God, do I not want to write you today. I get in these Sunday moods, where the only thing I want to do is my own stuff and catch up on… These days I have been trying to file away past bank statements for a couple of weeks. Isn’t it amazing how much energy it takes to put a pile of papers in chronology and stick them into a three-ring binder? Astounding. And I complain about how hard it is to write a screenplay. Jesus, I can’t even organize my own room, let alone a 120-page dramatic story. Who am I kidding?

But I started this entry out with God, and I realized that I wanted to put down, so that it was official, so that you and I could… I bandy the idea of God about a lot. And I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about what my conception of God is, because the truth is I’m a little self-conscious about using that word, that idea – of God – without a set of disclaimers. After all, I went to the Ivy League. I am very intelligent. I am able to see that God is a creation of man. I am the Post Structuralist mind. I am being facetious in all of this. The…well, wait. This is how I should have written all that: “I Went To The Ivy League. I Am Very Intelligent. I Am Able To See That God Is A Creation Of Man. I Am The Post Structuralist Mind.”

That took more time than it should have, but you get the idea.

Anyway, so I wanted to set down in black-and-white what I mean when I say God.

I have already discussed here my idea – I would like to lay claim to it, put a flag in it, and I don’t care if I sound pretentious, inflated like my lactose-intolerant belly – it is My Idea that (at least I have not heard it anywhere else as far as I know) religion is an adaptive trait insofar as it frees up a species that is prone (and I use that word ‘prone’ very consciously) to rational inquiry…the idea of religion in such a species frees up important cognitive space for useful, productive activities (hunting, gathering, developing tools and weapons and the like, smoking pot)…frees up cognitive space that would otherwise go toward the exploration of essentially unanswerable questions. That is, by positing a God, or a system that explains many of the unexplainable (either from a rational perspective at all, or at a particular time in a species’s technological development)…what?...inexplicable phenomena or ideas, a species has more time to increase its lead over competing species. Nevermind that it induces, at a certain point, some members of the species to totally retreat from productive society. This, from my perspective, is akin to the phenomena of worker ants, say, who perform necessary functions in a colony but are doomed to never actually reproduce with the queen. I don’t know if I’m accurate on the ant lifecycle here, but I know this phenomenon occurs in nature. Those who stay indoors studying Torah are in fact answering the questions for the entire tribe so that the average tribe member can go out hunting or bungee-jumping or whatever.

Anyway, so clearly this would indicate my feelings about religion as an evolutionary artifact, and not any accurate explanation of the universe. For those questions, again, that religion supposedly answers are precisely and by definition those that cannot be answered in any more satisfactory way. It (religion) is a set, in other words, of explanatory fictions that free the mind from unproductive endless inquiry (hmm, perhaps I should take a lesson from that).

This suggests that my idea of…well, it suggests that my…it suggests that I’m an atheist or at least an agnostic. But I don’t feel comfortable with either of these labels. They don’t really get at the (oh God, I’m sounding like Persis) ‘nuance’ (she has made me hate that word; everything in her world is nuanced; she brought home a book by some Oh-So-Brilliant scholar on race and culture and I read the jacket flap and felt like I got a pretty good idea of his ideas. Then Persis asks if I want to read it and I said that I read the flap of the dust jacket and she says, “His idea is pretty nuanced,” and I said, “Well it sounded like the ideas on the dust jacket were pretty nuanced.” What a load of crap. Yeah, Persis, that’s your shit in the toilet. “I don’t know, it looks pretty nuanced to me. See the way the turd has little lumps and crevasses. See the way it tapers at one end and breaks off abruptly at the other, suggesting that, at the time it emerged, there was still some shit left in my butt. That’s pretty nuanced.”) of my feelings.

I have decided that I feel about God the way a mathematician must feel about imaginary numbers. He might agree that they are imaginary from an absolute perspective; nonetheless, they are very useful. The idea of God is useful. Talking to God, thinking about God, addressing God as if he were up there and listening is comforting. It satisfies a true need. The idea of God is important to my sense of who I am. And the issue of whether the thing, being I am addressing is real or not is beside the point. So stepping back and asserting my true lack of belief is actually detrimental to my emotional, psychological health because it jeopardizes those creative, strategic fantasies that make me feel not alone in the world, and destined for something other than just the grave.

To advertise my atheism would be the same as my articulating my some nonbelief in the value of therapy simply because my ‘knowledge of myself’ is ultimately unverifiable and in the grand scheme of things irrelevant. [I don’t know if this is very clear. I think what I’m trying to say is that, if I am essentially an atheist – that is, one who accepts the nonexistence of ‘God’ – that fact is trivial compared to my belief in the utility and helpfulness – to me, personally – of the idea of ‘God’. So the comparison I’m trying to make with therapy is that I also find it so helpful that the fact of its unfalsifiability is of little relevance to me. In general, I think it is this personal experience of the helpfulness of an idea of ‘God’ that leads me to be extremely suspicious of professed atheists. First of all, you have to have a pretty clear and limited idea of something in order to profess nonbelief in it; so I kind of see professed atheists as people with either un-worked-through authority issues or a lack of imagination.]




Anyway… I feel like I’m forgetting something.

Ah. So I guess I see God as this adaptive personal fiction, a managed psychosis insofar as one gives one’s life over to something as real as the voices in one’s head in order actually to remain productive, to keep oneself from despair (I guess that’s another way in which religion is an adaptive trait: it not only frees up cognitive space, but it keeps a creature prone to rational thought from slipping into unproductive despair.)


So you might ask: What the hell does all this have to do with my writing you?

Well, I don’t really know. It was on my mind, and I didn’t really feel like delving into anything, so I thought I’d discourse on my contribution to theological philosophy…sorry: My Contribution To Theological Philosophy.



So I guess the question is what’s going on with me.


Oh go to hell.


Don’t I discourse enough on my dark diverticula enough Monday through Thursday? Of what value, really, is continuing to write to you? Yeah, sometimes a nice little gem emerges, but this is really starting to wear on me. I’ve been thinking recently of abandoning this and just sort of saying a nice good-bye to you at the one-year mark. Which is rapidly approaching. Or maybe I should wait for the one-year mark of my not seeing you in person anymore. The truth is that if this were not a public thing I don’t know if I would have kept it up. I don’t know if you alone would merit a weekly anonymous note. I doubt I would have posted these online for you alone. I mean, why would I go through the deception, the potential hurt of this blog just for you? You don’t really deserve that. You’re not, for all your wonderful…for all of your contribution to me, someone for whom I would sacrifice my marital happiness. Keeping you in the loop of my life is not something so important to me that I would risk really hurting Persis. And yet maybe I would have wanted other fathers to see this, other men who are struggling with the same issues of self definition as I am (I am starting to be a little proud of my functions around the house, and to feel actually like Persis, immersed in her world of work, of examining closely her shit and the shit of others, is actually divorced from reality; and that I, in dealing with my needs and the needs of my son and our household, am truly the one who is dwelling in the real world. If I were to disappear, her world would collapse. Mine would get a little trickier if she disappeared, but I wouldn’t be as out to see [sea] as she would be. Ha.), and maybe, without a group of friends out there to occasionally read my stuff, and for that to help me feel like I was still connected with my old life – and this is important: that, I think, is the most important function of this blog right now: it helps me to feel not isolated, still in touch with my old life, even if symbolically. Interesting: here I am considering the value of this weekly posting, and talking about God in the same therapeutic breath; when it turns out that in fact God and this blog play the same role for me: they are fictions that I defend and willingly engage in because they help me to feel in touch with myself and the world and creation, and to feel like I am not alone. I guess there are no accidents after all.

Anyway, I don’t think, though, that keeping my old friends in the loop…oof, this almost pains me to say, would sustain me forever. I mean it does sort of feel like hanging on to a world, a reality, that no longer exists. Like fooling around with former lovers. And that’s true not just in terms of my relating, communicating one-sidedly with friends from Platte, but also to you. There’s a congruence there: I have a therapist here, so why should I spend my time continuing to write to you? I have a life here, so why should I spend my time nurturing a life that is not likely to return in the near future (which phrase [clause] I append out of a vestigial hope that it might actually one day return)? I guess if I knew that friends were actually reading this on a regular basis, if it was really important to people to keep up with me on a day-to-day (or at least week-to-week) basis, I would feel differently, but the truth is (and part of me resents this, part of me feels like this is testament to the fact that you rarely know who your true friends are but sometimes something happens that separates the real ones from the imposters) that they have their own lives (and although part of me resents that they can’t spare fifteen minutes a week for me, part of me understands that absolutely: how many of my friends from Platte do I spend fifteen minutes on a week? My God, I haven’t even made the time to read Ryan Speck’s script yet (though not from a lack of desire). Part of me understands that many of the relationships that I consider dear to me are built upon distance, upon lack of constant updating, and are in fact important to me because they do not require constant updating. And that the relationships that no longer serve me in this context I have allowed to languish and decompose back into the earth of my life. So perhaps it is too much to ask even those friends whom I value deeply (regardless of whether they can spare the quarter hour a week)…well, I mean perhaps it is too much to ask that they spare that fifteen minutes. Perhaps it’s actually irrelevant. But that then doesn’t water down my sense that maybe that’s a stupid reason to be writing, that the people whom I care about don’t need to spend fifteen minutes a week on me. They and I do what’s necessary to sustain and nurture our relationships…and no more. Why do more than that? It is a waste of resources. Of course this can become a circular argument, because it perhaps assumes that people only do what they need to in order to preserve their relationships…it begs the question, in other words.

But I guess what I'm leading toward is this…well, back to this question of why I continue to write, whether it’s really for anyone but myself, and if it really is the lifeline that I imagine it to be. Maybe it’s just a selfserving habit that I will never…that is a waste of productive energy. I rarely go back to read over my journal from late teens and twenties. (Though, in fact, when I do, it is extremely valuable to me.) I don’t know where all this goes. I just didn’t feel like writing today and I have been wondering whether to continue. If no one needs me to do this but me, then maybe all of these fantasies that I’ve built up around continuing to write and post are silly, time-wasting fictions, and that no one will suffer or even notice if I get real and stop. Of course, I know that some people probably do read, if not regularly, then at least on occasion; and perhaps, like my journal, the only time this blog really matters, or would really matter, is when you or a friend logged on and it wasn’t there anymore.