Lobster Cop
A rollercoaster ride of crustaceans and clues
Pilot Episode, Part One
Scene: A dingy police office in a fictional small town by the coast of Maine. Camera zooms in on a map of Maine, CSI style, as numerous iterations of "Enhance" bring the Police Department HQ into frame. Camera speeds to the door of the building, then around a corner to the old freight elevator, which deposits camera on the 3rd floor, to bear on an almost noir-style office door, complete with a murky glass windows reinforced with cross-hatches of embedded wire mesh, and a stenciled sign on the glass says "Carl Brzscowitz, Chief of Police." The door opens to a small waiting room, complete with a vintage solid oak receptionist desk, behind which sits an older woman, hair graying, wearing librarian's glasses and a garish sweater vest. Opposite the desk is a pair of chairs such as might be found in a wood-paneled insurance office from the 1970s, their legs immersed in a thick sea of beige shag carpeting, the leather of the chairs marked with a map of cracks and tears, graying stuffing poking out of the larger discontinuities in the upholstery.
In one chair sits a man named Paul Sloan, one half of a crime-fighting duo, and seated on the chair next to him is the titular partner. Paul, or "Sloan" as he is referred to professionally, is the quintessential Bachelor Cop. In plainclothes with only a holster and badge suggesting his occupation, he has a ragged mat of very dark brown hair, and bags under his eyes that, if filled to half capacity with clothing and toiletries, could support a middle-American couple on a several week long tour of the nicer parts of Europe (you know, the regions characterized by McDonalds restaurants with funny menus and cute boutiques, rather than the regions that reek of ethnicity and cabbage).
In the other chair sits the crux of the plot, a loose cannon of a crustacean known to his contemporaries as "Lobster Cop", the only lobster in Maine to have risen to the rank of detective, despite completely lacking the ability to talk, hold and fire a weapon, or in fact detect anything at all besides tasty sea floor detritus and changing water temperature.
The Secretary, Marge DeLaCroix, has allowed her glasses to slide down her nose, not worried about them falling due to the fail-safe lanyard that connects the earpieces and loops behind her neck, and she looks over the glasses at a sheet of paper pulled from her old mechanical typewriter. She has taken a bottle of Wite-Out(TM) from that skinny drawer above her knees, and has dabbed it gingerly on a typo, and know sits calmly and patiently blowing across the liquid, as the cops squirm in their chairs, clearly ready for action, and the Wite-Out(TM) turns solid. She returns the paper to the typewriter and continues with her correspondence.
There is a heavy window in the waiting room that looks out on the sea, and the bright sunlight that shines through it illuminates a plethora of dust motes drifting lazily through the air of the still room, and the silence is broken by Chief B. (so called because no one in the department is capable of spelling or pronouncing his Polish-as-fuck name).
Chief B. hollers through the door: "Marge, send those two goddamn fuck-ups in here!"
Marge glances significantly at the two detectives and with a flick of her head directs them to the Chief's door. Paul Sloan grimaces slightly and stands. Lobster Cop clicks his dominant pincer and crawls over the edge of the seat, landing with a clack, and then begins the long shuffle from the chair to the office door. His badge, strapped to his back like a battle standard, glints in the sunlight and casts its own secondary beams into the cloud of dust motes, and it almost looks as if he steels himself against the coming criticism, performing a briny little shiver, before scurrying past the threshold behind Paul.
"Well look at what the fucking cat dragged in," says Carl, "a couple of fuckin' proverbial thorn-in-my-side fucking detectives. I can only thank you for not driving your fucking squad car through my wall, like you seem to have driven it through every goddamn other fucking wall in the precinct."
On the Chief's desk, not even remotely concealed, is a bottle of Jim Beam -- mostly empty -- and a glistening shot glass with a meniscus of the liquor still clinging to the inside. Surrounding the bottle is a mess of papers, forming a kind of nest in which he laid dutiful cussing eggs all day long; written reprimands, departmental memos, challenged reimbursement requests, and other HQ business. If you talked to his secretary at the right time, on the right day, she'd tell you that his gnarled and grizzly exterior concealed a heart of gold, but all that the majority his subordinates usually saw was a scruffy mug, red-cheeked from booze, hurling invectives through gritted teeth across the natural disaster of his desktop.
Sloan briefly considered correcting Chief B., saying that he and Lobster Cop -- mostly Sloan though, given Lobster Cop's inability to obtain a driver's license or even reach the pedals and steering wheel at the same time -- had only driven through 3 walls in the past 6 months, and that last one hardly counted since it was mostly glass anyways. Technically, it could be called a window, and who hasn't broken a window or two in their life? He thought better of it.
Lobster Cop waggled his antennae in silent protest, a gesture that did not go unnoticed by Brzscowitz, who hollered a response.
"Don't you fucking give me no lip, or whatever passes for lip with your spiny ass. I know damn well that you haven't done anything but encourage the distinguished Mr. Sloan's attempts to break the world record for unforgivable fuck-ups while in the line of duty. I'd give you each a fucking medal for it if they'd let me poison the goddamn backing pins."
"Alright boss, let's just get on with it," said Sloan, rubbing his eyes in the futile hope that it would help do something about the hangover headache made only worse by the morning sun reflecting directly off the Chief's name plate and into Paul's eyes.
The Chief look surprised and concerned, clearly an act, before he let out a sarcastic reply.
"Oh, is the princess too fucking wasted to listen to some goddamn operating advice from his goddamn superior officer? Well let me just adjust your tiara and powder your ass and lay out your fucking daily itinerary on a silver fucking platter instead of wasting your time with some fucking general direction. I'll get on with it: You fuck up once more, and I'm taking your badge. I'm taking it, and then you're taking it up the ass. Look, I've even got a pair of rubber gloves here with your name on them. I'm not kidding here. These fuckers go all the way to the elbow, don't even fucking try me.
"Here's the situation, fucknuts. You've got one last chance to save your tarnished reputations before you each get a personal brass enema from Yours Truly. I just caught on the dispatch that we got a homicide in the east sector, and you two are on it, and I mean ON IT, and if you can't stay on it then I'm gonna be on you. We need this closed in 3 days or your ass is grass. I can't have any more open cases on the docket, and last I checked you two geniuses haven't helped the ratio at all."
Chief B. took one of those cube-shaped pads of Post-It notes, wrote an address on the top sheet, and pitched the whole pad at Sloan's head, beaning him clear in the forehead. He then pointed at the door, making it clear that he would hear no more guff from anyone in the room, human or lobster. Sloan rubbed the welt and motioned to Lobster Cop, who led the way to the exit, and they stepped onto the rickety elevator and ordered it to the basement, where a dented and scratched 1970s Chevy Caprice sat in wait, its light bar dented in a kind of disappointed scowl. Sloan opened the door for Lobster Cop, climbed into the driver's seat, and triggered the siren's low setting, which made a somewhat mournful wail and heralded their coming for a few blocks before a capacitor blew and its alarm faded to a sound not unlike a sad trombone as they made their way to the location specified on the Post-It, its bent corner serving as a cruel reminder of the indignity that began their morning.
We’ve got a little catching up to do.
Now, it has been some time since I've written about farm life, though that was the original intent of this blog. It turns out, in these trying economic times, that the most interesting aspects of organic farming often have very little to do with the growing of vegetables, and everything to do with the navigation of politics. I would love, dear reader, to take you on a journey from day one of my trials and tribulations on the Western slope; on a sort of coming-of-another-goddamn-age story chronicling the arrival of a humble midwesterner to the harsh high desert of the Other side of the Rockies rife with parables illustrating his attempts to make sense of the motivations behind inscrutable HR-type decisions and his own trips into the punji stakes of emotional distress covering ten months, two farms, dozens upon dozens of chickens, numerous hippies, and more than 400 acres of land under varying states of cultivation. Unfortunately, that story cannot be told in the detail it deserves until I've moved on to the next chapter in This Man's Career, which is unlikely to occur until the beginning of the New Year, when the passionate Tiger of the Sheng Xiao yields to the sensitive Rabbit, and the internal world is set to peace, or some approximation thereof, once again.
In the meantime, know this: your narrator has left behind him the slings and arrows of an intern's life and adopted instead the increased responsibility of a real adult-type job, complete with upgrades in domicile and salary. Farming, however, is a job where a fuck-up often means that something dies, and we are no necromancers. This adds a unique sense of importance to the work, and also a quite extraordinary level of stress. Did you remember to check the water in the chicken coop? Have the goats been put away? Will you awake in the morning to find that the sheep have been drawn and quartered, Braveheart style, by packs of roaming coyote, driven down from the mountains by drought and famine? As I said before, a thing now dead cannot be made undead outside the realm of fiction, and the organic farmer (Biodynamic proponents excepted) must live firmly in the world of fact. Fact which leads water and sunlight and carbon dioxide to synthesize glucose and which leads a fertilized flower to set delicious fruit also leads a still heart to remain in stillness for all eternity, and leads a leaf singed by a 400,000 BTU propane weed-annihilating torch to remain wilted or crispy, and to thus cease its photosynthesis.
Never is this vital truth more apparent than when an animal nearly as large as one's own self takes ill, requiring treatment. It is one thing to see the yellowing of a strawberry bush or the browning of a pepper plant and apply proper nutrition via some kind of spray pack or granule, but it is quite another to take a living animal around the chest, set it on its ass, and inject a bolus of penicillin beneath its skin without causing undue distress to either patient or doctor; to understand that the vital injection probably burns like hell, and it's only by some small miracle that the animal resigns itself to its fate to a sufficient extent that one can deliver the antibiotic subcutaneously -- and to completion -- without being forced off in the course of the animal's struggle.
To those in the medical field, mammalian or otherwise, I salute you. To those for whom growing plants and caring for animals is a career rather than a youthful experiment, I salute you. To those who actually managed to finish reading this post, sorry, I guess. It was pretty long.
buried
there's a path through the woods that twists and turns
and there one finds why one's soul yearns
for a taste of freedom, though the comfort of the ferns
that grew round the cabin while the cooking fire burned
still draw a man back from the destinies earned
on a moonlit night in a far-off land
while waves lick his ankles and moisten the sand
on the face of the water an old smile returns
the grin of a lover, long since spurned
and the ground opens up with a rumble and roar
his footing escapes him, as with so many more
of the moments he cherished, the days gone before
through a pinhole of light the sky does soar
though he sinks, sinks, sinks, past the ocean's floor
a tree of decisions, forked and varied
the women he loved, but could not marry
the friends lost to time, though times then were merry
the properties forfeit, the things that he carries
a trail of breadcrumbs would be necessary
to follow life's route, for he rarely would tarry
but instead took flight on whatever wild fancy
held the promise of hope, of youth's necromancy
the cauldron of hist'ry forever will steep
and hold on to the things man himself cannot keep
and a glimpse at the surface, eyes heavy with sleep
cannot penetrate the unfathomable deep
Untitled 1
Some days, he gets lazy. He gets lazy and just sits in that broken-down easy chair; the wind grows hazy, like a malevolent god casting broad strokes with a brush, wide bands of silt impeding respiration and expedition.
On those days he gives up, shuffles around stiff legged for a few hours, and waits for breakfast of mash and other mash to hit him. Boyd draws a wreath of smoke around him with a cigarette before settling into the task. He unveils a foot locker from beneath the bed, gingerly raises the lid. His pad-like fingers leave discrete impressions in the fine film of household particulate that coated the lid, like an astronaut`s boot finding its way to the lunar surface. There`s a fat row of old records nestled in among a handful of faded pictures of long dead kin, ratty notebooks, a couple boxes of .45, and a half-empty bottle of gin.
Boyd flips through the disks like an old jukebox. He studies each cover intently --front and back-- before moving on to the next. There is an old Victrola sitting below the window. Only a few spots on the old record player are clean of the nigh-omnipresent dust: the bell-shaped amplifier, constantly swept clean by the tattered curtains above; the felt turntable, usually covered; the power/volume knob, made of ivory polished so smooth that dust simply wouldn`t stick, even without the high finger traffic.
Having removed his choice from its paper sleeve, Boyd reaches over to the player, blows it clean with a few breaths, and sets the vinyl record on the spindle. The volume knob is tweaked, the needle transported laterally, and soon that familiar warm crackle ushers faintly from the bell. It fills his ears as surely as water, and he sinks.
“Slots of fun!!”
David Foster Wallace said in Consider The Lobster (the footnotes, specifically) that to be a tourist "is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you," and that "as a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."
Certainly this was true of Las Vegas at one point in time, but today it appears that there is actually nothing real, nothing significant about the city except for tourism.
Las Vegas, like most of North America, was at one point occupied by American Indians, specifically the Paiutes. After the area was annexed by the United States government, someone clearly had to come in and start dismantling the local culture. In this case, it wasn't the Army or the Catholics or the Anglicans or even those fucking Baptists, but instead Brigham Young, that king of kings, sent a Mormon envoy in an attempt to drive out the old, natural gods and practices and replace them with synthetics. Even the Mormons bailed on the joint within a few years, though, leaving their fortifications behind. In 1905 the government auctioned about 110 acres of land to a Senator-owned railroad company. In 1931 the railroad town laid a foundation by legalizing gambling, the mob built casinos, and the rest is history.
Today, to go to Vegas is to immerse oneself in a milieu of incandescents and sheer conspicuous excess. The interstate that leads into the city tracks the dips and curves of mountainous desert, and following alongside like a dutiful pet you'll find row upon row of power lines carrying inductive lifeblood in their thick copper ropes. Vegas consumes a frankly retarded amount of resources making sure that all the world's affluent people have a place they can go to spend money for the sake of spending money. The people that live in Vegas live there to work in casinos and restaurants and retail stores, or they build those things, or they build houses for those other people to live in. Vegas has a diversity of sights, but a singular purpose.
Walking the strip you will find piles of hooker cards and soiled napkins and abandoned drinks that have been pushed off to the margins by the lumbering strut of Fat America, the clear and purposeful gait of camera-wielding Asia, and the long majestic stride of well-fed but healthy Europe. Coming from a Colorado winter, one thing that strikes you immediately is the smell, and the fact that there is one. Even at night, the air in Vegas this time of year is warm enough to rouse the olfactory nerves from their winter hibernation, sending a multitude of odors cascading into whichever part of the brain deals with that kind of thing. There's the smell of garbage, which radiates not as a concentrated essence from a few points of collection, as you might find at the Minnesota State Fair with its arsenal of trash cans, but instead as a constant outdoor permeation, sitting right at the threshold of perception most of the time, if you're lucky. There is the sweet stink of ethanol wafting from the lungs of at least 30% of weekenders and almost as many day-to-day Las Vegans (note: there is no room for actual vegans in Vegas, except at Chipotle, which was a hungover godsend to vegans and ovolactos alike). I would be remiss not to mention that distinctive baby powder and perfume combination that leaves one's eyes and head darting around at least every 10 minutes looking for the stripper from which the aroma emanates, but unless you're actually by a strip club you're left assuming, hoping, that it was simply coming off of one of the numerous cookie-cutter black-dress hoes making their way to the Bellagio.
While we're on the subject of hopelessly stupid cultural practices, I have just been informed that Hillary Duff received a million dollar engagement ring from her NHL boyfriend. Congrats to the future bride and proud owner of a blood diamond (every diamond is a blood diamond, FYI).
Anyways, I can't say that it's all bad. In fact, it is extremely possible to have a good time in Las Vegas provided that you can disable that part of the brain which processes ethics, statistics, and environmental concerns. I managed to do so with a dousing of cheap cheap beers and a flask of mezcal, but a necessary side effect of that is that I do not remember the most fun 4 hours of the night. Vegas is a phenomenal place to people-watch, and if your interests lean more to the architectural, you'll find no shortage of epic vistas and stylistic head-scratchers. The place is 100% geared towards sucking money out of your wallet, but that doesn't mean you can't have a frugal good time there. We got a hotel at the end of the strip, so we had a cheap room and it was trivial to stop at the liquor store (for liquor) or the food mart (also for liquor). I think I only gambled about $20, and I certainly made less than $7 with it, but you don't gamble expecting to win unless 1. you're playing only against other humans, 2. you're really really really dumb.
One thing I wasn't expecting, it being the desert and all, is the sheer volume and diversity of the horticulture in town. Las Vegas must use more water per capita than any other place in the country. In addition to the water features and replica fountains, you'll see massive trees in portable boxes being rotated into casinos, a lifetime supply of bay leafs, conservatories, palms everywhere, small herbaceous shrubs and, yes, even Astroturf (in front of the McDonalds, which really says a lot about their feelings towards living things such as grass and people). Apart from the Astroturf, most of those plants are irrigated. I'm told the Bellagio's conservatory has its own water treatment plant just to accommodate the landscape, but I'm sure most casinos find it easier and cheaper just to pump in water from other, equally dry states further north.
The gambling, despite being the driving force behind the city and a fascinating psychological study, was in fact boring as fuck in practice. The table games I did not get into (mandated social activity? in my vacation?!), but we did play some video games. A neat lil fact: they're all the same. All of them. Sure, some had different graphics and additional gimmicks (Slippery Reels!! Moebius Paylines!!) in an attempt to set themselves apart from the other 500 slot machines in the casino, but they're still just slot machines, and you'll still find the same unique variety cloned among every casino. If you're playing table games the crowd changes a bit every few hands and you actually get to make a decision besides "press button" and "don't press button", but for the most part what you're doing by walking the strip and checking out different casinos is a lot like getting a new faceplate when you're bored with your cell-phone. Note that I am never not bored by my cellphone, but that's a personal choice I made a long time ago to avoid seeing electronics as anything but tools, pure and utilitarian. At any rate, a casino is a fancy shell that holds a lot of games you cannot win. The Bellagio may have a more upscale "feel" (nevermind that the clientelle, despite having far more money than me, in fact sits pretty low on a large number of scales [intelligence, awareness, etc]), but in the end it is just a more expensive shell that holds the same machines and the same tables and the same pathetic slothounds as the Circus Circus and other cheap dives on the strip. The same myths surround the machines, and the same psychological trickery and false assumptions keep people in their seats feeding in bills. We did not find a single slot machine that would take coins, which was a pretty massive disappointment. I expected to find at least one old machine with a hand-operated lever and mechanical ciphers and a satisfying "clunk" sound as the pawls and gear teeth engage their mates and drive a quarter home to its destiny, winning or not.
Woah, this is almost 1400 words, and that is definitely more than enough.
Nothing interesting happened today.
A few thoughts for the day:
Starfruit's taste does not at all justify its visual novelty. Clearly, it's a trick mechanism that the fruit evolved in order to expedite propagation. Visual trickery is also commonly utilized by other, equally mediocre species, such as Megan Fox and those comfort bikes with fork shocks, to confuse animals into wanting to obtain them.
It is impossible to care about what Ringo Starr wears to the Grammy Awards. He's Ringo Starr, and it's the Grammys. In a sensible world, anyone would have passed out from boredom before managing to parse his graphic tee. Local TC boosterism is one thing I sure as hell don't miss since moving to Colorado (again). Yeah the Twin Cities are cool. So are about 25 other cities in the country that 1. don't have shitty winters, 2. are less than 8 hours away from another interesting place.
Not really a lot of news going on out here, except that it's just nice enough for riding to work to be fun, but not nice enough for me to actually want to do it. I did harass a huge jumping spider today! That is something, I guess. No pictures. (buy me a camera)
to the women
I'm sorry to have dined and dashed
on your hearts
I'm sorry to have acted so childish
though, true, I was a child
I'm sorry that when you complimented my ass
gazing through my long coat
I did not acknowledge it
but instead let it swish
swish
swish
silent, down the darkened streets
I'm sorry I forgot those songs
and that movie
and that other song
and that I did not leap when the void opened beneath me
in the whiskey haze of a muggy apartment
as we waited for clear heads to ruin the moment
I'm sorry that I sent my pain,
real though it was,
across every modern mode of communication
as I writhed and howled in the caffeine night
as if it were any help to you
or even to me
I'm sorry that in abandoning pain
so too did I discard the joy;
would that I could drag this heart along the pavement,
collecting shards of indiscretion,
dripping madness once again
to beat in time with another
I'm sorry for endless apologies
and I suppose this isn't helping any
but life is folly and folly's embrace
is not reserved for young love's mistakes
Oh god what do I do
Today's important things:
In this song Cole Porter basically lays down something like 50 ice-burns on as many fools. The song was featured in the soundtrack to Fallout 3 along with many other "vintage" (that seems to be the new It word) tunes. The game world evokes a vision of the future as seen through the lens of 1950s America, post-nuclear apocalypse, and the soundtrack does a fantastic job of being ironic, witty, moody, and generally filling out the game's aesthetic. Games as art, someone kill me.
Big Milk is reminiscent of Björk's musicbox musings (frosti, Scatterheart), but with a kind of weird tension. The cascading bells and marimbas more or less tickle the auditory cortex into submission, if you're into that. This song is a good example of the level of complexity that suffuses Dan Deacon's better work, which is easy to miss if you simply look at him as "ironic chiptune trash for hipsters" (note: I have never thought of him this way, but I know people who do).
...
Onto life's travails. I'm in residence on an organic farm in Colorado which is currently for sale (the farm). Someone is buying it next Friday, someone who made serious bank in the pharmaceutical industry. He has deep pockets and is looking for a toy business, and he reportedly has been talking about fruit trees and new greenhouses and solar power and all kinds of neat things. He also accompanied us on a tour of an Eliot Coleman-inspired farm near Silt, CO, and I expect that he'll be interested in implementing some of the practices seen there. Hence, there could be really cool stuff in the future, provided he actually gives a shit and isn't just looking to get some ostensible green tech into his portfolio for his ancestors to ooh and ahh over as though he didn't just ship a bunch of -houses and tools from China to grow Wal-Mart herbs.
Now, our internships aren't in danger but just what the workdays to come will require of us we do not know. Obviously, this buyer's intentions are mere speculation until he gains formal ownership and actually starts telling us to do things. I'll have to do some investigating and probing of my own, rather than relying on the voluminous chatterings of beloved coworkers, in figuring out where, if anywhere, I'll fit in long-term. On the one hand, there might be an opportunity for an honest-to-god grown-up job on the farm. On the other hand, the Fort pays pretty well, will continue to do so, and has invested too much in training me to be a shops badass to fire me, and the only bad part of the job is interacting with tourists (which, granted, is about 80% of the job).
Waaaaah, I don't know which great job to work at in which awesome state for the duration of the coming glorious summer. A bloo. Bla bloo. Bla #firstworldproblems.
Seriously though, it's a hard decision made harder by uncertainty and rampant rumormill misinformation. Stay in Colorado, farm like a motherfucker, and become a hardened high-altitude road cyclist with a six-pack and an awful Mick tan, or move to Minnesota, again, and cruise chicks in vintage clothes on my Deep-V rims (by which I of course mean "do a trackstand at a red while waiting for girls to notice me, and then look away sheepishly and pray frantically for a light change so I can avoid social interaction").
Decisions, decisions.
#firstworldproblems
So I have a group of friends I hang out with on an antiquated chat protocol named IRC, and we tend to complain about life much as non-allopatric friends would. When one of us is complaining about something trivial, a chatter --often the complainer-- will pipe up, will drop a simple "#firstworldproblems" into the channel in admittance of the problem's trivial nature. The joke behind this is that our lives are so basically awesome that we have to bitch about the good aspects in order to somehow find a balancing aspect to the other parts of life, which are great. "Oh, my house is outdated and I want to sell it" may be a common lament in the present HGTV-infused housing market, while like 90% of Haiti is stapling shelters together out of corrugated tin. "I got a pay cut" but a quarter of Detroit is furiously attempting to re-learn a high school band instrument in hopes of preempting the majority of the burgeoning busker cottage industry.
I feel like we're all guilty of this to some extent, and that it's not any reflection on our characters, or restraint, or bootstrapability, but rather an expression of that fact that humans are constantly striving for more than their present field of view allows. We live in a nation where, for the most part, if you have a heart attack in a restaurant, there will be at least a couple of qualified EMTs flagging down the concierge within 5-10 minutes. If you get cancer, your odds are somewhat less optimistic, but look back a few decades! 1918 was a massive flu epidemic that killed literally millions. Today we wring our hands over the Swine Flu (H1N1 to the less literarily disposed) which lays at our feet a fatality rate that could practically be dismissed as a rounding error.
As near as I can figure it, the universe is primarily a massive and internally consistent machine. It operates under a large handful of general and necessary laws which govern its tiniest elements, and from there are derived the multitude of reactions and interactions of matter which manifest our existence in the midst of the void. We are massively complex biological machines. We arrived at the doorstep of a universe striving for meaning, and we confounded it. Consciousness' own nature eludes us, and our chemical brains only have so much of a lifespan in which to make the connections that tie us to reality. We stand on the shoulders of giants, struggling for balance; our arms flail rhythmically above the gulf of nonexistence, and it does get terribly hard to take notes in such a position.
Christmas Tidings
On Christmas Eve, amidst family drama of numerous species, I departed from New Richmond (the tundra) and made my way into the warm bosom of Roseville, my home town, for some mild festivities. I have a good friend who is into expressions of spirituality and communion and so on, so we decided to go to the midnight Mass at St. Agnes. They had a full orchestra and a choir in the lofted pit behind and above our seats that more or less pressurized the building with choral sounds. We had hoped to see a pure Latin mass, i.e., Pre-Vatican II and back when you got your religion delivered to your own personal ass in a wash of ancient gibberish and cannibalistic subtext, but it turned out to be Latin only for a handful of chants and responses. Still, the music was very good, and we were inebriated, and there is a lot you can find joy in when you're a bit altered.
The priest, for his sermon or whatever it was, went on about the historical church, Back In The Day, and how they did things. Apparently there is a journal from the 4th century which describes a service on a Christmas Eve in the Middle East. The service was held at midnight, and was followed by a 5 mile walk, by torchlight, to another church for the sunrise service. The priest mentioned all of the modest riches of the church and the spirit of community and the intimacy, and said that when you think about it the church today is not so different. Point of contention: transportation. In the 4th century they walked to the church, and today we all drove in vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. People will drive 3 blocks to the store -- in June -- for a gallon of milk these days. You try and get all these tired, middle-aged knowledge workers to walk 5 goddamn miles after a long-ass church service, especially when the light at the end of the tunnel is another long-ass church service. Point of contention: The modern church definitely revels in the generosity of the Lord to a slightly greater extent than it did even as late as the 4th century.
Anyways we did the silent penitent dance, kneeling when cued, standing, sitting, looking sheepishly at each other as the program led us through another interruption to rouse us from any unauthorized somnolent meditation. Combined with the incense and the relatively soft music, it might seem that the very environment of the mass was designed to instill in one the inner conflict that seems so to plague the modern Catholic, the impossibly old battle between satisfaction and self-denial, the warm embrace of sleep so near, so late in the hours, and yet there is a centuries-old ritual that you are in the middle of which refuses to allow you a moment's too-quiet reflection.
We left as the communion's procession began, because I am all for anthropology at this point in life but I pretty much know what a line of white people looks like.
We even made it home without getting stuck as often as we did on the way to the service.