Orlando

This isn’t really a political blog, and I don’t know if its appropriate today to try and politicize the events of Orlando last night. My condolences to all involved in the tragedy, and that’s what is really important tonight; the people who had to experience it.

I’m writing a book that I’m nearly finished with called 922. Its mostly what this blog is about. On this blog, and in the book, I spotlight a number of things I either experienced directly or what I perceive in the larger world, that may have some supernatural significance.

Last week I was asked by an interested party if I could write-up a synopsis of the book–so I did. This is what I wrote:

The overall gist is that the Bible is just a series of stories from mentally ill people who experience strange things, and my story would be a modern example of this. The reader is left to figure out how “God” fits into this…

In order (the book is fiction technically by the way)–

1. My sixties, spent hanging out with my teenage brothers and sisters and their friends. The preschoolers are segregated into romper room watching “square” pre-schoolers and “turned on” preschoolers who have access to the sixties scene. A sample:

I said goodbye to Penny and Melody and rode my tricycle down the sidewalk, written all down the sidewalk in chalk were the most popular artists of the day. The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Moby Grape, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane and all the rest. Almost at the end of the street was one of my favorites; the Beach Boys, but someone had crossed them out for some reason now.

I had to address this, I went over to the next street, to the fort where all of the turned on preschoolers hung out.

It was August of 1968, as I rode down the street I saw other kids my age, some in windows, others sitting on the lawn playing with blocks; the Romper Room crowd. They didn’t have teenage brothers and sisters, didn’t get it. They were Nixon kids; some still eating Gerber, no beads, short hair, they were squares and just didn’t know any better I reckon.

But there were plenty of us who did. As I rode I see Troy, he was a Dylan freak even though Dylan had pretty much dropped out after his accident. Troy didn’t care, he would stand in the front lawn under the sprinkler, grooving and singing “Ev’ry body mus’ get stoned” at the top of his lungs. He had his beads sure, a baseball card clothespinned into his spokes to make the motorcycle sound like a lot of us did.

He was heading to where I was; asked me if I’d heard the latest from Donovan, I told him Penny had it on the turntable already, yeah I’d heard it.

We made our way to the fort behind Brian’s house, tricycles lining the driveway. Inside the fort were a bunch of kids our age or so, a Yippie poster on one wall and Cream on the other. Shag on the floor, shag on the walls.

Red haired girl was in the middle of a furious argument with Glen about Chairman Mao. She was the same age I was, not quite 3. Glen favored the Peach, it represented prosperity and a long life. Red haired girl said that Mao wanted the Mango, and it was his country. Back and forth they went, I still don’t think she knows her name and so we all just call her Red Haired Girl after the Snoopy character but she was a staunch advocate of The Red Guard who defend Mao Zedong thought, probably because it matched her hair, she was kind of prejudiced towards anything Red after all.

Finally I broke in. “Who crossed out the Beach Boys on the sidewalk?” Nobody knew. It might have been an older kid, a teenager. I spoke passionately. “It wasn’t their fault” I said, “Brian Wilson was a genius and he had pressures from within his family. The Beach Boys may have seemed squares, but listen to those harmonies. Who else could have done Good Vibrations I said. Smile will still come out, just give him some time!”

The others nodded in agreement, The Beach Boys had gotten a bad rap because of their striped shirts and doing what their Dad wanted. They needed to break away, become free like the Beatles had advocated.

But there was another agenda today. Tuna. We, as preschoolers, were being made to eat tunafish, most of us against our will. Jim raged, “sometimes I have to eat that deviled ham, that stuff is terrible. I don’t know why I’m being forced to eat a sandwich that I’m not in favor of.” Everyone agreed, it was time to take a stand.

We all made posters, pictures of Charley with a circle and a slash through it, Make Love Not Tuna, Free the Fish, the works. We made our posters and started marching through the neighborhood, going street to street making our case. Mothers were coming out of their houses, most running back inside and slamming the door. We would not be denied, Bologna, Cheese, Peanut Butter and Jelly, all were fine.Tuna was out, deviled ham, forget about it.

No more Tuna! No more Tuna!

The media had been alerted. The Grand Rapids Press taking pictures, WZZM with their big camera, we were going to change the world!

No more Tuna, Free the Fish!

And then it happened. Moms, Teachers, A&P Clerks, all began driving up, got out of their cars, armed with loaves of Wonder Bread. They attacked us, hitting us over the head with full loaves of bread, some wadding up bread into balls and throwing them at us, the Tuna establishment was attacking us for our beliefs!

We screamed at them, called them thugs but we were outnumbered by people about 3 times taller than we were. We all scattered, running for our lives in the face of this onslaught. Finally we regrouped in the fort, our protest had failed. This time.

We needed something else to talk about. “Hey, did you hear the new Donovan song?”

 

 

2. My mom then prevents me from hanging out with any of them anymore to coincide with the Manson murders and the end of the sixties for everyone else. I “switch” as a personality to cope with this.

3. The seventies are a series of short stories all written from a sledding hill as I develop an adaptive self who’s “tough”. Everyone now carries a sword.

4. I walk away from God and my Mom in the eighties, choosing my own lifestyle instead as I become convinced that Christianity is essentially a prison.

5. My world initially becomes much better, but then gets worse and worse over close to 20 years until a minister invites me to become a Christian again under duress.

6. Just after this happens, someone starts watching my kids (I’m a full time single Dad) who briefly looks just like my sister did in the sixties. Everything slowly comes back, and I switch back.

7. The girl goes away, like the end of the sixties happens all over again. I blame God and decide he did it deliberately and have a psychotic break where I turn back into the 3 year old, now running an adult life. Angels and demons now hound me at every turn after I flip off God. Things happen both on the inside and outside, other people see the things that happen on the outside.

8. The girl marries someone else.(she eventually didn’t look much like my sister so I would have been OK, don’t worry I had plenty of therapy…)

9. I meet and eventually marry someone else.

10. I can’t function anymore and am thoroughly beaten in my war with God and the demons. I decide that I have to be a biblical Object of Wrath and Destruction (Romans 9:22).

11. A strange synchronicity w/ Michael Jackson’s death introduces me to the idea that The Beatles had the same interaction with angels and demons as what I had. I become convinced that John Lennon is a biblical Object of Wrath and Destruction, like I believe I am.

12. I research the Beatles to find more instances of supernatural manipulation, finding it everywhere. I try to figure out what the Beatles did to “cause” this.

13. I figure out what the Beatles did, and the rest of the story is told as a Bible story between God and the Devil, taking place from WWII through until John Lennon’s death. The sixties is turned into a Bible story.

14. The ending, of which you read the very end, where we move to Michigan; my Dad gets sick and I get convinced to write a book about the whole thing…convinced that the Bible is a collection of stories from people just like me and if God exists, he exists totally separate from the Bible which is written by people and may or may not have any divine inspiration. But the bottom line is that if there is a God, he’s not responsible for what is in the Bible. If its wrong, and it is, it’s not his doing, it’s people’s and they were mostly all mentally ill like me.

That is my best explanation as to what 922 is actually about. At the very beginning, I state “The Book is fiction, but it happened”. That isn’t meant to apply to just 922. It applies to the Bible, it applies to the Quran, etc. Its meant to convey that, just like me and my story, these books were written by a number of people that suddenly had a bunch of abnormal things happen in their lives, and decided to write those experiences down. Those books became what we all have been taught since we were children. Its how we relate to the characters of “God”, or the “Devil”.

Its what these books told us was the truth, and then more people taught us about these stories.

The reason that the Beatles become part of my story, is because in the summer of 1966, the United States largely turned on the Beatles. They turned on them because of John Lennon’s assertion that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus. This was deemed offensive by the impressionable young Christian minds of that era, minds that had been taught something different. That John Lennon really wasn’t trying to state that the Beatles had become more important than Jesus didn’t matter much; he was just making a commentary on what people’s priorities were at that particular point, and he was right to say it. But this offended people’s sensibilities, they didn’t really want to see a choice between one or the other.

John Lennon and the rest of the Beatles apologized for saying this in order to rescue their careers. People had been wondering since the Beatles had burst onto the scene how long their popularity was going to last, and in addition to the backlash to More Popular than Jesus, they were staring at empty seats in the stadiums for the first time in what came to be their final US tour, an average of 10,000 less people than their last tour. They were also staring at the other bands that had come upon the scene suddenly, bands that may have been more accomplished live musicians than they were. And after all, even though their studio work was becoming much more elaborate, songs like Eleanor Rigby and Tomorrow Never Knows really couldn’t be done justice played live.

Within 3 weeks of their apology on August 11th, 1966 they had decided that they were no longer going to tour. Rumors abounded that they were going to break up. They each went off and did their own things for about 2 months. As luck would have it, during this exact same period some of the most important recordings ever produced were being done by the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Buffalo Springfield and so on. The sixties were largely appearing out of thin air in terms of what everyone was to hear.

It was right at this point that all of the “mystery” suddenly started with the Beatles; this is the point where it was later rumored that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced…the fall of 1966. When they all reappeared in November of ’66, they all suddenly had mustaches and a completely new agenda. They were to reinvent themselves as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and everyone was led to believe that they had completely forgotten about the More Popular than Jesus furor that put their careers at risk only weeks earlier.

No.

If the Beatles didn’t perform live, they didn’t have to be compared to bands like The Who, The Stones or Cream who were probably better live than they were. They didn’t have to deal with cherry bombs like in Memphis after KKK death threats; they didn’t have to deal with a government turning on them like the Philippines where they almost weren’t let out of the country. If they stuck to the studio, only the Beach Boys were truly competition there and really, the Beatles were still a bit more diversified and accomplished as even Brian Wilson concluded after pulling off the road to listen to Strawberry Fields Forever for the first time. (This was after Rolling Stone’s #5 all-time rated LP (Rubber Soul) followed by the #2 (Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys) followed by the #3 (Revolver) and the single Good Vibrations all were released in a one-year-span).

Sgt. Pepper would later come in at #1.

The studio was where the Beatles needed to be, where they still were on top. So what else was in the Beatles way as they came back into said studio in November of ’66?

Rules.

The rules that were in the Bible. The Beatles couldn’t do what they wanted, couldn’t sing about what they wanted, couldn’t express the ideas they wanted, because of rules. Rules that the Southern US, the Southern US still largely engaging in racism, were holding onto.

Enter this.

This had been published in April of 1966. On John’s son Julian’s third birthday as a matter of fact. Did the Beatles understand that this was all just teaching? People held onto these rules because of what they had been taught? That there’s a God, there’s a devil. But what is in fact the truth?

The answer to them was that people should do what they want. People should listen to what they want. People should think for themselves, not blindly follow their childhood lessons. They shouldn’t hurt anyone, love is still important of course, but the rules, the dogma needed to go.

And if you think about what the sixties became, do what you want is kind of the anthem of the whole thing. So, the Beatles decided to encode that idea into their next album. They decided to encode the idea of God is Dead into Sgt. Pepper.

They decided to hide the God is Dead obituary from the April 8th 1966 Time issue into the cover.

• November 9th He Die.
• ATL for Atlanta.
• God is dead, do what you want, all you need is love.
• We were talking about the space between us all, the space between the 4 Beatles where a drum and the letters ATL in Beatles told the story.

God was just a character, a character told in stories in the books of the Bible, stories that were in fact written by people. The sixties people now just needed to move beyond their rules, move beyond the notion of God.

–None of this is provable fact mind you, but its my story and I’m sticking to it.

However there was something they failed to consider. What if there is a God, what if there’s a…….something?

Have you heard something like this before? Sure, its in a song called American Pie. Because, after this, all of a sudden weird things start happening. God, or the Devil, or space aliens, or ancient spirits, or whatever, suddenly seem to be all over the Beatles and everything they did.

Fortunately the Beatles never had to come out and talk about this. And if you listen to an internet personality named Apollo C Vermouth, long rumored to be Apple Records head Neil Aspinall, they made a pact to never talk about it. And they didn’t have to; they had after all built a Plausible Deniability into the whole story from the very beginning. Paul McCartney was dead. Paul by the way happened to “die” on November 9th as the legend eventually went, the same date alluded to on the drum and the same date as the God is Dead obituary.

And when Charles Manson and his followers suddenly killed a bunch of people in the summer of 1969 believing that the Beatles were sending messages, Paul is Dead suddenly exploded throughout the US: by the time they were actually arrested for the crimes Paul is
Dead was one of the top stories in the United States; so when Manson later said the Beatles were sending messages, that was by this point absurd. Everyone now knew the messages were about Paul being dead and seeing as how he was not dead, it wasn’t about anything. This had already been vetted to everyone’s satisfaction

But then years later a bunch of very weird stuff happened surrounding John’s death; and among a very few people, maybe some questions were raised. Had John been targeted, singled out for More Popular Than Jesus? Or the real reason as only insiders knew; God is Dead?

Certainly that would prove there was a God, right?

Does it?

Lets go back to the idea that the Bible, Quran, were books written by people. People who heard things, people who saw things, people that may have had the same condition I have. Because I hear things and see things every single day. I have had to figure out for years where in fact it all is coming from. I had experienced, which others had also seen, events that anyone would conclude are supernatural in nature.

See, I caught you there didn’t I?

If that happens today, in 2016, I must be mentally ill (and I am). 3,000 years ago, that must be divinely inspired. And there is absolutely no difference, except that I have access to modern mental healthcare and so do we as a society. You couldn’t possibly add to the Bible or the Quran today. No one who hears voices or sees unusual activity would have those experiences added to the Bible in modern times.

But could you erase it based on a modern understanding of that? At least part of it?

Doesn’t it stand to reason that the only real answer in an age where we know what delusions are, know what voices are, know where hallucinations come from, that we would apply that understanding to these ancient books? That when someone relays the story of what God and Satan talked about relating to Job, that maybe this took place in their own imagination?

Doesn’t it make sense now to uncouple the notion of a God from the Bible?

I don’t say this because I don’t believe anything from the spirit world, I absolutely do. I think something is going on out there. Something really weird. Most of this blog is about just that. But none of that proves God. It doesn’t disprove him either.

Today we know the world isn’t 7,000 years old. There aren’t buildings that can be built to heaven; if you have intellectual integrity you also know that God couldn’t stop a sun that doesn’t move, you can’t see all the kingdoms of the world from anyplace on earth (you couldn’t see half of a marble if you held it right in front of you), and Abraham couldn’t have been told by God to stab Isaac because it says elsewhere in the Bible that God is perfect and cannot and would never tempt sin, and Cain and Abel established that murder is a sin.

The Bible is wrong. The Quran, with its slaughter gays and kill the infidels, is probably even more wrong. Just ask one simple question to yourself–

If there is a God, why didn’t he write his own book? One that would have actually been accurate?

It says in the Bible that if you know the right thing to do, and you fail to do it, then you have sinned. So if God knew that writing the book himself was better than letting people write it, then he didn’t do the right thing…and that would make him guilty of a sin per the Bible, which means he should be in Hell for having sinned. Or, if he isn’t, he must not be bound by the rules of the Bible, because he didn’t write it.

Make sense?

If you could possibly make people understand, that people wrote the Bible, people wrote the Quran, people said that gays were an abomination, people said that the infidels should be slaughtered, people said that in the Old Testament that sinners should be stoned to death, and then make them realize that society is no longer OK with these ideas, isn’t that the best way to actually solve all of this?

There might be a God, but he didn’t write the book. And he wouldn’t be responsible for its ideas.

Friday night a girl named Christina Grimmey got killed in Orlando. She was there with a band called Before You Exit. The following night, at closing time, at the exit of a nightclub four miles away, over 100 people got shot.

Seems kind of like a warning.

This is the sort of thing I spotlight on my blog all the time, cases of foreshadowing or possible supernatural manipulation or intervention. But God can’t tempt sin, so God couldn’t have been responsible for “warning” anyone.

So, who did?