidence of evolution.

God told me that, sure, he could have done everything they said, but that would have been easy. The Young Earthers have limited their own imaginations. They can imagine that it would take a great and supreme being to create the universe just as we see it, but they have failed to imagine how much harder it would have been to have created the seed of a universe capable of growing until man could emerge many billions of years down the line.

By way of metaphor God told me to think about citrus trees. You can head on out to your local nursery and buy a citrus tree with some branches that grow lemons, others that grow oranges and still others that grow grapefruit. This is possible because horticulturists can graft branches from different kinds of citrus trees onto the trunks of other citrus trees and they will grow and thrive. This does not happen because scientists were able to manipulate the DNA of citrus seeds and produce a seed that will grow into a tree that produces more than one kind of fruit.

Which do you think requires a greater God? A universe that was set in motion to grow for billions of years and then produce mankind in the image of God? Or a universe where God individually places all the things that he wants us to see?

New World

Monday, January 8th, 2007

Many Creationists believe that the universe came into being just five or six thousand years ago. This is largely due to the influence of a variety of Biblical literalists, the kind of guys that you’d call bean counters if you saw them around the office. These guys did things like add up the number of generations in the Bible and use whatever information was listed about their ages and various other things to put a date to creation.

Obviously the people doing this weren’t familiar with the part of the credits that tell you that although the film was based on actual historical events, some parts have been combined or omitted for dramatic purposes.

I asked God what he felt about the Young Earth theories. The first thing he told me was that it comes out of two human flaws; the desire to be the center of attention, and the desire to resolve ambiguity.

The ambiguity part was fairly obvious, but I had to ask for more information on how wanting to be the center of attention related to Young Earth theories.

God told me that it comes down to a human need to believe that they’re the reason the universe was created. They have a hard time accepting that they might have been an afterthought, but God says they’re looking at it all wrong. In the beginning when he created the cosmos, it was little more than doodling in the sand. He did it just because he could. Then, when the picture started to form it began to inspire more focused thoughts and a desire to do something more purposeful. That’s when he decided to create mankind.

In their rush to be the center of God’s attention, they end up wanting a universe that was created specifically to hold them. They don’t realize that what they’re describing is the cosmological equivalent of a shotgun wedding. Their suggestion is like saying that God got pregnant with them and then had to rush together the universe before they began to show. In fact, he says, he created a universe that was so beautiful that he created mankind just to have someone new to share it with.

Twelfth Night

Friday, January 5th, 2007

Well, tonight is the twelfth night of Christmas. I expect a lot of people don’t know why Christmas has twelve days, I know I didn’t. I’m sure I could’ve looked it up somewhere, but I took the easy way out and asked God. To my surprise she didn’t make me go look it up.

The reason is camels.

When Christ was born a star shone brightly in the sky over his manger. The three wise men saw this sign, did some hasty Christmas shopping, then mounted up on their camels and rode out to meet Jesus.

It took twelve days to get there.

I wonder how many days of Christmas there’d be if they’d ridden elephants instead?

Bad Dreams

Thursday, January 4th, 2007

I had something of a bad dream last night. I can’t remember it now but I think it had something to do with being the only one wearing clothes at a nudist colony. Anyway, that got me to wondering if God had nightmares, but he once told me that he hasn’t really slept since the creation of the universe, so I figured there was no point in asking. But being pointless never stopped me before, so when a lull popped up in the conversation I went ahead.

As expected, God doesn’t sleep, so he doesn’t dream. Except, that the whole universe can be sort of considered a dream that God is having. Since when we dream, everything we see or seem manifests out of our thoughts and is responsive to them, when we dream is when we are most like God. So does God have any fears that might affect our world? Well, he never really answered that but he flipped it around and said that he had some trepidation about how we might affect the world.

He’s afraid we might yet end up in all out nuclear war.

He told me that one way to look at the Earth and those of us that live here is as an art project. Imagine the Earth as a giant mural painted on the side of your local supermarket. Popping off nuclear bombs all over the planet would be like local gangs coming in and spray-painting their competing tags all over it. While it might not destroy what’s underneath, it’s pretty likely it won’t be very aesthetic.

Keep it Clean

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

We’ve all heard it said many times, “cleanliness is next to Godliness,” but is it true? Well, in some sense everything is next to Godliness, but obviously, that can’t be the sense that people mean when they toss out that aphorism because then it wouldn’t mean anything useful. Not that people are all that averse to saying things that are either meaningless or just not useful, but when they say “cleanliness is next to Godliness,” they do mean it to mean something.

So what do they mean when they say it?

Well, you know, it’s one of those phrases that seems to be designed to be deliberately ambiguous. That way, you might not get exactly the same meaning that the person saying it meant for you to get, but you still think they said something wise. They move up in your opinion, because you think they said something worthwhile, and yet, really, you would’ve come up with it on your own if you’d ever had any reason to think about it.

So for the record, what meanings do I see: God is pure, purity is a form of cleanliness, or vice versa, so by being clean we are being god-like. Or: Cleanliness is a form of taking care of ourselves; God gave us our bodies and expects us to care for them, so cleaning ourselves is doing what God wants us to do. Or: By keeping ourselves clean on the outside we develop the habits that will also lead to us keeping ourselves clean on the inside and to keep clean on the inside, we must live without sin and living without sin is only completely done by God. You’ll note that this last one is also covered by another old saying, “clean body, clean mind.” I could go on with different interpretations, but they’d pretty much all be variations on a theme (and what theme is that? Why it’s “cleanliness is next to Godliness”).

I’d tell you what God had to say on this, but, well, when you were a little kid did you ever ask your Mom a fairly straightforward and simple question only to have her make you work it out on your own? And just dropping it wasn’t good enough, no matter how much the answer really wasn’t important to you, you brought it up, she’d tell you, so now you had to figure out the answer. Well, sometimes God is like that.

Children of the Night

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007

I once saw a news program about people that purport to believe that they are vampires. They wear dark clothes. They avoid going out in the sunlight. They even have prosthetic fangs that fit onto their teeth and make them sound funny when they try to talk. Okay, I’ll admit to finding them a little silly and a little sad and I think God picked up on that when I brought them up in conversation.

I never did get God to give me an opinion of his own about them, instead he just seemed to care about making sure that I didn’t go around feeling smugly superior to them.

Imagine that they went into this lifestyle because they couldn’t really feel the pleasure of a normal human relationship. Imagine that they could feel love and could enjoy sex and emotional attachment but that it just wasn’t satisfying, that it was like getting a glass of water with a hint of citric acid while everyone else is drinking fresh squeezed lemonade. Now imagine that by playing at vampirism they were able to make love in a way that is like a rich lemon sorbet.

Would I pity someone that foregoes lemonade to indulge in lemon sorbet or would I pity myself for not being able to choose everything on the menu?

The answer, of course, is neither. We all bring something to humanity, we’re all in this together, and we couldn’t be what we are, if they couldn’t be what they are.

Another Day

Monday, January 1st, 2007

What I wanted to know today is, does God have any new year’s resolutions.

He told me no, but he did have one that he thought might be good for me. He suggested I resolve to pay no attention to any campaigning for United States President until at least the start of 2008.

It sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know how long I’ll last without breaking it.