As the Moon Draws Water

"In spite of our warnings and explanations, it drew [Dill] as the moon draws water," Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird                                                                                                                                                             

Dill Harris was instantly hooked on the mystery surrounding Boo Radley; he couldn't leave it alone, he had to know, had to see Boo with his own eyes.

Some kids are like that. A mystery drives them nuts. I was such a child. I used to tear small holes in my Christmas gifts to see what was inside. Forget waiting or deferred gratification. To quote the infamous Reverend Ike, "I don't want pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, I want my pie right now with ice cream on top!"

My curiosity killed Santa Claus when I was eight years old. I'd already begun to ask myself questions like, "We don't have a fireplace. Does he come in through the heat grates in the floor?" In any case I sneaked around and discovered  the stash of "Santa's gifts" and had to be told that the preposterous myth was a preposterous myth (self-inflicting who knows what degrees of psycho-trauma). Santa Claus: God with training wheels.

Death was also a mystery. I was, like many children in the South, taken along to funerals and "visitations" and the lame explanations for the smiling Grandmother lying in a big shiny box made not only no sense ("She's gone to be with Jesus in Heaven") but radiated a quality of evasion and uncertainty that I suspected would fit quite comfortably in the Santa Claus category. I used to conduct funerals for neighborhood pets and even considered being a funeral director when I grew up!    

When a mystery was freighted with a moral injunction it significantly boosted the attraction-factor. Surely the finest example of this is the Garden of Eden allegory. Adam and Eve had it all--including hanging out with God Himself--and only had to obey one simple rule: lay off the fruit of a single tree. We all know what happened next. Clearly God didn't know much about child psychology.

For me sex became the ultimate mystery and my fire-and-brimstone Grandmother made sure I was well-versed in all the Southern Baptist strictures against engaging in any form of it--including nudity --and made me aware of the terrible consequences of succumbing to lust. Thus when I discovered that sex was deliciously pleasurable...

I wrote this in a song called Swimming With the Sharks:

They told me sex was dirty except unto a wife

They told me I was jerking off the best years of my life

But somehow I saw different

And guilt was worth the price

To all alone or with someone escape to paradise!   

Rocks Turned to Meat

Here's what science has to say about why we're here: Around fourteen thousand million years ago the universe spewed out of absolutely nothing ("One quintillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe was infinitely dense and zero in size." --Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris) and billions of years later molten rocks turned to meat and started thinking. I drew a cartoon of this in our first book The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity and represented "thinking" as an egghead in a lab coat saying, "There is no God!"

My metaphysics is best summed up in a song I wrote for a friend dying of AIDS. It's called The God Almighty Blues:

God Almighty is the name that you all give to me

But God Almighty isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be

So hush your prayers, complaints and whines and hear my side a bit

I’m gonna tell you why I made a world so full of…it

You all think that being God is really where it’s at

Just lounging on a throne all day while chewing cosmic fat

With fifty trillion angel choirs all singing lavish praise

If you’re like me this scene would drive you nuts within two days

It’s true that all I have to do is give one small command

And there it is, just what I want, and I don’t lift a hand

How ’bout a perfect diamond with each facet light years wide?

No problem! I get what I want as soon as I decide

Limitations don’t exist as long as I am me

But that’s a limitation! It gets boring don’t you see

So I enter amnesia, what you call the universe

In which I savor all those feelings God can never nurse

Like fear and hate and jealousy and worrying ’bout the rent

Like walking up to my new car and finding a big dent!

Like falling oh so deep in love then falling out again

Like knowing that I’m gonna die and fearing how or when

Like having some old bastard ride my ass from nine to five

Like freezing down on skid row begging wine to keep alive

Like giving birth to babies and like starting to grow old

Like chasing after cuties and that rainbow’s pot of gold

So all of you who wonder ’bout the “meaning” of your life

It’s just a way that I can get a taste of toil and strife

By living out a life just like it’s really life or death

I play as many characters as ever drew a breath

Like Oonga in the jungle and like Bill who lives next door

Like Mary Queen of Scots and like old Fred who mops the floor

Like Hitler and like Joan of Arc like Blackbeard on the Main

Like Tom and Dick and Harry and like Einstein and plain Jane

Like Moses on the mountain like the woman at the well

Like Francois and Beethoven like Alexi Ho and Nell

Like Ala and Johannes like Mugobwe Singh and May

Like you and everybody else--just parts I like to play

Yes just for fun I let myself lose my identity

I trap myself in human form then wait to be set free

The pain cries out remember oh remember who you are

Escape this cage of flesh and let your light blaze like a star

So who you think you are is simply me there in disguise

I think you’ll find this makes up for the pain of life: surprise!

Yes God Almighty is the name that you all gave to me

              And life’s my way of passing time...inside eternity