I had a pretty productive week, although I crammed all the productive bits into about eight hours yesterday, while the weather was acting up and there was nothing else to do. Sometimes I marvel at what I might accomplish if it were raining all the time. Maybe I should move to the tropics.

As it is, I have to constantly find new ways to trick myself into working on projects I've started. The best way I have found is, whenever I get to that point in a project where there's a hurdle, I stop, pour myself a double (espresso, that is) and dream up a whole new project to start, bigger and more complicated than the first.

Then I start on that one until I come to a hurdle, and, needing a diversion, I go back to the first project, and that hurdle doesn't seem so insurmountable anymore. I resume work on the first project until I hit the next hurdle, and need another diversion. Sometimes I'm ready to jump back to the other project, sometimes not. If not, I start a third project and set to.

And it goes on and on, hurdle to hurdle, from there.

Right now I've got approximately 357 live projects, some dating back to high school. I may have to finally abandon my Sleeping With Biagio Azzerelli Project, the oldest live project I've got going, which I started work on in 1985, though. That one was pretty elaborate to begin with—involving staged car crashes, towering infernos, and trans-Atlantic crossings via Concorde (which took its last flight in 2000—one of the more recent hurdles, the latest being that I no longer really even remember what Biagio—his real name, by the way—looked like, or why I wanted to sleep with him in the first place, aside from his almost unbelievably gorgeous name).

Problem is, when projects start out that complex, the diversionary projects (or DPs, as we call them in the procrastination business) can only be more so. My most recent DP is taking over a country. Nothing big. I'm thinking maybe a microstate. Saint Kitts and Nevis, anyone?

Despite all the plotting and planning that goes into such a project, I have made time for the things I love: Living vicariously through total strangers' Flickr photostreams (I used to have to watch Friends reruns, but now there's Flickr, thank God)...


... going back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge using Google Maps' Streetview feature, watching Barats and Bereta and Flight of the Conchords on youtube...

Oh, and dining out on dollar oysters and free martinis (courtesy of my dear friend C., at 28 Degrees in the South End). And the theater, of course.

Actually, not a big theater fan here, ever since they started that "breaking down the fourth wall" business. You know, if I wanted you in my lap I'd go to The Foxy Lady in Providence. I don't even like 3-D movies, for chrissakes. Stay on the stage, stay in the screen, I'll stay in my seat, and nobody gets hurt. I mean, what would you do if all the sudden one of us broke down the fourth wall on you? You'd have us arrested, is what. I say, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Anyway, a visit to the Wimberly to see Campbell Scott in Ronan Noone's The Atheist was a condition of the free booze and oysters (and the meatballs afterwards, too), so I couldn't get out of it.

And our seats were front and center. We could actually smell Campbell Scott, people. I'm just sayin'.

And like the review in the Globe said, he relied heavily on the script, which he used as a prop throughout, in the second act—to the point where it became a little distracting. He pulled it off with his good looks and charm (although the picture of him they used on the playbill has to be at least twenty years old), but the second act was a little shaky, if you want to know the truth.

And that goes for Noone's script, too. Scott plays an unscrupulous self-promoting journalist named Augustine Early, who ends up offing himself after a series of unfortunate events he himself has set in motion lead nowhere. The script doesn't dwell on Early's atheism. It is mentioned from time to time in connection with a childhood trauma. But early's character could easily have been a believer, too. I'm convinced God doesn't care either way.

It was not a terribly thought-provoking play, though it was fun to watch. Not uproarious fun, but fun. I think people who believe in gods and devils might be more fun than atheists in the end, actually. I mean, check out this list of jokesters in an article in today's Globe about atheism: David Hume, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand. That'd be a riotous dinner party.

Bartender, I'll have the blue-cheese and cyanide martini, please! Shaken, not stirred.

Personally, I don't agonize over it too much. I have enough trouble fathoming the mystery of things I can see, touch, and understand. I don't have any beef with God, or belief in God, either, for that matter. But if God does exist, he should invest in a better marketing campaign. The word-of-mouth thing ain't cuttin' it anymore. I mean, God, have you seen some of the people who believe in you? I'm telling you, you don't want them endorsing your product.

But that's your business. And that's between you and your marketing people. I'll believe what I want to believe, you believe what you want to believe, but don't get all up in my grill. It's that fourth wall again. Stay in your box, we won't have a problem.

I will say that, in my opinion, what people need is not more religion, but more jobs. Especially religious fanatics. Many of them are obviously not adequately employed. Some have a job, it's true. They should be given two, if not three. As many as it takes. Put that fanaticism to work making Nike tennis shoes or fielding calls for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, or cleaning up the vomitorium after political fundraisers. Make yourselves useful.

The problem with Atheists is not altogether different. Atheism is a kind of fanaticism, too. To believe so fervently in not believing in something that probably doesn't exist in the first place takes a special kind of energy. Put it to work discovering the nature of Dark Matter, or something. Let it go. Especially since "it" is nothing. (Actually, it's closer to the truth to say that "it" stands for "the stupidity of 'believers,'" which is what Atheism is more about than the non-existence of God.)

The Globe article bandies about oft-quoted statistics, like that eighty-eight percent of Americans say they're "religious" or "believe in God," but this begs to be qualified with something like: "when they think about it at all," which, in the vast majority of cases, is not really very often.

Nor is belief any indication of behavior, except that it shows a predisposition towards passive acceptance of received values or notions. But ordinary folks don't sit around thinking about whether or not God exists, or whether or not they believe in him. If you ask, they'll say yes, because, like Pascal with his wager, they figure that's the best bet.

This is just one of the many ways in which God is not like sex, by the way. I mean, we tend to think about sex a lot when we're not having it, even when we don't "need" it. Most people don't think about God until they "need" him. And then once they're out of trouble, they stuff him back in the bottle quicker than you can say I Dream of Jeannie.

Which is fine. Better not to sit around and think about it. I mean, why is there something instead of nothing? You'll never get out of your pajamas asking silly questions like that. It's God. Forget about it. Now, get up and go to work!

But the godless can be just as silly. One of the atheists quoted in the Globe article (the head of the Tufts Freethought Society, no less) is a good example of naive reasons not to believe. She says "her prayers to Jesus and Buddhists deities went unanswered," so she decided they didn't exist. Well, that'll show them, won't it?

First off, honey, just because a god doesn't take your call doesn't mean he or she doesn't exist. That'd be like saying because you had to hold for an hour and a half when you called your insurance provider and never managed to get through to a live operator, your insurance provider doesn't exist.

(Same goes for not getting the answer you wanted. When you were a kid and your mother wouldn't buy you that Malibu Barbie you were whining and nagging her for, did that mean your mother didn't exist?)

Second, don't you think Jesus and Buddha knew you were two-timing them? You don't think they talk? And anyway, gods are OMNISCIENT, bitch.

Fact is, you were a prayer slut. Word gets around. And nobody likes a prayer slut.

At least make an effort to understand godhood before you make an ass of yourself talking crazy shit. Freethought Society is right. You get what you pay for, don't you?

But, hey, wouldn't it be great if we could make people and things not exist just by them not answering us? My ex-boyfriend—bam!--what ex-boyfriend? Send an invitation to your next birthday party to George W. Bush. When he doesn't answer: George W. Who? I don't know what you're talking about—Al Gore is our brave and noble leader. SUVs? Why, you can get the death penalty for driving one of those! And a year in the recycling gulag for every quarter-point over 4.5 your total personal carbon footprint goes!

Here's the deal. My dad was not a religious man, but in the very end, a visit from the chaplain could make him cry, and more than once in those last days I peeked in on him praying fervently, like a man at the edge of the abyss of nonbeing, which is what he was.

We all believe what we need to believe when we need to believe it. That's why our species has made it this far.

And anyway, when the plane you're on bursts into flame and goes into a tailspin, what else are you going to do to pass the time? Might as well pray as scream your head off in vain. Whenever I'm on a plane I always recite the Apostles Creed on take-off and landing.

Does it matter that I'm not Catholic? Nobody has to know.

Atheists take a leap of faith of their own, though, and it's a big one. And in making it they bring the absence of the divine into their world in an unnatural way. Those who don't believe in something need not make its absence central to their identities.

Which is why the mission of Greg Epstein, "a former lead singer of a rock band," now serving as "humanist chaplain" at Harvard—hey, you guys don't need a "horny pagan adviser," do ya?—to set up a church for nonbelievers is ripe for ridicule.

It's called a country club, dear. And there are plenty already.

Seriously, being united in disbelief isn't enough. That's the normal state of affairs in America today. I mean, can you believe Britney Spears actually went on stage at the VMAs looking like that? Neither can I. I can't believe it, but it's true!

No, uniting in disbelief is not the answer. It's not going to get you anywhere. You have to have something to rally round. Besides other people's ignorance, gullibility, and credulousness, I mean.

On my one trip to a gay dance club earlier this summer, I was downstairs getting dirty on the dance floor and noticed a sign on the DJ boof that read: "Sex is Good." Actually, when I first saw it I thought it said "Sex is God." Which seemed to me more to the point as I looked around the place. Sex is a god. And pursuit of it a kind of religion.

I mean, I am not the first to note that there are some striking similarities between gays and, say, Catholics—we both spend a lot of time on our knees worshiping naked men.