chapter three: the worst part's almost over

the bus was late, half an hour, when it got here had to wait another hour and a half, got to northampton, tired, hungry, bored, out of tune, red, throbbing note stabbed into the chord of downtown, night was dirty, not yet snowing.

there was a guy playing steel drums. wondered how the wet snow changed his sound. muffled it. distorted it. wondered what that would be like: to be a drop of water in the bowl of a steel drum, shaking from top to bottom every time he hit the drum, wanting to freeze, being annoyed. can't stop shaking, can't begrudge the steel drum player: it's his job, and how could you hate such a mellow vibe?

never-ending amount of shit to do. shopping. studying. writing. sick of eating. hate the fact that I sleep. habits, man.

here is a finite perception of infinite judgment:

it would happen in the present. (the present being within three seconds of the event. or, sin.) it would happen in suspended animation: the present wouldn't freeze, it'd be like a clip on a loop, the same three seconds neither in motion nor in stasis, moving only as much as is needed to qualify it as both suspended and animated. the full context would be reapplied. the immediacy of the event (or sin) would exist again, independent of the passage of time or memory or exadduration or any mortal effort to undermine or understate its importance. if everything is infinite, if nothing stops, ever, if what happens in the present doesn't really cease, but just stays there, like a line of a poem, then neither should its judgment. neither should its most final analysis.

the irony here is that, if such a judgment is really objective, if such a judgment is concerned only with the binary of "what is right" and "what is wrong," only with whether or not the event (or sin) adheres to the rules, be they dictated by god or some other infinite construct our finite means struggle to comprehend, if the goal of this judgment is to separate the wheat from the chaff, reward what's right and punish what's wrong, if after this process which could and should be prolongued into infinity, if everything it judges is itself infinite, how can you deny anybody heaven? after reliving every last action, every last decision, sin, boon and inbetween, every fucking thing you've ever done, what benevelent god would throw your immortal soul in a lake after putting it through that horse shit?

oh, then, of course, comes the counter-argument that in this infinite world, time does not exist, and the whole process will occur in less than the blink of an eye (interesting, that cliche, as though the blink of an eye were the smallest colloquial unit of measurement when it comes to time. I use three seconds for two reasons: in any given culture, one line of poetry is no longer than three seconds long, and when describing an event in the immediate present, the present tense is exchanged for the past tense after a waiting period, which usually lasts for three seconds.). convenient, that whole omnipotent-and-omniscient thing.

to which I respond: yes, but that undermines our infinite souls. sure, they're freed from our finite bodies. they're both on the same level, have the same perception of time. if that's so, both are unable to judge something that neither believes to exist. what I'm arguing is that to judge everything, even the smallest of things you've done, would be a torturous process, independent of time. perhaps because it would be independent of time.

yes, that's an opinion, based on a finite understanding of what time is, and only a conjecture about what time is to the infinite. but goddamn, that would be a drag, wouldn't it? to have your soul fractured into a million little pieces, divided equally throughout your life, haggling with god over why your name should be on the list. especially if my suspicions are correct, and he doesn't have a sense of humor.