Emergent Phenomena Exhibiting Novel Regularities

This is not a good place to be creeped out in.

Many people have been creeped out here before me, sure. It’s a cliché. But that does not help when it happens. And it’s happened. Now. To me.

I am all creeped out in New Orleans.

This hotel room is creepy and the lobby is creepy, and I can’t find the man I came looking for. But I can’t get drunk in my room, either. For me that is not an option. For standing with one’s back to the wall – my back – and scanning for something to be creeped out by is no way to get drunk. Not even in New Orleans.

All Sizes Vaguely Disinterested

I was talking to my friend, the Jesuit, when he asked me, “What do you believe?”  Then he took back his flask and he took a long drink.

I said, “Father, some days I believe in nothing; some days I believe in everything.”

My friend, the Jesuit, said, “Me too.”

A Story of Faith

She was always a believer.

A believer in God, I mean. And not just in God as Mystery, or in God as a shared dream or a cosmic game of hide-and-seek with every one of us as its players. Not God as some non-spatial, non-linear connectivity wherein time is curved light or light is frozen time.

No, Dana was always a believer in THE God. THE very left-brained, very male God of Western history. The God who put everything-but-everything that anyone ever needed to know or ever could know about himself down inside the snug confines of a single book. The God who worried a great deal over specific things like where humans stuck their bits and pieces and how many cubits wide a temple ought to be.

Clear-cut. Simple. Well-defined.

Have a Little Faith in Jimmy

Jimmy stands about five foot nothing. I used to stand five foot nothing, too, or so I am told by those who should know. This would have been roundabout fifth grade or maybe sixth.

I grew; Jimmy did not.

I like Jimmy and I like it when he stops by. I like our long talks deep into the night. You see, I do not trust many people, but I trust Jimmy, except when he starts talking belief and talking doubts.

Jimmy says he’s never had doubts – not a one. This makes me suspicious. I have my doubts about Jimmy’s doubts.

Saint Athanasius... On Sainthood

(Translated from the original Syriac manuscript)

Water.

¹The true saint holds on to no desire for hydration.  Although water shall be offered, the true saint goes without, for the Lord satisfies all needs through ambient humidity.

²Blessed be the one who knows this and blessed be the one who lurks silently in the corner of the cage, disinterested, grooming fangs and pedipalps, oblivious to the giant fingertips that shove bottle caps of water up to the door, day after day after day.

³The giant fingertips shall smell of jalapeño peppers, of Sharpie markers, and of sin. The true saint shall not be tempted, for the true saint hath no olfactory sense organs with which to smell. The Lord is great, and provides all that is needed and nothing more.  

The Naked Truth

“And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make clothes for themselves.”      – Genesis 3:7

“God said, ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked?’”   – Genesis 3:11

---------------------------

Is the little church dilapidated because the congregants can’t tell it’s dilapidated? Or is the little church dilapidated because there is just no way to work outdoors under the Houston summer sun while naked?

I Talk to God (and God Talks to Me)

Day 458 of my spiritual and physical ascent of the mountain.

Today was a wonderful day! Today was a fruitful day! I awoke before the sun in the small alcove I have discovered on the sheer north face of the mountain.

I say I “awoke”  but strictly speaking, this is not entirely accurate. I find that in these last days of my ascent, I rarely enter into anything that could be called “sleep”. As I have sublimated my will to the divine will, my state of contemplative prayer has deepened accordingly.

So I don’t really sleep now so much as I enter a deeper level of contemplation.

I eat only whatever grass or other foliage I can find, supplemented by small insects or even an occasional rodent or two. But this far up the mountain, flora and fauna grow scarce.

I drink rainwater; I eat snow. I chant for two hours every day. You should hear my voice: it fills the whole valley, coming back at me multiplied a thousand fold!

I no longer drum for an hour a day. This is because my djembe drum is no more. It was 17 days ago and I lost my footing when I momentarily fell asleep during a climb. Or I should say, rather, that a moment of especially deep contemplative prayer made me less than attentive to the precise location of my appendages. My drum fell down the mountainside. I watched it falling, splintering into its constitutive parts – parts, which, ironically, had all been found on this very mountain.

I have also stopped the twice-daily self-flagellations. I did not want to, but, alas, oxygen deprivation, extreme dehydration, and blood loss are not a good mix.

Words fail me.

Even analogy fails me.

I cannot describe the change in myself.

I feel that my soul, my very esse, is like… a mirror? A light? Bit by bit, I have cleansed it of each spot and of every imperfection. This process feeds upon itself: As I purify myself, the gratuitous grace granted to me by the divine increases exponentially, enabling me to further be cleansed of the darkness and the sins that my time on earth has left upon my soul.

The mountain peak is hidden behind clouds twenty-four hours a day now. But still, the mountain peak beckons to me. I feel drawn to it as though I am nearing home at last.

When I reach that cloud bank – tomorrow or the next day or on the day after that – and when I climb through the clouds to the peak that lies beyond, I know the veil will be lifted. I will gaze upon pure Being, upon the “I Am Who Am,” upon He who is in, with, and under everything that ever was.

Day 463 of my spiritual and physical ascent of the mountain.

The break in my leg yesterday was worse than I first thought.

The bone is coming all of the way through the skin. I wrapped it with my shirt. This means I do not have a shirt to wear anymore. The temperatures at night get below freezing for many hours. In addition, I have no wood for a splint.

My progress has slowed. I keep going up.

After all, it seems unlikely I will ever be able to get back down the mountain.

Day 466 of my spiritual and physical ascent of the mountain.

Today, after more than a year on this mountain, I reached the cloud bank that hid the peak. My lifetime of rigorous spiritual preparation and my months of mountain living had all been leading to this.

I entered unto a darkness that was a lightness that was THE lightness.

But I am not a poet. I cannot communicate the ineffable.

I could not feel my body, but I could sense a great wind, a wind which picked up speed until it sounded as though the world itself were being torn asunder.

And from the darkness that was a lightness that was THE lightness, at last I made out what sounded like words.

And I heard what sounded like this: “I-i-i-i HA-a-a-a-aTES FAGGO-o-o-oTS!”

Now, there is something you should understand before I proceed. Asceticism, it does things to a mind. You start to see things, to hear things that are not really there. After months of this, you almost even get used to it. The world is a giant Rorschach ink blot. Your mind can create words out of things that are not words, but just noise. It tries to make sense of things that defy sense.

Things like, you know, a voice that says, “I hates faggots.”

So I rose to my knees and stared into the cloud. I said, “Lord, I thank thee, for by your grace I have been granted the strength to come so far, to gaze into your divine visage and-”

“I HaTES FAGGoTS!”

The words were remarkably clear this time, leaving little room for misunderstanding or ambiguity.

I paused. I said, “Lord, I do not comprehend. My human ears are simply not equipped to make sense of the divine voice, for-”

“DID I STUTTER? I hate fags!”

“I MADE ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE!”

I winced, for I had always really hated that joke.

I took a deep breath. I refocused. This was the moment I had been waiting for; I could not bear to mess it up simply because of my weakened physical state.

I said, “My God, creator of Heaven and Earth, you who sent your only Son to die for my sins so that I might be redeemed, I have traveled far so that I might ask you this: Is my soul – my subjectiveness – a distinct something, separate and distinct from the eternal, divine essence, or is like… like… like a candle flame, a flame that will be reconnected with the divine fire at the end of my earthly life?”

Then came unto my ears a noise that sort of sounded like, well, to be honest, it sort of sounded like a belch.

“My butt is ineffable, so you can’t see it, but if you could, you’d see this big ‘exit only’ tattoo I got a while back.”

“‘exit only’! get it? hahaha!”

A long pause, and then,“HEY, Yer not a faggot, are you?”

I looked around. I tried to make some sense of the situation. What was happening? Why could my brain not process it?

I said, “Well, Lord, as you in your omniscience are undoubtedly aware, the term ‘faggot’ is typically an epithet directed at effeminate and/or homosexual MEN, and so, as a woman, I-”

“shoot fire in a bucket! You’re a woman? Didn’t I give you any tits?”

I looked around in the haze. There had to be something here to help me get my bearings.

“so you’re a bull dyke, huh? You Got something against dick?”

Ignoring the pain in my leg, I stood.

I turned around. I started walking back through the cloudbank.

“HEY, DEGENERES! WHERE YA GOING? AIN’T I BEING P.C. ENOUGH for you QUEERS?”

Day 1 of my spiritual and physical descent of the mountain.

I’ve heard some good things about the next mountain over from this one.

The Wheel of Dharma is said to be rotating behind the clouds at its peak.

I must prepare myself physically and spiritually for the journey ahead…

The Conversion Perversions

While we were still waking up that morning, inside of that fuzzy haze that exists somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, that’s when she announced she wanted to return to the faith of her youth.

I snickered. I said, “That’s not possible.”

I should not have snickered. And I definitely should not have said, “That’s not possible.”  Not to Dana.

           

I’ll admit that I was off my game. I was still groggy with sleep and it had sure been a rough week at work, what with the long lines for lottery tickets and all. Any other time, I suppose I would have been quietly supportive, or else maybe I’d have pointed out all of the perfectly respectable gay-friendly churches with which we share a zip code. What about Bering Memorial? What about Resurrection MCC? Anything but THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

But for whatever reason, I did not do any of that. Instead, I snickered and then I said, “That’s not possible.”  Or maybe it was even “That’s not possible, dear,”  which is just as bad or a great deal worse.

Dana sat up and began pulling her hair back into a ponytail. This was always a bad sign. She said, “Don’t give me that! I could be a murderer and be accepted back into the Church.”

And me, I pulled the sheet up over my head so as not to face the situation or the day. From beneath the covers’ muffle and glow, I said, “Murderer. Meaning ‘one who has murdered’.”

I said, “That is an altogether different beast from ‘one who is currently murdering and is planning to remain within a murderous lifestyle for the foreseeable future’.”

Dana narrowed her eyes. She chewed at her bottom lip. She stared straight ahead of her. Tick tick tick, and her mind was moving fast now.

Tick tick tick, and finally, “Okay. Okay, but what if-”

I snapped the sheet down off my head. I said, “No-o-o-o-o. Just… no.”

I said, “You are not going to be able to distinguish, to cross-examine, or to loophole your way around this one, Counselor. You are talking about THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. Aim somewhere else.”

Then I said, “Aim anywhere else.”

This was followed by several more minutes of Dana chewing her bottom lip and staring straight ahead and tick tick tick. And I’d almost sunk back into my fuzzy haze when there was a “Hmmph!”  and Dana bolted suddenly from the bed.

“I am getting the kids dressed and I’m taking them to Mass!”  she announced as she marched from the room in her boxers.

What a lezbo!

*           *           *

In my experience – as admittedly limited as that experience may be – there are those people in this world who will say to you that “Everything happens for a reason,”  and then there are those who will not.

Those people who believe that everything happens for a reason, well, they have a particular frame of mind. They have a supernatural bent. And since their minds work in that way, then somewhere, somehow, that supernatural bent is going to break out and make itself known.

Oh, it might be something as simple as not telling anyone what they wish for when they’re blowing out their birthday candles. Or maybe, you know, maybe they’ll wear crystals or magnets up against their skin, around their neck or around their wrists.

Or maybe they will find a benevolent and intelligent connecting consciousness underlying every single thing in the Universe.

Will not be mentioned.
It will be like it never happened.

Now, I do not – I cannot! – believe that there is a larger master plan behind why things happen as they happen. But Dana does, and I do love her for it, though it means there is a bright line or a gulf or a chasm across which neither of us can pass to reach the other.

So if Dana seeks to express her sense of wonder and her sense of awe about this life through the lens of the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, then I will support her in that decision. I will support her and I will not mention the Crusades or the Inquisition or the Concordat with the Nazis. The child molestation cover-ups or the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Or the Syllabus of Errors. Or Galileo or Joan of Arc or the papal condemnation of “Americanism”.

Or… Well, you get the picture. I will not mention any of that.

*           *           *

The Church returned my family to me several hours later.

The kids looked downright catatonic.

I said, “Aren’t you sorry that you chose Palm Sunday to start going to Mass?”  I said this because Palm Sunday Mass is the longest Mass of the year.

Then Dana, she kind of shook her head absentmindedly and sat down across from me, still staring into space like she’d done that morning. And I’ll admit I got a little worried for a moment, afraid she was going to start drooling right there on the spot. Afraid that maybe they’d given her a lobotomy or done an exorcism to cure the gay right out of her.

Finally, she said, “No. I’m going to try this.”

She said, “Katy, I am going to talk to the priest and I’m not going to approach it like a lawyer, and I’m just going to… see where it leads to.”

And what in the hell could I say to that?

I got up and I walked over and I sat down next to her. I nodded my head slowly. I said, “Okay.”

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

This could be the beginning of a great adventure.

The Gospel of Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money

Today we will talk about a miracle happening right beneath our noses.

We have a scorpion who lives in our house. She is an emperor scorpion, and this means she is not at all like those pitiful, flat little things we sometimes see cowering about under the rosebushes at dusk.

When compared to the emperor scorpion, those “scorpions”  are not even deserving of the name. We place them between quotation marks when we write of them, which is almost never. We place them between quotation marks because we do not want them making the other scorpions look bad… Fragile... Wimpy… Less than.

The emperor scorpion is none of those things.

So there is this emperor scorpion and she lives in our house, beneath a chunk of driftwood inside of a glass aquarium. The name of this scorpion is Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money.

The kids call her by the more school-friendly name, LAN B-BAM.

Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money is everything we could ever hope for in an emperor scorpion roommate. She is quiet. Keeps to herself. She does not demand to be walked or petted or held. She has never asked us for a new bicycle or for swim lessons or that we run to the store for a loaf of bread right before bedtime.

You see, that’s just not how Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money rolls.

Instead, she mostly hangs out beneath her piece of driftwood, thinking about whatever it is that an emperor scorpion thinks about, until such time as we drop a live cricket (or maybe two live crickets!) into the aquarium with her. It is only then that she announces her presence to the world by waving her large dark claws out from under her chunk of driftwood. It is only then that she charges out in all her armored splendor to chase down an unwary cricket.

Sometimes, there are as many as half a dozen school-age humans huddled around her aquarium when she does this. All the tiny humans, they squeal in delight and horror as Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money makes her brief appearance.

“Run, Cricket, run!” some of the children shriek. These children we call naïve optimists and dreamers.

“Here comes LAN B-BAM! Get ‘em, LAN B-BAM! Go!” other children shout. These children we call realists.

In the struggle between emperor scorpion and cricket, emperor scorpion wins every time. That is how Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money rolls.

*           *           *

Recently, we noticed some changes in Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money.

Her armor was not fitting as well as it used to fit. In fact, where the plates of her mighty armored suit were once snug and form-fitting, now we could see layers of flab hanging out. Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money had gone soft.

How humiliating!

This is not a surprising phenomenon in our house, for everyone tends to grow noticeably more rotund once they begin residing with us. But our fat cat is not an emperor cat. Our fat cat does not have a suit of mighty armor. Her name is nothing like Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money.

But when we had done all that we could do – feeding the scorpion fewer crickets, making her run little laps around the bathtub three times a week – we found the emperor scorpion even fatter than when we’d begun.

We required help. We posted photos of her on the interwebs, on a forum where people post such things. And the response, it was immediate and it was overwhelming: “That scorpion is pregnant.”

Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money was pregnant!

But this could not be. At first, we all felt a little betrayed. Had Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money been sneaking around on us? Had she been slumming it with those pitiful, flat little “scorpions”that we sometimes see cowering about under the rosebushes?

We went back to the forum and we asked, for by now, it seemed that the forum knew all. And the response, again it was immediate and again it was overwhelming: “Some scorpions can get pregnant multiple times over multiple years from a single coupling.”

And then, this: “Some arachnids are capable of parthenogenesis, giving birth without ever mating at all.”

*           *           *

It was a miracle. We had been chosen. We were a part of God’s plan. Our humble home would serve – it will serve! – as the holy site wherein the Lord again takes flesh unto His creation – this time as a scorpion (or, more likely, scorpions).

We fell onto our knees:

Hail Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money, full of grace

The Lord is with thee

Blessed art thou among scorpions

And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, [name/s yet to be determined].

Holy Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money, mother of god[s?]

Pray for us sinners

Now and at the hour of our death

Amen.

And now we wait, and now we try to prepare, but how is it possible to really prepare for such an event as this?

When the Lord(s) come(s) again in glory, will it signal the rising of the universal New Jerusalem foretold in John’s Apocalypse? Is this “merely” a New Testament reboot of sorts wherein the scorpions are the Incarnate Word?

Must these baby scorpions die for our sins? How would we ever break that to the children?

*           *           *

We have a scorpion who lives in our house. She is an emperor scorpion, forever Virgin, and all the angels and saints sing her praises. And all of us will sing her praises, too, if we know what is good for us.

For the time grows short, and this generation will not pass away until great events have taken place.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. Life Ain’t Nuthin’ But Bitches & Money is eating for between five and fifteen, and our little unborn Christs are hungry for crickets.

A Warning for Young People

October 6, 1992…

Katy, it’s me. It’s only me. Katy? Set down your toy, Katy. Set down your toy and come over here for a moment. There is something your mother and I have been wanting to discuss with you.

Katy dear, now… No, set down your… your- bloody fucking hell, Nancy, where in the blazes did the child find a crossbow? A… Katy, set down the, the crossbow, and sit down right here between your mother and me. Leave the crossbow there for now.

Now, Katy, you are getting to be a big girl now. You are nearly seven years old, and that is getting to be a very big girl indeed now. And when other people begin to notice that you are getting to be a big girl, other people are going to begin offering you things now. They are going to begin offering you things and your mother and I agree that you are old enough that you need to – indeed, you really must – be made aware of what could happen to you if you accept the things that they will be offering to you.

We think you are getting old enough that it is important that you know…