i dreamed i was on a rooftop in seattle, a tall apartment in the queen anne neighborhood. the roof contained a white tiled swimming area, with a bathhouse with white painted walls. the sky above was the solid white cloudcover you sometimes see in seattle, white without variation from horizon to horizon. i miss seattle. i miss not seeing the sun for days, it always made me feel buried, private, closed and comfortable.

the pool was drained, and the only person on the roof, maybe even the only person in the whole world, was my grandfather.

he was standing on his feet, and he looked just fine. he was wearing gray slacks and a starched and pressed white shirt, like he'd just been to church. i was so happy to see him, i gave him a big hug, and he smelled the way he always used to, various hair tonics and powders. in the middle of painted white pool furniture, i told him that i missed him and that i loved him, and he said that he missed and loved me too. i told him that i was sorry that i never told him how i felt about god, and that i thought it would hurt him had he known. he just said that he understood, and that the answer was "somewhere in-between" what he believed and what i believed.

he told me that the answer to that whole god question was painted on the bathhouse wall behind him, in giant white letters.

the wall was entirely white, and i couldn't read the answer, and i told him so. he said that he understood, and that it didn't matter. "it's mostly about love." he said

and then i woke up. when i awoke, i could smell the hair tonic and powder for about a minute. my head hurt terribly.
i just finished watching a documentary on Ayn Rand, truly a remarkable woman in her own right, but it seems to me that her philosophy of Objectivism has been misrepresented since her death. Her books "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" are on my ever dwindling "I mean to read that someday" book list. (I just polished off Larry Niven's "Ringworld Engineers" and "The Gripping Hand." I think i'll take them back to the library once i'm finsihed here, and see if i can find Rand's books.) Anyhow, Rand's sort of optimistic hope in capitalism seems to have turned somehow into a frenzy of greed for greed's sake, and proponents of Rands more restrained, intellectual approach to the idea of every man for himself, (like Alan Greenspan) are largely ignored. (at least, philosophically, half the world hangs on his every breath when it comes to interest rates) Perhaps the way lies somewhere in the middle (no pun intended, all you buddhists out there.)

"death is insignificant and unimportant.
eternity is important, and eternity is now.
i will not die, it is the world that will end."

-Ayn Rand.

how true this is.

the Nordstrom "subscription" card on which i jotted this quote features a smiling young man, whose black sweatpants (Nike Men's track pants BP65602, $55.00 www.nordstrom.com) look (at least in the light of the cathode ray tube) like a cowled monk holding his hands up before his face in prayer.

too powerful in my mind to be ignored, god inserts himself into my free association and my unconscious. this is the nature of god. you can't keep a good man down.

i am reminded of something my father taught me, a memnonic for remembering the tuning on a six string guitar (E, A, D, G, B and then high E)

"Even After Death, God Bothers Everyone."

Apple Remote Access interrupts these thoughts. "Due to inactivity, You have been disconnected."

Finally, some recommended reading, a fantastic essay on love lost, reminiscence and the emptiness and objectivity of pornography, truly some of the best writing i've read in a long while (although some mature content is enclosed therein) from the blog of Michael Barrish, found on www.cruel.com,

http://oblivio.com/road/02062801.shtml

(i will not spellcheck this entry, i am sorry.)
yay
we have an address, i'll send off an email soon with it, once we have phone-age too. we move back to philly to occupy our space on the fifth (sunday.)

living here at home has not been too bad, things seem like they are turning a corner (knock on wood) out here with the hicks and the deer, one can catch one's breath, and observe things a little easier, as if time were moving slower, or somehow forgot to look in on me and shake my tree. perhaps i can gain momentum and sneak up on time? maybe get a head start and get across the line before the son of a gun can react?

maybe

jason called, it was nice to hear from him... one needs friends when things are going sour.

looking at my grandfather's clergy badge makes me sad. i hope he found heaven. i hope that if you believe in heaven, you go there, even if it doesn't exist. (how un-saint-monkey of me, i know.) if anyone deserved to go, he did.

i can't find my high-school yearbook. what a relief. it's like it high school never existed!

picked blackberries off of the side of the road all night, now we are making a cobler. got some half and half chillen in the fridge, gonna be a fat bastard.
hello, you've reached steffan and mystery... please leave a message after the tone.

*beep

uhh. are you there? pick up. pickuppickuppickup. um. okay, this is god, and um. i like had this problem with my carborator and um, well the long and short of it is that i need a ride to the grocery store. or maybe you could come by if you have some smokes? cause that's all i need. that and a sixpack and some poptarts. anyhow, i guess you are out. i'll manage, talk at ya later.

*beep

(traffic noise)
yeah, hey if you are there, really pick up this time! *sigh* it's me again. i guess i just missed you. look, i'm in a bit of a jam at the safeway up on fifteenth and john, i mean what's up thier ass up here? the restroom was full and it stunk like a mug in there anyhow, and i figured i just whiz in the alley and i think the mutherfuckers called the cops and *oh shit! there they are anyhow

hello, sir, we've had complaints of a transient disturbing the peace around here, would you happen to have some identification?

um, look, i'm like on the phone ok?

you can either cooperate or we will bring you downtown. you need to have some form of ID or we have to bring you in as a transient, unless you can prove residency around here. it's a city ordinance. do you have a receipt for those poptarts?

ordinance? damn sidran! look, why are you hasslin me? is it the robes? not everyone with beards and linen robes is a nutcase, OK? it's an asthetic thing, right? it's like part of my whole IMAGE. i'm just tryin to do my own thing here. i'm totally tired of you athiest pigs coming down on me all the time! and NO, i don't need ID, i'm god, okay? i'm like omnitient or some shit. i'm a resident of EVERYWHERE, okay. you can't have an ID for EVERYWHERE, or at least that's what they told me at the DMV. shit. i wasn't doin nothin and people are always blaming thier shit on me, so cut me some slack. you think i'd walk all the way up here just to steal some crap from safeway? hell, i could miracle a whole truck of fucking poptarts if my back didn't hurt so damn much. (stupid slipped disk.) look i'll show you *arrgh* damn, all i can manage is the SAFEWAY brand. Jesus those suck, but i really CAN miracle poptarts, really. look anyhow, i lost the receipt when the bagboy chased me out of the alley... whups. look, steffan, i'm going to have to go, i just put my foot in it here.

*beep

look, okay, when you get in, could you come down to the capitol hill station on 12th and bail me out? it's not far from the globe, over by where central co-op used to be before they sold out (bastards! can't get any good carrot juice in seattle anymore!) anyhow, it's like $250, and it won't be like last time, i got this check coming for workman's comp in a couple of days, so i can get you back then. or at least call my kid? i think he's somewhere around here... tacoma i think, there is this promisekeeper's gig at the tacoma dome, i think he's the headliner...(aw hell, that's in BOISE this week, he ain't in tacoma till next week. damn ingrate. never calls, not so much as a father's day card from the little prima donna.) c'mon man, if you are there i REALLY need you to pick up! damn. anyhow, when you come by i need to talk about crashing at your place for a couple of weeks while i look for a new pad, cause my landlord says that i have to get out cause of the whole goat thing. anyhow, we can talk about that later. get down here as soon as you hear this, okay? thanks, i like totally owe you one.
consider the possibility
that there are no higher beings
there are no lower beings
there is only the earth and
all the things on it

it is all unexplainable. an accident
or just as good as one,
a non-accident
that we have no chance of understanding
no chance of explaining
we will never know the truth
attempts to explain can only compound the error
at least until we can see enough of the picture.
and we are very, very, very small,
and very, very, very far away.

why then... we would be responsible!
responsible for our own actions
for good and evil!
could it be that we
are responsible for every horrible thing
and every beautiful thing
that man has ever done?
no angels holding our etch a sketch
no devils guiding our hands
we made it
we did it
we broke it
and if it is to be fixed
WE MUST FIX IT
no-one else. not god, not the devil
not hitler or ghandi
not our fathers, not our children
but simply
we must do it ourselves, just as we are
with no help from anyone

god didn't give us anything
neither did he take anything away
heaven is the realization
that there is no heaven
except the one that you make yourself
hell is never realizing
that you control your own life.
and subjecting yourself to the
random world
with blind faith
and expecting
someday
your reward...

enlightenment is the realization
that no-one is bound
e x c e p t
those that bind themselves.
And on the 8th day, God said:

"Ok Murphy, I've done all I can, you take over."
"Saint Monkey" I mean. Everything seems to be synchronous lately, and all of my friends are involved in monkeys or elephants in some way, but I promise that i'm not just on the popularity train here, the name has a history for me.

For a long time, I made a vain attempt to be religious for my grandfather's sake. It would have broken his heart to tell him that I did not believe in God, so I never did. In a way, "God" to me was my grandfather.

When he died, I felt freed to truly abandon the concept of God, and as a way of coming to grips with that, I wrote little poems for about a year, dealing with God, (pissed at him,or his followers mostly.)
One day, while looking into research on rhesus monkeys for a project, I became just positively monumentally depressed over the evil that man perpetrates on nature in the name of the progression of man. (Not necessarily the preservation of nature, or even conscious stewardship of nature.) Earlier in the year, I had just read a wonderful book about "Washoe," a chimp raised to be human by a california couple. They taught her sign language. Washoe uses language as language, and she expresses herself eloquently and coherently. It is a very beautiful thing. For the first time, humans have encountered and communicated with intelligent life outside of their experience. It should be listed as an earth-changing event.

Anyhow, I started thinking about all of those rhesus monkeys in their cages, wired to machines, and I couple that with the thought that they may be coherent intelligences, capable of constructing their own religions, their own mythologies. Perhaps even communicating them orally, far more subtly than we have thought to look. Some research scientists want to discount Washoe, saying that she is simply "mimicking" and her attempts to construct new words for her surroundings are simply random babble, interpreted by her handlers. They don't want to face the idea that Washoe, and other research subjects are capable of cognition, because it may spell the end of their research.

Thinking about this, the idea that religions, the foundation of hopeless hope, could exist in some limited way among these monkeys, and we as the devils in their hell, want to deny them even the right to exist in order to further our own needs (and for what? Jesus Christ, cosmetics? ridiculous.) Thinking about that, I started to cry. (don't figure me as someone who cries a lot. I almost never cry, not even when my grandfather died.) Where was the "saint monkey" that would come free them from their cages?

That's when I knew for sure that God was dead, and he wasn't my grandfather, because he would never permit such a thing.

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