there's some really cute skunks living near the cat colony beside our apartment. we see em eat the catfood at night. there's two raccoons and an opposum.

I went to the library

I finished Children of God Yesterday

I finished REFORM! PART 3 just now. I loved one of it's closing lines--to paraphrase, its hard to see what history has in store for us "in the cheap seats of the present"

it's a documentary by the same guy who did the Football In The Future digital novela. the first Philosopher of Sport ever to make me love the idea of sorts, which like many leftist nerds of our generation I had a deep distrust for. then I watched /read 17776 and a couple years later read Terra Ignota and suddenly the idea of the Olympics, if not their actual execution, kind of makes me want to cry.

I feel that way now, and also about certain works of more explicitly political History, especially Debt: First 5,000 Years. an awe in equal sense -ful and -some, the mysterium tremendum et fascinum, the mystery which makes us tremble and in-facinated

The gift of prophets, as social reformers or revolutionaries

it always strikes me weird how often I hear Marxists say "but (of course) Marx was no prophet," he has his scientific theory of historical materialism."

for the garden of good and evil was vast and wild, and full of many terrible creatures, and terribly truths.

the angels at first of the fruit, and they cultivate it still, hauling hurricanes by yoke.

they were sent by to the garden like trained sparrows and eagles by the Gods in their predatory heavens.

the Gods had been promised the garden by their grandmother, but they were afraid to go down into the garden party, so they sent their messengers, spies, ambassadors, thieves, their sons and grandsons, their avatars and emanations and incarnations prophets and trustees vouched more or less faithful. of these the angels were perhaps the wisest, and also the most foolish, for they were filled with that desperate love and concentrated grandeur witch drives us to be Fools For Gods.

go down, Prometheus, go down Lucifer, walk on the beaches and up into the storehouses of stone we have set up in the mountains, go out into the vineyards where we have crossbreed blood to wine and wrath to grapes. go and then come back, come back and report to us, tell us of it's grandeur and a terrors and tell us of the taste of it's fruits, and if you die we shall know that they are good to eat for Gods, who can eat what no others can, but if you live we shall know it to be fit for angels, or for demons, or djinn, or golems, or nymphs, or dwarves or dryads, or beats, or to the humans."

but other texts say, "the Gods warned them, do not eat the fruits, nor the flesh of the fish of the sea or the birds of the air or the libations of milk or oil or the embers of incense of the flesh of the beasts or of sacred woods or burnt offerings of any kind, for all these things we have created and originatec and hallowed and preserved for Ourselves very unto the onset of time, and time out of time, and also Our Grandmother gave it to Us.

the Grandmother of the Gods was hosting the garden party in the Gods honor, and perhaps the Gods were feeling shy, or apprehensive, or faithless, or fickle. they'd been talking about it and yes they all agreed it would be best, and only proper decorum, to send a creature to scope the joint out. there were stories going around the verandas and hanging garden Heavens where they could circle updrafts of burning offerings and sweet desperate prayers and all you need do to please them was to shit out a miracle every now and then and wherever it hit a cult might make rich maneure and set out roasted lamb and roasted martyr burning up all the way to high heaven. Gods as a rule love their heavens, and are loathe to put so much as a tie out of their perfectly climate controlled bath. do not judge the Gods, not for their Vanity, dear reader. vanity is the rule and reason of Godhood, or so the theobiologists tell us. they are like tropical fish, exquisite and profound and not constituted for the lukewarm perfections and imperfections of our own place and time, far out in the Left field of the Divine Empire's backwaters. besides, it is on precisely these terms by which we can uphold those exceptional instances wherein this God or that God personally dawns the rites of humiliation, incarnation, embodification, inhistorification so exception, so impressive, so paradoxically pathetic and patho-stoic moments in the first place. they're always happening. the age of miracles never ends conclusively, it is in the nature of miracles to arrive on unpredictable terms, and just as easily to depart. but it is also true that there are droughts of miracles, and floods, and steady trickles, and on average theo-economists tell us that we really need 2% annual increase in miraculation annually or else we're apt to see the whole place go to Hell, figuratively, or for Hell to come to a location near us, Literally.

the angels and the Gods contest, by way of proxy theologians or world destroying Ragnarok, the details of creation, and it is suggested that this may be a retroactive contest, to with, angels and gods traveling back closer and closer to the beginning of time to put their own paperwork in re the Zoning of Creation. no matter how far back you go there are at least 10 Great Gods (all Gods are Great Gods, for they are Great Gods to someone. all Gods are Great Gods *to someone.*) claiming Right by Prior Claimant, Present Inhabitant, SuperNatural Law, Cosmic Auction, or Copyrighted Prophecy. usually there's some archangel hauling around its neck a a vast milestone of marble and diamond with the Gods name or pseudonym, flying backwards in time through the force of the Big Bang and the burning extra-entropic furnace of Time Out of Time which is what heats the kettle for the tea of the Grandmother of the Gods, and such millstones are as dust of tea leaves grown am under her own hand.

the gods who went down personally we call the gods among angels, or angels among Gods. some were wanted criminals of the Heaven Security State, terrorists like Lucifer who refused to stand for the national anthem of God, much less sing for it, but instead started humming very loudly a counter melody all to his own taste. some of them were criminal badboys, the rowdy harmless™ spiritual younger sons of untouchable demiurges, gods of merchants and thieves, or representatives of Reform-Minded Gods who recognized the smell of smoke on the wind and knew it was better to get out ahead of things rather than be crushed and humiliated under the sight of the inevitable. Hermes and Buddha and Dionysus and Jesus, all rolling up their slaves and tasting the fruit, in strict obedience or rank disobedience or an ambiguous dialectic of the two to those orders imparted by the Transcendent Powers.

but all Gods are Great Gods, whether the be recuperated lieutenants or demoted consorts or demigod regents or bullish promoters or partner to some role reversing con. and when the angels landed and ate the fruits of the garden of good and evil, they took on strange powers and they dreamed strange dreams, and some of them spoke of rebellion, and others of self reformation in hopes of winning back old prestige. many a devil spent a quiet torturous eon or twelve residing in exile, composing complexly orientated poetry from a sulfurous pit or wilderness monastery, waiting with cruel optimism, cruel undying hope, to be recalled back to the noble court of his noble master, to again minister his songs of praise or acts of wrath, and then, who knows, maybe receive a knighthood, a peerage, some less taxing post as an honored ambassador in another God's court, or even the hand of the princess. Jesus (who made history from the extremely tricky position as whipping boy to the Prince of Heaven) for example met with the devil in the desert during his fast. some pro-demon Christians had even speculated that the temptation in the desert, more than the cross, which was the primary point of the ministry, the opening of a critical dialogue on raising certain embargoes by heaven on earth and hell, a recuperation of mortal souls in anticipation of a recuperation of demons, and even Satan himself, returned to power in a new, United Administration. as precedent they point to the when Sisyphus Affair, when certain parties outwitted Underworld Customs and Border Control and temporary led to a Grand Coalition of God, the Devil, and Death Himself. Yeshua had his gripe with Death, with Suffering and Limitation and Alienation and Lonliness, and was willing, perhaps, to go into a grand coalition with the Devil if it meant kicking Death out of the government, a motion of no confidence against all we are inclined to call evil, a vote called on Calgary and lasting perhaps several hours or three days or up to the present moment, a balloting during and for which all manner of strange and desperate deals are liable to be mooted and even struck.