here we go a ranting, on a winter's eve ...

Douglas Connelly is indeed a blockhead.  We've got a cranky, exiled 90 year old guy who suddenly has a vision about the end of the world, given to him by his old buddy Jesus Christ.  How is he different from anybody wandering around in the street mumbling to themselves?  Oh, and of course I'm talking about John, the guy who wrote the book or at least told it to someone who wrote it down before it headed over to a selection committee where they yeah or nayed themselves into a canon (followed by another selection committee and another one as people decided that the other guys had a few of their bullet points wrong on their internal mission statements).  Fast forward over the last couple thousand years and people are still arguing over this.

The thing that really got me about this book was somewhere in the middle where he's talking about how reading one of the sections can't help but make you fill up with praise and adoration for Jesus, and how it's good practice to get going on that now so that you're ready to perpetually pat the dude on the back and say "good job for destroying mankind and bringing us all up here where we're just wandering around happy for ourselves and the only thing that we've got to do is constantly congratulate you."

I feel like a book like this, that purports itself to be a guide to understanding a complex book that no one really understands and everyone has a different idea of, should be written by more than one person.  I feel like at the very least more than one denomination should be reflected in the construction of the book and perhaps a few literature/ philosophy people who can provide counterpoints to the rampant symbolism in the text.  But no, we get one pastor out of Michigan to tell us how it is (which is something that really annoys me in general and is used so often by talk show/ talk radio personalities to lend some pseudo-credibility to their rants and ravings and opinions).  We're talking PERSPECTIVES here people, we need more because you are not the be all and say all for the universe!

I was raised Lutheran, but a pretty liberal Lutheran, not the Missouri Synod who require woman to only wear calico dresses, and we never really covered this book in any of my Bible classes.  Better bet, I figure, to focus on the good guy hippie Jesus who wanders around with plenty of parables doing good wherever he goes.  Not only that, but he's got a gang of do-gooders that travel around with him (if they had a van and a theme song it would've been an awesome '80's show).  I think that the pastors of church's brand of Lutheranism were a little embarrassed by this book ... I mean it is pretty silly.  Lamps and lampshades and if you don't do as we say we're going to take your cookie, er, lampshade and you'll die with everyone else that doesn't agree with us when seals are opened and horsemen appear ... and monsters?  Um, it sort of sounds like John was just a little pissed that he didn't get into a quality nursing home and decided to take it out on mankind (though, probably the Romans first ... after that, maybe he'd chill out a little).

And really, the most frightening thing of all about this book, is that otherwise normal looking people that are upstanding members of communities believe it is absolutely true.  (Of course nothing surprises me anymore given how many people belong to the creepiest cult in the world ... I'd name it but then I'd get stalked and sued by their lawyers).  

Crazy is as crazy does.  Rant done.  (Bet you enjoyed Lewis Black more ...)

end of the world and i feel fine

I pressed my hand up against they high-resin polymer window, one of hundreds that honeycombed over me comprising my bio-dome.  It still felt cool, though through it I could see the firestorm whirling around outside.  I stepped back from the window and walked across the complex to the shed where I kept the CO2 scrubbers and water treatment machines.  I had a feeling that the burn would continue until the surface of the earth was rubbed clean of all surface life, both the feeble minded twerps that ignored my warnings as well as my green friends that I struggled to protect for all of those years.

Sure, they listened in the end.  I can smile now at the memory of them beating against my door, trying to turn their desire to get in into the means to achieve that goal ... but of course, the door held.  I designed it that way.  After all, it was designed to withstand all of this hellfire, but in the moment it was terrifying.  What if it hadn't held, what if their stupidity doomed me to their fate as well, what if ... no use concerning myself with that now.  It had held.  It held and it proved once and for all that I was right and they were not.

I paused to feel the trunk of the last oak tree on the planet.  In my other hand I held a small remote control that was tied into everything that made this pod function: power, lights, sprinklers ... everything.  Soon the fires will stop and the natural rains will return.  The world will cool again and then the grass and the trees will flourish.  Nature finds a way.  I wonder if anyone else completed their pods before the disasters came?  I'm not a soulless person, I don't wish ill of my fellow human ... well, not all of them.  The righteous and the prepared should be fine, they are the ones who had the intelligence to heed the signs.  Of course, I'm also not too proud to say that the way things went down didn't surprise me a little as well.  I can admit when I'm wrong, or in this case, only partially right.  I didn't see this apocalypse occurring from more than one battlefront.  I was prepared for Mother Earth's revenge, we've hurt her so much all of these years that it was only a matter of time before she got tired of it and unleashed her fury:  erupting the volcanos, ripping herself open to swallow those that would kill her.  I was prepared for that.  I wasn't prepared for the spaceship that preceded it (those idiots really believed that the creatures piloting the crafts were benevolent angels that would take them on a journey of the stars, even waved them in with flashlights and hippie music--they deserved to be the first devoured).  Those creatures worried me as the pounded away on my dome, wanting to devour me the same way.  Awful things really.

So first came the aliens.  Then came the volcanos and the earthquakes.  And now things seem to have quieted down.  Just the burning.  Don't hear any planes flying over anymore, don't hear those creatures outside.

Is that a cracking sound?  Are my windows giving out?  I circle around, cursing the contractors that I had to go through to get this place built.  Did one of them screw me over?  Low ball me?  I search and can't find the source.  Odd.  But the sound continues.  I track it back to the center of the compound, by the tree.  Housing unit to my left, treatment/ scrubbing shed to my right, the ammunition bunker behind me ... there is nothing here.  Nothing that could be making that sound.  Nothing ... on the ground, but under it.  I sit down so that I can feel the the grass on my legs and my feet, so that I can feel the rumbling under me.

My initial designs had been for a sphere, the bottom half to be buried under the ground.  I built the superstructure, the metal grid all the way around, but I only went part way under with the panels ... I didn't think I'd need to go deeper.  I lay back and looked at the ashen sky above.  The tentacles pushed through the sod near the tree and pulled the creature up and through.  Space monsters, I didn't expect them.  Who knew that they would be burrowers as well.  Smart as I was to know that the only way to wait out the hellfire and rebirth was in a pod.  The tentacle wrapped itself around my leg and I could feel the thousand little knives grip into my flesh.  The sandpaper muscle squeezed and began to pull me.  I looked up into its devil face and mouth full of teeth.  Smart as me.  Nearly.  I smiled as it pulled me into it's mouth and bite down.  I smiled as I pushed the button on the small remote control, the button connected to the small nuclear device I had in my ammunition shed (unlimited power supply, plus a nifty little contingency plan).  I smiled as the world around me went white.

Nearly as smart as me.  But not quite.