THE KING JAMES VERSION OF DINNER

Once you’ve fought as many mealtime “eat your food” battles as we have, you quickly learn that sometimes a hill of mashed potatoes is not worth dying for. When you’ve fought nearly all of those battles with the same child, and there are still two more incipient picky eaters in the family, mealtime survival becomes less a matter of convincing a kid to eat and more a matter of distracting yourself from what’s going on in front of you.

The other night, while our oldest was almost eating a taco, we decided to try the old “how was your day at school?” gambit. She loves to talk, so this seemed like a good way to keep the focus off the food. “Good,” she said, as she always says. The school could be taken over by a squad of Russian circus performers who spent the whole day squirting teachers and administrators with seltzer bottles, and that would still only qualify as “good.”

“How was Bible club?”

“Good.” *Ugh.* “But they kept using that one Bible with all the weird words in it.”

“The King James Version?” I asked.

“Yeah! Why is it like that?”

“Because it uses an old version of English.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You can’t tell the difference between ‘thine’ and ‘thee’ and ‘thou’?”

She giggled, and we were off. For the rest of the meal we spoke in Elizabethan English, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.

“Please passeth the saltheth.”

“Yea, verily, she didst search for salt with which to beseason her flat-bread; yet she foundeth it not, whereupon she pleadeth that the salt be passed unto her; but it availeth not, for the salt sitteth at her right hand, where she sought it not.”

“May I be doneth?”

“And whither wouldst thou goest?”

“In the basement, to playeth with my dolleth.”

“Depart; be gone with thee; go thou now to the place down beneath, where thy play-things awaiteth thee.”

It was fun. And she finished her taco.

SNOW SHOVEL BLUES

maybe somewhere today people–
tan, unencumbered
flat-stomached people
are feeling warm sand
forcing its way up between their Edenic toes
underneath protean palm trees

in my delusion
I imagine them
thinking about me
with my dried, cracked knuckles
open to the chilled lake breeze
and my cheap plastic shovel
my lone apologia
against what God hath wrought
all over my driveway and my sidewalk

but why would they care?
and why do I?
there’s life enough for both of us

TBP CLASSIC: JUST WUD THIG ABTA ANUDDA

Note: In honor of my latest respiratory misadventures, I’m digging out an old essay I wrote about the joys of having a cold. This is from October of 1998.

The title of this latest installment refers to that wonderful experience of trying to work (and having the busiest week of your life) whilst you are doped out of your mind on Sudafed. There has been a vicious cold floating around here (one of my parishioners has had it for a month) and said demonic virus is currently making its home in . . . well, it was in my throat, then my sinuses, thence my lungs, and currently in my ears, where it is trying valiantly to return to my throat, using my right eardrum as a trampoline. I have been on the Fed since Wednesday night with little to no discernible effect, apart from giving me some very interesting sleeping patterns. Even with my Buck Rogers Space Cadet TV antenna, you can’t find anything good on at 3:30 on a Friday morning . . .

Definition of a pretty bad cold: You can’t smell vinegar. Definition of a very, very bad cold: You can’t taste vinegar. Or cayenne pepper. Or a Hall’s Extra-Strength cough drop. Or anything. I have had colds which were bad enough to make me think I couldn’t taste anything; this one takes the cake. Friday at noon I ate a bowl of vegetable soup. Nothing. No flavor at all. That night I ate a peanut butter sandwich. Peanut butter is very, very scary when you cannot taste it. Come to think of it, so are most foods. When it’s nothing but a texture, food is more an annoyance than a joy. Cabbage feels like the roof of your mouth just peeled off and landed on your tongue. Orange juice just hurts. Bread could be drywall for all you know.

You’re tired all the time until you lay down to try to go to sleep. Then you twitch and flip and destroy the covers in a pathetic attempt to find that magical cool spot. Then, once you find it, your nerves turn glacial and you bury yourself beneath the covers again. For about thirty seconds. Lather, rinse, repeat. And now I don’t even have Art Bell on the radio to keep me company and remind me that I don’t have the most pathetic excuse of a life on Earth.

Comes the morning and you’re not sure if you slept. You fumble your way through the sacrament of coffee. First cup gets poured. It’s like drinking a hot, oily glass of water. You take the lid off a garbage can. Big whiff. Zilch. You sit down at the computer to work on one of the three sermons you have to preach in the next four days (funeral, wedding, just-plain-Sunday). The worsd comm uot verry distreptic and not every weurlof. Crap. I still need Sudafed, but in two hours I’ll be a zombie. Off to the bathroom. Two little red pills. Two aspirin. Regis and Kathie Lee. The pillow conforms to your head as you finally find a position that doesn’t turn you into a giant muscle contraction. Sleep finally comes, fitfully. You dream of ordering office supplies, a dream more frightening than a vision of the apocalypse. Suddenly you realize you’re talking on the phone to a telemarketer. You quiver, afraid you may have just authorized the construction of a missile silo in your driveway. Either that, or you agreed to let somebody send you some crappy fundraising candy.

Ill-advisedly, you set out to visit a couple parishioners. You greet their friendly and reckless dog. They advise you that the dog had been in a tangle with a skunk the night before. You are greatly relieved that they allow you into the house anyway. You sit down to a meal with looks fantastic and feels pretty good, but for the love of God you can’t tell if you’re eating pork chops or beaver tails. Following dinner, well, you must have driven home, because you’re there and so is the car . . .

The next morning you can taste the coffee a little, even smell it a touch. You lift the lid on the garbage AND IT SMELLS THIS BAD. It’s a wonder you’re not dead. You look out the window just to make sure. No pillars of brimstone, so you’re either still alive or your parishioners are right about the exact location of heaven . . . you just thought heaven would be a little nearer Barnes & Noble, that’s all.

Assuming the right side of my head does not explode, I can look forward to a week filled with less excitement. It’s already off to a rotten start. I spent all afternoon at a meeting during which we transacted exactly one piece of business (we named the organization) and the chair believed that we had actually accomplished quite a bit. Gross. On the whole, I’d rather have six more sinuses to get infected than endure that again . . .

THE NEW PROJECT

I’m starting a blognovel, Bringing In The Sheaves. Hope you like it . . .

HELP A BLOGGER

It’s a heavy day. I thought I had problems because I’ve had a three-day avalanche of comment spam that has left me feeling that anybody who has even the slightest scintilla of interest in a poker game whose name I’ll render “State West of Louisiana Retain Them” is just the biggest goober in the universe–I mean a complete blob of hard green gorilla snot–then London happens and I’m reminded that there are many worse things that can happen to you than having some script-running flatheads try to borrow some free Google juice from you.

You hate to say “Lighten up, Francis” on a day like this. You hate to appear irreverent. But then you realize that irreverence would be the first thing legislated out of existence under the reign of the Glowering Pseudo-Faithful, so let me request your help. I’m working on a fiction project which has, at its center, a legendarily bad (fictional) record album from the 1980s. The band is called The Rain Merchants and their sound is described as “A/V squadders who think they know what Depeche Mode sounds like.” The album at the center of this project is titled Selling Sunshine on the Moon, and I’ve already come up with three song titles for it: “You Balkanize,” “Social Conformity (Is Killing Me),” and “Love in the Time of Realpolitik.” I need at least five more song titles that could’ve come from a pretentious, angst-y 80s band. Go for it, and I thank you in advance.

‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

So I got home from our candlelight service about quarter to midnight last night. I got ready for bed and I got in. Paula turned to me and said, “Hi, honey, how was worship?” and I said, “Fine, lots of people,” and I started to drift off to sleep. The bed was comfy, toasty warm, and I was nearly on my way to those visions of sugarplums. The alarm was set for 6 AM so I would have plenty of time to get ready and grab a good breakfast before our 9 AM service this morning.

My eyes are closed and I’m drifting in and out of consciousness when, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, Paula turned to me and said, “Honey?”

And I said, “Yeah?”

And she said,”Did you turn off the space heater in your office?”

Suddenly I wasn’t so tired any more.

So I laid there for a little bit thinking to myself, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mark. Of course you turned off the space heater. You turn it off when you run to Kwik Trip to get a cup of coffee. Why wouldn’t you have turned it off when you were leaving on Christmas Eve?” But if I was so sure I turned it off, why couldn’t I call up the memory of having done so? Still, I had the feeling I was just being neurotic and silly.

Yet my mind’s eye kept seeing the headline in the paper: PASTOR BURNS DOWN OWN CHURCH ON CHRISTMAS EVE.

I knew that if I got up to go check, I wouldn’t get back home until at least 2 AM. That would have left me with just four short hours of sleep before the alarm went off. So there I was, in bed, weighing the options: Sleep like I need to, or burn down the church?

I gotta tell you, sometimes I really hate having a conscience.

I didn’t want to part with my sleep–I was really tired. I finally hit on a compromise: Why not just take a pillow and sleep in your office? After all, I’ve got an alarm clock there and everything. Sure, my office is lacking in amenities, like padded furniture and blankets, but hey, anything that still held out the possibility of a good night’s sleep was OK by me at that point.

So I grabbed my pillow off the bed and got dressed and bundled myself into the car, where there was nothing on the radio but “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.” I drove the half-hour to the church and ran to my office.

Was the space heater turned off?

Would I even be telling you this story if it wasn’t? In fact, it was so cold in my office, there were penguins frolicking under my desk.

I threw my pillow on the floor, pulled my coat around me, and slept as well as a pastor can on Christmas Eve when he’s sleeping on the floor of his semi-heated office, underneath a parka, with his head resting on a pillow propped up by three old textbooks.

So anyway, I hope you’re having a merry Christmas, everybody. I feel pretty confident that most of your Christmas mornings were a little better than mine.

(Gone to play in the Beltway Traffic)

TBP CLASSIC: INCLUSIVE TO THE nTH DEGREE

From October 2000.

Got a funeral tomorrow morning. Nice old man, lived just down the road from St. Peter’s, didn’t really know him at all. I met with the family this morning to soak up some details about his life. We had the usual discussions–what was he really like, would he have wanted a big fuss made over him, what Bible pasages should I use, et cetera. Through the discussion, I determined that the best passage was from John, chapter 14 (”In my Father’s house are many rooms . . .”). I determined this because, basically, there are only four Bible passages ever used in funeral sermons: that one, the one from John 11 where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, the 23rd Psalm, and Ecclesiastes 3 (a/k/a the “Turn, Turn, Turn” passage). Sometimes a pastor will slip in something else just to prove that he or she is not a sockpuppet, but 85% of the Christian funerals you attend will have at least one of those four passages read, I guarantee it.

About a year ago I wrote what I thought was a pretty decent funeral sermon on that John 14 passage and what it means to somebody who has endured long suffering. Since then, I’ve subtly reworked it three or four times, altering it just enough so that it’s not quite recognizable. I know, I should start from scratch, but every time I do I just wind up saying the same thing I wrote back then. And, in talking to the funeral directors in town, it turns out that I’m the exception in having three or four basic
funeral sermons. Most of my colleagues down here only have one. And the funeral directors know them by heart.

So, anyway, I actually cooked myself a meal tonight (pot roast, no less; I love food you can throw in a pot and ignore for a few hours) and, after I got the dishes washed, I sat down at the computer and pulled up the John 14 sermon. A little tweak here, a little tuck there, and now we just have to repersonalize it. I hit ‘Replace . . .’ and told the computer to change every “Evelyn” to “Ed”. No problem. But Evelyn was a she and Ed was a he. So I also had to replace every “her” with “him.” I knew I’d have to go in and change a few “him”s to “his”es, but that’s not such a big deal. So, I confidently clicked on “replace all.” Then I started to read the sermon, looking for pronouns to replace. And how did the first line read?

“Brothims and sisters in Christ, grace, mercy and peace from God our Fathim and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

OH FORK RYAN OAT LOAD! Why didn’t I *think* of that? It doesn’t look for the word “her,” it looks for the letters “her” and replaces them. I felt ten different kinds of stupid. Until I got to the passage where I talked about what the Luthiman Church had meant to Ed during his life, that is. Then I thought it was pretty funny.

I’ve always been a bit of a language geek, I guess. One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard was Victor Borge’s “Inflationary Language” where he tells a story but increases all the imbedded numbers by one. So the sentence “I ate a tenderloin with my fork” becomes “I nined an elevenderloin with my fivek.” My favorite part is when the Air Fivce lieutelevenant tells his date, “My darling, you look twoderful threenight.”

That got me to thinking: There’s a big debate in some churches right now about inclusive language–mostly avoiding excessive use of male pronouns. Some pastors I know never use pronouns of any sort to refer to the Holy One. Others try to incorporate more female imagery. I got to thinking, “What would it be like if we switched the genders in every word?”

I’m not sure I’d ever warm to the idea of being a Luthiman pastor. I couldn’t get used to watching Bill Mahim on “Politically Incorrect.” Nor would I ever get used to the idea of chermney sweeps. Herstory would repeat itself. You could tune in the high-numbered TV channels if you wanted to see faith shealing. (Assuming you’re not the sort who girlcotts those channels, that is.) I already call the mailman the personperson. But now, instead of needing a male-to-female adapter for my stereo cables, I’d need a female-to-male adapter. I could probably pick one up the next time I’m in St. Josephine, seeing as how there’s no longer a Radio Shack in Richarddaughter County. That would mean a trip into Misterouri, though. And I’d probably have to put it on my MistressCard. But I could shop for a smen pool while I was down there, maybe even grab a bite at Crackhim Barrel. (The budget would suggest Burger Queen, Taco Beau, or Long Jane Silver’s, however.)

No way would I take this idea to the chimch, though. You ever seen what they do to himetics?

TBP CLASSIC: “DEATH OF A TOASTER”

From May 2000, before I’d ever even heard of a ‘blog.’

It has not been a good week for mechanical things here at the dacha. The week got off to a rousing start on Tuesday, when the Richardson County “roads” claimed a new victim.

Here’s how it happened: The main route into Falls City from here takes me down what’s known as Kunz Corner Road (unless you live north of me, in which case it’s known as Palmer Corner Road, but I digress). Now, that particular road carries a lot of traffic, maybe 100 vehicles a day. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot to some of you, but trust me, for a gravel road, that’s freeway traffic. Kunz Corner Road is in such notorious disrepair that the UPS drivers are not allowed to use it. It’s potholed, washboarded, and generally covered with loose gravel.

Lately it’s been even worse than usual. It actually rained here the first part of this week, so now the road is not only potholed and washboarded, but rutted as well. How bad is it? I drove my truck down it on Monday, and dang if the road didn’t bounce me around so hard that the truck sloughed about 45 degrees off a straight ahead track. It gets disconcerting.

So I avoided Kunz Corner Road and started going into town on the Straussville Road. It’s a lot better, with two notable exceptions: there’s a vicious bump on the far side of a railroad crossing just west of the USDA office, and there’s a bridge just north of Straussville itself that has an 8″ deep pothole right in front of it.

Tuesday I ran into town like a fiend, trying to beat a check to the bank. I made it with plenty of time to spare, as it turns out. So I go roaring back up Straussville Road. I hit the rail crossing by the USDA office and catch a little air on the downside. (I love doing that.) I slow down to 50 when I hit Straussville (which is nothing more than a house, a machine shed, and a grain elevator, but the railroad still stops there) and blast it on north of town, because if you catch that one pothole just right, you almost go
weightless across the bridge.

So here comes the bridge KCHUNK and there I go! Once across the bridge, though, I heard this strange white-noise sound coming from the back. I pulled the truck over to make sure I wasn’t trailing suspension parts or a pedestrian or God forbid a shredded tire. I walked to the back of the truck and what to my wondering eyes should appear?

The tailgate, literally hanging on by a thread.

Not a good omen to start the week. Things got worse on Thursday, when I drove the Honda into town via the same route. I had noticed that one of the tires was looking a little low. I returned to the Tire Store of Indentured Servitude, knowing that I’d be out at least ten bucks. It was a nice day, so I meandered aimlessly about downtown while they worked. When I got back, bad news: ALL FOUR TIRES WERE GOING FLAT. The back two just had nails in them, but the front two had worn down to the steel belts. Oh, and it was out of alignment too. It would take $150 to get the car back on the road, plus about three hours of my time. And no, unfortunately, they’d already loaned out their loaner car. Grrr.

What do you do when you’re stuck in a tire store for three hours? That’s a rhetorical question–it’s happened to me twice in the last six months and I *still* don’t know. If it weren’t for the news stand at the Grocery Store Formerly Known As Hinky Dinky, I’d probably be stuck paging through all their back issues of Modern Tire Dealer.

I made it back home by about 4, lighter in the wallet and grumpier than a gathering of “Matlock” fans. It was too early for dinner, but the rumble in my gullet would not be denied. I grabbed an English muffin, popped it into the toaster, and sat down in the living room for just a minute.

Then just two minutes. Then three. Still no POING from the toaster. I sprung back into the kitchen just as the smoke began pouring from the slots. I jerked the plug out of the wall and flung the flaming English muffin directly out of the toaster slots and into the front yard.

That was it. That was all I could take. One too many mechanical betrayals in a week filled with stress. I had no choice. The toaster was going to pay.

I spun it over my head, lasso-like, by its cord, then flung it down the road. (That’s the great thing about living in the country. I’d like to see you try something like that in town.) Then I did it again. And again. Then I picked up all the plastic parts and chucked them into the burn barrel. Charcoal lighter fluid. Match. Two-week-old potato salad. Bye-bye, junk toaster.

The only negative aspect of this senseless act of toastercide, of course, is that now I had no way of making toast. This is a big problem, since toast is one of my four food groups, along with pizza, coffee, and things other people give to me.

Have you shopped for toasters lately? My WORD! I’ve had computers that weren’t so advanced, and here I am thinking specifically of the VIC-20. They’ve all got names like “BagelSmart” or “PastryPerfect” or “LuftWaffle” or some other spaceless Space Age name. I actually found one with something called “ToastLogic,” an onboard COMPUTER CHIP that senses when the toast is done to perfection. Twenty years ago, we would have laughed at such a concept. Twenty years later though . . . well, I still think it’s funny.

I had only two criteria for the new toaster: It had to cost less than $30, and it had to not be a Procter-Silex, since that’s who made the scapetoaster I’d wrecked the day before. I finally found one, a Toastmaster, ’cause hey, with a name like that, they must mean business.

In case you’re wondering, yes. My new toaster does indeed have “ToastLogic.” It makes mediocre toast. Anybody want to play Cowboys and Indians? I get to be the cowboy.

TBP’S GUIDE TO PICKING A COLLEGE MAJOR

(This post has been sent to go play in Traffic. And I, for one, welcome my new FARK overlords.)

Since college students are a significant portion of TBP’s readership (I think one of my seven readers is in college), and choosing a major is probably the fourth or fifth most important part of the college experience, I thought I’d help some of you along with a guide to what you can expect if you choose to major in certain popular fields of study. After all, you don’t discover what some of these majors are really like until you’re 24 credits into them, and by then it’s too late to turn around. So, to prevent educational disasters like the several I experienced, forthwith, I preventpresent the TBP Guide To Picking A College Major. We’ll go through the academy department by department . . . which is what I did for my first two and a half years of college.

Accounting is a great field for those whose idea of a good time is trying to figure out if the fourth debit on page D41 of the ledger is supposed to be $438.43 or $484.33. Accounting majors alphabetize their gardens and organize their sock drawers based on predicted date of replacement.

Art majors spend four years in near-total isolation preparing for careers at which they will probably never get a chance to succeed. This is why you see art majors and college basketball players hanging out together all the time.

Art history involves four years of looking at slides and going to museums, and forty-five years of working the 3 to 11 shift at Domino’s.

Biology is a good major for those who aspire to be doctors. Biotechnology is a good major for those who aspire to be Dr. Frankenstein.

Business administration would seem to be a good major for those who want high-paying jobs after graduation. After all, the want ads are full of jobs for which a degree in business is required. So remember, if you long for the sort of job that’s so mind-shatteringly boring employers are forced to advertise its availability, major in business.

Chemistry majors have to endure all manner of snickering about the possible illegal uses of their studies. You should only major in chemistry if you have a thick skin or a well-trained goon squad.

Communications majors live in absolute denial of how little money talk-radio hosts and TV reporters actually make.

Computer science used to be a great way to get on board the gravy train. Now it’s a great way to wind up eating Gravy Train.

Economics: There are those who say that religion is despicable because it is nothing more than a bunch of unprovable assertions about that which is ultimately unknowable; furthermore, these assertions are frequently contrary to plainly-evident fact and represent nothing more than a backhanded attempt to rule the world by means of subjugating humanity through the application of ritualistic mumbo-jumbo which means nothing to the non-brainwashed. I didn’t realize economics was a religion until I wrote this paragraph.

Education is a great major for those who have always wanted to be blamed for all of society’s problems, from drug abuse to property taxes. If you’ve got buckets of unwanted self-esteem you just can’t get rid of, hasten thee to the teachers’ college.

Engineering students spend four years in agony, taking brutal math and science classes. Many would-be engineers wash out and wind up in easier fields, like Middle East peace negotiations. But the dirty little secret is that engineering students smile so much at graduation because they know they’ve solved their last differential equations and can spend the rest of their careers just looking things up in handbooks.

English was in danger of dying out as a field of study due to a lack of lunatic interpretations around which to structure doctoral theses. Then along came Jacques Derrida and the twin demons of deconstructionism and semiotics, ensuring that PhD candidates will never lack for thesis material again, since it just might be possible that Julius Caesar is actually about Shakespeare’s deeply-sublimated fetish for root vegetables.

Geography: If you’ve ever thrown a hand full of pocket change on the table and spent three hours staring at the patterns it formed, you may be a budding geographer. Either that, or you just drank a full bottle of cough syrup. Otherwise, geography is a great major for people who think that they may one day be called upon to prove that, in fact, they can find certain parts of their anatomy with two hands and a map.

Geology majors usually find some sort of employment in the oil industry. Sometimes this is great; when the awl bidness is booming, the money flows like . . . well, like oil. But it’s fickle; you might also find yourself unemployed and trying to sell a house in Dalhart, Texas. Either that, or you’ll wind up as Vice-President, and I am not sure which fate sounds worse.

History is based on the idea that, if I know the winning lottery numbers for the past five years, I stand a better chance of picking tonight’s winning numbers.

Mathematics majors find employment as teachers, statisticians, actuaries, and stadium gatekeepers.

Philosophy is the biggest scam in academia. I ought to know; it was my undergrad major. In philosophy, you don’t have to be right; you just have to sound like you’re not wrong.

Political science appeals to three basic types of people: Pre-law students (insert punchline here), persons interested in foreign service (while we do have diplomatic missions in Paris, Fiji, and the Bahamas, bear in mind that we also have people in Gdansk, Ouagadougou, and Ulaan Bator), and persons who are actually interested in politics. The latter are guaranteed perpetual employment, since the only thing more difficult to explain than the ridiculous, self-contradictory behavior of politicians is the ridiculous, self-contradictory behavior of voters.

Public administration students spend four years in college doing the college-student thing, then two more years in in grad school. At the end of this, they get a government desk job. Why everybody doesn’t major in public administration, I’ll never know.

Sociology majors study complicated problems without any feasible solutions. It’s a great major if you one day expect to be named head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. Social work is the major to pick if college football is more your speed.

Hopefully, this will help out those of you who are uncertain about the future path of your life. Just remember, though, that ultimately, you can’t put a price on the value of a well-rounded education.

OK, actually, you can. How does $400 a month for the next 30 years sound?

POE, A TREE

Rain, rain, go away
Come aga–no! STAY away!