Paula's House of Toast

The end of my favorite limb of the river path comes out across the street from a low, stucco building that formerly housed a company whose name, emblazoned in magnificent 3-D metal caps across its facade, was

Q U E E N S C R E W.

Unfortunately, the business folded before I thought to photograph the wonderful sign. Renovations are underway. The windows are covered in milky plastic, and someone has unfurled a flag in a odd lamination between the panes. It looks incarcerated, suffocated, pinned down like a beautiful, living moth. The pResident's personal lawyer, Mr Gonzales, has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint." The nation recoils in utter horror and dismay at what has been allowed to happen in our name. At what has been done in our name. At the elective war that our unelected leader has undertaken, a war based on lies and wild ideologies and incompetant assumptions. Where are the flowers and the chocolates ? I keep hearing Robert Oppenheimer's lament "I have become death, destroyer of worlds." I keep hearing our pResident's lipsmacking boast, "I am a war president."

DK saw an even better sign on a bike ride yesterday.

P R I E S T C L E A N S E R S

All up and down our street small signs have been appearing: Save Sacred Heart Church. The Church of The Holy Armadillo apparantly has its head on the diocesan chopping block.



There's downsizing afoot; the church is selling off properties to pay for fifty years of covering up priestly crimes against children.

Is there a way out of this great darkness



and confusion ?

Yesterday, according to the Globe, Governor Mitthead once again "kept a low profile."

Let's call it what it is. He's in hiding. Hunkered down in his marriage bunker, the hastily retrofitted MEMA command and control center in Framingham. If this is not a Massachusetts Emergency that needs Managing, what is ? He's been poring over rogue marriage license applications. Plotting his next discriminatory salvo. Injunctions ! Against the clerks ! Because (cue the loathsome spokesperson)

The Governor cannot pick and choose what laws he enforces.

The stench of the 1913 law is overwhelming. A dead fish. An outlandishly over-ripe cheese. A corpse. The Governor has been squirting it with Febreze.

"Can't we keep this thing somewhere else ?"

"No, sir. No one else will have it."

"What about Finneran ? He's strong-arming his boys on the hill to cut its repeal amendment out of the budget bill. Can't he keep it for awhile ?"

"No, sir. Remember your deal ? He makes the repeal go away, you keep custody of the..the..thing. You know."

Mrs. Romney had put her foot down. "Get that unGodly thing out of my house !" He'd stashed it in the Land Rover for a few nights, but the windows had steamed with a greasy yellow miasma whose phosphorescence had prompted a visit from the Belmont neighborhood association.

"I must say, old chap," Arthur Fonebone-Betwixtbetween said, affably, "the Rover's looking a bit peckish."

The Governor's back hurt. He'd slept on a broken army-issue disaster cot. The damned thing had been off-gassing mercilessly all night. The press was nipping at his heels. He needed a haircut. His GI man had tripled the dose of his Little Purple Pill to no avail.

"We need some SUPPORT, here." he whined. "Can't we get that Phelps guy on board ? You know, that nice minister from Topeka ? Make sure you get out there today and issue some statements, something about how I don't have the luxury of picking and choosing what laws I enforce."

"Uh, sir," his spokesman muttered, looking up from his cellphone," we've just received word that there's a crowd of 10,000 people on the statehouse steps."

"Finally ! Decency triumphing at last, Eric ! Marriage is for manly men and womenly women ! I knew they'd come around ! "

"Uh, no sir. It IS a bunch of men and women, married couples, but it appears they're, um, asking to be arrested. Making a mass confession of some sort -- claiming they've all violated Section 34 of Chapter 272 of the General Laws -- they claim they've all committed the abominable and detestable crime against nature ."

"What the heck is that ?"

"Uh, sir..." He whispered in the Governor's ear. The gubernatorial cheeks turned scarlet.

"Omigod, people actually DO that ?"

"Well, sir, remember Bill and Monica ?"

"Well I'll be cornswoggled. So that's what they meant by blow job ! I always thought it was that, um, cigar thing. Say, is that cigar thing legal in Massachusetts ?"

The Governor brightened visibly. There was hope. There was always hope. "Put Tom Reilly on it. Or maybe Finneran can have his boys amend the anti-smoking law..."

It was hard to hold back the tears when watching the local newscasts yesterday -- happy tears for once -- at the sight of so many long term couples, many with children, finally allowed to wed. How can anyone witnessing such joy possibly continue to object to broadening the right to wed ?

Every time Dubya opens his mouth he brays about people who "hate freedom" -- and yet, paradoxically, here we have a quantum increase in the amount of freedom in the world, and Dubya take sour umbrage.

"Marriage is between a man and a woman," he sniffs. Another one of of his stock phrases, issuing forth in predictable reiteration as from a doll whose string is pulled.

And today the Mitthead has reportedly asked several city clerks to submit to him all the applications they approved yesterday so that he can cull out and void those given to out of state couples. Invoking that nasty little KKK of a law (circa 1913) designed to prevent interracial couples from marrying in Massachusetts when their home states had anti-miscegenation laws. A law so historically odious and repugnant that just the thought of it still being on the books would send any decent Governor to the legislature with a plea that they repeal it immediately as a defilement. But no.

Talk about raining on the parade.

I'm sure one of his loathsome spokespeople are ready to lament how the Guv can't pick and choose which laws he enforces.

I'm still waiting for Gubernatorial Enforcement Squads to show up at Fenway Park and enforce that old statute against dissing the ump. There are plenty of other statutes that aren't enforced becuase they are outmoded, unconstitutional and downright silly. Like the one about contumeniously disrespecting the Holy Ghost. Or having oral sex. Or living together before marriage.

I'm sick of his disingenuous claims about "enforcing the law."

What he's doing is campaigning. Pandering. Sucking up to Dubya and the RNC so blatantly that he's violating all of the remaining anti-sodomy laws at once, oral and anal, not to mention contumeniously disrespecting human love and devotion.

It can't be said too often: Faubus, Wallace, Romney.

This is a joyful, historic morning. A victory for love, commitment and civil rights. Important legal protections will be extended to all families who desire them.

Meanwhile, the governor broods dyspeptically in his manse. His "loathsome $150,000 a year spokesperson" (damn, I love that epithet, RiaF,) pours him another skim milk with Pepto chaser. The governor has agita. Waterbrash. Pyrosis. Serious heartburn. Even the little purple pill whose makers so generouly donate year after year hasn't touched it. This travesty has happened on his watch. Desite his best efforts. Herculanean efforts.

The "loathsome $150,000 a year spokesperson" reassures the Governor that those heroic efforts have not gone unnoticed. Will not go unrewarded. Nor will his own, he hopes aloud. Why just this week he has uttered one of his most brilliantly stirring remarks, the one about what next, will those uppity Provincetown clerks let ten year olds get married ?

It's about time Massachusetts has done something progressive. It's certainly been coasting on its "Massachusetts Liberal" laurels all these past years under the Weld, Cellucci, Swift and Romney administrations. (Weld's liberal stands on gay and lesbian issues were in stark contast with the rest of his cut taxes, screw the poor, teach prisoners the joys of busting rock agenda.)

And schadenfreude is sweet.

The acolyte, a sturdy, blond crewcut boy of about 14, stood in front of the sparsely filled pews and said Look around. There is room for more here. What is the solution ? We must evangelize.

She cringed at the "E" word, associating it with well-fed, over-confident Republicans, and empty eyed doorstep proselytizers asking, "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior ?" The last time she'd attended church with any intentional regularity was when she was the boy's age. Her parents had long lapsed, so she'd walked the quarter mile to West Parish each Sunday, Bible in hand, avid for something she could not even articulate to herself. Salvation, resurrection, the Kingdom, the second coming -- it had all seemed impossibly complex and implausible. So she gave up.

It had taken nearly forty years -- a Biblically resonant number -- to get her back inside a church. And then only to perch skittishly on the edge of a side pew, burning with self-consciousness. And things weren't looking good. First, the bishops of this particular denomination had declared they could not permit its priests to solemnize gay marriage, putting the unity of the Church before all else. And now the "E" word. What was she doing there ?

Stay with your own tradition, the wise and kindly Teacher had advised.

But how ? she'd fired back in her imagination, It's so theistic and mediated ! After all, she'd spent her desert time investigating texts and practices that promised experience of the One, the Absolute, and that meticulously deconstructed the illusory and unsatisfactory nature of the phenomenal world. How could she possibly cope with a Trinity ? The old image of the fish on a bicycle kept occurring to her.

The wise and kindly Teacher probably smiled.

On the other hand, even the sparest of the systems she'd admired was rife with ritual and structure: robes, chants, ceremonies, refuges, lineages.

Maybe, she thought , all religions are simply languages, different ways of articulating -- expressing, participating in -- the mystery of being. Christ is, after all, the Word. The Logos. Spoken out of the divine fullness.

She'd tried to explain Christ to her skeptical and dismissive spouse, lapsed from a very different tradition.

Look at Christ as the incarnation -- God taking on suffering flesh -- what a symbol of love and compassion ! -- Christ is the living emblem of how we all participate in the Godhead --

Well, yes, but how many Christians actually see it that way ? Don't they simply want a way not to die ?

He'd be appalled if he knew where she'd snuck off to these past few Sunday mornings. She could hear him now. Church ? You're kidding, right ? Why ?

A very good question, dearest. Why, indeed.

In the resonating wake of the "E" word, she squirmed on the hard pew. She'd awakened that morning hung over with anxiety from the preceeding day. Mundane stuff, nothing mystical or ontological. Worries about her son and husband. About work. Old and new guilts. Her shortcomings: her hardheart. Her irrational resentments. Her selfishness. Her isolation. Her peevishness and childishness. Things she'd dismissed as mental constructs, devoid of intrinsic being. She'd brought it all with her to the dark, chilly sanctuary, and, once again, the morning had darkened, and the rain fell.

Then it struck her. She'd been playing a role. Telling herself a story. She was playing the spiritually sophisticated intellectual condescending to her own tradition. Who could teach those evangelizing, I (heart) Jesusing Christians a thing or two. What arrogance ! She felt ashamed. She sat there humbled in her brokenness, her lostness. She was the pilgrim, the petitioner, the wandering child.

Later, at the church door, the Priest remembered her. She identified herself a little: a visitor, from another denomination. Welcome, he said. Take your time. When you're ready, feel free to call with questions. Come as often as you need to. Find quiet here.

She thanked him, and slipped out into the rain.

Variants of such moments had come upon her since childhood, moments when the world seemed strange and unfamiliar, a dizzying newborn sensation, an ictus of jamais vu. After awhile she'd come to live with the mild accesses of disorientation. She's come to call them "the strangeness," and found descriptions in psychiatric texts and existential novels that reassured her they were within the continuum of human experience and not some menacing visitation unique to her. Sometimes, still, looking in the bathroom mirror, she is overtaken by the paradoxically familiar strangeness. Who is that ? Who am I ? How peculiar it all is ! How peculiar that the most ordinary thing -- being itself -- should feel so strange !

Life, of course, quickly resumes its ordinary face. She disengages from the gaze in the mirror, washes her hands, and moves on to the next task, blaming her temporal lobe, Sartre, stress, diet, Republicans, whatever post hoc propter hoc excuse seems cogent at the moment.

Who would have thought the strangeness could grow even stranger ?

She was sitting at her desk between patients. It was the depths of Friday afternoon. The afternoon caffeine boost had yet to kick in. Suddenly everything seemed to shift. The focus blurred, the gain was turned down. The digital image fractured, the zoom changed.

Everything seemed equivalent, absolutely fungible. Cut from the same cloth, made of the same stuff: membrane and ion. A diabolical synesthesia. Text reduced to one gutteral syllable of want. It was almost, but not quite, a transparency. More like a threadbaring, a wearing thin at the elbow points of being. Desk, pen, chart; the footfall of the roofers overhead, the slatted sunlight throught the blind; cool breeze and tobacco smoke through the window; boredom, anxiety, irritation; headache, dirty coffee cup; each thought, sensation, perception all the same, undifferentiated brain stuff, from love to terror, from trash to art, from self to beloved.

She covered her face with her hands, covering the world's and her own nakedness in one oddly prayer-like gesture.