Shot Jot
Firing quills from a gun, a most holy poem
Lock, Stock, and Duckstack
Do you ever look up at the sky at night, at the stars, and ask what it is? Some believe them to be burning balls of fire millions of miles away. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, since space is a vacuum and fire needs oxygen to live1. Others think stars are the souls of the righteous, who have ascended up and turned into burning balls of fire millions of miles away. This also doesn’t make sense to me, because how would they get there? You can’t use wings to fly in space, because there’s no oxygen. Rockets? I don’t think spirits have rockets.
Others propose the stars out there are eldritch alien eyeballs peeking into our reality to stare at us. This makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. If you were an eldritch alien, wouldn’t you do that too? Earth is super interesting. Way more interesting than mars or whatever, which is mostly rocks. Earth has, for example, oxygen. Lets hope the aliens don’t want any of that!
Another theory is that stars are ducks. While there is no evidence to support this, a sufficiently stubborn individual cannot practically be convinced otherwise. In this framework, space is something ducks just swim around in, upside down, living a life of ease and comfort. I find this more leisurely model to be far more pleasant to think about than burning balls of fire millions of miles away, and thus flatly superior. This would also explain the origin of the universe, which burning fireball theory doesn’t relate to. Under duck theory, the ducks were tightly wound in a stack, some might call a duck stack, and that elastic tension caused them to rocket away from each other, in an event that duckstrologers call “The Duck Bang”
Duckstack Shopping: Baby Blanket
No babies were harmed in the making of this blanket
We have here the safest blanket known to man. This blanket is made of lightweight cotton, instead of bricks, and can be thrown on and off even by tiny hands. This blanket can fold and unfold without creasing, and cannot be bitten in half.
These baby blankets are designed with safety in mind, and contain no gunpowder, arsenic, bleach2, or nitroglycerin. They are nonsentient, and have no claws, fangs, or stingers. These blankets are 100% natural, created on earth, and are not known to burst into flame or to ascend into the sky where they become giant burning balls of fire. These blankets do not fly, they do not eat or drink, and do not harden when threatened.
If this isn’t enough to convince you, just check out that price tag- for only $40,000, one of these blankets can be yours. That’s four easy payments of $10,000, and you could have your own Duckstack Baby Blanket, safe for the little one. You want your little one to be safe, don’t you?
Suffer the Sinner
(menacingly:) “God is Love”
The Bible says God can get angry, which a lot of people think means he can pretend to get angry in a sort of symbolic sense. The Bible also says God is love, and I think a lot of people are reductive about that part too. If you will bear with me, I also think God can be a little bit sadistic. I find a lot of comfort in that.
I don’t just mean the parables of Jesus where he appears to take some sort of pleasure in speaking over people’s heads, or his smug reprisal to the woman at the well, or the way he would string people along with bread and fishes and then when they came back hungry he gave a lecture instead. I hesitate to label him a provocateur, but he was definitely a bit of a troll. And I think this is perfectly in line with his character and mission, to unravel the true desires in the hearts of mankind. Because how can you save someone if you can’t first save them from themself3? If there’s to be any chance of a prideful person repenting, they first have to start being honest with themselves, that’s how I see it.
When my son was dying of cancer, I found a lot of the standard religious offerings to be inadequate. I guess it doesn’t really make sense unless you’re going through it and you’re reaching desperately for some meaning, any meaning, somewhere. I knew about heaven. I knew about the resurrection of the dead. I knew where my son was going. I knew pain was a part of life. What I didn’t have was a specific why for my case, and in the middle of that I thought that perhaps least painful thing God could have said to me at that point was “I just wanted to see what you would do.”
I’m sure God, and my son, negotiated many, many different purposes for his life and death to have in the world. If anything God is an excellent orchestrator. But when you’re being stung over, and over again, It Doesn’t Feel Like Love. That’s what I’m getting at. Maybe its nice to be able to say “yeah, it actually is deliberate. Sorry.”
When we say God is Love, we’re thinking of a perfect love, usually in such a theoretical way that “by definition its incomprehensible to us”. But I don’t think God intends to be incomprehensible, I think that’s the whole point of sending Jesus. Life eternal is knowing God, and how are you supposed to do that if you can’t? When Christ said God is his Father, and our Father4, he’s implying a certain kind of relationship- and a certain kind of Love.
At church last week they had a lesson where they were making some analogy about God’s love, and they said “You as a parent, if you see your child hurt isn’t it your first reaction to comfort the child?” In a sort of “how much more than shall your Father in Heaven, who is perfect” do so type lesson. And I had to give pause, and I thought about my toddler, who I love quite dearly and authentically and aspirationally, and I thought: When my child gets hurt, my first reaction is usually I Told You So.
That got a lot of laughs from the class there, but there’s probably a real metaphor here. Our toddler has a rather exceptional ability to shrug off pain, which is a massive double edged sword because that will be really useful later in life and is absolutely terrifying to us as parents right now. And one of his problems is that he tries to get away with stuff for example head diving off of the couch. And if we tell him no and he survives anyway, he gets emboldened! It is a huge issue, and its like, if he isn’t going to learn from me he is going to have to learn from the school of “hard knocks” as they say. But its way better for him to get hurt early after breaking the rules than it is for him to get more and more wild, because the scale of damage potential to himself is just going to keep going up.
Its this way with sin too, of course. A person determined to get away with sinning usually can, and that usually comes with compounding consequences for a bill that always comes due, either for themselves or onto others. Hence the scripture: “Whom God Loveth, he chasteneth5”. Sometimes God is a little bit sadistic. Could that be a little comforting sometimes? Maybe.
History
Bee stingless history
We gave the toddler a piece of cake and he was like “Oh no, a big cake!” and then my wife cut it for him and he was like “Oh, there’s my little cake!”
The toddler is developing a very sad wail. After I started the car he wailed “nooo we need a mama!” and then a different day mama started the care and he did the same thing, “nooo we need a papa!” Its nice that he thinks families should be together.
The baby girl has started smiling and giggling. She especially likes it when you make nonsense noises at her, and she will make nonsense noises right back- but she won’t do this if you baby talk to her, it has to be actual baby talk.
Eggoscopes
We will never practice fowl witchcraft such as eggomancy. But we at the Duckstack are more than happy to pretend to predict the future through blatant pseudoscience6. What’s in store for your eggs? Lets find out!
Chicken Egg - If your egg type is chicken egg, a meal is in your future. Be careful of predators, and make sure to try a little salt and pepper for optimal seasoning.
Duck Egg - Ducks don’t lay eggs. Ducks are delivered by storks. Take measures against fraud.
Goose Egg - Take some time to relax and heal. Greater than normal compatibility with Chicken eggs this week! You’ll feel better in no time.
Hard Boiled Egg - Your shell is going to get picked at from all directions, and there is nothing you can do about it. None.
Ostrich Egg - Larger than life, what are you going to do with yourself? Perhaps you should charge money for appearances.
Golden Egg - You are desirable. Watch out for small green men and rainbows. Easter is your friend.
Ducksnax
Trick
♣♥♣♥♣♥ Previous Duckstack ♣♥♣♥♣♥
Or whatever it is that fire does
If desired, bleach can be added later, in the comforts of your own home, to get stains out. This voids the warranty
Moses 1:39 For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.
And Christ’s God, and your God, etc
Hebrews 12:6For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
Unlike Eggomancy, which is real science. I guess.