Tripping Out on Dickens

Dear George,

I love reading Dickens when I’m stoned. His twisted plotting and syntax dances in mad harmony with the convoluted spasms of my brain on its winnowing journey through the cosmos. I lose myself in each of his tightly wrought characters and hold prolonged conversations with them over multiple tankards of stout in Victorian pubs. (Scrooge was so misunderstood! His values were the values that made Great Britain a capitalist powerhouse. It wasn’t the ghosts that transformed him; he’d simply OD’d on laudanum to cure his Christmas Eve cold. He latter regretted his excesses of generosity.)

But, I digress.

Anyhow, I was trying to focus on his Our Mutual Friend last night when I came across a passage that fits you to a tee.

Dickens was sketching a character by the name of Mr. Podsnap. I have no idea who the fuck he was or what part he played in the story. When I read Dickens, each character and every incident exists in complete isolation from the work as a whole. None of them occupy a permanent place in my memory bank. Like the rest of society, I live in the eternal now which means memory is against my religion.

Anyhow, in this chapter, Dickens writes:

As a so eminently respectable man, Mr. Podsnap was sensible of it being required of him to take Providence under his protection. Consequently, he always knew exactly what Providence meant. Inferior and less respectable men might fall short of that mark, but Mr. Podsnap was always up to it. And it was very remarkable (and it must have been very comfortable) that what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant.

George, it that you or is that you? (I realize that after reading Camus, you might find the above passage too complex to comprehend. I’m sure Condi would be glad to explain it.)

There is no doubt that you and Providence are in a lip lock so intense that it is downright homicidal. This is why you are remaking the world in your image which is Providence’s image because what you think, He thinks.

So, continue as you are, ignoring the public and the polls and ignoring the fact that you are the most reviled president the country has ever seen. The Greeks believed that whomever the gods blessed they first made mad, or something like that.

George, there is no doubt you are doubly blessed.

Or is it, “Whom the gods would destroy….?”

Whatever.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones