It was hard to choose just one winning image to display after yesterday’s Photo Blueprint Contest (see the intro text of that entry for the gospel truth), because I received countless master-shots from contending photographers, and many of them were good. For this reason, I have decided to share one more from among the also-rans. Let us therefore call today’s image “the runner-up photo from yesterday’s challenge”; and let us award its author a 2nd-place trophy, plus one extremely romantic kiss on the hand. The photo below was taken by Bryan R. from Minnesota:
Dear diary,
Wow, the world sure is improving fast. Humankind used to lie cheat & steal and fight wars all over the globe, and 90% of the population went hungry and shelterless — but now, everyone is friendly. Everyone helps everyone. It’s as if, at a certain point in history, the idea just clicked inside the minds of even the worst among us: that acting compassionately towards every living creature will lower the crime rate. And this has had the effect of generally freeing up time for all people:
Schoolteachers don’t need to work so hard preparing lessons and helping students learn by rote, because the parents of these students are able to provide a healthy environment that allows the child to indulge in autodidacticism. And this works for the full scope of humanity, despite its diversity — for behold: If the parents are cops, there’s less crime to fight, therefore they can afford to toss more hamburgers to their youngins, which pleases the youngins and turns them into Einsteins and Shakespeares. Also, on the other end of the parental spectrum, if the child’s guardians are cat-burglars, they’re currently living a life of leisure, because burglarizing is considered a crime, thus it is currently catnapping (or, rather, “out to lunch”, or “gone fishing”, if you prefer those metaphors for temporary death) so robbers’ kids also learn good too now.
But if we’re worried about stopping warfare because it means that mercenaries and manufacturers of nuclear weapons will be out of a job, verily I say unto you: Chill out. — Same thing with mobsters and gangsters: We saw that eliminating crime from the planet did not result in a whole bunch of unemployed criminals: instead, it lured those people into the trap of suburban drudgery; so now they’re all fretting about whether they should mow their lawn today, and how big to make the doily that they’re crocheting. Ditto for mercenaries and nuclear-arms manufacturers: they’ll take up hobbies playing video games about frogs, where you control your main character, Monseigneur Kermit, and help him jump across the busy street to his home in the swamp. And then he builds a family. Pretty soon there’s enough frogs to plague ancient Egypt. Finis.
Yet I cry: Why do we not yet have safe nuclear pistols? I want a silver handgun roughly the size of a U.S. pocket-Constitution, which I can keep in my purse. Because: what if crime comes back! Say I’m walking the streets at night, and a country attacks me: How shall I effectively deter their free press from converting me into an anti-anti-fascist? It’s almost as if I need to shoot them first, before crime has been invented, before they even see me coming. That way there’s nothing on the books. And if there’s no precedent, then, when my case is being tried in court, instead of a timeworn rule or law to condemn me, there’ll exist only a blank area in the judge’s mind: “Here be dragons” it sez in the place where the statute should be (“hic sunt dracones” in Latin).
But normally I don’t like to complain about why good things have not been invented yet. I understand that most inventors still live in poverty, despite the fact that we’ve eliminated poverty: That’s cuz all the bad stuff gets invented first — it’s like: you gotta prime the sludge out of your waterline before you use it to sterilize the scalpel for your ballet number about heart surgery — so the first thing that gets invented is impoverishment, since nobody’s even heard of that yet. This way, we all have something to improve upon. For it’s a fact that most of the best inventions were once bad inventions, which some cagey baron stole and augmented for the better. Among us Constitutional Lawers, it’s called the “Amendment Amendment” — or “Ha Ha”, if you speak baboon — and it was neither officially proposed nor ever ratified, but that didn’t stop our ingenuity.
You’re right, tho: Back in the good old days, all people went naked throughout the streets. And then clothes were invented. — But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; first let us offer a proof text (Isaiah 20):
In the beginning, the LORD spake to Isaiah, saying, “Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot.” And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.
Then said the LORD to all the nations: “Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder, so shall all people, young and old, walk naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, until the end of time.”
Alright, so, at first, everybody walked around naked. But then clothes were invented — no one had seen such technologies before. And they made people’s forms appear alluring, because instead of the imperfections of their flesh, the clothes could accent the desirableness of nonexistent contours while concealing the truth. (There are really no flaws to any body; but, back in the day, folks were governed by fads — and what can ya do.) Yet then the invention was born that said: “Make transparencies and even slits and holes in all garments, so that the comely parts show forth.” But then some scientists published a paper that proved that the clothes that people were wearing were not adequately puritanical.
So you can see how one thing leads to another, and how something that was bad from the beginning gets better and better, until it becomes its opposite, and then it meets its own identical twin in the garden, and they cancel each other’s culture: & curse it right out. And that garden is Paradise.
But I see that a percentage of the congregation, in its joint letter to me, has voted to ask the question “What’s your next move?” (Most likely because the question that I allowed to contend with this, on the two-choice electoral ballot, was the rather dull “What’s up, God?”) So I’ll try to filibuster:
The next thing I wanna invent is a book that flips itself while you’re reading it, so that you don’t even know that it did it. Thus: when you reach the last page, you turn that page, expecting to see the endpaper on the inside of the back cover, yet: BAM! you find that you’re on the book’s very first page, all over again: for there is an additional page after the last page, and infinite pages after that — and you didn’t even need to close the book & flip it around & re-open it. This would be useful for those stories that go on and on; like a magnetic audio-tape loop that plays a recorded musical round.
Also, after making the above helpful innovation to codices, I’ll like to steal and improve my own amendment and turn the book-form back into a scroll. Preferably an electronic scroll that glows. And I shall call it “The Internet”, and I shall use it to catch all the people who are capable of staring, and I will toss them into my Death Bag. And all the websites will be slow-loading, because they use their background energies to spy on you (that is: they stare back at the starers, albeit clandestinely — this will be a feature that we can improve upon later, during “Operation: Staring Contest”).
Then I will shout aloud: “Let there be MERDRE,” and this shall separate Wisdom from Info, and a great gulf shall be fixed between them — something like a firmament, which we might nickname Chaos or the Abyss — and thus, in just six easy steps, I will have created the Blogosphere. (I will pay for this later, by way of the installment plan.)
One more thing: first I’ll invent text-messaging, causing its transmission to be instantaneous; and then I’ll improve upon this and implement a thing called still small voice-messaging (I Kings 19:12), where the actual oral speech of humans can waltz back and forth in real time, punctuated by swaths of deep, eerie silence; and I will call this latter amendment “Lobster-shaped Telephone”: it will be red in hue and possess a large rotary dial. I’ll also invent a thing called “the telegram”, which I’ll supplant by building the U.S. Post Office and all its mailmen and mailwomen with my bare hands; and I will fill their trucks and buildings to the brim with postcards, all of which shall have gorgeous photographs of landscapes upon them; and this will serve as my snail-speed system of communication, rain or shine. However, at this point, I’ll reinvent the WORLDWIDE FLOOD (after killing off rainbows, of course, and genociding all the unicorns) so as to privatize the government.
And Jesus will sit on my right hand, and Buddha on my other. And I’ll pen my name in chicken scratch on my sticker tag, so that you won’t be able to tell if it reads “Yahweh” or “Allah”. It’ll be hard to hold in my laughter, but I will do so — for I shall make this my top priority.
Ooh, and additionally I’ll stir up confusion about the mystery of the nipple. It will be unclear whether the nipple is a good or evil organ. I will suggest that men’s nipples are innocuous; but I’ll not make a peep about the paps of females — neither a jot nor a tittle — therefore everyone will think:
“It seems permissible to display as much of the female breast as we like, in graven images illustrating the scriptures,” (for, as was explained above: back in the holy days, everyone walked around topless) “as long as we carefully avoid depicting the nipple.”
And then viewers will look at these bosoms and remark inwardly, moving their lips in silent prayer:
“O, my heart, my heart! Look there: the covering of the focal point is either accenting or obscuring — I cannot tell which. All I know is that this covered nipple is much more of an enticement than a normal nipple, unless it proves otherwise, once the gift is unwrapped.”
Yet before any surprise can be revealed, I will enter the museum amid thunder and stipulate that newborns should be brought to term but not cared for. That way we can maximize human suffering, thus establishing yet another thing to improve upon: and this will give us plenty to do, in our days of retirement.
For the reason you work throughout your life is to reach that age when you can stop working, at which point it’s crucial to find work to work on, lest you grow wise. As it is written:
I said as follows, upon separating them at birth: “Information is for the birds,” (read: twittering machines) “whereas subtlety is for snakes.” Note also that, as I spoke, I hissed out all my sibilants, greatly extending them, in a style of overacting that, to this day, I claim was ironic...
Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. (Matthew 10:16)
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