Now, Some Good News..

For those of you who will understand. They put the repaired statue up again, in front of the newly consecrated (as of this fall) parish church the day before yesterday:

Pretty spiffy, eh? About time, finally..

 

 

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Tales of Rocamadour.. PART I

So, as I say, I left Lourdes last week and took the train to Rocamadour.  I'd read that Rocamadour is one of the most ancient Marian shrines in the world, a critical junction along the Camino de Compostelle, which I walked from Vezelay back in 2004, and which I am suddenly - and somewhat surprisingly; since until I think about this week, I'd felt absolutely no desire to ever do it again - feeling as if I may have to walk again, but from a different angle.  I thought I should go, and see the famous black virgin there, and climb up to the shrine on the cliff in the footsteps of Charlemagne and Saint Louis and dozens of other kings, saints, bishops, popes and millions of untold other pilgrims who have come there over the millennium and a half that it has existed.

So, again as I say, I embarked via Toulouse (where I stopped for the afternoon to visit the mother church of the Order of Preachers, and the Tomb of Saint Thomas Aquinas - !!! - pictures, some rather good ones, I think - soon to come, when I get my image sorting and storage issues sorted out!)  and then took the evening regional bus then another train to get to Rocamadour.  Along the way, it began to rain.

I got there about 9 pm, expecting there to be a village with some sort of selection of hotels there to choose from. But there was only one hotel directly opposite the closed station, and it was shut tight, and dark. In a spirit of mild abnegation, I decided to sleep out.  In the rain. No biggy: I have a sleeping bag, bivy and tarp. I've used the bivy frequently, but the tarp - a light, 6' x 8' - I've never used, and like a retard, have never even tested out.

There was an enclosed waiting bench on the far side of the tracks - which one had to cross on a rubber pathway laid across the rails with a lit warning sign that flashes whenever a train approaches - and the woods behind it looked somewhat promising.  I started to scout along the platform to see if there was a dim nook with good branches about on which to throw up my tarp.

I mucked about for ten fifteen minutes, and got well and drenched.  My anorak kept my upper body only damp, but my pantlegs were getting soaked. And I couldn't see anything obvious to pitch my tarp and bivy down on.  Damn frustrating..

It finally dawned on me that it was Saturday night, and that there most likely would be very little traffic in the station until well into the coming morning.. Why not just sleep in the enclosed waiting area, all nice and snug in my sleeping bag?  Genius. If you're gonna kick it like a hobo, you gotta do what you gotta do.

So, that's what I did.  I popped a sleeping pill, and went to bed on the bench in the enclosed shelter.

Next morning, I overslept.  I'd meant to get up at 8:30 and hunt down the church for mass, but screwed up my alarm and woke up 10:30ish, and groggily got myself together.  In the dark the night before, I'd assumed that the shrine would be revealed in the dawn, the impressive cliff would be right there in front of the station for me to just climb up and go to mass.

But there was nothing there.  Just that empty hotel, trees, and a few houses. What to do?  I had assumed that this being one of the most famous shrines in France, with a million and a half pilgrims coming a year, that 4mass would be easily had, even in the off season, just as it had been at Lourdes.

But here I was, and there was nothing there.

I was deflated.  It was like when I'd taken the train to Fatima from Compostella, and had expected a substantial station right near the shrine, but arrived to find a little dinky powdunk station 14 km from the shrine, that required a bus ride through the countryside to get to.

It was like that. I was screwed.  I hate missing mass, and this was a borderline thing - I should have done my due diligence, but I hadn't, and now I was out of luck..

I sat there, glum, waiting for signs of life.

About noon, a girl showed up.  Maybe 18, asian features, wearing a scout uniform and carrying a backpack.  Neckerchief, badges, the whole deal.  She came into the shelter, looks at me, smiles, and fires off a stream of French. I gaze at her through my glaze, try to smile back, end up with a sort of grimace and just shook my head. Now, normally I understand everything people say to me here. My French - not so recently "pretty good for a dipshit American" is on the verge of just being pretty good period.  But my mind had evaporated on me.  She looked at me pityingly, clearly thinking "ah, this guy is clearly some sort of mental gimp."

Yes.  That's right.  I sat wallowing in that deliciously familiar old sensation of mild humiliation and self reproach tinged with contempt.  It's been a long while since ineptitude in French has made me feel that, but I used to get all pruny bathing in it, back in the day, all the time. It was almost a cause for nostalgia.. But not really.

I decided to go see if I could roust someone out to tell me about the hotel, to get away from this girl scout. I was here, and I was going to see the damn shrine. I was not going to give up, dammit.

I went and knocked on the door of the house next to the hotel.  An extremely cheerful fellow with a round ruddy face, looking like he'd just stepped out of a Pieter Bruegel painting and changed into modern clothes, came to the door.  My mind clicked back into gear, and I asked him "ou est le proprietaire de l'hotel?  c'est encore ouvert?"  He grinned, and told me that yes, the hotel was open, but that the proprietor was visiting her family for Sunday and would not be back until four.  I could call her number, listed on the sign there.  I told him my cell didn't work in France.  Could he help?  He grinned again, apologetically this time, and said a client could call her, but he didn't dare, not when she was with her family.  The sign says she'll be bak at four.  Ah, can't call her, not even on behalf of a client?  No.  Sorry.  I was like, "elle va revenir a quatre heures, c'est ecrit en pierre?"  Sure.  Absolutely.

Okay.  I'll wait then.  I found the wall nearby and sat down.  A car appears and pulls abruptly in in front of the train station.  A girl and guy get out.  Late teens.  Both in scout uniforms.  He leans against the car, she leans into him, obviously digging his bones deeply.  I am amused.

Then, another car and a van pull in.  Disgorging more teens in scout uniforms. Over the next ten minutes or so, several more vehicles arrive, until about twenty 18-ish kids are gathered in scouting uniforms.  Two priests in cassocks drive in and drop off a couple kids and drive away.  The scouts - girls and boys - all socialize vigorously, eating lunch and screwing around with one another.  I am intrigued and bemused by the spectacle.

It's moments like this when the French strike me as being deeply other - familiar, somehow, but so very very not at all the same as us.  I was a boyscout, and made Eagle at 13.  Then, I basically disengaged.  Scouting in the States is very much a middle school thing.  Most kids - probably 2/3's or so - quit by the time they reach high school.  Cool kids definitely do not usually stick around.  It's definitely not cool to run around in uniform.  It's nerdy and definitely un-hip.  I think it has something to do with Vietnam and the hippies and the wave of cynicism that hit us back in the seventies..

But here, in rural France I was watching a co-ed group of strapping, attractive kids wearing rolled neckerchiefs and throwing scout salutes a eachother like gang bangers throw gang signs.  They threw their salutes like WW II British soldiers, throwing their hands up lackadaisically above their  shoulders with a loose wrist, like an SS officer barely acknowledging an underling's heil hitler salute; fingers in the three middle fingers up, thumb over pinkie below, just like in the States.

I was astonished.  Such amazingly artless lack of cynicism.. in teenagers. Astonishing, completely incredible.

Then they began to sing.  Sing.  It was like when the dwarves sang of the Mountain at Bag End.. They weren' t American style campfire songs, which are usually silly or comic.  They were singing about "le chemin" and "le seigneur," like something out le Chanson de Roland.

It probably was.  I tried to record it; but my camera battery was nearly dead and I could only take a few stills.  I'll put one up on the blog maybe, later.

Then, the train came.  Most of the kids got on it.  Five or six of them did not, and I realized that they'd come in uniform to see their friends off.  More salutes, they sing on the platform as the train pulls away.  I sit there mildly astonished, and somehow moved.

It happened all the time when I was living with the Philanthropotes (another group of vital early twenty something French kids who continually astonished, impressed and moved me like this.  I felt like an anthropologist amongst a strange people, a witness to all sorts of odd but profoundly human behavior that constantly surprised and touched me.

It's good to be here, in France.  I truly love these people.  They are awesome.

To be continued..



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Photographic Essay: Mom's Induction Into the Servites

So, two weekends ago, on Saturday September 14th, my Mom was inducted into the Secular Order of the Servants of Mary, the Lay Order of the Servites. The Servites, for those of you not quite up to snuff in things Catholic, are one of the five original great medieval mendicant (begging) orders, being the least famous of the five..

Those orders (in order of foundation, just to give some historical context, a sense of the momentousness of the occasion) :

1.) the Carmelites (whose monks according to legend first collected upon Mount Carmel in the Holy Land in the aftermath of Elijah's famous theophany there circa 970 B.C. , but who were ultimately expelled from Carmel in the aftermath of the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land in the 7th Century, whence these immigrants eventually came to establish monasteries throughout Europe, where they were canonically organized between 1206-1214) and, 

2.) the Franciscans who were founded in 1209 and then 

3.) my very own Dominicans, who were founded in 1215, and then,

 - drumroll -

4.) the Servites who were founded in 1233, followed only by the 

5.) poor benighted Augustinians in 1244, whose unfortunate lot it was and shall ever be to claim Martin Luther, the Ur-Protestant, as one of their own (but whose rule, that of Saint Augustine, upon which they are founded, is however even older than that of Saint Benedict himself) ..

The only reason the Servites are not as celebrated as the other four original 13th century mendicant orders is perhaps due to the fact that they were founded by seven co-founders, the most famous of whom is Saint Peregrine, who while being a very worthy fellow, is not quite as charismatically famous as Saints Francis, Dominic, Augustine, or the prophet Elijah (not mentioning other luminaries of Carmel  such as SS. Theresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux - whom I am now making a novena to, and will be visiting again upon her feast day this coming week - or John of the Cross, etc., etc..)

The Servites, though, are unique amongst the five in that their name includes that of our Blessed Mother.  They are formally known as the "Ordo Servorum Beatae Mariae Virginis," hence the "Servites."  The Franciscans, Dominicans (who gave us the rosary!) and Carmelites (of our Lady of Mount Carmel) all of course have particular devotion to her. But only the Servites are named directly after her.

I now belatedly give you, my beloved readership, some few images I took that morning.  When my Mom, Donna O.S.M. (as she is now able to style herself; Donna, who besides being named after her father, Donald, is also named after our Blessed Mother, donna being "lady" in Italian, you know?) took the scapular (that blue and red rectangular piece of cloth she has on there) of the Order.

Without any further extraneous commentary, those of you who know may perhaps appreciate these following:

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On Being from Boston: A Meditation Upon Patriot's Day

WBZ CBS News is finally reporting that they got the second suspect - "that knucklehead" (as the main announcer keeps calling him) who committed that bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday. 

I'm sitting here, welling with gladness. The tragedies of this week that those two fools perpetrated upon the people of my city have been the catalyst for a minor emotional restoration for me.  It's reawakened my dormant sense of passionate attachment to this place, New England, my home.  

I've been sitting here today thinking how Boston somehow oddly belongs to me, even though I've never lived there.  It's like this: when I am away from home, very few people know where Maine is.  Hardly anybody's heard of New England.  Foreigners tend not to know all that much about the States. I usually have a slight problem when people ask me, as they often do, what part of America I am from.  

My simple solution: I always tell them I am from Boston. Often that draws a blank, too.  At which point I just say that it's sorta like New York, only wicked awesome. That last part's impossible to translate into French or Spanish, so I'll interject the English then fudge translate (bien chouette, demasiado chido, algo y nada como esto..) No way they could possibly understand, it always makes me laugh. 

Sometimes I'll add another incomprehensible line about Boston being the hub around all known creation radiates (le centre autour qui orbite tout le reste de l'univers connu, el centro acerca todo el resto del universo orbita - just watch the linguistic ginsu master, how I roll).. I get on a slight comedic bend, and crack myself all up while the person who asked stares at me wondering what's wrong with the crazy damn gringo.

Anyway, I am somehow actually in fact from Boston. Because as anyone from Maine will tell you, going Down East is coming from Boston. That's how you go to get there from here, across the Gulf of Maine.  

What's more, we were once politically - until 1820 - part of Massachusetts. And to this day Boston's teams - the Sox, Patriots, Bruins, Celtics - are our teams. That's called belonging to something in your blood and guts. From the sea and soil. Blood, salt and dirt.. Family. Boston is our town. 


In my mind's eye I see the skyline of the city shimmering up from the inrushing tarmaced horizon of I 93 flowing toward us, the very first time my dad and mom took my brothers and me into the city back in 1980. We sat in the backseat of the stationwagon, I utterly entranced by the mystical majesty of those two clusters of towers thrusting high into the hazy summer sky.

Dad took us to Jacob Wurth's by Tufts, where he hung out in his graduate school days at B.U. The fat white shirted mustachioed German waiters kicking sawdust as they brought us our platonically delectable bratwurst and sauerkraut..

It was a love affair from the very beginning. All the graceful intimacy of the town, colonial class of Fennel Hall and the golden capitol dome, with the Aquarium & Old Ironsides hedging the Harbor throwing off briny mist, to Fenway and the Charles so storied, all democratically regal..

Which is merely to say the horror of the week has been unrolling across terrain I know. Places I often inhabit in my dreams.  Boyleston Street. Cambridge. Kenmore Square.  

I'm still riding this train, see, after all these years.. Florida could never keep me:

Tonight I again find myself patriotically emotional in ways I haven't been in years. The last decade has been very harsh on my patriotic feeling. I'm still ferociously patriotic. This country, this land, is my home. These are my people. My heart's not going anywhere, even if I happen to be physically abroad. But these past years my heart's become pretty well bruised and cynical. The love's intact, but the adolescent magic was gone. I've come to know too much, have been repeatedly disappointed.  

But now tonight, on Patriot's Day, the anniversary of the shot heard 'round the world, the old ferocious emotion floods back.  

They finally got that knucklehead.  

Not even news of Lindsay Grahm spouting the now all too trite quasi- fascist Republican idiocy assaulting our precious constitutional tradition of due process, once again whyping his nasty southern ass with the Bill of Rights, like those jack booted thugs have been compulsively for the past twelve years now can damp my happiness.  

How was it that I ever allied myself with those assholes, thinking that they were somehow pro-life?  Like they actually care about the unborn. Was I an idiot? Was there crack in our water supply back then? Why doesn't Lindsay and the rest of his gibbering cracker horde just succeed again, and leave us Yankees alone? Why was it we fought so damn hard to keep them last time?  I have no idea.

Whatever. My contempt for them knows no end. They call themselves patriots. Cretinous fuckers. Go fellate some more bankers. Put their plugs in your gobs like good little kept catamites. I have no more patience for your bullshit.

The people of Boston just put you all to shame. This week has been a minor epic, I felt like I was watching the boys form up on the green again, staring down Gage's thugs with calm defiance. 

No pathetic would-be terrorist is going to scare us. They only succeed if they terrorize us. They failed.  

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled..

The character of free men is defined in the conquest of fear, see.


Two hundred and thirty eight years ago today, on April 19th 1775, the people of New England faced down the forces of a foreign tyrant, and won our freedom.  

Tonight we triumphed once again.  God Bless Boston.  God Bless America.  



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Personal Note, July 17th 2012

Today, while I was walking home from the Bodegona, I noticed that I was smelling things very subtly.

Or, rather, much more subtly than I have for years.

I quit smoking almost three years ago in Medjugorje. The first week of September, 2009.

People can say what they want about the apparitions there. I know a lot of people have judged them to be false. Maybe so. All I can say is that of all the major Marian shrines I have made pilgrimage to (including Lourdes, Fatima and Guadalupe) Medjugorge is my favorite. It is beautiful there, a little village with a humble church nestled between two Bosnian hills... The place, like all great shrines, is overrun with pilgrims, and the lines for confession there are the longest I have ever seen. Dozens of priests in dozens of languages, lines of hundreds of penitents at every hour of the day.

If the apparitions are false, then that is odd fruit.

I know nothing about the apparitions or the seers. I can only say Medjugorje is amazing, a powerful place. One that I had a strong sense of forboding at, a sense of premonition like I have only felt a few times before. A sense that has always been followed by some consumation. I was very impressed, and was changed somehow.

I smoked my last cigarette there, the morning I hailed a cab away to Dubrovnik. I have not smoked since.

It's funny how I used to love to smoke - I never was a regular smoker, often going weeks without smoking at all. I never felt it as an addiction. I did it with friends, and almost always with good tobacco. As a social act, smoking is sublime. Drinks and a couple bowls in the pipe.. When it is a deliberate, conscious act, and you are paying attention, smoking can be one of the finest pleasures on earth. I often felt the hobbit, you see. It was good..

But not good enough.

The problem is that we all too often do it - like we too often live, eat and work - mindlessly, mechanically. So when I began to start to smoke more often, sometimes a half pack a day for strings of days - and when I began to roll cigarettes with the Frenchmen in Bourguillon, and began to become a full blown smoker, well..

I knew I had to stop, for good.

For while one in ten smokes is sublime, the negative consequences to the body are vast. One of the worst is that you lose most of your sense of smell. And when you quit, it doesn't immediately return. Your body takes years to recover from the abuse..

Years. As I say, it's been almost three now. This past year ambient tobacco smoke has begun to really annoy me. I am thankfully now a re-confirmed as a non-smoker. And now abruptly, just today, I seem to have suddenly recouped some of my long lost sensitivity. Maybe not all what once had as a child, but a stiff modicum of it. I suddenly noticed I was smelling things like I haven't in years.

It was mildly religious, in that I became plutot vif, quickened, slightly ecstatic. The world again leapt with forgotten vibrancy and texture.

Every thing vibrates with sense and poignancy. We are as open nerves receiving the vibration of creation's song; the light, the sound, the scent, the taste..

Taste and see..

How things are good: Gratias Tibi Beata Mater Maria,Virgo et Regina.

Anyhow, I have been in a mild funk these past two weeks, and have left this here blog aside. This week is my last in Guate. A frame shift is coming, and as it happens I think the blog here shall become rather more fecund. I think that I've shed the extraneous attention that I once may have had, and that anyone still following this has merited the grace of my pearls.. Such as they may be..

So they shall be strewn for your collective delectation, my dear public. I begin to write.

Tonight I write merely to tell you that I can smell. Deo gratias. Ay, Just thought you'd like to know.

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Location: :8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

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Both Scenarios Involve the Police and Stopping It.

Since I've been in Mexico, I've - naturally enough - begun to think again about the Legionaries of Christ and Father Maciel quite a lot.  In fact, this past week, I've been becoming obsessed with it once more.  It's so lurid and entrancing, and like the story of the Mormons and Jos. Smith, it is a train wreck I just can't take my eyes from.  The Legion's story has had a direct and profound impact on me, since I was briefly though intensely involved with the Legion and Regnum Christi personally in the mid 90's.  I went to several Legion vocation retreats, and hung out with a girl who was in Regnum Christi, who taught at their school for consecrated women in Rhode Island (we didn't say that we were "dating" - it was the 90's after all.  It was more a very intense truncated friendship, romantic on her side, platonic on mine, where we spent weeks - chastely - together over a two to three year period.)  Due to all that, I seriously considered becoming involved in "the movement" myself, before it became very, very clear to me on those retreats that the Legion and I were not at all a good fit.  


When the news about Maciel ("Nuestro Padre") broke in 1997, it devastated me.  I knew in my gut that it was true, and I did - and in some ways still do - not understand why the curia did not react more strongly than it did.  I also had significant questions about the Legion itself, due to several things that had unsettled me when I spent time with  them.  


It was a slow burn acid of doubt that ate away at me.  The subsequent revelation of the wider scandals just compounded the effect and left me completely shattered.  That anguish over the scandals was intensified by other doubts that I had about the nature and theology of the Church, and led to me joining the Army (and so rejecting the idea of going to the seminary that I'd been entertaining) and then, later, converting to Orthodoxy.  


I've of course since reverted, and am now picking up all the shards of my innocence and trying to completely own my faith again in an active, mature way.  Still, the ongoing saga of the Legion is harrowing me even now.  I want - need - to see them canonically suppressed.  They have to be disbanded, and the members of the Legion and Regnum Christi need to find new ways within the Church.  Furthermore, the scandal in its wider sense is still a live wire for me.  There are too many questions about sex and indeed money and power within the Church that remain unanswered for me.  There needs to be an accounting, and people need to come clean.  On everything from usury to birth control people are fudging and bullshitting and not being sincere.  


I include myself in that assessment.  Being more honest about sex money and power has been one of my central struggles these last few years.  


I want to talk about all of that more, and soon, on this here blog.  Not because I am under the illusion that what I think matters to many people (even though I hope it matters a bit to my immediate audience of a couple dozen, who are mostly friends of mine) but because I need to finally articulate these things coherently for my own sake, so that I can name them, and think about them well, and so hopefully put them in their proper places and so then grow and become more integrated.  


This isn't funny, but it does sum it all up as far as I am concerned:

Brief money quote from the transcript of the preceding interview:


All right, by now you've probably heard about the situation unfolding at Penn State University, where longtime football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested last weekend for alleged sexual abuse of children.


It's terrible.  But it's also come out that those around Sandusky knew about his behavior for years, including an incident in 2002, where a 6'5" adult eyewitness walked in on Sandusky raping a child in a Penn State shower, and didn't do the two things most people would do in that situation:


(a) stop it and call the cops, or
(b) call the cops to come stop it.

Both scenarios involve the police and stopping it.  

Ecco.  Isn't that obvious?  Isn't that what "most people would do" damn the consequences to themselves (such as losing a job), anyone's reputation (creating a scandal), or any other extrinsic consideration when faced with something so evil?  

Apparently not, eh?  Because let's be clear here, sexual abuse is pretty common and when exposing it will compromise powerful interests, most of us seemingly become sluts to security and power, and maintaining the status quo. Because the scandals in the Church, that in the "Legion," both like that at Penn State, involved many people keeping silent and not exposing the truth, thereby allowing the violation of innocence to fluoresce..


It's almost as if having integrity means knowing you ultimately have nothing to lose but your soul. 




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Travel Notes: A Few Afternoon Sagacities from Guadalajara..

I've been traveling now throughout the world for twenty years. Tack on my three years of high school weekend trips up to Quebec City that we made say a dozen of back in those days

(we'd drive four or five hours up, three or four of us in the car, inevitably get harassed and have the car searched by Canadian customs ( we were straight edged hippies with long hair: so we *deserved* it. Canada: by far the worst migra in the world for US Citizens in my experience, and I've been to Bulgaria when it was still communist - Anyway, we then would spend the weekend in Quebec City on thirty or forty dollars apiece, including gas money. Slept in car, snuck into le Chateau Frontenac, where we'd wander the halls and steal uneaten food of from abandoned room service carts outside of rooms - then we'd go out to Chez Dagobert - the discotheque by the walls of the old city and get the ritual Fuzzy Navel - I was a near teetotaler back then, and did not get drunk, but every time I went to Quebec in those days I'd get a fuzzy navel, which is orange juice mixed with a couple ounces of peach schnapps, something I would never think of drinking now, but that back then seemed to me to be exotic and hopelessly romantic - there's simple pleasure in youth and idiocy.. Inexperience makes for revelation in everything. It's really one of the few good reasons to be young.. So.. In Quebec we'd go to the mall and try to meet girls - we'd meet them, speak excrebable French - back in those days I could barely deploy a sentence - and make awkward - and I think mildly charming fools out of ourselves.. )

and I can say that I've been tramping about the planet now for over two decades.

I've learned in my time some things. I've got my travel down to a near science.. albeit a science that I nearly always violate on one principle, that of parsimony in almost all things, knowing that I'll regret it mildly, but never truly repenting:

I almost always bring too many books with me. More than two books is alway too many. You need (maybe) a guidebook, and one good novel that you can read while on the bus or whatever. No more. That's all you need, but I rarely have the discipline to keep myself to that. This trip I am carrying three bags- a 46 liter main bag (carry-on size, but cavernous and very well built Osprey Porter 46 - 5 stars, tough, humble, pure in it's simplicity. If you need luggage, and want functionality and do not care about making a fashion statement, get this bag), a camera/laptop carrier made of tough canvas (carries both 13" mac and my Nikon, a bit tight, but adequately), and a daypack for my books and computer peripherals. That's it. I carry a convenient cloth sack to throw my book of the moment in, and snacks and drinks for long bus rides and things like that.

I'm slightly overpacked, but I can still walk-on to a flight and not have to check anything if I really wanted to.

It's a minor pain in the ass to carry everything, but not much of one. I can, and have, walked with my stuff for miles on several occasions on this trip.


Here is a list of things that I've decided that I will always travel with, that many people might consider extraneous.. But that I have been using over and over again with great pleasure here in Mexico profundo:


1.) a small spray bottle of alcohol. Cleans everything, and keeps my hands clean after touching uncouth things.

2.) several packs (when you plan on being gone for months like I am) unscented baby wipes. These are utterly crucial. Used to keep clean on buses, in nasty bathrooms, anywhere.

3.) a 6' extension cord with a 3 plug end. This makes it possible to plug everything in at once (in Mexico the current and plugs are the same as at home) - I have a converter plug that I attach on it that makes a three pronged plug on my long mac cord (with the third round grounding prong) into a normal double pronged plug, as well. I can easily plug everything I need to in (battery rechargers, computer, clippers, whatever) simultaneously, even when (as is often the case in cheap Mexican hotel rooms) there is only one or two double pronged plugs in odd, inconvenient places in the room..

4.) a compass. This is useful everywhere, but especially in strange cities. I have decent sense of direction, but still can make mistakes. A compass orientates a map every time, with no confusion, which can save you time and many senseless walked blocks of frustration..

5.) a small stack of plastic cups. A small luxury in cheap hotel rooms without glassware, when you want to drink soda or tequila or wine or whatever. Very pleasant addition.

6.) A compact Swiss Army knife with only six things: a 2" blade, a bottle opener, a can opener, a corkscrew, an awl, and a short 1" blade. I also have a toothpick and slight tweezers in mine. This is the essential picnic tool. You can open anything, anywhere, and cut food to size. Essential. Just be careful to put it in your stown luggage if you fly, or they will confiscate it (Go Homeland Security!) .. It sucks having to pay a 20-30$ idiot tax every time you fly like I've done a few times.. I don't forget putting it in checked luggage, anymore. I carry a spoon and serrated steak knife with me, too. Eat anything, anywhere.

7.) your marine band harmonica, key of C. The best instrument in the world.

8.) your iPod with many books on tape on it, and the essential road mix.

9.) earplugs and eye cover for sleeping. I'm also carrying a 20$ compactly stuff able pillow (attached to the outside of my bag with a quality carabiner) and a sleeping bag liner, which acts as a convenient blanket on buses. Makes any uncomfortable situation much more pleasant.

10.) a half dozen good carabiners. Attach anything, anywhere, fast.

11.) packing cubes. I organize everything in a set of multi colored see through waterproof mesh bags when I pack. You find things much easier, and everything in you luggage is always in order by type.

12.) a good travel alarm clock that gives to the time in multiple timezones, illuminates, etc.

13.) I believe in fiber. I carry a small thing of metamucil, and take a teaspoon or two every day or so. Keeps the innards in order, no matter where or what you are eating.

14.) that's not it, but that's all I'm going to type this afternoon.

I have a sleeping bag stuffed in a compression sack (carabined to the outside of my large bag) as well as a 5 x 10' tarp with four stakes and lines, as well (and this was a big splurge in packing, one that I have yet to use, but know I will eventually) a small packed hammock. The sleeping bag has been key, and the tarp may be, if I need to sleep out. I debated bringing all of these, but am glad I have, especially the sleeping bag.

There. The hard distilled agave of many years experience. I'm going to look for some tacos, now.. Salud.



---

The Discontents of Civilzation: The Contradictions of Village Politics [Revised]

Back Briefly in the Villages, I am once again subjected to the discontents of the bourgeois, of how the government is ruining everything, told of how everything is going to hell.

But now, I am somehow (miraculously, even) beyond annoyance, and am just bemused.

Really! Really? No, Really.

One of the sublime ironies of this discussion for me is how the Villages are probably one of the best governed places in the country, not to say planet.. Everything works and is in order here. There are lots of rules, and people respect them.

Grant you, this is an oligarchic association inhabited almost exclusively by upper middle class white people from New England, the Mid- Atlantic and Mid- West. These are disciplined people, who know how to balance a checkbook and respect a red light.

They've got government in their DNA, coursing their veins and invigorating their very sinews. They are mostly mid to upper level bureaucrats who managed this country through the greatest economic boom in human history, a boom we are still enjoying.

Tonight I sat around a table and listened to people who all - everyone, without exception - had worked for the public sector their entire careers, as public servants in the military, the Portsmouth Naval Yard, as public school teachers and administrators, who are all retired in their 50's and early 60's on public (federal and state) pensions, Social Security and Medicare, universally abuse the government and decry its incompetence.

All without any apparent sense of irony or self criticism.

I posed questions that bounced back at me like duds off a cushion: is there any substantial difference between a publicly controlled bureaucracy and a corporate one? Isn't the substantial difference whether it exists to create value for shareholders (as per U.S. corporate law) or to advance the common good?

Isn't it in our interest to ensure that all bureaucracies and decision makers are held accountable to the public (general) good? Isn't democratic governance one of the few ways to pursue this end in our fallen world? Would it really be better to live in a world where everything was owned by a rich man, and we all were forced to bow and scape for some sort of contractual relationship with someone of wealth, where we had no recourse but to sell our labor to an overseer for the right to sustenance and shelter?

Isn't what the wealthy usually call socialism almost always a merely matter of regulating markets and guaranteeing that the economically disenfranchised maintain access to wealth necessary to their well being?

Regulation of markets, especially labor markets. The 40 hour week, workers comp, minimum wage, care for children, the sick, the elderly. Guaranteed access to food, shelter, education and healthcare. Guaranteed access to information, to markets.

It seems to me that we all benefit from the maintenance and advancement of the public good, of the public space.


I don't know. It seems to me that we can take care of one another, or else be left each of us uncared for. It seems we either fight for the common good, for mutual responsibility and benefit; or else descend into anti-social selfishness, disregard and irresponsibility.

We must either hang together, or be left to hang alone.


Just so. That all seems clear enough. Just as it seems we have yet another, similar, related choice: you can either be proud, angry and cynical or humble, bemused and amused.

I have had done with curses and cynicism. It's all worthless, it brings nothing.

Nothing but more bitterness and wrath.


Me, from now on I bless and laugh.



---

Discursive Beginnings: My Great American Road Trip..

These coming few months I am going to follow John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, Chris McCandless, Bringham Young, Lewis & Clark, Johnny Apple Seed, David Bowie, John Ross, the Lilies of the Field's Homer Smith and all the rest. This blog will serve as a waylog, a testament to my journey across this great continent. This was one of the things I was debating whether to write out. I've decided I'm not only going to write it out, I'll film some of it too.

One of the things that I've been failing to do is document my travel well. That's going to change, and I'm going to share the proof of it here.


The first of the month my lease in Vermont ended. I packed all my stuff I had in that apartment into my car and drove south. The first week of June I spent with my brother Rich and sister JD on Long Island, playing checkers (her very first game no less) with Izzy and celebrating Sam's third birthday. When I got to Florida, I stuffed almost all my stuff back into the 11' by 11' garage sized rented storage space that I've kept most of my possessions during these last four or five years of nomadism, and then spent a few days visiting with my parents last week.

Then, I hit the open road. Just me and Emma. When I bought her, I made sure to take a tape measure to the rear with the backseats down. She's a very svelte station wagon, dubbed a "sportwagen" by VW, and has 67 cubic feet of storage space back there. With the shotgun seat all the way forward there's well over six and half feet of room for me (at 6' 2") to stretch all the way out and sleep in.

Which I do every night. Crack all the very tinted windows an inch or so, open the panoramic sunroof all the way and close its screen all the way forward (usually there's no rain expected, I check the forecast before bed) and open the back hatch, leaving it slightly open, resting on my rubber imitation croc sandals. I have a rechargeable battery powered fan with two batteries that I charge off my car's circuit (cigarette lighter y-jacks on the car's two cigarette lighter outlets power my GPS and let me recharge all my phone and other batteries simultaneously).. I can also recharge my laptop and run any other appliance because there's a normal 120 V 60 Hz household plug on the back of the center front seat arm rest..

I find far dark corners in Walmart parking lots or along a dead-end road in a state forest or other such cozy places where the cops and other annoying types will leave me alone for eight hours, to get some rest.

I've been sleeping in my shorts with two pillows atop my sleeping bag, inflatable pad and two warm throw blankets. Gallon of water and back scratcher close at hand, fan suspended from the roof handle by the door, blowing air at my head all night long. Battery lasts until just after dawn, which acts as a nice wake up mechanism. Fan cuts out and I start to sweat, a nice sauna effect that tells me it's time to get up.

I get online at least once a day at McDonald's or Starbuck's. Can I say once again for the record how much I love the remodeled Micky D's by the way? I hit them for a grilled chicken Asian salad and wild berry or pineapple mango smoothie for dinner, or a bacon egg and cheese bagel and large sugar free iced coffee for breakfast every day. Even Starbuck's is getting better, in that they don't seem to be over- roasting their beans to the point of mildly unpleasant bitterness anymore.. Huge props to both chains for the free WiFi, anyway.


This is how I've been living this last week. I was initially uncertain if I was going to take to the road for long, but it has been bliss. Every day's been another release, another small revelation. This, without much effort: I've merely been mucking about the Orlando area, going to the local state parks, and exploring the city. I've been trying to swim every day, and discover all the beaches and natural first magnitude springs around here. I'm trying to scout as much as I can so that when everyone's visiting Florida we know where to go. There's more than the theme parks to be had, and I'm beginning to gain much more respect for this place. I'm beginning to really like it here.

No absolute clear idea where to go or what to do, though, so I've decided just to live my way forward and let the road take me wherever it will. I do have a series of ideas of things I want to see - Burning Man, Civil War and Revolutionary battlefields, Branson, Catholic and Orthodox churches, temples of any denomination, good independent movie theaters, any sort of park, good bars and honkytonks, natural swimmable springs, classic diners, Mormon pageants, stuff like that. But the methodology of actually encountering these things (the rhythm and art of arriving, which is not as simple as just driving wherever there happens to be - one must know how to encounter such places, know how to meet the people who come with them well.. ) is something I need to grow into.


I just need to relax, I think. I want to fall back in love with this country. It's been a rough decade, and she and I have been having issues. It's time to spend some time with her again, have a second honeymoon and recapture that magic we used to have.

So I'm just going to plunge in, and let whatever happens come. I've decided not to push or plan too much, and let the moment unfold and carry me where it wants. This is my favorite way of traveling, and always brings good things with it.


I was initially going to go canoeing in Maine next month, to do the most epic trip possible, but decided that because no one has the time or interest to come with me on short (two month it was) notice, that I'll postpone that.

I've also been thinking the last couple years about making a pilgrimage to venerate Our Lady of Guadalupe in Ciudad Mexico, but that too has been elusive, in that the troubles in Mexico and the other circumstances of my life have been persistently mitigating against it.


I've been wanting to see her though for a while, ever since I abortively began my pilgrimage by bus from Obregon but ended up waylaid by illness in a cheap hotel room in Mazatlan puking my brains out in 1996. That disaster was due to my own foolishness (another story that I may tell soon, if the words come to my fingers) and I've been wandering afield ever since. Time maybe to pick up that path, again.


I'll receive whatever comes, as I've said. We'll see.


These last few days I've seen three movies: Super 8 (second time, IMAX theatre), Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Tree of Life. These three films actually have quite a bit in common in my mind, and I am going to review all three of them seperately on the blog this coming week, as I get time to do it.


[Aside: Orlando has a decent movie theatre scene, which I love. I saw the Tree of Life here, one of a half dozen things that I've experienced this last week that has radically changed my feelings (which had been very negative - I'd only seen Orlando as a great swathe of strip malls orbiting the theme parks) for the better. Not a bad town, Orlando. ]

One further thing:

It's very interesting: but last summer I couldn't stand the heat here, and when I lived in Gainesville a few years back I felt the humidity ferociously. This summer though, that's all gone. Either Florida has become gentle, or else I am become acclimated and tough. For her blows now are become as caresses..

The weather is not bothering me at all, and that is marvelous. I've gotten this great tan, and the heat and sun are intoxicant.

Something's fundamentally changed. Circle come full round.


Ultreya, Suseya, then. Let's see where this takes me.



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So, I've Come to a Momentous Decision: This Here Blog Continues..

A few weeks ago, and with my characteristic rashness, I leapt into the abyss knowingly and had a brash encounter with my own conscience. A sort of brush with purgatory or maybe even a foretaste of hell. A near death experience. One that sat me back on my haunches these last few weeks, which is why I stepped away from this here blog, and even briefly considered shutting the whole damn thing down for good. I did pull it offline a few days in fact, as some of you noticed. In the aftermath of the shock, the blog seemed rather superficial and spurious, too revealing and offensively opinionated while not actually telling enough of the truth. Inconsequential and self indulgent, in other words. Things my conscience suggested are all too characteristic of too much of my life.

I had other things to think and pray about in any case, and nothing to say to say about any of it. Trauma induced aphasia, whether passing or not was uncertain for a while there.

But I've slowly come back around, and due in no small part to the few messages of concern and support I received while convalescent. Thank you, my miniscule public. I appreciate the well wishes. I shall not forsake you, because I guess I might as well say those things that I've been meaning to say anyway, if only to amuse the few dozen or so of you who regularly read what I post. The discipline of writing, of trying to do it well, is a worthy exercise in itself I guess.

Like virtually everything I created this blog to say, and have not yet but mean to put up, the details of what happened last month will remain my own until the muse dictates.

There are too many stories jostling for air, and not enough ether to inspire any of them usually. It's a question of what my heart and gut tell. Possibly both are suppressed by my head too often, in that reason usually counsels me to err on the side of discretion..

But good writing demands the truth, and the truth is always good. It is only a question of making a good confession, and letting the stories (be they of pear trees or prostitutes or whateverhaveyou) free to testify.

Here's to pre- empting the shouting from the rooftop and all that.

On recommence.



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O Hail Star of the Sea, Draw Us All Safely Home to Thee..

So, I am now home (so to speak) in Vermont. Two weeks in Florida, where the May weather this year was actually quite beautiful (as compared to last May, which was so hot as to be miserable), and now have returned to New England decked in her full late spring regalia.

Maple Street, Newport, from my porch. Taken this afternoon, less than an hour ago.


When I left, it was the mud season. There were still residuum of drifts, long thin ridges of granular snow all about. Snow, that is, but without the stark beauty of the mantle, or the joy of skiing. This is the only time that New England does not sing to me, really. She gets mucky and slightly smelly, and is all brown and cold. I still love her, then, but it's my least favorite time with her.

Two weeks later, though.. She blossoms, she blooms. I had had no idea that there were dozens of lilac bushes on my street. Not a clue.

I can't photograph perfume for you, only this:

These are my favorite flowers. Purple, light blue. The finery of the May Queen come lightly, deftly dancing Spring's melody:





Lyrics:

Bring flowers of the fairest,
Bring flowers of the rarest,
From garden and woodland
And hillside and vale.
Our full hearts are swelling!
Our Glad voices telling
The praise of the loveliest
Rose of the vale!

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!

Our voices ascending,
In harmony blending.
Oh! Thus may our hearts turn
Dear Mother, to thee.
Oh! Thus shall we prove thee
How truly we love thee.
How dark without Mary
Life's journey would be.

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!

O Virgin most tender!
Our homage we render,
Thy love and protection
Sweet Mother, to win.
In danger defend us,
In sorrow befriend us,
And shield our hearts
From contagion and sin!

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!

Of Mothers the dearest,
Oh, wilt thou be nearest
When life with temptation
Is darkly replete!
Forsake us, O never,
Our hearts be they ever,
As Pure as the lilies
We lay at thy feet!

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May!



---

An Open Confession

This last weekend I behaved very poorly. In sort of a culmination of pride and acedia, I both mocked some people I disagree with, calling them fools..

And then sneered at people who often quote scripture chapter and verse in their writing.

They usually annoy, even anger me sometimes, you see.

Because you know, I am above such credulous tasteless crudities as quoting scripture, I guess. Too cool for that sort of thing. Way too cool.


[But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,' is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. (Matthew 5:24) ]


Anyway..


We went out Saturday, and there were shenanigans. I behaved like a fool, and ended up having a very "interesting" night. One that I will not describe in any detail here, and mention it only to say that at some point before dawn on Sunday I realized that not only had I missed the vigil, but that I was probably going to miss mass that weekend altogether.


Which I then did.


With the sabbath dawn, knowing that I would not be at mass, I had an irrational moment of terror where I was sure that I was doomed. The rapture had occurred, and I was a fool who had been left behind.

Not a pleasant sensation, let me tell you. A moment of repentance, you could say.


Later, after my head and heart were cleared, I realized that even if I do not believe that the modern eschatology that anticipates the "rapture" makes any sense, that I should not be making snarky fun of people who do believe it. Indeed, if I were wise at all, it should be my fervent hope that if such an event occurs, that I should be included in it. Apart from that, I should mostly not say anything at all about it, really. There are other things, such as the state of my own soul and conscience that are far more worthy my attention and concern.

I mean, I believe that the second coming will be just as unexpected as the first, and that he will upend our expectations in such a way that everyone will be surprised. He is always doing things we do not understand, after all. The end will be no different. Still, I am now resolved to generally keep my mouth shut on that point.

On the ride home, I spent much of the way thinking about all of this and examining my conscience.

(I'm sort of an aficionado of examenes by the way, and just found one that I really like, here. It's pretty staunch, and I used it today. )


This morning I went to see Father Micheal at the rectory, and interrupted him at breakfast. He left his meal to hear my confession. I am trying to keep my confessions short lately, to simply recite the things my conscience accuses me of, without any explanation or excuse. Just the sins, the number of times I've committed them if that's applicable, and maybe mention of the names of people I have hurt. It should take five minutes or less, even being a jackass like I am. When the priest speaks, I have resolved to keep my mouth mostly shut and suppress the impulse to start a discussion, unless he asks me a question. This I find harder to do, but I am making progress there. It usually takes only ten or fifteen minutes these days to get absolution.

This morning, Father was blunt. I like this. No great discourse on how much God loves me. I know that the Master loves me. That knowledge encourages my presumption and laxity. What I need is to be kicked in the ass honestly, and disciplined.

So, Father Micheal was not impressed by me, and I was glad. Because I am not impressive. He looked very stern, and said "we make it very easy for you to get to mass here, you know (I didn't tell him that I was in North Carolina Sunday, but his point still held) and you have absolutely no excuse not to be at the feast."

I nodded, mute.


"Stop being lazy. Do your duty."


Do my duty. Yes.


I think I will. Tonight, I herewith resolve not to be vulgar anymore. I also resolve not to call anyone any names. I ask you, my reader's forgiveness for having done both of these things too often before now.


I also resolve to seek simplicity, and only write what I think may edify. Remember, I am still a fool, only one who hopes to be wise. Your prayers and criticism to this end would be much appreciated.


Tonight, all of you are in mine. Good night my dear readers. Sleep very well.



---

On Distrust & Anger

I've been thinking about my anger.


Until a few years ago, I wasn't even aware that I was angry. It wasn't even an emotion, most of the time. It was more a psychic state, where I'd spun out. A mix of alienation and fury, death by 10,000 judgments consumed by cognitive and spiritual dissonance.


It began back in the 1990's when I began to read Church history, taken up in a rapture of re-conversion, convicted and in search of the perfect apologetic. I want to write about this (re)search in detail, but in small increments. I'm not going to start tonight. This coming week I'll start, by first getting to the nub of things in less than 1,000 words. After that, I may have a dozen brief essays about ecclesiology, epistemology and authority in me.

I'll just note that the "problems" proliferate pretty quickly, but that no one is unscathed when it comes to them. Everyone's running around naked pretending to be clothed.


Anyway, this perceived crisis in authority is at the root of, and is the backdrop to, my anger.


The two main axes of my identity - the things I had the most of my sense of self invested in, namely my identity as an American and a Catholic, were both called into profound question. Things I had never imagined could be true, clearly were.

I felt betrayed, lied to and manipulated. Victim of multiple trahisons des clercs.


First, there was the bald treason of our bishops. I do not think that Catholic priests abuse minors at a much greater rate than say teachers do. That's not to say we do not have major issues pertaining to gender and sexuality within the Church or priesthood and religious life. We clearly do. But none of that is the main issue: the fundamental betrayal in my eyes is not in all that.

It's that the bishops conspired to protect the very worst abusers, over and over again.

That the Church is not unique in this sort of corruption, and has been subjected to a scrutiny that should (but is unlikely to) be also applied to other institutions, religious and otherwise, in our society, is also beside the point.

It's that they systematically lied about the violation of innocence, over and over and over again. And that they did it everywhere, in a way that makes it pretty clear that the "strategy" of obfuscation and denial of truth goes to the very top.

The pope himself, the curia. Back decades, centuries.


I am going to write more about this, in personal terms, succinctly, yet in also in a bit of detail. Suffice to say for now that when I started reading about it (in books like Leon Podles' Sacrilege) it destroyed me.

The worst about those I had considered the best was true.


At the same time, my country, that I had also put on a pedestal, was attacked in an inconceivably graphic way.


Like most of us, I was traumatized by it. Unlike most, though, our national response did not make any sense to me. I mean, I understood it on an emotional level. Fear of nuclear terror. Strike back in revenge. Got it.

It was the entire Axis of Evil Shtick that I didn't get.


I have no interest in defending the Ba'athists or Mullahs.


What I resent is being fed obviously fraudulent propaganda lines. I resent turning them into cartoon villains, caricaturing them in ways that are obviously false, that lead us to misunderstand them.

It was very clear from the beginning that we were being propagandized and manipulated according to an agenda that had little or nothing to do with the one publicly professed by our leaders.


It was disinformation and lies on the scale similar to that practiced by Goebbels and Stalin, along with a rationale for violence ripped from the Nazi playbook.

Preemptive war is never just. Iraq, Iran and Korea were not allies and were in no way ever equivalent in any way to Germany, Italy and Japan in 1939. None of them was nor is in any way a real threat to the United Sates, nuclear weapons or no.

The Ba'ath party is not a admirable organization, but let's be clear here: the sorts of things they are guilty of are not that extraordinary. Everyone from China to half of Africa and many of our Arab allies and the Israelis commit similar sorts of torture and violence as the Ba'athists in Syria and Iraq have, all the time.

It offends me when our press and leadership pretends otherwise, and then uses such pretension as a pretext to war.


In fact, we have now done most of the things to Iraqis that we accused Saddam of: tortured with impunity, used despicable weapons such as depleted uranium that will have centuries of devastating consequences for the Iraqi people, and killed tens of thousands of Iraqis imposing our will on their country.


Anyway, I hate being lied to, and I hate gross liars. I also intensely dislike violence, and when we all went on an ecstatic orgiastic binge of it, "shock n' awe" and all that inexcusable cruelty that we inflicted on the Iraqi people..


Well, I'll be honest. My childhood love for my country died in 2003.


I feel like I've been betrayed, and don't really know how to deal with the emotional and psychic consequences of that.


This is merely an wordy explanation for why I've boiled over here these last few days.


I see lies everywhere now, and suspect the very worst is possible.


Because they are, and it is.



---

Golpes en el Corazon.. From the Halls of Montezuma to the Avenida de los Niños Héroes..

On July 17th 1996 I flew down to Mexico, to teach at a prep school down there.

I remember that date for a reason.


The town (which I will not name here) was one of those Sonoran municipalities that had been laid out in a grid by Mormon city planners back in the late 1800's.


One of the streets was named Avenida de los Niños Héroes, as in most Mexican towns. I asked someone who they were, and received my first of many object lessons about history's many possible inversions.

Do you remember 1848? The grandchildren of the last Caudillo do. I've met them. I taught them English. They told me so.


There was this guy I knew there who had been in Army special forces (like a few other people I know) and had done some odd things. One night over tequila after carne asada he told me about how he'd been involved in loading planes with cocaine during a stint in Central America back in the 80's. Could have been b'sing me, but in that context (where I was in a place where half the city was - without exaggeration - living in shacks with farm animals, and most of my students where from families with houses like the ones JR lived in on Dallas - big sprawling modern, trashy neo-classical places with at armed guards at the gates..) it made sense..

When the drug money and violence is in your face, and apparently half your students' families are running chop shop and coyote operations, that sort of admission isn't that weird.

After all, Amado Carrillo Fuentes had died on the plastic surgeon's table in the latter part of that year, and his surgeon's body reportedly was then found chopped into chunks in a trash bag.. One of my student's uncles had been kidnapped and killed a few years before (from very rich agribusiness family with reputedly 100's of millions) and had been killed by the kidnappers. Those fellows reputedly all met very public and grotesque deaths.. This is what happens to anyone who kidnaps a Diaz-Brown..

Merely a foretaste of the violence that was to come.


At the time, I was really still an American evangelist. I was pretty arrogant, and had the gall to lecture my students on how their corruption was doing them in, and how we Americans were in contrast incorruptible, which explained our power.

I actually delivered that message to them in a lecture, after I caught a bunch of them red-handed cheating. I knew that they were all cheating, almost all the time, but they were good, and I didn't have the wit or energy to catch them most of the time.

(I never told them about Pik and Hartley passing the answers back and forth brazenly in Health Class, or any of that other counter indicative stuff.. One of the many slight hypocrisies I've committed in my time..)


Very Calvinistic attitude, anyhow. We are rich and powerful because we are good.


The prosperity gospel in a nut shell.


I've long since lost that faith.. The last post was merely my shooting the pooch for the last time, and saying it out loud.


How did it happen?


Some point along the way.. Or was it in increments?


Maybe it was when Grover Norquist said that he wants "strangle the government in the bathtub"? Then his boys get elected, they cut taxes for the wealthy and keep on spending, and then squeal how the government is inefficient when the deficit explodes.. This, while massive amounts of public money goes to pork and private business?


Or, when a bunch of Saudis lead by an Egyptian putatively (I love that word, putative) attack us, and our response is to launch an attack on Iraq, the arch- enemy of Salafi and Shiite Muslim extremists.. And also incidentally perhaps the most important oil power left, and the second biggest threat to the Saudis after Iran?


Or, when they overturn usury laws, repeal Glass-Steagall, and then we immediately get screwed in a series of bubbles and fraudulent insurance scams, in which institutions are destroyed, but individual speculators walk away free and filthy rich?


All this, while our oil and banking scion president walks hand in hand with the Saudi "king" across the White House lawn, and then kisses him for the cameras.

When I was in Florida people kept on saying things like "I won't be surprised if they get Obama.. Someone's gonna shoot that bastard.." This, with the implicit understanding that someone shooting the president would be a good thing.


That may have been the last straw.


Is it that cynicism is like never having to say you're sorry..

Or is it that paranoia's just having too many of the facts?


I've lost my testimony. I no longer can tell..



---

Resurrexit vere! Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

Yesterday (Good Friday) I went to McDonald's and ate four filet o'fishes and three one buck side salads with balsamic vinaigrette for my one Good Friday meal. Sat there for a few hours and drank lot's o' iced tea (I gave up all hot n' heinous "soft drinks" for penance's sake, and only broke that abstention once in 40 days..)

Today, I got up late and went to McDonald's again, and ate chicken salad with bacon, another side salad, a McChicken sandwich (also off the dollar menu!) and then a couple hours later got a large wildberry yogurt smoothie. I sat there for maybe six hours all told, drinking more unsweetened iced tea dashed with slight amounts of lemonade, and reading.

Ave Sancta Claudia Procula, uxor Pilati, ora pro nobis..


A rousing finale to my Lent.

But not exactly in keeping with the Athonite fast.


But I'm a broken lapsed Orthodox, now. Just a poor Catholic.


On the way home I stopped and bought a gallon of rich red table wine, came home and did some work on my new will. I'm writing it on my own, following a model and reading Vermont inheritance law as I do it. I'm specifying that they not cremate my remains, and that they pay all my taxes before charity or my nieces and nephew get a thing. I'm adamant about that. Pay my taxes dammit. Also, make sure that Comcast and AT&T get theirs, too.

You know, the only black mark on my credit report is when I broke my cell phone contract with AT&T before leaving for Europe a few years ago, and then flipped them the bird. I owe just under 300 bucks, I think. If I want an iPhone in purgatory, I may need to pay them.

(I may need ask Tommy forgive me too.. But not for the sake of my cell phone..)


Just over an hour ago I broke the seal on that bottle, and my lips touched wine for the second time in over two months.

I've not kept the fast fully nor prayed well, and I am a guilty man..

Yet tonight I keep the vigil.


I'm thinking of how much fun it would be to be at a good Orthodox parish tonight.

Fifty days of strict fasting, nuts and water on Holy Saturday, then a two hour long vigil liturgy begun late in the evening..

Cyclical chants for well over an hour, standing the entire time (feel how the spirit is willing..) dim candle lit incense ridden anticipation..


Light breaks darkness some point after midnight.


After the mystery is made consummate, Father comes into the church hall, where there is a cornucopia laden table overflowing with food and drink like something out of Paschal Slavic version of Dickens.

He blesses it all and us..


Then all heaven breaks loose. It's two in the morning, and everyone's feasting like it's the millennium: here there are ten year old kids and grandmothers gladly all about. My home brew is uncapped and praised like it's bordeaux. Old guys with barely understandable accents circulate with homemade vodka, filling my dixie cup to overflowing.


Every time I keep a long (Lenten or Advent) fast and then make the requisite vigil with the Orthodox, I somehow serendipitously find myself up bathed in a suffused breaking dawn..

One always shared with some few happy exhausted winsome friends still ready for breakfast, followed by a very long nap and yet *maybe* another liturgy..

(See how vapid and hedonistic my approach to my beloved.. Exi a me quia homo peccator sum Domine..)


Here I in all my tepidity and decadence nevertheless dare pray:

Κύριε Ιησού Χριστέ, Υιέ του Θεού, ελέησόν με τον αμαρτωλόν..


Bless us all, and keep us, may your your Face always shine upon us and be with us, forgive us all everyone of our sins.

That you my Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, may grant us all Triumph and Victory over the temptations of our visible and invisible enemies.

That by your Grace we may all crush beneath our feet the prince of darkness and his powers.

That we may all rise with you and so rise from the tomb of our sins and offenses.

That you may fill us all with joy and happiness in your Holy Resurrection.

That we may all merit the Grace of entering into your Chamber at your Divine Wedding Feast, to rejoice beyond limit together with your Heavenly Attendants and the Host of Saints glorified through you, the Church Triumphant in Heaven.


Amen. Alleluia, Alleluia.



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