HAVING LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY “DONE this in my sleep(1)” on occasion as ahem an award-winning reporter for the Sonoma Index-Tribune and Sonoma Sun (and freelancer for the Novato Advance, Petaluma Argus-Courier and The Bohemian) and being somewhat-to-greatly rankled by what passes for “news” these days outside of local outlets and the Daily Show, methinks it urgent to spread some of the skills needed to excel in The Game. Let’s start with the Interview.
First Graf: VALIS
IN FEBRUARY AND MARCH OF 1974, science-fiction author Philip K. Dick had a series of experiences which might have been psychosis, hallucination or divine grace. Phil often tended toward the last explanation, at least in print, and based a handful of novels (and more than a million pages of exegesis) on trying to figure out what happened to him. VALIS is one such novel; its thesis (in part): through an ancient satellite named VALIS (for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), a rock and roll musical, and a little girl, God or something like It is trying to comfort us all — most especially the broken ones. There’s much more to it, but this — and the fact that Phil once lived around the corner from where I live now — is what makes VALIS this week’s First Graf pick.
Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now, she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.
Prosatio Silban and the Mayor of Ixtachet
EVERYONE WANTS TO BE THE Mayor of Ixtachet, at least until they become so — this Prosatio Silban discovered on a chance visit to the edge of the Azure Void which forms the southwest border of the Uulian Commonwell.
Ixtachet was one of the few villages in the Commonwell not blessed with verdant pasturage and running streams. Instead, its inhabitants lived in a series of cliffside huts, each with a breathtaking view of the Void’s eternal twilight, and a small terraced landhold containing a handful of roosts for the prolific and precarious-clinging snoat whose large, richly flavored eggs were the economic foundation of Ixtachet’s existence.
Pithyism #9
Fig. 1.
Pithyism #+1
THANK GOD, OR THE GODS, or Fate, or Luck or Fortune or Purpose, or just feel grateful, that you still have one more thing to do.
5 Thoughts: The Idolatry of Gay Bashing
1. READ A LETTER TO THE SF Chronicle’s editor this morning by a gentleman saying he voted for Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative, because heterosexuals own the word “marriage.”
2. I’ve heard this argument before, and like the other arguments favoring less freedom for minorities it does not persuade me. In essence, this particular argument, a favorite of Bible-lovin’ folk, makes a word more important than people.
3. But Bible-lovin’ folk (of which I consider myself one, in some sense) must needs believe that people were created in “God’s” image.
4. And the word “marriage,” like other English words, came to us long after Biblical Hebrew. Like other words, it’s an artifact — a man-made thing — and by definition, not nearly as important as a living, breathing, bloodbeating human being made in God’s image.
5. So why are some Bible-lovin’ folk so quick to commit idolatry?
Come Out To Sonoma
HAVING MENTIONED THIS ON FACEBOOK yesterday in the wake of U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s 136-page ruling against Proposition 8, I’d better repeat it here:
Neal Ross Attinson offers his services as secular ULC minister to marriage-seeking gay California couples
My only balk is doing anything in Jesus’ name, since I’m both unqualified and uninterested. (“Bob” is okay, though; I’m biordanial.) And may I suggest this spring in Sonoma?