Archive for February, 2014

There Are Reasons

Friday, February 28th, 2014

I go through my days analyzing things around me. Most especially I spend time analyzing the behaviors of people, people in general and also in particular the people immediately around me. Lately I’ve been paying attention to the way people walk. Not to how they move their legs, how they work their joints, but to the paths that they follow. People have a strong tendency to wander around as they ambulate along a sidewalk. They drift to and fro. They find a comfortable distance from the nearest wall or obstacle. but they don’t hold that distance fixed. It’s actually quite annoying when they’re walking slower than I am and casually meandering in such a way that I can’t figure out on which side of them there will be enough room to pass.

I realize that I’m not immune from some of the same random movement to my own path, but I am working on it, I am making an effort to walk in a straight line and to not position myself just far enough from a wall so as to make it impossible for someone to pass between me and the wall but still taking up as much of the sidewalk away from the wall as possible.

Today I had a woman walking in front of me and pretty much right on cue, as I started to move forward to pass her she angled to the left, moving away from the street and cutting me off. There was no one in front of her, no obvious obstacle, no reason for such a deliberate maneuver; but when I moved around and to her right I was able to see that there were a couple of shallow puddles left over from the morning’s rain and clearly she had moved to avoid stepping in those. It was one of those all too rare moments in my analyzations when there was an actual answer, one that was essentially definitive.

God says I’ve now moved from overthinking things to overthinking my overthinking. And I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.

Life Imitates Art

Friday, February 21st, 2014

I asked God what he thought about the mayor of Sochi claiming that there were no gay people in his town. He reminded me that on an episode of Soap, back in the late seventies, one of the characters said they didn’t have any “homos” in Texas, with complete sincerity. God went on to tell me that it was funny when it was fiction and still early in the struggle for Gay rights, but that these days it was more sad than anything.

Chubby Baby

Friday, February 14th, 2014

It’s St. Valentine’s Day. Today we celebrate love and promote it with pictures of Cupid, looking for all the world like a chubby little baby, who goes out shooting people with magic arrows to make them fall in love. Now I don’t really know Cupid’s motivations, but I’m willing to do some second guessing here. I think maybe he didn’t really have all that good of a childhood so he figures that maybe one of those newly-in-love couples that he puts together will look at him and think “What a cute little baby, let’s adopt him!” and he’ll get to do it all over again and get it right this time.

Then again, maybe he did have a good childhood, even a great one, even more than one great one, and he just keeps getting adopted and living out his dream, over and over again. It might not be a bad way to spend eternity.

Pray Louder

Friday, February 7th, 2014

I asked God if he enjoyed the Superbowl last weekend and he sort of groaned at me. He then explained that before the game he’s got millions of fans pestering him to make their team come out on top and then after the game he’s inundated with blame from the fans of the losers and mostly ignored by the fans of the winners. So I asked him why he doesn’t do something to make the game less popular or find some other way to get people to leave him out of it. He said he considered that but then he figured it was actually kind of nice to have one Sunday a year when something drowned out the noise of people praying in church.