I write essays. It’s a balancing act, living the life and writing about it. When I’m living the life, I feel like I should be writing, and when I’m writing, I feel like I should be living the life. These days, I’m definitely living the life. I have put my mind on record, and I hope when I push the button that what I think I recorded is still there.

I’m biding my time on writing about the book project. I said I’d give it a year and then go for it. I don’t think that I yet have enough material.

Yesterday a whole chapter materialized. There I was, cleaning children’s books, while across from me, a volunteer questioned me as to my views about the rapture – what specifically I thought it was, and what form it might take. I didn’t have an imaginative comeback because I was attempting to figure out what to do with umpteen books. Figuring out what to do with the week’s haul is often like being a logistics expert and figuring out where, say, the U-Hauls in the former Fred Meyer Parking Lot are going. Whoa, unto the unfortunate individual who inadvertently sends a Mom’s Attic destined for Glennallen to Fairbanks. Making an error like that can cost you your job – and there is no better job for someone into logistics than working for U-Haul.

I guess I also didn’t have the energy to provide one of my imaginative rebuttals, such as, since I believe that God is a dog, that I believe that a slobbery St. Bernard is going to be the one to pass judgement on me. Or, having belonged for many years to the Brotherhood of the Pear, I believe that a fruit tree is going to ask some hard questions about my non-fruit bearing years. Or, since I believe that God is a transexual, he/she/it, they/them are going to send me in the direction of hell for only partially exploring my more masculine side. I will say in my defense that I tried really hard to learn how to belch like a guy but could never get it down. It has since remained a mystery to me how males, or females, do this.

The problem may be that my very highly developed imagination has kept me from making that Kierkegaardian leap of faith. I picture this leap quite literally – I envision a creek with fast moving water – there are rocks; one could perhaps leap from one to another and get to the far shore (halleluiah), but I am not willing to risk getting my feet wet, or worse yet, slipping and falling.

It seems to come down to this: if you take literally what the Bible says about the end times, we are totally screwed. But the way I figure it, it didn’t take too much imagination on the part of writers to deduce that signs of the end times would include fires, plague, pestilence, and in-fighting. What else could there be?

The universe is infinite. Our imaginations are finite.

All this was what I, who am right now writing about the life, should have said.

Next: 229. 8/19/21: One Thing Missing