Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Before I had a blog I scribbled endlessly in tree-based notebooks. Here's a brief meditation on my hometown:

Harry S. Truman's old house, at once incongruous and knowing. The interior has the clean-edged, untouched look of virtual reality. You must remain on the clear plastic pathway or else the sense of history will dissolve like so many discordant pixels.

A walk away, the RLDS Temple screws the heavens like something from a high-budget science fiction film (the imagined traceries of planet-bound rockets visible behind its steeple).

The inside of the place is cold, gifted with an austerity that approaches transcendence. Thin gray carpet, walls hewn from moonrock. Loud symbols rambling over the walls and floor: apocalyptic calligraphy.


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Today (spent mostly online and listlessly Christmas shopping) had a quietly surreal undertone. The crowning moment was happening across a table of old people in the library. They were into Urantia and attentively listening to cassette tapes of a man narrating their favorite text. They even had their own sign with the Urantia symbol, although it was unclear if this was intended as an invitation or a territorial marker.

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