Thursday, December 28, 2017

Ice Cream for the World: More conflict; More Ego-Eating Buzzards; More Slow, Gradual Enlightenment

As I started to say, Monday did not go as planned.  I hate gravity.  I always have and I probably always will.  I hate designers who have no clue how gravity works even more than I hate gravity itself.  Designers of kitchen utensils seem especially unschooled in the way gravity works.  Designers of spatulas and stirring spoons seem spectacularly inept. 

Anyway, after I struggled to free myself from my dream of the girl with the little pointed puppy teeth, I staggered to the kitchen to make my routine egg.  All went well until I rested the spatula in the pan with the sputtering egg.  It was a big, grand pan, and the two eggs slid down to the far edge, so rather than gunk up the counter-top, I just let the spatula be in the remaining portion of the pan.  However, due to the spatula's stupid design, gravity did not.  It yanked on that incredibly fat heavy handle with all its might, flung that thing up, over, and then down on the dirty, dog-hair covered floor.  Damn!  Who makes the handle of a spatula heavier than the spatula itself?

I thought to myself,  Nope, ice cream can't solve every problem in the world.  Who knows what to do about the worm infested minds of inventors who don't seem to grasp the very essentials of their art.  I'm thankful the same can't be said for bridge engineers.  Some people in this world deserve ice cream.  Others deserve firing squad. 

I picked up the spatula, threw it in the sink, and sat down at the table, mad at myself for getting angry at such a little thing.  After regaining my composure, I thought about wiping up the greasy spatula-spot on the floor but decided to leave it for the dogs to clean up. I sat down and opened up my scriptures to read while eating my breakfast.  This day 2 Nephi 4:15-16 stood out:

And upon these I write the things of my soul, and many of the scriptures which are engraven upon the plates of brass.  For my soul deliteth in the scriptures, and my heart pondereth them, and writeth them for the learning and the profit of my children.

Behold, my soul deliteth in the things of the Lord; and my heart pondereth continually upon the things which I have seen and heard.  

I set my thick, black leather quad (King James Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price) on the crumb-cluttered green table cloth, open, so as not to lose my place, and took my fork to the egg.  Not to be egotistical, but my fried eggs are simply the best.  The secret is to season them with Old Bay and Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning.  It gives them a slightly sweet salty taste.  That bite was so good I almost forgot about gravity.

I thought about plot, daily conflict--how so much of it leads to nothing.  That is what is wrong with Victorian novels--or art in general, I thought.  The plot has a point.  It does in life too--to piss us off so that we have to deal with our ego, with our constant desire to be in control of things we can't control, until we are forced into that corner of uncertainty and are finally willing to just let go and turn things over to God.  But, in life, it's not neat and tidy.  Nothing is wrapped up and tied together; there is no chain of seemingly small little coincidences that come together in some great resolution--or at least not anything we can see from this side of the veil.  Some people do die and return to tell about it.  Most of them do actually claim it does kind of add up like a Victorian plot.  But here I am eating my eggs, all wound up from a flying spatula, and I just don't see it.  That little crisis might add to the rising action of what is obviously going to be a stinking day, but I just don't see that it matters!

I had a gulp of watered down 5 calorie grape juice.  Not that it bothers me.  Delighting in the things of the Lord isn't the same as delighting in each day.  It is narcissistic to expect to enjoy each moment.  What I delight in is writing down on my soul the slow eroding of the natural man as a steely blue-eyed raven plucks the flesh of my ego away bit by bit and I feel myself soften in the ways of the Lord.  This occurs precisely because of gravity-flung spatulas and other daily travesties.   For instance, I said grandly inside my head, not once today did I say the F-word.  There was a time that surely would have come out.  Perhaps a cupboard door would have slammed too.  Marci would have tucked her head under the covers thinking, What kind of maniac did I marry?  But instead, here I am, calm and cool in the face of dealing with gravity, reading my daily scriptures.

I looked up and noticed it was 8:22.  I was suppose leave 12 minutes ago.  More conflict; more ego-eating buzzards; more slow, gradual enlightenment.

I thought, It's an ice cream of some sort.  







  


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