G-40: Practical … September 5, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog

(2343)

Crucifixion should never be discussed casually.

Damn those who study it as a theological necessity or a part of any kind of holy plan.

For after all, the idea of capital punishment isn’t particularly “capital.”

I came to live as a human. Of course, somewhere along the line, that does entail death. I guess I was hoping this would occur as an old, old man, from a mild heart attack as I was sleeping in Rome, after finishing up a spectacular revival.

Just not to be.

If God has a plan, He must desert it because He has cast his lot with humans.

Golgotha–the place of the skull. A cranium without face or brain, for that matter.

My feelings are mixed, tossed to and fro, squeezed by reality, only prohibited from smothering me by the expansiveness of faith.

The trial they put me through came to an awkward impasse–the witnesses against me constantly contradicting each other. It became apparent that I might be cleared on a technicality–maybe exiled back to Galilee.

Yet you can’t go back, can you?

What is their concern?

They say they are worried because I call myself God.

Alexander did it.

Caesar, likewise.

It’s nothing new. Whenever men gain power, they like to claim some aspect of divinity.

But see, here’s the problem: if God really has visited mankind, then why do we need religion or priests anymore? Scared the bejesus out of them.

So I stepped in and simplified their plight.

I told them I was God. I told them that they would see me one day and know I was God.

They deemed this arrogant and blasphemous. The proclamation sealed my fate.

They are killing me.

I am a reluctant martyr, a disappointed teacher, a rejected friend and a lonely savior.

I must warn them that their deeds will reverberate back to them with future consequences.

“Your house is left to you desolate!”

How can I tell them that chosen people must be replaced by people who choose?

I know this–you can’t save the whole world if you’re trying to promote one race.

So I took a haggard breath, wincing in pain.

I am trying to die well.

It is all they have afforded me.

 

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Untotaled: Stepping 22 (May 14th, 1965) Jack Smack … July 12, 2014

 Jonathots Daily Blog

(2289) 

(Transcript)

School was nearly out. I cannot tell you the relief I felt to finish out the year.

Having survived my infatuation with Jennifer, I had disguised my feelings by using revenge or attempts at ridicule, to make it seem that I no longer cared about her.

We were two days prior to summer vacation, in the midst of a school-wide festival, which had loosened the reigns on the tight restrictions usually imposed on us by teachers and principals.

I was feeling so darned good that I felt like I could say “damn.”

I was in the hallway with my friend, Craig, when we both noticed that Jennifer was standing next to the boy’s locker room door, absent-mindedly staring out the window into the school parking lot.

I had an idea–another way to embarrass Jennifer and therefore appease my male ego from her rejection. I whispered my inclination to Craig and he giggled.

So we ran forward, grabbed Jennifer, opened the boy’s locker room door, and pushed her in. It seemed hilarious in the moment. We lodged our bodies against the door as she pounded and screamed to escape. Her pleas sounded a bit comical to us, so we were in no hurry to set her free.

Suddenly she stopped crying out and the pushing on the door ceased.

So both Craig and I ran back into the festivities, hoping to blend into the crowd so that our misdeed would go unnoticed. Little did we know that in the boy’s locker room was Coach Swartz–and that he had walked out of the shower to discover that Jennifer was there, peering at him, creating what could only be the personification of an awkward moment.

He quickly covered himself, ran around to the other door, to peek and see who was keeping her from escaping.

Now for a moment let me talk about Coach Swartz. He was a collision of cool, crazy and confusion. He was cool because he was very handsome and all the girls in the school thought he was dreamy. Crazy, because he taught health class, and thinking that he was a doctor, passed out some erroneous advice. And confusing because he once told us at football practice that black people couldn’t play quarterback because there was extra oil on their hands, and they couldn’t hold onto the ball.

We also knew his first name was Jack because he had a paddling board which he used to punish students, which he had surnamed “Jack Smack.”

Returning to my story, Coach Swartz, with his hair still wet from the shower, ran into the festivities, found Craig and me, took us into his office and explained his overexposure to dear Jennifer.

He wasn’t mad, but said we would have to be punished. He wasn’t even mad as he took the Jack Smack board from its perch on the wall and hammered us both on the ass, seven times apiece.

Matter of fact, from that moment on, I think he liked us more, winking at us in the hallway as he reflected back to his one-man Chippendale show for Jennifer.

Even Jennifer never complained about our prank.

So you see, even though I got my butt whipped, I didn’t learn anything about being a better person through this experience … whatsoever.

 

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God Needs a Job … September 6, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

(1998)

He has an impressive list of abilities and accomplishments.

After all, He created the universe, and even if you only want to give Him credit for portions of that process, it’s still pretty magnificent–if He only came up with the idea of evolution.

I think every child of earth should be appreciative of His ingenious proposal of sexual pleasure leading to procreation.

Sunrises and sunsets would be very difficult to duplicate.

Needless to say, the Fellow (or Lady, depending on your sentiment) is predisposed to creative bursts of energy and rejuvenation. So it’s fascinating to me that we take this well-qualified candidate and limit His job description to “bless” and “damn.”

Truthfully, the only time we ever invoke His name, other than the Facebook “OMG,” is when we’re asking Him to bless something or we get in a fussy mood and require His damnation skills.

How odd.

But I’ve always believed that if you want to understand the nature and future of a society, you should study both it’s prayers and it’s comics.

When the prayers are insipid–lacking mercy, justice and practicality–you can tell that the spiritual systems that exist will not have the energy to lift the burdens they’ve levied upon the people.

When the comics are more preoccupied with silliness, foolishness or just a general spirit of grumpiness instead of leading us to do something rather than damn one another, then you pretty well know there is no common enlightenment of the people in store.

Thus, OUR time. We choose to bless things, and if we don’t feel we can do that, we damn them. So we take the greatest intellect imaginable–and relegate Him to ceremonial acts of bestowing mystical fairy dust on certain projects, only to bring down the thunder of Thor on those who would dare to disagree with us.

To say it is childish would be an insult to children. It is worse than that.

It is short-sighted.

And people who possess that lack of vision always perish by falling off a nearby cliff.

I’d like to give God a job. I am hiring Him, as of today, to do four chores for me:

1. Show me where I’m stupid before everybody sees I’m stupid, which makes me feel really, really stupid.
2. Lead me to one person in this twenty-four hour period who needs help, so I can feel good about myself and he or she can have a meal in their belly.
3. Let me stay current with world events without becoming cynical or escaping into fantasy.
4. Let me notice the natural order already exists and has lasted a long time. The more I learn it, the smarter I appear.

The wage I will pay for this magnificent list of accomplishments?

• My devotion.
• My “thank yous.”
• And my reasonable conviction that You not only exist … but You would love to do something other than bless and damn.

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