One Last Detail

“It all there?” He lifted his chin, pointing at the tented magazine on the table. 

“Of course.” I snorted. 

He smirked and slid the envelope from under the magazine into his jacket. “Alright then.”  

He started to scoot his bulk out of the booth and I panicked realizing I had forgotten something. “Wait- " 

“We’re done here, Lady.” 

“No. I want something, uh... additional.” 

"Not my concern now.” 

“I’ll pay.” 

He frowned but remained standing at the end of the table.  

 “See, He- he’s got this great smile. Brilliant teeth. I want those to go first. Before everything else.” 

----

The above is my submission to this week's Flash Fiction Challenge at Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog: Write a story in 100 words. 

I think I managed to do it in 99. I reworked something I wrote a few years ago.

That One Forgotten Thing

On the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Las Vegas facebook page the question was posed:

How do YOU – as a UU – think or talk about God? What do YOU mean when you say the word?

If you don’t ever use that word or want to, do you use a different word? Or do you just avoid the idea all together?

When someone asks me if I believe in God. I ask them in turn “Who’s asking? If it’s a Christian asking then I am an atheist. If it’s an atheist asking, I’m an agnostic.”

I hesitate to use the word God because it might be mistaken for that all-powerful creator described in places like the Old Testament and the Quran. Still, I use the word God because I believe we are talking about essentially the same thing –except not at all.

When I say God I am referring to something that does not have identity or intellect. I even hesitate to use the phrase universal consciousness because that might imply some form of intellect or consensus.

What God is to me is a state of awareness that allows we are part of something far greater than we can adequately express. It is a state of being that includes us but is in no way centered on us. Everthing –every thing- is connected. Everything is.

This understanding, that we only get glimpses of every now and then, is God. When we glimpse this we invent words like divinity, sacred, sublime. We are divine, sacred, sublime, and eternal because we are a part of this not a product of it. Carl Sagan told us “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” Ask Neil deGrasse Tyson if he doesn’t experience the sublime in his work.

I think we have the capacity to understand this at least in an abstract way. We should be able to treat each other like the incarnations of The Greater Divine that we are. But it is much too hard to hold this in our minds and hearts. It is much easier to be swayed but the amygdala because we are still closer to that in our evolution than the awakened souls that we hope to be. It is far easier to create this Greatness to be something outside us and give it an intellect and an identity and a human physicality to identify with. At that point is an easy step to attribute to them the source of our morality, our compassion, our righteousness and our accountability. ‘They’ are divine and we are not. We invent books to tell us we are lesser things to be ruled by greater things. Heaven and Hell, the carrot and the stick: all of that is put beyond us instead our legacy in the here and now.

We are the blind men telling each other exactly what an elephant is like. God is the ones and zeros underneath the operating system that religions have overlaid with their proprietary user interfaces, logos and catchphrases. The underlying framework gets written, rewritten, stolen, re-attributed and the new versions rolled out with ad campaigns and keynote speakers. All we want is for our battery not to run out before we post those pics of cats photo-bombing our selfies.

TL;DR
We have forgotten that we are God

Neologism winners

Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words. The winners are:

Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

Gargoyle (n), olive-flavored mouthwash.

Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.

Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

The winners are:

Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.) Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

[~~Forwarded to me by my friend Finnian. Thanks, Finn.]

The Errosion of Heroes

I'm having a hard time, people. Two or three days ago I deactivated my facebook account. I was going to do the same with Twitter and even this blog. The intention was to shut down for a while because the all the babbling in the stream made me crazy. I had nothing to offer the voices but cutting bitterness. I wanted to destroy happy little emoticons with acid edged words. I wanted to say everything you don't dare say when you are angry. I wanted to speak with the Devil's own tongue. Instead I cut the breakers before any real damage was done.

You see, my uncle died early Friday morning. It was not a surprise. We knew it was coming. He knew it was coming. He bought himself a slow death by the bottle. About six months ago he was told he would have less than a year if he didn't stop. Well, he didn't stop. I'm not sure he knew how.

This man; this wretched, tortured man had once been my hero. It was a thing I could have used against him in his later years if I had ever conjured enough anger: "You were my hero! Now, look at you!" But by then I had long since put the notion of heroes aside and he certainly didn't rank among them in his abusive state. I still loved him but I also hated him for not being strong enough to break free of his poison.

He was a Green Beret. I was born during the first of his two tours in Vietnam. I was the flowergirl at his wedding. He had a rough way of tickling you till you were helpless and laughing and crying and he still would-not-stop.

There are memories of him I have that are like silent flip book movies: my mother and father fighting - both struggling with a shotgun between them. It was all chaos and screaming. My father, a few years divorced from my mom, had come to steal my brother and I. I didn't understand anything was wrong until my mother ran out of the house screaming and crying and pointing a shotgun at my dad who was about to back out of the driveway with us in the station wagon. It was odd. Just like in the movies: two people fighting over a rifle, it's muzzle wavered between them first pointing up then down and back again. I'm not sure where he came from but my uncle walked, *walked* up to them and within a blink he had the gun and had them separated. He was calm and had calmed them. It was over.

He had been my hero before that for more insignificant things. Even before that day I understood how noble he was. It was knowing how great he was that made his downward spiral so hard to bear. Little by little, bit by bit this living icon of my childhood faded away to something sad and infuriating.

In his last days I spoke to him with an upbeat casualness about how things would be when he got of the hospital. My disdain for the alcoholic was gone. It did not matter any more that he had fallen so far. It did not matter any more that he had allowed time and the bottle to betray the legend I once held in my mind. It did not matter that he had slowly killed himself. I just talked to him and held his hand, wrinkled skin soft and yielding entirely unlike the calloused hand that once wiped away my tears.

Had I known he would pass away that night I would have told him then.

I'll never be as strong or noble as you. I'll never be able to do the things you did. But if I ever did anything to make you proud, it was because you were my hero.