A Bible Study by the only people truly qualified to study the bible — those who don't believe.

Again, I feel the need to apologize about the scarcity of my posts lately. When I started this blog, I had a good part of the winter off work. My job is seasonal, you see, so while off I wrote like a monkey on fire, sometimes a post every day, sometime every few days. Progress on our atheist bible study surged ahead, but then work reared it’s ugly head and I had to sally forth into the world again.  Damn God and his reality!

Sigh! Have you ever noticed how this making a living crap really gets in the way of having an actual life? It’s not that I hate my job or anything. Truly, I enjoy it and love the people I work with. But I will be honest here. If they stopped paying me, I would stop showing up. It’s just not something I would choose for a hobby.  I don’t hate being there, I simply enjoy time with my family more. In truth, I’m one of those people who could live happily on a desert island as long as my wife and son accompanied me. Right up until my social butterfly of a spouse and her extrovert child went insane from lack of company and ate me.

My main problem with work now is how it interferes with my writing. At first, it ripped out only about fifty hours a week from me. But the nature of my work is such that though it gives me large blocks of time off, when I do go to work, I work very heavy hours. Therefore, it soon grew more rapacious and now sucks about 85 hours a week from my poor bruised veins. Most of the writing I do is on coffee breaks or lunch. This is inadequate.

Have you ever tried to write for just 15 minutes at a time and then only every three hours. Believe me, four separated 15 minute blocks of time do not add up to one real hour of writing.  The whole is much less than the sum of its parts. Added to this is the difficulty of concentrating in a room full of chattering people. I am aware that there are geniuses who have no difficulty working well under these conditions. My friends, I am greatly saddened to admit to you that I am not one of them. I have learned that, though my mind is perfectly adequate for most tasks I set it on, it is not of the quickly booting variety. The first five minutes of coffee break are spent pulling my head out of my ass attempting to remember what the hell I was writing previously. The next ten are spent trying to frantically get something intelligible on paper.  It has been an interesting experience, and I have learned much about myself. Nothing great, of course, just my limitations. Sigh. Oh, to be more than human.

There has been other obstacles to my progress which I do consider fascinating. I have written most of the last six posts on an iPod touch. This is truly an amazing piece of technology, and with it, I can carry a very small word processor anywhere I go. This is a great advantage, but it is a very small word processor and that can also be a disadvantage. I have fat fingers and the on screen keyboard is small enough to be seriously affected by quantum mechanics. Not an ideal combination, but this obstacle I expected. Another problem which arose I did not expect. I liken it to painting a landscape, but as you work you can only view the result through an opening the size of an average deck of cards. Now everyone can understand this difficulty in regard to painting, but writing, being a much more linear art, shouldn’t be affected. Right?  Allow me to assure you, it is. It is hard to get the flow of a document when you can only see twenty words at a shot. It’s like the scope of my writing becomes proportional to my screen size.  Is that not a man thing?  But I trudge forward in search of the truth, small screen, small mind, fat head.  Oh, the humanity!

Forgive me if I am slow. I have reasons.

Not good ones, alas, but they are all I have.