Stare ‘n’ Share

Brainy’s Fight Against God’s Terrorist Tactics

I was hiking with my friend Sarah, the other day, when I stopped in my tracks after noticing a rainbow.

As a rule, I didn’t look at rainbows until my early teens when I switched to secondary school where there were no rabbis and for a moment, this rainbow made me regress to my childhood habit.

I was educated by devout Tremblers, their label, not mine, and they did a fantastic job of taking all things natural and beautiful and pure, and turning them into sin and doom prophecies and terror.

It is forbidden to look at a rainbow, they said. A rainbow is a sign that God wants to destroy the world. The only reason He doesn’t destroy it, they said, is because of His covenant with Noah. (Genesis 9:8-17)

That certainly put my young brain at ease.

While covering my eyes in my youth, I’d inevitably sneak a peek through my fingers, then quietly apologize to God, rub the shameful sin from my eyes, and pray He didn’t forget His covenant as he conjured up new ways to punish me.

Move over Watson, our three thousand-year-old Little Abraham experiment makes your Little Albert experiment look somewhat amateurish.

Staring at a rainbow, the Tremblers told me, is forbidden because it’s tantamount to staring at God Himself and He does NOT take kindly to being stared at.

Forgetting for a moment God’s deep-seated body image disorder, let’s focus on His terrorist tactics. If The Almighty is to be taken at His word not to destroy the world with water, and this is debatable, it’s worth noting that He has not ruled out destroying the world at all, which would certainly explain His other creative methods: Cancer, Covid, climate change, AI, Bezos, Instagram, the Kardashians.

All of this fear mongering is reason enough for rebellion.

As far as rainbows go, I’d seen better than the one I saw during my hike, but a rainbow is a rainbow and the first thing I wanted to do was point it out to Sarah. I hesitated. It’s embarrassing to admit that old habits die hard but there were also rules about pointing out rainbows.

According to the Tremblers, a blessing was to be recited and it was forbidden to share a rainbow sighting—this was not only sharing bad news but also causing someone else to sin by staring at God.

It’s both easy and fun to blame my primitive ancestors who had yet to figure out that sunlight hitting water creates an electromagnetic spectrum made of different wavelengths of light reflected at various angles.

Before we were The People Of The Book, we were more like The People Of The Sand or to quote the brilliant philosopher, Gene Wilder, “you know, morons”.

And if you subscribe to a destructive terrorist God, why wouldn’t you spend your life trembling?

Everything scared the shit out of my ancestors, and they in turn passed down their fears through the generations, eventually scaring the shit out of me.

I quickly told Sarah about the rainbow and together we watched it fade away. Decades after ditching God, the idea that a rainbow is a bad omen seems ludicrous, but this doesn’t stop me from retaliating against my childhood fears, and when it comes to rainbows, Brainy has a firm ‘Stare ‘n’ Share’ policy.

I stop everything, including my car, if I’m driving. I want the moment to last. I stare at the rainbow until the final ray and hue disappears.

‘There’s a rainbow!’ I’ll yell at anyone who’ll listen. ‘Look at the rainbow! What a gorgeous rainbow.’

If I were more secure, I’d break into a poor rendition of Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

Though we’re used to seeing rainbows, it takes very specific circumstances for one to occur. The sun must be behind you, the rain in front of you. The ray of sun hitting the drops of rain must be between forty and forty-two degrees Celsius, or slightly less. If it’s higher, a rainbow can almost never happen.

So how many more will I see in my lifetime? Fifty? A hundred, if I’m lucky?

That’s a hundred opportunities to bask in rainbows and to retaliate. I figure that if that Maniac in the sky is going to continue to trade in terror, He’s going to have to up his game.

I’ve missed enough rainbows and I’ve got some catching up to do.