Approaching the great four oh – tomorrow at approximately 1400 hours.

And not funny.  Not interesting. Snarly.

… a mighty fine gecko…

And planning a “coming out” post for Sunday, my fortieth birthday.  Doing research and trying to decide on a structure. More later.

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Keith Douglas (1920-1944)

for Jason

I realize one of my previous posts may have seemed a bit anti-religion. Maybe it’s important to clarify: I’m not anti-religion. I’m anti-human-beings-as-interpreters-of-messages-no-one-else-can-hear-but-which-give-them-the-idea-that-what-they-think-is-right-should-be-what-everyone-does.

Hmm. No, there are still a couple of… well… okay.

I don’t like “con’s” without corollary “pro’s,” though. It’s far too easy to bitch and moan without suggesting a solution, an alternative or at least a palliative. So after years of research (and that part’s true), I’ve put together what I consider the most universally workable, humane, loving messages from every major religion and laboriously conflated them into a modest proposal for an entirely new creed:

The Church of Don’t Be an Asshole.

I’m still working out the details, of course, but here’s what I’ve got so far.

The Confessional: people need to vent. It’s easier in a dark private place with someone whose opinion is neutral – ask any hooker getting out of a car off Sunset. As a holy confessor, my role would be to constantly and gently guide the needy back to our central belief and suggest ways to realign ourselves spiritually with The Eternal Force Who Is Not A Jerk. Something like this… (dream music)

Random Guilty Conscience: Help me, you, for I feel like an asshole.

Me: What seems to be the problem?

RGC: So, I was dating this guy… I think he really loved me and things were great, but then I met this much hotter guy at a bar and hooked up with him.

Me: Ah. You had sex with him (notice my firm grasp of modern youth vernacular – very important). Questionable move.

RGC: Yeah, well, but I really liked him, and he was soooo hot. So I kind of dumped my boyfriend.

Me: You traded up based on one night of sex? Dumb move. But go on, my child.

RGC: Yeah, right? But he was so sweet that night… anyway, when I texted “Doormat” and told him we were over, he was so upset that I just kind of avoided him for the next few days…

Me: Holy Whoa, my child. You texted him to end the relationship?

RGC: Yeah, well…

Me: And didn’t even have the decency to face him?

RGC: Well, sort of…

Me (thunderously): ASSHOLE MOVE, MY CHILD.

RGC (quiet sobbing): I know! I know! And now he won’t even let me apologize! He won’t talk to me!

Me: Then leave him alone and give him time to think and recover.

RGC: But I love him!

Me: Then put aside your guilt and your need for selfish comfort and let him heal.

RGC: But I… I want him back! (wailing, gnashing of veneers, tearing of highlights)

Me (in the quiet tones of the gathering of the righteous storm): You are… available, my child? Where is Mr. Hot’n'Sweet now?

RGC (whispering): He didn’t work out.

Note: This is where we get to the true “pastoral care” biznatch. TCODBAA doesn’t have penance or excommunication, because those are kind of asshole moves that shift responsibility. Instead, watch as the lamb is led gently back to the fold…

Me: So, my child, allow me to wrap my head around this. Disregarding honesty, history and decency, you attempted in an ASSHOLE way to make an ASSHOLE play for an ASSHOLE whom you considered a boost to your ASSHOLE ego. When he in turn and quite predictably behaved like an ASSHOLE, you attempted to pull another ASSHOLE move and reattach the nice guy to whom you had behaved like a complete and utter… say it with me, child…

RGC: ASSHOLE! (sobbing) Yes! Yes! And now I feel like shit!

Me: Yes, my child. You should.

RGC: Wha- what?

Me: You behaved like an asshole. You’re not a sociopath. You feel awful.

RGC: Help me!

Me: Help you what?

RGC: I – I don’t know. Help me feel better! Tell me what to do!

Me: Yea, verily, my child, do you not recall the First and Only Commandment of TEFWINAJ?

RGC: You mean, “Thou shalt not behave like an asshole?”

Me: There’s your answer.

RGC: I don’t understand.

Me: Yes, you do. You just don’t want to. But lemme ’splain anyway. No, lemme sum up (a little pastoral humor, there).You treated someone like dirt. You were treated like dirt. As is our human wont, you attempted to assuage your feelings of rage and hurt by once again attempting to treat someone like dirt, because that’s what makes us feel temporarily better…

RGC: But I love him!

Me: Well, sucks to be you, huh? The worm has turned, the doormat has flipped, and you’re the one with old gum and dog crap on your face. Think, child. Think as The Eternal would have us think. What would be the NON-asshole move now?

RGC (hesitantly): To… to leave him alone?

Me: Good, good. And?

RGC: To… not do that again?

Me: Good! Good for the spirit, good for the common sense. Leave him the hell alone, get on with your life, and get a goddamned STD test.

RGC: Yes, Your Holiness.

Me: And commit to your heart the Eighteenth Adjunct to the Seventh Proviso of the Holy Creed.

RGC: What?

Me: “One Fuck Does Not a Boyfriend Make,” my child. Go in peace. And Don’t Be an Asshole.

RGC: I Shall Not Be an Asshole.

(dream music)

Tomorrow: Alternatives to Excommunication; or, Public Shaming Without The Guilt.

… for Castle and crochet. Back later.

So I’ve been thinking with increasing irritation about that perennial conundrum-within-an-enigma-which-actually-isn’t-that-difficult-at-all: the separation of church and state, this time in the context of gay marriage. And it just gets more annoying the more headspace I give it.

Look, I firmly believe that the followers of any given religion have the perfect right to include, exclude and/or vilify anyone they choose. I further believe that their right to express their group disapproval stops absolutely short of causing their chosen bugaboo any actual harm… as in, breaking the laws enacted by the larger secular state in order to protect all its citizens.  Those laws, we hope, evolve in specificity and efficacy as our understanding of what constitutes demonstrable societal or individual harm evolves as well.

For example, the general population, excluding Louisiana JOP’s, has eventually come to understand that a union between two people of differing overall skin pigmentation does not lead to apocalyptic plagues or children with multiple heads… and also that allowing humans to own other humans is a damaging economic construct, not to mention leading to some rather hard feelings in general. Had the original Southern Baptist Convention (and by “original,” I mean the SBC from 1845 until 1995) been able to retain a state-sanctioned grasp on the laws of the Southern states, slavery would still be legal, “miscegenation” would still be a crime and hundreds of thousands of lawn jockeys would still be on display across the land of Dixie – because the Southern Baptist Church was created to support these ideas in defiance of the views of other Baptist congregations.

Sure, it still took a hundred-plus years for anything to actually change, but I think the parallel is clear: in a democratically-based society, the general idea is that we don’t let small groups dictate to everyone, in the belief that time, evolving understanding and the collective better judgment of a larger group of citizens usually works out better for everyone.  And when small groups, or large groups, or individual states or wheezy rednecks do attempt to tar and feather someone, we can take their asses to courts which represent successively larger segments of the population and hope that somewhere along the line, better judgment and better education will prevail.

I don’t give a damn what happens in anyone’s church if the law isn’t being broken, if children aren’t being abused, if the Kool-aid is untainted. And if a particular religious sect decided that I was by nature a lesser human being, I think I’d leave. Wait, make that I know I’d leave – that’s essentially why I don’t consider organized religion a tool that’s safe for most people to play with.  Any system of thought which approves and allows the dehumanization of certain other humans… risky stuff.

Religion doesn’t own marriage, the concept or the reality. It has its own variations on the theme and every right to them. Marry (or don’t) anyone that you like (or hate (or sadly but firmly condemn)). But please try to understand: pair-bonding predates religion; stable, wealth-creating, ably-parenting households are the true and demonstrable societal benefit of such bonds; and there’s not one iota of real evidence that a pair of the same gender doesn’t work just as well… and your talking shrubbery or flaming cow, while inspirational and possibly entirely real, is no excuse for acting like an asshole.

and not one damn thing I truly want to see. A few possibilities, minus the ones we’ll never agree on. Let’s see. Top ten at the box office this week…

Michael Jackson’s This Is It: aging drugged-out pedophile rehearses for concert that never happened. From all reports, his nose does not fall off. Nothing to see there.

Paranormal Activity: I could go for this. In fact, I’d probably enjoy it. I hear the acting is unobtrusive, the writing and direction build hellishly good suspense the old-fashioned way (they eeeeaaaaaarn it), and so what if I already know the origin of the paranormal activity? Demon, ghost, whatever. No chance in a million years of convincing the spouse to see it.

Law Abiding Citizen: hmm. Not that I’m not desperately seeking my next Hannibal Lecter (the one from the first book, damn it, not the lame, dissected version of Thomas Harris’s financial need), but family man to mass-murdering sociopath in ten years? First of all, doesn’t happen. Second and more importantly (because I’ll suspend my disbelief from a nanofiber for a good scary crazy person), it’s going to lose one of two ways. The best revenge fantasies show the toll the process takes on the victim-turned-perpetrator, and if the blurbs are using the right terminology there won’t be any of that with a “soulless” killer. On the other hand, the best scary crazy people are the ones you never quite understand, the ones who arise and exist and die unexplained (Thomas Harris, you bastard), and here we have a dead family/flawed justice system/wasn’t there once some flick called The Fugitive? to explain everything.  Bleh.

Couples Retreat: go away, Vince Vaughan. Just go away.

Where the Wild Things Are: aha. This could work.

Saw VI: saw Saw. So I’ve seen it. After a while, even extreme Goldbergian splatter becomes boring and repetitive (and please don’t even try to Post-it a plot in there). “Oh, look, her head is trapped… and his arms are tied with… and the key/switch/antidote is… and they have to… bang/splat/temporary relief.”  Come to think of it, it’s exactly like mainstream porn.

Astro Boy: no.

The Stepfather: can see this on LMN any day. No reason to pay for it.

Cirque du… Hey! More Sparkly Vampires: bless their little money-train jumpin’ hearts.

and number ten…

Amelia: about which I can only say, from a glance at the picture and reviews, that hey, Hilary Swank does look a lot like Amelia Earhart, that the gushing press release sounds like the back of one of those “Easy-to-Read” paperback biographies always lying around the corners of seventh-grade classrooms, and that a movie bumped into the PG category for “mild sensuality and smoking” is probably not going to retain my aging interest.

Choices, choices, choices.

Today my Facebook friend Deanna posted a link to this article in the NYT: “Good Dog, Smart Dog,” a look at changing ideas about the cognitive abilities of the canine set, the point being that, hey, they might be smarter than those brainiac science-types thought.  My layperson reaction? “Finally, some scientists who actually live with dogs.”

A beagle I once knew and still love (not a breed that ever makes the “smartest” list, by the way) would purposely sit and stare intently at our French doors, squeak to go outside, let the younger male mutt assert his dominance by rushing out first as the door opened… and then drop to the ground to indicate that she wanted to stay in, thank you. As soon as the door closed, she would hop to her feet, head to the middle of the rug and do the rolling, squirming dance of beagle joy as the mutt stared bleakly inside through the glass, gaslighted yet again into losing possession of the indoor realm.

Do dogs think? Of course they do, about dog things and in dog ways. That beagle changed my ideas of the capabilities of canine manipulation and the effects of sheer doggie force of personality. We developed an entirely new vocabulary to describe the machinations of The Beagle Known as Alice.

Poobutt was the probably the first and most often used word in the beagle lexicon – as anyone with a short-haired dog knows, it’s not difficult to tell when she needs to take a poo. The subtle variations of the term lie in the intonation and context, from a casual,”Hey, does Alice have poobutt?” to a frantic dash to the door accompanied by a wail of,”Pooooooobuttttttttt!“

Next came stealthbeagle, because a dog with a jingling collar who can nevertheless sneak past two adults and a strategically positioned chair on a microscopic apartment balcony and get halfway down two flights of stairs before being noticed obviously has some kind of special mode that renders her silent and invisible. I believe to this day that she held her tags in her mouth to get by us. Stealthbeagle can occur at any time, in any place, and like PMS and bad potato salad, you won’t realize it’s happened until it’s far too late.

Bedtime behavior gave rise to an entirely distinct subset of the beagle lexicon. The Ooze was the inexplicable method by which without ever visibly moving a 25-pound dog could ascend in mere minutes from proper placement at the foot of the bed to an excruciatingly uncomfortable position jabbed into my armpit ; the Wedge was the position which was somehow intrinsic to the maneuver, nose first, front paws tucked, low and streamlined. Pillowsnatcher occurred when (never a morning person) I would blearily open my eyes, expecting to see the husband, and immediately suffer severe cognitive shock when confronted instead by Alice’s big black nose and floppy ears firmly ensconced on his pillow, sometimes with the blanket tucked up around her. If she had said “good morning” in Brian’s voice I wouldn’t have been surprised. Finally, when patience was exhausted and opportunistic deafness made her impervious to “Get DOWN,” the mysterious force of canine physics known as leadbeagle would manifest itself. A pinpoint gravitational force of incalculable strength would suddenly exponentially increase the weight of the perpetrator without increasing her mass, rendering her nearly impossible to dislodge.

And then there was Alice’s determination to rise, shine, poop and EAT no later than five in the morning.  We recalcitrant humans were treated to an interminable chorus of jangling dogtags punctuated with the squeak of “don’t make me crap on the floor” – a bluff, but effective, until one day brilliance struck and we replaced her loose tags with one that slid on. Silently. Haha, dog, we foolishly gloated, and for a few mornings peace reigned until at least six … until with the inevitable shock of the fatuously complacent, we both leaped out of bed one godawful pre-dawn to the WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP of some kind of low-flying aircraft. Named Alice. Who had discovered the sonic potential of helicopter ears, and used it assiduously to the end of her long life.

In the end, the joys of living with a smart, sneaky and yes, funny dog were ample compensation for the irritations. Picture Snoopy’s trademark jig, body whipping into opposite c-curves, ears flying, paws waving, and then imagine it performed on the ground with a beagle tummy bared to the sky – and you have the beagle dance, the ultimate expression of beagle triumph and glee and proof positive, if any were needed, that Charles Schulz lived with and loved some beagles. There was cakeface, an expression of unbelievable do-or-die primitive savagery that I saw only once: as Alice soared through the air, fangs bared, lips drawn back, on a direct collision course with an extremely expensive Italian cappucino cake left over, intact, from a faculty party. I rounded the corner of the living room at the precise moment of flight, a millisecond before she scored a defiant nosehit into the chocolate ganache.

First, though, and always best was the beaglenap: a nap taken on a comfortable couch, preferably mid-day, with a warm and dozy dog curled up behind my knees. Sometimes she’d poke her nose over my hip within stroking reach, then resettle with a delicate grunt of contentment. Sometimes I would wake to a muzzle lightly perched upon my foot as she surveyed the world from her blanketed throne.  She and I were nappers by nature, napping companions as a matter of course, and I will never again feel her wedge her cold nose into the crook of my bare knee, or know her snuffly breath on my leg, or warm my feet in the curve of her body.

I’d give a great deal more than most people might imagine for just one more beaglenap.

One thing I knew about walking pneumonia:

• You can sing it to the tune of “Waltzing Mathilda.” Similarly, “diverticulitis” scans beautifully to “Gary, Indiana” from The Music Man.

Two things I didn’t know about walking pneumonia:

• It is not merely a vernacular reference to an undefined group of diseases; it is in fact a generally accepted name for a specific atypical pneumococcal virus.
• I have it.

Which gives me medically-sanctioned and spousally-enforced time to rest, recover and ponder other things, like: what about all those other folksy disease names? The ones from Chaucer through Shakespeare and well into Wodehouse, a vast array with which I am casually acquainted but not intimately familiar? “Chilblains,” said the husband, and I replied, “Frostbite… maybe? Hmmm.”

So while waiting for yet another infuriatingly disappointing episode of Project Runway, I’m going to play a little game with my own ignorance called “I Do Not Think That Means What I Think It Means.” First I guess, like this:

Ague (me): a fever with chills? The real question here is how I’ve been reading this word for mumblemumble years and still don’t how to pronounce it. Ogg? Weird. Ogg-YEW? Weirder. Ayg with a hard “g” (which is also Texan for “egg” (unless you’re in East Texas, in which case it’s ay-ug))?

Then I look it up.

Ague (reality): a bad fever with chills. Or just a case of the shakes, as with chills. Or malaria, which could include all of the above. Batting a thousand! Pronunciation… oh. Well. Turns out I wasn’t even in the ballpark: it’s from the same French root as “acute” and retained its semi-Francophone identity as AY-gyoo. So I was half-right. Thanks a lot, Guillaume le Frenchie Conquérant with your accent… aigu. Damn. Total butterfly effect moment.

Goiter (me): a growth somewhere about the head or neck, maybe removable, almost certainly containing some sort of alien life form capable of controlling its hapless human host. Possibly pendulous. Never seen one, but have vague memories of a horrific description from my mother of a goiter she saw in her youth. It changed her somehow.

Goiter (reality): an enlarged thyroid gland. What? That’s it? A swollen gland? The sight of a swollen gland scarred my mother for life? Let’s see a pict…

Back from ineffectually scrubbing my eyeballs. I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m sorry…

Moving on.

Wait, one more.

Chilblains (me): cold fingers or toes, maybe mild frostbite? Certainly nothing serious; more along the lines of a quaint Dickensian character introduction, the charming homeless ruffian or the crusty ex-soldier nursing them at a welcome fire as the chapter opens.

Chilblains (reality): Well, what do you know? Inflammation of extremities responding to sudden warming from cold. Pretty close, although unrelated to frostbite, and the charming/crusty ruffian/veteran is actually exacerbating the pain and swelling with that cheery fire, may have a serious underlying circulatory condition and if he keeps up this in-from-the-cold-to-a-hearty-fire crap the swelling could turn into splitting, cracking, seeping, bleeding opportunistic infections.

Picturesque kind of sucks when you’re in it. Take it from an aguey waltzing Mathilda.