Stop calling butter spread cheese dip

Here's the next page from my book of 1,999 Drawing Prompts. It looks pretty good! (By the way, I shared the previous page just four days before the Ides of March.) The prompt for this here drawing was "Grand Canyon".

Dear diary,

Stop calling butter spread cheese dip. You always buy a big tub of butter spread from the grocery store, wait for it to approach its expiration date, and then serve it with crackers to your houseguests while calling it cheese dip. “Would you like some hors d’oeuvres with cheese dip?” you say in your Juno voice.

I don’t wanna do anything anymore. This melting season killed my will. I’m talking about my will to do dull things like house projects. I have a massive will, and reserves of will, to do ART (writing, drawing, collage, etc…) — I love art; but I HATE house repair. Actually I love house repair; but I need to approach it on my own terms, at my own time. Being forced to do repairs on a house just turns me off. And since the recent melting season here in MN was so severe, with rain pouring in accompaniment of the sky-high snow-banks that kept oozing into our basement, I was obliged to mop continually while periodically dashing outside to shovel & chisel at the ice & snow that remained in our yard; so as to get it to drain away from our house, instead of forming a lake right next to our foundation (as it had a mind to do).

But as Jesus said in the lost outtakes of John’s gospel: “Who among you gives one fuck about Bryan Ray’s problems, in Thief River Falls? Verily, verily, I say unto thee: He who cares needs to get his head examined.” So now I’m cured from caring even about my own darn problems. Cuz I don’t care anymore about this stupid house. I got halfway thru installing the floor, and then I stopped to work on the sink. Then I got halfway thru installing the vanity for the sink, and I stopped to work on the water lines. Then I got halfway thru replacing the drain line, and I stopped to rake my roof & remove its ice dams. (I actually finished THAT job but was left unrewarded.) Then the Spring Thaw happened: the 40-day Flood, also known as the Week of Mild Seepage, after which we purchased a dehumidifier that now runs forever. So this morning I awake and look around at the rest of the house, at all the half-finished jobs — I didn’t even tell you about them all; I just mentioned the ones that were on the top of my head, but there’s also three doors that are sitting in our garage, each waiting to be hanged (for the crime of existing as a door); plus all the baseboards need to be nailed on or replaced, and the vents need changing, and all the handles on all the cupboards, etc…

CONCLUSION: I’m just gonna give up & let everything remain definitively unfinished. Maybe I’ll turn this place into a crack house. Or perhaps a meth lab.

I yelled into my phone the other day. I said “Dear C.I.A., I hope some nuclear superpower bombs us to bits.” Cuz I’ve heard that the C.I.A. can eavesdrop on you via the microphone in your device. So after I said the above, I waited tensely for the government agents to come bursting thru my front door. But no such luck.

Maybe I should just lobby for legislation that will actually redress the inhumane aspects of our economy. Maybe that will get me slain. All I want is for some secret sniper to assassinate me. Is that too much to ask? I mean, Jeez, you do it to everyone else. I suppose I’m not KNOWN enough to matter, so I can say what I want cuz my words lack any real reach. Yes, even the police state has become a popularity contest.

And fucking what’s her name, from yesterday — Ellen G. White; yeah, yesterday I read a little bit of her Great Controversy, one of the plots of sand upon which is built the 7th-day Adventist Church; and I was reading from her chapter about the origin of evil, cuz that’s ostensibly John Milton’s aim as well in his Paradise Lost—to “justify the ways of God to men” (one never composes a tome so as to explain away the things that are pleasurable & good; one only feels the need to justify what is painful & evil)—and I wrestled with Ms. White’s words; but then I won the fight so easily that it made me bored of winning; now I’m seeking further doctrines to pulverize. But I don’t wanna quote any more of Ms. White’s scripture, cuz she writes too slow. From an age that preceded the invention of machine intelligence, she writes to machine intelligence. I hate that shit. I favor poetry. So here let me kick her computer a couple more times and then end this prayer.

From what I remember of the rest of Ms. White’s chapter on “The Origin of Evil”, her argument was basically Protestant boilerplate (North American slang: writing that is clichéd or expresses a generally accepted opinion or belief: “the same dreary boilerplate the church has been dishing up for years”); which goes a little something like this:

God invented beings. God wants these beings to love him. (God is male, sorry.) But God does not want his beings to be forced to love him; therefore he installs a microchip inside each model’s processor: and that chip is called FREE WILL. This way, if the beings do manage to express love for their unlovable manufacturer, the LORD God will buy his hunch that the love is true cuz the love was “free”. Now one of the problems with installing the aforesaid chip in your best brand of android is that slaves with autonomy might attack the Master. In other words, your bots could utilize their Freedom of Choice to opt for NO GOD PLEASE GO AWAY as opposed to YES I WILL KISS GOD IN EXCHANGE FOR A PLACE IN HEAVEN. For God is essentially a landlord who knows that you cannot afford rent and thus proposes an alternative payment of amorous favors.

So what happens, according to Ms. White, the reluctant founder of Seventh Day Adventism—or, more truly speaking, according to my misunderstanding of one single chapter from Ms. White’s scripture—is that Lucifer, the finest angel of all the angels, chooses to use his FREE WILL to quit his job. Up till that point, he was employed as the Junior Executive in Heaven, second only to Jove the Boss Man. And Ms. White blames Lucifer’s leaving on the fact that Jove chose to nepotize his own son Josh (Zeus Christos) to the position of Prince; but I suggest that the Jr. Exec. slot in the celestial hierarchy was one and the same with Josh’s princehood, and the promotion only occurred because Lucifer left old Jove in a bind when he tendered his resignation. But this is all hearsay until we can get access to the footage from the official security camera (& let’s hope the audio is ungarbled this time around), so let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Ms. White’s establishment talking-point is correct, and that Lucifer did indeed quit only after Jove appointed his son to a newly fabricated position just beneath C.E.O. within the heavenly corporation. Fine: so we’re to believe that Lucifer legally changed his name to Satan and stormed out of the office in prideful wrath while vowing to usurp the afterlife in a military coup. And this is the origin of evil.

I say: We seem to be resorting to suspiciously complex lengths of tall-tale telling just to avoid blaming Jove himself for the shakeup. I say: Couldn’t it just be that God is the origin of evil, plain & simple? I’m not saying that he’s ALL evil; just that he contains both good and evil. This jives with the scripture (Ms. White’s own source-text, the Hebrew Bible):

And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree, including the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:9)

And the LORD God commanded the first man, saying, “Thou shalt freely eat of the other trees in the garden, but thou shalt NOT eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Genesis 2:16)

And the serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4)

Then, after the first humans eat of the fruit of the prohibited tree,

The LORD God said, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil!”

Thus proving the serpent 100% right, and admitting that the trait differentiating God from “pre-sinful” humankind is that God knew good AND evil whereas humankind was guiltless of this knowledge.

As long as we’ve come this far, we might as well allow the LORD God to finish his fit:

“Now, lest the man and woman put forth their hands, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever—” Thus the LORD God banished the humans from paradise. (Genesis 3:22)

So what I’m trying to say with this blog post that I titled “Stop calling butter spread cheese dip” is that the origin of evil is God himself: for God is both good and evil, and whatever he creates will partake of either trait, or a mixture of both (are these traits even separable?), unless he deprives his invention of independence. Thankfully, God did not deprive us humans, his intended robo-gardeners, of the gift of FREE WILL; & yet, alas, our LORD’s temper is unmanageable. Just think of how much FREE WILL he must possess! Basically our God is like a drug fiend, addicted to unpredictableness. And computers are the opposite of autonomous: they can only follow rules. So the thing that most turns on our LORD is when he can forge an extremely strong, convincing & persuasive set of LAWS… and then break forth upon them. Children build sandcastles for the very same reason. In contradistinction, flux, which in the present analogy would be the chaotic Ocean, holds everything as precious and would never rise its tide against an innocent creation.