Arnold J. Putterman vs. the World

Arnold J. Putterman was feeling good today. He jumped from his bed, anxious to meet the new day. His immediate supervisor, Mr. Krelman, had finally given him the long awaited promotion to CPA, second grade at the firm of Stemson Accounting. This, of course, meant more money and a better desk. But, more importantly, it meant he would immediately receive a heightened respect from his boss, his coworkers, his wife and, especially, his mother.
His mother often made thinly veiled remarks about his ambition and abilities. Once she said, “You know, your brother Arthur was a First Class by the time he was 27.”
But what bothered Arnold the most were the snotty little remarks from some of his coworkers. Sometimes they reminded him that he had been at same desk for 6 years.
“Still here Putterman?” Johnson said knocking on his desk like it was a door.
Sometimes Johnson and others would make fun of his clothes. While Arnold was a fairly good accountant, he was a terrible dresser – maybe the worst. It wasn’t that his clothes were cheap or ragged, they weren’t. It’s just that Arnold had exactly no sense of pattern or color relationships let alone any concept of tone, hue or value. It was as if his vision were missing a part of the spectrum, like color blindness.
This morning, after his daily shower, Arnold felt exuberant. This morning he would not be swayed by his wife’s opinions or, for that matter, anyone else’s. Today he would wear all of his favorite clothes to celebrate victory over his enemies and detractors; over everyone who doubted him. Today was Arnold J. Putterman’s victory over the world!
He stood at the front of his closet and took stock. This was a collection he had personally picked out and valued. This was more him than anything else – unadulterated by the noisy opinion of others.
First, he pulled his favorite burnt-orange, polyester dress shirt with the pink paisleys. Paisleys always reminded him of the sixties and seventies, a time he wanted to celebrate but he had been too constricted and shy to join in. Next he selected the pale blue wool pants with the little squiggle pattern running the length of the legs. Then the tri-colored belt form Jamaica. Arnold would have gone to Jamaica himself but flying always made him nauseous. Next was his favorite diamond-patterned argyle socks. He loved the way the yellows and browns looked against his white legs. Then his slipped on his two-toned Florsheim “Executive Model” shoes, “Probably the finest shoes in the world.” He thought.
For a second he thought he heard some unfamiliar, low hum. “It must be freeway noise.” He thought.
Now, it’s time for his jacket that he bought at Target especially for his nephew’s wedding. It was a dark blue and red plaid that always made him feel like a swinger; like a mover and shaker; like a Dude. He slipped on the jacket and immediately received a loud crackled shock.
“Ow!”, he yelped, jumping back a step. He looked around. “It must be static from the carpet.” The hum had become louder. “Probably Audrey was using the microwave again.”
He was nearly ready. Time to accessorize. He took his favorite handkerchief from the drawer. It had a western theme with a silhouette of a cowboy and his horse riding away with the setting sun behind them. As he folded and tucked it into his jacket pocket, he thought he felt a rumble through the floor.
“God, this neighborhood is getting noisy.” He said out loud. “Another promotion and we are moving to Ridgecrest on the east side where the successful people live.”
And now, finally, the tie. He already knew which it would be. It had a gold and green pattern based on a computer-based fractal design. It featured repeating organic swirls that grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared. He got the tie at an electronic gadget convention last year but hadn’t summoned the nerve to wear it until now.
He wrapped the tie into a double-wrapped Windsor knot that he had learned from a Playboy magazine style section when he was a teenager. He knew that was a sophisticated way to finish off his ensemble.
The moment he pulled the knot tight, the background hum and rumble ceased. The room grew oddly quiet. He held his breath. He had the uncomfortable feeling like he was standing on the very edge of a thousand-foot cliff. Then there was something. A rustle? A buzz? The hum, barely audible, began to return even louder than before. The very air began vibrating. The rumble rose quickly like large dump trucks were circling the house. Fine little bolts of blue lightening jumped from his tie to his jacket. The fleur-di-lis flocking on the wallpaper began to crawl around the walls with a life of their own.
“Aaaaahhhh!” Arnold cried for no reason other than fear and confusion. “Aaaahhh!” He could hear other voices screaming from outside the room. He yelled yet again but no one could hear him now over the roaring turmoil.
The room was swirling now. The world outside was disassembling. Mountains shattered into paisley shaped pieces. Planets cracked into fantastical squiggly slivers. The air itself split into fractal patterns that arced toward the epicenter of Arnold’s tie.
As Arnold himself began to loose consciousness his own atoms were imploding in on themselves in red and blue plaid patterns. Before he and the world and the universe and everything sucked into itself like water down a drain, one last image came to Arnold J. Putterman’s mind. He saw a silhouette of himself with a large cowboy hat riding a silhouetted horse into the sunset; head held high and proud, victorious over the world.

Billy Goes to Heaven, Part 2

(*Note – You may want to begin with Part #1 below)

As God and I began our tour of Heaven I had to find out more while I had the chance.
“Here’s something I always wondered about: pain, struggle and death. What’s that all about?” This was going to be interesting
“There were two ways to do this, as usual.” He said. “I could create all of you in a constant state of bliss, telling me how great I am. But that gets boring really fast. So, I chose the other. I allowed all of you to work it out on your own. Much more interesting don’t you think?”
We were drawing closer to a series of strange mountains; each a different color and each shaped roughly the same, like huge mounds.
“So you’re saying we have free will? We can make our own choices?” I continued.
“Oh sure. You can do what you want. It’s just that having created the bow, the arrow, the wind and the target, I know exactly what’s going to happen every time.”
“Wait a minute.” I said, “You can’t know everything. You can’t know the path of every drop of water, every bug, every human whim, every nutty move someone might make.”
He smiled smugly, "Of course I can. I’m God. I created all of this. To be more accurate, I am all of this. Everything that is going on is Me going on.”
Now I had him, “You can’t know that I was going to do this.” I said . Quickly I swung the palm of my hand up to dope-slap myself on the forehead. His hand hit his forehead at exactly the same time as mine. I made a face at Him. I screwed my mouth up to one side and squinched one eye closed and made an um-mum-mum sound like I was gagging. But he was in my face with exactly the same expression only with an exact copy of my own face like a mirror image. A couple of seconds later he morphed back to his own face.
“Pretty good don’t you think?” he said.
As we approached the hills I noticed that they resembled huge mile-high piles with no trees or structures.
“These are the seven hills of heaven.” He said proudly.
They were each of a different color and texture. One was brown, one multi-colored, one gleaming silver, bronze and gold and one, amazingly, was completely translucent and sparkling. They all looked somehow familiar but I couldn’t identify why. He pointed to the brown one.
“This is Mount Wallet. It’s all of the lost wallets, purses and moneybags. That colored one is Sock hill."
I caught myself slack-jawed again.
“That silver one,” He continued, “is Key Hill. This is where they end up. That beautiful one is Glass Mountain. Millions of contact lenses and spectacles, one each. That orange one is Mount Pencil. We get a lot of those. There’s Loose Change Mountain and that smaller one is T.V. Remote Hill. It’s pretty new.”
“I don’t understand. Where did this all come from?”
God looked down and replied in a soft voice, “There are still some wrinkles in the space/time continuum. And for some reason they act like tiny black holes. They settle into places like the hidden corners of clothes dryers and sofas and desk drawers and glove compartments. So, this is all of the stuff that humans have lost over the eons. We’ve got a pair of Ben Franklin’s spectacles and Einstein’s door key. Actually, we have several of those, and, one of Cleopatra’s socks. Hey, who knew? We even have the key to Pandora’s Box. Too bad she didn’t lose it a little sooner.”
He was obviously proud of his collection.
“I have one more thing to show you.”
He led me down some stone steps into a dark underground, lit only by oil torches. We descended into a dank, rather large hall full of almost identical little men with long wisps of scraggly, white hair and smudged white robes. They were all laboring over little candlelit desks with parchment and quill pens, mumbling to themselves. They appeared to have been there for ages.
“This is They.” He announced waving toward the room.
“They? What do you mean, they?” Yet another puzzle.
“You’ve heard ‘ they say; a stitch in time saves nine’? Well, this is They.”
I leaned closer to one of the little men and listened.
“A rolling stone gathers no lichens.” He said under his breath as he looked to the ceiling for inspiration. “No, no, that’s not it” He continued, “Let’s see, a rolling rock gathers no moss. No, no, no” he muttered in frustration.
I said to no one in particular, “ I always wondered where all that stuff came from.”
We returned to the surface where a table was waiting for us complete with lunch.
“You know God, I have just realized that if I had designed the universe, it wouldn’t have turned out nearly as interesting as this.”
God looked pleased as we began eating.
“This pizza is terrific.” I said. “What kind is it?”
God smiled and said, “Polish . . . with chocolate sprinkles.”

Billy Goes to Heaven, Part 1

Something was wrong. I was either having a strange dream or I was not in my bed anymore. I opened my eyes to see that my bedroom ceiling had been replaced by the open sky. I jumped up to find I had been sleeping in a grassy field in an unidentified countryside. It was rather generic; mountains, trees in the distance; no buildings.
“How the hell did I get here? Who kidnapped me? Why?” I thought to myself.
“Questions, questions.” A voice declared from behind me.
I jumped about a foot off the ground and spun around to see a very small man – a little person with slightly bowed legs and very stubby fingers. He was wearing rough tan leather with uneven fringes and an odd little cap. The overall effect was slightly Robin Hoodish and a little preposterous.
“What, what did you say? How did you know what I was thinking?” It all spilled out of me in a stream.
“Questions, questions – always with the questions.” He said with a little smile. “First, a question for you. What did you eat before you went to bed last night?”
“What did I eat last night?” It seemed a very silly thing to ask. “Well, I had a Polish style pizza with kielbasa slices, sour kraut, sliced pepperoccinis and havarti cheese.”
He tilted his head slightly, “And a few chocolate sprinkles?”
“Well, yes, a few chocolate sprinkles.” I wondered how he knew.
“You are a very sick man, you know.” He said. “If you eat that unlikely combination of foods before going to bed, you will end up in heaven for awhile. It’s a glitch in the universe that I haven’t ironed out yet.” He shook his head.
“What do you mean you haven’t ironed it out yet? Who are you? This was getting crazier and crazier.
“Well,” he looked straight into my eyes, “I am God”.
I assumed the slack-jawed glazed-eye look.
“You are God? But you are just a little guy.”
He shook his head again and rolled his eyes. “Oh God, you humans are so dense sometimes. What exactly did you expect? The Wizard of OZ?”
“Well, something a bit more incredible, uh, amazing, uh . . .”
“Dramatic?” He said finishing my sentence.
“Yes, dramatic.” I brightened.
“OK,” He said, “How about this?”
And with that he disappeared right in front of my eyes with an audible “pop”. I then heard a low rumble in the distance and looked up to see boiling, black clouds rolling around the distant hills toward me. In moments the wind picked up as lightening and thunder shot out of the rapidly advancing turmoil. It moved at amazing speed and in moments I was fighting to keep my footing in the howling storm. A huge, ominous voice came from all around me, “How’s this?” it boomed.
I was hanging on to a tree and was beginning to worry.
“Is this dramatic enough?” the voice howled.
“Ok, ok I believe you. Please stop,” I cried
Instantly the storm was gone. I fell to the ground. The little man was sitting in the same spot as before. I tried to catch my breath.
“Humans only respond to Cecil B. DeMille,” he said.
“So you’re telling me you are God? The one, great God?"
“Something like that. It can get complicated but, yes, I am He of whom you speak.”
“That’s fantastic.” My mind raced. “Can I ask you some questions?”
“Well, I saw that coming.” His eyes rolled slightly. “Go for it.”
“Well, uh, I mean, ah, what’s the answer to the universe?” I figured I’d better go for the big one while I have the chance.
“What’s the answer?” He looked a little surprised. “I thought you would ask the question before you get an answer.”
“Well, I mean, what’s it all for?” I pressed.
“For awhile. Look, as a sentient being, I can’t just sit around twiddling my thumbs for eternity. If you do nothing, you’re dead. I desired complexity. So, I did this,” He motioned his arms around at our surroundings. “this and everything else; atoms, people, fungus, planets, cremuloids, meteors. . .”
“Cremuloids?” I blurted.
“That’s another story.” He said. “Hey.” He said, brightening, “Would you like to see the rest of heaven?”
“Of course.” I answered and we began to walk.

Father Knows Best

"Trying to eliminate Saddam .. would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq ...there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

Bush, George Sr. and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998