The Book of Ron

The heretofore-undisclosed skinny.

The Book of Ron

(Being a Highly Authorized clarification of events surrounding the Creation and early development of man)

--By Way of Introduction--

I am one of the few lucid individuals to have actually seen and heard God--an honor He no longer bestows lightly.

He is not particularly ravenous for company, embarrassed as He is by the blunder of humanity, and so presently limits His interviews to those who possess a certain stolidity of constitution. The bungling-humans Headache has persisted for thousands of years now (thanks a bunch, scribes, for a convoluted spirituality, an ever-splintering credo, and a mangled and incomprehensible testament)…so I was approached with caution.

Here was the Great and Wonderful God’s dilemma: The most important, meaningful, and profound document in the universe--the Word, the History of all that Is--was set down millennia ago in a turgid, incredibly overdrawn, wholly unreadable style. How in the world was He to win over an endless stream of increasingly sophisticated seekers while saddled with a work that guaranteed the rapid zoning-out of even the most avid reader?

What God needed was a contemporary writer--someone attuned to the easygoing, near-glutted appetites of modern Americans--but one with an attitude. What He needed was a cynic, a thinking man; someone not so susceptible to the emotional pitfalls of faith as to immediately revert to ecumenical gobbledygook; you know, all that outdated stuff that makes the Old Bible so hard to get into.

But man, was I a tough nut to crack.

In the first place, I’ve never bought into magic, metaphysics, or mysticism. The universe works according to physical laws that cannot be undone by our pathetic imaginings--and, highly desirable as an afterlife may be to we vainglorious little mortals, a whole cosmosful of parroting adherents doth not a mutable reality make. As a matter of fact, it makes no f---ing difference what one knows, believes, or wants...erase sentience from the picture entirely and the universe will proceed as-is.

So imagine my surprise when I learned there really is an Omnipotent, Magnanimous, and All-loving God!

Talk about having Egg on your face!

All my life I’d been disgusted by a perceived intellectual cowardice on the part of virtually every encountered human being, and here I’d suddenly become a fellow babbling weenie.

But, as I said, my soul didn’t come easy.

--As to profane images and descriptions--

First, let me make it amply clear that God is not some silly caricature or phantasmagorical personification! He most most certainly is not a kindly old man with a long, flowing, snow-white beard. Nor is he plump, rosy-skinned, and obsessed with jollification. In no way does he resemble incendiary shrubbery.

Even attempting to describe Him, in all His Wonderfulness, brings on a play of reverent emotions which absolutely befuddles the process. Already my quill quivers. Console yourselves, then, in knowing you’ll find out…soon enough!

Now, I realize a lot of this will come off as blasphemous to those of you still adhering to antiquated beliefs. Worse, it will sound like malignant untruth, sick issue, antisocial heresy...and I offer my apologies in advance. Be all that as it may very well be, it’s the truth. Swear to God. It’s no fun writing all this down under the pressure of such a mighty Taskmaster, for the sake of a posterity that will no doubt blast it as lies and the ravings of a deranged mind.

So be it.

You opinionated gophers, you oh-so fabulous conformists--you think you know it all! But you’re laboring under an illusion.

You only think you think.

All your smarmy conclusions are merely ground-based platitudes, and God and I spitteth upon you. Go ahead, hang onto your smug and hypocritical heresies, wallow in your fornicating, sacrilegious lifestyles while you can...boy, do you have a comeuppance waiting for you! But I digress.

Your worldly wrongheadedness is simply the residue of one of God’s early projects. As He explains it, intelligence was something that, like gravity, at first didn’t occur to Him, and a truly working brain seemed like so much supercargo on a paradise of a planet where sexual reproduction is a perfect perpetual motion machine. However, intelligence--before The Lord realized how it could backfire--seemed like such a clever idea. What would these creatures do with such a gift? That’s what fascinated Him. It was no fun watching the “lower” animals slurp, gallop, and reproduce all day. These new beings couldn’t even gallop. They were damned good reproducers, however. Apparently the brain’s hurried installation had an unforeseen side-effect: humanity was in heat all year-round. Only one thing to do: leave their played-out carcasses to rot and refurbish the soil, and take the souls, which are very light and compact, and store them up in Heaven. He can’t leave our souls “down here” because we are, after all, His children, and you don’t keep up a reputation of being Wise, Witty, and Wonderful without a long-term benefits package. But after thousands of years even souls can take up a lot of room, and Heaven’s better acreage is already grossly overpopulated. And old souls never die. They just hang around. Naughty ol’ Satan, confined as he is to the interior of this embarrassing little rock, has solved the problem. He fries the souls until they resemble crunchy little pork rinds, puts them on a diet of coal dust and bat dung, and makes them listen to Jesse Jackson discourses throughout all eternity. Just for the Hell of it.

--But still the question remains: why me?--

Why, out of McBillions of far more likely prospects, did the Good Lord God Almighty pick a stubborn non-believer to revise this greatest of books? Well, according to The Lord, there was an unwavering pattern in His interviews, so reliable He considers it a rule: the feebler the belief, the milder the reaction, or, inversely, the more devout the subject, the more crazed the response. His past attempts invariably brought on reactions ranging from deep hysteria to cardiac arrest, making accurate communication impossible. It took The Lord days and days of cajoling, conjuring, and outright bullying to make a believer of me--consequently, when I finally came to my senses and saw The Truth, the typical frenzied reaction was considerably dampened. But at least I was doable--the reaction of all previous candidates was so wild they on the instant became monomaniacal zombies. You’re skeptical? Ignore the impotent tracings of my pen. Witness, instead, a planet crawling with visionaries, prophets, and wannabe messiahs--all stricken failures of The Lord in His frustrating campaign...and here I sit with my quills, my earplugs, and my extra-strengrh Tylenol...quite an honor you think? To be The Lord’s personal scribe...but I tell you, the pleasure is most assuredly not mine. The Lord beats a mighty Drum, and I can row only so hard. And His rages are tempestuous, His moods mercurial and infectious. And now another goose-stepping headache is on the way, an all-too familiar sign announcing the Dictater is, once again, getting Impatient. This fate, mine, I would not wish on the lowest sinner, not on the meanest fool.

But it’s back to work. Let’s see now…

--In the beginning--

Right from the start of the Old Bible, The Lord has grounds to be upset with humanity’s early poor performance at dictation-taking. There was no beginning, He points out, and if there had been, it surely would have been His conception that was the beginning, for He couldn’t have created all this if He Himself hadn’t already been in operation, unless of course, He concedes, the original authors meant in the beginning of His activity, which, He notes irritably, would imply a sort of vegetative Deityship activated simply for the future gratification of egotistical little men. “In the beginning,” in short, is too vulnerable to misinterpretation, so God has ordered The Book Of Ron to have a better opening; an opening that will more clearly set the pace for what theology is all about:

--Once upon a time God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep--

All this about jumping right to work on this remote hunk of rock really infuriates The Lord. Typical of the mad vanity of our species, to allot our insignificant planet priority in the sequence of universal events. Is it possible that a couple thousand years ago men were so backward? The general tone of the Old Bible is heavily patriarchal, and suggests the pontificating of a hard-nosed old B*****d in His mid-fifties given to random acts of sadistic violence, but the mental content of the work brings to mind the slapdash constructs of a bright six year-old with a wild imagination. In actuality, according to God, Earth is one of His more recent projects, and certainly one of His least successful.

First on the agenda was some light to see what was going on, and where He was. He recalls “Just sort of floating there” for a “Real long time” with nothing much to do and no one to talk to. Then getting “Kind of paranoid” and wanting to “Do something about it.” As anyone who has lived totally alone for an extended period realizes, eventually you get to the point where you begin to vocalize your thoughts.

--And God said, Let There Be Light--

He wishes it could have been that easy. In the absolute vacuum of space no sound was generated, for there was no medium to carry waves. But God found that by twirling a Forefinger He was able to create a spiral that generated both heat and light. This first nebula was formed (to give some perspective on our high and mighty attitude toward Earth) so far beyond our present scrutiny of the heavens that it will take our technology, even at its headlong pace, another thirty-two thousand years to develop instruments sophisticated enough to breach the gap.

Now, one nebula gave plenty of light, but only enough to See that there really wasn’t a whole lot to see, and that, wherever He was, it was an awfully big place. So God set about hanging new lights, but no matter where He went it was the same old thing. Pretty soon there were star clusters all over, and The Lord, bored almost to inertia, sought to amuse Himself by positioning stars and galaxies to play connect-the-dots. These were whimsical designs: a bowman, a bison, a big or little dipper here and there. Just so were the heavens created; a bit at a time, with patience and great expertise, with insight and, yes, with Love.

But there just didn’t seem to be an end to the void. So, since The Lord had eternity on His Hands, He threw Himself into His new hobby with truly deific enthusiasm. After a few billion years it became like a mania, and what was born of simple boredom grew to be a desperate endeavor, a passionate attempt to fill up all this emptiness with enough light to See that there was more emptiness needing light to fill up the emptiness so He could See there was more emptiness needing light to See the continuing emptiness. Eventually this got to be rather silly and exhausting. There had to be a nobler way to expend the creative energy of what was obviously a very productive and gifted young God, so He got into detail. What He had in Mind was some kind of little orbiting system of planetary bodies around one of the lights, a sort of concentric Ring Around the Rosie. Just what shape these satellites should take was an absorbing and delightful puzzle for The Lord in those ages.

God became more than a simple Dabbler in physics.

He found that if He zinged a spark just so at the light He’d chosen, well, that spark would whiz around all on its own!

He tried it out in lots of places, and had a whale of a time for a few gazillion years.

But there becomes a certain routineness to just whinging sparks that can grow to be unsatisfying and, even to the Mighty Lord, wearisome.

So it came about that God found Himself plodding lonesomely through endless fields of stars, and thinking what a mess He’d made of the place, and wondering just what the heck there was to do now.

And gradually He begat a glorious Idea, an almighty scheme for building a little working model of a self-perpetuating environment He’d visualized way back when He was still hanging lights. So gung-ho was The Lord on this new project that he managed to finish it in less than a week.

The first couple of days went into thinking up neat new names for light and darkness and so forth.

God then set about creating a firmament to divide the heaven and earth. This was some fancy Doing. What He Did was part the ocean and sort of flip the firmament into a horizontal position so that half the water was above and half below. He then moved all the nether water around, exposing land above the seas. He confesses to a certain lapse in Planning here, for He could have saved Himself a lot of Trouble by simply introducing gravity first and allowing the seas to form naturally. The important thing was the thrill of the creative process.

God saw that it was Good…but it took all day.

The next step was to give the place a little life and color. He was getting so good at creating He didn’t have to use His Hands to whip up any miracles; all He had to do was speak to make it So. He never did quite get the hang of telekinesis...but just by saying He wanted it--whoosh--there were grasses and herbs and fruit-bearing trees everywhere! It was wonderful, it was magic, and boy, was it ever Good. But the details took all day.

The pre-Book of Ron Bible is confused here, stating that God now began hanging lights, with the implication that He made earth and grasses and whatnot working blind, and that He saw how Good everything was in the dark. As I’ve previously recorded, the sky was already riddled with stars. But God decided His little terrestrial experiment needed a couple lights of its own. So He slapped together a sun and moon, and had a deuce of a time setting them in place. It was dizzying work, making the moon zoom around the Earth once a month while adjusting the Earth to travel in a statelier manner around the sun, then having the sun barely drift through the Milky Way, which was in turn configured to revolve in immense light clusters...but it sure was Good! Yet it took...all...effing...day.

The next morning God decided His handiwork could use some locomotion. So He spake into existence whales and fowl, and blessed them and told them to multiply. It was really Good, man, but it still took the whole goldurn day.

On the sixth day The Lord, indefatigable as ever, was whale-and fowl watching when it struck Him that there was as yet lots o’planet to be filled. Whales can make pretty boring pets, and fowl are noisy and smelly at best. Still, the whales got into some interesting antics caused by slow starvation until The Lord whooshed some plankton into the seas--one thing led to another, and The Lord just had a ball creating everything that came to Mind. He made cattle and other beasts, and all kinds of creepy things. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to imagine the burst of creative Zeal taking place on that sixth day. The number of species on this planet seems almost uncountable, but God was really on a roll. Man, it was Good. He designed the thorax, the pulmonary system, the proboscis, the carapace--faster than you can say whoosh. Annelids, insects, reptiles, amphibians, primates--it was a whirlwind of activity. The platypus, the wombat...then, in a burst of Vanity, something that, in miniature, would resemble Himself. This creature He called man, and this creature He made top dog over the whole Earth. Then He kicked back, exhausted. He looked over His experiment and Saw it was very Good.

Modesty is, in this instance, a truly deific virtue.

It was spectacular.

--Man alive--

Next day God was totally bushed. He blessed and sanctified the day, but that was about all He felt like getting Into. He was even too tired to make rain, but fortunately a mist that was hanging around warmed, rose, and fell to wet the ground. This little observation got God’s creative Spirit back in gear. The damp dust, He found, could be molded into all kinds of shapes, but the one He really liked working on was a male figure. When finished it just lay there, so God decided He’d try to inflate it.

Talk about Finesse!

The Lord’s Lips are wider by far than the largest super-galactic cluster, but He managed to blow life into the dust man’s nostrils without even shattering it.

Lord God then planted a garden, called the place Eden, and put His little man, spot-named Adam, in charge of all the luscious trees therein. God told Adam to go ahead and eat from any tree save the tree that bore knowledge of good and evil. Lord God was dead-serious about this, and threatened Adam with certain death if he dared, if he assayed, if he even thought of disobeying. His Wrath resolved, God went back to sculpting wet dust, creating a whole neato-jet menagerie to keep Adam company.

But something was still missing. God put Adam to sleep and looked about. There was plenty of dust around to make another person, or even a whole planetful, but Good Old Lord God, prey to a reckless whimsy, decided to fashion this mate from one of Adam’s ribs. So He tore open Adam’s side, and He r-r-r-ripped out a rib. That woke Adam fast enough. Adam lay there howling while The Lord concentrated on the rib, and God admits the howling got on His Nerves and messed up the whole blessed experiment. This new creation was a laughable failure, all rear end and sagging pectorals. Whereas Adam had the potential for strength and prowess and a certain animal cunning, this Eve couldn’t possibly be good for anything. But, since Adam just gawked at her, The Lord decided to forget all about her for the time being and focus on getting Adam to move around and maybe perform some tricks. Here gravity was the real poser. The Lord, intrigued, inflated Adam a little more and was rewarded by the sight of Adam rising arse-upward into the air, where he hovered like a rag doll with a slack jaw and empty eyes. The Lord putt-putted Adam around for Eve’s amusement, but after blankly watching Adam bank and circle she slipped into a heavy sleep. So The Lord dropped Adam and tried to think of another means of locomotion. Even though there was a whole lot of space between the ears that wasn’t being used for anything, God had begun to develop a strange fascination for Adam’s legs. He had, after all, created Adam in His own image, but He Himself had never encountered a solid surface, so he had no idea what His own Legs were for. Once He managed to stand Adam upright, the little dust man could be prodded along quite nicely. It may seem curious that the idea of a snakewise slither didn’t occur to Lord God at that time, but He confesses that slithering gives Him an uneasy Feeling. This Feeling gets validated pretty soon, when a famous snake does something really rotten.

Anyhow, now that things were beginning to take shape, The Great Lord God Almighty looked down with Delight on His creatures and saw they were Good.

And Adam somehow spontaneously attained the ability to utter his thoughts (which were, understandably, pretty vague) through the unlearned, instantaneous use of speech.

Think of that!

Barely out of the dust stage and he’s already putting sentences together.

Not only that, he’s taking control of his environment. He calls Eve “Woman” and acknowledges himself as “Man”. Then he’s dictating that man and woman should live as husband and wife. This intellectual upstart and his woman--the dust man and the rib lady--were a peripatetic pair, and as naked as jays.

--Enter The Snake--

Let this be a lesson to all you silly, irrational, embarrassingly unrealistic Darwinists out there...back when Homo sapiens originated, snakes could already speak as articulately as you and I!

That’s right.

Believe it or not, they were vocal and wily as all get-out.

Nowadays, it’s true, snakes haven’t gotta whole bunch to say. But back in Edentimes this crafty old viper just slinks right on up to Eve and convinces her to disregard Lord God’s edict about avoiding the good and evil tree. The snake tells Eve she and Adam will themselves be gods if they get the inside scoop on good and evil, and won’t die at all. The snake was saying, in effect, that The Great and Goodly Lord God Almighty didn’t want any competition and so was trying to keep the two in the dark.

So Eve ate of the fruit of the tree and turned Adam on to a piece.

Apparently the fruit caused them to see their nudity as evil, for they were abashed enough to sew aprons out of fig leaves.

But then they heard God’s Voice somehow walking in the garden, and had to hide in the trees.

God busted Adam semi-nude.

Adam fessed right up, ashamed as he was with the image of God.

Then, after a quick grilling by The Lord, Adam narked on his mate, setting a precedent for all humanity to come. He fingered Eve, hoping to save his own skin. Eve, catching on quick, pointed her fruit-spattered finger at the snake, who didn’t have a finger to point.

God blew it.

He cursed the snake up and down, damned Eve to woeful childbirth, and doomed Adam to hard labor and easy death.

You don’t mess with The Great and Goodly Lord God Almighty.

Then God made them suffer the further humiliation of wearing skin coats as He kicked them out of the garden. Realizing the snake was the only genuinely guilty party, The Lord decided to let him hang out, and even whooshed in some rather tacky ornamentation--your basic whirling flaming-sword-and-chubby-angels display--to add a little life to the arboretum.

--The Duo Incorrigible--

Once they were out in the real world, the pair went straight from bad to worse. Adam discovered that new people could be produced biologically, which was not only a lot of fun, but a tremendous relief. The last thing he wanted was to lose another rib.

And they named their love child Cain.

Child-making was so much fun the pair got right to work producing another; a boy they named Abel. This Abel grew to be a shepherd, while brother Cain worked the soil.

Eventually the boys decided to get on The Great Lord God’s Good Side, so they agreed to bring Him gifts. Abel brought sheep fat, but all Cain could manage was veggies.

Lord God was more than happy with Abel’s homage, but fit to be tied over Cain’s humble offering. Where was the fat?

Cain was crestfallen.

The boys went into a field and had it out.

When the dust had settled, Abel lay dead and Cain stood vindicated. The phenomenon of sibling rivalry was off to a murderous start.

But God’s rage over Abel’s death, and over Cain’s pathetic gift of all he had, was undiminished. Lord God heaped unbearable punishments upon poor Cain.

Cain was stunned. The Great Good Lord God Almighty had just doomed him to the life of a fugitive and vagabond, with no crops to tend and a price on his head. God decided to mark Cain for easy assassination, and booted him out into the cold, hard, unforgiving world.

Cain then took a wife, which is pretty strange, since the only woman on the planet was his mom. The oedipal insinuation here is too delicate to broach, but suffice it to say that things began to get a tad on the kinky side, culminating in polygamous doings by Lamech, Cain’s great-great-great-great grandson.

--Noah--

Life expectancy was like, super high back then. Adam died at 930, while Seth, his third son, lasted until he was 911. Lives this long gave folks the opportunity to reproduce aplenty; the over-population of God’s little masterpiece was well on its way.

Lamech was another of the multicentenarian heavyweights proliferating so widely in those days. He lived to the ripe old age of 777, but sired a boy when he was only 182. This boy--who was to play such an important role in the global shenanigans to follow--young Lamech named Noah, prophesying the boy would comfort humanity, even though The Lord had cursed the ground and was in no mood to parlay.

Now Noah was in his prime, scarcely five centuries old, when Lamech finally passed away, and Noah decided it was time to concentrate on a brood of his own. The result was Shem, Ham, and Japheth (aka Larry).

Anyway, about this time God’s sense of humor was nearing depletion, and He was really sorry He’d ever begun the whole project. So He decided to destroy the works--not only that demented poser man, but the innocent beasts in the fields, the inoffensive winging birds, and all the creepy things. Especially the creepy things.

But God liked Noah. So God gave old Noah ample forewarning of the Calamity He’d dreamed up, and iterated explicit instructions for building an enormous Ark out of wooden gophers. This was to house not only Noah and his family, but a pair of every living creature on the earth, one male and one female. This was because The Lord, like all artists, couldn’t bear to see all His handiwork destroyed.

Noah was a rather simple fellow, and didn’t pause to consider the magnitude of his task, but just got the Mrs. and kids packing and set to work. It took poor Noah almost a hundred years to get the job done, though by the time he was finished he appeared to have aged a thousand years.

He caught malaria and various spotted fevers sweet-talking alligators and king snakes into his clever swamp traps, went half-blind one day luring a squirrel out of a tree, and got mauled wrestling a brown bear into captivity. Noah, indeed, was in poor humor after a hundred years of butterfly chasing, grunion hunting, and peeking under various tails. But somehow he got them all together and crammed into the Ark.

What a zoo! As if the stench of the place wasn’t bad enough, Noah was soon to discover that hungry tigers and wolves, for instance, don’t cohabit well at all with fat yummy ducks, for instance. Also, rabbits and rats and many of the lower animals were very fruitful and multiplificate, though not quite so proliferate as the fleas, flies, mites, ticks, tapeworms, and mosquitoes. Giraffes, even in dry dock, were seasick around the clock. Poor Noah’s manifest included a hypertensive sloth with the hots for a spider monkey, a hyena with insomnia, and a Tasmanian Devil whose idea of a good time was to sneak up and scare the daylights out of him.

For a whole week the Ark remained grounded while The Lord aggregated hydrogen and oxygen molecules into a great liquid atmosphere. Making rain is no quick trick, and God was beginning to think it would be just as tough to destroy life as to create it, when the seventh day passed and the deluge began.

--Captain Noah--

For forty days and forty nights it rained cats and dogs, and everybody was perfectly miserable, what with the cold and damp and the howling and braying. Noah, who was a ripe 600 years old, suffered through the constant sniffling and aching joints with the quiet humility of a willing dupe.

And still it rained. And rained and rained. The sodden Ark was borne up and drifted out on the face of the waters; up, up, fully fifteen cubits above the land. Naturally, every living thing on dwindling Terra was exterminated, and for weeks the water was littered with the carnage of fowl and cattle and creepy things. But old Noah and his brood just drifted on, week after week, month after month, futilely searching the horizon while resolutely accepting their dreary fate.

Meanwhile The Lord was busy hanging new lights in the firmament of the heavens, amusing Himself by flicking away bits of energy to create comets, playing a sort of cosmic tiddly-winks with galactic matter.

After tooling around the heavens for a few months He remembered Noah and Co. bobbing around down here, so He turned off the tap and blew away the clouds to see if anything was left.

Sure enough, there was Noah, soaked to the bone and still scraping the Ark’s rank mushy deck; a creaky old codger given to mumbling and grumbling and the scratching of imaginary bites.

The Lord got busy right away, but it took Him over ten months to blot up most of the mess. The Ark got stuck on Mount Ararat when the earth finally dried to its present paradisiacal state.

--God Makes An Announcement--

Seeing His work was Good, The Lord told everybody to pile out and multiply.

And the entire menagerie wobbled, pitched, and staggered off the Ark, old Noah and his dung-crusted spade dragging the rear.

Noah, half-crazed, built an altar to God, then flipped out completely. He ran amok with his spade and barrow, slaughtering the clean beasts and fowl and barbecuing them on the altar.

“That does it,” said The Lord. “Here I’m stuck with nothing but dirty beasts and some old nut who’s a pain in the Holy Neck. But I can See what good it does trying to straighten things out. This time,” vowed the Great and All-forgiving God Almighty, “I won’t curse the ground or pick on these puny living things. Noah, I bless you and your boys and grant you the right to eat anything you want, excluding relatives.”

With The Lord’s blessing, Shem, Ham, and Larry took their wives to town and started bonking like crazy.

--Noah Ties One On--

Meanwhile Noah, with time on his hands and grieving his lost occupation, husbanded the first vineyard. He mastered the art of wine-making and whooped it up by himself in his tent all night. There is some uncertainty about Noah’s activities during that night-long bacchanalia, but in the morning a shocked Ham found his father naked and out like a light. Shem and Larry then put a cloak over their father, for a buck-naked 601 years-old man in a drunken coma is not a pretty sight. Noah woke hung over and in a terrible mood. Since Canannan, his grandchild by Ham, had absolutely nothing to do with covering him up and enraging him so, Noah put a curse on the boy and doomed him to familial servitude. The Lord was delighted to see that old Noah still had his sense of humor, and left him alone in his tent with his booze and his funky spade. The common ancestor of all winos, Noah clung to his shattered existence for another 350 years, finally passing away in withered, sniveling ignominy.

--The Plot Sickens--

The generations passed rapidly, and it became pretty obvious that man was here to stay. Already he could postulate sillily, dance like the dickens, and carry on rudimentary conversations. And boy, could he come up with some wild names for his kids! Some of Larry’s children were stuck with real doozies, like Magog, Dodanim, Ashkenaz, and Togarmah--Yeah!--while Ham, not to be outdone, was responsible for beauties such as Phut, Cush (and of course poor Canaan, the family fall guy), and indirectly responsible for gems like Asshur and Rehoboth.

--SRO--

Now, coprolalia is no laughing matter, but in practically no time the whole planet was inundated, and this phonetic awkwardness had evolved to a fine art form.

And everybody journeyed to the east and settled in Shinar.

Why?

That old, obsolete Bible doesn’t tell us why, but The Great And Marvelous Lord God Almighty demands it be noted in The Book Of Ron that, when He sincerely tried to fine tune the aimlessly milling multitude in Shinar, everybody at noon abruptly stopped and said to one another in unison: “Go to, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly.”

God wanted to be sick.

And everybody suddenly had the same bright idea: they would build a tower to heaven, which was a mere 205,000⁶⁵⁵ light years distant. God came down to check out this latest act of mortal lunacy and, Almightily embarrassed, scattered ’em all right back out of Shinar and splintered their common language.

--One More Try--

Now, it’s true that everybody so far had turned out to be a holy flop, but The Lord was a diehard at Heart, and firm in His belief that someone out there wasn’t beyond help. So it was that, after glumly watching a few more generations of humans breed, The Lord started looking about for a ripe pigeon. He picked Abram, son of Terah, and promised him celebrity and protection if he would only ditch his family, country, and home.

That all sounded pretty good to Abram. So Abram took his nephew Lot and his shapely wife Sarai and they headed for Canaan.

In Canaan Abram built an altar to God, then traveled to a mountain east of Bethel, where he built another. Abram had the situation pegged. The Lord was crazy about altars. Sensing he was on a roll, Abram continued south, but ran into a famine which forced him to cool it on the altar-building and head for Egypt.

This posed a huge problem for wayfaring Abram.

He was about to confront one of the great trials that hit men who marry for looks.

You see, Sarai was a real corker. And Abram was hip enough to the Egyptian brand of testosterone to realize that, once they got a gander, his goose would be cooked.

Abram managed to pass off sweet Sarai as his sister, which meant Pharaoh could get his greasy elite paws on her common luscious beauties without having to disembowel wily egocentric Abram first. The plan worked out perfectly. Abram got the royal treatment in exchange for his toots: servants, sheep, oxen, and even asses!

The sly old fox! He comes into Egypt a vagabond, pawns off his hot little honey to the high muckety-muck, and next thing you know he’s related to the richest guy in town. Lord knows, literally speaking, which of the many feminine plagues lovely Sarai brought upon the house of Pharaoh, but Pharaoh did what any obscenely rich guy would do and sent her packing, Abram and Lot in tow.

--The Continuing Adventures Of Abram--

Now Abram was loaded. He’d come out of the Egyptian affair a rich man; with cattle, with gold and silver.

He, Lot, and the oh-so comely Sarai returned to Abram’s mountain altar.

Both Abram and Lot had so many tents, flocks, and herds that there wasn’t enough land to support them all, which caused their respective herdsmen to have a falling-out. Abram and Lot decided to divvy the place up between them--Lot taking the Sodom side and Abram taking the Canaan side.

Abram knew which side his bread was buttered on.

Sensing a touch of mortal competition, Abram wasted no time. He settled in the plain of Mamre and built an altar pronto.

--Slimepits And Shoelatchets--

Worse even than to want is to have. Abram was finding out that, just as the Egyptians coveted Sarai’s gorgeous goodies, so his new neighbors had an eye on his garish goods. Smiters smote, folks got carried away, arrogant little humans set precedents everywhere. After the dust had settled, Abram was richer than ever and the friend of kings. God was certainly making good on His end of the deal.

--After The Lovin’--

But time was catching up with Abram, who now found himself in the grip of some pretty wild hallucinations. He went star-tripping with God, Who, ever the Showman, got off on tearing live animals in half for His and Abram’s amusement. This went on all day long until the night came and Abram crashed, for some reason paranoid of the dark…SomeBody must have slipped him Something. He dreamt of God talking to him about what great good buddies they were, and about all the blessings that were to come to the progeny of God’s favorite little altar builder. Abram woke to more hallucinations, this time to some supercreepy visions of smoking furnaces and burning lamps. He was in no mood for altars.

--The Old And The Restless--

Things were swinging in the house of Abram. With Sarai’s blessing he got it on with her Egyptian handmaid Hagar. Everybody got bent out of shape when Hagar got knocked up, and Hagar felt horrible. She took off into the wilderness. So Good Old God of course put a curse on her. It was a doozie. Hagar was doomed to perpetual childbirth and to submission to kinky Sarai. So it came to pass that, at the age of 86, virile but burnt-out Abram had Hagar bear him a wild young boy. This was Ishmael.

--The Agony And The Agony--

Thirteen years passed.

Now Abram, even though he was only 99, was no spring chicken. He tended to laugh at inappropriate times, and was constantly falling on his face. God was not amused. He made poor Abram walk in front of Him, demanding perfection every step of the way. But down went Abram again, flat on his face. The Lord took umbrage. There was just no way to get the bugs out of these recalcitrant little humans, no matter how hard you trained them, no matter how well they were rewarded. So God decided to make an example of Abram. He picked him up and dusted him off, renamed him Abraham, and cursed the old man into stud service. Abraham just laughed and fell on his face. God’s rage was immense, but His sense of humor was indomitable. He had to come up with something really, really, really good. And He did! He decided--now get this--to order every boy be--it’s difficult to be delicate here--every boy have his...that is to say, have his member, if you can believe it...sliced away around the head! Old Abraham just fell on his face, laughing insanely. But he wasn’t so senile he didn’t fear The Great and Kindly Lord’s wrath. Abraham got his blade and went to town, slicing like the Devil was after him. He even went under the knife himself. These were some pretty gory times, and God was pleased.

--XXX--

Incest, drunkenness, and a general good time were had by all. Sarai, renamed Sarah, caught Abraham’s laughing disease, but was still canny enough to appreciate the power of denial. The couple were now senior citizens, and Abraham was way too far gone to fulfill God’s stud curse. He did, however, love his wine. So The Lord sent a couple of Lot’s horny daughters into Abraham’s tent to get him wasted and laid and give curvaceous Sarah a giggle or two. I won’t go into details (you can read it yourself!) but, man, those were the days.

--The Sucker Trade--

Abraham now pulled the old Pharaoh trick again. He went south and passed Sarah off as his sister to king Abimelech (no kidding) of Gerar (no kidding!). Even though the king didn’t score, cunning Abraham got sheep, oxen, a thousand pieces of silver, servants, and Sarah back! You don’t have to teach an old dog new tricks.

--Gall In The Family--

At an even 100 years old, with a little help from God, Sarah birthed another boy, named Isaac, by Abraham. Eight days later, slipping in and out of reality, old Abe pulled out his trusty mutilation knife and got to business while Sarah watched, shrieking with hilarity. But she stopped laughing soon enough: once little Isaac was weaned, he began mocking her for not being his true mom; Isaac, you’ll remember, was a product of Abe’s and Hagar’s whoopee-making. Sarah, seeing red, made Abraham kick out Hagar and their love child. Fearing he’d be seen as a bad provider, Abraham rummaged through all his gold and silver and masses of wealth, finally settling on good old, practical bread and water. He heaped kid, bread, and water on poor Hagar’s shoulders, and kicked her out into the wilderness.

--The Ghoulies--

Sarah finally died at well over a hundred; Abe hung on until the big one-seven-five. Even so, after he’d buried Sarah, he still had enough in him to remarry and sire six more kids! When at last he croaked, Isaac and brother Ishmael buried him in a cave, then dug him up and reburied him!

The gazillion-year spate of boredom was irrevocably dissolved!

God had created an insane and irrepressibly horny playground for generations to come. Millions would beget billions! There would never be a dull moment, not with a whole planet of selfish, uninspired, greedy clones at each others’ throats. He foresaw cell phones and low riders, televangelists and garage bands, tailgate jocks and clopping, shamelessly-public pregnant soccer moms in spandex and heels. Fatcats and posers and pop stars and pinheads and oh God, oh God, was it ever Goo-oo-ood!

--Thus Endeth The Book Of Ron--

I haveth an almighty headache, and mine Merciful God doth grant me a break. So I riseth now, layeth down mine quill, and slammeth shut The goddamn Book Of Ron. Unto The Lord’s people I goeth, that they may worship their Master’s Word. Fall flat on thine faces, ye sheep, and bless yourselves, your loved ones, and the innumerable sons of all your crucifix-hawkers to be.
It can only get lamer, for the slaughterhouse is boundless and the Worm is on the rise.

And our Wise, Witty, and Wonderful Shepherd hath all the time in the world.