I'll Call Him Liking

Another man I know. I’ll call him Liking. Why an odd name like Liking? Maybe it suits him. Maybe he’s a modern day tropist. A modern day simile-man.

Author of prosaic complaints and laments, thanksgivings, descriptions of God’s sudden manifestations. A satirist. A surrealist. A self-centered bit of gristle and nakedness. A blogger, in other words.

Finds God by rolling around in his bed all night. His wife sleeps in the other room, he is so energetic and persistent in his rolling. So sweaty and teary and altogether irritating in his wrestling and cavorting and caterwauling and caviling with God that she will have no part of it. That she will make her own bed so that he and God may have their fun. The light on every hour or so. The TV on every hour or so. The “Abba, Father” rasping every hour or so in his dry throat.

Finds God also by waking up, turning on his computer, and writing. Writing his bloggy pseudo-psalms. His soggy balms. His bleary songs. His seery bongs. His. Well, you get the idea. Writes out of anxiety and love. Out of fear and grief. Out of tenderness and anger and banality. A holy rolling blogger, if you will.

Full tilt boogie human here who reads the actual Psalms. A real dirty human, see. The real thing. Muck of the earth. Your garden variety human. Your muck farm human. Your slimy 21st Century American human. Your ruling class type of human. Your Holocene extinction type of human. Your wealthiest class of human in the history of the world type of human. Your make war, not love type of human.

And who can’t understand. Can’t altogether get. The angst. The hyperbolic whining that he finds there in the Psalms. Until he comes to the blog at hand. His own particular blog. And then of course the whining comes wheeling out like some Medieval war machine. Creaking and moaning. Flinging real figurative missiles all about. All about the place.

Real Medieval death machine that comes creaking down the centuries like Freedom’s monster itself. Like the monster that the idea of Freedom (God’s own idea, by the way) unleashes to maraud over the earth, laying waste the earth, extinguishing the beautiful almost wherever it might be found. The great long whine we humans make when we are given a little comfort and expect comfort then like a birthright. Preserve comfort then at all costs.

And orthodoxy. Preserve orthodoxy of whatever peculiar variety. At all costs. However odd. However arcane. However involved and difficult to explain. Rightness. Correctness. A real motive force to be stored and then used to. To what? To assail, of course. To avail. To lay waste. To bring down a wall. Any wall. That stands between the self and what it must have. What it must lave. What it must take. What it must make its own.

But Liking is also mild-mannered. He is humorous. He has a sense of humor. He understands civility. He understands courtesy. He is generous. He likes to think of himself as loving. He likes to think of himself as an okay guy. As a pretty good guy. But of course, he’s made of dirt. He’s made of muck. He’s a potato. He lives underground. He shoves up leaves that live above ground.

He lives in two worlds, really. The world of the air and the world of the earth. The root is his mind, and it is a mind buried in the mud where the worms and the grubs course and the fungus grows. The leaves are his heart, open to the sun and the wind and the rain. Fragile as any leaves that will be dust again in the winter. He is pathetic, really. A pathetic fallacy if I’ve ever seen one.

Liking. A guy I know. Find him anywhere out there in blog-land. Anywhere you’d like to go.