The best thing to have is dirt. It sounds funny, but it’s true. By dirt I mean healthy soil. The reason it’s good is that you can grow things in it. There’s a scene in the 2013 film WRONG COPS where Officer Duke is on a meal break in the police cafeteria with Officer Shirley Holmes; Duke explains to Holmes that their colleague, Officer Sunshine, just found a bag of money buried in his backyard, and Duke jokes that nothing so lucky would ever happen to him, and that if he were to dig in his own backyard, the best that he could hope to find is “a potato.” This sounds humorous, but I’d like to point out that a potato would be a very good thing to find. Potatoes are edible. They’re, in fact, very nutritious. Later in that same film, after Officer Sunshine has lost all the money that he found, he goes digging in other parts of his backyard, hoping to find more cash stashed there, and he does end up discovering a bag that looks like the first one, but this second bag turns out to be filled not with money but with farming implements. This comes off as another humorous moment, but, when one thinks about it, these tools possess more intrinsic value than a sack full of banknotes. For, as it is written: one cannot eat money. It’s true that if you live in a stable society, money could be used to buy groceries easier and faster than it would take to plant and grow food yourself; but there never has been a stable human society, and there never will be one. So that’s why dirt is my favorite thing. Here’s the very first verse of the Bible:
This is the story of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground; But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground; and the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
This shows the importance of dirt, soil, “dust of the ground” — it is the substance out of which the LORD God crafted man; then the verse that immediately follows the above introduction explains what this Deity did with His good dirt next:
And the LORD God planted a garden; and there he placed the man whom he had formed; and out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.
So here we’re looking at the business plan of a person who owns everything: the LORD God is the richest being in the universe, and what he chooses to do with his infinite wealth is invest in some dirt and grow a man and a garden. The LORD God does not fashion a motorized vehicle or even build a mansion for himself; he’s satisfied with simply walking on foot and living wild and free in the Great Outdoors, for he set the atmosphere to stay at 22 centigrade perpetually and remain balmy and misty. (I always imagine that this ideal land settled by the LORD God looks like the background in the famous “Mona Lisa” painting by Leonardo da Vinci.)
The LORD God does not build for himself a sailboat, because he lacks any desire for adventure, as of yet. Why would you go out on a river and travel into the Seven Seas, when you have such a nice place to live, and a perfect roommate that you animated from scratch? Only when the two of you start to tire of each other will one of you decide to manufacture a sailing vessel and follow in the footsteps of Ulysses. You will then meet up with sea monsters, and when you finally return home to Paradise, you’ll be glad to see your long-lost friend waiting for you at the weaving mechanism, and all the suitors (the animals of the garden) passed out from having consumed all the fermented fruit.
Eve will be born from the severed organ of Ouranos: she will come surfing to shore on an outsized seashell. You won’t know what to do with her. (You, O reader, will have become the LORD God, for the nonce.) To comply with the Motion Picture Ratings Board, selected parts of her body shall be obscured by foam.
How long do you suppose three people can survive in the perfect vacation spot before they collectively are struck by the idea of inventing money? My guess is ten thousand years. Do you really think it would happen quicker? Fine, let’s settle for three hundred.
So, at that point, Constantine declares that religion and finance shall resurrect from the chaos of space as two sides of the same…
All of this dreamy talk about soil and beginnings stems from the fact that yesterday I tried to start a new habit of watering my lawn. For my lawn is ugly, and I would like to make it pretty. I’m not sure if watering it will help, but, if I don’t try, I’ll never know. I also don’t have any pets or children, so the grass might agree to serve as my surrogate pet or child. If the grass were willing to acknowledge British English, I would speak to the grass in British English. As it is, I just telepathize back & forth with it.
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