Sarah, You're Lazy

His problem was he was lazy. He felt it quite unfair that he be judged harshly for it. No one would blame him if he were short, or if his legs didn’t work or if he was bald or impotent. But flaws of character... they were the big ones and they were unforgivable.

As if he could help how much motivation he had inside of him! Motivation had to either be given to him be God or Gaia or an Uncaring Nature or else instilled in him by his upbringing – neither of which, he wanted to scream, were his fault.

Frustratingly, he was also given the desire to want things like respect, adulation and appreciation for his achievements. He had been given no will at all to do what it took to achieve them. This was most unfair on him.

He was, however, aware that he had been given a sense of how unfair this was and how unfair it was for him to know about this unfairness without being able to do anything about it. How unfair.

How unfair forever.

Belief

Forest

He said nothing would be proof for him that God existed.

“Oh c’mon,” Johannes would say. “If someone had the power to make you think God existed, in an infinite, cruel indifferent universe, they’d do it….Just to fuck with you.”

He’d shake his head, “Jesus comes back performing miracles, I’m not buying it. Someone’s made advanced technology and has decided to play the Jesus card. Do you ever wonder why so many “great leaders” thought they had God on their side? It’s obvious!”

He’d grin and laugh incredulously, “Of course they did! They got to the very top, billions don’t, of course God wants them there. Shit, if you had the power to perform Jesus’s miracles You’d think you were Jesus too.

“Any of the biblical miracles he could perform, would be achievable, theoretically, with extremely advanced technology. Walking on water, I wouldn’t buy it? Best Case scenario is someone built something that repels water molecules or some kind of antigravitational thing or worst case scenario is it’s some sleight of hand.

“Coming back from the dead? We can do that now – advanced medicine!”

He’d have tears in his eyes by now. It was almost a religious experience.

“You might say:

‘if he was God, I could just see him and just know. You know, I’m in the presence of God, or Jesus, or whatever. He says he’s Jesus does all these miracles and inside I feel all this love and stuff and I just know.’

Post hypnotic suggestion! Or he’s invented some kind of mind ray. Still more likely.

“Then you would ask, what would the motive be of someone with all this power claiming to be Jesus? Well, people without power claim to be Jesus all the time and maybe “Jesus” would even believe it too but it still doesn’t make it true. He could just be delusional…

“Or he could have all these powers and truly be magic and say he’s Jesus and think it’s true but that still doesn’t mean God’s real. I mean, in an infinite number of universe, as my boy, “E” Everett, claimed there are, couldn’t there be one where a being is created that has all of Jesus’s powers and believes he’s Jesus but isn’t really Jesus?”

He’d fold his arms and smile. Q.E.D. Point proven forever.

As ever, I knew he was wrong, but it wouldn’t do me any good to say so.

Years before, I’d gotten lost in my local woods. This in its self was an achievement as they were less than a mile long and half a mile wide. But get lost, I did, because, I was special. Or it was willed. Or…

I heard a very high pitched commotion happening nearby, so clambered round a few trees (scraping my left leg in the process). I saw, on the floor of a clearing World War 2 occurring.

The whole thing, in a tiny way, entirely from start to finish. Tiny Hitler, Tiny Hirohito, Tiny Churchill, the lot. Tiny fighting men and women, Tiny “Buy War Bonds” Posters, Tiny Metal Drives, Tiny Jitterbugs…

The thing was, when I looked closer, was that they were all Disney characters. Disney characters just playing their roles out there in the forest.

Some had multiple roles. For example Mickey Mouse got to be both Roosevelt and Stalin. Daisy Duck seemed to be playing most of the female parts – of which there were several billion (however they were given nowhere near the prominence of the brave fighting Donalds and Goofys, the indentured Plutos, and the Pete’s lying dead face up on the frozen Russian fields).

I wept a tear as the millions of ducks and mice and dogs were marched into the gas chambers and pushed into shallow graves. I saw Huey fly Enola Gay over the tiny island nation of Japan and hit Hiroshima -  instantly incinerating the thousands of Baloos who had been going about their daily lives.

I knew God. If he was going to give me a sign this was it. He defied interpretation and that’s what this did. It was ineffable. 

It was just the right amount of ineffable.

So I never argued with Johannes about the issue.

Hope

When showering

Look down

There is someone somewhere

Who would be thrilled to see that sight.

Of Course, Of Course

It didn’t used to be like this. He was pretty sure. Almost sure. Like, 99% sure.

It must have been incremental. He knows he started measuring 2 years ago. So it had been happening before that.

The problem was that the measurements changed as the chins changed. He took out the ruler: 29.8 cm. He looked in his A4 notebook - neatly written on the faded blue lines were a list of dates and measurements. Each one said 29.8 cm and there was a little comment along the lines of– “previously said 29.8cm!” or “now the ‘previously’ has changed!” or “why would I write a comment if they were just the same?”. He took out his pen and wrote in today’s assessment.

23/11/16      29.8cm     previously 29.6cm (I think)

He was well aware that when he shut the book it would change, just like all the other days.

Of course, at first, It was all quite innocuous. He merely noticed that people who had been unremarkable before were suddenly quite jawsome. He commented to his friend that a colleague was looking rather “lantern faced” – his friend’s response was “yeah I guess but doesn’t everyone”… and it was kind of true.

He thought about it. When was the last time anyone had been called a chinless wonder?

It was glacial. It was a boiling frog that never gets out of the pan because the temperature never rises sharply enough. It was the drip, drip, drip of stalactites forming or maybe Chinese water torture.  

 A while later, he doesn’t know when, he looked in the mirror and noticed that his own head was now rather square, previously having been triangular at the bottom.

He asked his friend if his appearance had changed at all? His friend laughed and told him he was the same ugly git as always. He laughed and coyly asked about his chin, you know, his jaw? It was just the same as before he was assured but he noticed that his friend’s face was distinctly bulging at the sides…. Just like everyone else’s.

A few days later he told his friend his theory. People’s jaws had started to grow. It was so obvious. His friend laughed at him. He suggested they look up old photos to compare. They did, of themselves, of celebrities, of old timey people from the Victorian era. All of them. All of them, large jawed, granite chiselled chins, a powerful base to the face.

“The chin’s what makes us human, you nutter,” his friend laughed.

He was no longer his friend.

That’s when he started his diary. That’s when he started his research.

For example, he was pretty sure there used to be a whole load of face types you could have, people being described as moon faced or… well, whatever other terms they used. Now everyone was described as being a block or a pointer. You know, ‘cos their head tapered at the top?

The diary, every day, of course, as you know, showed everything the same, even though he knew it changed.

As time went on things began to grow more ridiculous. He noticed people at his work had jaw rests for when they were using their computers. He asked and they’d always had them, of course. His colleague told him she’d had her’s since she was 16. It certainly looked old.

There were other little things, like, shaving had crept in as something people talked about like the weather. “Ugggh, getting up half an hour before sunrises to shave, I hate winter!” That kind of thing.

He became fascinated by famous works of art. He would search one a day to see if it matched the picture in his head. The Mona Lisa: Bulbous jaw. The Scream: rectangular. Vitruvian Man: chin heavy.

Unfortunately, the picture in his head changed too. He could only ever picture swollen jawed Lisa, or The Laughing Cavalier’s tiny pointed beard in the middle of his gargantuan face end.

And even in his book – his journal of “madness” - he could never exactly remember the original dimensions he had written in; just that they had been .. smaller?

As time went on things became less trivial. He was sure there used to be 7 billion people in the world, not 3, right?  That previously the “Miracle of the C-Section” was not a common phrase. That the third world wasn’t so underpopulated because everyone died in childbirth from these massive jawed freaks?

It annoyed him more than anything else. Why was he the only one who saw it?

He posted on conspiracy boards and was generally ignored. Too outré even for the crazies he supposed. Until one day he had a response that interested him.

“Have you ever considered,” it began, “that it’s not the chins that have widened but that your previous memories are false? That they’ve all been implanted? Occam’s Razor, my friend, Occam’s Razor.”

He leant back and rested his jaw on either side of his shoulders and nodded.

Of course, of course.