Pantheism ~ When one God just isn’t enough. 

The Gods, also known as the powers that be, are overheard kibitzing in the cloak roam amidst a collection of robes, togas and laurel wreaths when Stillwell (not his real name) conspiratorially leans over to Darnell (his real name) and unctuously announces, “Localized Consciousness. It’s the next big thing.” Darnell heartily agrees saying, “Yeah, why should we keep all this exquisite awareness to ourselves. Let’s exhibit some spiritual largesse and create some soulful spin-offs. Nothing too large mind you. We don’t want to be challenged in any meaningful way, we just want to be amused.”

Stilwell:          That’s what I’m saying. I call it Localized Consciousness and it’ll give the natives illusory fits. We’ll create them in our image using the evolutionary system. That will be the first dichotomy. They’ll think they’re really separate and distinct from everything else. They’ll confuse independence for isolation when the entire time we’re all one and we love them exceptionally.  

Darnell:          Well I’m all for it but we’ll have to create a playpen big enough to overawe the so-called individual and his “Localized Consciousness.” He thinks he’s really that person in the mirror, identifying completely with the body and its senses. If they really knew how serene our heaven is, they’d never sweat a thing on earth and that Lennon song Imagine would have to be retitled Reality.

Stillwell:         (affects “jazz hands” as he conjures up power) Boom! Done. (And the universe as we know it, is before them)

Darnell:          Wow! That was one Big Bang. Maybe you could warn me next time.

Stillwell:         Here take this eye dropper and start animating these human vessels with a tincture of awareness. Use the short one for North Korea and that special one for Jesus, the Buddha, Moses and Bill Gates.

And so it came to pass that there was one insurance company that we all happily subscribed to. But Lucifer tempted mankind with ill-gotten booty and a great fraud was perpetrated in the Garden of Indemnification which begat the multi-headed hydra of AFLAC, GEICO and Progressive Insurance. And now no one knows Flo, from the gecko, from the duck. A Babel of coverages, riders and deductibles. The only real insurance is faith. Faith and an awareness in an incomprehensible power infinitely greater than ourselves. Ooooh.

 

As a dilettante of the second order, I occasionally glance at The New York Review of Books just to see how the other half lives. Alright, just to see how the other .00000000025% live. Except for Presidents giving a State of the Union Address, no one reads any more. Instead they troll for satisfying videos of some do-gooder giving a homeless guy $100 or an abandoned kitten being breast fed by a honey badger. I know I do. And I get it. Reading takes time and application. It’s proactive, but it is ultimately more rewarding and nourishing than idly surfing some video screen seeking temporary fulfillment. Well that’s as preachy as I’ll get because Wimp.com just posted a video of a Dolphin making oatmeal. That Dolphin happened to be former Miami Dolphin fullback Larry Csonka.

The NY Review of Books is bone dry and devoid of juicy gossip. If it were any drier it would spontaneously combust. It’s a narrow publication appealing to people who sometimes equate intellectual heft with spiritual awareness. The NY Review of Books is replete with bravura verbal muscularity and apposite aphorisms, soft as church music. However as comprehensive as it may be, the following words or ideas seem to creep into about half the articles or reviews. For example I’ve detected these recurring themes or phrases throughout the NY Review of Books:

• • Sylvia Plath’s suicide changed nothing. She was still unhappy.
  • So that was it. Jane immersed herself in English romantic poets as a means of coping with her intractable psoriasis.
  • Harold’s homosexuality was known only to his wife, Ralph.
  • All we had were parsnips. Fortunately all we wanted were parsnips.
  • the Zionist experience of Jewish Semites
  • the Jewish experience of Semitic Zionists
  • the Semitic experience of Zionist Jews
  • the influence of chivalric modalities in 12th century Hohoenzollern 
  • Marcel Proust would often mispronounce his name as “Proust.” Knowing that if anyone were to write about the event, no one would be able to know how Proust pronounced “Proust” in the first place. 

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After chipping a tooth on my fiancée Muriel’s prosthetic clitoris, I knew life would never be easy. Muriel didn’t snore when she slept. Instead she did something more disturbing. Whenever she entered Deep REM sleep she’d emit a Dial Tone. A Dial Tone, like from Bell Labs. Very unnerving, although after about a month I figured out a way to call China, where prosthetic clitorises are made. So I ordered 2. One for her and one for me. I explained to Muriel, “This clitoris is great. Now I no longer have to go to sleep right after we make love.” To which she responded, “Oh is that what we were making?”

Did I mention she had no native intelligence? Instead she had Artificial Intelligence. From Hasbro. It might manifest itself like this: She’d put on scuba gear and go kayaking upside down in the lake. As Muriel maneuvered the kayak around the lake I’d see her capsized hull moving through the water while the occasional oar penetrated the surface from underneath.

If forewarned is forearmed, I should’ve heeded the birthmark located on her back: Best By MAY 2014. Muriel was so advanced and yet we met offline. Way offline. It was at a Pre-stressed Concrete Convention where concrete with mother issues went for counseling before their feelings hardened into an ossified mess. Muriel and I both worked there as counselors. Muriel would often sit before a couple of yards of pre-stressed concrete annealing in its rebar and advise, “If you think about it, not only are all politics local, but so is everything else.” That paradigm-busting advice usually did it and the concrete was no longer stressed. This relief worked for most concrete, but sometimes years later it cracked up in some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

That’s when I told Muriel about the health benefits of local honey. She agreed and said she’d be my local honey. She’s so sweet. Early on Muriel would bring a lunch to church. I thought it was a bad idea saying, “You shouldn’t pray where you eat.” She cackled like a hen, because although she was my local honey she wasn’t immune to my humor.

Then she got me back. By now we were married and living in a 2 bedroom hive in a fashionable section of Compton. We went into the funeral business called Caskets with Friends. It did not go well. Between the ill-fated Frequent Diers Program and the sign advertising “Walk-ins Welcome” business was moribund. Well more or less moribund. Business also stunk, but that was more due to our poor embalming technique than anything else.

When I mentioned how we needed to refinish the coffee table she remarked, “David, as far as refinishing furniture goes we’ve only scratched the surface.” I couldn’t hold back any more and kissed her passionately. She got very excited and began emitting a Dial Tone. Then she suggested I try kissing her mouth next time.

Her brother Giovanni was one of those rare guys. Not only did he own a very expensive Ferrari, he also had a really big “Testarossa” if you know what I mean. How did I know? Well he lifted the hood one day and showed me. Muriel’s sister Gwen was a very fetching young lady and when I casually remarked to Muriel, “You’re sister Gwen is a beaut,” Muriel said, “How did you know she was a Butte? How did you even know she was from Montana?”

As the years passed we both agreed that time had gone by and although Muriel was well past her expiration date, so was I. We were 2 peas in a pod or bees in a honeycomb. Because she is my honey I’ll always love her sweetness.

Thunder-pumping piano man Jerry Lee Lewis was probably the least celebrated member of Sun Records’ Million Dollar Quartet whose other members were none other than Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. You might even say he was the “quiet” Millionaire. Although taking into account his marriages (7), arrest records (almost as numerous as his musical records) and his addiction to moonshine, he was a very noisy Millionaire. Killer (as fast became his nickname) was not a paragon of virtue. In fact he wasn’t even a nice man. But in 1958 he was a high-flying Cajun, till it all came crashing to the ground in what was supposed to be a triumphant tour of jolly old England.

On the strength of Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On, Jerry Lee Lewis was “the next thing” and in great demand . At 22 this hillbilly high school dropout probably felt a little invincible. Feeling a little invincible is like being a little bit pregnant. You either are or you aren’t and it’s important to know the difference. Sam Phillips, fabled owner of Sun Records and architect of the Million Dollar Quartet, had arranged an English tour to take advantage of “Killer’s” popularity and Mr. Lewis decided to bring his new bride, Myra Gale Brown. So far so good. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Arrive refreshed and unconscious

Route supposedly taken by stowaway.

 2. Avoid the “busy hands” of frisky TSA agents

3. Finally understand the adage: That which does not freeze me, only makes me colder.

4. Can congregate in front of landing strut without being told to return to seat

5. Great way to earn Frequent Dier Miles

6. Get to board plane before those snooty Platinum Club members

7. Can’t beat the cushy oversized rubbery seat

8. Don’t have to listen to know-it-all guy next to you go on and on about how, ”On a BTU for BTU basis, propane gas is your best value.”

9. 5 hour trip seems like 10 minutes because you were unconscious for 4 hours and 50 minutes

10. Because there is no oxygen, you never have to worry about placing margarine cup over mouth and “breathing normally.”

11. Private compartment kept at a constant temperature of -48

12. Without the prying eyes of passengers, can join the mile high club when you’re ready

13. Freedom to get up and move about the wheel well whenever you want

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Author’s note: In Edmund Morris’s authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, Mr. Morris employed a fictional character as a literary device to report on and catalogue the many events of Mr. Reagan’s long life. I employ a similar literary device in my unauthorized thumbnail sketch of Jesus Christ’s life, although at no time do I refer to Jesus Christ as “Dutch.”  

 

Sure I remember the Christ boy. He was the son of Joe & Mary Christ. They lived down the street from my cousins the Goldstein’s of Nazareth. If we knew then what we know now, we would’ve been a lot nicer to him. It’s not everyday God incarnate appears in your midst. He had it all, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted everyone else to have it all too. You might say that was his mission in life. Some people didn’t want it all. They wanted things returned the way they were BC, and therein lied the rub. 

His life and his death have inspired billions, and spawned a fierce and bewildering competition for his legacy in yet another example of why earth would be better if it was run by Microsoft. If only Jesus’s estate had the foresight to copyright his images and words, perhaps then we would’ve preserved the kernels of wisdom in his loving message. Instead, careless clerics have germinated them into an inconsequential tuft of weeds. The Garden of Eden is in serious need of landscaping. People are more stymied than facilitated by their religions. It just seems his whole message has gone to seed. Read the rest of this entry »

The Hubble Space Telescope, floating so serenely above the Earth’s muddy atmosphere, is uniquely qualified to penetrate into the farthest reaches of our uncharted universe. It methodically scans the celestial sphere searching for Star Clusters, Spiral Galaxies and Gas-Filled Quasars. While gazing into deep space recently, the Hubble Telescope glimpsed the most distant object in the universe. And no, I’m not referring to my father. These miraculous photographs are believed to be the first images ever taken from before the Big Bang, which occurred over 14 billion years ago (6,000 years ago for my Creationist friends). These remarkable pictures depict the sketchy outlines of a concerned father figure hovering over a child who appears to be experimenting with an unfathomably dense and infinitesimally small sphere called a singularity. While manipulating the singularity, the boy assures his father, “Don’t worry dad. I know what I’m doing. There’s no way it’s going to explo….”

Further studies of the singularity suggest it maintained its equilibrium by freely giving energy from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration: From each area according to its ability, to each area according to its need. Astrophysicists have labeled this perfect redistribution of power, “Communism. Pure and simple.”  Read the rest of this entry »

~ In the decade of the 1840’s a series of catalytic technological leaps conspired (in a good way) to turbocharge the era and toggle society from primitivism to modernity. ~

 

The pervasive wizardry of the Digital Age has palsied our ability to appreciate its origins. It seems the ubiquity of ever-advancing gadgetry has quietly rendered us both a slave to its expediency and a marveller at its everyday sorcery. Whether it’s asking Siri to; “Find me the nearest Weinershnitzel” or waving our sudsy hands beneath a motion-detecting faucet, we’re unthinkingly demanding of the technological feats which, until recently, were nothing more than crack pot ideas found in the back of decade’s old Popular Mechanics magazines.

A proper accounting of how we got here demands a deliberative look at where we came from. Being fortunate enough to have missed the Dark Ages (unless you count the Disco Era), I have a mighty appreciation for the technological marvels which have allowed us to avoid the drudgery of the past. For example, there was a time when Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White had to actually turn the letters by hand. Such drudgery! Now she just touches a screen and the letters magically appear. This kind of enabling touch-screen technology will add years to Vanna’s letter-revealing hostess duties. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll spare you the indignity of bad puns and obvious analogies…in my next story. Meanwhile, prepared to be slimed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be read slowly. 

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Here at davidhardiman.com we value our readers and we understand that many readers self-medicate with these essays.  Again, if this is an emergency or you are hyperventilating, stop reading and dial 9-1-1. Otherwise continue reading and a pain-relieving essay will be with you as soon as one becomes available. We apologize for the delay in bringing you relief, but we are currently fresh out of ideas. You are the 5^th reader in the queue so don’t stop reading or you’ll lose your place in line. Your wait time for a meaningful essay is approximately 8 sentences. We are sorry that due to higher than normal reader volume, we are unable to provide our usual level of wit. Additionally, geopolitical events have stifled our creative process. Our outsourced Idea Department was mostly staffed by Ukrainians who have since fled Crimea and are now refugees. We are working hard to keep you interested and while we’re not exactly sure where the problem lies, we are sure President Obama is to blame. Meanwhile please bear with us as we fumble to say something meaningful or at least pertinent. Read the rest of this entry »