Letter to Julia 20111221

Hi sweetie! Are you hanging in there? Take good care of yourself my beloved, and have patience. I just got a new axe, with which I am going to do yardwork. It's a big un, the type Paul Bunyan used to carry. You don't know Paul Bunyan? Neither do I, but I think he was a giant lumberjack in Canada or something. Anyway, it's a big axe, and it's heavy! It doesn't have much of an edge, even though I spent most of the afternoon trying to sharpen it. I guess it's supposed to function as a sort of sharp sledgehammer, where the weight and momentum thereof causes most of the damage. I need it too, because the long and short machetes I have don't have the balls to demolish trees and stumps. It's made in China, but it has a German brand name. Interesting. There's this blue paint all over the head, which started peeling as I tried to sharpen it. So, I spent most of the night scraping the blue paint off, until Sasameki Koto 13 came up on Shadowplay TV, and it occured to me that I had to write to my sweetie, so I stopped scraping and started to write and tell my sweetie about my new axe. It's an axe, not a guitar, even though I could sure use an American Deluxe Strat and a Gibson SG 6/12 doubleneck, but that means I should also get a tube stack along with those. I'll settle for a local tube stack. Malaysia is reputed to make some mean tube amps, y'know. But I wouldn't turn away a Marshall or Krank tube stack. Anyway, it looks like I'll be building up more bulk with this axe, and maybe become very buffed and macho. And you thought you were marrying a chick singer!

An average sincere Muslim has to give open warning to the heedless about Judgement Day, and that all humans will have to face God, because everything belongs to God. Some of these humans think they hold you in bonds and contracts, but everything and everyone belongs to God, for God to do with as God pleases. The day will come when the axe of distress will fall upon them. Now, the command for Muslims to give open warning to unbelievers about God and Judgement Day is stated distinctly and repeatedly in the Qur'an. Allah made it somewhat easy for me today, since I am a writer and I blog the Qur'an, but the earliest Muslims had to live as a minority in a pagan society, so they preached their warning in person at the footsteps of the Ka'bah in Mecca. Too many Muslims today haven't a clue of that difficulty because they live in a Muslim majority and they preach to the converted, in fact they pass it over as unimportant and passe, and some even rabidly join cults. I remember being a street musician, and my reading the Qur'an on the streets of Tempe, Arizona, USA. I remember what it's like to have to carry out the commands of Allah as stated in the Qur'an, in a society of non-Muslims. I know what it's like to have to pause work at a pizza joint when it's really busy, to go and pray in the toilet. It sucked, but I did it. The earliest Muslims had it much worse, to the point where God commanded them to fight. Then imagine Abraham, after attaining Awareness of God as a teenager growing up in a family of pagans, having to preach to his own father, to stop worshipping statues. Compared to all that, I feel clueless too. Ya Allah, please have mercy on me, and make my work easy.