When Cain killed Abel

“Okay, stop being religious again”.

You’re right, I won’t and that doesn’t mean I can’t use a biblical reference. Think about it, the moment I said those four words, you knew exactly what I was talking about. That, is good communication. Now granted you can’t take the inference too far and you shouldn’t take any reference I make too far. Like when I referred to Shawshank Redemption last week, I referred to one scene, not the whole movie.

Plus, as far as “scenes” go in the Bible, that one is just a story anyway. To the best of my knowledge and belief (please, someone check the CCC,) there was never human being with the DNA that produced the personality we know as “Cain” or “Abel”. Rather the author of that book in the Bible (it’s actually a collection or library of book, 73 books by almost as many different authors,) or really, just that (well, a bunch of the ones in the beginning of that book,) story is meant to be just a story, to explain how that author had made sense of the beginning.

You know, the garden, Adam, Eve, walking and talking with God, masters of the Earth. If the author believed that is what the beginning was like, well that certainly needed a story element other than “FAST FORWARD” to explain how everything ended up, well how it had ended up at that point when the author wrote that book.

To me, the most interesting part of the story is that it is true. Imagine it, two brothers in competition, one killed the other.

Which one was guilty? Honestly, it doesn’t matter, they both were. Okay, see and here is where my use of the biblical analogy breaks down, so you should forget (as context for what I’m talking about in this story,) about the rest of that whole story, or even the part where I pulled these two characters from, other than the context that I brought with them into my story now. Here, let me restate my story:

Two brothers in competition, one killed the other.

That’s a short story- so many details.  And, here’s the kicker, this is a human story- so we care about the details. Not every story about humans is true, though it’s actually pretty easy to pick out the false ones, they just feel fake and the characters that don’t seem to make sense. Now look at the one line story again, can you picture it? Seems pretty real to me.

Very human, both of them. It’s not about who is guilty because neither of them are “who’s”, they are “what’s”, they are characters in a book, not real, yet you can let the concept that they speak to become alive in our mind. It’s a cautionary tale.

See, it’s a human story, that means it’s every humans story, it’s about you too. Guess what, you can’t pick your character either – they are both YOU. Just depends on the day of the week. I can’t tell a specific story about you to prove this, I am just talking into the ether right now, however, face to face I might ask you to recall someone you don’t get along with well, maybe a coworker, hopefully not a spouse!

In the story Abel ended up dead, yet in reality there might be a lot of ways to kill a person when they’re still alive. Kill a person family, their career, their livelihood, their hope, their faith, their love- so many ways to make a person feel dead (double check me here, presuming you’re still alive as you read this right now, have you ever felt like someone ‘killed’ you?)

The way I think about it, all those other things are murder. If a person murders your faith, you are still alive. Whereas if a person kills you, you are no longer alive.

I might continue this in the morning, eleven thirty six and I’m pretty tired and this story of mine needs to be told correctly.

Not much about the day, three meals, pills as required. Was able to finish importing the old “skydiveblog.com” content (yes, that domain still works here.) So tomorrow to start on the screenshots.

Also, I found the software to create my book, Vellum and I found the place to get ISBN numbers. We’ll see how this goes, yet now I think I might release all three books at once, a trilogy of tragedy and redemption.

Time to rest.