Blog Love Omega Glee: Typing In Tongues (10 September 2012)

Since August, Mom has written 175,918 words of her new Bible. She just gets on the computer and lets it flow, baby! The holy spirit pours through her and comes out at the tap tap tap of her fingers and she can tap tap tap very fast, let me tell you. Monique the cat usually jumps in her lap and occasionally puts a paw on the keyboard and makes a contribution before meowing and jumping off to go visit her fooddish or take a nap. Tonight, Mom's almost done, and just working on her version of Revelations, which so far just involves a nice recipe for lamb chops so no one gets hungry when Famine, one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, shows up. Actually, the horsemen are far too scary. She'll make them handsome, dashing chaps, who ride in as disaster comes down and sweep her heroine, Sue (she kept the same characters throughout the Bible; all the character changes in the old Bible are too confusing for today's reader, who wants an Oprah style tale of self-empowerment and not vengeful villagers chopping off foreskins and heads for revenge), off to save her from a landslide or something so she can be safe and warm in the arms of Jesus. In fact, why not end there? That's a happy ending. Why blow up the world at all? Let's just skip the big battle and have peace and love. The big horseback galloping rescue scene should be enough action to please the male reader. She wants kids to read it too so she can't make it too scary. Maybe she'll throw in some kittens and puppies for the kids.

She clicks "Save" just as her husband comes into the study and complains that she spends all her time on the computer, just like her son. "Is it a commercial break?" she says, and he mumbles his way back to the living room and the television.

She leans back and sighs. She scrolls through the file and thinks that God's message is transcribed right this time, not garbled like in those versions the old men made, where people were always fighting and trying to settle old scores and nursing old grudges and swindling the suckers. Well, might as well get it started, she thinks. She logs into her email and reads some of the latest email forwards from her friends. There are some funny ones about people at Mart Mart today. She hits "Select All" and "Copy" and then pastes the new Bible into a new email. Hmm . . . 175,000 words might be a bit long for an email forward, and the whole point is to get people to read it. Maybe she should edit it down first. What should she take out though? She already took out all the really boring stuff from the old Bibles, those lists of who begot whom and where and where not to eat a goat when a woman is menstruating. What could she cut down? "Well, what's the most important part of the message?" she thinks and decides, "How to live and why!"

Maybe she can get it down to the length of a Twitter Tweet. That's real popular today. She doesn't use it herself but she knows people read them. She clicks on over to Twitter and signs up.

140 characters?!

Maybe she can do an email forward size version and then a condensed version for Twitter and cell phone text messaging. Maybe she can even add some graphics to accompany the bullet points, of which there are many. Maybe she can make it a YouTube video. People like to watch those.

It looks like she'll be here for a while. She just hopes one can edit glossolalia because typing in tongues is one thing, but editing in tongues is probably another.

Monique the cat comes back and jumps on her lap. She sticks a paw out and presses "Delete" and all the selected text disappears. "Monique!" Mom screams and the frightened cat jumps and runs off.

Mom hits "Undo" and the text comes back.

Hmm . . . what to get rid of?

God probably has to make this kind of decision a lot.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.