Dog Boy Bobbing in a Boat, The Autobiography of God

By RMark Johnson

In this wry, understated, illustrated novelette, RMark Johnson claims that God was originally a small Dog bobbing in a row boat on a Cosmic Lake, speaking in fluent Sunfish. Sometimes God is a He, sometimes a She. The Serpent isn't evil (He's Mexican, usually). The Forbidden Tree has poisonous almonds. Adam hangs by his knees hooked around a branch and addresses God as "O Great Twerp." Eve cooks.
In this first book of RMark Johnson's Genesis, God seems to suffer multiple personality disorder. He fusses over the shape of His/Her breasts as well as his His other creations: Heaven, Earth, a black beret and Aviator Ray Bans. The Angel supposedly guarding the entrance to Eden turns out be a Celestial Squatter. Cain does not slay Abel. Witnessing all and understanding only what matters, (very little, as it happens) Adam and Eve are left to cope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RMark Johnson
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301857760

RMark Johnson

RMark Johnson is a painter and poet (in English and Spanish). He was born on a Naval Base in East San Pablo Bay (part of San Francisco Bay) in the Cetaceous Period and has been fashioning books with chisels struck with stout tree limbs on soapstone since then. Next year, he hopes to upgrade to cuneiform if he can find a serviceable gas-fired kiln on eBay. He lives now in Daytona Beach, FL, USA with his faithful companion, a trilobite (it's fossilized).

Book preview

Dog Boy Bobbing in a Boat,

The Autobiography of God

Entire contents, cover art and illustrations by RMark Johnson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 by RMark Johnson

In the beginning was the word and the word was fug. It was sufficient unto itself and so had no further meaning, per se. This state would continue for uncounted billions of billions of years awaiting a moment of need by Rinehart & Company on behalf of Norman Mailer in 1948.

On the first day, even despite that I was God, as of course, I AM now, I realized I had never seen a woman and guessed that She had never seen a man. She can't have realized that She is God. This was certain. I couldn't say Myself that She wasn't a reflection and, since Reflection could not exist then, I would need to create some properties for it, a nature of some sort. Whatever the reflection would show, it wouldn’t be doG – because that could only be a Pun, a metaphor – impossible to arrange because I didn’t even have phor, yet. And, furthermore, my entire oral history consisted two words (I AM – actually, three, if you count fug). Going down this track, eternity could be completely used up before Universe got going. And, besides, it was just unfair that I already had a splitting headache before I conceived of a head to put it in.

Instead, I paused in the midst of declaring creation and chose to muse upon the subject of Her. That led to a fair amount of time bobbing in a boat. And this is despite that Time, Boats and Bobbing didn't exist then. I chose to ignore the constant nagging responsibility that one inherits when one is born of the Void, vis a vis: In order to have anything at all, it must be created. Captial-C-Creation for instance, needed to be created. It was thorny and circular. Naturally, this kind of thing can get tiresome.

From the second day and well into the fourth, I declared Lake, and defined Water to fill it, Lotus to rise above it, Sunfish to swim in it and, improbably, Saltwater Crocodile, just to mix things up a bit.

Admittedly, it was all more complicated than that, but the summary version is necessary because I temporized a great deal then. Boat, for instance, was an afterthought. It was cobbled together for the sake of the convenience of sitting atop the water, as opposed to standing on the sand floor beneath it. It also neatly side-stepped the tedious details of declaring Inhale, Exhale, Buoyancy – Air itself. No matter. Sequence can be critically important to a man. But I wasn't man-like then and in any case, sequential matters are of little consequence to the non-evolved, such as Me, God.

I bobbed in the boat for eons, always dangling a line in the water lest there might be sunfish or saltwater crocs. I hadn't thought of Hook, at that time, because I hadn't any need to. I patiently explained to myself that I only meant to converse with whomever followed the line to the surface. This was prevarication. In truth it was more solitary on the lake than it had been prior to that fateful first declaration I AM. This little story served only to provide a plausible explanation for what I was doing there. But, really, I was waiting for Her.

I fancied that She was waiting for me, too, though, in fact, She was busy. She was actively maturing all the while. Perhaps to mark time, She wound her hair around her fingers