HOME Divine Designs

Percival Drudgeman looks just like your average workman - navy-blue stained boiler suit, tousled I didn't-have-time-to-brush-it hairstyle and designer the-last-time-I-had-a-razor-was-ten-years-ago beard. But his eyes give him away. Instead of being heavy-lidded and bloodshot, they have the clear wide-open look of a toddler afraid it might miss something.   For Percy Drudgeman is the founder (and, at the moment, only member) of The Church Of Codology. Percy was just a spotty 16-year-old, digging a hole in the road when God appeared to him in the guise of the Devil and revealed to him in simple terms what has eluded the greatest minds since the world began an unspecified number of years ago - that there is no meaning to life. And, furthermore, that there is no such thing as life. What we perceive as life, Percy explained, is nothing but the indigestion and other ailments of an unhealthy Universe. The Universe is, apparently, something God invented in an idle moment and looses interest in periodically, before returning to tinker with it once in an aeon.   But what is the point of it all?   "There isn't any point to anything," says Percy. "Things exist because they exist and not because we worry about them. And since we don't exist ourselves, but are simply symptoms of a particular sickness the Universe is at the moment suffering, it is rather silly to speculate whether other things might exist. Symptons don't speculate."   So who - or what - exactly is God?   "God is an apprentice cosmos designer in the early millennia of his apprenticeship. He is working on millions of Universes at the same time, but our universe is the model on which he carries out experiments of design and function, which is why nothing ever seems to make any sense to us. That doesn't matter, of course, if we remember that we are merely symptoms of something else."   So God is not the Supreme Being, after all? How high up does the hierarchy go?   "It doesn't go up at all. It goes around in a circle. Every entity is a Supreme Being to another entity."   So, what is the purpose and function of the Church Of Codology?   "It doesn't have a purpose, but its function is perpetuating awareness of the fact that people are only symptoms and that symptoms shouldn't have any opinions one way or the other. Because, at the moment, I am the only one in it, the church is not functioning properly. When all people accept their status as symptoms, then humanity, with all its problems will cease to exist and God will have solved another problem with his experimental universe."   As the interview ended, Percy extended an invitation to me to become a member of the Church Of Codology, but I excused myself on the grounds that, as merely a symptom, such things as churches had no meaning for me.