Thoughts on God and Stuff…
Does God have a beard? In paintings, He always has a beard. But that is because in biblical times, everyone had beards. You look at a painting of a shepherd with some goats, the shepherd has a beard, the goats have beards... everybody has a beard. It's even quite possible that the women back then had beards as well, they just covered them up with veils. Granted, these are just artists' conceptions of what God looks like. I would bet that the artists had beards. We really don’t know for certain, and many of you could care less, but I'm kind of curious.

I don't know much about the style of sandals that were worn two thousand years ago. What if they were like the "flip-flops" we wear to the beach. Jesus walks by, flip-flop flip-flop. His followers hear Jesus going by and run to catch up, flip-flop flip-flop flip-flop... He's trying to speak to everyone, but nobody can hear what's being said, flip-flop flip-flop... a thousand times over. Just a deafening roar of flip-flops.

"I hope somebody writes all that down because I couldn't hear a word He said."
"Look! He's moving on! Let's go!"
Flip-flop flip-flop...

There comes a time during the mass or service of most Christian denominations, where you receive communion. At this point, you rise and head for the altar. Many times, I'd be chewing gum. So I'd swallow it because you are about to put a wafer of bread in your mouth that is symbolic of the bread broken at The Last Supper. The priest hands me the wafer and says, "The body of Christ." I put it in my mouth and swallow it. Now I'm thinking "Right now, in my stomach, I have the body of Christ mixing with a wad of Bazooka Joe. That can't be good."

Speaking of God, I got to wondering recently, who cuts God's hair. Does he trim it Himself? If we are talking about eternity, that is staggering number of hair cuts. There must be a barber shop or salon in Heaven. Would you have to make an appointment, I wonder? Are walk-ins accepted? Maybe you float in.

If there is no life on other planets, why did God make the cosmos so freakin' big? Did He just get carried away? Is it a guy thing? Or is it that we’re not supposed to know for some reason. Maybe the same deal that we have here on Earth is going on somewhere else and we’ll only get to find out when the game is over. The bible says that on the seventh day God rested. So, the next day He wakes up, He's fresh, and He's looking at another 51 weeks to round out the year. How does He fill those? C’mon.

We are all in this together…
The news is bleak, dear readers. Inflation, deflation and stagflation are words that are causing investors to stock up on libations as a hedge against serious losses of sanity. What the hell happened? It wasn't me. I'm not living in a McMansion or driving a Hummer. I have no delusions of grandeur; the only throne I sit on comes with a 2.5 gallon tank. Unemployment is up, stocks are down, and debt is all around the town. It was so easy to get money and nobody worried about paying it back. Everyone was making a decent income. Life was good. Then a bunch of stupid banks handed out sub-prime adjustable mortgages to a bunch of stupid people who couldn't understand the stupid adjustable part, and now they can't afford the Hummer and the house.

So the world will also pay the price living large. Why should all this affect someone in a different country? Like you, who has never witnessed the amber waves of grain (of which there is a looming shortage and we're all going to starve). Globalization, don't you love it. Global markets, global banking, global trade agreements, global entanglements, global courts and all sorts of global bull! I'm ready for some good old-fashioned isolationism. Throw in some protectionism as well. And while we're on the isms, what ever happened to patriotism. And national sovereignty, remember that one? Everybody is getting into some kind of union. There's always a price to pay for being a member of a union. They still haven't found Jimmy Hoffa. Anyway, we're all caught in this inevitable and sticky web where when somebody on the other side of world farts, we all deal with the stink.

And they say it will only get worse. Home foreclosures, job losses, bank failures, Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre retiring... It looks pretty bleak indeed. How does one maintain any holdings of inner peace and joy in this world? Well, at least we're not dealing with roving bands of flesh starved zombies yet. That's a good thing, isn't it? And there are no reports of blood sucking vampires lurking about. You can still stumble home from the pub without raising the BAC levels of some hapless vampire to illegal limits where he gets a DWI driving back to his crypt, as the rappers say, or worse, ends up in a tattoo parlour getting the likeness of Bella Lugosi inked onto to his puny chest. In those 1970s era B-movie vampire flicks, the female vamps where really hot. I may have been bit if I were in one of those films... yeah! Also, here in the present which is beginning to resemble a bad B-movie from the 70s, there seems to be no unusual howling out on the moors. I guess that qualifies as good news. Are there still moors? Or are there less moors? There seemed to be more moors before but I'm not sure. I've never been. Probably because of the werewolves and all.

I wish we could all shrink down and get inside a football. Then with his legendary rocket arm, Brett Favre could throw a blazing spiral into the air so fast it would break the speed of light and we could go back in time somewhere to a better place, a better time when things were good. Of course that would leave him to fight off the zombies, vampires and werewolves… but he's a pretty tough guy. And he always seems like he's having fun. He appears to have acquired large holdings of inner peace and joy, two valuable commodities. He must have bought when they were low. God help us all.