Neanderpundit

is a Blogtalkradio show that Steve has been doing sunday evenings for a while. If you haven’t been, and you like actual flavor in your food, you shoulc check it out.

Tonight, in chat during the show, I ran into Eli’s son. he suggested that our post-show conversation was a blogpost in it’s own self.

Actually, it was just a story of the kind I usually tell to kill the time between the departure of one clusterfuck and the arrival of another, but along the vein of that specific conversation, I present to you, a dream.

I dreamt of a hollywood movie, and I was the star of the mov.. No, wait, that’s Eric Burden’s dream.

My dream involved meeting a man with whom I’m all too familiar, the persona of Kilgore Trout, from the many novels by Kurt Vonnegut. I dreamt of meeting Trout as I ate dinner in my hotel- I don’t know what job I was on or why, I just saw him sitting at the bar, and he looked at me, recognized me, and walked over.

“hello! I’m Kilg..”
” know who you are. I dream of you somewhat regularly, I’m ashamed to say”
he shrugged. He explained he had a manuscript there he wanted me to read. He’d heard I was the king of crapblogging (since the untimely demise of Acidman) and wanted me to read his manuscript, and see what I thought.

The manuscript was exactly that- single spaced, written on a combination of canary legal pad, three ring binder paper, and pages torn out of a spiral notebook. Some of the pages appear to have been written in crayon. There were coffee stains and cigarette burns on everything. I took it back to my room.

Lacking my good reading glasses, I nearly went blind trying to decipher Trout’s illegibel scrawl, and after several hours of torturously dragging myself through, I gathered, at least, the gist of the story. The novella- for that was the approximate length- had the working title “Shit baby”. The premise consisted of a boy who had been conceived by the chance combination of a prostitute’s egg somewhere in Queens making contact with semen from a feebleminded janitor jerking off into the urinal in the sewage treatment plant itself. The unholy zygote of this unlikely encounter grew, nurtured by the filth in the sewers, chased in his infancy by the gators of NYC, weaned on bat’s milk, grew hale and hearty eating discarded goldfish.

One day, Shit Baby came out of the sewers to view, with his own eyes, the noissome world above. SOme wanted to make him their king, some wanted to flush him back to the sewer where he was born.

Here ended the narrative.

Apparently Kilgore, having gotten this far, could go no further.

I met him for breakfast and he said “well?”

‘I think” i said “That you would ahve been an excellent riddler, but you have no business writing. Here, let me finish it for you. ”
I took a pencil and wrote for a few minutes, and handed him the now-complete manuscript. He read.

“Wow, you really pulled that off. Can I really use this?”
“Certainly, as long as you NEVER TELL ANYONE IT WAS ME”.

I think he left me the tab for his breakfast, too.

I woke up wondering what the fuck I’d eaten. This was only a few weeks ago.

Mr Porretto posts about the golden compass, here. That discussion is spreading around the blogosphere among Christians. In discussions with Pascal we have concerned ourself wiht the Amalekites- or rather he has, for he is orders of magnitude more knowledgeable than I on the subject. He even goes so far, in comments at “The American Culture”, that he considers himself an agnostic because, as he puts it, “no religion is safe harbor” from the amalekites (archetypal enemy of the Jews- and by definition, the Christians that succeed the Jews) I have, as one might expect, a few words to say on the subject.

One of the biggest problems I have with every organized religion, is specifically that. Once a religion has become organized, it requires organization. And religion is not a safe harbor from politics or pecadillos- in fact, it’s very nature engenders the very sins it professes to disdain. And a GREAT deal of this is due to modern-day Amalekites- people to whom personal power and prestige are more important than their interest in connecting their followers and brethren to the Creator.

So here’s the thing.

Pascal has it unquestionably right. No religion is a safe harbor. And never will be. but you don’t have to reject religion to avoid the Amalekites, so to speak.

Faith in the Creator is intensely personal, and that’s the way itis supposed to be. Now, I’m not advocating you stop going to mass, or temple, or whatever- in fact, if you don’t now, you ought to start. No, what I want you to do, is praise the creator in your chosen way, whatever it might be, and realize that everything written about the creator, said about him, done in his name, was done by men. Fallible, flawed men. Men who might not get it. Men who may have missed the point utterly. Men. And the guy who is in front of the congregation, asking you for dough to buy him a new Escalade? A man. Or a woman, maybe. Don’t follow man. Follow God. In whatever way you find him- keeping in mind that the Creator, in all his forms except the sadistic invention known as Islam- is not interested in having you visit unnecesary harm on your fellow beings.

No, I’m not a preacher, and I don’t play one on TV. And I’ve met an awful lot of my fellows, and I think they all understand this: My relationship with the Creator is intensely personal, and should stay that way. Your local temple or church or chapel happens to be an excellent way to connect to your community, and you should be involved(Editor’s note: Emphasised so those with poor reading comprehension will gather the purpose)- but you should also realize that the machinations of the leaders there -unless they are directed specifically at helping others-are purely selfish and economically/politically motivated. Enjoy the message. Live the Word. Beware the messenger.