Tag: God

Cool Dude God Tells It Straight

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COMES OUT OF HIDING

God, I gotta tell ya, Dude — [this is me at the top of Beacon Hill talking to the sky] — you are one dubious entity, an invisible and unknown force in the mind-bucking infinity of 100 billion galaxies.

Everyone agrees that the universe is a miracle of unfathomable mystery, and has been, and will always be an enigma within 100 billion enigmas throughout all of history, the work of someone or something that many of us refer to as God, namely you, Holy Dude.

But what I want to know is: Why the big mystery, God? Why do you leave your “creations” in a quandary of questions? We mugs on earth spend half our lives asking, Who or what is God? Does God exist? Is God dead? And so on and so forth.

Hey, Man, all I’m asking is, why don’t you put all these pitiful questions to rest by coming out of the Cosmic Closet and just laying it out like it is, Man. [You will notice, Dear Reader, that I am capitalizing Dude and Man etc out of respect — that’s the kind of guy I am.]

So the next thing that happens — and I couldn’t believe it because I was sort of kidding around on top of that hill talking to the sky in a sort of irreverent way — but I hear this voice in my head — not an actual voice, more like a thought-stream in my head.

And here’s the truly amazing thing: God turns out to be a Cool Dude — the way he talked or thought-streamed, reminded me of Rainbow Johnson, a flashy dressing black dude from back in my Detroit days who had the coolest collection of hats — Panamas, fedoras, homburgs, skimmers trilbies, bowlers, derbies.

Anyway this what I hear in my head:

Okay, here’s the deal, crazy dude on the hill, there is a Heaven and if you don’t kill anyone or hurt an animal or treat anyone horribly, you will end up in Heaven, but if you really mess up in a murderous way or any other bad-shit way, or if you’re a politician, you ain’t gettin’ into Heaven, you on your way to hell, boy — although I’ll let you in on a God-only-knows secret, there ain’t really no hell. If you totally fuck up your lives in a bad-shit way, you end up in Oblivion — an eternity of blackness, an endless void of nothingness, no reunions with loved ones, no memory of your past life, no sensation, no feelings, no nothing, baby, just like before you were born — you didn’t exist then and when you die bad, you won’t exist forever.

So, how do you like them apples, baby? Pretty grim, huh? Better to live in world of God and Heaven — call it make-believe if you want. It’s not that difficult, babe, all you got to do is — what’s the phrase fiction writers use? O, yeah, suspension of disbelief.

So, have a good rest of your life, man — and hey, be careful walking back down that hill. 

Man, that was such an amazing experience on top of that hill — God turning out to be a Cool Guy and all.

I’ll tell you something — I sure as hell made my way back down that hill real careful like.

After hearing from God, I didn’t want to slip and fall to Oblivion, because just between you and me, I’ve done some things I ain’t proud of — nothing like murder of course or any of that bad-shit stuff God was talking to me, or thinking to me about, but you know, shit I’m not proud of, so I walked down that hill real careful because I wanted to get back down and make amends and find my way back up to Cool Dude God, man.

Take a Flyer on Faith

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It goes against everything I ever believed

But I am so inconsolably bereaved

By the death of my wife so suddenly taken

My sole soulmate by “merciful God” forsaken

That I am prepared to suspend disbelief

To free myself from this insufferable grief

And do whatever I need to get to God

And if faith is to be my connecting rod

I will embrace it for whatever it’s worth

It’s bound to be better than this hell on earth.

Busted Water Pump Leads to God?

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The water pump in the basement of my old house stopped working yesterday. I live in the country and get my water from an outside well. The pump somehow gets the water from the well into my house.

So, the plumber comes out this morning (Sunday), tinkers with the pump and says he can’t fix it.

I have a deeper problem than the pump, he tells me. The problem lurks somewhere down in the 240-foot well in the backyard.

He told me to call Hudson Pump, which I did,  but they couldn’t come out until the next morning. So I went out for more jugs of water to do my ablutions, brush teeth & etc. 

In the past, this sort of thing would have made me crazy, but I find myself dealing with the problem in an uncommonly calm manner. I almost welcome it as a sign to get the hell out of this house.

For the past nine months the house has been a solitary madhouse of grief and suicidal depression following the death of my wife Susan last December.

I have thought about moving out every day since Susan died, but I didn’t have the will or the energy. Most days I didn’t even want to get out of bed. There’s no point in moving when all you want to do is curl up and die.

Then, two things happened: Nineteen days ago I got a phone call out of the blue from one of my wife’s friends when we all lived in Miami Beach in the 1980s.

Her name is Renata and she has the faith, as I like to put it, a deep faith and a firm belief in God. As I spoke of my despair about losing Susan, Renata tried, respectfully and unobtrusively, to convey to my pitiful pagan mind and empty heart that Susan is not gone forever and that, when the time comes, I will be with her again — all that stuff that I could never wrap my head around.

As we reminisced about old times, the three of us drinking and smoking in the ‘Miami Vice’ era of 1980s South Beach craziness, I suddenly had a surreal feeling — totally alien to my way of thinking — that Susan was in the room with us, sharing the memories and the laughter. It was the first time in nine months that this empty house had heard the sound of laughter and seen the glimmer of hope.

I wrote about that phone conversation in a previous post, ‘Susan came back today’ and I realized then that I wanted — needed — Renata to continue to be my friend, my spiritual guide, so to speak.

Okay, that was the first thing. The second thing, of course, was the — I was going to say goddamned water pump,  but now I say the blessed water pump. I’m beginning to believe it’s part of the Overall Plan, the ‘Mysterious Way’ that English poet William Cowper wrote about in Light Shining out of Darkness and from which we get the popular phrase, ‘God moves in mysterious ways.’

So, let me end — or begin — with this: The next step for me is to start packing up this house and get the hell out of here — dare I say, to a town near my spiritual guide.