It makes me feel dirty

Barack Obama—the same man who falsely promised to close Guantanamo Prison—now has several times more people locked away without charges than Bush did, and he is planning to expand the capacity of the Parwan Detention Camp from 3,500 to 5,500. How can any of us claim to be moral people when we surrender money to an immoral entity like the United States government so that it won’t treat us with quite the same contempt for human rights that it treats others? If we too support evil, how are we more moral than those who supported Hitler?

In appreciation of my religious/spiritual readers

There aren’t a great many arguments to support the existence of a god, and studious atheists have rejected them all. This makes any attempt to convert such people a waste of time. Few of my religious/spiritual readers who have stayed with me through my attacks on religion have tried to convert me. Their tolerance and kindness has made it increasingly difficult for me to write posts in which I criticize religion, not because my opinions have changed but because I don’t want to wound my friends. Yet, I must continue to write such posts because they are important—to me if to no one else.

I never mean to make it personal. I can’t even imagine attacking one of my readers personally, much less one of my readers whom I value as much as I do Marion in Louisiana; Fodder in the Ukraine; Julie, Corgi, and Robin in California; Marion in British Columbia; Rhymes in Georgia; or Kylie, Nolly, and Natalie in Australia (just to name the first ten who come to mind).

It is certainly possible to find some touching stories and some impressive wisdom in religion, so if you find solace there, then who am I to begrudge you? It is only when religion hurts people that I object to it. As the Wiccans say, “An it harm none, do as ye will.”

When my mother died

My mother would become infuriated when I smoked marijuana, so I did it in front of her every chance I got. I was that way about everything that infuriated my mother. My sister was the opposite. She too did all kinds of things that seriously displeased our mother (our father didn’t care what we did), but she would lie her way out of them whenever she could.

When my mother died—in 1988—they brought the body to the house, and I sat beside her, smoking pot, in a one-person wake. I didn’t think I could bear letting her go, so I hoped I could rise to some plane where she still existed, or at least hallucinate her, but the closest I got was when I heard her gasp for air. At that moment, I thought I had done it. I thought she was going to open her eyes and talk to me, but she just lay there, not really looking much like herself.

Old dogs and old parents

Having old dogs is like having old parents. Sometimes, I just wish they would get it over with and die already. Other times, I feel honored that the universe has made me their guardian.

About Bonnie—the dog in the picture. She’s a blue heeler, 14 years old, blind, arthritic, and going deaf. Even with all this, she still loves to play fetch, only instead of throwing the ball off mountainsides or across rivers like I used to do, I now roll it up against her in the corner of the living room.

1/3 of 1 oz

The nasty looking stuff in the bottle is 190 proof ethyl alcohol in which marijuana leaves steeped for three months. You’re probably thinking, “Hell, son, I could drink a quart of that and race at Talladega,” to which I would respond, “Great! I look forward to seeing you do it, because I find that one third of one ounce propels me into a strong but mellow high that just keeps taking me up and up and up for hours until it dumps me back on earth sickly and depressed. I would even go so far as to say that if any drink ever deserved to be called The Devil’s Brew, this is it, not because it tastes horrible (which it does), but because of its strength per molecule. After a few drops of this stuff, your world will glow, pulse, undulate, radiate, and even transmogrify into a magnificent state like that of a vivid dream of a land in which strange beings dwell.

There are advantages to seeing in oneself the proximity of schizophrenia without actually being schizophrenic, except when on drugs. There is truly a gift here, but there is also the threat of nightmare. If I were unable to return to a normal life, I don’t know how I could bear it, yet I don’t want to rush back from a world that exists so deeply within that I hardly recognize it as being a part of me.

The men in my life part 1: Matt

Matt’s daughter killed herself last week. When I listened to him on the phone today, I felt such terror that I had to monitor my breathing so I wouldn’t hyperventilate. My terror came from my awareness that there was next to nothing I could offer that would make things even a tiny bit better.

Matt is my opposite in many ways. Most notably, he’s Christian and ultraconservative. Yet, he’s also a gentle and patient man who is out somewhere, helping someone, everyday.

I had a big tree cut down recently, and I decided to give it to two friends. One of those friends was Matt. He had been splitting wood for hours before he mentioned that he didn’t really want any; he just wanted to help me out by splitting it. I informed him that the ten cords he had in his shed would only last him a couple of years, and so he was jolly well going to take some wood home. He said he would give it to his daughter. She died the next day.

I feel so very small right now, and Matt’s grief is so very big. I haven’t known him that long or that well, but I like and respect him, and I’ve learned from experience that it’s not necessarily our closest friends who stand by us the best through hard times. Also, grief is something that I’ve always felt both honored and honor bound to embrace despite the times I’ve given even less than the little that I had to give.

Given my atheism—and assuming that you know something of the Bible—you might guess that my favorite book is Ecclesiastes. I sometimes wonder how it got into the Bible because the author’s conviction that life lacks objective meaning—that is, a god-given meaning—is completely out of harmony with the rest. This is Chapter 7, Verse 12:

“It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.”

Fifty years after I first read Ecclesiastes, it occurred to me that I would like to change that verse to:

“It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for the house of mourning is where you’re most needed.”

If I were to make a list of things that I would like for believers to know about atheists, the first one would be: “To deny god is not to deny the possibility of meaning. Kindness, patience, nobility, a passion for truth, and every other virtue are no less important to atheists than they are to theists. The difference between them is simply that the one attributes our knowledge of right and wrong to god, and the other to the social evolution of the species to which we owe our existence.”