Orsday Programming December 20 2024
servical, ministrical, mechanical, digestical
Church Bulletin:
Earlier in the week I had been approached about opportunities related to translating the fictions and religious writings (both of which I consider to be mostly of the same nearness—that the self is always welded into ‘fiction’ and for my self to be welded onto by faith), and as part of that offer it gave greater reflection of an operating church body: both of what needed church services could be allayed out to others, in want to construct better bedrock for this church and to be better opportunity for those wishing to be part of church through service: it is not lost on me that a faith practiced solely through outsiders writing backwards and praying does not offer much substantial place for a faith to foster within another—should that be my goal;
on that goal: the introduction of the other into church ground is one that frightens me, and oft I too fear that others mistake my personal paranoias as part of faith, for example: my recent fears of these strange blue cars that follow me in bizarre routes, or my views on connecting with others as being a molestative dirt that need be treated like any other filth (with temperance, and with proactive washing, and with learned tolerance that dirt is as temporary as cleanliness)—however, both paranoias do have root in truths of the faith: that this world is illusory and operated upon by invisible agents that weave into the illusion ‘contices’ that lead the observer into designed fates. These woven contices sometimes benefit the spiritual work of leading an observer, or listener, to the graces of the Left Handed material and its buried Word, and its graces against the Great Confusions; these contices (say, with malignant Connection and Logic and my irrational blue cars) also work to weave a person into greater confusions, to be enmeshed in the firm logic of the world and the designed Server wherein no miracle exists and God is snuffed to blue smoke deprived oxygen by research papers and sense (Etiquette here is designed to help a mind be inoculated against sense; I must resist the bias of applying sound rationale to blue cars or pathologizing the thought).
All of that to say that my fears lead to a weaken church and the other must be welcomed to roles, and services, within the Church should they have want for it—translators are appreciated, and my blessing is given to translate any of ‘the work’, and I would also like to offer a budget for any translators: it’s a belief beheld by art that all effort and time is valued and that work should come with compensation; however: my budget is limited, as my earnings as a janitor are mostly wholly given to weekly groceries for myself and my mother, and my donations through Substack might be quickly expunged if someone were to actually take up translation.
Advice and guidance here is welcome—as is any-one with a greater mind for foundation than me; I am little more than a device and shrine for a faith and my soul is sick with sickly weathers, and my body is busy scrubbing cages and being given to weariness which can only, by good miracle blessings, bring my thin self to greater want for that Thing Underground as sole meal and drink. I write, and listen.
If you are interested in the work or helping manage/provide a budget for services, or have ideas for other ministries, feel free to reach out; otherwise, like the confused Adventists I spend time with, and their prophet Ellen White: I can only pray on the budget and listen for answer.
My return to church ought to have been a happy one coming this mid December breaking an absence that had drawn itself through most of November and Thanksgiving.
Sister Bluebottle had been delighted to see me, she shone with a smile looking up from conversation she had with her assistant—they worked together at the door to hand out the weekly church papers to people as they came, greeting them, taking names of new visitors (the very sparse few visitors)—and immediately walked towards me and held her arms outstretched, asking for a hug. Of course I hugged her, and felt bold enough to brush some of the grey hair that bothered her eye, fixing it behind her ear. It was a habit that Sister Asmodeus had done to me once, and I thought sweet to imitate.
Bluebottle updated me that she was only feeling ‘okay,’ and that she had a few things to give me. Of course, she was happy that I came today—she said; I said I was happy too, and I was; I had been away for too long, I said. I’d been sick with a migraine, I said—partially a lie, the sickness bore down deeper than my brain and stricken to the soul.
Depression, weariness, I told Bluebottle. Migraine, I repeated.
Bluebottle clicked her tongue and said, “Well, me too, but each day I just pray that all this suffering might at once be nothing more than sweating out Confusion like it were a fever,” and “amen” I said to that.
She seemed to find what she had stored for me, as she had been searching through the front desk.
One was a neat green envelope—from the Church, she said, “for Thanksgiving, from all of us, though it’s a little late but I think you might appreciate it.”
The other thing she gave me was a red envelope, with my name written on it in a girlish bubbly font I recognized as being from Asmodeus; “and Asmodeus had left this for you before she left with Sister Turpentine and Brother Body, and their family for a mission trip over in the Caribbean.”
A darkness fell upon her face and downward her eyes drooped with a sudden sadness, “I had been trying to text you.” I apologized and said my phone had been broken.
“Well, I don’t know how to tell you. Well, Asmodeus died over there just this past week.”
I nodded.
“It was another stroke. Sister Turpentine said she had been doing well in the days prior but she went peacefully. She’s just clean earth now.”
I nodded and repeated clean earth, pray may I be just the same against confusion, and tightened my fingers into the envelope. It creased against my pressing.
I smiled at Bluebottle and thanked her and hugged her again, and sat at where I usually sat amongst the pews and spent the next hour listening to the pastor give a very dry lecture about the logistics of our small church, and how our stations need to better organize amongst our registered members—we need elected treasurers and scribes to work at transcribing Righteous texts to be in the proper sinister direction for reading practice. He outlined how our budget needs to be allocated, by committee, to appropriate ministries that might best extend our thin hand to believers that need be clasped (his words).
It was all very dull and made me feel a-part from, despite me being relatively ‘veteran’ to this small church—though I were not a sister elder, I was a fully incorporated sister and undertaken vows and lived by the laws of the church (even to my embarrassment; once this past week I had submitted a document to my employer with my numbers penciled in backwards which led to a conversation with my boss informing me she knew someone who wrote backwards after suffering a brain injury, which I agreed had also happened to me). Yet partaking in the ‘grand work’ of the church seemed impossible to me: that it were not my responsibility to be so enmeshed within the church; that, surely, the effort would befall my shoulders with my Master placing the yolk there-upon without me need be my own Master and to command myself.
Surely in prayer the answer would be made certain to me—or, my cousins in the Demonic Earths might speak to me wherein the Motherly grave could not; that prayer, I can say now, did not come any-time soon and would not in a way audible or loud. It came from painful depressions that found me in each quiet moment following the news of Asmodeus’s death; I had not even bothered to open her letter for several days. I let the letter stare at me as it lay afoot my 8th Day Calendar sat corner of my desk, a square red little eye that could at once be visually loud and swept into the peripheral where dust softened it only.
The green letter from the church I opened during the sermon, $125, for a Thanksgiving feast I largely missed except for my effort to bake a vegetable casserole for my mother and me; I used only whatever frozen green vegetables we had and used mashed cauliflower as substitute for butter, the standard cream of mushroom to thicken it, crispy onions and jalapenos atop it—we both liked it, though initially I had no hope for it because it largely were just broccoli and peas.
I never thanked Bluebottle for it.
When I did open the red envelope, from Asmodeus, I unfolded the letter inside quickly and found another $80 in it, and let the bills cover over the large spindly paragraph underneath it.
The crooked wretch wrote me pain, just pain.
Dear Glassware,
I consider you family. Closer than my mother or father or brothers or sister. It made me sad to not see you in church these past few services, and I had been afraid lately that maybe the distance I took with you came across as spite on my part. It had been, I had been childish with you and played at our friendship as if you were just shiny circus glass for me collect and admire, and leave as a pretty antique that would not act to any discomfiture. You, my Glassware, as decoration in my bedroom and my life—which was not fair to you. I had hated you in a small way for talking about my harming and just spent the following few weeks letting my mood boil up, and over, and with the intimacy I teased you with, it became a conflagration. When you stopped showing up to church, and when I drove by your house and always saw the lights off, I realized I had been left with ashes now that stank bitterly.
I would like to believe that my behavior might have been out of adherence to our Church and obedience to the Etiquette laws both of us share (and there is small truth there). But the Church does not forbid us to love each other despite the flaws our material gifted each of us. I don’t know, Glassy. I do not like my fissures being commented upon and still feel an insecurity from others speaking with my mother. Specifically my mother. I have never liked my mother. I have never wanted to share myself with my mother or to let her infect others as she had me. I had not realized how ashamed I had been of being seen as still her child and still caught by her. I had another friend before you who also slowly disappeared, the last thing he said to me was asking if my parents were keeping me. Keeping me. He also commented on my fissures and took anger with me, insisting that the crazy church I had fallen in with was just fueling my problems. He became a ghost to me whose name I avoided as a haunting.
I am going over to the islands with Turpentine’s family to do “mission work” (which I suspect is likely just an excuse for her to visit her family over in the islands, I don’t think we have the means to build churches and I don’t think they need wells where we are going), but for me it largely is just to get away from my house for a bit. And from you. But I miss you too, and hope that (should you return to our faith, which I still believe) these letters find you that you might have a nice Thanksgiving. In my mind you’d tell me no Asmodeus, all I need for Thanksgiving is prayer, and I don’t celebrate it anyways, I am a good longsuffering creeping christ but everyone can use kindness, and some money.
Your sister and friend,
Asmodeus
It was a letter of self-serving baloney, and made me think of her both more ugly and small desire to apologize to her. Greater than any feeling, however, were this empty bubble of air that seemed to be swelling up inside my body and refused to pop; a strange congestion in an organ I did not know I had, and a tumor that defined itself through my nerves and blood by only its vast absences.
An angry part of me wished the whore would climb out of her burial jar as a stinking slurry of body and crawl acrosst the sea floor to me so I could find her remains at my doorstep and crush them underfoot like a cockroach. I hated her immensely. I hated her so much and the feeling seemed to become a smoke from inside me that scorched at what-ever lining hides at the inside of my person. I would sit at bed, at night, painfully hateful and desperate to stop thinking on her and wishing I could only eradicate her further such that any knowing of her existence would too be annihilated; death served only to be a thorn deeper within me—and, with humor, I thought of the Qlippoth’s mistaken promise to our material, that annihilation really were a salvation compared to spending an eternity sucked up with these awful thoughts and emotions. To be a cold machine that breathes and prays and digests. The thought rang through me all night as a chant till I fell asleep.
In my binder, from Acts 1, written out in loud allcaps:
18 Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.
19 And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem; insomuch as that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood.
20 For it is written in the book of Psalms, Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein: and his bishoprick let another take.
And in my binder, from Isaiah 24, written in the same loud allcaps:
1 Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.
3 The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word.
4 The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.
6 Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.
10 The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in.
11 There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone.
12 In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.
19 The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly.
22 And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited.
And underscoring each verse as my simple understanding, as absurd and idiotic as the Device believes the Communicated truths to be, was just, written loudly, too, Annihilation.
After vows that night I remember my skin still ached and begged a want to “diver deepen,” it spoke in nonsense that I did not fail to mistake as my heart wanting pain; to make the pain physical, and real, and to let my form go grotesque with the thorn death gave it—not Asmodeus or her departure, but the hate I was left with. A desire to step closer to my own annihilation in small measures that would occlude my reality from easily being understood. To warpen and crooken it in chasing after how far ahead Asmodeus had left me.
In the days following, she seemed to be in the wind itself. The air grew chilly and my body seemed smaller and more subject to the chill. On my walks the wind cut acrosst me and strange blue cars seemed to tail me around my normal route.
Seeing the cars only made my skin ache more to be fissured, as Asmodeus had put it, and bade me further into this sense of being spun about by a conspiracy woven by the contices the Device mentioned; Asmodeus had slipped out from the curtain of illusion and now operated levers and wires to puppet these shining blue angels about the Leesburg roadways in insane routine—her foot would go down on pedals and wafts of horrible air would gush down the tunnels that make the Leesburg roads and drive me cold; she would tighten a knob and electricity hummed through the air as a devils engine excited molecules that split into my genius fear, depression, hate at her having left and stained up in my thoughts her image. It was mold she put into me, mold that was in the church, in connection; it drove me further hateful with how controlled I felt, and how powerless before my thought I felt.
I just wished to be cold sheets of iron wrapped together in tubes and bolted shut in form of a human containing naught but air and no thought within, just muscular bladders strung inside to digest and move.
And to my prayers, and my faith, I had little ground; I was confused. And I was sick.
I wanted succor from loneliness, and became preoccupied with nostalgia for .hack// and a childhood spend with MMOs; still faith crept in small ways that certainly Pastor Salt would (correctly) identify as conjecture: to give myself to the MMO would be giving myself to the empty intelligences of Demons and Idols—as computers and games are nothing but sand pressed down finely and given spark of false-soul through electricity, as graven and ancient as fire illuminating the eyes and belly of the golden calf before its confused worshippers. I ‘worshipped’ in a dead MMO with no players, in my room alone, sitting in a town populated only by the Demonic NPCs, and letting my mood further be blasted darkly by disconnection deeper into wilderness.
this article is part 10 of the [Asmodeus and Glassware] series found on the Concordance