Chuck
Charles Uriah Farley had been given his name by an asshole father and a mother asleep at the wheel. And by the time he was savvy enough to be in on the joke he’d been going as Chuck for far too long to circumvent the inevitable. He swore at one point, though, that he’d punch the next jerkoff to blurt Chuck you, Farley! like he’d invented the gag on the spot. But Chuck never made good on that vow, of course; just withdrew a bit further instead.
Shaped for introspection by a misshapen name, Chuck U. Farley acquired a predilection for performing such mental calisthenics as calculating how many pints of pee get pissed at Arrowhead Stadium during your average Kansas City Chiefs game. It intrigued him to think that an exact amount of pee gets pissed every time—not exactly the same amount, obviously, but an exact amount, at any rate, every time.
He liked the idea of unknowable finite numbers, you see. Numbers beyond all knowing, yet no less finite for not being known.
Another thing Chuck liked to do was imagine something bad and then counter it with something good. Priests buggering altar boys, for instance, countered with a goldfinch plucking thistle from his seed feeder. (It wasn’t qualitative he was after in this; only quantitative.) And it occurred to him one day, that just as with the pints of pee at Arrowhead Stadium there were finite numbers attached to all the malevolent things and all the benevolent things in the universe. Finite numbers beyond all knowing, but which, if tallied and compared, could settle the question once and for all of whether God is good or evil.
# # #
It seems Chuck has deduced already that God is. What in his computations could have led to his belief in God, who by all accounts is beyond all knowing?
ReplyDeleteWill he indeed tally and compare the malevolent/benevolent universe things and let us in on his conclusions?
Or will Chuck U. Farley be satisfied knowing only that it can be done?