Waterlog
Adrift a rootbeer sea, this ship in a bottle was placed prematurely
Readers, we have a big announcement on The Duckstack! We are pleased to welcome our newest guest contributor: bobdaduck! bobdaduck is a surrealist, a pepper, a duck, and a saint. Incredible. Say hello!
As part of this week’s letter, we’ll be featuring a never-before-seen interview with him, to help our readers get to know him better. From now on, he will regularly make minor contributions to the newsletter.
Drowning (good)
Brigham Young tried to inculcate a love of persecution in the saints12, and many other prophets have said similar things3 . It is a law laid out in the D&C4 that trials are a time for us to prove our faithfulness to God, to think “I’m being tested” and show him what you’re made of. I have started re-reading the Book of Mormon, and it is somehow even more poignant than it has been in the past, and I tell you the Book of Mormon’s poignancy has not historically been a thing to be trifled with! It seems the older I get the more acquainted I am with evil, and the more acquainted I am with righteous modes of living, and this causes yet another color of backlight to click into place and turn on beneath the pages, causing new meanings to fountain up like reverse matrix code5. I cherish every time the rippling sheet beneath me brings me up high enough that I can see over the eternal hill and catch a glimpse of the mind of God and it is such that even in the midst of trials one cannot help but shout “halleluiah”.
I tell you, I have never in all my decades of praying known God to refuse a plea for mercy. And God rebukes me often, but these never come with the self-loathing sting of normal beratement. When God tells you you suck, it gives you hope. Why wouldn’t you sing praises to him? A testimony isn’t an on/off switch, it is a portfolio of exactly such moments6, and, if maintained, brings you to the point where when God tells you he’ll take care of something, you actually do relax from the comfort of the promise. The early saints had this kind of faith-life, because the early saints had that kind of trials. Climb to God, to where he’s involved in your life, to where your mission wasn’t the last time you were seeing the hand of God daily, and being taken care of exclusively by him, and you will see it too.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
Duckstack: Hey bob, glad to have you here today.
bobdaduck: Its good to be here, Duckstack.
Duckstack: Now correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re a duck, correct?
bob: I am watching the spiders, I am watching their webs.
D: Umm, what? That’s great, but that doesn’t really answer…
b: The spiders come, the spiders do what spiders do, if you are naughty they’ll come for you, spinning heedless of your plight, hissing venom from the skies. You can see, but they see more, for yours are two, and theirs are four.
D: That’s… Kind of creepy. Also whatever you are saying I think spiders have eight sets of pretty much everything, not four.
b: You can see, but they see more, for yours are two, and theirs are eight.
D: Ohhhkay. So… Are you a duck?
b: yea I’m totally a duck
D: How did you choose your pen-name?
b: When I was five my dad would make a joke of telling me every animal’s name is bob. One day at a stoplight a duck was crossing the road; the duck was being careful to stick to the crosswalk and had waited for the light to turn red. My dad said: “Look, its bob the duck!”. Later, I wanted to make a lego.com account to play some sick games, and needed a username. It was kind of off the cuff, you know? Kind of on a whim? I didn’t really think about it much. It just kind of happened. I didn’t mean it, there was no malice in it, it was just the thing I happened to think of. I’m so sorry. And now I’m stuck with it, and I’ve been bobdaduck ever since, and I can never change it, ever.
D: I’m pretty sure you can, actually.
b: spiderrrrs
D: Alrighty. I think we’re just about out of time here, is there anything you want to tell the audience?
b:
D: I mean something that isn’t about spiders.
b: I’m pretty sure nobody checks your signature at banks, there’s nothing stopping you from drawing a nice little stick figure mural on the pad when you cash checks and stuff.
D: Well there you have it folks, we’re glad to welcome bobdaduck to The Duckstack! If you have any questions for bobdaduck, feel free to ask in the comments.
b: spiderrrsssssssss
Water
My wife has a hydration virus on her phone. Eight times a day, it rings and tells her she needs to drink water and she can’t figure out how to get rid of it or how it got there. This is all a conspiracy by Big Water to sell more water, of course. They say the human body is 80% water, but I think this is silly, because you can’t hit water with a hammer. It seems to me that anyone with eyes can see a better estimate would be the human body is 80% meat. We don’t even need water. Mummies don’t drink hardly any and seem to get on just fine.
Myself, I subsist almost entirely on juice and milk. But do they tell me that I’m 80% juice? Absurd. I will grant however, after watching my baby's appetite, I *might* be willing to buy that my wife is 80% milk.
& the baby definitely is7.
HISTORY
I consider myself (falsely) to be quite the handyman - I mean, I put glue on things. As a handyman apprentice I used Elmer's glue, as a journeyman I started using super glue, and became a master when my wife showed me something called “epoxy”, which is gluier than glue, which I used to fix my car last year and it actually held up pretty well which is why I have such a high opinion of myself. Anyway, I was fixing my kids favorite monster truck toy which he had ripped in half, and the super glue tube sprung a leak and now my hands are coated in so much glue I could probably remove things from the oven bare-handed. It is like wolverine’s adamantine skeleton, except as an exoskeleton, except made of dried glue. This is the way things are. This is just life.
UPDATE: I molted, the superglue turned me from a duck into a snake, wow, disgusting.
UPDATE: I am a duck again.
Mission Musics
Like many missionaries, I was asked to take a vow of silence as part of my service, and seek to let no worldly music brush my ears but hymns8. Well, this had the effect of nurturing a strong appreciation for rap music in me, as in the ghetto the stereo blaring from the cruisers and the alcoholic lawn parties were the only tunes I was exposed to, and, well, you learn to cope. An acquired taste by force, if you will. Anyway, here’s a song I love very much which wracks me with tender nostalgia every time I listen.
Here is another by the same which also pierces with accuracy.
“You can never kick this church downstairs, you can only kick it upstairs”
“Some say, “I do not like to do it, for we never began to build a Temple without the bells of hell beginning to ring.” I want to hear them ring again.” JD 8:355-56
President Nelson recently addressed BYU and told them if they weren’t being persecuted they were doing something wrong.
D&C 58:4 For after much tribulation come the blessings. Wherefore the day cometh that ye shall be crowned with much glory; the hour is not yet, but is nigh at hand.
I really doubt online or virtual scriptures do this. Caveman tech.
@JesseLucasSaga first said this to my knowledge.
He came out a doughboy and then he became a milk monster
like hearing music isn’t sin its just a lot of missionaries in my particular mission were listening to Five Finger Death Punch’s “Jekyll and Hyde” and calling it spiritually uplifting but obviously they didn’t actually care if it was or not so the president just set a motab only rule