DIRECT AND IMMEDIATE Ideas, like blades of prairie grass, sprout in abundance everywhere. Equal at their inception, all of them have the potential to develop beneficially. From mere scribbled notes, to books blossoming from imprisoned authors, to worldly Montaignes, ideas can encourage us, even to flourish in inhospitable places. Ideas to fit our particular lives. Elementary thought, the ordinary, the eccentric, all are conditional at first. Cultivated by outsiders, the new art, music, popular culture and knowledge thrive everywhere, but hardly ever are considered mainstream. How influential, and as pertinent, who promotes them, determines their utility and value. People have to be comfortable with them, or perceive how far-reaching these ideas are. I am a thinker, an eccentric one by all accounts. These ideas seem most natural to me, and I find myself grafting them into one book after another. Holding any book, and such a book as this is a suspenseful action. Does it click with us? Are we attracted by its appearance? Are we influenced by the endorsements of friends or pundits? Striding through this prairie of universal ideas, adventurous browsers and informed readers will pick out which ideas are substantial to them.

DIRECT AND IMMEDIATE Ideas, like blades of prairie grass, sprout in abundance everywhere. Equal at their inception, all of them have the potential to develop beneficially. From mere scribbled notes, to books blossoming from imprisoned authors, to worldly Montaignes, ideas can encourage us, even to flourish in inhospitable places. Ideas to fit our particular lives. Elementary thought, the ordinary, the eccentric, all are conditional at first. Cultivated by outsiders, the new art, music, popular culture and knowledge thrive everywhere, but hardly ever are considered mainstream. How influential, and as pertinent, who promotes them, determines their utility and value. People have to be comfortable with them, or perceive how far-reaching these ideas are. I am a thinker, an eccentric one by all accounts. These ideas seem most natural to me, and I find myself grafting them into one book after another. Holding any book, and such a book as this is a suspenseful action. Does it click with us? Are we attracted by its appearance? Are we influenced by the endorsements of friends or pundits? Striding through this prairie of universal ideas, adventurous browsers and informed readers will pick out which ideas are substantial to them.

This book never was meant to be an introduction to god. It was a short story of good clean fun. In the beginning god the scientist was puttering, and invented life out of nothing. Imagine that. "This might not seem like much to most people. But how many can say they have done as much?" Soon another chapter bounced along. While skinny-dipping god invented death. It did prove necessary. "Paradise had been getting flabby and mediocre, almost as if a greenhouse and a menagerie were the best god could come up with." Not necessarily next. All things, being in the present, did get a little jumbled. God invented sex. He was careful to keep the temperature down for us readers. A chapter on consciousness, about which he had a few doubts, "Plants had survived for billions of years even though rooted in one place. That took real genius." And more, until god is handling eggs without breaking them, and driving leaves of grass through giant sequoia trees. And more. Perhaps an introduction is just the beginning.