unscriptured

God asked me the other day about what’s been happening with Mountain Dew Somehow over the last few years it’s gone from being a drink to being a franchise. I remember when it made what I think was its first really big promotional push. I was a kid and the advertising for it was all over television. There was an animated caricature of a hillbilly shouting out “Yahoo, Mountain Dew.”

Mountain dew, the original Mountain Dew, not Mountain Dew Lotus Fusion, or Mountain Dew Tropical Depression or whatever other variant is out there this week, is basically just another citrus soda. It’s different than the lemon-limes (like 7Up and Sprite) and the grapefruits (like Squirt and Fresca) in that it doesn’t strive for that “crisp” citrus drink quality, instead joining its more common pop brethren by being sweet and heavily caffeinated. I think the caffeine was there mainly to differentiate it from Cactus Cooler.

But it also has that yellow color. And the “dew” in the name is awfully close to one of the slang terms for excrement. Combine those with the unsophisticated plumbing that young boys in the sixties believed to be extant in the backwaters of Appalachia that featured in the advertising blitz and it didn’t take much to imagine that they were all but saying “Hey, come try our urine soda!” To a prepubescent tyke like myself this was even better than a good fart joke, and I was instantly enticed. To this day I still occasionally imagine I’m indulging in a bit of cleaned up bodily waste when I pop open a can. Thankfully, the illusion never makes it past the first taste.

So I think that maybe this ties in to the mass profusion of different variations on Mountain Dew that now adorn our convenience store shelves. Somebody at Pepsi woke up one day and thought, “You know, if we can sell a brand of soft drink by invoking piss, what couldn’t we sell under that brand?” Of course, thinking about it this way really does make me wonder what kind of medical condition drove someone to come up with Mountain Dew Code Red.

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One of the tricks that gets used in art is called “forced Perspective.” God reminded me this week that a little forced perspective can be a good thing if you find yourself a little short of the non-forced kind.

Now that I’ve integrated my iPad into my life, I find myself with a perceived lack of downtime. I’m not putting in any extra hours at work (if you don’t count my hour-long commute), and I’m not, at the moment, getting any significant work done on my myriad artistic or entrepreneurial projects. But I’m also never (well hardly ever) just staring into space anymore.

Forced perspective is an optical illusion. There’s a number of different systems of perception that we use to determine size and distance. There’s binocular vision, the way we see 3D because the view seen by each of our eyes is slightly different. There’s also the arc of vision that something takes up, that is, how much of our field of vision it fills. It’s this latter clue that forced perspective plays with. By making something physically smaller the artisan makes it seem bigger. To be a little more precise, by making the part of something that is further away from us smaller than the part that is near, it makes it seem as if the thing is actually bigger because we know that for it to look that much smaller, for it to take up that much less of our field of vision, and still conform to our expectations of its geometry, that it must be a certain distance away.

A good example of this is in one of my favorite places in the world, Disneyland. On “Main Street, USA,” the stores along the street are all built with the second floors on a smaller scale than the first floors. This is done to make the buildings seem bigger and grander, it’s a subtle thing that adds immeasurably, though not immensely, to the ambiance. It allows them to make a barely two lane wide street feel much larger.

With the iPad, I find myself filling in all the cracks of the day. I’ve always got something I can do. I keep up on the news more than I ever have before. Thanks to social networking, I can keep up on the lives of my friends like I never have before. Thanks both to computer A.I.s and to network access, I get to play more games than I ever have before. Now to be fair, when I was younger I used to always carry a book with me and used it to fill in those small moments of downtime, but with the book I could see progress and I could measure (by space on my shelves) a certain kind of advancement over time. With the constant and massive deluge of things on the web, I only ever feel like I’m falling behind.

So God’s advised me to find a way to skip more of what interests me, so that I can do more of what interests me. In a way, I’ve got to both narrow what I’m willing to spend time on and go into it less deeply than I’d like to. It’s just like the technique of forced perspective which gives you less while seeming to give you more. The trick will be to do it without feeling guilty.

So last time I talked about going to a baseball game, and how it reminded me of going to church. This got God and I to talking about sports in general. Of course “sports” is up there in the list of most talked about subjects, so really it was rather more mainstream of a conversation than I’m used to having. As a subject though, it’s up there in the company of things like the weather and politics.

Now baseball stands out from other sports in that it’s been singled out as The Great American Pastime. I think I’ve got a good idea of why that is. It’s a game you don’t need to pay attention to, and Americans like things they don’t have to follow too closely. Things happen, in baseball, at a leisurely pace. It’s not like basketball, football, or hockey where the action is frenetic and sometimes hard to follow. This means you can chat with your friends while watching the game and not generally feel like you’ve missed much. You can go get something to eat, you can shop for souvenirs; you’ve got the time.

In other ways though, baseball is just the same as every other sport. It has its passionate fans, its devoted followers, its sinners and saints. And also, like every other professionally played sport, it has one big thing in common with religion: Everyone thinks that their team is the best, whether they win or lose, but which team is theirs is mostly just an accident of birth.

I feel like I went back to church yesterday.  I went into a large, publicly accessible building, engaged in arcane rituals, partook of, if not sacred, at least ritually specific food, and witnessed the public excoriation of the unfaithful.

Did I do this in a church?  A mosque?  A temple?  Of course not, I did it in a ball park.  I watched the San Francisco Giants take on the Chicago Cubs.

No one was called a sinner, but the unfaithful, the Cubs fans, were derided, shouted down, and then loudly booed when one of them caught a ball that had been hit into the stands.

There was music.  There was the sacred sing-along to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”  There was the playing of John Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” which is surely a baseball hymn or there is just no justice in the world.

And there were call outs and responses, though I don’t remember what they were.

Now I don’t know much about baseball statistics, so I don’t have any clue which team was favored to win, but I can tell you the outcome was far from Biblical.  In the Bible David defeats the Giant, but in this case the Cubs failed at the same task.  Maybe they should have used a sling.

So I’m working now in downtown San Francisco.  I’m not actually in the financial district but I share a BART station with those that are.  God asked me to look around at my fellow corporate drones and see what I could see.  I wasn’t sure what she wanted, but I went ahead and looked.

Now I didn’t grow up in the fifties but I did grow up watching reruns of fifties sitcoms and TV broadcasts of fifties movies.  Where today we have “knowledge workers” in the fifties they had “office workers.”. Both kinds of workers sit at desks all day.  Both kinds of workers get to and from work on trains and busses.  Both kinds of workers spend time filling in cells in spreadsheets.  And more often than they’d like, they end up taking those spreadsheets home for a little more tweaking.

Of course today the spreadsheets are files on computers and in the fifties they were actual large sheets of paper, with blank cells printed on them to be filled in by hand and bound into books.  So to take your work home with you in the fifties, you tossed real paper files into your briefcase, but now you bring home a laptop computer…  Then I noticed…  There were no briefcases.  They’ve gone the way of button-down shirts and black ties.  Lost to a sea of “business casual,” the briefcases have all been replaced by backpacks.

So there’s progress for you.  We never got the “paperless office” that they kept promising computers would make possible, but for the most part, they did get rid of the need to carry all that paper around with us.  Now if only we could get rid of homework entirely.

I’ve spent the last couple of days packing. Since starting this blog I’ve moved about as many times as in the rest of my life put together. The rational part of my mind says this is a natural outgrowth of having reached the point in my career where just any job won’t do. The less rational part of my mind says that when you start talking to God, you’re just naturally going to have to start moving around more; to believe you’re talking to God is crazy, and crazy just doesn’t tend to stability.

Craziness aside, I’m making an effort this time to sort of downsize. I’m getting a place that’s smaller than either of the houses I’ve owned, and fully expect to start getting rid of much stuff as part of the unpacking process. Partly this is in reaction to something that God pointed out to me. He told me that the so-called McMansions are the natural outgrowth of American Consumerism. The American Dream has always been to own our own homes, largely for the independence and stability that they represent, but in times past a modest house was enough.

So why does our culture of consumerism lead to larger and larger houses, beyond just the need to show a bigger “score” in the game of life? It’s pretty straightforward, once we’ve bought all the stuff they keep selling us, we need a place big enough to hold it all.

Like most of the people I know I saw Inception this week. It’s the latest bit of art that riffs of the age old idea that was perhaps best summed up by Edgar Allen Poe’s immortal line, “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

So this got God and me talking about dreams and daydreams and memories. When you or I get nostalgic we spend some time thinking about the past. When God gets nostalgic, people start getting together to run Renaissance Fairs and Civil War reenactments. This tends to remind me that there’s not just a quantitative difference between God’s mind and ours but most definitely a qualitative one as well.

So you know how sometimes you get a song stuck in your head and it just keeps playing itself on a loop? Well God told me that’s kind of what’s been going on with the Middle East for the last couple of thousand years. They keep fighting because he can’t get their song out of his head.

One of the things the religious are fond of telling us is that God has a plan. The things in our lives happen for a reason. Of course they also tell us that the horrible litany of things that the Bible chronicles happening to Job were simply for the reason that God didn’t have the strength of will to ignore Satan’s tauntings. When it comes down to it, a lot of religious folk really do have a pretty pitiful image of God.

Anyway back to the “you planned this?” notion of life the universe and everything. I’m moving again. I haven’t actually finished moving to Portland yet. Most of my stuff is in storage in Thousand Oaks, I haven’t actually gotten my house onto the market yet, let alone sold it, and I haven’t finished reading my Portland guide books, let alone gone out and experienced the cool places they’ve told me about. I did get to one of those places this week, a hole-in-the-wall donut shop downtown, but I don’t really have a lot to say about it other than bacon actually does go amazingly well on a maple bar. I didn’t think to ask if it was maple-cured bacon or not.

But back to moving. Again. And to God’s plan. I asked her what was up with the new new job having taking almost four months to get back to me. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just contact me back when I applied and save me having to move to Portland in the first place. She reminded me that she doesn’t do detailed planning most of the time. She explained again that she likes to shake things up every once in a while but that she mostly just sits back and watches. The Earth, as I’ve said before, is God’s own sticom. Apparently the new idea for situational humor involves me riding on BART every day.

I suppose I should be glad. I mean, in most sitcoms when things start to get dull somebody ends up having a baby.

Three weeks ago here in Portland it was still raining a few times a week and everyone around me was saying enough already. They were ready for summer. I think I reached my quota of summer during the decade I lived in Phoenix. I can pretty much do without it for the rest of my life, or at least do with a bare minimum.

Apparently Portland is pretty much used to the bare minimum of summer. Among the houses and apartments here it’s pretty rare to find one with air conditioning. My apartment is not one of the lucky few. It reached a hundred here this week. I complained to God about it but it seems that as much as I’ve had enough summer to get me through the rest of my life, God has had enough complaints about the weather to last him through the rest of eternity.

He then went on to tell me that the ultimate complaint about the weather comes right out of the Abrahamic religions. Those people that did their imaginings of God while living and wandering out in the deserts of the Mid-East. It’s the image of Hell, the presentation that the ultimate punishment from God comes in the form of unending fire and brimstone. Talk about people hung up on the heat!

So God walks into a bar.

The bartender says, “What can I do for you?”

God says, “Just love your fellow man.”

The bartender says, “I tried that in college; turned out I was in the wrong fraternity.”

It’s Gay Pride month. Many of you probably already know that. A few less of you know why June is the official Gay Pride month, and for you I’ll give the short and quick explanation.

It’s quite simply to celebrate the contribution of a bunch of drag queens and other homosexuals who in late June of 1969, were subjected to another in a continuing series of harassing raids by the New York police. At the time they were mourning the death of Judy Garland, who was a good friend to the Gay community, such as it was in those beleaguered times. To the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and they finally fought back, taking on their oppressors in a riot that lasted into the wee hours and then began again the next night.

A year after the riots, and the start of the gay rights movement they spawned, they were commemorated in the first Gay Pride parades, a tribute that has continued ever since. I don’t make it to one of the parades every year, but I go as often as I can manage. This year I went to the Portland parade and watched from under a tree that sheltered me from the intermittent rain. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve gone to a Pride Parade and not come away with some amount of sunburn. Oregon is definitely my new love.

Temptation is all around us. As Americans, we’ve collectively done a pretty shoddy job of resisting it. I was telling God that the best way to resist it is to avoid it, to plan your days and weeks so you encounter it as seldom as possible, but she told me that that missed the whole point. See, we’re supposed to face temptation and then we’re supposed to choose to resist it. Not all the time, but enough of the time.

But why?

She explained to me that it’s like our immune systems but in our minds. If we don’t face the small temptations and learn to say no enough of the time to keep from getting sick or shunned, we’ll not have any resistance when the big temptations come. When we get offered a big bonus to forge an inspection certificate, we need to have the moral fortitude to give it a pass. When we find a wallet stuffed with money and also the address of the owner, we need to not just know that it’s not right to choose our own level of reward, but to not give it a second thought.

So the little challenges matter. Passing up the donuts that the guy in the next row of cubicles brought in, because you’re trying to eat healthier doesn’t just help your waistline, it helps your moral fiber.

On the other hand donuts are pretty tasty.

Health nuts are pretty fond of telling us that our bodies are our temples and that we should be careful what we put into it, lest we offend our god. But what if our god is Dionysius?

I had an infestation of ants this week. They came in from under the carpet in a corner of the pantry. I have no idea why anyone would want a pantry to have carpet by the way, but it’s as connected to the living room, in this apartment, as it is the kitchen, so it ended up carpeted. Hopefully nothing I put in there leaks. Anyway, they trekked from there the short distance to my kitchen trash, which, due to space considerations is actually even more towards the living room and just as much not in the kitchen as the pantry; but enough about apartment geography…

Now I don’t have anything against ants, but I do have something against uninvited house guests, so I decided that the ants had to go. The only thing is that I don’t have any sort of insecticide at the moment. So I decided to get some. But I wasn’t in any real rush. The ants were pretty well behaved, I thought they might have been intimidated by God hanging around my place, but she tells me that ants don’t really care about her one way or the other. That’s one of the areas where were different from ants. So I asked her if it was okay that I was going to decimate the invaders, and she told me it was between me and them.

So I figured I’d pick up some ant spray in the normal course of my shopping, no need to make a special trip or anything. It turns out though that the normal course of my shopping just doesn’t seem to get near bug spray very often. I do most of my shopping at Costco, and they don’t seem to stock the stuff. Well, things that I don’t get at Costco, I generally pick up at Trader Joe’s. They also don’t seem particularly interested in helping me end the lives of some nuisance visitors. God just grinned at me when I’d bring up the subject. I began to suspect that she was keeping me from getting the stuff, but she of course denied it.

So where do I get bug spray? I’ve had it in the past without going out of my way, so where did I get it. To the best of my recall, I get it at those big home improvement stores, but since I’m renting an apartment now, I haven’t had much call to go to one of those, so I haven’t even learned where one is up here.

All in all, it’s been a most unsatisfying turn of events. Then I came home today and the ants were gone. Maybe they had finished off whatever was in the trash. Maybe God chased them away, for their own good. Maybe they found some ant bait in a neighbor’s apartment. I really don’t know. One thing I do know, though, is that I finally got God to admit that she sees humans and ants differently, that we’re not just two different species united by being among those that the world has far more of than it needs. The difference between us and ants? The difference is that we mourn our dead and missing, and the ants don’t. And apparently that’s enough to make God not care if I kill them. Suddenly I feel a lot better about attending funerals.

The music group “Boiled in Lead” created a song with the lyric “caffeine, sugar and THC are all the doctor’s are gonna find in me, when they do the autopsy.” God and I were listening to this fine music the other day and it lead to a discussion of various drugs.

One of the unstated points of that lyric is that sugar is as much of a drug as either caffeine or cannabinoids, I think they would have tossed in alcohol as well, if it wouldn’t have messed up the scansion, but far be it from me to put words in other people’s mouths. The thing that God found interesting in this is that, with the exception of dealing with hyperactive kids, we don’t treat sugar the same way that we treat other drugs.

With most drugs it’s all about the dosage. The amount of caffeine in cup of coffee, a cup of tea, or a glass of soda is pretty similar. That’s part of why the average soda is twice or more the size of the average coffee drink. Now I know some of you will point out that Starbuck’s has managed to notably increase the size of what an average person considers a coffee drink, but I’ll counter that convenience stores and fast food outlets were way ahead of them with the size of soft drinks, so really Starbuck’s was just playing catch up. So moving on, I’ll also point out that the amount of alcohol in a glass of beer, a glass of wine, or a shot of spirits is also pretty consistent, and the amount of THC in a joint, a pipe bowl or a brownie works out to a pretty standard dosage.

So the thing about our social drug use is that our cultures worked it out, worked out how to standardize doses, even before we could measure the active ingredients. We didn’t work out which were the better drugs to keep legal, very well, but that just goes to show that we’ve always been better at the quantitative side than the qualitative side. I think we’ll get there though. I have faith. I asked God if he liked that I had faith about something. He just shrugged. He’s like that.

I still don’t know why we’re so laissez-faire about sugar though.

In the course of a day at work I go through a lot of doors. Well actually, there’s a few doors that I go through, in aggregate, a lot of times. Now the people up here in Portland are a courteous bunch. I’ve already remarked on how polite the drivers are, though I’ve only mentioned that from the perspective of a fellow driver.

Now that I’ve been walking to and from work I’ve seen another side of the drivers. There deferent almost to a fault to pedestrians. I’ve had drivers stop their cars half a block away to let me cross the street. When I wasn’t even at a corner. It’s a little mind-boggling to someone raised in L.A.

But I was telling you about doors, not drivers. There’s a lot of us moving about the office and invariably several of us will reach a door at about the same time. That means that pretty often whoever opens a door is faced with someone, or even some several, that were about to open the door from the other side. Again, almost to a fault, whoever opens the door will then hold it open for everyone that is in reasonable distance. Once everyone else has gone through, then they get to go.

It’s almost enough to make me not want to open a door. After all who knows how long I’ll end up having to stand there. I was thinking about this and asked God what she thought of it. She told me that she rather liked it. She said that it was a nice way of reminding people what it says in the Bible. In the Bible I asked? Sure, she told me, it says plain as day, “the first shall be last.”

One downside to my new job and my new city is that I’ve got a workmate that has dragged me into a couple of conversations where I’ve felt obligated to defend science. You’d think that someone that makes their living as a computer programmer, whose every day tools are the results of thousands of repetitions of the scientific method, would get that science works and that the considered output of a preponderance of scientific specialists, in the area of their specialty should be given high regard and heavy credence. But alas.

You’re probably thinking that I’ve come to work with someone “skeptical” of Global Climate Change, or even simply of Anthropogenic Global Climate Change, and I admit that I would find that sad and that it would lower my opinion of their intellect, the truth is it’s much worse than that. I’m working alongside a Creationist. Well, he hasn’t actually said he’s a Creationist. What he has said is that he doesn’t believe in evolution. I’m going to play fair witness here for a moment, so sorry to those of you that hate it when I split hairs (and I do split hairs a lot). He hasn’t said that he believes in Intelligent Design, but he has said things in support of Intelligent Design. He hasn’t said that he doesn’t believe in speciation but it seems like that’s because he doesn’t know the word speciation, or at least not well enough to be comfortable using it. What he has said is that animals adapt, but don’t necessarily evolve and certainly don’t evolve into new species. He hasn’t said that he believes in a young Earth or the Biblical flood, but he did say that the geologic theory of the creation of the Grand Canyon over millions of years and the theory that the Grand Canyon was created in a massive flood that brought in huge amounts of debris that settled out in layers were both plausible. I don’t think he actually said “equally” plausible, but I sure think that was his implication.

So I sat here and tried to reconcile the notion that you can’t be stupid and still program computers, with the notion that you can’t not be stupid and actually, literally believe in Creationism. And I kept going around in circles. So I turned to God. I asked him how can somebody be both stupid and not stupid at the same time.

The first thing he told me was that I could find the answer to the question in the question itself, but I didn’t let him get off that easy. I mean just telling me that I’m being stupid while obviously not stupid doesn’t really get me any closer to an answer. So we continued talking. Finally what it came down to is a question of brainwashing. There are many millions of people that have been brainwashed, from before they’ve even given up breastfeeding, to believe in Religion and to believe in what religion teaches them. So the question then becomes, if they’re not stupid why don’t they move beyond their brainwashing when confronted with the sheer irrationality of what they have been taught?

It seems to circle around the point of blind spots. Brainwashing inherently creates a blind spot in our minds. Here’s the conundrum… If I point out to you that you’ve been brainwashed and that this thing you believe does not in actuality pass the simple muster of being consistent with itself, let alone with observable reality, why would you take my word for it? Just as I wouldn’t take their word for it that the Grand Canyon supports the notion of the Biblical flood, they will not just accept that it doesn’t. So to overcome their brainwashing they have to not just be given the word of experts but they would need to, at the least, study the field enough to themselves become experts. Anything less would not be enough to overcome their brainwashing.

And that’s way too much to expect most people to do. Especially when they know up front that doing so may well deprive them of notions that are actually quite comforting and pleasant. So I get it now, I do, but that doesn’t mean I like it. And I like even less that I now have to wonder what in my own worldview might be merely the residue of brainwashing, and is any of it worth the effort involved to clear away, is any of it worth the effort of rinsing away the soapy ring around my own little mental bath tub?

Spring is in the air and animals are on the move.

I’m used to living in L.A. and Phoenix, where the term “wildlife” is mostly reserved for nightclubs. Sure there are animals in the suburbs but they tend to be pretty circumspect. The coyotes make an appearance every so often but usually you don’t see anything bigger than an opossum and those you usually only see when they’ve been ground into the road. Now I haven’t actually seen anything bigger than an opossum here yet, but God has told me to keep my eyes open.

So I’ve been watching. In my neighborhood there’s signs warning of deer crossing the road, but I’ve seen those signs in other places and found the signs to be a lot more common than the deer, so I’m hopeful but certainly not holding my breath. A little closer to home, there’s a stream that I cross on my way to work every day and the last few days there’s been a goose and maybe eight or so goslings playing around in the mornings. In that same area I watched a considerably smaller bird land on the sidewalk, pick up an earthworm and fly off again. It was nearly eight in the morning so I don’t know how early I should really consider that, but by my reckoning, for the first time in my life I’ve actually seen the early bird get the worm.

One last sighting was made by a coworker who snapped a picture with his pocket camera. It was in that same stream where I watched the goslings but a bit further along where it runs alongside my office’s parking lot. The picture’s a little blurry but not so much that you’d mistake it for a shot of bigfoot, instead it’s obviously a shot of a beaver, swimming along with it’s paddle-tail flat out behind. Now the suburb of Portland that I’m living in is a city called Beaverton. It’s kind of nice, for the first time in my life, to live someplace that has a natural and obvious derivation for its name. And not even a touch of irony to it, so the City of Angels can eat its heart out, as far as I’m concerned.

Christ is famous for basically three domains. He performed miracles. He was an accomplished philosopher. And he was the son of God.

Now that last one is the sticking point, the last one is the one that people just had to take his word for. Miracles? There were witnesses. Philosophy? He talked up a storm and a bunch of his friends wrote a bunch of it down. But “son of God?” Well let’s just say that a lot of kids with absentee fathers make up stories about how great their old man is.

But in the end there was one trick, one miracle, that most of the people were willing to concede he couldn’t pull off on his own, one grand show stopper that would at least make his claim plausible, that would mean he had “outside” help: Coming back from his own death.

So that’s what he did. He lay in his tomb for three days and then headed out, a little more ripe than just three days without a shower could explain. He went and saw some friends, some of whom hadn’t heard yet that he’d been executed. Then he headed up to Heaven. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I mean, through Christ’s resurrection we finally had evidence that he’s god and suddenly he’s like “well, bye now.” If there was ever a time that people would have paid close attention to what he had to say, that would have been it.

I asked God why. He told me that the most important trick, the one that every magician really needs to learn, is always leave ‘em wanting more. It’s not a bad answer, but I’m not sure it’s enough of one.

People should move around more. Well, I should move around more, or rather, I should have moved around more.

I never really knew what I was missing. God says she arranged for me to end up in Portland because something was missing from my life. It turns out that that something was weather.

I’ve lived all my life in Los Angeles and Phoenix. These are two places that do not have weather. They have climate. Climate changes slowly. It gets colder over a period of a couple of months. Not actually cold, mind you, just colder. Clouds tend to spend a few days building up before they start pouring down rain. Things like that. Up here in Portland, though, in the couple of weeks that I’ve had to form my impressions, it hasn’t been particularly uncommon for it to be sunny in the morning, pouring rain in the afternoon and then sunny again before the sun goes down. It’s kind of cool.

But there’s one thing I’m not too sure of. I grew up with the L. A. River and when I moved to Phoenix I was near the Salt River. Both of these seem to have a pretty clear purpose; they’re where the water goes when it rains so that it can go away. Up here in Portland, though, they’ve got these things called rivers, only they have water in them all the time. I’m not so sure this is a good idea. What if it rains really hard for a few days? God tells me they can handle it, but I don’t know if I can really trust her. I mean look what she did to Noah’s neighbors.

God and I were out walking the other day, but we weren’t really talking, because I was wrapped up in my head cogitating on some deep thought or other. I can’t really tell you how deep the thoughts were because I lost them.

I lost them? “Well, how?” you might ask. I say it was God’s fault, she says she was just being polite. Okay, let me be a little more clear. We were coming to a door, a door that we needed to go through. God opened the door and then held it for me as I went through. And that was it. Well, maybe not all of it. See, I was raised to be polite. That means that I hold doors open for people and stuff. It also means that when people hold doors open for me, I know enough to do the polite thing, to look at them and say “Thank you.”

What I don’t know how to do, apparently, is to keep my deep train of thought while I look at and say “Thank you,” to the kind and polite soul holding the door open for me.

So I lost my train of thought, and will never again get back the exact same state of mind. Maybe I was on the road to solving one of life’s conundrums, maybe I was on the verge of knowing the perfect way to combine beer and sausage, who knows.

So I said my thanks, and then complained to God that I had completely lost my train of thought, that my deep thoughts were gone. She looked at me and said maybe I should take a look back at the stuff I’ve been writing lately. She pointed out that for me deep thoughts are a lot like 3D movies, the depth is mostly just an illusion.

People warned me that I should get rid of my California plates as soon as possible. They told me that Oregon drivers would cut me no slack, as they defended their territory from the hostile invasion of us ill-mannered southerners.

Well I admit my sample is pretty small, having just had my own car up here for a few days now, but I just don’t see it. My best guess is that those people that warned me were victims of their own habits, or maybe of just their expectations. In L.A. I regularly observed that I was a less aggressive driver than many of those around me. I drive fast, but I drive polite. I let people in, I don’t jump around lanes a whole lot, and I take my turns somewhat cautiously.

And that’s how everyone seems to drive up here.

So in Oregon, I’m a little more aggressive than average, thanks partially to not driving as aggressively as I do in L.A., and in L.A. I’m more laid back than average. It’s been a great object lesson in relativity. I asked God about it and he told me that driving in different cities is like a box of chocolates; no matter how sweet it is, you still have to watch out for the nuts.

I moved to Oregon this week. You don’t need to applaud or anything; I just mention it because it’s what got me to thinking about North. Thinking about north got me to wondering about maps, specifically why is north always on top?

So I asked. I said, “God, why is north always ‘up’ on maps?”

He told me to look at the trees.

So I did.

The trees are taller here than down in L.A. but not even for a minute did I suspect that gravity had anything to do with it. So if it wasn’t the height, what was it? Then I noticed that they were evergreens, pine trees, and pine trees grow straight and tall. Now I may not encounter pine trees much on the streets of L.A. but Southern California does have lots of them. They keep them mostly on the mountains.

That’s when it hit me. To get to pine trees I had to either go up the mountains or go north. So going north is like going up. So on maps they put north on the upper part of the page!

It makes me feel sad for the people in the southern hemisphere; their maps must be all messed up.

So I’m packing up to move and it occurs to me that this has a lot in common with spring cleaning, at least when it’s done right. They both involve getting into every cupboard and onto every shelf and moving things around, preferably out. They both involve moving around your furniture. And they both involve going through those piles of things that built up because you didn’t really know what to do with them at the time.

Those piles of things are like little mini archeological digs. You work your way down through the layers and never quite know what you’re going to find. You pull out a piece of paper and say to yourself “I probably could have used this a couple of weeks ago.” Or you say “Why did I not just throw this out at the time.” Or “Hm, this is a good idea, I suppose I’ll have to hang onto it,” and it goes into a new pile, but a thankfully smaller pile.

Somewhere in all of this I took a moment to whine to God. I thought, “Hey, what’s the good of knowing God if you can’t ask her for a favor now and then.” So I asked her if she could give me a hand and just wiggle her nose or blink or something and instantly pack everything for me. She told me that I need to pack the stuff myself, because it will give me memories, however dim, of where everything is, so that I can find the things that I need to unpack first, when I figure out what those are. Well, why not just plant the memories in my head, I started to ask, but I stopped myself. I just couldn’t bring myself to ask God to go around flipping bits and setting states in my brain. That’s something that should be kept between me and my drugs.

So I’m doing the packing myself, and I’m doing my best to remember what goes where, but somewhere in the back of my head there’s this nagging thought: What if I did ask God to do the packing for me? What if she did it and then, possibly at my request, she went in and altered my memory so I would remember packing everything myself even if I didn’t? Would that really be any better or easier than if I had gone ahead and done the packing myself? What if Edgar Allan Poe was really on to something when he asked “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

Now my brain hurts and for some reason I think I need a drink.

Videophones have been predicted for just about as long as we’ve had phones. They’re one of those obvious extensions to existing technology that’s just never managed to really catch on, despite decades of prototypes and proofs of concept.

God blames cavemen for this. Well, he blames the part of us that’s still our inner caveman. We spent millions of years learning to communicate with a few grunts and a lot of hand waving and chest thumping, and we’ve spent a paltry few tens of thousands of years refining speech.

Now, I thought that the depth of body language and the shallowness of speech would have been the best argument in favor of videoconferencing but God told me that videophoning actually gets it wrong. It’s not just that the screens tend to be so small that you can’t make out much of the body language but that the two dimensionality of the images masks a lot of the most important cues. What really matters isn’t just things like the crossing of arms and looking each other in the eyes, but more subtle things like the pushing out of a lip or the angle of an elbow. Not to mention the equalizer effect that sometimes happens, when a pushy negotiator finds it hard to take a dominating position and still stay on camera.

So do we just need holographic systems to make video calling successful? God told me it would help, but then he said not to forget the value of smell in evaluating a business proposal. I’m still not sure if he was kidding.

Larry Niven, in his Ringworld novels, created the term rishathra as a name for having sex with other species. Now wikipedia reminds me that in the Ringworld the practice was limited to sex between intelligent hominids, but I was recently reminded of the term when I had the common enough encounter of a dog sticking its nose as deep into my crotch as I would let it.

Dogs, I’m sure you’ve noticed, are very fond of sniffing sexual organs. They greet each other not with a handshake, but with a quick, and sometimes not-so-quick, sniff of each other’s butts. I’ve already noted that they tend to greet humans much the same way. So do they consider this sex? Is it foreplay? We all know that there are many dogs that will happily practice frottage on a human’s leg and clearly they consider that sex. But what about the sniffing? Do they just like to use their sense of smell and our genitals just happen to be at a convenient height? Is it interesting because being one of the most sheltered parts or our bodies, and one with an expulsive function, it tends to exhibit a wider variety of scents than the rest of our bodies?

Okay, they’re stupid questions but I was wondering. So I asked God. He pointed out that flowers are the sexual organs of plants and humans go around shoving our noses into flowers and sniffing as deeply as we can. Do we consider that sex? I agreed that we didn’t. But it does make me wonder a little about giving flowers to someone on a date.

Anyone that’s spent much time dealing with kids knows that they don’t always do what they’re told. They misbehave. They get in trouble, they get punished, and life goes on.

That, according to God, is basically what happened with Adam and Eve. The story famously tells how Eve decided to break the rules and eat an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but, like so many kids since, she didn’t want to break the rules alone, so she convinced Adam to join her. That’s another thing that’s common with kids, they often end up getting punished together, and that’s no accident. As the saying goes, misery loves company. And what misery wants, misery gets.

But what about that “life goes on” part of things? I asked God if it wasn’t a little harsh that we’re all still paying today for Adam and Eve’s disobedience. She looked at me and sighed. She told me that was one of the things that the Bible got wrong; being kicked out of The Garden of Eden wasn’t their punishment, mostly they just got a scolding and sent to bed without supper.

So then what happened? Why don’t we get to visit The Garden today? God reminded me of what they did to get in trouble. They ate from The Tree of Knowledge. They learned the difference between good and evil. God told me that actually they never left the garden, they just stopped believing in it.

A certain famous soap opera opened every day by intoning “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” It’s a clever enough notion and even made for a funny moment in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” when it’s uttered by Socrates, but it often seems to me like there’s better metaphors we could be using.

One that occurred to me is that the days of our lives are like the crumbs in a toaster. Some are tastier than others, and some have been burned to a crisp.

So I told my clever new metaphor to God and he told me to go back to the hourglass. He pointed out that as the hour goes by the sands fall through the choke point at the same rate, but as the level in the glass starts to run low the level also begins to to go down faster, because the width of the pile is smaller at the bottom than it is at the top. This, he told me, is why when we are young a day seems to take forever to go by, but when we get old even the years seem to pass in the blink of an eye.

Have you ever tried to imagine a world without evil? One of the things that gets in the way is that you first have to define just what evil is, and that is a very slippery thing indeed.

Does evil require intention? One of the things I was taught as a young Catholic was that major sinning requires knowing that you are doing something bad. That’s why if I kill a man for the sport of it, it’s evil, but if a lion kills a man for the sport of it, it’s still bad, but it’s not evil. So what about other animal actions. Anybody that has had much contact with dogs and cats knows that they can be taught that some things are bad to do, but that knowing they are not supposed to do something doesn’t necessarily stop them from doing it; especially when their owners aren’t around, and especially, especially if they’re upset about their owners not being around. So when these animals do bad things with the intent of punishing their owners, are they being evil?

And one thing I really don’t want to get into is the notion of how far down the spectrum of human intelligence does someone have to drop before they lose the capacity to do evil. And what about sociopaths? Does it matter that they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong even though they know that the rest of us think what they’re doing is wrong?

The world is a messy muddy place. Sometimes trying to define things is just an exercise in frustration.

I brought my musings to God and asked him if he could clear things up. He told me that my problem was that I wanted language to be something more than the imperfect representation of thought that it is. He told me that language is a vast bag filled with all sorts of pegs, round ones, square ones, triangular ones, and reality is a sea of round holes. He told me that I would just have to accept that some pegs can never be properly fitted to their holes. But you know, I think I’ll still keep on trying. I may not find a perfect fit, but I may find a better one.

The winter Olympics are going and I’m not watching. Not for any reason having to do with the Olympics, I’m just not set up to watch TV in my house and I’m not interested enough to find alternate means. But the Olympics have gotten me to thinking about competitions in general, and so they’ve come up when I’ve been talking with God.

But there are other competitions that I do pay attention to, and one of those is the Academy Awards. There’s been a lot made of the winner’s speeches for a number of years now, basically boiling down to making the winners keep it short so they can keep the ceremony down to a reasonable runtime while still being entertaining. One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed about the Oscars is that the Academy winners don’t tend to spend a lot of time thanking God and Jesus for everything in their lives, like professional athletes tend to do. That may or may not be because they’re trying to keep it short, but either way, I appreciate it.

What God did point out to me is that the people who thank Jesus for their success a lot of the time are doing it because they think it portrays humility. They think it’s modest to credit their accomplishments to someone other than themselves. Here’s the thing about that though, it’s hogwash. God doesn’t take sides in our petty little competitions and she wants you to know that by trying to give her credit, you’re saying to all the other equally deserving, hard working individuals that still haven’t been able to make it, that their sacrifices just weren’t good enough, that their faith just wasn’t strong enough. It’s unthinking at best and at it’s worst it’s downright mean.

So just for the record, you can still be humble, and you can still be modest, without having God to pin your success on. Just admit that even though you worked hard and put in the hours of effort and sacrifice, you know that there was still a lot of luck involved in getting you where you are. And if you’re someone like a recent U.S. President, someone who, as they say, was born on third base but thinks he hit a triple, well, one of the hardest things for you to actually accomplish just may be some real modesty. Try putting some effort into that.

A good friend of mine read what God and I discussed last time about how we find ways to mark out special birthdays in our lives and wondered about the way we mark out special days during the year. I decided that was an interesting enough area that I took some time out to talk to God about that.

The first thing that God told me is that for any stretch longer than from one meal to the next we’ve had a long history of looking for points to celebrate, or at least to mark the passage of time. We break up our lives into mini-epochs, from child, to teenager, to adult, to middle age, and on from there. We break up our days into mornings, afternoons, evenings and nights. We break up the year into twelve months, the day into twelve hours and the night into another twelve hours. The months have their weeks and the weeks have days and ends. Time may get us all eventually but we hack and slice it every chance we get along the way.

So what about our annual events? Why do we celebrate those days we mark out on our calendars? Well some of it, like I said is more or less just to break up the year. We mark the transitions from one season to the next, we have our fertility festivals come the Spring, we vacation in the Summer, we practice facing death when Autumn comes around and in the midst of Winter we oversee the death of one year and the birth of the next. I understand all that and I told God as much, but I asked her what about all those smaller events? What about St. Patrick’s Day and Valentine’s Day and Groundhog’s Day and Black History Month and Gay Pride Parades? What about our birthdays and anniversaries, and Veteran’s Day and on and on?

Well, it turns out that the truth of it is quite simple. We just like to party. All those big celebrations? They were once small and were celebrated by just a few people, but they caught on, they made it big. And the people that came up with the idea of celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday (hey, that’s today!) just wanted another excuse to party, and they hope you’ll join them. And if enough people do, well it could get to be as big as Memorial Day, and if it doesn’t? Well, we like to have small parties too. Sometimes we want a celebration that’s a little more personal, that’s a little less crowded, and that’s where the birthdays and anniversaries come in. And months with five Saturdays, we should all celebrate the fifth Saturday of any month that has one, because after all, life is short.

Any ritual that’s been around since before we were born seems like it’s always been and will always be, yet they come and go, they change without us ever really seeing it. Birthdays can be a good occasion to see this in action. Birthdays lend themselves to rituals, both big and small. We celebrate every year, but some years we celebrate more than others.

As a society we’ve agreed on some of the birthdays to celebrate big, we’ve almost agreed on others, and we can get downright random on still more. When we start out, every birthday is a big deal. One year, two years, three years, these are still grand milestones, celebrated with almost the same fervor that they were in the days when a child often didn’t make it till age five. So then what ages beyond that? Well, to the kids it’s still a big deal to become a teenager, at least in English speaking countries. In the United States we celebrate the mostly adulthood of eighteen and the full adulthood of twenty-one. And Jack Benny fans get to celebrate being thirty-nine. And celebrate it again, and again.

While we were talking about this, God assured me that the linguistic pattern of numbers ending in “teen” being so close to the ages at which we march our way through puberty is actually less of a coincidence than it might seem, but I don’t know if I’m buying it. In any event, many cultures celebrate a transition from child to at least approximately some form of adulthood at an age that corresponds to puberty. We have Sweet Sixteens, and Confirmations, and Bar Mitzvahs, and Quinceaneras. I imagine that in primitive societies, where we weren’t so desperate to keep our development hidden away in layers of clothes, such celebrations were actually tied to developmental milestones rather than specific years, but we’re oh too sophisticated now to actually admit, as a society, that we notice when boy’s voices change or when girl’s chests expand, or when hair begins to sprout, well, almost anywhere.

We still find ways, though, to celebrate the transitions themselves, the things we do because we’re ready rather than because it’s time. The rite of passage to adulthood used to be the transition from short pants to long pants, now it’s when we stop eating off of the kids’ menu.