I used to go to Sunday school when I was a kid, of course when I was a kid, it’d be a bit creepy to hang out with the kids in Sunday school while their parents were upstairs singing or tithing or sacrificing goats or whatever the hell it is grown-ups do at church. I was pretty fucking good at behaving, or at least looking like I was behaving when someone was watching, but, seeing how I can’t remember committing any Sunday school crimes, the end results of looking like I was behaving was exactly like behaving.
The exposition part of that is long and boring, but, I just want the record to reflect I was a kid once and in Sunday school once, up until I was eight. I continued being a kid for a little while longer, I just stopped going to Sunday school. That’s one of the reasons I’m not sure what it is exactly that grown-ups do at church, though I’ve seen movies and stuff with grown-ups in church, and why would movies lie to me? Grown shriek and stampede when little old ladies become demons and climb around on the ceiling. Sometimes they batten the hatches and shoot at demons. Word of mouth tells me they listen to a guy speak for a while, sing things and pass around a collection plate, then gossip and smile.
Anyhow, like most kids or grown-ups with some curiosity about what the deal is with the bible and shit, I read through the bible and shit and high-lighted stuff that might mean stuff. Even as a kid behaving or looking like I was behaving, I was anti-authority and figured those passages that everyone knew weren’t the sort of thing you needed to study because you could just ask anyone and they’d tell you that sort of stuff.
My favorite of the things I found, and I can’t tell you where in the bible or even the context, if I could I would have lead with that. The quote is … The Fury of his Nostrils were incredible …
The pragmatic part of me figured that was a bad translation. The poetic and trying-to-figure-out-what-the-deal-was-with-religion-and-shit always imagined you were in big trouble when God’s horse’s nose was mad at you. Two other things were and are closely enough associated for me to remember one small line from 48 years ago. Thunder storms and horse Latitudes.
There’s a good old fashioned Michigan Thunderstorm going on outside my window as I type. The biggest difference between a Michigan Thunderstorm and, say, a Missouri thunderstorm, is location. The sky gets dark and angry, the rain is hard and unrelenting, lightening etches itself into the gray marble sky with black back lighting, and the fury of the thunderstorms nostrils are incredible.
I wrote a flash the other day. I liked it. I don’t think I liked it because it was good, it might not even be good at all. I liked it because I was beginning to start suspecting I was out of ideas. I never believe it, but I do go through that. Ideas are more important than the words used to represent them. That’s absolutely true and yet it makes for a lot of bad stories. I don’t know about anybody else, but I rarely read things solely for their importance and I can’t recall ever writing anything solely for its importance. When I’m told I have to read something because it’s important, that Sunday school kid in me comes out. I pretend to acquiesce but do the opposite. I have written important things; court reports, letters to the editor (I never thought it would happen to me, I was delivering these pizzas to a sorority …) Letters of intent, that sort of thing. But if I had sat down with the intent of being important those things would never have gotten written.
I mean shit, I didn’t read psyche textbooks for psyche classes, but one wet spring morning I started reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols because … it was on my nightstand. Ok, that’s a shitty answer, I obviously put it on my nightstand, my point is that I didn’t read it when it was important to a grade and I did read it when it didn’t make no never mind no how.
Fuck, now I forgot where I was going. Big, deep throated, rumbling booms outside my window, like a clam I’m smiling all over. I’m smiling all over like a clam. I don’t know why clams smile or if they do and I’m sure their sense of humor is … clammy. I just mean if you pretend the inside edges of a clam shell are lips, the whole dam clam smiles, is committed to smiling. Hmmmm. I like the sight and sound of a thunderstorm. Like a clam or even a scallop or mussel.
It’s not a good habit, not reading things for importance. All the shit I do that’s either anti-authority or fear of being a sheep (um, acting like one, following the Shepard and other sheep without question. I am not afraid of literally being a sheep or sheep in general being themselves. Shearing a sheep is gross though. They ooze lanolin. It looks like ghost blood and smells like sheep.). About fifty percent of the shit I do to avoid sheepishness is not helpful to my own or anybody else’s enlightened self-interest. Of that fifty percent about twenty five percent teeters on detrimental. Of the fifty percent that could potentially be helpful, one hundred percent is accidental.
I behave often as a grown up and I do helpful shit all the time, but it’s mostly deliberate and I can’t think of a deliberately helpful thing I’ve done that was a reaction to not being sheepish or being pro-authority. Fuck the police; somebody has to. The cop profile already has anger management issues. In the history of mankind I’ve never heard an incident where a person with anger management issues was calmed down by not getting laid. In general, historically, currently and in the future, getting laid, consensually and among adults, usually defuses potentially volatile situations, particularly the potential volatile situation of not getting laid.
This is an election year. There’s enough weird shit this time around that sex has yet to be made an issue, well, not a direct issue, there do seem to be trailer parks full of folks that think Roe V Wade is still being litigated and that they might be winning the trial (of course they don’t know if they are for Roe or Wade but they liked the movie V. For clarity, the movie V is for Vendetta, not the mini-series that had something to do with aliens and blonde hair).
Typically double standards are raised high during an election year. Anyone who is running for office that has ever been laid or gotten high or done anything the voters do daily, god willing and the crick don’t rise, are publically flogged. Simplistic as it sounds, given that narrow criteria, I would much rather that the finger that launches nuclear missiles had recently been inside another consenting adult. I think that’d make that finger less likely to push the doomsday button. Heh, notice how I avoided gender and even proclivity? Yay me! If Hilary is commander and chief I hope she’s getting laid, god knows her husband is. That is a point in their favor to me.
The idea of Trump getting laid makes me reach for tums. Do you think he keeps his hair on? Do you think the market will spike with crotchless pant suits?
I think perhaps I’ve gone far afield from my original intent here. If only I could remember what that was …
One last time
… the fury of his nostrils were incredible.
That ought to do it.
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