Creator Stuff — October 4, 2024 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Evil Angel🎶
Jacob’s Story👼
You There, God?🤷

THE DAILY UPDATE

Three Things I Am Grateful For Today:

The askjeeves.com still exists.
A new beard trimmer. My old one held a charge for about a half a second.
Playoff baseball.

Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Four. I seem to be getting a lot of fours these days.

Wordle 1,203 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟨⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟨⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: PERFECTO! And a fairly easy one at that.

Connections
Puzzle #481
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪

The song in my head when I woke up today: Evil Angel, by Breaking Benjamin

Oct. 3: Right Here, by Staind
Oct. 2: So Far Away, by Staind
Oct. 1: I Will Follow You Into The Dark, by Death Cab For Cutie

Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: I’m a believer/
Nothing could be worse/All these imaginary friends/Hiding betrayal/Driving the nail/Hoping to find a savior

Work Tunes: Music as I did some work yesterday came from John’s Ultimate Chill Song Compendium.

Slide, The Goo Goo Dolls
The World I Know, Collective Soul
Imagine, John Lennon

Something I’m looking forward to today: It’s DnD night!

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Going to the Yankees-Royals playoff game on Wednesday!!!!!!

Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Slowing down from a fast-paced day to watch the last three innings of the Brewers-Mets game.

What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved a ton of really heady editing/rewriting of two stories for my day job … one on the gap between male and female life expectancy and one on the lingering working-age mortality of those in the UK post-COVID.

What I’ve written: I always find it funny when I see book listings for Jacob’s Story like this: “Jacob’s Story: a journey of faith. SIGNED by author” Because my signature is worth so much.

I happen to believe in a creator of some sort, something beyond my comprehension that created everything we can see (and can’t see). Some call this God, some call this Allah, some call this Gitche Manitou, some call this Mwari Shone, and lots of people have died because of these differences.

Many of those who believe in this creator, whatever they call it, put themselves at the center of the story. Maybe not themselves, personally, but their personal culture or certainly their species. I used to do this too. If you grow up in Muricah’s mainstream culture, you’re pretty much indoctrinated on the Judeo-Christian view of the creator, and he’s all about the human.

Here’s the thing: I can’t prove this. I can’t disprove this. I can’t prove or disprove that the view of the creator I formed growing up is any more right or wrong than the view of the creator my human brother or sister from Zimbabwe formed growing up. That makes arguing about (and certainly makes killing for) my view of a creator vs. your view of a creator utterly stupid.

What I will say is this: There are things that make me doubt the centrality of the human species to this creator’s purpose. Lots of things. Different religions and cultures try to explain away these things with pithy platitudes that all come back to George Michael. “Well, ya gotta have faith.” And indeed, that’s what you have to have if you believe in a creator, despite the things that show you said creator might not really have you at the center of his/her/its narrative.

For example, pinkie toes. Their placement makes them incredibly vulnerable to bed legs and coach posts and wall corners. I would think that a creator who had us at the central would have given us stronger pinkie toes.

But that’s just one thing. If a creator God was so enthralled with us, my thought would be that he (and I’m gonna go with “he” from here on just for simplicity’s sake, so deal with it) would smooth our ride a little bit. Yes, he would make our pinkie toes out of something more ouch-resistant. But he also would make this relentless of life a little more relenting.

Toilets clog and break and require a $500 repair, and just when you’re getting your feet back under you from that your car tire goes flat, and just when you’re done dealing with that the garage door opener goes on the fritz, and just when you take a deep breath from that you ask a simple question to someone you love and that person bites your head off completely unnecessarily because that person has her own shit that is relentlessly smacking her in the face, too, so she’s a little edgy at existence herself.

“We live in a fallen world, John,” they say, which is such a copout. I mean, I’m not saying we don’t, but I’m saying that telling someone who’s talking about the relentless slog through life that the world is a fallen place as some sort of explanation for the slog is a good way to have that someone want to punch you in the throat. And it doesn’t really answer the question: Why is everything so relentless if there’s a creator who cares so much about us and who theoretically has the power to make things a little less goddamn difficult!?!??

“Maybe he is making things a little less difficult, John. Think of how things could be if God didn’t exist?” they say, and to this I go far past a throat-punch and start thinking about how you’d smell if I took a flamethrower to you.

For the love of God (see what I did there?): Stop trying to explain away the central truth that this life is hard! Stop trying to say that it’s a sign of a lack of faith if you point out that this life is hard! Stop devaluing the very real critique on how fucked up this place is! Just. Fucking. Stop!

The creator I grew up with and found a deeper relationship with as a young adult supposedly has the power to fix all this — and chooses not to. That’s a jerk move … from a human perspective. But the gazelle doesn’t complain about the relentless pursuit of lions and cheetahs and how a simple visit to the watering hole can turn it into a crocodile’s breakfast. Why? Because the gazelle doesn’t put itself at the center of any creator story. The gazelle either has no awareness of that or has some understanding we ourselves don’t understand that it considers itself just a fucking gazelle. It doesn’t think of itself as special or favored. It thinks of itself as an gazelle, and the potential to become lion chum is part of the game.

The longer I live, the most shit I have to deal with on the regular, the more I believe that, yeah, there’s a creator, but humans aren’t the pinnacle of his efforts and he’s not particularly focused on our general happiness and well-being. We’re just a somewhat intelligent and incredibly violent primate, kinda like a suped-up cheetah who could write stuff about a creator we’d love to have rather than the one that is showing us to be more actual.

I don’t know what awaits after my last breath — not for real. No one does, despite what they tell you or preach at you. They have faith, and faith is cool. But faith in the face of contrary evidence could also be called insanity. If I believe aliens are beaming signals into my brain and, thus, wear a tinfoil hat to protect myself, I can couch that as faith, too. How different is that from believe in an unseen entity that created us and, thus, requires our head to be covered when we worship him? So yeah, it could be faith. But it’s probably just nuts. Taken from another perspective, so is a ton of stuff in every faith. I’m pretty sure no one religion or spirituality has gotten everything right. That’s just a mathematical probability.

All of which is to say, I hope there’s something better than this on the Other Side, and from my own personal experiences, I think there is. But that still doesn’t address the central problem that this life right here? The one we’re living? It’s hard and it’s relentless.

My own version of Truth is this: It’s hard and relentless because we’re not living as we’re supposed to. We’ve used our big brains to create all this stuff that was supposed to make things better, and it’s led to everything from cities to the internet to bullets to soup and cake. But with all of this stuff comes a whole lot of shit. Cities pack people together, and I’m not really sure we’re supposed to live like that. Don’t even get me started on what the internet has done. Bullets could be for protection, but tell that to the average Beirut resident this morning. Soup burns the shit out of your mouth, and cake gives you diabetes and obesity. My thought is that we’re supposed to be living much more simply and much less packed together, and if we all got together and decided to just stop all this shit we’d be better.

As it stands now, my only hope is to someday find the courage to live that way myself.

Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?

Creator Stuff — October 4, 2024

THE DAILY UPDATE

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