[Detail from a library magazine:]
Dear diary,
My working title for this here entry – that is, the name that I’m calling its file on my portable typewriter – is “Pre-couchdropoff”. I never know what I’m gonna write about beforetime; yet I must name my file from the jump, this e-device warns me, in order to AUTO-SAVE my contents (I am thus abetting an auto-savior); so I end up using terms that reference whatever aspect shall distinguish this particular evil day from the evil days that surround it. In short, I assume the reason your God moved me to title the work file of this entry “Pre-couchdropoff” is that He knew I was planning on dropping off at my friend’s house the big leather couches that our new home’s previous owner abandoned when he sold us this place.
I asked my friend – the one who trimmed our trees for us last week – if he would care to inherit the black marshmallow sofas with the dual drink holders that he ogled in the basement of our abode. He said he would. So today we’ll rent a pickup truck and deliver them, after we clean all the fallen leafage from our backyard. That’s all we have planned.
Also maybe we’ll wash the windows on our new house. The windows are filthy: they’re dead-insect heaven. Or rather dead-insect HELL, because there are corpses lining the sills and obscuring the glass, and none of their souls can escape this righteous punishment; plus the flames that burn them offer no warmth but only pain eternally, and God is not there.
Thinking about God absenting himself from Hell makes my mind wander to the depictions of Heaven that I’ve read. I’ve read that Heaven has an area, sort of like a Central Park, hollowed out of its midst where the saints can look down and view the daily goings-on of Hell: they can watch their former colleagues writhe in torment, and this gives them satisfaction (the saints, not the damned – altho, on second thot, maybe the damned DO get some small kick out of being observed; for, as they say, “False misery loves an audience” —Proverbs 1:37).
& the roof of Hell is the floor of Heaven. So from Hell’s perspective, it’s like having a window installed in its ceiling. A filthy, bug-ridden window. Also known as a skylight.
Now this entry is really starting to cohere, because that same friend that I told you about earlier – the one who agreed to inherit our couches – has a skylight in his bathroom. Plus the word itself seems compound to me: “sky” means “heaven”, plus “light” is the second-most abundant ingredient in God, who serves as heaven’s landlord. (His most abundant ingredient is darkness.)
My friend’s skylight leaks water during storms. This leads me to the question: Is the storm-god Jehovah aware that his saints have been escaping thru the o-ring in the heavenlight to the fashionable flames of hell?
Yet maybe this is part of God’s plan: All ye saved souls can watch the punishment of your former business-partners & family members, but don’t get too close to the gasket with a circular cross section made of pliable material which I employed to seal the portal between this place where I am and that place where I am not.
I always tell my friend, when I visit his house, that I like how the daylight floods the room thru yonder roof-borne semi-sphere. I wish that I had one in my own home’s ceiling. In fact, I wish I had much more than one. Why not make the whole roof of transparent panes? When you think about it, having an opaque rooftop is like being anti-God. It’s like saying to heaven “Keep Out!” But if the entire top of your house opens up to the sky, then the angels can observe you easier. They no longer need to tap into your computer’s cameras & microphones to enjoy the spectacle of you sinning – this frees up the spying enterprise, brings it out into the open: gives it a place in the community. During the day, you walk from room to room of your abode, fully nude, ascending and descending its escalier (stairway to heaven), and remark aloud to yourself “Oh I must have forgotten to turn off the electrical lights!” but then you remember: your rooftop got replaced last Tuesday with clear glass paneling that collects solar power and uses this energy to run the waterfall near the southeastern corner of your bedroom and also to keep all the gas jets illuminated. It’s like the flame on JFK’s grave. Except it is devoid of warmth, and the stone that covered the tomb got rolled away, and there’s a fallen angel occupying the coffin, claiming that the former president is still alive. He is risen! and currently employed in New York and San Francisco. He got remarried to Marilyn Magdalene, A.K.A. “God’s Mom Dot Com”, alias Mary Monroe; and he goes throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the Glad Tidings of the Skylight: and all the usual suspects haunt him, even certain agents from the C.I.A., which have cultivated the jolliest spiritual infirmities, and our old friend Lyndon B. Johnson, whose phantom holds seven devils and thirty pieces of silver, according to Luke 8.
I’m only saying that when you install a window in the ceiling of your bathroom, your friends, on sunny days, might mistakenly think that they’ve left the light on, because brightness is annoyingly persistent. Also a careless online search revealed to me that the term deva denotes “a member of a class of divine beings in the Vedic period, which, depending on one’s religion, are either benevolent or evil.” Now I’m arrogant enough to quote my own self, my own passage from my own damned scripture: I have a piece called “Next on ‘Divas’: Vishnu vs. Venus” in my collection A Second Letter to the Same People, which contains the following words.
Here was the LORD, hovering above me: He had blasted through the roof of my house. I remember every detail of the scene exactly. A thick, jagged edge of soot outlined the space where the ceiling had melted from the blast, through which I could see that the neighbors’ siding had also been cracked. There was frost on the roof. The sky was blue, there was not a cloud to be seen.
Yes, God had blasted a hole in the roof, and he was present, physically floating before me in my living room.
So I’ve been obsessed with skylights for some time now. Cuz I wrote the above back in 2010 or earlier.
Passageways to & from heaven… stairways… staircases… escalators… ramps… tractor beams. Ladders & zip lines… (A zip line is “an inclined cable with a suspended harness or pulley, down which a person slides to their death.” And a tractor beam is “a ray of energy that can be used to drag objects such as authors into centers of detention like space pods or Christian Heaven.”) Snakes or chutes…
As always, I just wanna be elsewhere. Anywhere else will do, but preferably someplace better. So, being landlocked, I dream of the sky. But if I were skylocked – or I should say: not if but when I become the LORD in Heaven – I will want to go back to the sea. My pal Satan tells me that we all came from the sea originally. He’s a big proponent of the theory of evolution, my good pal Satan. He says that all of us life forms were once mermaids, in the beginning, but the ocean got too crowded, so we shed our tails and grew shapely legs and shaved them. And the normal cycle would be that we grow bored of land and put our tails back on, or at least turn our arms into tentacles and dive back into the sea. Then we could learn that it’s far more amusing underwater, because it represents the subconscious, which is a huge fan of surrealism. That’s why octopussys are so smart, and they should take over the world. But instead, like I said (or rather Satan told me), we humans broke the cycle, and turned the circle into a spiral, and we spiraled up into the outer darkness, which is alt-slang for Heaven. We built a tower and infiltrated the realm of the gods: the soundless vacuum of pure dead space. Which would be all fine and dandy if not for two things: (1) the gods don’t like us, so they cursed us with anxiety and impatience; and (2) we ruined the oceans before we left. Now there’s nowhere to fall but UP; plus after dragging the seafloor with a oversize comb, we unearthed Atlantis, the lost world inhabited solely by octopussys. Look at the thing: it’s all green and corroded. It’s got bumps all over it like it’s shivering. We shouldn’t have done that. Give it the Statue of Liberty as a consolation prize. Let’s build a Newer Colossus: an intensely self-destructive mutant cyborg that has gills that respirate alcohol. Then we can preserve it in a clear globe of absinthe, and display it on the mantelshelf (a structure of wood or marble above the fireplace) until it escapes. Then we’ll use the disasters that it causes as material for our next Holy Bible. Available wherever bestsellers are misread!
I’ll forgive this entry for overstaying its welcome, if it ends itself now.
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