That woman of salt...

Jul 07, 2008 - 12:10 PM PST

Lot's wife recovered. She got better. Lot escaped and several thousand years later, when God died, the spell was broken and his wife came to life again. The scream of Israeli jets overhead sent her into paroxysms of fright. She found a hermit's cave and made a meal of the vermin within and sheltered there until she got her bearings. Distant thunder in a cloudless sky. Smoke from somewhere beyond the desert. Could it be another rain of fire & brimstone? What Sodoms and Gomorrae were being destroyed now? She carefully averted her gaze even from the pillars of smoke themselves.

She had post-traumatic stress, even after all this time. Hell, it was only yesterday for her. Being changed into a sodium chloride, as most contemporary audiences know, does halt the thinking process. Jehovah magic is particularly potent. Just ask the Wandering Jew who, for all his heartache, never had to worry about growing old and who now finds himself covered in liver spots and bald as an egg!

It's kinda sad now, in the days post-Jehovah. Like as not, there won't be a rainbow. And everybody's paranoid the rains may just go on and on -- but then again, since He's dead, there's nobody to make them do so, right? It's just natural processes, like it's always been...right?

We are closing in on the secrets of the universe. Pretty soon they will all be in our hands, or so we think. What we think are the secrets of the universe are, however, clearly not. How could they be? The secrets of the universe can only be comprehended by a mind the size of the universe itself. Us with our half-measures and dipshitteries (cane toads, anyone?) are apt to delude ourselves into thinking we know the answers to things, but how can we really when we never know what we do not know? How can we know the unknown unknown? We used to rely on God for that, but now he's decomposing in an unmarked grave somewhere.

Now, going by the name Senorita Salty, Lot's wife wanders the shores of the borax lakes of the Chilean highlands. She used to wander the shores of the Dead Sea looking for her lost husband, but the fishermen and convicts and malcontents who hang out there, the spa vacationers and runners and bicyclists and scientists, drove her out, in search of more silent vistas to contemplate, places where ghosts come out in the moonlight and pad across the sands. She slipped aboard a borax freighter and wound her way to far Atacama, where she continues her search under  the stars even today.