One More Time

Reiterate:  To say or do (something) for a second time, such as for emphasis.

I hate to repeat myself, to say the same thing over and over, to explore redundancy, but I don't really have that many stories so if you think you've heard it before you probably have.   I thought I had a lot of stories.  Then I started writing them down and found that I'm just repeating myself - the trouble with writing things down is that there's proof that you've already said something.  Moreover, it would be okay to repeat things if the stories were any good but they're not that good.  You can see that I'm in a tight spot.  

I never let the truth get in the way of a good story, oft-told.  I never, ever let the fact that you've already heard something stop me from saying it again.  I like the sound of my voice that much.

SuperK (conversationus interruptus): "Yeah, yeah, I've heard the story about you and Bob taking LSD and getting lost in the bear preserve."

Me: "Really?  You know that didn't ever happen, right?"

Anyway, the meeting today was on Step Eleven, the prayer and meditation step.  Meditation I get - you close your eyes and think about how you're going to fuck up all the people who have wronged you in the past.  That, and sexual fantasies run amok.  Boom.  Done.  Meditation.  What's the big deal?

Prayer:  The practice of communicating with one's god (Meh); a request, a petition (OK, much better).

Prayer is a little trickier for me seeing as I have a tendency to put word's in god's mouth.  I should barely be speaking for myself let alone for my higher power.  The Step does suggest that I should be careful that I don't ask for specific things for specific people - this is me assuming that I know better than god.  While this is true I still need to be humble about it.  The Step also warns that if I think I'm hearing specific advice directly from god I might want to check the content out with someone else - I hear what I want to hear, in other words.  I hear it even when it's patently ridiculous because I want what I want and I want to avoid what I don't want.

Anyway, there's this great short story called The Lathe of Heaven.  The protagonist is a man who finds that if he directs his thoughts at the end of each day his wishes manifest themselves in his dreams, which then become reality.  For instance, he hates a co-worker and wishes that he didn't have to work with him anymore - this emotion leads to a dream where he murders this person.  When he wakes up he finds that the co-worker died the night before in an automobile accident.

Understandably rattled he begins to see a psychiatrist and the two of them - good men with good intentions - decide to try, through auto-suggestion, to direct the dream sequences for the betterment of mankind.

They start with eliminating world hunger.

The protagonist dreams that a wicked virus kills 95% of the world's population.  Boom.  Plenty of food for everyone left.  World hunger solved.  Obviously the intent was to increase the food supply, not reduce the eaters, but you gotta be pretty precise when you want to control god.

OK, next on the hit list is world peace.  What can go wrong with that, right?  The dream sequence for this problem starts with a large group of alien spaceships landing on the moon and beginning to build an outpost.  Their intent is sinister.  The result, of course, is that the people left on earth quit bickering and begin to work together to defend the planet.

Our main characters are frustrated.

"Just get the aliens off the moon and we'll start over," they yell.

The evening's dream features the aliens launching their attack.

This is me and prayer.  I'm really careful about the specifics of my prayers.  My god has a weird, twisted sense of humor.

Be careful what you pray for - you might get it.