Proverbs 30, Verses 2 & 3:
"I am too stupid even to call myself a human being!
I cannot understand man, let alone God."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
Orson Welles once said, "I don't pray because I don't want to bore God". I guess I feel kind of the same way. I suppose, in some sort of perverted, disorganized and unfortunate way, these blog posts could be construed as a type of prayer. Something is created, if you want to be kind and call it that, and it is sent out, maybe sent up. Prayers are pleas, right? They're missives intended to be heard, if not heeded.
Hear us, O Lord. We beseech you and so forth.
I'm doing the same thing, if artlessly so. Hear me, O Best Beloved. I beseech you and so forth.
Whether we're secular or pious, we've been sending things out, and maybe up, for a very long time. Whether it's been psychotic scribblings on walls or Haydn's "Lord Nelson Mass", a tumultuous and terrifying play about Vietnam by David Rabe, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet on a deadline or a whistleblowing expose of greed or incompetence or worse-- it's all prayer. Every raspy, erotic exhalation and every turn signal and each creak of the rocking chair and each diaper change. Every cough and every tear.
Every, every minute.
And I suppose that's why people think they need religion because, without it, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. We're like fumbling with buttons in the dark. We're too stupid even to call ourselves human beings. We're lazy and scared and there's a mess on the desk and dog shit out back and twins tenuously asleep in the next room and everything is precarious and we're all holding it in or holding back or waiting for the next thing.
What is the next thing going to be?
I remember when my brother-in-law died of cancer. He was thirty-four. And the babies had just been born. And I was thinking, what could it be? The next thing. Even in the couple of months from his diagnosis to his death, there were many "next things". More MRIs. More scans. More tumors. More texts. More calls. Every time the phone rang or went "bleepboop" it was bad. It was so bad. And I don't think I ever prayed for him. Not formally. No Hebrew. I mean-- he wasn't Jewish, so maybe it wouldn't have gotten translated right anyway. But there was plenty of prayer. My kind of prayer.
This.
DO YOU HEAR ME UP THERE YOU FUCK?
I love it. You pray to the guy who did it. Hilarious. A scream. A howler. Crazygonuts. Fucking phonies.
The high holidays are coming again. They always do. We're going to go to services and march around with the children behind the torahs. It is what it is. I don't believe in it any more than I believe in Santa Claus. Hell, I believe in Santa Claus more-- at least I get to play him at the psych hospital. And read "A Christmas Carol". I love that. There's no prayer more prayery than that. Dickens in the Day Room.
It doesn't heal a soul. It doesn't do a thing. But it does what art is supposed to do: take you out of the place you are in, for a moment or two. Take you out of yourself. Out of your own psyche. Your own troubles. Your own shit. It does it for me as much as it does it for them.
My children are having what my wife calls "The Language Explosion". In laymen's terms: they're talking their little asses off.
mamadadacarshoessipcupuppacrackercookiewatercookieavodacoballbeepbeepbearblankieandalltherestofit
One day, they're going to start asking me about God and religion and humanity and why people use nerve gas on each other and why the former president put a cigar in that idiot's vagina and why the neighbor doesn't like us and why are there little shiny bits in the street that glisten like diamonds and why diamonds are a girl's best friend and why they don't have any friends and what were we like before they were born and what happens when we die and why do birds suddenly appear and bluebirds say.
What the fuck do they say?
What the fuck do I say?
What will I say?
I'm kind of hoping they befriend an old man. Not a creepers old man with a dirty trench coat and a comb-over and a ubiquitous white van, but a wizened old man, all crinkly behind his gold-rimmed glasses and his well-worn wingtips and his faded corduroys who'll sit on his porch and tell them stories about the way it was and he'll have clever, quaint, slightly biting, deadpan and droll way of looking at the world. And they'll soak in his words and his wisdom and they'll repeat his aphorisms at school and their teachers will call them "old souls" and they'll know things-- they'll just know.
You know?
Because I don't. I just don't know. And I know that's supposed to be one of the bravest things you can possibly say, but these are troubled times. They're always troubled times. And I just don't know.
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