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April 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:28
200 The God of Atheists Chapters 1-3 (Note: Explicit Content! Danger! Danger!)
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Good evening, good morning. I'm not sure what time of day you're listening to this.
This is podcast 200.
Yes, we've made it quite a long way from my first chitter-chatter in the car.
I guess it was November of last year.
So, in about six months, we have gone quite a journey.
There are 200...
Six months? Yeah, maybe?
Something like. We have gone quite a ways.
I certainly appreciate you coming this far in the journey.
I am actually cheating a little.
I'm going to do podcast 200 a little bit early because...
I have decided, and I know this may sound like a minor vanity project, well, if not the whole thing sounds like a minor vanity project, but this part in particular, I have had some interest, I guess you could say, in my novels.
And you can, of course, buy Revolutions, which is a novel I wrote many years ago, but I still am very proud of.
I wrote it when I was about...
It was almost 15 years ago now.
I was about 25 when I wrote it.
Very pleased with it. I was very influenced by the Russian writers at the time.
So it is a historical novel.
Quite an exciting one about an anarchist and a wiser, older man who tries to help him focus his hair-trigger capacity for violence.
And it's a very interesting story, I think.
And I... You know, this always sounds like...
When you hear people say, somebody says to them, do you want to run for office?
And people say, well, you know, if enough people ask me to, I guess I would do it for them.
And so I hope it doesn't sound too much like that when I say that a number of people have asked me to let them know a little bit more about my novels.
So, Podcast 200...
It's going to start with a gift, and of course I've been talking about a gift for some time, and so I am going to tell you that the gift is that the novel that I'm going to read the first chapter or two of to you is available for free.
Free, free, free, for free.
There's nothing better than free, is there?
Okay, maybe a little hard drive space and a tiny little bit of bandwidth, but you'll be paying for that on your side, I'll just be paying for it on my side.
So, The free part is that you have this novel for free if you've already donated.
To freedomainradio.com.
This, I think, this one that I'm going to read to you a bit of, it's called The God of Atheists, and it is where I developed most of my theories about the family.
This is the novel that puts those theories into practice, and I worked out these theories in preparation for this novel.
So what you're hearing distilled in Freedomain Radio is sort of the thoughts that I'd put together just for this novel, and it's all very personal stuff.
A pretty universal and, I think, quite good story.
I'm actually quite proud of this as a plot situation.
Plot has never exactly been my strong suit.
I'm very much more into characters and ideas, as you can imagine.
But I was quite proud of the plot in this one.
And it's received some excellent reviews from people who are trying to get it published and so on.
So it may be available in a bookstore at some point.
But I thought it might be interesting for you, who are wonderful free-domain radio listeners, who have coughed up some cash, if I were able to give you something in return, and I did sort of promise something that I think is quality, it's going to engross you.
It's a big old chunk of text.
And I think it will be something that will be interesting for you to see just how the ideas that I've been talking about for the past couple of months can be displayed artistically.
I mean, there's lots to go into in terms of how you get ideas into the artistic realm, because this is where most people get their ideas from, is the artistic realm.
As I've always said, you deal with the philosophers, and then as the philosophers become popular, their ideas are transmogrified into art, And then from there, you can go in a number of different directions.
But one of the central problems that we have is the fact that art is not as well represented, I think, in the libertarian sphere.
You've got some science fiction. You've got, obviously, the brilliant novels of Ayn Rand.
But art as a whole, I think it's missing a little bit.
And I'd like to do my bit to contribute to that to whatever degree I can.
And I guess one of the things that's been missing for me in novels about freedom is that they tend to be somewhat absent of two things, and two things are somewhat related.
The first is that they tend to be somewhat absent of children.
I mean, you don't see a whole lot of children in novels about freedom.
You'll see some dystopian stuff, like if you read Lord of the Flies or something like that, you will see...
Some, I guess, novels about freedom that have children in them, but they're all about the loss of freedom.
Whereas I think that, to quote our good friend Whitney Houston, children are the future.
And I certainly believe that in terms of the youth and the freedom that they have to have not made the mistakes that we older folks have made.
And if they get the right ideas early enough, it can save them a whole lot of pain, heartache, and trouble, which I think would be great, and what a great thing to hand out.
So I think children... Are a little bit missing.
And I think that, for me, humanity in libertarian novels is just a little bit missing.
Humor and humanity.
Okay, three things missing.
Children, humanity, and humor.
Now, those are the things that I think grab people that the movement doesn't already appeal to.
So, I mean, if you're interested in science fiction and so on, then you're already going to have some exposure to different types of ideas and ideas of pure imagination and so on.
But I was sort of interested...
Wait, there's more!
Women! Or, you know, women...
I know that Ayn Rand writes a lot about women and so on, but she still has sort of the male protagonist, and I thought it would be interesting to have...
So I put sort of all these things together in The God of Atheists.
There's a lot of ways that I think that I could write a libertarian novel, or a novel about personal freedom, And so, two of the major characters are two little girls.
So, really, you know, it's important to write about what you know.
So, I guess I'm digging deep into my reincarnation matrix to come up with the solution to this, right?
So, I've tried to put some humor in.
I've tried to put some humanity in.
There's lots of children around.
And there are, yeah, what you could call women's issues and so on, or issues around female freedom.
And so I'm particularly proud about the way that I've managed to portray that.
It's never to my satisfaction because what's in your head versus what's on the paper is always you can spend the rest of your life trying to get that gap closed just in one novel.
You can almost work on every sentence until you go, basically you edit until you're just about to go insane and then you have to stop.
So, I hope that that has translated itself into the page.
So, I thought that for podcast 200, it might be fun to take a break from ideas and family examinations and so on.
And I did this once before with a novel that I was working on called Almost, but this is the one that I feel is ready for wider consumption.
And this is the one that I took a year and a half off to write after I sold my last company.
I took this time off and I worked away for four to five hours.
I have a Welcome to my show!
I'm going to crack the book wide, and I'm going to read to you the first chapter or two.
And to those who've donated already, I really, really hugely appreciate it.
And when we get to the end of this podcast, then I will talk to you, if I remember, if not, I'll do it in the morning, about how you can go about getting the book.
So I guess without any further ado, we're going to start with The God of Atheists by one Stefan Molyneux.
CHAPTER I JOANNE'S FAMILY When she was twenty-seven and feeling deep body hunger pangs for a baby, Joanne made a decision which won her two babies and lost her a husband.
Joanne worked in a bookshop.
It was dark, close to the university, and filled with tilting shelves and a dank, rotten smell, as if the words in the books were flesh and were decomposing with their authors.
Alder came into the bookstore one rainy afternoon, when the streets were quiet and wet, and Joanne was sitting behind the narrow counter, marking down back issues of Today's Parent.
He was short, freckled, and so pale she could almost see his skull, which was unsettling but strangely intimate.
He turned at the door, squinting out at the rain, and the cold light through the streaming glass poured rivulets down his thin body.
Joanne stared at him, then suddenly raised an eyebrow.
For the past year or so she had been glaring into the future, craving a family, and back into her past at her lack of preparation.
She had frittered and hooked up.
The wool needed to knit an infant together had not been gathered.
Day after day her thoughts went round and round.
Meet a man, like a man, date a man, keep a man, deepen a relationship with a man, three years equals thirty.
Marry a man, live with a man, not scare off a man with incessant baby talk, determine viability of marriage.
Four years equals thirty-four, plus nine months' pregnancy.
Almost thirty-five for the first one!
Almost eight years from coffee-shop hair-twirling to the wet and groaning birth-table.
I could have given birth at fourteen, she thought.
Twenty-one years later, if the right man comes along to-day, I might squeeze out bundle of joy numero uno.
Strange math ballooned in her head.
My mother had me when she was twenty-three.
Twenty-three years after my first period, I could have a child.
In her journal the day before she met Alder, Joanne had written, Problems with being between boyfriends in one's late twenties.
Availability of men seems inversely proportional to their fitness as fathers.
Potential fathers already married, otherwise unavailable, or simply elsewhere.
The men who remain are unable to commit, too oddly constituted to imagine settling down with, broke, ugly, unstable, unskilled, uneducated, unkind, unfaithful, dishonest, boring, needy, independent, addicted to something unsavory, otherwise unsuitable.
Joanne had sighed, chewing at her bitter pencil.
Some sort of underground movement had been going on, perhaps under her very nose.
It was hard to tell. Somewhere along the footloose path of her twenties, a series of neutron bombs had gone off.
Hot, hidden flashes had silently stolen marriageable men from circulation.
None of her own friends had settled down, or were particularly close.
Yet somehow the Alpha Fathers had been carried off anyway.
It was as if some sort of pre-feminist hole had opened up in the space-time continuum through which jewelled female arms had reached to pluck modern men into fifties marriages.
Joanne saw the evidence of this other world when she rode her bike from work through the annex, passed to the white globes of Palmerston, under the frowning peaks of the enormous houses.
She saw men in polo shirts, watering lawns, moving the neon detritus of children, or hand-washing sensible station wagons.
But these mansions always seemed to be inhabited by people of another age, somewhere in their forties, perhaps.
People the drug companies aimed vague commercials at.
People way outside her own cool demographic.
Men with careers, not just jobs, backpack travel stories, or endless hamster wheel degrees.
Men who saved money instead of collecting CDs.
Men who opposed excessive taxation instead of railing against corporate imperialism.
Men who actually bought furniture instead of just inheriting it.
Boring men, Joanne told herself, to avoid feeling sad.
When she was a little more honest, she thought,"'Boring perhaps, but they know how to provide and don't view commitment as a noose to be chewed through.' After she turned twenty-seven, Joanne could no longer imagine that this other world was populated by men and women infinitely older than herself.
Her imaginary age barriers were beginning to sag under the stretching claws of the crow's feet widening from her eyes.
The backs of her hands, too, seemed prematurely withered, and she stared at them in horror one day under the dusty sunbeams of a lurching bus, and began to truly understand that they would some day be the veined claws of an old woman.
What else had changed? Well, she used to be a solid sleeper.
Now sleep had to be wooed, or sometimes not so wooed with sleeping pills.
When she lowered her arms, her armpits radiated wrinkles like stretching spiders.
Her breasts seemed drawn to consummate a love affair with her belly button.
She had first failed the pencil test.
Her breasts held up a pencil thrust under them when she was twenty-five.
Now, when she clenched her buttocks and craned her head, she could see lunar dimples on her buttcheeks.
Finally, and perhaps most terrifyingly, Joanne began to wonder, what the hell was the difference between her and the women who got married anyway?
She had always been proud of her sexual power, not knowing that power always corrupts.
But then, one day, while biking past a hip-cocked line of loud and face-sparkled club girls, she suddenly had a terrible thought.
Pussies are as common as noses.
Joanne shuddered and almost took a spill, her heart pounding.
Did I sell myself too cheaply?
Oh, that was a terrible thought, both for its implications and the possibility that her brand of feminism had been somehow off, which was, well, a thought she could not entertain, to say the least.
The morning of the day she met Alder, Joanne looked straight into her spotted little round mirror and thought one word, decay.
The passage of time was leaving brutal tire marks on her flesh.
Staring at her face, she suddenly realized that her life was no longer something that was going to be, but something rather that already was.
It was deeply shocking.
What she had thought she was preparing for was already passing.
There was no longer an infinite vein of choices to be mined, but to some degree, what she was going to be— Would be largely composed of who she already was.
The day she turned twenty-three, Joanne had made a list in her journal.
Now, half-dressed, her hands shaking, she dug out the entry from her bookshelf of red-bound diaries.
She found the day, and picking up her chewed pencil, crossed out the following entries, tears dropping from her eyes.
I will not marry a man who has been divorced I will not marry a man with children I will not marry a man who watches sports every Sunday I will not marry a fat man I will not marry a skinny man I will not marry a short man I will not marry a bald man I will not marry a hairy man I will not marry a man who isn't sensual I will not marry a man who makes less than me I will not marry a man past his thirties I will not marry a man who does not like the band Enigma I will not marry a man who does not read.
I will not marry a man who does not get along well with his mother.
I will not marry a mama's boy.
I will not marry a man who wants me to stay home.
I will not marry a man who is aggressive.
I will not marry a man who is passive.
And so, on that grey day, Alda had scurried into Joanne's bookstore, and his pale hair was fuzzy with rain, and one lock stuck to his forehead like Superman's question mark.
And after obviously working up his nerve, he asked for obscure books to impress her, and the fact that he wanted to impress her almost broke her heart.
And as they fell to talking, it did not seem to matter that his voice was quite nasal, or his nails were chewed down, or that he was so obviously inexperienced, because Joanne was mapping out the future through his body language.
Alda's soul, she could feel, was a species of soft clay which she could spin and mould.
Within moments her feminism seemed to fade away, and she felt herself suddenly shapeshift into the kind of woman who could rule over a man.
And of course there was subjugation in that for her as well, but it no longer seemed to matter at all.
And so she played no games, and asked him if he was single and available for coffee, and theirs was a brisk courtship of efficient sex and scant small talk.
She made him dinner, and listened to his theories, and bought him a dish-rack, and made his bed, and did not organize his bookshelves, but suggested that they do it together.
Wiles! Joanne thought in wonder.
My God! I have become wily with feminine wiles!
And it was all quite simple, really.
She just made herself necessary to him.
She insinuated herself into his life, and made his days and nights more pleasant, and cooked his breakfast, and there was an undertow, of course.
She was quite aware of it, but strangely unashamed.
I make you eggs, you make me pregnant.
There was a kind of hypocrisy in her courtship, of course, because she had a hurried agenda, but could not rush him.
She could not linger over prams, or stop and mist at tiny clothes in storefront windows, or stare dewy-eyed at him while holding his sister-in-law's baby, but that was okay, too.
She spoke of her desire to keep working no matter what, but the simple truth was that she'd been working for five years, and they'd been okay, but were scarcely the kind of foundation for old age that a ball of life in a blue blanket could be.
And in her own way, Joanne was wise to choose an intellectual.
Alder was dry, brittle, and uncurious about life beyond books.
She sensed deep pain in him, a kind of abstract defensiveness that could never be penetrated.
His intellectualism was a dry moat around a bottomless hole.
She felt that dimly, but never examined it closely, for her heart knew the truth.
Certain defenses can become so well developed that they become the personality they were originally designed to protect.
Nineteen times out of twenty, the life of the mind arises from the grave of the heart.
Learning, in other words, is loss.
But Joanne did not examine any of that.
Her sole goal was the blue bundle.
She told herself that the simple fact of Alda's life was that he had never been loved.
The rest was easy.
Easy! But not simple.
If I love him unconditionally, she thought, he will lose his ambition.
And the depths of her wiliness truly began to amaze her at this point.
So she praised him, but with qualifications.
She missed him, but did not call.
She needed him to succeed, not because she didn't want to, but because she wanted to succeed at something different.
He had yet to prove himself, so she trained his ambition with grudging love.
I am committed to the best in you, she murmured, when he complained of academic obstacles.
You can achieve anything you set your mind to.
Endless testing, visible carrots and hidden sticks, that was the nature of her love.
Alda was smart, stinging smart, she thought, like a freshly spanked brain, and had a liquid ease of language, but he had been compared and contrasted into a sort of academic jellyfish, able to take the shape of any fashionable container.
He called it adaptability, and Joanne held her nose for the sake of the blue bundle.
She believed in his scholarly potential, insofar as she utterly failed to imagine him doing anything else.
Probing his past, yielded little he wanted to escape his uneducated parents, had been praised by the occasional teacher, was vaguely anti-capitalist, anti-materialistic, and a very fast typist, the latter perhaps his greatest academic gift.
He did not tan, and looked ridiculous in shorts, and so seemed perfectly suited to spend his life probing ambivalence under artificial light.
He was a teacher's assistant when she met him, just starting his PhD.
She watched him teach, but did not envy his students.
He was a bit of a droner, the kind of teacher who forced extensive notes, because his monotone gave no real indication of important points." Joanne's heart would sometimes break when she thought of him sitting in his little shared office, waiting for students who never knocked.
Joanne and Alter were married within a year.
On their honeymoon, his wife's sex drive amazed Alter, and he felt incredibly lucky as he attempted to hang on to her hips, writhing above him in the dim Mexican heat.
Afterwards, as Joanne lay with her legs raised against the headboard, Alderhoft dozed, vaguely thinking that, from a genetic standpoint, his hand was only obsessed with making another hand, and that he was merely a means to that end, and then started awake in vague shock as he felt Joanne's fingers groping for him again.
So Joanne became pregnant on her honeymoon.
Miraculously, she got everything she wanted within the span of a single year, and then, inevitably, she began to pay for it.
Chapter 2 Sarah's Family Sarah's father, Dave, was a solid, overbearing, jocular man with small eyes set in a tall, wide face like a raccoon peering over a shovel.
His wife, Angela, were small, angular, pointlessly athletic.
Dave and Angela were perfection-embodied, almost embalmed.
They enjoyed sailing, country clubs, dining out, and endless renovations.
He established himself as a businessman, she as a homemaker, and they emitted such a plastic sheen around themselves that they actually captured that final prize of the upper-middle classes.
They had no inner lives whatsoever.
They fed off the doubts of those around them.
They lured the insecure with the silent promise that life could be lived without inner conflict.
They roused jumpy jungle dwellers to blind envy with the glassy mirage of a paved rainforest.
Dave was...
well, it was hard to say.
He worked in a suit, shook hands hard, and traveled first class.
One thing was clear.
He founded companies, and then he foundered companies.
His preferred source of income was to find inexperienced young inventors, inflame their greed, and then merge them with inexperienced investors, the doctors and lawyers always in need of more money.
It all seemed good and believable, but there was a subtle, unperceived, and therefore inescapable undertow of self-sabotage which ruined each and every one of his enterprises within a few years.
Dave had been enormously lucky early in his career.
He had bought a telephony prototype from an inventor for $50,000, then sold it to a phone company for over a million dollars about 18 months later.
This turnaround was just quick enough to shortcut his talent for self-destruction, which thus ensured it would likely continue for the rest of his life.
This windfall was consumed quickly—five-star European trips with his family, a ski chalet, private schools, a cottage, unsteady investments.
Vanity is the natural enemy of statistics.
A belief in the Midas touch gives people scant sense of the randomness of their powers.
Like most vain businessmen, Dave hungered for the magic of multiples.
The slow and steady path was not for him.
So naturally he gravitated, like all ephemeral thieves, to software, the latest entry in the Huckster's lexicon.
Dave nimbly worked the gap between greed and knowledge.
There are knowledge workers, and then there are men like Dave—ignorance workers.
The young programmers knew nothing about business.
The investors knew nothing about software.
Dave knew little about either, but he had an instinctive feel for the negative alliances required to keep the truth at bay—keep those who know the most about software far away from those who know the most about business.
Get angry at any practical questions.
Speak in untested generalities.
In the face of interrogation, quote, unrelated experience.
Treat income projections as spreadsheet games.
How much profit would excite investors?
All sales are hockey stick projections with the upward arc always just over the hill.
This strategy had worked well for almost a decade, but now four of Dave's companies had, as he put it, augured in, and he was getting rather desperate.
If asked, Dave would say that he lived for his children.
Dave had a teenage son, Justin.
Justin was like a Ming vase, beautiful, priceless, empty.
He was perfectly poised and completely paralysed.
Justin had been born with perfect little curls.
The nurse was amazed.
His hair seemed to have body even at birth.
She wiped it off with a towel, and it sprang back into place.
He had dimples, pleasing babbling brook burbles, waving gripping little fists.
She would not have been surprised if his bowel movements had produced the smell of fresh-cut grass.
As a child, he fell in love with his maids until they disciplined him, worshipped a teacher until finding out he drove a Honda, loved a girl until he saw her collection of teddy bears.
He could not stand sentimentality.
It enraged him as nothing else quite could.
He was beautiful in a bored, flawless, blonde way.
His sex drive was immense.
He hated books.
Sarah, on the other hand, loved to read, but reading, being a poor spectator sport, did little for the gene status of her parents.
Her mother's parents were poor, and Angela had inherited their low-cost distaste for recreational reading.
Self-improvement was all right, geography and a smattering of science, perhaps craft-books, but to read for the sake of reading alone— Thus Sarah joined the enormous historical species of cave readers.
She lived under a blanket with a flashlight, her thirst for plot at war with her need for air.
Angela would find Sarah lying on her pink bed on a sunny day, the curtains partly drawn, and would pause outside the door, in the timeless wrestle of a parent who wishes to believe that she is considering alternatives before enforcing her will.
"'Such a lovely day, dear,' she would say, her aura fidgeting.
"'Snice hat!' Sarah would stare at her book.
"'The current must not be broken.'"'Let's go to the mall.'"'I'm—oh, what!' Sarah would sigh.
"'Parents are so easily offended.
This is a dark secret of childhood.' I'm reading.
I'm busy. I don't want to go to the mall and watch you shop.
I have no money.
I'm not hungry. Clothes don't interest me.
They've just found the children on the island, and Peggy is flying off to make tea, and they don't know that the storm is coming.
But these desires were so indefensible.
Beyond the window were wind and sky and rainbow patio umbrellas, and girls wobbling on hopscotch, and boys spraying pedestrians with hose-water, and everything the bright and clear external world had to offer, but it did not interest her at all.
Not at all.
But her mother was clearly bored and wanted company.
"'What's on at the mall?' Sarah asked finally.
"'A sidewalk sale?' But we already have a sidewalk.
A stupid joke, but she always wanted to say it.
But what do you want to buy?
Not buy, just browse.
Look, you know. If you don't want to buy, why look?
Shopping was a surgical strike for Sarah.
Need, identify, buy, flee.
Daddy's working again, said Angela softly, leaning her head slightly towards the doorframe.
You're bored, you go, thought Sarah, with a vague, queasy premonition, common at times like these, of how little truth could actually be spoken in a young life.
Will it always be so?
You can read later, said her mother, shaking her head suddenly, in the decisive gesture which said, This show of negotiation is now over.
It was as if she held a police megaphone right there in the doorway.
You there, with the contented expression, put the book down, move away from the bed slowly.
We have you surrounded.
You will shop.
And so they would go to the mall, or the movies, always too adult for Sarah, always too childish for her mother, or walks, or to bake, or clean, or organize.
And always, always there was this sense of connection without closeness, a maddening, vacuous, locked dance, proximity without perception.
And the less her mother understood her, the more she wanted to spend time with Sarah.
Is this love, she would wonder, hugging teddy-bears in her pink and bow-tied room?
She was well-tended, well-groomed, well-fed.
Her parents seemed to get along.
They were well-respected.
But love, love like songs extravagant, like the giving tree, like Cinderella, the love her parents read about to her, the love they neither displayed nor lived for, the love that filled the heart with veins of white flame, love that could be leaned on, not nanny love that died in expulsions, or parental love that flickered with shifting grades and dipped with corrected pliés, love like a harbor, unadulterated shelter.
Well, that was just for toddlers, it seemed, like Santa Claus and shopping mall elves.
It was a myth that made adulthood a punishment of lost illusions, a snort in the face of imaginary passion.
Even the occasional grappling hugs of her mother after Sarah was bathed or when she feigned sleep did not warm her heart, because her mother seemed greedy for love.
It was a kind of a mouthing, a toothless chew, a groping for contact through a shell of distraction.
Children see themselves by being loved.
Love as metaphor always grows in the absence of love as experience, and Angela's whirling words and empty hugs beat around Sarah like glorious birds afraid of the earth.
What would she do with such imagined abundance, such wild recipes in the absence of ingredients?
Spirits beckon children in the absence of flesh, but Sarah felt too deeply to flee to mere ghosts.
Instead, she found Alice.
Chapter 3 Alice's Family Alice was a child of the suburbs.
Her mother and father were both consultants in the fashion and music industries.
They were eager participants in the great modern experiment of professionalism, wherein the division of labor reached from the factories and cubicles into the very nest, almost into the very womb of life, and faux parents worked for others, and real parents worked for the faux parents as nannies and day-care workers and babysitters, And it became true that it took a salaried village to raise the children because the natural parents were so rarely to be found.
And so it was that, as a toddler, Alice experienced the death of more caregivers than most children do in war zones.
Her first nanny was a young Iranian woman who, her foe-mother said, seemed born to raise children, thus of limited potential.
In the still, detailed hours of a daylight homestead, Alice sat and watched her Nummy, her name for Nanny Mummy, prepare cookies and clean and cuddle and drop her dank bottom on the change-table and play peek-a-boo with her.
Like most nannies, Alice's Nummy was far from her real family, religion, home, past, and men of any description.
And so Alice was the sole receptacle for the full force of affections designed for an entire tribe.
Then the nummy vanished amidst threatening booms from the television, and the Persian spices, babbled foreign phone calls, and dark numminess, the entire panorama of Alice's senses, all left with her.
Then there was a short span of the foe-mother standing in the kitchen, twisting the phone cord around her forearm and interviewing potential replacements between panicked calls from head office.
Gwen came next. She was a brisk and scrubby Scottish woman who was much, much older, and seemed to view infancy as a period of little utility, and who moved and cleaned Alice rapidly, without sentiment like a maid with another woman's knick-knacks.
Gone were the readings, the palm massages, the cooed Arabic songs, and dark cave of lowered hair.
In their place was an almost complete absence of smell, and fingers so rough it seemed that each one was capped with a thimble.
Even Gwen's breathing was different.
Infants have so little weather that breath is their wind.
Langued Persian desert breezes were replaced with tight-lipped Protestant nasal snorting.
Alice resisted, of course.
She screamed when the blunt yellow tentacles of rubber gloves picked her up, and cried at the sound of bagpipes, and did that sort of red blowfish expansion howling when the acrid fumes of endless Scottish scrubbing filled the air.
"'Ah,' said her mother,"'she doesn't seem to be taking to the new one.' And so the Scottish woman vanished, and the cleaning fumes left with her, and the kitchen floor regained its familiar patchy textures.' Alice's parents were older and honestly didn't seem able to recall what infancy was like, and so were forever confusing cause and effect.
Instead of understanding that her baby was resisting wrenching change, Alice's mother decided to change the nanny again.
This was the same woman who threw tantrums at work when something changed and she was not informed immediately.
So, two nummies, two deaths, and then a third, a slow and repetitive Jamaican woman, who did not mind reading the same story fifteen times, and could stir stew for an hour, just staring into space.
Alice calmed down immediately, much to the relief of her mother, but Alice was not happy.
For infants, personalities are contagious— And Ethel's pace was so sluggish that Alice began to lose touch with reality.
At a time when her brain was a seething ecosystem of impact and exploration, time seemed to stand still during the day, and Alice became dangerously close to becoming a connoisseur of sunlight in the manner of a cat, watching the slow, slow stroll of daylight's dusty legs crossing the floor.
Occasionally Ethel would shuffle from room to room or stare at the wall and radiate resentment in the timeless manner of inert people.
This resentment was an important ingredient for Alice's stultification.
Dissociation always requires a sense of danger, which is why snake-chalmers do not perform their wizardry on slowly swaying squirrels.
Finally, Ethel managed to rouse herself enough to have a child of her own, at which point Alice was three and was put into preschool Montessori, where one or the other parent would come tearing in from rush hour driving, the implacable green glowing clock, the fumes, the panicky rage of haste and immobility, and was babbled to in a sped-up parody of everything that might have been said during the day had they spent eight extra hours together.
Being a young child, Alice was a terrible communicator.
She was designed to share, not speak.
And so these conversations were often turned to frenetic monologues where complex office politics and the trials of difficult clients were translated into Seuss-ish rhyming couplets.
Oh, mummy's upset because there's this ogre at the office who keeps dumping work on her like a big bully.
Are there bullies at your school? Probably not.
It's Montessori. But maybe you've learned the word for bully in French.
Well, it's the same thing. Well, by the time she was ten, Alice had grown into the most beautiful girl in her school, the founder and leader of a clique.
Sarah was the new kid, and it was some weeks before Alice tested her.
One day, at a birthday party, Alice said, over the humble glow of an easy-bake oven, handing over a lopsided cup of muffin goo,"'That's the stupidest hairdo I ever saw.' This made the other girls giggle.
"'What's your name?' Alice asked.
"'Sarah, where are you from?' Toss of the head, the days of horse love were not long to come.
"'Rosedale! Rosedale!' whispered the other girls.
"'So rich, an army of Barbies!'"'Your mother works there?' asked Sarah, determined to remain unimpressed.
"'Yes,' smirked Alice.
"'She's a designer.
"'She's rose and spun, trailing imaginary veils.
"'And your father?'"'Managers rock bands.
"'Boy bands? Backstreet boys?
"'Grungy old eighties bands.
"'You wouldn't know them."'They're very retro, just like your hair.
"'Yours?'"'Business owner, homemaker.' Where?
Young and Shepard, not far, just up the street.
I know. Sleepovers?
Been, not had.
Have one. When?
Tonight. Be all spurred by the moment.
A turn of the head. Who wants a sleepover?
We do, we do.
A wild chorus.
Sarah thought, then said, Um, need more warning, though it would be fun.
Well, when do your parents get home, then?
Ooh, tricky. Parents who came home too early were unambitious, possibly alternative.
Too late, and they were uncaring slaves of the nummy, always apologizing and leaning over your bed in their work clothes, trying madly to slow down.
Sarah settled for...
So we'll all come now, and you can ask them then, cried Alice, and then demanded that Sarah write down her phone number, which allowed her to review Sarah's skill with even numbers.
Don't look too laboured, Sarah thought, circling carefully.
The sudden sleepover landed like a watermelon on the sidewalk of Angela's evening.
She raised a grinding resistance, and countless reasons leaned like spears against the cavalry of little invaders.
The other mothers have not been notified.
We know them all. Call.
The girls don't have any bedclothes.
Oh, I only have about a jillion pyjamas.
What am I going to make for breakfast?
I have a jogging club. Is it too much to ask for a little warning?
Your father is very tired. It's a school night.
You'll be all exhausted tomorrow.
What about the homework, toothbrushes, medication, bedwetters?
The reasons flew fast, dizzying.
Her mother was a rigid gait.
Sarah turned to her father, who took his wife aside for a parental pow-wow.
After a few minutes there were grim smiles and stiff hair-pats, and the girls were allowed to flow upstairs, where time dissolved into dawdling and giggling and running, and after dinner the parents attempted to herd them through the narrow gates of toothbrushes.
And face-cloths, and handed out night-clothes to groping hands, and mattresses were pulled off beds, and parents phoned, and one or two wailing girls were swallowed up by scowling porch shadows.
And after the stern warnings and finger-wagging door-shadows, by flashlight they did each other's hair, and bossed, and booed, and attacked the early dozers, and imitated teachers, and told sexy stories to prudish girls, and theorized about nuns, And e-ewed the smelly boys, and swooned in southern tones over the cute ones, and acted out cartoons, and struggled to whisper loudest that that was the best part of the film.
And then, slowly, only Sarah and Alice remained awake.
They lay looking at the moon, and the white continent coin seemed to pull them out of themselves, and they crept into each other's ears and hearts with soft words.
The words were unimportant, the ideas primitive and powerful, the listening as wide as the pendulum of an echo across a canyon.
What did they talk about?
Being fake, putting on airs so others would like them, being afraid of boys, not wanting to be like their parents, not having any idea how poor people lived.
Whether there was a God, and why did it have to be a man, anyway?
And that Frankenstein was actually the doctor, not the monster.
And having only once seen a ghost, but not really sure.
And why English teachers always seemed sad, and gym teachers scary— And who was supposed to pay the national debt?
And would society end in the year 2000, when the computers stopped?
And would they ever go to war?
And what would it feel like to die?
And why girls were bossy, and women were bossy, but teenage girls seemed dreamy and afraid?
And what it would be like to lie in a field of wheat, and not have to do anything else ever again for the rest of your life?
That last whispered thought was so like the present night of starlit murmurs that they giggled and hugged, and both of them felt a sudden and unheralded warmth, like an egg breaking open inside, and swore that no boy would ever come between them, and that their husbands would just have to understand, because no one else would understand them, not the way they understood each other to-night.
And there was little sleep the whole night long.
But who could sleep the first night at a lush oasis after such a long, young, desert life?
Chapter 3 Al Wherever possible, the family ate together, but Alice's mother, Greta, rarely did more than pick at her food.
This was partly because of her involvement in the fashion industry, but also because Greta had a mortal foe, her digestive system, and also had great trouble sleeping.
Stomachs are the bane of the modern world, stomachs and sleep.
Everybody wants their body to be a car, fixable while they wait, but Greta was beginning to believe that the body is the great silent weeper of modern times.
The imperious conscious mind, Roman almost, curls its lip and whips the flesh, hot in pursuit of what the body cannot offer, status, immortality, intimidation.
The mind prefers the iron simplicity of statues.
The body shits and fails and listens more deeply, and dies, of course, which makes the mind like Michelangelo, with hooks for hands, frantic in a vision that can never be completed.
Greta went to her doctor, talked at the walls at his degrees.
Doctor, it's almost embarrassing, but I'm having great trouble passing stools.
I see. How often do you go?
Here come the whispers, thought her doctor dismally, and they did.
Perhaps once a week.
Twice, maybe. Sometimes once.
But I never feel that, well, it's never all...
End your diet? An embarrassed laugh.
Well, limited to say the least.
I've read up. Roughage and liquids.
No sugars. Metamucil.
Water, of course. Sudden tears.
Sorry, doctor, but I feel that I can't do anything.
Sports. Dinner parties.
I feel so heavy. I'm afraid to eat.
Are you on any additional medication?
No. Well, Exlax doesn't count as medication, does it?
What dosage are we talking about?
Just a couple of times a month when I can't stand it any more.
Because you have to be careful about causing lazy bowels.
This image of a pink bowel dozing in a hammock while the shit piled up in the yard almost made him smile.
How long has this been going on?
There was always a pause here, as Greta thought back to her salad days when she was not obsessed with her bowels.
Quite a while. This patch, a couple of months.
What about exercise?
Taibo, four times a week.
Every week, before...
before sentry duty...
Are you under a lot of stress?
Not particularly, except of course that I can't...
sigh. Ah.
Here they generally descended a meaty pause, as they both regarded this problem which could not be solved.
Finally, well, we could do an ultrasound, he would say, with the clear implication that an ultrasound would be completely useless.
Well... There was another pause then.
Unfortunately, there's no way to diagnose this based on what you've said.
I would suggest that you eat more roughage, exercise, and eliminate sugars and alcohol.
Do you smoke? No.
Ever? No. Sometimes when people quit, their bowels quit too, but...
Anyway, I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help.
There was always a dismal after-moment, then, when the hopeless petulance of an unmet demand for fixing it mingled with the true despair of an unnegotiable betrayal.
The conversation about insomnia was about the same, except that the pause would be longer, because real insomniacs have about as much sense of time as cave-fish.
Sometimes the doctor would prescribe sleeping pills, because he found the thought of sharing highways with these zombies frankly too unnerving.
Greta was a woman defined by scarves.
She had scores of them, as well as an affection for the peasant dresses of landlocked mountain countries.
She was a designer who praised herself for providing alternatives to corporate clothing.
She had a vicious intolerance for thick catalogues, and anyone who mentioned the word gap around her usually regretted not wearing the kind of thick arm padding used for training police dogs.
Greta also had a teenage son, Ian, whose suspicious height her father was short and squat, sat like a fifth corner on the family cube.
Ian loved watching fashion television, nipple-vision, he called it, and this invariably sent Greta into passionate fits, and she would stand in the living room, her scarves twitching with displeasure, awash in a foam of rabid denunciation, in Ian's phrase, channeling Stalin.
Greta's inevitable environmentalism was also mocked, since she had a habit of defending only popular animals.
Ian enjoyed pointing out that we kill far more sharks than dolphins, their fins are cut off for soup and they are thrown back in the water to die, and we are shocked about the poor dolphins caught in the tuna nets while neglecting the fact that thousands of tuna are also killed, which, he would say with heavy adolescent sarcasm, gives the nets their name.
Very few parental beliefs can withstand close scrutiny, of course, but Greta's Rosedale socialism seemed a particularly vulnerable bruise, especially since her florid revolution against big business was largely funded by her husband's involvement in the skankiest underbelly of modern capitalism, the music business.
Al's ascent into the realm of retro-producer had been propelled by an honest impulse.
As a teenager, a band he had started had failed miserably, but the bassist had formed another band who attracted attention, and whose rising star he fastened onto as a manager.
The band did well, scoring a top-ten hit and touring most of Canada, and Al was pegged as a talent-spotter, the coincidence of his first find being completely overlooked.
The music business is generally run as a huge primordial lottery, and tends to draw people who would like to be in the mafia, but instead choose an industry where lies and lawyers whack the marks.
Al had all of the slippery cheer of an amoral optimist.
He had seen enough of the music scene to know that most promises were lies, not about money, that much was obvious, even to the new bands who grew up listening to Queen and learning the identity of the manager in Death on Two Legs.
The implicit promise of drugs and promiscuity was also true, but so irrevocably disastrous to the participants that some of the newer groups adopted the squeaky lives of Brazilian boy bands, their drugs-bad, god-good sap truly turning Al's stomach.
No, it was the promise of fame that quickly rang hollow to him like a payphone in an empty stadium.
He had seen the pattern so many times, the shy wonder of sudden adulation, the invasive, corrosive, fanatical crowds, the diamond-hard biosphere of deference, and the fatuous evacuation of a life lived without consequences.
Everyone famous warns of it, the industrial soul-scouring of foaming eyes, the grave markers a legion, drugs in the sixties, sex in the seventies, money in the eighties and by the nineties, just about anything carbon-based.
Al had little eye for new talent, he knew, but then that was true of all of his contemporaries.
They sometimes joked that picking talent was like picking stocks, and wanted to even become successful managers by throwing dots at long lists of bar bands.
His true skill was his ability to keep aflame the hollow hunger of the somewhat successful.
His speeches were impassioned, serpentine ramblings of confused self-actualization that sometimes caused musicians to compose lyrics right there in his office.
One had been sent to him, which he kept pinned to the back of his door and glanced at whenever he lost his place while speechifying.
THE ROAD OF THORNS It's a road of thorns we ramble on, the dream of roses that lifts our feet.
An icy cliff we scramble on, a bitter wind that whispers, DEFEAT! The road of thorns pokes at our toes, like a paper cut of infinite woes.
Sometimes it pulls us to our knees, and punches us with a fistful of keys.
The road of thorns leads to the rose of life, like the blind date that leads to a loving wife.
Repeat to fade.
The music, of course, had been awful.
A typical Jethro Tull meets landslide guitar, a tinkly fairy opening mashed into oblivion by a Godzilla foot of feedback and rampant regression howling.
But the idea that great art was suffering was always melody to Al's ears.
Al himself had been scared away from a musician's life for a number of reasons, which he had entered into his diary, which, lost in the attic, had only one entry— February the 12th, 1972, 5.45 a.m.
New life! Dangers of being a musician, being pulled into the audience, being ignored by the audience, selling sex for a place to crash, not getting any offers for above, doing covers for the rest of your life.
Well, there are a lot of idiots in Rockland.
They're not going away. Dealing with the endless hissy fits of lead singers, quitting in disgust at 35 with no savings, no family, no skills, ruining my health, can't sleep in vans or buses, have to make it to private plane big time to be remotely conscious for gigs.
Bassist always gets last pick of groupies that all they want is details of the lead singer's devotion to Tibet, followed by a surreal blowjob.
What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?
Homeless. Not so, ha.
Benefits of being a musician.
Um, I don't like drugs.
Lots of sex. Performance high.
Mostly fear, but very good.
Could make it big time.
Not exactly tangible, but it could happen.
Arts? Well, we're not exactly yes.
It wasn't enough.
Al knew it even before beginning the list, but it felt like less of a compromise to write it down.
Being amoral, he had little fear of selling out.
His definition, people who complain about selling out, never got offered a good price.
Also, the tangible evidence is that the world of professional music was, by and large, only open to those who had no other abilities.
It was like Freddie Mercury, the singer for Queen, had once opined in an interview, I can't cook, don't like books, can't do anything else of value, so thank God I can do this.
Unfortunately, this clearly contradicted the Follow Your Dreams speech he gave every week for the benefit of depressed musicians whose children sang their songs in bright mockery.
Even while giving his motivational speeches, he heard its opposite corollary in his head.
You have no choice, loser.
You've backed yourself into a corner like someone with no RRSPs who has to play the lottery in order to have any hope of retirement.
And quite frankly, you are a useless human being in every other realm.
All I can hope is to squeeze one more hit song out of your depleted nervous system before casting you to the rubbish heap of jazz experimentation and acidic condemnations of mainstream popularity.
Al was also skilled in knowing when to cast his acts off.
The first sign was the use of the word project.
When a client came in and said he was working on a project which usually involved a musical rendition of a classic horror text, this was usually very bad.
Soon he descended to experimental collaborations, and when he finally proposed a solo album of his own drumming, usually justified in a Paul Simon-ish way by references to African influences, one even attempted to recreate the ambience of the rainforest using only symbols, it was clearly time to part ways.
Over the years, Al had developed what he called a pop-patter, which gave the impression that he had taken a lot of drugs in the past.
This gave him a sort of credibility with his clients, who generally had given up drugs, but still spoke carefully, as if weighing the transcendent value of each syllable.
Still, firing a client was usually a scene so fraught with pain that he could barely refrain from laughing.
As the musician generally said, after proposing a jazz project with sampled penguin chatter,"'You don't see my vision?
This is about more than charting, man!'"'Absolutely I do,' Al would say,"'and moreover, I applaud it.
But that's not what I'm about.
I'm about the business of music.
But tell me this, why not a great song with innovative drumming?'"'Great is not just what the radio wants.' This was also bad.
The musician would no longer refer to an audience or even airplay, but the radio, as if it were an all-consuming entity, a bland and yawning god.
Haven't you ever wanted to do something truly different?
Sure, like different, like music without music, like that 45 of pure silence put out in the 50s so folks could get three minutes peace and quiet from the jukebox.
That was different. Sure, I see that, but that's not what I'm about.
We have a relationship because you wanted commercial success.
That's great, that worked, and I don't want to interfere with your development.
Follow your muse, your dream, whatever, but I'm telling you, a musician without an audience is just some wanker in a basement.
All music managers use Britishisms.
Al just accepted that and went with it.
Hell, you're going to turn into a mime the way you're going, and children will cower in fear at your passing.
Just be normal. Make normal music.
Make people tap their toes and laugh or cry, and if you don't think there's Bach and Celine Dion, you're mad.
That shit is not easy, or everyone would do it.
Pop is hard, man.
Shit, try writing a jingle.
I'd kill to sign whoever wrote that pizza pizza thing.
Don't make music for musicians.
It's like romancing your hand, for God's sake.
Your dream was to make music that reached people, and we did that.
You had the spark. I know it goes.
It can go to shit. Hell, look at Peter Gabriel.
But I think that's a lack of will, a fear of risk, and these fucking hard rock sirens of difference and experimentation.
Music is as old as mammoths.
Everything that is possible has been tried, and there's nothing better than three minutes of tunage that has you leave the elevator humming.
If you don't want to do that anymore, fine, but then leave music.
You can't or won't be Henry Moore anymore?
Okay, but don't hang around sculpting your little poos.
Melody is the ultimate sophistication, and if you mention the J-word, I'll kill you on the spot.
Right here, bare hands, all that.
Tuning, noodling, tinny sax, car-selling bullshit.
Build a little coven of exclusive appreciation and you've killed music death.
There is nothing more complicated than a pop song.
I don't care how many damn notes you can play, how fast, or how you can create a mournful horn from the skull of an Amazon warrior.
Experiment, sure.
Give me bow rap, give me Mr. Cairo, give me grooving cave pics or whatever the fuck it was called, but don't turn your back on Mr. Stuck in a Traffic needs a sing-along and tell me you want to be a musician.
Occasionally, rarely, they would believe him and return to what he called "the craft".
Days on the guitar dubs for Killer Queen, he would say, days of making songs.
This made Al happy because he truly believed that experimentation was the unnatural birth of the exhaustion and insecurity that occurs after the easy fertility of a young artist dries up.
Don't become an Einstein, wasting your life in some grand theory when it dies, either resuscitate it or walk away.
So Al ended up with a stable of dependable 2,000-draw acts that acted as a low-rent fountain of youth to the baby boomers.
The concerts were early, dependable, mosh-less, and tightly patrolled.
It was a stable living, and he had invested well due to the close links between music and software.
He had invested in a few startups formed by ex-band members, which had done quite well.
By the time Al was in his late forties, he had a young daughter and a teenage son, but he had waned early.
He had no foundation, really, for the second half of his life.
His ambition was never overwhelming, but what he had he had crippled with irony.
His son Ian knew this easily, caustically, with the corrosive psychic ability of a teenager.
Ian passed through the veils of his parents' illusions as if they did not exist, inflaming their sad compromises with biting termite relentlessness.
Al sighed deep within his creaky heart and girded himself for the inevitable showdown.
His son was cynical, he knew, but desperately cynical, because he hoped he was wrong.
He could kill Ian's desperation, of course, only by proving him right.
He could, of course, do nothing about the cynicism.
Well, that's as far as we're going to get for chapters, I guess, one through three of The God of Atheists, which is, I hope, enjoyable for you.
It's certainly a lot of fun to write.
It's fun to read, too.
I'm still pleased with it, I guess.
And so if you have sent me a donation by the time you hear this, fantastic.
Send me an email.
I'll check my list.
And I will email you a copy of the novel itself.
Now, the only thing that I ask is, because we've already had this chat about intellectual property, all I'm going to ask for you for this free book that is 700 pages long is that you don't send it to anyone else.
This is just my gift to you, to you personally, to you directly.
And if you can send me, just send me an email saying, yes, I won't send it to anyone else.
I'll be more than happy to give you the book gratis, or at least in response to your kind donations to me.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope that this was an enjoyable Podcast 200, and I will talk to you soon.
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