If I were as good as I'd like to be...



Whirl
by CDM.MMXII

 ...... I'd be able to animate the image, show the right leg flashing into the high kick that pulled back propels her into the pirouette, the shadows from the sailing veil setting curves across the soft flesh of gender, the ripple of dancer’s muscle as she bends from the waist through the second revolution, the plant and leap taking her out the right side of the frame.  But *sigh* I’m not that good yet, all I can do is imagine the power and grace of her motion, and maybe, just maybe, you can imagine it as well...

Once More into the breach...

I know, I know
by CDM.MMXII

A painting a bit off my usual styles (or attempts at style), but fairly pertinent to the news of the moment.  It fits.  I’ve taken on a final labor of love, playing Mr. Mom for my brother and niece, taking on keeping house and coaching homework and driving the taxi runs and... and... and you get the picture.  He’s a single parent running himself ragged trying to earn a living, someone needs to step in as backstop.  What the hell, it’s life where pretty much everything else has run down into shades of slow fade to black.  Truth be told it’s as much for me as for them.

Yea, I can do this.  I kept track of a fifteen, twenty million dollar chemical batch plant for a decade, worked warehouse and receiving and R&D and sundry such related things... how much harder can a kitchen be? (Any mom’s in the audience: keep yer mouth shut, please, I don’t want to know just how cold the water is, I’m already airborne and halfway to the drink...)  It’s still working time figured against batch scale to match load demand and all of it riding a (insert fifteen favorite obscene words) JIT inventory system... yea, I’ve been there before.  But I’d bet serious folding green dear old Mrs. Cleaver never used words like that to describe what she was doing.  I just wish Betty Crocker knew how to write a proper annotated SOP... translating is a, well, just say it bites fleas and barks at the moon.  Oh, well.

Today was the first day of school... dear God, do all those soccer moms actually have a driver’s license?  Judging by the chaos of freaking idiots around that Jr. High I’m not convinced they should be allowed on the road.  Ten minutes of wading the traffic and I was wishing I’d driven the big truck... heavier, more power, and sheet metal I don’t mind bending... I was ready to put some serious push on the pavement to make ‘em move.  Took thirty minutes to make six blocks, and that was just to get to where I could cut to the back streets and make some headway.  What a circus.  Thank goodness the kid will be riding the bus tomorrow.  He (the driver) gets paid to put up with the idiots.  I don’t.  But it does explain why they’re always advertising for drivers.

Of Pain and Painting...

Look Up Sweetheart, Look Up
by CDM.MMXII

Another reflex painting, just letting the feelings fall off my fingers and into the colors.  It is almost time to tell her story, such of it as I know.  Almost, but not quite yet. 

Suddenly numb, Uncomfortably numb...

I got my feet kicked out from under me yesterday, got totally blindsided by something I hadn’t even given a thought to.  I was packing up my big desk, emptying the drawers, clearing and cleaning getting ready to move the beast to its’ new home.  The job proceeded as such jobs usually do, the things used daily, a few of the ok, that’s where that went kind of finds, a yuk or two.  The usual. 

When the last drawer was empty I took a break, when I stepped back into the room afterwards something slammed into my mood like a two ton wrecking ball, left me spinning hard for the remainder of the night and into today.  Not down, not blah or blue or flat or angry, just numb.  It hit so hard I was totally numb so suddenly it was a bit frightening, really.  It took an effort that carried through the night into dreamstate, almost Escherville, to figure out what had happened.  I did it to myself, but I never saw it coming. 

Sometime this morning a question popped into my head... “How many convicts get released from prison, and then get a job where they get to take apart the prison they were incarcerated in?”  Not very many, that’s for damn sure.  But that’s what breaking down that desk was to my subconscious, it was taking apart where I’d been imprisoned for years.  I walked back into that room and got smacked by all the things I’d felt sitting in that corner, and all the things I knew I should have been feeling but couldn’t acknowledge, not then, not under the circumstances.  All the despair of watching my wife fade into bitter senility, all the anger, all the helplessness of being pinned in a corner to get beaten daily by her attitudes I’m now convinced were seeded on her by a pair feminazi lesbian grifters working her for money, pinned there to endure rather than break the promise I made with God for my witness.  Sorry bitches (NOT), I’m stronger than you gave me credit for. But then again, you really don’t know much about men.  All you know are the steers and queers.  I’m neither. You couldn’t make me help you validate all your hatred for anything male.  You wanted me to abandon her so you could add my story to your list of justifications for your way of life.  Didn’t happen.  Might have, you got close, but it didn’t.  God gave me a couple of genuine friends beyond the reach of your poison, you couldn’t quite turn my sentence into true solitary where you might have had a chance.  I owe the Almighty another effort on His behalf, because all things taken into consideration it’s beyond believing Alex and Leia and Ira and Irisha were a coincidence, finding them then and there is just to far beyond the laws of averages to be believed a chance encounter... examples of good women to set against the influence of bad women on my life.  No, that didn’t happen by chance.

 

Anyhow, I sat numb all night, started painting by force of habit, didn’t have a clue what I was trying to paint until it was finished.  It came out almost what I didn’t know I wanted to portray, almost, so I figured I might as well post it along with the story.  Last night wasn’t a very restful night’s sleep, but it was productive.  Now I know just how deep the damage goes, I’ve found the bottom.  It can be fixed.

Gonna be interesting to see what expression winds up on her face the next time I take a try at capturing an image of Malaguena.  Very interesting.

It isn't your time...



Until You See Her Hands
by
Cyranos DeMet

 


  Originally painted on a long lonely night many days ago, partially painted that is.  I refound the file cleaning up the hard drive ( I do a lot of digi-doodles that never amount to anything but wasted drive space, have to go through and cull them out from time to time), and with the theme for that great television show "Mash" hung in my head finished it this morning.  Have you ever heard the lyrics for that music?  If you have you'll fully understand the painting, and why it is titled as it is.  ( Suicide Is Painless, the theme to Mash... I recommend the Johnny Mandel version, it's on uTube, of course).

I'm not sure what happened to the image quality... it's lousy... someone/thing totally fubar'd the shading.  Oh, well.  What do you expect when the subject is suicide?

Sandhaisat...Prologue

All Rise...

"Has the jury reached a verdict?"

"We have, Your Honor."

"On the sole count of premeditated temporal murder in the first degree how find you?"

"We find the defendant guilty as charged."



Unneeded by CDM.MMXII

 Ok, I'm killing a lot of time.  Guilty as charged.  And you know what?  My conscience doesn't bother me at all.  It's my time dammit, what's left of it, and I'll do with it as I damn well please.  Thirty years of servitude, I figure if I've done the time I might as well do the crime.  So yea, I'm gonna kill a lot of time... painting, writing poetry, thinking up ways to do neat things like put a set of angel wings on a beautiful woman that not only work but look like they grew there, write on my stories, flirt with the pretty girls and in general enjoy whatever life might have to offer.  I've done my time, I've lived with the betrayals and the heartbreaks, the mockery of morality from the smug and the perverted, the usury and deceptions of the damned by any decent deity corporate establishment, the lies and hypocrisy of those who claim to speak for God himself.  I'll let someone else fuck the whole lot of 'em, I won't, I have no sins on my soul to deserve the likes of them.

It's my time now, and I don't give a damn what they say.

30 Doodle Street...



"Evita" by CDM.MMXII

 This is one of those posts that has nothing to do with anything, and everything.  A ramble.  The picture just sort of happened because a random grab into the music library brought up the soundtrack, the story, of Evita Peron and somehow that's what the story put into an image.  Sort of a surrealistic running out into psychedelic commentary and condemnation of materialism and ambition.   The panel is all colors, the figure more black than white and devoid of detail, just like the hearts of those for whom materialism has displaced humanity.  Boy howdy, like I'm the first to make that observation.

When I was young I was poor, much like Evita.  I always felt myself an outcast, lower class, isolated and alienated.  But I chose a different path than she,  I'm a lot closer to Che than Evita.  I survived, grew up, freed myself from the cult that had inflicted the misery, freed myself from the chains and contradictions, found my way back to a God of my own understanding, built my life literally from the shirt on my back and very little else.  I didn't do badly by myself, not really. 

But now none of that matters.  I'm drowning in crap, things, posssesions, and I feel more destitute than I did when I literally stole my dinner at times.  Things have never really held that much power in my soul, not really.  I'm fond of my stereo, but that's for the sake of the music and the emotions stored therein.  I like a good sipping whiskey at times, I can delight in a beautiful woman without her ever knowing I even noticed her.  The fact of the matter is I feel homeless these days, more homeless than the year I lived out of my field jacket.  The material never held much sway in me, any one place just a different place than the last one, no real biggy.  Home has always been a place in someone's heart, and I feel homeless.  It totally sucks.  Poor Evita.  I wonder if she felt like she had a home.

If you can't say something nice...

Paint a picture instead.

This one was inspired by a line in a song:

...from the wells of disapointment
where the women kneel to pray
for grace of God in desert here
and desert far away...

from "Democracy" by Leonard Cohen

I've had that song, mostly that line, stuck in my head for several days now.  It's becoming annoying.  I'd say I don't know why, but that would be a lie.  I know damn good and well why. 

Prisoner of Choice

The prisoner is not the one who chose, the prisoner is the one

whose every chance for choice

was set null  and void by the consequences of the first choice.

Corners...



Now You Know
by CDM.MMXII



There’s an old saying that relates to foresight in action... it goes “don’t paint yourself into a corner.”  Right.  You’re painting the floor, don’t paint yourself into a corner (where you’ll be trapped by your own wet paint).  Hmmm... that’s most generally good advice, and of course the idea of leaving yourself a route back out applies to a great deal more than the fairly rare case of actually painting the floor.

These days I’m thinking that is exactly what my culture has done though, I’m thinking we’ve allowed ourselves to be painted into a corner of our own making.  All of the liberations and libations, all of the profitable passions and ultimately pornographic compassion, all of the psychobabble bullshit addressing all of the politically correct angst and anxiety of the steers and queers and identity challenged alternate lifestyles trying to justify the sterility they’ve created?  I’m thinking those are nothing more than the wet paint locking several generations of American’s into a corner, where they must either wait for the paint to dry (aka, waste off a generation or two into the grave from old age, and neglect to put their story in the history books),  or walk out leaving tracks to advertise just how not bright we really were back in the day.

Stranger in my dreams...

To Cross a Desert of Dreams
by
Cyranos DeMet

She's starting to show up on a real regular basis, and that's beginning to bother me.  She's waiting for me somewhere, I'm sure of that.  But where?  At times I think she won't find me this side of mortality, and that is... unsettling.  She never feels threatening, not at all, in fact several times she's shown up to give warning of a threat, the kind of threats I used to face in Escherville.  But she's not a citizen of that place, I'm sure of that.  She's silent, smiles, feels warm and strong and benign, a friend.  Maybe somenight she'll tell me her name.  That would be nice, to know her name...

Giving it all away...

Yea, why not.  Might as well post them all.  I've given away everything else in my life, might as well give these away as well.  They'll have a better chance of being appreciated than most of what I've given away.

Spotlights and Spheres of Empathy...

There are a lot of ways a man can get his heart broke.  The most common of course is when he falls in love, overcommits the situation and ends up crying in his beer thinking he's hurt a lot worse than he really is.  That may be the most common, but that isn't always the most painful.  Sometimes you'll be walking along and have a perfect stranger catch you blindside with something that hurts like hell, although from a distance, and your choices are endure or diminish your own humanity to disable the hurt's ability to reach you. 

It happens to me more often than I like to admit, happened just last night.  No, it wasn't a beautiful woman wishing she could be seen for more than her beauty.  It was exactly the opposite, and worse, it was a homely woman wishing she could be seen for herself, wishing the spotlight wouldn't find her because of how she looked.  Kind of an occupational hazard for those who have an open heart, an open sphere of empathy.  Sometimes you really, really wish you didn't have to image all the data you recieve.

Bar-chord Lives, or something like that....

Just because I painted it doesn't mean I have a clue what it's about.... really.  Take your own best guess.

House of Cards...

There are times life feels so very much like a house of cards, each card leaning against the other in off-square corners, layer after layer stacked up on the feeble walls of belief or hope or assumption.  Trying to believe the best about people leaves faith a rather fragile construction when you get right down to it.  Let hope bring an error into a wall and the entire creation can collapse.  No earth shaking revelation, that, pretty much everyone has seen that one way or another.  Just one of those unhappier facts of life.

Even knowing it could happen it still happened to me just the other day.  I tried to believe the best, and got shown the worst.  My mistake.  This isn’t the first time I’ve had a bent card, a deformed and badly weakened card get way to deep in the pile, this isn’t the first time I’ve watched a house of cards fall.  Nope, not at all.  But this time it’s more than just fallen walls easily restored with a stronger straighter card in place of the weak one.  When things fell apart to some innocent error or random accident it isn’t so hard to forgive and forget.  But such wasn’t the case this time, there was no accident or error, no puff of breeze, no bump to the table.  I watched it shaping up, watched it forming, hoped I was wrong and had my hope betrayed.  What could have been noble proved out as deliberate and premeditated malice with greed for a motive.  If it had only been greed for money it would have been bad enough, but no, the truth goes far deeper than that.  I said I got shown the worst, and I wasn’t joking.  What the falling cards revealed was a lustful greed for power, a cold greed black and evil as any vampire villain from fiction exploiting the living to linger in the shadows of anti-life, the kind of evil that requires a continuous stream of victims.  What I saw was truly the ugliest side of what passes for humanity.     

Which brings me to the point of this post.  Exposure to that kind of evil is like exposure to a great many other toxins, the toxin will often linger in concealed forms to poison later times and places and peoples.  Such evil leaves anger and bitterness and vanity in its’ victims, the toxins of the soul that create the very weaknesses that open the way for evil to jump from life to life like a contagious disease.  Those contagions are the deepest damage done by even a brief encounter with genuine evil, the contagions left behind what must be guarded against most closely after exposure to such a carrier.  Failing to guard yourself against what the evil left behind is to invite the evil to make you its’ new host.  Such a carrier is what the falling house of cards revealed to me, I’m having to keep a very close watch indeed on the state of my soul, the state of my inner defenses.  The degree of evil I encountered demands acute vigilance to limit the damage done to no more than the superficial things of money and a fallen house of cards once built on the hopes of what might have been. 

Oh, well.  Since the house has fallen might as well play some poker.  Folks, the game is seven card stud with nothing wild being as how the jokers just burned themselves. 

The Third Reality of Man Chapter Two: "Me, We, and Thee"

It is a fact of life the human has the same requirements for survival as do all life forms:  the need for sustenance, for security, for procreation.  For the animals these needs are quite straightforward, the literal things directly associated. For the animals instinct and environment govern the competition to fill those needs, but such is not the case for the humans. 

Human intelligence has set perception and imagination as new players alongside instinct and environment in the competitions for survival.  For all that it is an obvious observation it still needs made: because his environment includes abstract imaginings communicated the life of a human is at least one order of magnitude more complex than any of the other creatures sharing the planet with him. 

Further, the human capacity for abstract thought communicated enables a single human to form alliances with multiple collectives beyond those defined by nature, alliances beyond the troop or pride as would be seen in the other animals.  The human will form alliances with several unique arrangements of differing individuals according to a common thought or imagining, specialized structures evolved to enhance the cooperative efforts aiding the cause of survival.

I will assert to you these groupings, whose sum is known as society, provide to their members aid in more than survival within the physical reality, they also serve as the foundation for survival in the inner reality created of abstractions and imaginings in ways not yet fully understood. 

Among the deepest and most profoundly life altering consequences intelligence burdened on the human is the ability to perceive the common physical reality from a perspective other than first person singular.  To perceive reality from a perspective removed from the self opens to human perception a vision very likely unique to the human: the possibility to see your own self among the multitude as others might see you and be compelled to ask the most uniquely human question there is: who is that?   

Consider that question if you will.  When the question is set in the first person it instantly takes the more familiar form of Who am I ? 

But how to answer that question?  It is not such a simple problem, and nature provides no clues. Perhaps there are other creatures who also ask that question, but that possibility remains undefined for lack of communication between the species. To the best of my knowledge only the human must define for himself an identity unique enough to recognize self  from other  within the internal reality expanded into the third person perspectives made possible by intelligent imagination.  The question of self recognition, self identification is as unique a marker of humanity as exists, separating the human from the other creatures sharing the planet with us. 

I will assert the challenge of building an identity robust enough to be recognizable from any perspective available to the abstract inner reality is the single most powerful force empowering evolution in shaping both society and the inner structure of the individuals who are the component elements of those societies.

Even the most casual glance across human history shows the impact of the ongoing quest to satisfy the question of self identity. From within the perspective of this question the dividers of race and culture, nationality and religion, the various social classes within the larger definitions are revealed as little more than constructs in the cause of facilitating an acceptable answer, for it is from these artificial divisions the majority will derive the symbol set used in the cause of self definition.  

Such symbol sets are the one critical function nature does not, and cannot, provide to any species ascending from instinct into abstract intelligence.  Within the animal kingdom there is no demand for such, only the presence of imagination empowered by abstract intelligence creates need for such symbolisms in the struggle for survival.  Where nature is concerned the humans are very much on their own in answering the question they quite literally invented.

It should be no surprise that when faced with this new challenge the humans returned to their first source of strength.  The humans ascended to dominance on the strength of cooperation within and between the various collectives enabled by symbolic communication, it is to those same collectives the humans turned to meet this new challenge threatening their mental rather than physical survival.  They did as they had done before, and in so doing opened the way for evolution to resume its’ work.

With what has gone before set as both foundation and anchor it is time to move beyond observations distilled from history and deal with humanities current state of affairs.  Just how has mankind fared in his quest to live in the divided reality of abstract imagination?  What tools, what tactics have been employed?  And most critical of all, what are the long term consequences for the human race of such tools and tactics considered in the context of evolution’s efforts?   Such thoughts are next on the agenda in Chapter Three, “Tools bartered and borrowed...”

Roll On Sanity...

I love the kids down at the diner, I really do.  They’re great.  Lost, confused, fighting for a place to call their own, a home in a heart to go the distance for them, you know, all the nobility of youth so often overlooked by those embarrassed to admit they did exactly the same things.  And beyond that they’re so often an inspiration to me.  The years between us open a parallax for me, put things in a perspective I’d never see otherwise.  They’re great.

There’s one particular lass down there I’m getting ever more fond of, she reminds me in many ways of both my wife and my muse in about equal measure.  She’s very much her own woman, but yea, she was built from the same sort of things as the others, no way she wasn’t and turn out like she is.  We flirt a lot, it’s a game between us.  She has her man and she loves him, I totally respect their relationship, but she likes to flirt and I’m about the most harmless person possible for her to play with on a slow afternoon.  It’s almost a lost art, flirting, and she’s good at it.  But flirting isn’t what this post is about, even though we were indeed doing just that when she popped open a thought for me that really does run deep, way deep, into the human condition.  It’s kind of subtle, and yet fits so very many things to be seen in reality.  Let me frame up the story for you.

The other day she shared that she was in a bit of a frump.  Not down, just kind of sideways off a little deeper into left field than she wanted to be.  A bit worried, a bit annoyed at and for her lad.  He was definitely off his feed, not feeling right about his world at all.  And of course she, good woman that she is, was responding to what his world was doing to him but not quite sure how to deal with the situation not being totally sure just how the situation had come to be.  For a bit we talked about the situation, mostly me just trying to draw her out, help her put the facts into words where maybe they’d be easier for her to organize.  A friend thing, you know?

Anyway, what emerged was that her lad was suffering, at least in part, to the fact that he’s the only male working with six women who’ve worked together for a long time.  Six women who’ve worked together for so long they have, as women in a tight knit group so often will, synchronized their cycle.  She said they were driving him crazy, that the poor boy just couldn’t catch a break, that about the time that time of the month was over for her they were just getting started.  I said I sympathized with his predicament, which I do.  She kind of shrugged, and said “yea, that’s close to how I feel right now, like it’s just fixing to start even though I know I just finished.”  She kind of went blank for a moment, and then shrugged.  I heard something make a tiny “click” in the back of my mind.  Something was trying to make a connection.

Then she looked out and away with that look on her face, I mean that  look.  I chuckled, and in full and compassionate understanding of why that  look would show up at that point in such a conversation said “ah sweetheart, the only thing you really need is for someone to bend you over the bed and not let up until you don’t have enough breath left to beg more of what stole your breath in the first place.”  She brightened up like the sun, big smile, suddenly shining eyes feral and hungry and with a bit of amazement in her voice said “yea, that’s exactly what I need!” as if she hadn’t really recognized it for what it was being as how by her calendar it wasn’t at all the right time of the month for that  to be a power player influencing her mood. 

Now I was just flirting, trying to lighten the moment by shifting into something safer like joking about the sort of enthusiastic sex that goes down mostly just for grins and bragging rights,  moving away from what really was getting rather to personal.  That was what I’d intended, but not what happened.  She looked me in the eye, and what was in her glance was indescribable.  It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t embarrassment, it wasn’t an invitation, but whatever it was it exploded in the back side of my brain producing one of those light bulb moments, an epiphany I think they’re called.

What if a big chunk of what drives, and overdrives, so many of the modern women has for a beginning contradictory hormonal signals being carried to her by others in her world?  Signals out of phase with hers?  Just how much unhappiness might that be generating?  Just how much of the needless angst and anxiety and tension might be starting right there?

A great many things, confusing and disturbing things, about the modern world fall out in neatly ordered ranks when examined in the light of such a thought.

The girls respond to such signals far, far more than the boys do, that’s both folk wisdom and proven by science.  No doubt one of those bell curve - normal distribution kind of things as to just how much any given woman would be effected.  The ends of that curve would be of course -not at all-  running out to -eating mood pills by the handful-  (much to the pharmaceutical industries profit... hmmm...). 

Equally the girls are much more tribal than the boys are, have been for all of recorded history... my troop, my tribe, my village.  The cliques in high school give solid evidence of just how deep that instinct goes, stack a bunch of women in the same place for any length of time and they’ll form tribes to call their own.  Do they form such tribes trying to make sure they are keeping closest company with other women whose biology is producing a hormonal signature compatible with their own? (hmmm, again hmmm... 28 day cycle, just how many phase angles does that generate? And to what effect along the interfaces? Perhaps a neat little problem in topography welded onto social psychology...)  Something the high school counselor set might want to consider, being as how educating females is a relatively new thing compared to the run of human history.

One other fact comes screaming out of the blue where this thought is concerned: only in the last century has the world really become co-ed enough for these functions to really find a great deal of traction across the macroscopic population!  Only recently, as history accounts such things, have the girls and the boys mixed company on a regular enough basis for such signals to really become an ongoing problem, self sustaining on the mechanisms of momentum by memory.  Once again, the social convergence and re-orientations of World War Two glare in the spotlight. 

Good grief.  This thought even goes Biblical, all the way back to Leviticus in the Old Testament.  Yes, Leviticus, the most mocked book of the Bible, and yet perhaps the prophet really was onto something when he said do not wear two different cloths on your body... cloth, in those days a thing exclusively produced by females, each cloth unique to it’s village which in turn would mean saturated in the hormonal signature unique to the women who produced it.  He didn’t say don’t wear cloth from a different village, he said don’t mix two of them at the same time.  Why?  Of course, you don’t want to carry home to your woman a possibly conflicted set of signals that could cause your life and hers to head for hell riding in their very own hand-basket, of course not!  A great deal of the Old Testament was simply solid wisdom concerning survival, perhaps this thought is actually big enough to have gotten a spot in that ancient repository of wisdom.  God knows better than anyone how many things in that book have ridden across the years by rote only to be explained in modern times by science. 

This thought even explains the current thing about girls shaving all the hair off their body: body hair, the broadcast antenna of the hormonal signals.  Yup, that fits as well.  What a thought.

Oh, and the title of this post?  Just how much of the modern cosmetics/hygiene industry is actually dedicated to trying to suppress this very function?  All the damn perfumes and colognes and aftershaves and deodorants?  And most of them (the cheap and common ones anyway) totally saturated with pthalic and alcohol?  Yea, roll it on, spray it on, bathe in it, do something to knock down all those conflicting signals that are beating on the girls from every side in this brave new congested overpopulated cross domain dependent world of ours.  Old man Leviticus may get the last laugh after all.

So yea, I really love the kids down at the diner.  There’s one lass I most definitely owe a big thank you to, I’m thinking more watermelon (she loves watermelon) and wine (gentler than vodka) and neat music she hasn’t heard before (and yea, she’s quite welcome to cuddle her lad on the couch while listening, they’re really kind of pretty together), because I’m thinking she may have cracked open an understanding of a really major hidden power player for me, and maybe for you as well.  She endured the discomfort to make it happen, she deserves a thank you in the same realms.

It just sort of happened...

Hmmmm..... oh well. 

Concerning God...

(From conversations with Pip)

A thing I've rarely to never seen in anyone else's concept of deities, God Almighty or any of the sub-sets of that thought, is a compassionate attempt to perceive the inner motives of such an entity.  If I say God is omnipotent and omniscient then there is nothing outside his realm of ability, or his realm of perception.  What intent could he possibly have that would require "a desired outcome?"  Desired implies there is the possibility of some other outcome, a thing impossible under the premise of omnipotence.  If I say, as do many of the repressive religions, that God desires his creation to worship him in a personally debasing way I am saying he is insecure (countered by omniscience, God knows there's nothing bigger) or that God is cruel (countered by omnipotence, what is there to be found in doing harm to your own effort, an act tantamount to being self destructive when considered on a scale large enough to hold a supreme entity responsible for, and encompassing, all of creation?)… things that hardly fit with either of the opening arguments.  In fact such concepts are actually part of the definition assigned to his inverse, although in a much more direct form. 

If I say God is not omnipotent and omniscient  then I have reduced the most powerful entity I am able to conceive of to simply massively powerful, and the Descartes argument holds… I perceive myself, as a reference, and I perceive the other who is more (or less) powerful than I, there is a line defined between the two points and a progression established, at some point at the utter end of the universe that line must reach an end (and a new beginning) and you are back at square one… a single entity which is the source from which all other entities are derived by reason of the defining comparison.

If I say there is no God, no first and initial point of self aware consciousness (from which to define the initial point of nurture if not nature) then I am in with the contradictions of the physicists, and they have a whopper to deal with.  Consider the fairly well proven definition of matter as given by Einstein… the classic e=mc² so often slammed around.  Expand that equation and you come out with a term in units of time, and time is impossible in any state of perfect symmetry (asserted as the state at the point of the singularity from which came the big bang, or the nexus points of a cyclic universe), because the only possible definition of time is the transition from one state to another state, and perfect symmetry has no transitions, it is perfectly stable!  If there is enough asymmetry to produce time then there is no singularity, and the entire argument collapses.

I therefore assert it is more logical to include an initial and immortal point of consciousness from which the requisite definition of time may be derived in order to remove the contradiction in the argument of the physicists.  This is not to say I understand anything about the perceptions and experiences of such an entity, but I can say such an entity perceives change, that perception is what I assert provides the beginning of time from which came the beginning of matter.  Regardless of what scale we might try and impose there has to be some form of progression in that entities perception… that there be a difference defined between the alpha state and the next state, be it beta or omega or alpha prime.  Immortality and infinity are equally slippery concepts: regardless of the amount of "local time" between discrete states (as perceived by any entity whose existence was enabled by the initial definition of time) the initial entity will traverse an infinite number of transitions… if the universe is steady state and never ending then time is infinite, immortality infinite, the number of moments perceived is also infinite; if the universe is cyclic then the cycle repeats endlessly, the number of moments perceived can be no less than the number of cycles, one perception to start/end each cycle, and again the number of perceptions is infinite.  Any way I slice it I come back to an entity which has, most literally, seen it all.

In compassion for such an entity I ask "how could such an entity maintain enough sanity, enough internal balance, to mark the changes which define the reality I perceive?  How could it avoid the ultimate positive feedback collapse in such aloneness? "  It is from this question I derive the only answer within my (admittedly limited) range of perception:  that entity would have great motive to create other entities which also perceive change, time, to their own unique scale in order there be some point of comparison to break the aloneness, and thereby the possibility of death by sameness.  That would be you and I and the entire silly noble evil and utterly essential human (and who knows how many other mortal) races.  Such entities would, by definition, have to be within the first entities frame of perception, or they serve no useful purpose. 

No, I do not believe (as an abandonment of rational thought) that God exists, and that he has a vital interest in the minor doings of such as you and I for reasons of some psychological imbalance within the greatest entity possible to postulate, I maintain by the logic presented above that entity must exist to explain the reality I perceive, and pursuant to the basics of both psychology and philosophy the only attitude I can imagine such an entity could take towards his creations-of-perception which would maintain sanity would equate to love, the desire to see his creations grow, in order that they prosper and continue.  If that entity, may I call him God now? imposed his will over his creations then he has defeated the very purpose for which they were created, regardless if the mechanism he were to use was fear or orgasmic ecstasy.

To quote that beautiful, fictional man Forest Gump:  "and that's all I have to say about that."