Drinking lunch

Another example of me waking up screaming from my own awesomity is I've already lost control of this paragraph. Bother.

Back in retail, with the 30-minute meal-break (as if!), I've not been finishing the conventional PB&J brown-bag - then leaving work ready to eat my own hand! Great start to a stoopit end-of-day, right? The alternative has been, like, scary genius, which is the most-bestest kind.

GLASS JAR with METAL LID (plastic is tired)
palmful of RAW OAT FLAKES
wad of NUT BUTTER
spoon of COCOA (non-dutched)
spoon of CREAMED COCONUT
as much BANANA which can be accommodated
top-off of WHOLE MILK

That's the full cast: the oats need to be soaked in the milk overnight, but besides that I think the rest can safely be abandoned to whim: blackberries, cherries, raisins, apple butter, Christmas candy.... Experiments with proportions results in variations of color and consistency that attracts the attention of coworkers - but no-one dares to get close to it. I've given the day's components several times and there still haven't been any volunteers to run off with it. (Yes, I have to work with fridge-raiders.)

And in ten minutes, I've downed the entire jar and am satisfied. Wow, it really is the little things.

Have I made this point before? Does that matter?

My mother is old plenny-nough to be my grandmother, so plug in generation of your choice:

"Certainly, girls were having babies at thirteen in 'the good old days (when times were bad)', but that was different. People old enough to do adult work were considered adults, and being on Facebook all day actually isn't the same thing as running a working farm. Now get off the phone, do your chores and schoolwork, and go to bed - like I done told you."

!

At the opposite extreme of Extreme Parenting, I was trying to fabricate a human skull out of calico cotton in R&D preparation for making the heads for my art dolls when Ma came in from somewhere mas come from when you've specifically been disinvited. My mother knew better than to ask what I was doing, as the last time it happened I chose not to accept her look of "God, I submit to your will and praise you for being able to make all things new, but seriously - other mothers only have to deal with strippers: was it necessary that I get the mad scientist? Why can't I have a normal gay son like everyone else?"

A hymn for those who would rather stay in bed

Life is holy
Life is simple
Simply by the presence of
The ever-present and living
GOD
Let it be done according to his word
Let it be done
According to his word

Fancy White Trash

Since I'm daily subjected to peer pressure to saddle up on pinterest.com, why not get some bidness on the side? Keep your eyes - and most importantly, your wallet - open!

This radical self-acceptance-thing you're doing? Stop

So I was rehired at the shop. Fourth time - yes, thank you for asking. I noticed that you haven't had fresh drivel in ever so long, and just wanted to show up and say I still don't. That's not really true, but apparently my purpose for the last few months is to stand as silent witness to people getting in the way of their own happiness.

You really don't want to know (but we're completely surrounded, by the way).

The mystery...apparently is some kind of mystery

Being one of those people who are able to understand multiple viewpoints on the same topic (which actually translates as "wishy-washy," "Devil's advocate," and my favorite - "rail-fence Christian"), naturally I have a range of Facebook friends whom I try never intend to introduce to each other. Recently, and spiking at the state-legalization of same-sex marriage in New York, I've had the opportunity to experience others' responses and ponder on ideas and solutions which would be more-condusive to everyone else shutting up and letting me have more screen-time to tell you what's really interesting. I mean, you'd think....

Imagine people in two distinct and opposing groups: the group which remembers marriage is really a promise/agreement motivated by intentionally giving one's love and committment to another as testament to the love and committment God has given freely, and those who think of it as open access to somebody's CD collection, foundation-garment contents, and dental plan.

COMPARE/CONTRAST: marriage is a lifelong testament to an eternal and unvarying God, or marriage is,

well, from the beautifully-frank perspective of a man who has Asperger's:

"[I want to get married so I won't have to cook for myself or masturbate anymore."

When components of these two populations run into each other on my Facebook page entirely by accident and with no prompting from me, invariably the facebookiness itself prevents meaningful exchange of ideas. I don't know if you've ever been subjected to a four-hour texting session (I have an extra one to give you if you've not had the experience), you know chopped sentences produce chopped conversations with chopped meaning.

But wait - I got me a blog!

Many advocates for redefinition of marriage have genuine feelings, desires/motives, and thought-out reasoning. Of those, a portion would describe themselves as deeply religious and committed Christians. When we choose to share facts and feelings, however, everyone is as likely as anyone to garble the two together.

I think this is an important observation. Feel free to do so as well. When told through argument that God wants children to be in a home with a mother and a father, a home godded by a God who considers divorce anathema and fornication and adultery not in the game-plan, what about single-parenthood happening anyway? Essentially, I can only speak for myself - extending the kind offer for you to agree with everything, but still I only speak for myself - I just think we need to be open to considering marriage as not so much a civic/legal idea. The government can not establish a marriage, can not justifiably define it, and can not by any stretch of warm and fuzzy imagination fix it. I've sat in on a televised...conversation...where it was actually said "I wan't to marry so I may then legally access my lover's insurance." But we do live in a world where that sort of thing has to be thought about. We also live in a world where some people consider marriage a Mystery and Sign of Something Really Huge and other's can only wonder "what the fuck was I thinking?" Unfortunately, Christians find themselves in both camps. Possibly, sex-deviants can show up on both sides of the issue as well, but until we use the same definition, we may as well just start hitting each other.

That's why you have me, Dear Reader: a good use for railfence-Christianity is that it's visible evidence that bridging the sacred and profane is possible and a duty - or rather, that the invisible/undeniable world of the One True God exists in tandem with chatshows, comment-boxes, op-ed pages, people who believe Tarot wasn't first just a plain-jane card game (a future post!), White-flight, unreasonable landlords, idiot drivers, American hitchhikers in Europe or Asia finding themselves (completely lost), "spiritual-but-not-religious", members of the "I Love Loosely" fanclub, Big Pharma, Big Farm, addicts, the feeble-minded, pure scum, and yeah, me and you. What is the Church for, if not all these? What is the Church for, if not for people who have no free-kicking idea what's going on? What is the Church for, if not to show the way to The Way itself?

But it's still not about the insurance. Go in peace and practice the real safe sex: get married in the Church and stay faithful until death do you part.

Right to be wrong

Trick questions--just so you know:

• "What are my rights?"


• "What determines if these rights apply to me and/or to a larger group I may or may not be part of?"


• "How are these rights guaranteed?"


• "Are there circumstances where my access to these rights may be changed?"

From good ol' Wikipedia (the article on the United States Declaration of Independence, specifically), comes this-here quote which I think all American English-speakers have heard at least once today: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." I have long-believed only because that sentence was written down after some discussion that it has any validity. Look out the window and tell me it's all good, yo, if you disagree--I love comments!

Recently after receiving a comment offering more information on what "we" deserve--as everyone is entitled to no-fault divorces--and I remembered a conversation I had on a beach with a Southern Baptist youth-minister I was so very much in luv with. Needless to say, he's neatly avoided crossing my path for, like, decades. He made the fascinating blanket statement that (brace yourself!)

There are no such things as "fundamental rights"

I thought the boldface and italics would also be helpful in you noticing the point. You're welcome. "I have a right to sit down after coming home from work in peace and quiet--do something to shut those kids up." Notice that this fails to obviate the need (pardon, I meant to say RIGHT) for children to be with their father, with whom The Office is such an abstraction it isn't even nameable as Abstraction. I could go on, but I'm already satisfied I've made my point. Any assertion of individual right inevitably and invariably bulldozes over everything else.

Early on in my career as Lavender Menace-wannabe Attack-Fag, I played the "What If" with my first you-know-what. The premise: "If I were Supreme Benevolent Dictator, my first edict would be"--and of course, I would command total committment towards all children under the age of ten having 5-7 servings of fresh fruit and vegetables every day. I mean, duh, I am such a giver. He didn't even look at me while he countered with "even if they didn't want to eat them, I suppose" and followed that with "I would make it so that everyone would check to see if there were any toilet paper before they sat down. This may have been indicative of some past difficulty, some Personal Obstacle to Growth, which needed to be exorcised--but only after the requisite trout-boning which is the firm bedrock of all good and healthy relationships between two men who are beginning to realize they really-rilly dislike each other. But I digress!

And to top that, I've lost my own point. I'm frightened; in this time of great darkness, will you hold my hand?

MEANWHILE, people blather on about what they have rights to without bothering to understand that "with great power comes great responsibility". If marriage is really about medical and dental insurance, I'm certainly for it. And again, in the great land of no-fault divorce, why would it matter? One more opportunity for no-reason marriage just isn't relevant. Marry your lap-dog. Marry everyone in your Bunco group. And by all means marry the man who will make all of your weakly-boundaried, poorly-constructed dreams come true before he runs off with some skank who is (no-kidding) a real-live street magician. HOWEVER, if marriage is really about "I've got your back in this crazy bar-room brawl that's Planet Earth" or "together, we can make something way-awesomer than if we worked alone", or even "God loves you so much, that anything short of me totally committing to you for the rest of my life and with all that I have would be an insult unworthy of your attention"--could you finish this paragraph by yourself? I'll owe you one.

In a brave effort towards summing-up, I say that there are plenny-nuff rights that are not being realized (lack of clean water, which is stupid and gross; gross inequality in access to education between sexes, classes, whatever; the ability to make a living for oneself without needing to pay allegiance to some complete stranger's bottom line; the ability of Blacks in America to go to First Baptists and vote Republican...), because you're taking up too much time and effort organizing the kiss-in at Waffle House. And no, I won't expect you to come see me in the ER after I kicked that man-skank in the face because he was making a move on you and was trying to blow me off with "oh, it's just sex, after all"--instead of the other kind.