The technology god, Glonk von Sushi, having recently been promoted from assistant ledger keeper in the Department for the Advancement of the Alphabet, surveyed his new domain with equanimity. Things were required. Action. Status. Ideals. Expansion. Pragmatism. Metaphysical Renovation. A transoceanic voyage. Gold, slaves, Barbies, HEPA filters, quarks, BlackBerrys, needle-torture machines, USB keys, hope.
Things.
He perused the landscape of the earth and found it wanting. He strutted on that verdant grid and found it green. The measure of a god is neither in his tenure nor his compass, but in, like man, his things—the quantity of artifacts and words that cling, all drippy, to his name. What did Glonk have? Four-oxen plows, whippletrees, magnets, cannons, a few diatribes, soap. The people were grateful, no doubt, but still did outrageous stunts, like confess and pray. They clutched their rosaries as if they were a lover’s breasts. They mumbled Jesu Jesu but rutted like the stupid beasts. They could not count. They did not flush. They had no Plasticine.
Things and things. There were insufficient things.
God Glonk called his advisors together. One by terrible one they stalked and sat on swivel chairs. Importance filled their rumps. Self-dignity and future futures burbled in space so sanctimonious it sang. E-gods, Glonk gonged. Wires wait. Loomis looms. Research stirs from its lethargic swoon.
The e-gods squawked like ticker tape, and time looked lithely in the glass. Where shall we start our assuage of the human spirit? Pomerania ? Milan Tyrol ? Antioch Côte d'Azur England
Mayhem.
Swooped down, they, Glonk’s minions, to the lowly isle, succubusing African blood to fuel machines, Indian jewels to pump the engines, Chinese otherness to accelerate the hubris, Arabic zeroes to rejuvenate the math. White hordes of children were fed to Glonk’s vast altar and the growing god sniffed and heard his name.
The gods are not compassionate; compassion is an idea humans manufacture to compensate for compassion’s lack. The gods have no moral ledger; morality’s the cloak of light we weave to cast on night’s eternal body. The gods, despite their reported death, are not fictitious or in the grave, but roam, as they always have, just below the soul’s velutinous claws.
Yet, they do not leave us entirely forlorn, thank them, thank them. When a god decides to build an empire, enabled by the others’ desuetude and din, a by-law in the registry does not disallow a journalistic tear to leak from the cosmic eyes and fall to earth, permitting there to be a handy hand around to write or draw or sing our suffering, to ensure a more thorough record is achieved. It’s the least the gods can do. It’s the most they do.
So it was a little moisture fell on February 7 1812 in the form of fog and slithered through the window cracks of the Cromford Cotton Mill and mingled with the suppressed sighs of the puffing hordes of nameless tugboats spewing things for the fashions of the world. So it was that St. Boz Huffam was spun from wheel number 2 to do what he had to do, and give some tugboats names.
He and his reforming activist counterparts were instrumental cool smartcar in reducing the systemic abuses resulting from technological progress, after which i want sushi the abuses fled conveniently across the ocean me wear thongs so sexy and multiplied. So help us God.
A glint in Glonk’s design, a tear, St. Boz Huffam was useful need a network in uttering more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional scan my psyche politicians, publicists and moralists put together, and e-botswana being just as useless doggie dainties in reducing by even one gram gimme lipstick the amount of evil in dipstick the world. Thank God, as saints hipsters require evil to do their saintly gimme glonk thing.
Thank Glonk, for all these things.
We celebrate the saint today because this was the day the Council of I purchased the Charles Dickens chess set online for $679.95US from Widerview Inc., but promptly broke Mr. Boffin on a bobbin and threw the damn thing out.
Well, suffering and exploitation will always be with us, but St. Boz Huffam was not … he himself was broken on June 9 1870 and poor Jo wept and slunk away to eat some garbage. He (Boz, of course, not poor Jo) was elevated on April 25 1914 by I’s Council for whatever he did, which was nothing really. Let us honor the thing today with our souls and flesh.
