JAIMIE VERNON – DIVINITY INC.: (Chapter 1, Part 1)

During another life – say, 14 months ago – back when I had spare time and the ambition to write every single day I did more than crank out a biography, a book of my blogs, and two 400 page music Encyclopedias. I also wrote fiction. Or attempted to. I’m currently working on a batch of short stories in a sci-fi vein. I am also a big fan of satire – mostly British and specifically that of Douglas Adams. He wrote several of the funniest, most irreverent books about the absurdity of life on this planet in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy” five-part trilogy.

Adams had his finger on what it was like to be both British and human – in that order and not always together. He touched on the very fabric of what makes us tick and how cranky Brits can get if they don’t take their tea at 4PM. He also, occasionally, poked fun at the church having recognized that Monty Python were bigger masters of the sub-genre.

I have always had my own thoughts on the matter particularly in the circular debate between science and religion. DIVINITY INC – In the Company of God. was born out of these unknowns and the unknowable. If I could be so bold, I’d like to think this is a point blank satire of the best and worst arguments for Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Faith, Science, Spirituality, Alien Life and just about anything else that has obsessed us as a species since vacating The Garden…or outlet malls in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

So, ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in Technicolor ^TM is the first of several pieces of the yet to be published satire. For you really religious folks, come back to my column a month from now. I promise to write about some musical thing or Miley Cyrus.

Of Biblical Proportions (When Size DOES Matter)

God was bored. And not just in a Sitting-around-in-your-boxers-on-a-Sunday-afternoon-scratching-yourself-while-trying-to-find-something-to-watch-on-TV kind of bored. This was a stark, raving going-out-of-your-mind/bat-shit bored where you’re puttering about aimlessly back and forth in the garage moving crap from one counter-top to another hoping that something of interest like an unfinished (i.e. headless) garden gnome pops out from underneath 18 months worth of unmolested dust bunnies and perhaps piques your interest. But usually doesn’t.

Mrs. God had sent him out to the proverbial woodshed because he had resorted to peeling labels off her finely stewed jars of preservatives, wadding them up into projectiles and spitting the gooey concoctions at the cat. And, frankly, Schrödinger was all the happier for it as he was tired of licking the sticky paper accoutrements from his matted fur. He ran outside and took up a superposition inside a box. He was sure no one would see him there.

God needed something more substantial to occupy His time. Something a lot more challenging than inverting matter or lighting blue angel farts across tracts of the uncharted cosmos where future astronomer Jan Henrik Oort would name this particular gaseous sign-post the Oort Cloud; God thought it arrogant of Oort to take all the credit and was tempted to ask him how big a fart he could manage out in deep space but just never got the chance to meet the man face-to-very-large-face.

God was jaded from all the juvenile pranks he’d pulled (to no one’s delight) and wanted something more meaningful to re-focus his aging mind; maybe something that featured bells and whistles and a Greco-Roman fountain that sported a cherub peeing from a concrete orifice. Okay, so maybe he’d keep the juvenile antics a while longer. He hadn’t truly gotten his hands dirty since, when was it…The Big Bang Project? It seemed like a billion years ago. Or was it 4,000 years? He couldn’t be sure anymore…time being mostly relative and all that. Unless, of course, you’re able to mess with the whole Space/Time Continuum thingy as God was inclined to do.

No, His time would be wasted from all the effort Mrs. God spent getting him to move the deep space furniture around; Alpha Centauri over here; Haley’s Comet over there. He had created black holes for those occasions when his lumbago was acting up and he needed a place to stash the crap he couldn’t be bothered to move. It was the quantum version of sweeping it under the carpet. Humans would one day call these anomalies gravity wells which made God chuckle knowing that the holes were just glorified, bottomless sock drawers filled with miss-matched Binary stars and Voyager probes 1 through 15.

He wanted to get some ideas to chew on from someone other than the missus, but He hadn’t heard from his brother, Herb, in eons. Ever the black-sheep hippy of the family, Herbert had taken an astral plane to another part of the dominion getting moon dust highlights in his hair and communing with “nature”. Come to think of it, that was back during the Age of Aquarius. Herb continued to be ‘out of touch’ in more ways than one.

As much as God was looking for a pick-up hobby to keep amused since his semi-retirement, he realized that he might have to call upon professionals to get him rolling with the capitol and incentive to make it a worthwhile venture. A trip to the front office was going to be necessary.

He yelled to Mrs. God across the yard to let her know he was going to the store for some large New York-styled ball-park franks and he’d be back…well, whenever. She looked out over the top of her trifocal glasses, rolled her eyes and muttered something about how it would be a short putt rather than a long trip. He ignored her. Or couldn’t hear her. Geriatrics is a bitch when you’re over a gazillion years old.

He pulled on a pair of driving gloves, a World War I flying helmet (with complimentary goggles) and proceeded to back his newly-restored, immaculate 1928 Bugatti out of the garage. But, as he pulled around the gold-leaf, circular driveway toward the Pearly Gates, he narrowly missed the box that may or may not have contained Schrodinger and smashed directly into…Mars; Not the Roman God — though that would have suited God just fine having gone to lager heads with the Warrior over minutiae involving the make and model of certain atomic particulates used in the Manhattan Project — but the actual planet itself.

Large pieces of the sphere were sent hurtling into the great unknown and now the Bugatti was no longer in re-sale condition. In fact, there were parts of it strewn about the cobble-stone entranceway and were sure to piss off St. Peter and the night staff who would be stuck with the monolithic task of cleaning it up. Again.

God would have cussed under his breath, but it always seemed ridiculous to God that a deity had to curse at himself. Mrs. God had always chided him about driving a standard. She would have preferred something more Enviro-Friendly and automatic, like a ’73 Chevy Vega, so she could apply make-up while driving to the Outlet Mall on a Sunday afternoon. But the VW Jetta diesel had become the back-up vehicle of choice.

Meanwhile, the Solar System was now short one planet and this was millennia before the rage over Pluto’s planetary status by the humans. He could drop the whole mess into his homemade Black Hole Central Vacuum System but the surrounding planets would be sucked in as well and Mrs. God would be sure to notice a few of them missing especially when the Ladies Auxiliary had one of their ‘Wendy Under The Stars’ nights out in the backyard.

In a panic, he whipped up a sparkling brand NEW Mars. This time it would be RED coloured to replace the original, barely-in-season browns and beiges; with hills and valleys and running water and a place to hide the pottery class remnants he’d fashioned but which Mrs. God didn’t want cluttering up the front parlour back at home. These were nice art deco pieces that looked like pyramids and mountain-sized sculptures of his face smiling dolefully back into the cosmic void.

But he still had the problem of what to do about that debris from Mars (Version One) that was quickly expanding out across the vastness of space in-between the 3^rd and newly created 4^th planets. As if covering up the stain of a chili-bean burrito on the couch that only ‘good guests’ get to sit on with Tide Spot Remover ^TM, He sprayed the whole area with cosmic radiation as a means to keep people from poking around suspiciously. He would tell Mrs. God it was a new, glowing, igneous rock garden. She might actually like the idea for a change. He would just be happy if she didn’t notice that the distance between the faux Mars was now farther away from the sun than the original Mars had been. Later he would learn that this orbital differential would cause New Mars’ running water to dry up on the planet’s surface and leave future humans wondering whether life had existed there at one time. God just assumed the giant, protruding rock sculpture of his face might be the first, obvious clue. The Tinfoil Hat Brigade would have nothing as obvious as that deflecting their own “facts” and, instead, concocted some idiotic theory about aliens evolving there.

Ironically, aliens had actually visited there, during SFeXpo 19, but felt that God’s art deco sculptures “lacked a suitable third person perspective and was executed with all the grace of a lumbering Gryxelnyk Beast” [page 53 of ‘Interstellar Art Dealer’s Quarterly’, A.D. 10,399,822]

God was unfazed, either now with the ad hoc rebuilding of his backyard Solar System or all those years ago with the mopey, dutiful “Greys” critiquing His universe. He was well aware of their constant bitching about his handiwork but dismissed them out of hand as they were always unhappy so long as the Galactic Tourism Board gave them economy class seats on those school bus-styled coaches with empty promises of seeing primitive life forms. Well, that and the shitty buffet meals they served on the planet-to-planet in-flights. You’d be snarky about the sightseeing prospects too if your whole weekend getaway amounted to nothing more than seeing a bunch of 3^rd grade pottery on a distant planet without so much as a bacteria culture in sight not already belonging to someone you knew. Or a functioning bathroom facility to drain the ole skree televara after drinking one too many Comet Coolers at the TGIF (Thank God It’s Fizzlewag’s).

God sent the Bugatti back to the shop for restoration and made his way to the office in the back up diesel powered ’94 Jetta. Mrs. God was right about one thing: there was something about the German engineering that always impressed; tuned to perfection and economical. It would take those Germanic humans 3000 years and the distractions of a lunatic mass-murderer to get them there, but still…a triumph in utilitarian craftsmanship this simplistic couldn’t be found anywhere else in the known universe.

The car sped through the Pearly Gates as St. Peter arrived just in time to see the detritus splayed over the previously gold-coloured driveway. God smiled and waved as he watched Peter’s reaction to the carnage in the rearview mirror. Meanwhile, Schrödinger had slept through the whole fracas. Or maybe he didn’t.

Send your CDs for review to this NEW address: Jaimie Vernon, 4003 Ellesmere Road, Toronto, ON M1C 1J3 CANADA

=JV=

Jaimie’s column appears every Saturday.

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Jaimie “Captain CanCon” Vernon has been president of the on again/off-again Bullseye Records of Canada since 1985. He wrote and published Great White Noise magazine in the ‘90s, has been a musician for 35 years, and recently discovered he’s been happily married for 17 of those years. He is also the author of the Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia and a collection of his most popular ‘Don’t Believe A Word I Say’ columns called ‘Life’s A Canadian…BLOG’ both of which are available at Amazon.com or http://www.bullseyecanada.com