Houseworries (continued), with some sky-thots and a dash of Darwin

Dear diary,

If I remember right, the last time I spoke with you, we were in the middle of getting our home inspected. Why did I fear the worst?—things ended up fine.

Now we have a couple finishing touches to add to our apartment, before “closing” on the deal. Closing on a house requires both parties—the buyer and the seller—to sit at a table with six hundred lawyers. Everyone holds hands and recites a standard chant in singsong fashion: “We are sorry for being ungrateful for all the evil deeds that the big banks did unto us.” Then you sign the affidavit and leave; walk into the sunset.

Since our movie ends in a month, we have to think about how the next movie should begin. What I mean is that we should coordinate the selling of our current house with the buying of our next house. Because you can’t just camp in your sleeping bag on the floor outside the lawyers’ office forever.

So we visited a few houses that are for sale, all of which were ugly, and we even made an offer to purchase one of them. Then, while we were waiting to receive news about whether our offer was accepted, we said to ourselves: “Why did we just make an offer to buy an ugly house?—perhaps that was an unwise decision.” So when our realtor returned and informed us that the homeowners had read our offer and reacted to it by frowning and throwing it on the floor and stomping and spitting on it, we felt slightly relieved.

But what now? That’s the new dilemma in this endless chain of dilemmas that constitutes life. Where can we live?

This is what I love least about humankind: We use our massive intellect NOT to make existence easier but to make it more difficult. For, if you’re any other type of creature—say, a squirrel—all you have to do is pee on a branch, to indicate that you own that particular neighborhood of the tree: You then make your nest there, have some babies, and die at the ripe old age of two, after being hit by a motorcar. You don’t have to sign a whole bunch of paperwork before building your dream home. You just gather fallen leaves in your mouth; then use your paws to pat them between the branches. Make your domicile vaguely circular shaped, and sort of tamp down the center, so that it’ll hold your brood when you birth them. Then choose which model of vehicle you’d like to expire by. Run out into the street: dash forth-back, forth-back… Now you’re done. Game over. You got the top score. Welcome to squirrel heaven. Say hi to your ancestors.

We saw a dead deer at the side of the road yesterday, when we were driving back from our walk at the Deep Black River. Especially in this part of the globe, a dead deer is not an uncommon sight; but it always distresses me.

I’d be a lousy soldier, if I were in the armed forces, because I’d never get accustomed to pillaging and tormenting opponents. I’d always be trying to sweet-talk my fellow troopers back out of the war zone. Let us leave the enemy in peace – they’re probably dining now; let’s not bother them.

So the dead deer went to deer heaven and now it’s with its deer ancestors praising their deer god. It’s a commonplace to note that the god of any species resembles that species; so the squirrel god looks like a squirrel, and the deer god’s a deer. And then, like I said, after you die you go to heaven, which means “the sky” where that god resides, and you get to talk to your precursors, your lineage, your forefathers—all those living creatures that came before you.

& here is another commonplace: If the theory of evolution is correct (which it is not; which is why I believe it), then your ancestry, whoever you are, contains not just your familiar squirrel-shaped brethren BUT ALSO the many forms that morphed before you—that is to say, all the pre-rodents, and the half-rodent-half-fish that leaped out of the sea, and the first gray-bearded squidling, etc. So there are many types of life inhabiting heaven, but not one sinner.

So the only place in the afterlife that welcomes humans exclusively is hell. Because hell is where all sinners end up, and the only beings capable of sin are humans. Things like bacteria and the common cold virus, and cockroaches and ants and wasps—they aren’t complex enough to know how to sin, so those things are only going to be found in heaven, with the good saints above. Therefore hell is germ-free. Its walls are eggshell white, and its carpet is earth-tone. Lo, its roof is approximately 8 years old.

I never read Charles Darwin much; I don’t know why his ideas so often pervade my entries here. I bought a copy of his book On the Origin of Species when I was fresh out of high school, and I read it with mild interest; but I couldn’t see why THIS text, rather than any other, should provoke all the members of our church to set their panties in a bunch. Honestly speaking, I thought Darwin was a little boring. But I remember liking the sections of his writing where he described the creatures that he encountered. His thoughts about how they ended up this way interested me less than the fact that they were what they were.

And even if one calls oneself a believer in Christianity, one must admit that this Holy Truth has been employed to control and manipulate the masses. To herd the herd. Whether it’s right or wrong to do so is another question—I’m just saying it’s a fact that it has been done. And it’s still being done. So when a guy like Darwin comes along and presents a way of thinking that has the effect of loosening the church’s grip from the mind of its flock, yet the flock kicks against this liberating prick, I’m left befuddled. I myself value freethinking, so I assume that churchgoers would savor the increase in options; that they’d exclaim: “The more perspectives the merrier!” But instead we have all these decades with churchfolk battling the Dreadful Dragon of Darwinism.

I personally prefer the rumor that says that alien deities from some distant galaxy visited Earth long ago and created humankind in a test tube. And then they let us loose, and we ravaged everything in sight and became ourselves. And they (our divine scientist-creators) either watched us for a while, then grew tired of us and abandoned us to our fate; OR they stuck around to see what havoc we’d wreak – and they’re either among us now, hidden, invisible, like phantoms of the spirit realm, sometimes tweaking the outcomes of our reality…

Or maybe they look just like us, and they’re hiding in broad daylight; so every time we meet another human, we just might be encountering a god.

Another possibility is that the alien deities from a faraway universe traveled by spaceship here to our planet and manufactured us to be their slaves, and then we grew up and slew them. That’s what I think must’ve truly happened.

Or what seems even more likely, now that I consider it, is that this scientific creator-race of gods, after making us, split into two groups: one group of gods decided to return home, so they blasted away on their spaceship and traveled back to Planet 1001; but the other group of gods decided to remain here on Earth with us, their newly created beings. So now that we’ve annihilated the group that stayed here, the gods from the first group who chose to travel back home might someday return to see how things are progressing with their earthly experiment – pay us a revisit. If they do so, I wonder: Will they be horrified to find that the species they brought to life ended up destroying their own makers, the deific aliens’ brethren? Or will they say “We warned Group 2 that this would happen—we begged them to return back home with us, but they wouldn’t listen. They were like a lion tamer who, partly from love and partly out of arrogance, decides to sleep in the same cage with his beasts.”

Yet did we actually mate with the alien gods before we killed them? If you’re right about this, then perhaps we brought forth hybrid offspring: semi-divine. But that would mean that their line is not extinct—at least not exactly. But then they’d have to include us humans in their ancestry, and then we’d appear in their afterlife. I wonder if there’s an upper-class hell that harbors exclusively gods. Or if gods can sin in a way that we humans haven’t yet learned; like how we men can sin and meet hell but deer can’t.

And all the gossip about The Return of Christ: The Second Coming – this is simply a déjà vu glitch of the eternal recurrence, because the gods from Group 1 (the group that went home and came back) decided that they liked certain aspects of the outcome—they were happy that Group 2 was exterminated—but they don’t like some of the mutant demigods that we humans produced with them via legal congress at risqué nightclubs; so these alien christs of Group 1 decide, in their infinite mercy, to travel back in time and re-do the operation, again and again, until the problems are all worked out. And sometimes they, the prodigal gods who come & go, end up, during some cycles, opting to remain with Group 2, because, even tho they know it’ll mean their death, they can’t resist mating with humankind. And that’s why there’s so many christs in this world; and every Advent is a letdown, and the Second Coming is always an anticlimax. This explains a lot. This is why nothing ever happens. It’s also why Jesus and Lucifer (“Christ” and “Satan”), seem so similar, and both claim the Morning Star as their sign, as well as the pole-dancing serpent. For they’re alternate outcomes of the identical iteration; parallel potentials of the selfsame spacetime quanta. As William Blake always sez:

TO THE ACCUSER WHO IS THE GOD OF THIS WORLD

Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man.
Every Harlot was a Virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.

Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah: thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill.