Future Home of the Living God

The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening.

Someone has been tortured on my behalf. Someone has been tortured on your behalf. Someone in this world will always be suffering on your behalf. If it comes your time to suffer, just remember. Someone suffered for you. That is what taking on a cloak of human flesh is all about, the willingness to hurt for another human being.

We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.

After a while, I asked who was in charge. Phil said God. I said that was the most terrifying thing I'd ever heard and he said, "Yeah, me too. That's why I bought the Bushmaster.

How the flowers were fired and colored into the design. Perhaps this sort of gesture will be lost, perhaps it is a function of consciousness that we don’t need in order to survive. Perhaps this piece of evolution makes no sense—our hunger for everyday sorts of visual pleasure—but I don’t think so. I think we have survived because we love beauty and because we find each other beautiful. I think it may be our strongest quality.

There were no colors. Everything was neutral. From this I know that hell is not black or fiery. It is an unvaried gray without promise.

This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.

I want to see the story. More than anything, I am frustrated by the fact that I’ll never know how things turn out.

Perhaps we are experiencing a reverse incarnation. A process where the spirit of the divine becomes lost in human physical nature. Perhaps the spark of divinity, which we experience as consciousness, is being reabsorbed into the boundless creativity of seething opportunistic life. A great wish courses through me. I am curious with desire. I want to see past my lifetime, past yours, into exactly what the paleontologist says will not exist: the narrative. I want to see the story. More than anything, I am frustrated by the fact that I’ll never know how things turn out.

I relax into a black unconsciousness. I dive in, submerse, and breathe oblivion, my favorite element.

For you, not vaccinating me was a class thing. Upper-class delusionals can afford to indulge their paranoias only because the masses bear the so-called dangers of vaccinations.

She turns to glance at me over her shoulder and I see that she has her capable face on, the face she wore on my two emergency-room visits, the face of packing the car for a vacation, the face I saw during Glen’s idiotic affair, the face of Thanksgiving dinner preparations for thirty people and the face of teacher’s conferences. It is the face that got me into college and the face that got Glen out of jail after many an arrest during protests. The face of I’ll take care of it. The face of failure is not an option.

Perhaps you will know how to speak this language--perhaps it is a language we have forgotten in its present form. Perhaps you are dreaming in this language right now. And perhaps there is a word that has changed the course of human existence. A word written in the depth of things, in the quantum and genetic and synaptic codes, a word that told all beings and all life--enough.

I think about seventy percent of my depression was my seventeenth-century warrior trying to get out.

don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

Where will you be my darling, the last time it snows on earth?

...I close my eyes and listen to the roar and clatter of the world as it rushes by. We are rushing too. The wind is whipping past us. We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don't know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

Where are we bound? Is it any different, in fact, from where we were going in the first place? Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are not an idea worth thinking anymore.

This is eternity, right here, for eternity is nothing other than awareness of time going by.

AUGUST 9 The next morning, I travel north to my Potts reservation home...In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads "Future Home of the Living God". ...I pull over and take a photograph of the sign, and keep driving....We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.

Eddy tells me his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.

I don’t know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don’t know why they care about me as they do. I only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself. I turned back, my fingers rubbing the little agate. All the way back to the store not a single rock slipped underfoot.

hell is not black or fiery. It is an unvaried gray without promise.

She has decided to appear to nobody but the feckless.

Idolatrous frenzy, Is that something like traditional religion?" asks Bangs. "Yeah it is," says Sweetie. "I'm a pagan Catholic. Moving on?

I believe Eddy's book serves as therapy. Like this book, or notebook, like yours.....Eddy talks, but Eddy also listens.

You probably fucked a priest and now your baby's going to be a monkey. And it won't get born with a silver spoon in its mouth, it'll be wearing a little black and white collar like so-" Little Mary jumps up and begins to dance around making hooh-hooh monkey sounds and putting her fingers to her neck. She's talented. She like the dark side, the devil version of her supersmart dad, Eddy.

I’d been a snowflake. Without my specialness, I melted,” she says.