I did not want to blog today. I got shit to do, man. Road trek tomorrow. 

But sometimes you just gotta. Sometimes something comes along so mentally stimulating, you gotta share it so other people can join the braingasm. 

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I learned an important lesson last night: Make sure every last chore is done before you gummy up. Because after you gummy up, you never know what might come along to leave your mind cruising the universe, making physical action of any kind an iffy proposition. I had to change the litter and bring the laundry up from the basement to the second floor. That was it. But those two things felt like quests in an old-school text adventure.

CHANGE CAT LITTER

You could do this if you had new litter.

GET LITTER FROM CAR TRUNK

The car trunk is locked. 

GET KEY FOB

Do you remember where Eva put it?

SEARCH FOR KEY FOB

...and so on.  I kept getting sidetracked. I had inadvertently got the laundry bag wet earlier by dumping a dehumidifier into a laundry sink and splashing it, so that was outside airing on the railing of our back deck. Going outside lately is challenging. Oh, it's just as easy to slide a patio door as it ever was, but the trick is making sure you and only you go outside, and not, say, a little bolt of lightning named Q.T. who likes to hide  under the deck. She's done it three times in the last two weeks. It can take an hour for her to come out, and also it's dark right now, and 

A reminder: if Q.T. gets out, Eva will kill you, then resurrect you so she can do it again.

I grab the laundry out of the dryer, put it in the mesh basket which is mercifully dry, and then head up for the fifty pound box of litter I had deposited at the top of the basement stairs after retrieving it from the car trunk. Wouldn't it be a laugh riot if I fell down the stairs right now, I think, and them promptly fall down in slow motion.

I have  enough presence of mind (somehow) to fall backwards, onto my butt, and then just kind of butt-bounce down a couple of steps with the box of litter in my lap. No harm done. But the gummy makes the whole thing so much harder than it would otherwise be, both physically and mentally. I have to granulate everything and specifically remind myself to turn each light out as I go to bed. And then I sprawl in bed, refusing to sleep despite having taken the best sleep aid known to this man. My mind doesn't usually spin anymore at sleepytime, but last night it wouldn't stop.

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I've been binging the Kingslingers podcast, billed as "Constant Reader Scott leads first time reader Matt" through the works of Stephen King, beginning with his genre-bending magnum opus, the DARK TOWER series. It's a deep dive. Each episode is two hours or longer, and I'm episode 15 of 16, the last four chapters of THE STAND. 

THE STAND is Eva's favourite work of King's. We bonded over it when we first met, in that job interview. It's among my favourites as well. The best friend I ever lost once bought me the complete uncut edition, which is a giant doorstopper of a novel, and inscribed it "You think I'm Gonna save you from this stuff? Naw, I'm gonna let you DROWN in it. Your friend and mine, Kieron".

Scott and Matt tease out so much material I'd  either registered subconsciously or missed entirely. The novel, in case you haven't read it, is a helluva ride: the world ends, for a start. A manufactured and mistakenly released  pandemic that makes C19 look like a fleeting sneeze wipes out 99.4% of the human species in a matter of weeks. But what's much more important is what comes after. What sort of society should spring from the ruins? Are we doomed to make the same mistakes again? 

King calls this his novel of dark Christianity. It is that, very much so. It owes motifs and scope to THE LORD OF THE RINGS and it's got a little WATERSHIP DOWN vibe to it, but this novel asks hard questions about God and man, and attempts to answer them. 

I learned to read critically in H.E.L.L. (Honours English Language and Literature), a couple of years after my exposure to THE STAND. I've since reread the novel several times, but never through that critical lens that Scott and Matt apply. At the end, the podcaster friends start musing about why Bad Shit happens, in King's world and in our own, like, why would a loving God permit that.

I've always had my own answers to that which somewhat touch on what Scott came up with: no good without bad; what is our response to the 'evil'; we are all co-creators. But never have I ever heard someone take that and just RUN with it. Where he went with it caused my mind to short-circuit, making laundry and litter into colossal undertakings. 

Okay, you're God the Great and Terrible. All powerful. Can do anything. A human asks You, "Why is this bad shit happening?"

Scott: I’m gonna relieve your suffering. I’m gonna make it you no longer feel any more physical pain.  In fact I’m gonna make it so you never feel any more emotional pain. I’m gonna make it so nothing bad ever happens to anyone around you. No, in fact I’m gonna make it so nothing bad ever happens.  In fact not only does anything bad ever happen, you’re just always happy, and nothing even happens to disturb that even transiently.  In fact I’m gonna make it so that you’re always just totally blissed out, maximum level bliss…you know what, you don’t even need a body anymore honestly. You’re just gonna be like an orb, experiencing bliss, and nothing will ever change for you, and you’ll just be a permanent floating orb of bliss. Sound good ?  Sound good to you?

Matt: N-no…

Scott:  Should I do that?

Matt: No!

Scott: The point is to say, we DON’T know what’s good for us, which is another way of saying the Lord works in mysterious ways. The struggle we go through that provides us with all the meaning and richness and complexity and value of our lives is part of it, inextricably. The sacrifice is part of it,  inextricably. If you take those things away…I’m making the argument that there’s a slippery slope towards bliss-orb. There’s no line where you say “this is the maximum amount of problems God should fix.”

I sat there, stunned. No, of course we have no idea what's best for us, have you LOOKED at the world we're merrily pissing and shitting all over?  We look to the best among us for answers, and many of the best among us are (at least supposedly) emissaries, messengers from a Higher Power, reminding us we are all one. We flawed beings than take that information and bludgeon each other with it, at every turn demonstrating our separation from ourselves and 'God'. (I still think my theist-dodge works here: if you don't like that word, by all means replace it with a synonym. You've got a whole bunch to choose from, pick whatever one resonates. Love. Joy. The Universe. All That Is. Freedom.

But not bliss. Not endless bliss with absolutely nothing to punctuate it. Supposedly that's heaven; I've read enough spiritual books to have seen the concept crop up many times, completely independent of a Christian heaven. But here in the physical realm, we're supposed to love each other and respect/love whatever we choose to call the processes that shape us and bring us together. 

Do we know why the bad shit happens? Usually we cause it (I'm of a belief we always cause it, on some level, but I recognize many many feel that's a gross abdication of reason.)  But even where/if we do not....can anyone tell the future?

In THE STAND, a minor demon  and common King villain  named Randall Flagg, in the wake of the pandemic the ends the world, founds a tyranny in Las Vegas from which he intends to subjugate or destroy   survivors.  A competing outpost of the old world arises in Boulder, Colorado, this one centered around one of those Emissaries, a 108-year old woman called Mother Abagail. Several people are dispatched, on foot, to confront and "stand" against Flagg, the "Dark Man". There are some odd choices made. A mentally enfeebled man (with a heart of gold)  is sent out as a spy. So is an octogenarian judge. It's not made explicitly clear why each person was chosen, but reading closely you can see how each person has a role to play in the eventual (but never certain and never eternal) defeat of evil, how without the lessons each person learned going in, they'd never have succeeded. 

That's life, in a nutshell. We live, we learn, but we don't always learn right away, do we? And it's hard to deny there's a destructive impulse in humanity. The various faiths, drilled down to their essences and stripped of human meddling, seek to reduce that destructive impulse. There are of course other ways to do it, but religion is a way humans seem predisposed to consider.

The Slippery Slope towards bliss-orb. I will remember this every time something bad happens.