Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Happy Accession Day, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Ireland, and France! I’d trade every so-called “man” in Congress today for you at your worst.

My loving people,

We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you in the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.

- The Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, 1588

I’d a damn sight rather have that than a fucking “State of the Union” any Goddamn day of the week. Compare that to:

“We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems.”

- James Earl Carter, peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia’s inaugural address.

I think we found where the heart and stomach of a weak and feeble woman wound up.

Oh, Lizzie. We’ll always have work for you if you decide to come back.

You know what I hate? Of course you do, if you read this blog. But you know what I’m gonna articulate my hatred of?

Facebook.

There is nothing good about it. For example:

- For a long time, I had a fake name on my facebook profile: Ferdinand Maximillian Branganza-Hohenzollern. At least three times, a stranger either tried to befriend me to ask if that was my real name, or accuse me of having made it up. These people thought it was their business.

- Because the Hohenzollerns ruled Prussia and later the German Empire, and the Branganzas ruled Portugal, two extremely minor royals friended me, “because we were family.” So I got see a lot of drunk college pictures of Leka II, Crown Prince (in pretence) of Albania, and some random anglicized Habsburg cadet who lives in Miami and is a TV commercial actor. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

- You know how sometimes, you’ll be making out with a guy at a party, and some girl we went to high schol with several years ago will interrupt you to talk about something boring? And you know how she’ll later figure out, somehow, your fake facebook name and friend you, twice, based on the fact that she annoyed you briefly at a party some months ago? What kind of mind thinks that “relationship” should be preserved?

- “Here is the top music in the Tulane network:
1. Jack Johnson
2. James Blunt
3. Pussycat Dolls
4. High School Musical 2 Soundtrack
5. A broken white noise machine that emits a piercing whistle”
Why should I want to know this? Information like this depresses me.

- There are people dumb enough to give Facebook their credit card details, so that they can pay Facebook to put a small picture of a Pina Colada on someone else’s page.

- “You have been invited to become a unicorn mermaid ballerina princess ninja zombie vampire pirate mummy football hooligan eel!” If I wanted to pretend to be a mythical creature, I’d change my name to MistWolf NightRunner and hang out in my mom’s houing project playing D&D with the developmentally disabled. But I don’t, so I won’t, okay?

- Even I think it’s sketchy when people try to get laid from Facebook. However, I find it much more disturbing when people try to make friend on Facebook. And I find it incredibly disturbing when a stranger friends you, “pokes” you a lot, and then drunkenly declares love. Also alarming is the idea that Facebook interaction constitutes a valid relationship, to wit: This guy pulled the “I’ll call you, really, but I’m not gonna” thing, which is fine. It happens. I have done it. But then let’s leave it at that. Let’s not pull a snub in real life but then “poke” someone on Facebook and invite him to lame-ass groups about how you wish you were a viscount.

- Just because we went to the same high school doesn’t mean I care if you live or die. People I never once hung out with in high school would friend me, and I didn’t understand that. There was nothing to preserve or maintain, but because they remembered me, kind of, we were friends?

- No one should be allowed to say what their politics or religious views are in an open space, because they will say dumb shit.

- Ditto sexuality.

- Ditto favorite music, favorite quotes, favorite food, favorite movies, goals, aspirations, fears and joys.

In short, Facebook eventually became a near occasion of sin. I knew, if I looked at it, that it would just turn into a Two Minutes’ Hate, so I got rid of it. What pissed me off is that I couldn’t just do it; there were people I actually liked that I only had touch with through facebook, so I had to nag them to give me their real emails before I could erase it. And erase it I did, to bask in the glow of never, ever again having to read that “Jessalyn Katzenberg is EEEEE!!!! soexxxited 2 b going home.”

Jessalyn Katzenberg
Anthropology 101
Professor Schmidt
10/29/07

The Kanak people of New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands carve traditional

Mrs Jessalyn Gylenhall
Mrs Jessalyn Gillenhalle
Mrs Jessalyn Gilenhaalle
Mrs Jessalyn Gyllenhall
Mrs Jessalyn Gillennhalle
Mrs Jessalyn Ledger

Halloween Costume ideas:

a slutty nurse
a slutty secretary
a slutty Baruch Goldstein
a slutty whore
a slutty angel
a slutty Bea Arthur
a slutty Tori Amos
a slutty Commonwealth of Nations
a slutty Kanak native
a slutty cagou
a slutty French colonist
a slutty anthropologist
a slutty Cardinal Richelieu
a slutty Papal states
a slutty Loyalty Island
a slutty Wailing Wall
a slutty Land of Zion
a slutty rebbetzin
a slutty diesel dyke
*a slutty Chi Omega* <- THIS ONE!

genealogy and tribal identifiers recorded in carvings.

I consider myself a rationalist.

God plays a limited role in my affairs, except when we hold our occasional powwows, which tend commence at around hour 40 of wakefulness. I wear a hamsa, but less to ward off the evil eye and more to bestow ethnic pride on my chest hair like an airbrushed Virgin Mary on a hydraulic ‘64 Impala. I knock other people, not wood. I find spitting distasteful under any circumstance, and combing it with the nonsense syllable “tfu” probably carries the death penalty in those small, economically overachieving Asian nations where failure to keep one’s anus tightly clenched results in an immediate visit from a surprisingly diffident unit of brownshirts.

But despite all that, I remain firmly convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the flesh-eating dead descend upon our cities and chew up thousands of years of human civilization until it bursts from their grossly distended abdomens. I use garlic as a seasoning, not a deterrent, and even if I had a gun, it would be empty of silver bullets - but I have prepared multiple contingency plans of action for the inevitable moment the ghouls’ moans reach my window (remember: if your home lacks any implements which can swiftly destroy a brain, you may as well begin to accustom yourself to the taste of human flesh now).

Optimism may be a luxury in the face of undead hordes, but I allow myself enough to hope that when the zombies arise - and they will arise - they remain slow of both motion and wit à la Dawn of the Dead, not athletic like 28 Days Later, not shambling proof of extremely fucking punctuated equilibrium à la the execrable Land of the Dead, and not possessed of an insatiable taste for poofy-haired, heavily-armed cheerleaders as in Night of the Comet.

But the ever-growing library of zombie movies and agreed-upon meeting points with similarly farsighted compatriots in the event of an outbreak of the living dead has begun to have a profound effect on the workings of my subconscious. I dream intensely and incessantly, and zombies have begun to converge on my somnolent mind as if it were the attractive but loose blond who receives a bloody comeuppance for baring her tits about an hour into every traditional zombie flick. My dreams not only feature zombies, they feature cinematic structure - they increasingly start out by introducing characters and building suspense before the first rotting hand grips the first unfortunate ankle.

I can only assume this means that locked somewhere deep in my psyche is the definitive zombie movie, a Citizen Kane where Orson Welles rips out Dorothy Comingore’s vocal cords instead of inflicting them upon an opera house, a Seven Samurai where seven ronin protect a village from the undead hordes, a Godfather where cannoli is eschewed for cannibalism. I reckon the movie - I’ll call it The Shawshank Reanimation for now - will continue to be revealed in prophetic bits and pieces snatched from dreams until I finally wake up one morning and devote my life, with epic singularity of purpose, to the creation of the cinematic pinnacle of the genre, a movie that makes Night of the Living Dead look like Saturday Night Live.

I just hope I do it before the dead arise.

And they will arise.

—–

This post brought to you by:
Fela Kuti and Afrika 70 - Zombie

I haven’t put much about my personal life on this blog, partly out of decorum and tact, but mostly because I want to save some salacious stuff for Sweeps Week in case we get nominated for a blog award. (NB, I wrote this post about a week before we actually did, so brace yourself for some tawdry shit. We must live up to our Mature Content - Not Family Oriented caveat, especially since we were the only nominees so honored.) However, I did something incredibly stupid recently, and I want to appeal you, dear readers (all ten!) for help.

I went out with someone despite the presence of a DealBreaker.

You know what I mean. We all have DealBreakers - the attributes someone must not possess if we are to pursue them. They’re different for everyone, but everyone knows, or comes to know, the telltale warning signs of a Bad Idea. Just as Nature paints poisonous animals red, she makes undesirable romantic partners carry The Da Vinci Code. With this in mind, I am going to list my DealBreakers here, and if you see me making excuses for going after one of The Tainted, wrestle me to the ground and talk sense into me. If I have to be killed, so be it. Better dead than the alternatives:

Chris’s DealBreakers:

A love of:
- Evanescence, Linkin Park, or any other band “that’s so honest!”
- The primly self-condemning poetry of Arthur Rimbaud*
- “The common people”

Possession of:
- Any Che Guevara paraphernalia whatsoever
- A marijuana-themed T-shirt, especially one featuring a stoned grinning mushroom, cannabis leaf, or Jamaican
- A small vestigial tail

They Must Never Say:
- “Meat/fur/leather is murder!”
- “…noble struggle of Palestine…”
- “I don’t drink.”
- “I’m a ‘recovering Catholic.’”
- “Make love to me.”
- “I don’t particularly care for Boney M.”

They Must Not Believe In:
- Communism
- Harry Potter
- Predestination

*This is the one I ignored, but in my defense he had a Getz/Gilberto album.

There are more, but imagining an Evanescence-loving Che-embracing “muggle” touching me has left me too nauseated to continue. I’m going to go eat my sardines and fantasize about Mikeleh’s and my upcoming wedding. Now that Disneyland apparently allows The Gays to use their “Fantsy Wedding” facilites, we may be going to Florida. The thought of a somewhat-sham wedding to my best friend conducted by Ursula the octopus-drag queen and ushered by Disney workers who have just been through “diversity sensitivity” training is too fascinating a horror to be written off just yet. Imagine Mickey Mouse leading a toast about how wonderful and beautiful inter-religious gay marriages are.

Now imagine Mikeleh and me shouting foul, drunken abuse at him.

It’s a match made in heaven, if galvanized in the gutter.

Somehow, probably because by his own telling he was raised in a Charedi box, my friend Meier has lived 21 years and never seen the Star Wars trilogy. So we’ve rented it, prepared not one, but two bags of popcorn, cleared the detritus off the butt-dents in the couch to prepare for an optimal slouching experience, and thrown on PJs, slippers and blankets - and now Meier is ready to discover for the very first time that that is not, in fact, a moon, it’s a space station, and that one should always let the Wookiee win.

Remember how every teacher you had would impart that tidbit? Not “Native American languages are on of the few examples of polysynthetic syntax in the world, along with some native Australian languages.” Not “Let’s consider what it would have been like to live in a society with different ideas about the nature of property than our own.” Not even “Native Americans have longer penises that any other ethnic group.” (This last is apparently true.) No, just “Indians called corn maize!” Hooray! One word, in one of many, many languages, has survived! A culture has been saved!

This is a feeble introduction to a post I probably ought to apologize for.

Anna Nicole Smith continues her Fruma Sarah-like odyssey to stir up shit from beyond the Styx.

AN INDIAN LOVE CHILD?! FUCK YES! I cannot express how giddy I am about this. Seriously, “as a historian,” this shit is awesome and trumps all those feeble Tudor succession crises. Everything that happens in this story - ev-a-ry-thing - has just added to my perverse delight. She flees to the Bahamas to whelp! Her son dies, mysteriously, of a fatal combination of methadone, ennui, and having more money than sense! Then she abruptly dies, of natural causes that are variously held to be methadone, pneumonia, Femi-Slim (or whatever) overdose, alligator attack, or some combination thereof! Her infant daughter inherits the moon! Her infant daughter has four potential fathers - including Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband, who judging by the last name may be distantly related to Catherine the Great! Her corpse is the center of a legal battle!

And now. Oh, and now. She has, according to the Red Man’s Jared Leto who claims to be the father, a half-Indian love child - the fruit of an illicit and race-hysterical affair. I CAN BARELY STAND IT. I feel like I should talk about the taboo against intercourse between a non-white man and a white woman. I ought to make some intelligent comment about media saturation in modern culture. I should at least make a tit joke.

But… she referred to herself as his “squaw!” Squaw! That’s probably not even a word! She referred to his penis as “big wampum!” That doesn’t even come close to making sense - I’ve certainly never, during the Act of
Love, advised anyone to do anything to my “token of an intermediate economical stage between barter and a cash-based system.” When he hid with the child at the reservation, she called him an Indian giver! Yes, she fucking did! Even her alleged papoose-daddy gets in on the act, referring to Smith’s hunger to be hunted and gathered by someone who knows how as “scarlet fever.” Can you even believe it?

Here’s the original Phoenix New Times article, if you can stand it. I… I have to lie down.

Unrelated Introductory Note: As happens every damn day, the internet cafe sound system started playing James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” so I had to go back into Mikeleh’s old music journalism posts and listen to “Some Unholy War” and “Ha-Perach be’Gani” until it was over. I hate that song so much it amazes me. I’ve long been a foe of The Guy Who Brings His Guitar, and James Blunt is their king. Don’t you hate The Guy Who Brings His Guitar? I spend time with other people so I can talk to someone other than Mikeleh, the Lord, or my invisible friend Captain Pip. I do not want my basic times of friends interrupted by having to conceal my rage at being interrupted by random snatches of “White Wedding,” “Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and, God forbid, that old Semisonic song about a bar closing. Furthermore, any woman who would inspire a drecksterpiece as astoundingly, artery-cloggingly, doubt-in-the-existence-of-good-in-heaven-or-on-Earth-producingly bad as “You’re Beautiful” is not beautiful. I bet she has a cast in one eye and laughs like a tern being neutered.

The Actual Post: I grew up on Nick at Nite, and it has had a profound effect on who I am. Let me clarify: Nick at Nite when it actually showed old shows from the fifties and sixties, not the refuge of last week it has become. “Cheers” is not old enough to be classic TV. “Full House” is not good enough to be classic TV. I cut my teeth on “Bewitched,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “Get Smart,” “Dragnet,” and the best television show ever (don’t even think of saying “Seinfeld,”) “I Love Lucy.” This shows imparted to me deep and uncompromising ideas about how life ought to be lived:

-Regardless of one’s private life, certain standards should be observed in public. Even if you keep a woman in a harem costume who calls you “Master” in the house, for form’s sake, you should not allow this to become common knowledge. If she must appear outside of the house, “mod” dresses should be provided.

-Honesty is to be avoided in favor of wacky schemes hatched with a consistently reluctant best friend.

-Acrimonious marriages are hilarious.

-A woman’s role is to care for the home, and to ease her family’s life through the use of magic.

-Communists are foolish, and easily outwitted. Like zombies, they are only a threat when they appear in large numbers.

-At the end of the day, more often than not, one ought to have learned a Valuable Lesson.

and so forth. I kind of wish women still looked like Barbaras Feldon and Eden - they were both lovely and desirable without looking like irradiated, malarial prostitutes.

Any, my point, if I can ever corkscrew my way back to it, is that television, as far as I am concerned, is officially over. The only bright spot in a sea of “Survivor: Palau Was an American Territory Until 1994 So We’re Not Actually That X-treem and Anyway, the Support Crew Is Camped by the Airstrip Ten Yards Away” and “Rich People Pretending to Churn Butter!” has been the gleefully vapid Tori Spelling vehicle “So noTorious,” which apparently only I had the requisite blend of trashiness, sarcasm, misanthropy and faggishness to watch. It was grim, it was bleak, it was “Grey’s Anatomy,” and then…

this.

Oh yes. They’re making the briefly amusing, for a commercial, but now beaten-to-death-like-an-educated-woman-in-Jericho Geico Caveman commercials into a sitcom.

How? How could you possibly do that? Is it going to crib from “Three’s Company,” only instead of having to pretend to be gay, Jack Tripper has to pretend not to fear the sun? A nice “All in the Family” recap, only instead of coloreds moving into the neighborhood, it’s sabre-toothed cats lowering the property values? Or just “Roseanne,” which would require few changes? Are they honestly going to have a show about cavemen selling insurance? Is Tara Reid going to guest star as a love interest, and are we going to have a cringeworthy “afterglow” scene of her and one of the cavemen a-tangled in the sheets after a night of hunting and gathering passion?

“Hey, Og, what are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m placing my hand on the wall and blowing pigment onto it in order to create an outline of my hand that will evince that I was once here. It’s an early example not only of art, but of history, narrative, and the idea of ownership.”
“…Fag.”

I’ll bet you anything that they find a way to make a fart joke out of the Lascaux cave paintings.

The psychologists, an ever-growing group of overpaid people who hover just above sarcastic, buzzing (buzzed?) gadflies on the “usefulness” scale, have struck again. They’ve done what they do best: shone a handsomely-funded spotlight on a social issue already as well-illuminated as the planet Mercury. Let’s discover together:

Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

“We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. “Kids are self-centered enough already.”

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

Professor Jean Twenge, come over here right now and let me pleasure you. I don’t care that you’re a psychologist and doubtless dry like sandpaper down there. I’ll make you twenge like a 15-year-old girl whose boyfriend has just discovered the clitoris. I owe it to you, for you have shown me my calling.

You’re right, Professor Jean Twenge, we need to stop endlessly repeating “You’re special.” In fact, the scourge of unqualified specialness already gone so far that we must desperately attempt to shore up the bulkheads against a flood of boundless self-love by employing large-scale, persistent degradation. Especially when they’re young. And I am just the man for the job. Put me in America’s kindergartens - I’ll nip this in the bud!

“Mommy says I’m special!”
“Well, Billy, the next time Mommy tells you that, watch her and see if she goes into the den and drinks from the bottle of ‘mommy’s special juice.’ And then ask her if she loves ‘post-partum depression.’ It’s a grown-up way of saying ‘candy’!”

“I heard that everybody is beautiful on the inside!”
“That’s just what people tell themselves to stave off suicide, honey.”

“My daddy said I can be anything I want to be!”
“Well, sometimes daddies fudge a little…and judging from your last spelling test and penmanship handbook, I’d say daddy fudged a lot. Tell me, sweetie, what color is the collar on this Raggedy Andy doll?”
“Ooh! Ooh! I know! Blue!”
“Correct! Get to used it, because you’ll be seeing it on all the men in your future…”

But in all seriousness, Professor Jean Twenge, you’re giving narcissism a bad rap. The problem is not narcissism itself, it’s simply that most narcissists themselves are completely unworthy of the abundant love they bestow upon themselves. Most narcissists are just having pity sex with their personalities, personalities which are fundamentally undeserving of attention.

But there’s a way to solve this problem, Professor Jean Twenge. Take it from a narcissist like me. The best way to keep narcissism from destroying the society we all so dearly love is to temper it with an equal dose of self-loathing. To illustrate with an example that is absolutely in no way at all derived from my own personal life: the ideal is for the narcissist to look at the face in the mirror and be paralyzed by his conflicting urges to smash it and furiously make out with it. We cannot wipe out narcissism - because let’s face it, Jean, in certain cases narcissism is entirely justified - but we can cripple it. America - nay, the world - is counting on us.

Why has the astoundingly uninteresting life and death of Anna Nicole Smith been the fucking top story on CNN for days? Really, I thought America had moved past its “buxom blonde dead in mysterious circumstances” headline obsession ’round about, oh, World War fucking II. What’s the headline going to be tomorrow? “Made Moll Takes a Powder in the Great Gin Mill in the Sky - Was it the Shine or the Hop?” “Pro Skirt’s Patsy Behind the 8-Ball in Court - Will He Get a Leaf of Her Lettuce?” Are we going to start having to end our sentences in “see”? Will our streets ever be safe from Capone and his trouble boys? SHOULD I BREAK OUT MY FUCKING SUSPENDERS?

Excuse me, I need to go drown a pint of giggle juice and maybe have a little tea.

I’m sure many of you are expecting one or both of us to come out with a long, thoughtful post detailing experiences shared and lessons learned during the heady days of Kosher Eucharist Does Israel 2007, but honestly, a lot of it is hazy. Come to think of it, that actually brings me to a lesson learned: separately, Chris and I may be mildly functional members of wider society, but together, we are bitter, misanthrophic alcoholics. Except we also giggle a lot.

I bet Hemingway giggled more than he let on.

But really, I can’t think of much beyond that. So as a shorthand method of helping our readership understand the nature of the time we spent together in Israel, I present a complete list of the movies we downloaded and watched over the course of those three weeks, usually while staggeringly intoxicated:

- Lady and the Tramp
- The Jungle Book
- The Lion King
- Sleeping Beauty
- The Land Before Time (which, by the way, is HEARTBREAKING. Seriously, revisit it. How did we watch that as kids so often and not wind up horribly socially maladjus…oh no, I think we’ve just achieved a breakthrough here.)
- Cinderella
- 101 Dalmatians
- Robin Hood
- Aladdin
- Mulan
- Zombie Flesh Eaters

Doesn’t that really say it all?

Oh, okay, one more lesson learned. Gin + Schweppes Bitter Lemon? Goodbye gin & tonic, hello handy surrogate for the love of a woman.

Did anyone else watch Monstervision? Has anyone else even heard of it?

When I was in middle school, TNT had this great show called Monstervison. It was the same idea as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, in that a host did little interstitial spots during a (usually awful) horror movie. Instead of a busty goth chick, Mostervision had Joe Bob Briggs, a good old boy who would sit out in a lawn chair in front of his trailer with a beer and a BugZapper to discuss the movies. It was the highlight of my Awkward Years, and I was distraught when it lost its regular Saturday late-night slot. Anyway, Joe Bob’s signature “thing” was the Drive-In Totals. He would tabulate the high points of the movie and present them in table format, using coutable objects and the suffix -fu (as in kung). For example, Drive-In Totals for Psycho might be:

2 dead bodies
0 breasts
2 iconic horror-film images
Janet Leigh fu, transvestite fu, skeleton fu, Oedipal fu. Joe Bob says, “Check it out.”

So anyway, since I’ll be done with college in a few hours (assuming I pass this class I did almost no work for,) I thought I’d do Drive-In Totals for my college career.

7 1/2 semesters of college

120 hours

6 Jewish studies hours (legitimizing my presence on this blog)

40,000 dollars of debt

2 escapes from hurricanes

2 virginities lost

11 illicit sustances experimented with

7 weeks of intensive independent study of the English Reformation

2 former Presidents Mike and I would imagine were in an unhealthy sexual relationship and improvise dialogues between

30 minutes spent doing a gleeful jig upon hearing of Arafat’s death

3 Mardis Gras

2 failed attempts to go to Israel

97 electoral votes (it will make sense after the next comic)

2 pinky toes I seriously injured in separate incidents

17 consecutive episodes of Family Guy Mike and I watched on Thanksgiving 2004

6 nights I slept in my freshman year roommate’s bed while he was out of town and I had mono

0 arrests

1 failed class (Creative Writing)

2 potato-flake-and-flour angels made on the floor of the kitchen

5 christmas cards my mom sent me on the same day

Crazy Broad fu, Zionism fu, Bob Dylan’s pool fu, Emigration fu, catastrophic flood fu, martial law fu, trailer fu, pork rind fu, Jew fu. Chris says “I got some good stories and idiosyncratic beliefs, but it was ultimately not worth the time, money and effort.”

BUT IT’S OVER! (after the extreme anticlimax of “printing stuff and turning it in and then packing the car”)

People are still displaced and destitute after 2005’s recordbreaking hurricane season. Sderot, in southern Israel, is bombed almost daily by terrorists. Armies are raping their way through the Sudan, and are making attempts to spread the violence into Chad. There are countries in sub-Saharan Africa where over a third of the population has contracted HIV. North Korea has threatened to turn Seoul into a sea of fire. Iran wants to kill anyone, everyone, Jews preferred, but anything that bleeds will do. Governments in the South Pacific are collapsing. Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air.

And there are still people who think that the most pressing issue facing Americans and the world today is the fur industry.

I love animals. A lot. More than people, by far. I would gladly trade much of the world’s population for two good, fat pugs. Cruelty to animals genuinely revolts me. But I have to say this: there’s nothing inherently wrong with eating or wearing animal products. That’s how food chains work. That’s how the human anatomy works. If you are opposed to the use of animal products, in theory or in practice, mazel tov, l’chayim, I support your decision. And, of course, it is your right to - politely - try to convert others to your cause. But I ask you, gentle readers: has anyone ever changed their clothing habits over a “MEAN PEOPLE WEAR FUR” t-shirt? I mean, yes, I’m sure some mean people throughout history have worn fur. Stalin spent most of his life, including winters, in Russia. Henry Hudson, Arctic explorer, may have been a complete bastard (his crew did set him adrift in the Canadian bay that bears his name.) But it’s certainly not a constant among mean people. My common-law step-mother is an absolute harpy (she puts the “wreck” back in “homewrecker”), and she has no fur (other than that which she naturally produces.) While I’m sure Hassan Nasrallah has a secret drawer full of things he likes to wear just because they feel nice, and make him look as pretty as he feels, I feel confident that the Mediterranean climate of Lesser Syria counterindicates fur.

But I guess if he doesn’t wear fur, he can’t be all that mean. Crossing a border, kidnapping foreign nationals, provoking a war, bombarding civilian targets, and advocating the downfall of an (allegedly) secular, elected government are… peccadilloes, to be sure. But fur-free ones.

Anyway, as you all probably know, PETA has celebrity spokespersons who urge their fans to lead fur-free lives. Now, I do enjoy The Golden Girls, but until “Bea Arthur made me do it” becomes a valid legal defense, I’m not going to be swayed. I’m glad to see that Christina Applegate has had a career after Don’t Tell Mom, the Babysitter’s Dead, and I’m glad that she has convictions, but only in a distant way - like when someone kind of pleasant you went to high school with gets married, or has their harelip fixed, or whatever. And, honestly, can it ever, ever be wise to emulate Pink, in any way, however remote, ever-ever-ever? And unsurprisingly, one of the celebrity features made me think of something strange that happened to me back when I was coming of age in a small town in the South, over the course of one unforgettable summer. It was of a very, very handsome Croatian man (I’m surprised too) holding a pug. It read “If you wouldn’t wear your dog, you shouldn’t wear fur” or similar.

So, for reasons I don’t want to talk about, my family had a brief sojourn into heresy during my “preteen” years. We, uh… we were Episcopalians.

(This is way, way harder for me to admit than substance abuse or that whole “has sex with dudes from time to time” thing. Coked-out homoeroticism can, in certain contexts, be cute. Not so heresy. The only thing more embarrassing than this in my immediate family is my parents’ voting record. They BOTH voted for Jimmy Carter. IN 1976 AND AGAIN IN 1980. I know, I know, it was against never-elected Ford and made-a-movie-with-a-chimpanzee Reagan, and I understand voting against the star of Bedtime for Bonzo, but… they meant it. They voted for Carter. My mother defends this decision to this day, on the grounds that he is “a good man.” I mean, so is Tom Jones, probably, deep down, but leader of the free world?)

But back to the Church of England. We were… you know, that way, for a while, and it was during this stint that we had The Least Comfortable Spaghetti Dinner Ever. Present were:

-My parents and me
-”Tammy,” a woman who often got into bar fights and bore scars from them
-Tammy’s three children, in the one-father-for-them-all-is-unlikely, classic-joke configuration of a blond, a brunette, and a redhead, and who were for all practical purposes feral
-Tammy’s mother “Winifred,” who wrote bodice-ripper romnce novels
-an enormous woman who looked like a gypsy, and was wearing some kind of necklace with bones on it

Oh, and we’re in a housing project. So we’re having spaghetti, the conversation lags, and my mother turns to the gypsyish woman and asks her about her necklace. Enormous Gypsy explains that, after her beloved dog was hit by a car and killed, she “went out and got the jawbone,” made a knife of it (here she unsheathed it,) made a necklace out of the knife, and wore it each day.

So, uh, I guess she can wear fur. In Croatia.