Night Watch

(For Tess, who is "not sure who she wants to be when the impending singularity comes") Click here for audio reading by the author

When the singularity comes, I am a failed monk.

Making a habit of praise keeps your eyes open: the bishop told me this as he shut the door.

When the bishop shut the door, I very much wished for a couch. I did not pray for a couch. I did not pray for the couch because I supposed the prayer would be heard as a wish, which it really is, and thus denied.

We must ourselves deny desire for comfort, and look for the good in all circumstances. This rule is true, even post singularity. When we do not deny ourselves, we deny Our singularity.

In the time of Our singularity, the bishop schooled us with the words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. “We must use time as a tool not as a couch.” JFK 10:1

I did not ask for the couch. Who would I ask? The bishop? You may be correct there. The bishop is appointed to oversee the resources of the community.

But the bishop would not give me the couch. He would not give me the time of day.

Not true. The bishop would and does give me the time of day. The bishop I suspect enjoys nothing more than providing me with the ebbing time of day. He loves to prove how I am lazy. We all are lazy. So very completely lazy. Lost-cause lazy. Which is to say humankind is lazy and must invest time being productive in service to others, which serves Our singularity.

If we do not, then we are not. Which is to say we become no better than we are, which is to say we are lost, we are damned, we are caught in a web of sloth and laze, pure laze, purest of lazes

Look you. Look at the time as it burbles away from you and runs like a choirboy up and down the stairs. Look you lazy time-a-waster. Find your time. Afore the time runs out and away and over and under your fingernails and other than your mortality is gone all gone.

What praise will be manufactured for the Lord then?

When the stories of Our singularity are true, then up is within, within is at hand, and all of time remains forever. Time will respend itself in Eternity, die and stand resurrected as praise, like the perfect body of Christ.

All time forever will be new ensconced in Alphas and Omegas and beginnings and ends. Spend it well, it yields a good return there. Throw it away here and it is lost, then reappears like vomit. Throw time away there (as if) and like a boomerang Eternity will multiply its strength to a thousand times, ten thousand peaks, a mountainous ungated valley of one tree, one lamb, one golden crown.

One couch.

Unlike the Lord there is no resurrecting your time. When your time is wasted on frivolous matters (couches for instance) when you waste your time with thoughts for a couch you will have neither the time nor the couch. At the end of your thinking you will have only the

end.

The bishop must be right, that is correct, that is moral and straight and perfect as the Lord is perfect as the Lord commands we be and the bishop echoes, “KEEP WATCH!” For ye know not the hour. “KEEP WATCH” He is one the bishop and two he uses his time as a tool and talent to serve the Lord and the Lord’s church, so no couches, no whitewashed tombs of pillows to sink into no fox den so lay not your head O man!

Lay it not. Birds of the air have nests.

You do not have a couch.

You, what you have, is time. You may use your time on earth any way you wish but don’t waste time wishing. If it is night and you find yourself the watchman, or if it is day and you find yourself watching as if it were night, praise the Lord that the sun never ceases rising in the morning nor setting at night. Except for Joshua and that pre-singularity. Anomaly. Miracle moment. Ah yes, and Moses holding his staff in the air. But normally, usually, all things in their time. And the seasons they will not end. Except they do seem to be changing. And the world is without end. Except that it isn’t, it seems to be spinning to its climax. But it can’t. Or it can but we just don’t see the way it pauses in orbit sometimes, two times, and half a time. Let the Reader understand! The hands write upon the wall, they take stock, they tick then tock. All a measurement, an apportionment, an inheritance traded for a bowl of lentils and hairy wristlets. And no one, not even the Son of Man (Jesus) much less the bishop, no one knows the time of what arrival, of His return save One, and that is the Father.

I wonder when the bishop will. Return that is.

There is always a night shift and sooner or later we are all put on it, so.

Praise the Lord. Amen.

No couch. Before the singularity, I fall asleep standing. Now, I sleep awake.