Housekeeping: It’s gonna rain tonight, so the Cat needs to go into Xanadu, and there’s space in the office for him. Is that a r/brandnewsentence?
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So, if I gotta talk about God, we need to start out with some AC/DC:
OK seriously I have no idea why I’m posting this, except that it was the song-in-my-head when I woke up. The reason for this is the dream I had, where a man beckoned me into a hall full of people eating at trestle tables and asked me to tell him three jokes about balls. I know only one joke about balls, but he accepted a karaoke version of that song as one valid response*.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to get Midjourney to agree to render anything at all from AC/DC lyrics? The social papers say I’ve got the biggest balls of all…
Some balls are held for charity, and some for fancy dress…but when they’re held for pleasure they’re the balls that I like best. She looks a little done with holding balls, to be honest.
So now that’s out of the way, what’s my conception of God?
A couple of things. When I was a very young child, I was convinced that God was a big old beautiful Black lady. The type with a trumpet voice and a zillion grandkids and she doesn’t take shit from anyone. She looks a little like this:
I also had a very strong sense that God was the light that shone through the stained glass windows at church. God was not IN the church. Not at all. But God was outside, shining the light inside.
I suppose after I left the church when I was 14, I didn’t want to think about divinity for a while. I was never a hardcore atheist, but I was agnostic enough, and my adoptive father didn’t ever go to church, so I just hung out at home on Sundays like he did. We didn’t hang out together, but we avoided church in tandem. His excuse was that he was a Presbyterian and my adoptive mother was a Methodist. I didn’t really have an excuse except that I didn’t want to go any more and Dad didn’t so I didn’t have to.
Decades went by.
You know, when things get tough, you start to look for creative ways to handle them. I had big issues with Yahwehstic religion, and wasn’t about to go back into that container, but as things got tougher and tougher, I realized that I needed a container. I needed help. I needed to not feel alone in the crippling responsibilities that had landed on my shoulders.
That’s all it boils down to, really. “Turn it up to Jesus” is just a way of saying “this is too much for me to handle alone, so I’m going to punt it into the ether and really trust that it’s gonna work out.” That really trust part is key.
I am not capable of dealing with everything that comes over my threshold solo. None of us are, but there’s this weird idea especially here in the West that we should be.
Nah.
That’s just silly. I’m not nearly that powerful. The world is way too big and way too weird.
So now what…where do AC/DC’s Big Balls come into this?
I’m feeling like it’s balls in the sense of chutzpah. Moxie. The ability to jump into something and rest in some assurance that your daring will be appreciated, because there’s something out there that has your back. You have to have ovarios, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says for us women-type people.
Oh I’ve got big balls, I’ve got big balls. They’re such big balls, and they’re DIRTY big balls…
*BRRRR* time’s up!
*Footnote: The other two ball-related jokes? One of them, I performed that sleight-of-hand where the magician pulls a foam ball out of your ear on the guy who asked me for the jokes. In waking life I have NO IDEA how to do this trick, but I did it flawlessly in the dream. The other joke? It’s the only ball-related joke that I know:
So this guy with a monkey on his shoulder walks into a bar. He sits down and orders a drink from the bartender, who obliges him. He finishes the drink and then goes to the bathroom, leaving the monkey at the bar alone. As soon as he’s out of sight, the monkey goes berserk. He rampages up and down the bartop shattering glasses and pulling other patrons’ hair. He swings from the lighting fixtures. He throws the peanuts all over the floor. For a grand finale he scampers into the back room, jumps on the pool table, and eats the cue ball. At about this time the dude comes back from the bathroom, and the bartender has him and his monkey thrown out.
A week or so later, the same guy comes back to the bar, still with the monkey on his shoulder. The bartender is about to have them both thrown out again but the guy pleads with him: “Dude I’m so sorry about last time. But the monkey has changed. He’s a reformed individual. Please give us another chance, I promise it’ll never happen again.” So the bartender lets him sit and order a drink. Once again, the guy has to go take a whiz and leaves the monkey at the bar. The bartender is watching the monkey like a hawk, but he’s just sitting there calmly. After a minute or so, though, he casually saunters over to the bowl of maraschino cherries that’s sitting on the bartop. The bartender watches as the monkey takes out a cherry, looks at it, sniffs it, shoves it up his ass, pulls it out and eats it. Horrified, he continues watching as the monkey does this trick with every cherry in the bowl. By the time he finishes the bowl, the whole bar is staring at him silently in horror and disgust.
The guy comes back from the bathroom, sits down and orders another drink from the stunned bartender. “What did I say? He behaved himself, didn’t he? He’s a good monkey now.”
The bartender gulps and says “Yeah, he didn’t go on a rampage like last time, but he did the grossest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. He ate that whole bowl of maraschino cherries, but he shoved each one up his ass first before he ate it. What the fuck is going on with that?”
The dude laughs and says, “Oh, that. Well ever since the cue ball incident, he checks for size first.”
Ba dump-tsss…
🤣 This was so good on many different levels!