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 Day I Got Run Over by a Canoe

In the landscape of the Big City, mankind is confronted with a full spectrum of dangers to life and limb. It is not too great an exaggeration to say that here, peril lurks around every corner. Even for such an experienced and skilled Land Pirate as myself, a mere moment’s hesitation could mean disaster.

Why, if time and space but permitted, I could tell you tales the likes of which would leave all you denizens of rural and small town America running for the hills!

For I have seen the sewer rats descend upon the downtown Family Law Center Park after rush hour is over. I’ve seen a man try and drive his car through the wall of an eighth floor parking garage only to fail and leap out into the street to his death. I have even watched – on two separate occasions – as a METRO bus drove into the side of a rail car, knocking the rail car right off of its track.

The horror! The horror!

But there is nothing, nothing in heaven or earth that could have prepared me for what happened at the corner of Main Street and Walker this past Tuesday.

I remember it like it was yesterday…

It was in the early afternoon and I was – as usual – engaged in a most heroic mission, the details of which escape me now. And in the course of this heroic mission, I had the misfortune of coming to that notorious corner whose name shall now live on in infamy.

Main Street and Walker [to be read in menacing voice].

And though the crosswalk light was on – meaning the downtown gods had smiled on me with nine or perhaps even ten full seconds in which to rush across Main before all Hell broke loose again – I found myself unable to get across. For there at the red light, my finely-tuned eyes spied a tiny, tiny passenger vehicle atop which was strapped the most massive canoe ever to curse the streets of downtown Houston.

Not the actual offending canoe.
For demonstrative purposes only. 

Now, I clearly, unquestionably, and most heroically had the right of way, but that tiny car kept inching forward until it had rolled right over the crosswalk and was nearly within the intersection itself! 

I proceeded to take defensive action. This consisted primarily of making ominous faces at the driver and shrugging a lot. But the driver, who was engrossed in doing something-or-other with his phone – googling the location of the nearest lake for his massive canoe, perhaps? – remained blissfully unaware of my annoyed gesticulations.

Obviously, this turn of events would leave your average man, woman, or sexually indeterminate land dweller hopelessly stranded on that corner, maybe even permanently. But the first rule of being a Land Pirate is this: Always have a Plan B.

I had a Plan B.

I edged my way around the offending car, intending to cross the street behind that noxious driver in the 4 or 5 seconds remaining for the crosswalk light. But as I stepped out around the end of the canoe, which stuck at least four feet off the back of the car’s roof, that car – canoe and all – suddenly and unforeseeably lurched backwards!

As well as I can reconstruct the events which followed, I was struck upon the head, either by the tip of the tip of the canoe or the side of the tip of the canoe. As the car roared off to locales unknown, I staggered backwards, tripped over a convenient curb, and lay on my back upon the sidewalk.

Anyway, that’s probably what happened.

The next thing I remember, I heard some clopping sounds and opened my eyes to see the face of a man far, far above me. The face was attached to a body, and the body wore a police uniform, and this whole face/body/uniform amalgamation sat perched upon a titanic horse.

It was probably a Clydesdale, but it might have been one of those giant breeds, long thought to be extinct, which in days of yore stalked the Arabian Peninsula eating stray camels and unwary caravans of travelers.

“Ma’am, are you alright?”  a sound emerging from the face spoke in my general direction. The man’s face, I mean. Not the horse’s.

I found that I was holding the side of my head and crying. Heroically, of course…

I said, “I got hit!”

The man in the uniform looked around him. “Right here? By a car?”

“No, by a canoe!”  I cried.

The man in the uniform began to appear less and less concerned with my situation. “Ma’am, where is this canoe now?”

I rubbed at the side of my head, right at the point of the impact. “I don’t know. It was a hit and run.”

The man in the uniform considered this for a moment. “A hit and run canoe on Main Street?”

“Yes.”  I sniffled. It was true.

The horse took a couple clops backwards, and its rider said, “Ma’am, would you be able to stand up for me?”

Either the horse or its rider, or maybe the horse and its rider had sized me up as a drunk or a homeless person, or maybe a drunken homeless person. But I was not a drunken homeless person, or not this week, anyway. I was a hero on a mission. And so I stood up, just as I had been asked to do.

I still clutched the side of my head a bit, though.

Then the man in the uniform looked me up and he looked me down.  “Ma’am, are you going to need to go to a hospital? Do you want to get checked out?”

No. No, I still had a mission to complete.

So the horse and the man and the uniform all turned and started making their way back down Main Street. But I heard him exclaim as he clopped out of sight, “I’ll be sure to put an APB out for that canoe!”

I don’t think the canoe has caused me any permanent damage. I can still count from one to seventeen, and I still know that Barry Hussein Soetoro is currently occupying the people’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, and I know that someday, somehow, I am going to find that rotten bastard with the canoe.

I am on a new mission now, you see, and I will walk these Big City streets until I can have my revenge.

How hard can it be to find a canoe in downtown Houston? 

Secrets of the Gay Agenda

It has recently been brought to my attention – been brought forcefully, in fact – that the good people of America are fed up to here with the big gee, big ay, Gay Agenda.

I get it, I get it, and I can’t say I blame you. Not one bit. You good people are fed up, yes, fed up to here, and it’s about time, too. Now, the jig is up. It was bound to happen, and I am ready to step forward and to come clean and to admit it all in its entirety, unequivocally and once and for all.

The cynics were right. Of course they were right. Even a fool could have seen it from a mile away: Gay America has an agenda. I have an agenda. This agenda exists and it is clearly-defined, and it is made up entirely of twisted things that the Good Lord never, ever intended – and I know it!

I have always known it.

But now that the proverbial cat is out of the metaphorical bag, there is nothing left for me to do but fess up. Lay out some specifics. Maybe even, in some small way, make amends for my past contributions to this massive worldwide conspiracy and cover-up.

So go get World Net Daily on the phone, hide the children, and gather ‘round, everybody. Here is Katy’s Big Gay Agenda for today, Sunday, March eighteenth, in the year of our Lord, two thousand and twelve.

Item One on my Big Gay Agenda is to get the family up and dressed at a decent hour for breakfast together at West Gray Café. And when I say “breakfast,”  I say that knowing that many of you will naturally take umbrage at my indiscriminate use of the term. What I mean to say, of course, is “Gay Breakfast.”

Now, Gay Breakfast might bear a superficial resemblance to the breakfast you have tried from time to time, but Gay Breakfast is an abomination. Ah, be glad you don’t have to see it. It is not at all what George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Elvis Presley had in mind when they were saving America from the Mexicans.

Why, at one point during Gay Breakfast this morning, I was heard to say the following in a failed stage whisper: “You don’t need to cry about it. You wanted the hash browns, so you’re going to sit there and you’re going to eat the hash browns.”

And also this: “Hey! Leave your sister’s food alone. And don’t kick her under the table.”

Then, having destroyed the underpinnings of traditional Western notions of breakfast, we left the restaurant. And when we’d gone on our merry, er, our gay way back to the house, I suppose they had to go and find a priest, an exorcist, or maybe even a bishop to get that table back into any sort of shape in which another patron would even consider eating off of it.

Predictably, our Gay Breakfast had undermined everyone else’s breakfast… 

Again.

Let me see here… Yes, Item Two on my Big Gay Agenda is the ironing. This involves me pressing a heated electrical appliance down hard upon my clothes and down upon the children’s clothes and even down upon the clothes of my wife, Dana, in order to make wrinkles in the fabric diabolically disappear.

It is the same way they used to do it in Sodom and Gomorrah.

I know what you’re thinking: You don’t mind if I iron – not one bit – but can’t I just iron and be done with it? Do I really have to wear my ironed clothes around like a banner for everyone to see?

This morning, after I had finished with the ironing, I looked at the work I’d done, and I was proud. I considered throwing a Gay Ironing Pride Parade, but unfortunately, I still had a long day of furthering the cause ahead of me. My Gay Agenda was still pretty full.

And so, while Dana prepared some papers of some sort or another for her job tomorrow (in a way that would make Rick Santorum puke!), I moved on to Item Three on my Big Gay Agenda, and that’s the one where I feed the assorted non-human critters who reside within our house. Mostly, this involves dropping crickets down into cages with tarantulas or with a turtle, or maybe even with a pregnant emperor scorpion.

I think it goes without saying that when I feed these critters, I always try and get the public schools to teach your kids – some as young as kindergartners! – that this is an entirely acceptable critter-feeding choice.

And Item Four through Item Eight, well, they’re just as bad or worse. I find myself compelled to skip over them for the time being. Chickening out from some innate sense of guilt. Perhaps self-preservation. Maybe the sudden realization that, were I to lay it out in black and white upon your computer monitors for everyone and their grandmother to see, you would justifiably rise up-up-up and you’d gather round and throw rocks at my head.  

It would be the right thing to do. The moral thing to do. The Christian thing to do. So I can’t begrudge you those feelings.

And when my Gay Agenda is finally done for the day, when I’ve made my little check marks all the way down the page and put the kids to bed, and as I lie before Nickelodeon on the television waiting for Gay Sleep to overtake me, Dana will sometimes walk in and she will say to me, “Hey. You gonna be awake for a while?”

She’ll say, “I am almost finished up with work. I thought that maybe later…”

And me, I’ll mumble something like, “Uh, I’m pretty tired. I think I’m just going to sleep.”

Dana will shrug, and on her way back out of the room, will say, “Okay. If I fall asleep at my desk, try and wake me up before you leave for work, will ya?”

And then I sleep – and sleep comfortably, too! – blissfully ignorant and ignorantly blissful of the fact that I am one day closer to the smiting and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, my just desserts for foisting these atrocities off onto the rest of you.

So there it is, there it was, and I’m sorry. There it is, like you always sort of knew.

This is what you’re up against America! Consider your next move carefully.

Who knows what we’ll come up with next? I mean, the hallway outside the kids’ rooms needs painted.  

(Nothing)

Nothing to say today. Nothing to write.

The piles of books today. The racks upon racks of CDs and DVDs and vinyl records, and so on and so on. An entire internet at my fingertips, chock full of tragedy and outrage, of suffering and hot lesbian sex. I sit dead center in the middle of my room and I am not the least bit interested in any of it.

I am not even bored today.

This is a bit worrisome to me, frankly, but not worrisome enough to raise my blood pressure. Not enough to be a thing. Worrisome, but just a smidgen. A smidgette, even. Or for all the Latinos out there, un smidgito. Smij-ee-toh.

I walk over to the window. Open it. The air outside is precisely the same temperature as the air inside.

Close it.