A Breviary For The Eager

If one is to burnish A Calling,
One must learn one's tenets and sacraments--
One must find one's rabbi, if you will,
(for was not the Savior Himself called by this title?)
And finally, a suitable catechism must be dispensed.
Consider, neophyte,
Your betters:
Saint Mark The Evangelist, dragged through the streets and beheaded.
Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive and crucified.
Saint Sebastian, lashed to a post and shot through with arrows.
Saint Barbara, tortured and beheaded.
Saint Peter, The Rock, crucified upside down.
Faith is not for the sissified, or the weekend enthusiast.
It demands...
Everything.

Behold the lecturer, at whose feet you may learn
To mold the preposterous Play-doh of your gift
Into something truly fine.
Place no stock in his appearance--
He may look untrimmed, overlooked by the campus landscaping service,
Rumpled, ridiculous;
But his work has appeared in countless quarterlies.
He has thrown in with the ravening cream of his generation,
Tearing and ripping his way into the few available publications,
Subscribed to by 117,
Actually read by 44,
9 of whom read beyond their own contributions.
Let him guide you.
A hundred hours spent kneeling may yield a flashing moment in mid-air,
And it is only the very particular pigeon who may wheel,
High above the mob.
This can be you.
You can become one of His little favorites
If you keep your ears open, your mouth shut,
And avoid the unthinking spontaneous outburst,
Or any embarrassing, sick-making tiresome end rhyme.

______

for dverse Meeting The Bar

illustration: The Martyred Saint Sebastian by Gustave Moreau

Mitch Albom's Asshatedness Reaches Critical Mass and Fireblossom Can't Stand It Anymore

There is a time when a girl just has to speak up. Now, you know me, readers. War, famine, politics all leave me unmoved. I don't even look up from filing my nails. But bad writing, and using bad writing as a platform to spew one's teensy thoughts into the world as though they were carved on stone tablets, well, that gets my goat.

Let's talk about Mitch Albom. He writes for the Detroit Free Press newspaper and has won many awards (mostly for writing about sports). I won't mention his having been censured by his employers for plagiarism. He has written several (schmaltzy, presumptuous) books. One of them was subtitled "The Meaning Of Life." Such a humble man. But you've got to hand it to him. He waits patiently for someone more interesting than he is to die, so he can bend their bones into a self-serving book. "Tuesday's With Morrie" and the new one about the late Detroit Tigers' broadcaster Ernie Harwell. Mitch not only claims to know the meaning of life, he also knows what happens when you die. Wow! Not bad for someone who has spent most of his life hanging around locker rooms and looking up at everybody. He's so small and delicate, I'm surprised he didn't get asked to dance. Oops! Was that a lame-brained idiotic comment I just made? Which brings me to my real subject...

Some of you may have heard about baby Storm, born to a Toronto couple who have decided to keep their baby's gender under wraps for the time being. Unorthodox to be sure, but this has made them targets for an angry, sneering lynch mob (kind of like gay people who blunder into the path of Reverend Phelps!). More on Storm in a minute.

Mitch Albom now writes a Sunday column on the front of the "News & Views" section of the Free Press, ( http://www.freep.com ) which is the next section after section A. Flip once, and there's Mitch. Now, in Detroit we have a zillion things someone could express their views about. There is unemployment, the housing crisis, racism, corruption in city government, and a public school system that is disastrously underfunded and floundering. So, at what does Mitch decide to point his sword-like pen today? At baby Storm and his family.

The column is a gold mine...of easy generalizations and facile bullshit. Quoth Mitch: "Meanwhile, Storm's two older brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2 -- are being raised without formal schooling and taught to choose whatever behavior they like. Jazz, according to the Star, dresses in pink, paints his nails and wears a stud in his ear. This, we are to believe, is his 'choice'. Of course, Mom and Dad made the choice to buy the nail polish, the clothes and the stud. What happens if the child points to a chain saw? They get him that, too?"

Hmmm. What does it mean that Mitch Albom equates the danger of nail polish for a five year old, with that of a chain saw? Scared that Jazz will never make it to a professional locker room, Mitch? With that stud in his ear? Oh wait. Look around. Studs on those studs. Oops! Still, far better that Jazz be treated in a more traditional manner, as you espouse. Shame the shit out of him. Beat the crap out of him. Scorn him, insult him, yes, disown him. All these are better than studs or nail polish! And all of these are done all the time. Better to engender self-hatred, isolation and, often, suicide in our children than to put gender and gender roles aside. You accuse Storm's family of making gender everything. No, Mitch. That would be you doing that.

Mitch also says: "It's called parenting. If the child, later in life, prefers football to lipstick, or boxer shorts to dresses, or one day asks a doctor to mangle its private parts in an effort to be something else, it still will be unable to deny that it was born one way."

Well, Mitch. How stunningly transphobic and simple. I capitulate. Fairies should just suck it up and be a man. Transsexuals should ignore their foolish impulses and be a man. Women, farm animals and tractors should all just be a man. Sister Sally and her kitten as well!

One last quibble, before I take up weight lifting and belching the alphabet. Many intersexed babies (babies born with dual or ambiguous genitals) are summarily operated on, the decision of their gender made for them, irreversibly, before they have the chance to show who they are, or say what they want. In fact, this was routine until recently. If you want to talk about mangling and butchery, there it is. 

But back to baby Storm, and then I'll hush. Look at the picture of Storm and Jazz. They are clearly a threat! Their parents are obvious monsters! Canadian authorities need to step in and force them to enlist in the army or something!

Good grief. Isn't there enough real trouble in the world? Why does this bother you so much, Mitch? Maybe you are just an asshat. After all, you're the one who says a person is what they appear to be, and that's that. So here's your hat. There's the door. Please go away and let the rest of us live our lives. 

 

Blackthorne & Celeste

I wasn't going to post this, having written it for sheer amusement. But then, wickedness whispered to me in the form of....well, I shan't name her. (oOooo, I just said "shan't". For my next trick, I'm going to sip Darjeeling with my little finger stuck out, just so. See? How cool am I? Don't answer that! We haven't got all day.) Now, as all of my regular readers know, when faced with the temptation to do evil, I generally cave immediately, thereby leaving me more time to actually perform the deed. And so, shower her with hosannas or bombard her with brickbats as you choose, but my friend prevailed, and so here is this lovely bit of doggerel, entitled...

BLACKTHORNE & CELESTE


Blackthorne crouched in his garret
Working feverishly on "Ode To A Backed-Up Drain"
Brooding in the dark--
Wracking his brain--
So very somber deep and serious was he
About finding a way
To shock the industrial bourgeoisie
That he hadn't bathed in weeks
Such that the dirt lay upon him in streaks.

His lady Celeste, light and airy
Dashes off poems
In the haiku form
About unicorns, sprites and fairies
Sort of a Sino-Celtic headache
In verse,
To make strong persons curse
Their fate
In having to read it.

They were married in the park
In June in the rain in the dark
His verse got bleaker,
Her haikus, weaker,
And now there's no telling when or if they will stop.

_______

dedicated to Charles Bukowski and Jewel, the finest poets of our time   

Another Barfy Thanksgiving Post About Being Grateful And Such Like

Crow swooped down out of the sky and landed on Dappled Pony's head, then said,

"What are you grateful for, Dappled Pony?"

Immediately, Dappled Pony replied, "I am grateful that my head doesn't fall off when you land on it like that."

Then she added, "What are you grateful for?"

Crow said, "I am grateful that my ass is not an anvil. I am grateful that my wings are not weights."



After a moment, Dappled Pony observed, " My gratitude is bigger than your gratitude. Yours is so small that scientists have to find it with an electron microscope. Yours is so small that it can dance on the head of a pin and feel that it is in a ballroom. Yours is so small that you can't find it with tracking dogs, a map, and both hands."

"You don't say," drawled Crow. "So, who died and made you Queen? I should have landed on your head harder. Some people change after a crack on the cranium. The bilious and snappish become beaming beatific benevolent beings with the brains of babies."

"I should have ducked. Then you could have gotten back to the Earth, all in a jiffy. You could have kept going, all the way to China. You and your nest could have ended up in someone's soup. The impact would have left you flatter than a pancake. You could have become a frisbee. I feel that I have cheated you of all these opportunities."

"Well," said Crow generously, "I forgive you."

(brief silence)

"So, what are you really most grateful for today, Dappled Pony?"

Dappled Pony shook her mane and stamped her hoof. "For you, even though you are just a talking turd with feathers."

Crow replied, "And I am most grateful for you, even though you are nothing but future dog food. I hope that you will be my friend forever, and not go to the glue factory, but stay here with me."

Dappled Pony whinnied, as she tended to do when pleased.

"Crow, you can perch on my dome all day if you like. I rather enjoy having you there. I hope that you will not ever become a cat's Christmas present to its owner, but rather, stay here with me and be my buddy forever."

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers, from Crow, Dappled Pony, Everyone at Danny's Coffee Shop, Bosco, and his faithful human, Fireblossom.  xoxo  Let's eat!

_______