Entry written during a thunderstorm

Dear diary,

It was a dark and stormy night. Scratch that: It IS a dark and stormy night. I had set a goal for myself: to sleep all the way until the morning; but I failed, because the lightnings woke me up. It’s now 4:28 a.m. There’s howling wind and pouring rain. I wonder where all the brown bunnies are hiding. I bet they’re in my neighbor’s shed. There’s probably a loose board near the bottom, and the bunnies squeezed thru and got in there and took shelter from these adverse weather conditions.

Does God ever tire of his “natural disaster” cliché? Why did the so-called Cities of the Plain receive such good sport from Jehovah, and all Minnesota ever gets is snow?

Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. (Genesis 19:24-25)

So God killed even the cowslips and the daffadillies. (I’m referring to “that which grew upon the ground”, which I take to be the flowers from John Milton’s “Lycidas” — one of my all-time favorite poems.) And in my youth, back during the days when my parents forced me to attend church services, our pastor claimed that the reason God gave those ancient places such fine weather is that their populace legalized marriage. Well we here in the U.S.A. have had legal marriage for many months now, yet still no fire display. Maybe God finds us boring. We’re like a channel on his cable television set that he never tunes in to watch.

Thinking of Jehovah leads me to think about war, cuz of Exodus 15, where we’re told that Moses and the children of Israel sang a song unto Jehovah, whose third line goes:

Jehovah’s a man of war! Jehovah’s his name!

Also the tale (Joshua 5:13-15) where Jehovah appears in person before Joshua on the battlefield (By the way, Joshua was the 2nd U.S. Prez, after Moses):

And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, “Art thou on our side, or on the side of our satans (which is to say: our adversaries)?”

And the warrior said, “Nay; but I have appeared here on the battlefield as the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Jehovah.”

Then Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, “What sez Jehovah unto his servant?”

And the Supreme Commander of Jehovah’s well-regulated Military said unto Joshua, “Loose your shoe from off your foot; for the place whereon you stand (the battleground) is holy.” And Joshua did so.

Now just in case there are young children among my readership who are not yet familiar with the encounter that the above references and echoes, here’s the first five verses of Exodus chapter 3:

Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb.

And Jehovah appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

And Moses said, “I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.”

And when Jehovah saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, “Moses, Moses.” And he said, “Here am I.”

And he said, “Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

So what I gather from all these Bible passages is that God has a name (by the way: who named God? his parents? or if self-named, why choose THIS name? & shall we refer to this as God’s Christian name; &, if so, what is God’s last name? or should we say that God lacks a patronymic precisely because he lacks parents? & yet does not this imply that God is an orphan?) — I say, what I gather from all these Bible passages is that God’s name is Jehovah (more accurately today’s scholars say that the name should be pronounced “Yahweh” but all my neighbors in Thief River Falls have threatened to douse me with tar if the truth-rating of my blog posts rises by even a single percentage point; so I will continue to refer to God as Jehovah the Lord — or Jesus the Christ, when that seems more appropriate) — I say, what I gather from all these Bible passages is that God has a name, and that God’s name is Jehovah, and that our God Jehovah is male rather than female, and he’s a warrior rather than a wet nurse, and he appears randomly in battlefields like an amnesiac escaped from the institution, and even his most ardent believers do not recognize him, and he fights for neither us nor for our enemies but only for some weird Third Party up in the Sky, and wheresoever he happens to materialize instantly becomes his new home, and he demands that you remove your footwear before joining him on his tatami mat (a rush-covered drugget that is used as a Japanese floor covering, traditionally made from rice straw and compressed wood chip boards, or, in Lord Jehovah’s case, polystyrene foam).

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What a stupid entry this is. I started out talking about bunnies shivering in a woodshed hiding from a rainstorm, and now I’m pondering Almighty God’s social habits.

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I’m always amazed, tho, that my house doesn’t leak when it rains. I mean, our basement seeps water when the snow melts right before springtime, but, at least so far, when the angels are pissing, it never drips thru the roof or the walls. Think about how incredible that is! Yea, consider the state of construction work in the U.S.: everything you see was built by an underpaid worker & thus is dysfunctional in some way; therefore it follows that this house’s roof should leak. Yet it’s water-tight. And how is it that the seams where one wall joins another are not faulty and crumbling, so as to permit the passage of the elements into our abode? I guess we got lucky.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Just think how it must feel to weather the storm outside, up there in your nest, so high in a tree, like the little squirrels do; and like the crows. All they can do is just wait for the angels to finish. How degrading. Unless you’re into that type of thing; then it’s probably kinda fun, in a kinky way. But I hate the angels, and I hate their behavior. And I think the crows are with me, on this issue. As for the squirrels, I’m not too sure about them. They’re a little stupider than the crows. I can imagine the squirrels half enjoying an angelic shower.

No, on second thot, they must hate it too: Nobody’s so stupid as to like the feeling of walking around with wet fur. That’s why my boss keeps a spritz-bottle of tap-water within arm’s-reach of his cubicle: cuz if his cats try to climb up on his desk, he sprays them and then they race away. Cats hate to be wet, that’s what my boss tells me.

But I always wonder why they (the cats) don’t get wise to my boss’s plan. If I were a cat, I’d probably be named Biffy; so I’d go leap upon the computer desk in my boss’s cubicle and stand right in front of his motherboard; then, when he sprays me, I’d spring out of the way, straight upward and cling to the chandelier (cuz, being a feline, I’d possess superhuman dexterity), and the water droplets from the spritz-bottle would land NOT on MY fur but on the motherboard’s shiny metal circuits, thus causing the city’s entire electrical grid to go dark, & the citizenry would assume that the Brits were attacking. Then I’d jump in a boat and move to Russia. Make it a gondola. There I’d recline, looking out over the vast beautiful sea, enjoying the sight of England and the U.S. battling it out. I’d use one paw to shade my eyes from the sun, while the other is gently working the oar at the stern.

But it’s good that God doesn’t plague us with molasses anymore. You think regular rain is bad? Try molasses. Not only does it leave you feeling wet but it’s also sticky. And, no matter how much you lick your coat, you’re never quite able remove 100% of the contaminants. It can take lifetimes for you to ever feel truly dry again.