Letters to the Editor
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Inside My Creation Museum
I’ll tell you what I think. I think I’m a literalist even when I mean to be metaphorical, or analogously witty and punloving. And because I’m a literalist I have a tendency to generalize my experience and my ego filtering defensive mechanisms to fit nearly everyone I come in contact with, either physically or through written word or thought or just remembering the last time I made love to a woman named Eve. In the end it’s only my version of the story that I pay attention to, even when other bards are knocking at my door with love poems and rifles.
I’m a creationist. I have spent years memorizing the story of my creation. I spent thousands of dollars telling priests and therapists the story of my creation. I had paradise and then I was tricked into peeking behind the curtain and gained knowledge that everything wasn’t perfect in Edenville. And just like the vegetable munching dinosaurs that never even considered a meal of atomized flesh, the t-rexes of my paradise fundamentally claim it really was paradise. They will tell the same story again and again that everything I learned peeking behind the curtain is wrong.
According to them, and to them the potential of absolute truth must be weighed in accordance with their rotund reading of sacred birthday cards and other congratulatory text, it was paradise. Then the flood of their history was wiped from the world I knew in a 400 session (10 session equal 1 day in all sacred text) deluge until all that was left was a naked me and weirdly inconsistent localizing of fossil and plant matter in different degrees of psychic strata. I fundamentally deny my father ever loved my mother even though my mother will fundamentally embrace a paradise that contains only facsimiles of my reality. I mock my mother to the point that I refuse to speak to her. She spends her days playing solitaire or reading the Left Behind series of novels. My father can only say, “When is this ever going to end?”
It’s a crazy lonely world I live in and I’m always looking for a new way to tell my story so others will believe me. I just need someone to finally tell me that what I say happened really happened, and if at all possible, I’d love to know why. This is my reality. When I put down the beer, or quit checking my retirement account or actually pay attention to my wife when he talks (sorry that was a slip of some sort as my wife really is a she) what I know is only what I don’t know, a sort of Rumsfeldian dream fugue. I don’t know shit about any of this and if someone can give me an answer, hell, I’ll drive to Cincinnati if necessary, and shell out (by the way how much does it cost to get in?) the cost of a ticket to believe.
Not really. I think religion is like my parents trying to convince me they really didn’t beat me or scream maniacal curses or demand I pay tribute to them with some sort of self burning sacrafice. I think religion as commonly considered is a displaced paranoia in an effort to finally find out who’s listening behind the sheet rock. Cause my little boy brain thinks someone has been listening all along and that someone can finally tell the story to clear everything up once and for all. Cameras have screwed with everyone, cause now we know they've had pictures for at least 150 years. And finally, I think religion spent a number of years backstage morphing with political correctness so its impossible to distinguish between fact, hyperbole, shock, interpretation, or plain old bullshit. I think religion of every stripe belongs in diaper bag along with anti-bacterial wipes and vegetable snacks.
In case I want to be honest, I’ve got my museum too. All the art and facts of my creation, the creation of my creators all the way back to Grandma Kelly who fucked her boyfriend Edward in the backseat of a Packard on a hazy summer evening in Irvington. And when I spend a Saturday afternoon walking the halls of this museum I sometimes get really pissed that more people don’t know about what really happened. Sometimes I get so pissed I think if I had the money and the people I’d invade my paradise with an army to clear out all the infidels who mar my story with claims of tofu rex’s and perfect skin.