I don’t particularly know why. I mean, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the callousness with which people just butcher animals or plants for food. --And not just for food, sometimes just because they get in the way. Mice invaded my house recently. I snapped all their necks with rat traps. Weeds invaded my corn, asparagus, and onion beds. I dispatched them to a forced social policy compost bin the city of Berkeley taxes me for. By squatter’s rights, the veggies invaded the weeds, but by the law of who has the fittest allies, the weeds lost. Well, last week anyway.
So, I keep having these dreams about butchering pigs. Not about the act, more about how they are laid out on the ground having turned to an off color of lifelessness afterwards. You only have to have that dream about three times before you wonder, “Okay what’s up? Is this some kind of weird residual ghost dream of recent deaths close to me?” In February, a guy from work, a few months younger than me, died of a heart attack on the golf course. My uncle passed away in March. A friend had a pretty close call with some new HIV medication recently, and then every day on the TV, I have to look at all the soldiers and Iraqi’s that just end up dead. Then again, maybe it’s because Jerry Falwell just expired in his office last week. One of the few guys in the world who had the peculiar ability to just open his mouth and piss me off and suddenly he just
isn’t, and can’t.
They are all part of it. But I’m more fascinated with the fact that at one moment a being is cruising along all conscious and then, not.
The “Not” part not only preoccupies me, it preoccupies just about every human. To the point the preoccupation causes us to create religion to explain all the “Not” that happens. (Find me a society that
hasn’t had a religion to explain “the Not.” Anthropologists I’ll take candidate non-Not societies by e-mail.)
I watched the PBS
Frontline special on the Mormons recently. Long and short on the book of Mormon: “Some Hebrew tribes came over to Central America from Israel, fought among themselves for a few years, Jesus showed up after the crucifixion, hung out with them for a few days, and 1800 years later, a guy found a book that explains what happens in the “Not.” Like all religions, Mormonism started the same way. Some guy, usually through spiritual influence, gets an explanation of what happens after the Not. Well, actually, religions tend to go farther they not only tell you what happens in the “Not” but how to get into good neighborhoods in the Not and avoid the bad ones. You know the various “
EuNotpia” developments.
The interesting thing about all the Not societies or religions or whatever you want to call them: they all have the same basic problem, nobody in them has been in the Not and gotten back.
Well there is one case. But, apparently, he’s the son of the Not owner. It’s hard to tell. No one has ever actually met the owner of Not. He either talks to you in a one way conversation like early radio, or he sends one of his messengers. But, if you believe this one guy is the son of the Not owner, he gives you the key to the Not or not Not. It’s confusing, it’s really the key to ever lasting life, which is the not Not, which is here, I think. But you have to go to the Not to get there. Anyway, the story is, the son of Not believed in himself so he used the key to come back from the Not. This made him the Not Holy Spirit cause he could move through impenetrable Not walls. Like we all want to. Cause without this key, the not lock is one way.
So anyways, while he was back from the Not for a few days he talked to a few of his
pre-Not friends (including the Mormons indirectly) and they all subsequently went around explaining what happens after the Not, or really –how to get in the best Not neighborhood or out of the Not. It’s very confusing. What is important, really is no matter where you end up, is you are not really in the Not.
But never mind that one two way incident, cause none of my readers are the Holy Spirit. We only get once chance to cross into the Not. There in lies the problem. As I said before, we can’t see the Not just the door to it. We really don’t know what’s in the Not. So we make crap up. We do this mainly because outside procreating or dispatching plants and creatures to the Not, so we can eat, build shelter and stay off the Not, there is not much else to do here in the not Not. It’s like waiting in line for a ride at Disneyland on Memorial Day weekend. The lines are long, so we talk to our neighbors to pass the time. We really don’t know much about our neighbors, and we are all first time visitors, so we feel free to come up with theories, based on second hand accounts we’
ve heard, as to what the ride at the end is like. After a few thousand years of lines we’
ve reduced our theories to the following:
There are three categories of Not,
Good Not,
The Bad Not,
And the not, Not.
I really don’t care if the other two exist or not. I’ll find out when I get to the front of the line. What I’m more fascinated about is how we spend all our time in line trying to figure out who gets into which neighborhood in Not. Jerry Falwell seemed overly preoccupied with what neighborhood everyone was going to inhabit in the Not. --Like it was any of his business.
I think, because he was a
televangelist, and thought he'd figured everything out. He was bored here in the not Not. So he reached out and started a lot of conversations with strangers in line.
So why do I mention all this? Funny thing happened in the park the other day. It was hot and sunny. One of those days I play hooky from work, walk down the street with my laptop and steal a bit of someone’s wireless
internet connection to make it seem like I’m working from home. Anyways, I’m sitting on the bench watching Berkeley students play touch football in their last acts before leaving for the summer, and this homeless guy walks up and asks me for a dollar. I have rules about panhandling, and if you ask for specific amount I’ll usually fish it out of my pocket. So, homeless guy got a dollar. He then asked if he could sit down. I said, “Sure, if you don’t ask for more money.”
He just smirked a bit and sat down saying, “Nah, I’m just tired.”
He sat a bit looking at the ball flying between students while I typed. Then my bench sitting partner decided to strike up a conversation. “My name’s Gabriel. What you working on in that computer?”
“After the Archangel,” I said back? I’d been watching too may PBS shows on religion.
“Nah, not after.” He replied back. “For all you know, I am him.” He smirked again, like the line made me owe him another dollar.
“Where are the wings and spiritual glow?” I asked.
He just stretched out his legs, crossed them at his ankles while shaking his head in grin. “It’s the first sunny hot day in three weeks, and you just gave me, a dirty black homeless guy, a dollar.”
I smirked back.
“So what you writing so intently on that computer?” he asked again.
Now I had the upper hand. Sure I’d get him to shut up I said, “Well Gabe, I’m working on some poetry about why people spend so much time trying to figure out what happens after death.”
“
Hmm, I can’t help you there. I’m never going to die. So I don’t know.” He said back.
“Really, you think you are just going to go on living forever?” I said, noticing he looked a little less healthy than me.
“In one form or another,” he replied. “Like everything else.”
He looked back to the football game.
The one thing about Berkeley is you never know where an interesting conversation is going to come from. It could be in a bar, coffee shop, or with a homeless guy who sees profit in claiming he’s an archangel. So, I indulged him, “Want to run your theory behind that through me?”
“Well,” he said, “If I was an archangel, I’d be immortal.” But then he pointed out to a German short haired pointer in the park eating at a clump grass. “You see that dog. He’s basically killing that grass. But, in a few days that grass will be alive again as part of the dog. The part he poops out will end up as grass again. No matter how many times something dies, it can’t escape life. It gets consumed by it and takes another living form. It’s like taxes or forced recycling. It’s a certainty you can’t escape. You always are a prisoner and you’ll always serve it”
“So under your theory, I’m a dinosaur?” I said.
“It depends, what did you have for breakfast?” he mused back.
We won’t go into what I’m made up of based on Gabe’s immortality though dietary consumption theories. But we chatted a while longer and explored some of the concepts I discussed about the Not earlier in this entry. Then he got up do go, walking away from me down the side walk as I continued sitting on the bench.
As he walked away, I said, “See you around again sometime?”
He just continued down the sidewalk, answering, but never looking back at me. “Maybe in the not.”
