god

[warning: material may be offensive to some readers. comments blasting me to hell and damnation will be deleted, unless they're really funny]

Handy tip: If you want a LOT of people to tell you to pray every day, you can either (1) attend a religious revival or (2) put your Mom in the hospital for surgery.

Sheesh. I don't think I've ever been so frequently exhorted to relgious activity outside a location where my presence announces my willingness to engage therein (i.e. a church). Of course I expect it from my mom's friends, but now everyone—from the cafeteria worker at the hospital to the lady who delivered flowers—is telling me to pray. And what do you say to that? "No thanks"? "Mango chutney"?

I mean, I don't exhort random strangers to "keep up the fight for the glorious revolution." Maybe I should start doing that.

But one thing always stops me from doing this (though it obviously doesn't stop them): fear of being an asshole.

But then, at the funeral on Friday, there was just such an asshole at the reception, and it was great. We had slogged through the Mass* led by an Irish priest with a strong accent, which allowed me some private moments of amusement ("caught up in the Lord" pronounced as "cut up in the Lard"). At the reception, I dutifully commented that "It was a nice service, wasn't it?"

"Oh yeah. Great that the priest had an Irish accent. That was really essential," said the asshole.

"Really completes the whole atmosphere, eh?" I said and we smirked at each other. Nobody else was at all amused. But it was a little moment of reality that helped me stay sane. So who knows. Maybe if I were more of an asshole, I'd be helping others stay sane. They do, after all, have nothing to lose but their chains.**

This reminds me of Franklin's recent reference to my difficulties with "suffering fools gladly," and I have been contemplating a post confessing my past sins in that department, and defending myself that I'm not like that anymore. Even though maybe I am a little. But the past sins are funny. But I'll save that for another time.

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*including a bible passage informed us that God had tortured the deceased with heart disease just to see if he would really stay faithful, and only after that was he allowed into heaven (1 Peter 1:6-9). What kind of sadistic, fucked-up god is this, anyway????
** Our local bookstore cooperative tried to put its new ad campaign on the local public radio station, but it was completely bowdlerized, because apparently the FCC would object to (among other things) the slogan: "Patronize independent bookstores: you have nothing to lose but your chains."

One wonders (I did anyway) whether (1) the objection was to quoting the Communist Manifesto, per se, in which case, that doesn't really seem Constitutional—not that I am under any illusion about the strength of that document these days; or (2) the person doing the censoring didn't recognize the quote and just feared FCC objection to the implication that chain stores were bad.

I don't know which interpretation is less appealing: draconian censorship or devastating ignorance. The surrounding text suggested the latter.

Maybe I do need to start randomly preaching socialism at complete strangers.