Lelanophilus

This morning after I got up I scribbled two notes to myself.  To remind me of my dreams.  Let me tell you about them, because that is always interesting.

The first note says “Catballs tyler mal breanna”.

I was outside the Tyler Mall on the side next to the freeway and Barnes & Noble.  For some reason I had to eat the testicles of a tomcat.  Offered to me in the sac, but unattached to a cat, they were oblong in shape (like the long purple grapes) and a little bit bigger.  There were three testicles.  Good job, cat?  I put it in my mouth and started chewing and immediately had to fight off my gag reflex.  They weren’t furry, in case you were wondering.  Anyway I heaved and spit two of them out into a drain and then managed to swallow the third and straighten up.  Somebody, I’m not sure who, congratulated me on eating all three and I decided to not mention the fact that I spit up two of them.

Why did I write down the name of my niece?  I remember that I thought I should tell her about the dream, but I can’t remember her even being in the dream.  My best guess is that she was being held hostage by terrorists who required me to eat cat balls in order to free her.

The second note says “Alt. Univ. Girl Walgreens”.

A girl, the object of my affection, was visiting me in the house where I lived when I was thirteen.  Somehow she cut herself and I offered to get her a bandaid and some cotton and she also requested some sanitizing stuff.  I’m not sure what it is called.  I have a brown bottle in my head with contents that fizz and sting when they are poured on a wound.  Anyway, I looked in the bathroom under the sink and it wasn’t there so I had to go out to get some.  I was walking around by the church at La Sierra and I told the people I was with that we would just go off into the housing tract and hopefully happen upon a pharmacy.

The girl was SORT of being a jerk and rather stand offish and then I remembered that there is a Walgreens on the corner of La Sierra and Collett (there isn’t actually).  I walked there and while I was walking I realized that the girl was from an alternate universe and that was why she didn’t love me!  She loved alternate universe Joshua and had no room for me in her heart.  That was a relief.  When I got to the Walgreens I checked my shorts for my wallet and realized that while I had my cell phone and two pens my wallet was not in my pocket.  I reached down further and checked the extra cargo pockets on my cargo shorts and felt a lump that was too small to be my wallet.  It turned out to be half of my wallet.  The other half had been bitten off by a shark or a tiger or something.

I thought that I needed to share this second story with my little sister, but again I have no clue why.  She doesn’t seem to have played any part in it.

Stupid brain only half-remembering things that it made up and don’t matter at all.

We went over Elder Packer’s conference talk, Cleansing the Inner Vessel, today in my teachings of the living prophets class.  I really love that class and I really love this talk.

I guess there was some anger about the talk because one comment he makes implies that homosexuality is a temptation that can be dealt with and overcome.  Okay, I guess people can get angry about that, but whatever.  When I first heard of the uproar I reread his talk and thought it ridiculous to be up in arms about it since the talk is mostly about pornography and how it can destroy families and how the priesthood gives us the power to overcome it.  The atonement can cleanse us and make us more like the Savior.

My Institute teacher, noted the same thing, except he concluded that the underlying message of the talk was a little bit different from what I came up with.  He said that the talk was about priesthood power and authority and how Satan attempts to remove that power from our homes and from our lives.  Pornography is just one of the many ways that Satan undermines love and marriage.  It is so awful because it stifles priesthood power and with that power a primary means of escape.

Pretty insidious to pretend that the talk is about something else and have it be derided, defended or dismissed based on that when the true message is so vitally important.

The salient points, I think, are the following (some of the phrasing is directly from Elder Packer’s talk and probably ought to be in quotes):

1. The priesthood holds consummate power and has been restored so that priesthood authority could be present in every home in the latter days.
2. The power to create life is key to the plan of happiness and Satan attempts to degrade the moral use of this God given power.
3. Pornography is just one of Satan’s many means of counterfeiting and undermining marriage with the intent ofremoving priesthood power from the home.
4. The priesthood holds the power to break a habit and erase an addiction (this made me think of Isaiah 1:18) and sin, guilt and perversion can be removed completely by repentance.
5. God’s laws are eternal.  You can vote to make something that is immoral legal but you cannot legislate the consequences of immoral behavior.  Pain and penalties surely follow sin.
6. The ultimate end of church activity is happiness in the home.

I love point six in particular.  It sort of explains why having the priesthood in the home is so important and why the devil works so hard to destroy marriages and families.

On Friday I decided that I would take my camera with me so that I could maybe document the beautiful trees and squirrels and other random things that hang about Seattle. Thursday was beautiful with a lot of sun and bright blue, clear skies and even though I figured that Friday would be much less so I was determined to carry my camera anyway.

LUCKY THAT I DID! Friday was, in fact, overcast and moderately depressing outside but this did not matter to me because I was having a good time inside the Institute of Religion chitting and chatting and cracking wise. AND THEN I NOTICED.

Can you see what I saw!?

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I had a few thoughts.

1. The word bajillion is a lot like the word infinity.  Both words mean something really, really impossibly huge that you haven’t a hope of every being able to get all the way through numbering.  However, the nice thing about bajillion is you can say nine bajillion or twenty-three bajillion or even forty million bajillion and two and they are all equivalently enormously large.  So next time somebody turns down your offer of a bajillion dollars try offering them two bajillion dollars.  If they accept then you win because they’ve revealed they aren’t really that good at math.
2. Robots wouldn’t find standard “spot the difference” pictures to be very challenging since they’d be able to just scan them and then overlay them one atop the other and immediately be able to demonstrate the differences between the pictures to the pixel.  I thought, maybe you could make it interesting for them by modifying the color, slightly, of some of the pixels or, if the picture was a digital file, by only changing some bits around inside of the header.  Really though you’d only be able to get away with that once and then they’d know the trick.  I guess they’ll just have to have fun with their blamed sudokus.
3. “We have enough experience under our belt that we’ve now got a wholly new direction” is a TOTALLY inappropriate sentence.  Please do not repeat it out loud.