Today’s Words:
Boise
tusk
Spiderman
jovial
mishmash
tabernacle
hypotenuse

Nobody seems to like Boise or Spiderman as topics. Well, I don’t have a halcyon story about the beginning of my writing career, but I’ll relate some events of that era nonetheless before launching into my own story.

In first grade, I wrote a story about a little girl who hates her parents so much that she kills them and buries them under the tree in her back yard and every day she would swing on the tree swing and when she would jump off she would land on her parents graves and it would pack the ground down harder. It goes on to explain that she was adopted and her foster parents were similarly hated, although not similarly killed. She also liked candy. A lot. More than was seemly for a 9 year old.

They published my story in a little booklet at the end of the year. But they took out the paragraph about the killing and the grave-stomping. I don’t remember how they did it, because why would she have foster parents if she still had real parents? But the message was clear: we don’t publish stories about kids killing their parents. We don’t send them to counseling either, because we don’t have a school counselor because the people voted to cap the property taxes. Instead, we just censor the story and pretend everything is normal.

In second grade, I wrote a story about a little girl who wins $200 in a contest and uses it to buy a house and clothes for a homeless family. My teacher submitted it to a contest and I won an award and got to go to a special ceremony and it was published in a little booklet. Lesson reinforced: write about happy and naively sweet topics and grown-ups will like you.

I didn’t write many stories after that.

Ugh, I’m being such a downer. Clearly I didn’t get the lesson very well. Bastards.

Ok, let’s shove these words into a jovial mishmash of lexical delight.

Once there was a mad mathematician who was calculating how to destroy the world. Since he was trained in math, rather than physics or bomb-making, it was proving to be a challenge. He had to get pretty esoteric and was getting into the Kaballah and the Order of the Golden Dawn, not to mention the Illuminati and the Masons. He decided that all he really had to do was move the gravitational constant of the Universe just a little lower so all the matter in the Universe would be slightly less cohesive and then everything would float away from itself. Of course, as modern, and pre-modern, and postmodern physics all said this was impossible, he had to turn to numerology and mysticism.

[Note: I know nothing really about gravity so all the above could be bogus.]

He would spend many hours visiting various synagogues around the world, making estimated measurements with his eyes, as he had taught himself to do so as to seem inconspicuous. His theory was that a secret order of synagogue builders had created many of the synagogues of the world to be the exact proportions of the original Tabernacle that carried the Ark of the Covenant, and thus were, in the same manner, dwelling places for God. And not homey, nice-to-visit dwelling places, but rather a global network of God-boxes that bound God to this planet. God, it turned out, was an alien, who was passing through Earth on a leisurely visit to the eastern outer rim of the galaxy and just happened to be roped into a favor by this guy named Moses who needed to get away from some Pharoaohs pronto. So God arranged for a bit of sleight of ocean with the whole parting of the Red Sea bit. But God didn’t realize that Moses had laid within that a trap whereby he would collect God into a box, much like the Ghostbusters would collect ghosts into their Ghost Trap. Yep, Moses was the first Ghostbuster. Or rather Godbuster. God is such a relative term you know, but that’s another discussion.

Our mad mathematician was convinced that if he could only release the alien we call God, that the resulting restoration of the imbalance caused by the entire course of human history being changed by this one entity’s existence and entrapment here, given the billions of human lives that have believed in the invincibility and omnipotence of said creature (and the collective power of thoughts to create reality), that unspringing this trap would effect a change that would somehow destroy, or at least alter irrevocably, the world as we know it. Now, this wouldn’t really change the gravitational constant of the Universe, as was his first goal. But after more deliberation, he realized that perhaps it wasn’t fair (let alone realistic) to try to undo the entire Universe, when all he was really mad at was the cruel world to which he had been born. Destroying it would likely be enough to assuage his considerable anger and resentment over having been given, of all things, a life.

He began to have subtle conversations with God, which involved subtle rearranging of key pieces of furniture in the synagogues he visited, in an intertwining pattern that could only be groked from being connected to all of them at once. He had to do it quickly though, because who knows what could be re-rearranged in his absence? His flight bills piled up, but he was quite well supported by a few years of working for the fraud department at a credit card company. IE he learned how to defraud practically any entity he wished to.

Boise was almost his undoing, as it was the key to form a hypotenuse in a geodesic spiral that would spell out to the alien: “Friend, I will release you soon; take me with you”. But the alien, being fairly bored watching our backward little planet for so long, managed to fill in the gaps and got the message. The reply was just “OK”. God knew that untranslating it would take the mathematician a few decades, and that anything longer would just slow things down further. The ironic thing about the myth of God was that the synagogue builders had so bound him with their synagogue-God-trap that all the power that parted the Red Sea was now sublimated. There was a God, but now, there was just a helpless alien creature bored to tears by watching us endlessly fail to get obvious cosmic lessons. Contented only by the existence of comic books, which God read over the shoulder of the boys who would come to worship and hide their comics in their Torah’s. God’s favorite was Spiderman, which makes sense given the whole trap-net-web theme.

You might be wondering at this point how the mathematician released God. Well the answer is he didn’t, obviously, because Earth is still here isn’t it? He was accidentally impaled on a walrus tusk whilst trying to collect data from a particularly remote Alaskan synagogue.

You also may be wondering about Jesus, and whether he was really the Son of God. No. Jesus was a tax collector, and a mediocre one at that.

After being stuck here for a few thousand years, God had racked up considerable unpaid fines and taxes. But Jesus got so enamored of the signs and miracles bit that tax collection went onto the backburner for awhile. Of course it all ended kind of abruptly and Jesus decided to just mark the account as “unrecoverable” for now and spent some time on Alpha Centauri recuperating. Humans can be so brutal, sigh, and all that. The masseurs were very understanding. Yeah, heard Elvis had a hard time there too. Yeah, but at least they didn’t nail him to a cross. Yeah, well, there’s that. Buddha was the only one who really had a good run. Oh yeah and Bill Gates. He’s doing alright.

THE END