Dave Sim's blogandmail #132 (January 21st, 2007)

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the

Most Merciful:

There is no God but God

& Muhammad is His last messenger and seal

of prophets.

Almighty God

One God having One Name, One Face and One

Aspect which is God:

Glory to God in the Highest, Glory to God Most

High

God Who is the Most Gracious and the Most

Merciful.

Great is God and there is no other god but He.

Almighty God, I thank You for having revealed

Yourself to men.

I thank you for Your Presence in the world

and Your presence in my life

through Your Living Word, preserved for all

time within Your Sacred Scriptures;

Your Living Word which is like unto a shining

beacon, illuminating the path You have made

straight before me.


Almighty God, I thank You for the book of Genesis,

I thank You for the book of Exodus,

I thank You for the book of Leviticus,

I thank You for the book of Numbers,

I thank You for the book of Deuteronomy.

I thank You for these books and revelations which

You imparted to Your great prophet, Moshe

Peace be upon him.


I thank You for the book of Joshua,

I thank You for the book of Judges,

I thank You for the book of Samuel,

I thank You for the book of Kings,

I thank You for the book of Isaiah,

I thank You for the book of Jeremiah,

I thank You for the book of Ezekial,

I thank You for the book of Hosea,

I thank You for the book of Joel,

I thank You for the book of Amos,

I thank You for the book of Obadiah,

I thank You for the book of Jonah,

I thank You for the book of Micah,

I thank You for the book of Nahum,

I thank You for the book of Habakkuk,

I thank You for the book of Zephaniah,

I thank You for the book of Haggai,

I thank You for the book of Zechariah,

I thank You for the book of Malachi,


I thank You for the testimony and the records

of these prophets and messengers to

Your Chosen People,

Israel.

Peace be upon them.


I thank You for the Gospel according to Matthew,

I thank You for the Gospel according to Mark,

I thank You for the Gospel according to Luke,

I thank You for the Gospel according to John,

Peace be upon them


I thank you for the testimonies and the records

of Jesus, the Lamb of God,

Peace be upon him.


I thank You for the Acts of the Apostles,

I thank You for the Epistles of Paul,

I thank You for the testimony of the disciples,

I thank You for the Revelation of John.

Peace be upon them.


And I thank you for your glorious Koran.


Almighty God, after the instruction of Your

last messenger and seal of prophets,

Muhammad, peace be upon him,

who counselled that a man must submit himself

to the Will of God, wilfully and peacefully, I

renew my vow (this morning) that I do so: that

I submit myself to You and I submit myself to

Your Will. If it be Your Will, please grant that

I might be brought to the fulfillment whish

You intended for me from before my birth.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious and

the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other God but He. God Who created all

the worlds and all the heavens, God Who is

the only Source of salvation, God Who is the

only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

Who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God most

high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, I thank you for allowing me to

be born in Canada in the last half of the

twentieth century: pampered, coddled,

insulated, sheltered and protected

from so much of the world's genuine hardship

& pain, misery & strife, famine & poverty,

disease & dispair, hunger & need, want &

dread, fear & violence, suppression &

oppression which are the yoke & the burden

under which so much of the world's

population yet labours.


Through these sufferings are the dust of this

earth -- from dust they came and to dust they

will return -- still I know that I have been

spared them, only by Your Grace and by Your

Mercy, and I am profoundly grateful to You

for that.


May God's will be done in the earth, and on

the earth, as it is in all the worlds and all the

heavens.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious

and Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other god but He. God Who created all the

worlds and all the heavens, God Who is the

only Source of salvation, God Who is the

only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God

most high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, if I am worthy of forgiveness

in Your Eyes, I ask forgiveness of my many

sins, transgressions, iniquities and vanities

which are abomination before your Eternal

Laws, Morals and Ethics. If I am worthy

of forgiveness in Your Eyes, I ask forgiveness

for all my sins of commission and of

omission: those sins which I have

committed and which I commit, out of

wilfulness, out of ignorance,

out of spite, out of misery, out of

self-absobtion, out of self-pity,

out of self-destructiveness or out of

misundertsanding or

misconstruing Your Living Word.


Almighty God, I accept all consequences and

repercussions of my own choices, decisions,

self-imposed inadequacies, actions, deeds,

words and works. For God is the Sure Judge

over all the earth and all the worlds and all

the heavens, slow to anger, measured and

temperate in Your Judgements, sparing and

merciful in Your chastisements.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious and

the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other God but He. God Who created all

the worlds and all the heavens, God Who is

the only Source of salvation, God Who is the

only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

Who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God most

high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, I commend into Your Care and

Your Custody, my soul, my mind and my

heart, knowing as I do so that free will is

God's greatest gift to man. And while I

entrust myself only to You and while I trust

only You, still I know that there are choices

and decisions which lie before me in my life

which are mine alone to make. If it be Your

Will, please grant that those choices and

decisions might be informed by the common

sense, the good judgement and what wisdom

You have seen fit to bestow upon me, by Your

Grace and by Your Mercy.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious

and Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other god but He. God Who created all the

worlds and all the heavens, God Who is the

only source of salvation, God Who is the only

hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God

most high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, I also renew my vow (this

morning) that I will never again marry and I

will never again cohabit with a woman. I vow

further to exercise all caution , all restraint, all

common sense, all good judgement and what

wisdom You have seen fit to bestow upon me,

by Your Grace and by Your Mercy and to

exercise all these to the utmost in all of my

dealings with womankind.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

most High, God who is the Most Gracious and

the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other God but He. God Who created all the

worlds and all the heavens, God who is the

only Source of salvation, God who is the only

Hope of redemption, God who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God

most high,

In excelsis Deo.


Amen.

STEVE PETERS ON THE

SUNDAY EDITION

BLOG & MAIL



My car broke down completely in August, and I decided not to shop for a new one. If God wants me to have a car, I'll get one (the two cars I've owned were both hand-me-downs from family members, and I always thought that in both cases receiving a car was a case of God looking out for me). In October, my company bought several new supermarkets from another company that went out of business. Almost all our more experienced employees who get a higher rate of pay have been forced to go to work at the new stores. I was slated to go as well. This would have been a huge inconvenience; a half-hour drive and I'd no longer get exercise from walking 2 miles to work every day. I would have to buy a car. I might've even had to get a second job. It certainly would've made working on my comics more difficult. Fortunately, I was ultimately able to stay at my own store because of not having a car. As far as I'm concerned, God wants me to have as much time as possible to work on my comic. When He got me my car 10 years ago, he timed it to last just as long as it did and it expired just before all this business with the mandatory company transfers went down. God is merciful.


He is, indeed. Virtually all of the people reading this are going to think you ridiculous for thinking that way, but since I think the way you do, let me say that in those situations I usually try to recognize that there's a large sense of obligation to God implied. The fact that it was such a near thing that made the difference between a life that accommodated your cartooning and a life that would have made your cartooning all-but-impossible means that you're supposed to make the most of your gratitude and be productive: having seen how easily it can be taken away and how important it is to you. And, of course, that implies a further obligation to do important work, right? In order to be worthy of the special attention you got, I mean.



As for Dr. Strange – I always loved Ditko and had an affinity for his extra-dimensional stuff, and I love those huge abstract characters like Eternity and the Living Tribunal. A few years ago, I discovered some beat-up copies of Strange Tales and started collecting it, always keeping an eye out for cheap, beat-up copies (as long as all the pages are all there so I can read it, that's all that matters to me – I have no interest in the collecting aspect). I recently realized I cold fill the holes in my collection by buying them on eBay. I bought a nice batch that arrived recently, and reading it after three years of praying, was dismayed by how demonic it is. I mean, this Strange character must be damned for sure. Half of his spells invoke some demon or other – Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, indeed. Do the ends justify the means? Is it OK to use black magic if you're using it to save the world from cosmic crises on a regular basis? You keep writing how you think nobody's interested in what you're writing about – the Neal Adams issue, the Ditko analysis – but you seem to keep writing about stuff I'm very interested in or that I'm thinking about. Maybe I'm just in that 1% of fans you talked about.



Well, I think that's a given, Steve.



Now that you've had a chance to read The Origin of Sparky, I thought I'd make one more try at getting you to do a jam for my upcoming Sparky in Love comic (your reply last time was "I should say no"). You talked in your blog about a romance comic someone was putting (or already has) put together, and how interesting it would be to explore that theme in this day and age. I think you'll find the other jams in Sparky in Love pretty amusing; not surprisingly, most of them take a pretty pessimistic tone. I met Lee Thacker through you; he did a lovely color solo piece for it (which, unfortunately, will have to be rendered in gray tones). I had several ideas for it which might either make you more likely to change your mind or make less work for you if you do change your mind.



No, it's not the jam itself—you're great to jam with—it's the fact that, really, the subject of love doesn't interest me now that I know what love has been turned into. Love—familial love and romantic love—is what women use to make men into feminists. I've been trying to come up with an analogy to explain my reaction when you ask me to do a jam about love. To me, it would be like doing a jam about the sort of compulsion in religion that the Islamist government in Somalia is indulging in: forcing people to pray on pain of death. That, to me, is what love is like in our society. Love is the cudgel I've been beaten over the head with since I was 14 to compel me to become a feminist. To me it's not something I can parody or deal with affectionately or try to ignore the core of what it is in favour of the attractive surface veneer anymore than I could do that with the Islamist government in Somalia.



Incidentally, I'm also enclosing a couple of Origin of Sparky CDs for the Archive. I think it's a nice curiosity since, as far as I know, no one else has done a song with Dave Sim lyrics. Unfortunately, it's home-burned, and I've heard that home-burned CD's only last about 10 years. I haven't been burning CDs long enough to verify this. I do think I'll have some copies made by a print-on-demand service at some point, so I'll send them along when that is done. I do hope you'll give our song a listen if you visit someone with a CD player. When my former friend Paul (the one who didn't come to his door when I went to pick him up for our trip to SPACE this year) and I sat down to write it, we first watched the movie Crumb for musical inspiration (I wanted a `30s-style feel for the music to go with Sparky's `30s animation look).



I'm pretty much staying away from playing music apart from the occasional Sparky-related project.


Much appreciated. I'm not sure that I'll ever listen to it but that's nothing against you. I haven't owned anything that would play music since 2001 and I still spend the vast majority of my time with pop songs playing in my head. Certainly far, far more often than I think of alcohol, not having had a drink since 2003. I'll hear a song in the grocery store I haven't heard in ten years and I'll know all the words, but for the most part I can't remember two consecutive lines of scripture to save my life. I can't recite Isaiah 40 off the top of my head but I could sing the theme song to Car 54 Where Are You? without a single mistake. That's pretty sad. Funny, but sad.



Whatever you want to do, or if you don't want to do anything, is fine with me. I feel like a heel for even asking when I read on your blog how busy you are. But I got some good responses to our jam in the first one, and it always gets "oohs" and "ahhs" when I show it to folks in person. The next one wouldn't feel complete without something from you, so I thought I should give it one more try.



Again, sincere apologies. It's not you, it's the subject matter. Let me know if you decide to do a jam about something else.



So now you know some of the sad details of my life in the 21st century. Actually, I suppose I'm not doing so bad – no girlfriend in six and a half years (breaking my previous record of just under five years), regular prayer for three years and (I hope) submission to God's will, fasting on Sundays, no intoxicants or mind-altering substances in over six months (and not particularly missing them, oddly enough). Hopefully I'm moving in the right direction.



Hopefully, we're both moving in the right direction.



God bless.



May God see fit to bless you as well, Steve.



Steve mentioned on his inside front cover a bunch of great stores that have supported him all along—a very good habit to get into for those of us whose fortunes rise and fall on the efforts of those in the brick-and-mortar trenches. Here's Steve's list (unleash the 14 pt. Bold Face Italic WITH underlining!):



Commuter Comics in South Orange New Jersey; Brave New Worlds in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania; Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan; Jim Hanley's Universe in New York, New York, the Graham Crackers Comics chain in Illinois; Comix Experience in San Francisco, California; Mile High Comics in Thornton, Colorado.



Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture reading bible dvd Deuteronomy Item number: 250073477062

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