Tuesday, January 20, 2004

I was thinking tonight about how difficult it must be to be a vengeful god in this world of system redundancy. I mean, sure, you can throw down a can of earth quake whoop ass on a city living in crowded conditions in essentially the same habitations they had during actual old testament whoop it up with a plague times, but that just wouldn't have the same impact on today's Babylon. Which is us. As I was driving back from the Y, I noticed that there was a block without power, including the firestation. For a god to take out a whole city, he (and I use this non-gender neutral term with intent) would have to basically take out all the firestations, all the hospitals first. You couldn't just take out fire station number 9 and 10 and expect to get anywhere with your leveling of say, the sinful SouthSide. You'd have to take out every single firestation within a thirty to forty mile radius, PLUS, all the oldtimers with their oldtime parade fireengines, that may in fact be in better working order than the real engines, for all the care and lack of wear. Just figuring out the powergrid alone would be fairly daunting. I guess the one thing old testament god has going for him, old testament gods, for that matter, is that they have us at least pissing off the rest of the mud-hut dwellers in the world that our children and their children will grow up in a world of fear, not of some vengeful deity, but really, really impoverished, exploited people (not that they don't exploit and oppress themselves - hell, they're still worshipping that old testament god, and twisting the hell out of his intent to create crazy, bare knuckled patriarchy), using homemade bombs, or taking over our planes, or poisoning our water. I think the thing I love most about swimming again is that moment, pulling out of the flip turn, when I am weightless, holding my breath, and I know what it must be like to fly in outer space, what it must be like in that moment, suit free, floating in the vacuum, before your body literally becomes one with the universe, and then I surface, wait for one second longer, after the second stroke, and breath, born again between the flags. Doing backstroke as a cool down, I found myself going underwater, dolphin kicking, almost halfway down the pool, my muscle memory erasing my essential out of shape self's actual anaerobic threshold. I would wonder for a second, with each of the three turns, if I would ever come up for air. I know now that the surgical tubing is paying off. Exercing my petite muscles, the rotary cuff wrapped around or under my deltoids, bruisers they were, and are becoming, but without ignoring the delicate, the ball bearings, keeping my arms from falling completely apart. I sometimes wonder what people would think, coming into my home, seeing my latex strap on the doorknob, my sinus-irrigating enema bag, even my stomach cruncher could be misinterpreted in that way. Reminds me of Chris C. thinking the ceremonial sage in my desk drawer, the summer he subletted my room, was a big ole bag of weed. Except this would be folks assuming I'm some rubber loving SM/BS person - which is cool - just not presently part of my palette. 9:22:07 PM