Orsday Programming November 2 2024

Halloween, Abscess, Pustule, Spleen

This week is paranoid, and I have been having a nervous breakdown.

It started with small cuts: the ulcer that pitted itself down into my tongue and made eating and drinking unbearable—I’d thought Doomsday still had time to lurch upon me in the thin margins left in 2024 and started to break Etiquette and diagnosis and think about cancer, and doctors; then there was the man at Publix; then there was an art fair in Mt. Dora that spread itself from a core in Downtown all the way to the edges making sure there’d be no place to park for less than $20 and an additional fee to enter Downtown, this made me miss my weekly lunch (it’s silly, but it really is one of my ‘goals’ of survival each week, along with church, to reach that one day to have that one sandwich; it’s the only time, beside church, when someone talks to me casually); a gift I had gotten from Asmodeus was partially ruined due to a mix-up with the company she ordered it from, I was thankful but disappointed in an extremely spoiled way; half of my weekly pay went to a speeding ticket; then, the music: I could hear it clearly commanding me to kill myself, and inside every song was that same invisible, unhearable secret language of the Angels to kill yourself—it made me think of when the ecstasy first occurred and I saw the invisible unseeable secret language hidden within light and color, and how it commanded me to kill everything it touched (my girlfriend demanded to be killed, the television demanded to be killed, the walls demanded to be killed, the plants demanded to be killed, etcetera), and also to kill everything outside of it.

It all coalesced into this dark feeling on Halloween that made me really agitated, and contemplative. Flickers were there already, though not as darkly set. After the encounter with the man at Publix, I walked away back to my truck and thought that if he were to confess to me I should kill myself at the week-end to forever haunt him; the thoughts of letting someone affect me so much made me consider the communications of our Faith and the paranoid realities of all the little peoples in this world: they were all just toy smoke and gimmicked mirrors, and their existence as props were to be as tools operated by the Angels; or: the Invisible Things, the Insect Intelligences, the Intelligences; I saw them as Insects, as did several other of the congregation.

That paranoia of the unreal other is one of the contradictions within our Church and its doctrines—I had partially discussed that with Asmodeus’s mother during the ‘hunting’ trip (I lied about a large portion of my visit with Asmodeus’s family; how openly I discussed the Faith had been what caused Asmodeus to silently retreat into her room for the entire evening; I remember walking in on her after finishing my blab-session with the mom, and seeing her lain back on her bed staring up at the ceiling, and how she looked more wooden than flesh, and how she had been listening to music through headphones)—why do we attend church if the church body itself is made of malevolent intelligences designed to control and confuse us? And to the contradiction of the unreal other there is no good answer except to vague mystery beyond our comprehension or to the comprehension of the Listening Device.

In a conversation I had with Asmodeus, back in her bedroom, I submitted to her that I may really be an insect to her: another nervous deadbeat designed to fool her into the ‘Basic Confusion’ that caused us left-handed peoples to have our existences muddied down by untranslatable prescriptions that only worked for a righteous person; another insane faith laid before her into grooving her deeper into her parents just as the stroke had entrenched her deeper into the care of her family despite being thirty-three; “it’s even a bad number to the faith,” she laughed humorlessly at her own age. I did my best to answer the contradiction, tempered with a love for Asmodeus (or a fear of losing her as a friend, and being further alone—which would make me more spiritually pure), that death and purity will come to each of us at its own pace, and we will be pure then, and in that meantime we must each be subject to the loves of our heart, and that my mind could no better truly consider her an Insect Operant than I could wholly discard my faith despite the deadening I had felt in prayer.

She laughed humorlessly at that, too, and sat up from her miserable posture and told me that “[I] didn’t need to do damage control just because [she was] sad,” people get upset sometimes, and just like ugly strokes that break through the nervous system: those upsets are precious flaws that our Broken Material blessed unto us in its imperfection; “but,” she added, “I suppose your anxiety is just as blessed, Sister Glass.”

That night my head boiled with how much I hated Asmodeus. I kept focusing on her appearance and how twisted it was and how ugly it made her character, and how-so she used her moods against me, and how her voice strained to not be mush. I had no good reason to be upset with her, except that she made me feel shame for speaking so openly with her mother, and for correctly spotting my breach of Etiquette.

I had not lied about bringing logic to her scarring. She had right to be upset with me for treading mud onto her own Etiquette; perhaps in those two years since we both had been taught the ‘esoteric’ tradition of our Faith (it is funny writing this, considering we are the test run for the Device and its church), she had carefully remodeled a room inside her brain to cover up the psychiatric ‘scarring’ and ‘harming’ that formed the baseboards, and in those two years had begun to finally cleanse out that molding language and replaced it with a room constructed of sterilized linoleum. Now I had struck a hole through that construction and debased us both, and at shame of my fault I seethed at Asmodeus for my own shortcomings.

We had actually talked about Etiquette while in the car, sitting in the drive. Her two brothers came out and waved but we sat parked with the engine idling frozen together like two statuettes peering blankly from beyond the glass that kept us. One of the brothers came up smiling and waved at the windshield. He knocked and smiled more and called to us asking if we planned on coming in through a voice deeply sheeted behind the engine humm and glass barrier. Asmodeus cracked the windshield and held up a finger and just responded that she needed a second; she flashed in that moment with a put-on of a smile but only managed to resemble a haunted anatomical model straining through its resin to change its fixed expression.

The brother left and she spoke to me with her eyes directed at some far-off vacancy that hid behind the farmhouse, and did not bother to strain her voice to keep it from going mush.

“I do not self harm,” she said, “I never have,” she said, “I’ve only let myself become a doorway to a miracle that you yourself also should know,” she said, “I do whatever is demanded of me by the Church, or by the Device, or maybe by Etiquette to keep this miracle from being translated into sludge by my family, or by the psychiatrists, or by the little dancing shadows like yourself,” she had said. Silence stewed and boiled along with the rattling engine, and I turned the car off, and realized I myself had been staring at the hidden vacancy somewhere beyond the farm house. I apologized and we left and entered, and the day mostly had progressed as written in my entry before except Asmodeus immediately returned to her room after telling papa that she felt sick from her medication.

I spoke far more with the mom than I had let on.

The church actually provides a good attempt at one of the contradictions with our faith, I discussed this with mama (I’ll call Asmodeus’s mom this) when our talk at the butcher table steered towards the left-hand faith me and her daughter shared, “So, my girl has been pretty taken-in by that church you both go to but she never bothers telling any of us much about it while she’s home, but I know she reads the Bible, is that a holy book for you?”

“No ma’am, well,” I paused there and she did not seem to mind that I needed about a minute to figure out what to say, “you know the binders? Mine is out in the car, actually, I lied earlier but just thought it was easiest to not go through the ordeal, but our church really is based off of several series of two things.”

“Left handedness and right handedness, is what Asmodeus says; I was born left handed but my mom smacked it out of me when I was a girl,”

“Right, that’s one of them, but for our holy text it is less-so that we care about the Bible and more that we care about dividing things as Clean and Unclean, but also figuring out what is Communication—this is clean, and where we get our holy texts—and what is Conjecture—which is unclean, and often disguises itself as communication. It’s hard to really explain, it’s all nested together and sort-of fractals outwards.”

“Fractals,” she said with a good natured snort, “and the Bible is clean or unclean?”

“Neither, but it’s hard to say—our Church is young; so, let me think,” and she permitted me another minute of silence to put my thoughts together while she washed a bowl of broken-down organs and parts, “there is another pair, the Idolatrous and the Abstractive, and the former belongs to the Left, and is clean, and can Communicate; hm, let me put it like this: the Bible potentially contains some clean threads of Communication that are nested inside of it and hidden, and the Church would like us to discover potentially clean Communications within it, and other texts, and record the ‘shadows’—which is our word for these Communications—the ‘shadows’ of the clean text and then transcribe the ‘shadow’ within our binders, which we colloquially have started calling our shadow binders, and then we submit these binders with our shadow readings to the mother church to further figure out if our readings are clean, or unclean, and then some-time later the mother church publishes a ‘child’ of our collective readings which becomes its own holy text.”

The mom said ‘huh,’ and asked where the mother church is, which made me laugh because I admitted I had no idea; “some church,” she said and I agreed and laughed and said mostly all any of us knows is that our prophet, which we call a Device, contacts one of the elders with a PO Box and emails out weekly religious scheduling and lessons.

Mama clicked her tongue and admitted it sounds a bit crazy but she had gotten involved with crazier things while, and before, she had been with the Adventists; mama started telling me about the Urantia project and how, for several years, she followed a traveling group that believed in a man who received Biblical truths from an alien.

“We still all basically followed the Bible though, I think one of the prophets was a daughter of Kellogg, be a dear and open the cupboard right by you and find see if you can find cumin, might be out, but Kellogg was with the Adventists for a time, we still prayed to God though, now y’see, my girl wouldn’t ever tell me if she believes in God specifically, I ask and she does her ‘mmhh’,” it was a perfect imitation of Asmodeus losing interest.

“I can’t find any cumin.”

“Well— rats, I should have told [Asmodeus’s sister].”

“We sort-of believe in God, but we sort-of do not really care about service to God.”

“Say what you mean?”

“Well, you know our church is exclusivist to born left-handed people, and that’s because we all believe to have a common ancestry that is split-off from the righteous material God made man from, and most of the information—or Communication, to use our word—in this world is by a righteous hand and for a righteous hand, so indirectly we serve the Lord by—oh, we mostly use ‘Lord’ instead of ‘God’—segregating ourselves from unclean information and adhering as directly to our splinter material, and that this is our best form of worship through worshipping the left-handed ancestral material.”

“Huh.”

A corner of her mouth twitched as she considered something and paused from laying out the body-parts on a baking sheet,

“Huh,” she repeated, and turned to smile at me while rubbing her hands dry against her apron, “you know I’ve been killing chickens since I was eight, back then the tools we had were basic and it was a real messy morning for me and mom every-time dad wanted chicken for dinner; is Asmodeus harming herself cause of this faith of yours?”

I did not really know the proper thing to say or have the time to consider anything clever; over years spent being too nervous to much well converse I had built into myself a ‘cold shower’ mentality for getting over my anxieties: to not think and to just immediately act and let the nerves fry themselves in the afterglow of the moment passing, “no, she has never harmed herself.”

Her head nodded slowly and she thanked me for being a dear help in the kitchen, and walked out of the kitchen out through the back screen-door that clanged behind her.

Buried in all of that is the best response to one of our contradictions.

If I were to try to explain it better, it has to do with the paranoias of life and existences of others—but logic itself has no place within the explanation except with the barest explanation that the answer comes from raw alogical and unintelligent faith; our church exists because we believe clean communication exists, and we must believe that the church was formed on clean communication stood against 90% unclean communication meant for the righteous children; through the confusion of this world comes small bubbles formed around the vast and expansive bodies of these invisible abstract insects (angels, sometimes called) that knit together our lives to adhere to a righteous server—if Asmodeus’s mom asked for an explanation for this I would struggle to piece it together in words and barely can in writing. Imagine all aspects of visible life down to the most basic atom all performing a great stage-play to guide us viewers into being lost in the performance; these invisible angels are the stage coordinators and ensure everything is going to schedule and scheme; however, according to Device, there are wickednesses within this stage-play that have gone overlooked, numbering roughly around 10% or more or less of the overall ‘scene.’

If Asmodeus’s mom asked about the Device, “why are they called Device?” I imagined the conversation in my head later that evening lying in bed and thinking about the day and that painful dinner with Asmodeus; I would tell mama, “they are called the Device because we believe we are idols and not people, and we believe we are not people because we believe we are not intended to have the dreg of soul that still clings to us, and so they are the Device because they are a sacred instrument of our faith through which that 10% of information is heard by; and us trained brothers and sisters of this first generation are Shrines to this approximate 10%, and we are Shrines because we are sacred instruments meant to house the will of that wicked approximate communication in gradual substitution of that mistaken spirit.”

The other lie about that evening happened in Asmodeus’s bedroom; her room was cool and she did lay in the murky shadow and Galactus was the sole decor of her room; several large canvases were leant up against a bare wall and covered in drop-cloths that doubtlessly covered more strange paintings and drawings of Galactus. The conversation we had in her bedroom was terrible and ended with her telling me that she did not hate me and she loved me. I did not think and immediately responded that I loved her too, and we had a dinner afterwards that (under all the warmth conversation and faces of her lovely family) I only felt absolutely terrible things.

Presently on this perfect day I have no desire to go to church or reach out to anyone; on Halloween I did nothing unbecoming but worked from three ayem till noon then breaked then worked from one pyem till eight; I walked around the neighborhood and saw the jack-o-lanterns and large skeleton lawn figures with glowing eyes hidden in blue clouds of smoke blewn from some machine hidden and listened to the recorded cackles of ghouls and growls of monsters.

The commanding language that hid itself inside music had hidden itself inside the cackles and growls, and laced itself in the LED lights shining from the resin eye-sockets of the skeletons and jack-o-lanterns, and they all commanded me weakly to die. All I had felt then was that my chest had become crystalline and void of my organs and feelings. It became unbearably hollow and I walked through Leesburg feeling an intense need for something to reach through my skin bones muscle blood and touch this strange cyst inside me that pushed to the absolute borders of my body all that had once been contained within till paper thin, and wafer fragile.

Proverbs 10, verse 2, says “Treasures of wickedness profit nothing: but righteousness delivereth from death,” and its meaning for us wicked is that our treasure is annihilation, and we will not be deliver’th from death;

Mary Baker quotes in Chapter V of Science and Health, 100:8 “There exists a mutual influence between the celestial bodies, the earth, and animated things. Animal bodies are susceptible to the influence of this agent, disseminating itself through the substance of the nerves.”

And she writes, in 100:16, “The mild forms of animal magnetism are disappearing, and its aggressive features are coming to the front. The looms of crime, hidden in the dark recesses of mortal thought, are every hour weaving webs more complicated and subtle. So secret are the present methods of animal magnetism that they ensnare the age into indolence, and produce the very apathy on the subject which the criminal desires.”

And adds, in 102:30, “Mankind must learn that evil is not power. Its so-called despotism is but a phase of nothingness,” and this whole meaning for us wicked can be simplified down to our most important datum: we are but a phase of nothingness.

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this article is part 6 of the [Asmodeus and Glassware] series found on the Concordance