The Tesla “stretch”
By: Brian Kent
Tags: Elon Musk, Art, Tesla, God, Sustainability

I don’t know what you think, and even though it wouldn’t be exactly correct to say I don’t care what you think — because indirectly, I do — I am the person who loves Tesla more than anyone else on this planet. The fact that this is so is more than evident enough; the data proves it rather clearly and conclusively. You will, of course, deny it. The first things, in some order, you will say are as follows:

“It could not be. Who are you to say such a thing? To think such a thing?”

“Are you not aware of all the people who have worked EXTREMELY hard for the company? Of all the people who *actually* sweated to build them? To promote them?”

“Do you not even KNOW ABOUT the one they call, Elon Musk?”

and of course if your face were anywhere near me I would laugh in it until my spit covered it completely — social distancing notwithstanding. I would belly laugh until I was purple. Elon shows devotion? Oh, that’s a goooood one.

About as much devotion as ANY MAN can show on a planet-speck created by a God who is a She and who opts to take three wives and four mistresses to lavish his ‘ample’ attention on.

One thing is very clear: You, my friend, know nothing at all.

You know nothing of me aside from the fact that it seems like I must be human — just like the rest of you prisoners down here. You might actually be mistaken about that, too. I’m not even sure, to tell you what the deepest part of my heart tells me.

I don’t even KNOW whether I’m human. I’m actually kind of pretty sure I’m not. What does that make me, then? To be truthful, fully, I don’t know that, either.

I just know — FOR A FACT — that no one loves Tesla more than I do.

I don’t, however, love it quite enough to literally kill myself to fix what ails it — I still have a planet to save, after all, and Tesla is just not going to get it done by itself. Not even as a ‘leader’ down the ‘right path.’ Certainly not with a guy who is arguably even crazier than I am sitting at the top.

Ostensibly as our Lord and Savior but actually as a rather good placeholder until I (or someone incredibly similar in thought pattern, capacity, and follow through) shows up to make the last bit of the difference between success and failure.

No, I am not God.

I am not God, I don’t have a “God complex” and I’d rather you take this seriously so I’ll take a couple steps down from complete enlightenment pretty directly here so you can keep track of what it is I’m saying to you, but

She DID send me. God sent me, and even though I’m not terribly experienced — having lived not the eons it would take to figure out the variances in “The Good Woman’s” moods — it appeared to me that She was starting to get a little perturbed when she did.

I remember when it happened, people. Don’t you get — what sequence of words and actions would it take for it to sink in to your (often, too often) incredibly THICK skulls that when He or She or It comes back, He or She or It will very much take human form and the

PR ‘stunts’ that He, She, or It does on the occasion of coming back will not simply be walking on water or making blind men see.

Do you realize that you’ve dreamt the Second Coming of Christ right out of the possibility of existing? Do you realize that in trying to make of your art the better of nature, you’ve crushed and chopped and aimlessly mixed DNA to the point where a girl somewhere in Iowa came out of her mother’s womb capable of such things as this:

…and then in searching for the above girl’s name and an example of “her” art I promptly came across Alexa Meade — who body painted Ariana Grande for her Grammy winning, “God is a Woman” music video?

Something I didn’t even know happened, know existed, or had any idea was titled that way three minutes ago.

I may not be very smart, but you are ALL a special kind of stupid if you don’t get it after the story that prompted me to sit down here — almost against my will — this morning and finally get THIS particular task off my task list.

I’m not a dead man — not just yet — but jhg (that was Fred’s edit as he walked across part of the keyboard, and I’m sure it was supposed to be there or else I’m being ‘coached’ to take a different direction with this narrative — welcome to my life, folks. Welcome to every day that I live, and just about all my hours if not all my minutes.)

I’m not sure what The Chicago Manual of Style would say about whether the closing parenthesis after a note made in italics should also be italicized or not — my copy is down in Athena and it’s a pretty long set of rules (as compared to, say, The Ten Commandments) so I won’t get dressed again and go check that. I’ll just do it the way I usually do — with a nonitalicized parenthesis.

As Fred continues to flick his tail across the better half of the keyboard — with the space bar and such. Telling me — of CoURSE hes telling me — that the spaces…

…the gaps…the pauses…the breaks…the fucking relax a minute, will you PLEASE you stupid fucking humans?!

That those are necessary. I mean, sort of. Isn’t that right, Fred? I should pet you now, right Mr.?

Ah heck. Is there a bottom to this rabbit hole? Why am I here again?

To demonstrate what NOT DOING WHAT YOU’RE TOLD actually looks like. Without breaking any of the important rules, 1 through fourteen.

Ah yes. So, I pet the Fred a little and then go out for a smoke, and then come back in here, pack up a few things, and hit the road again.

For another 3000 miles by next Monday, is the guess. Whatever it is to go to Brennan’s

417 Royal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70130

to fetch some bananas foster for my grandmother, Virginia, who was the person most directly responsible for my driving a Tesla just about every single day and as much as possible since August 26, 2019.

And then probably to Key West, Atlanta, Philadelphia, D.C., New York, possibly Boston, then back again to Albion. Which you have not, I’m sure, heard of, but which was in fact the birthplace of The Santa Claus school.

If I make my guess, you’re *still* sitting there trying to figure out not whether I’ve lost my mind but how much of a lunatic is this guy? Is he actually dangerous? Shouldn’t someone put him in a hospital somewhere — you know, get him ‘checked in’ so he can get ‘checked out’?

Yes, please (translation: try that one again — see what happens to all of you if you just please, try Her patience one more fucking time with that bullshit. PLEASE, I am BEGGING you to incur that sort of wrath.)

And you see there? I *can* change my mind. You can’t, bless you, but I certainly can. I did that parenthesis both bold AND italic AND I doubly enunciated both of them here, because you nice Homo sapiens sapiens (translation: you utter fucking idiots) don’t even bother with the sort of Chicago Manual of Style kinds of rules (very long and artfully created, by the way) so how could anyone expect that any of you would get

The Golden Rule

right? And the others? Oh no, don’t get them right. Just wrap yourself in a nice comfy blanket with what the most immediate people around you tell you to do and flip everyone else — all the trees and the animals and the fields and the water and the children who have yet to be born — flip all of them the bird. You know, because that’s what works best for the only one that matters:

YOU.

Of COURSE you’re the only one that matters. I mean, even that’s a pretty terrible lie (both ways) because:

a. not even Hitler believed that. I bet not even Jeffrey Dahmer (if that’s how it’s spelled) believed THAT.

b. You don’t even do a good job of believing you’re the only one who matters. You do a shit job of it. You half ass it just like everyone else does EVERYTHING else. You don’t know how to commit, and you’re talking — thinking, at least — about having ME committed? The only hope you even have and you’re going to get ME committed? Oh that’s rich. I’d just LOVE to see you try to do that one more time.

I mean come on, guys. You dress the way others tell you, you talk the way they tell you, you act the way they tell you, you pursue careers, oftentimes, that they tell you.

You go to school the way they tell you. You ‘share’ some significantly less than brilliant television programs because you want to be able to converse with others in the phony social structures that they build and you’re even probably thinking I’m being judgmental about what’s brilliant and what’s not brilliant

WHILE YOU’RE COMCOMITANTLY SCOLDING ME IN YOUR MIND FOR ENUNCIATING HOWEVER I PLEASE — DESPITE THAT YOU’RE FAR FROM A PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, ART, OR LITERATURE.

It’s almost as if you think you know something. It’s almost cute.

It’s also fucking annoying as can be — or just about. Because the things you know — I mean the things you REALLY, right down to the core of your heart know — the things you both feel and you know…those things play a mean second fiddle.

They play a mean second fiddle to the things you do because you’re supposed to. Not because you figured out why — even thought for half a second why — you ought to (ALL OF YOU, EVERY TIME) complain about things that just aren’t right.

And the fact that you don’t do that…the fact that you don’t, every single stinking time you see it happen, take issue — POLITELY — with the things that just strike you right down to your core as wrong…

Well, let’s just say it starts to make me green.

It starts to make me green — either because I’m envious of a person who can walk around and have no heart, or for some other reason. Your footsteps must be light and airy as they tread around on the people and animals and plants and utter artwork that this planet was before the lot of “us” showed up.

And then you’ll predictably think of ‘all the wonderful things humans have brought to this world’

Which is another heart-lie, because, even though when pressed to the point of the extinction of your species and the extinction of three hundred some odd species per day while you’re doing the dirty work of killing yourselves — even though at THAT desperate point you’ll finally reflect on ‘all the beautiful things’ we made happen here, over the centuries — because it’s really just a few centuries that we’ve been here to ‘make our art’ of the place…

Even though you’ve trained yourselves to be thankful — at least when you’re kinda sorta THREATENED — you’re a thankless and utterly Godless people.

Well, you’re Godless if you don’t count me, anyway. Because I am the only one I’ve ever even HEARD OF who respects God enough to tell the rest of y’all — from this seat in central Texas — you can fuck right off if you think you’re ever going to tell the likes of ME what to do EVER again.

Because you’re not. And it’s not even because *I* personally will find it within me to make very certain you’re extremely sorry that you do or even within me the heart to explain it all away, yet again, as you being just as utterly clueless as everyone else milling about down here.

God will make a good deal shorter work of you than She did of me if you ever genuinely think you’re going to talk to ME again as if you know something I can’t figure out on my own. I don’t NEED you — not a single fucking one of you, as a matter of fact — and if you think you’re going to bring me your horseshit and baggage you better pick a different zip code than whichever one I’m presently in because you will be sad for an infinity of time afterwards if you take that approach.

You’ve amply been warned.

I’m not even going to tell you the rest, actually, because it really just isn’t worth my time.