St Nicholas, 1957

I have been waiting all day since yesterday morning to find out what the honest and responsible position was but I guess that is not to be revealed.  I guess you just meant that one should go about having sex in an honest and responsible manner, as one should go about everything in life, as Beagles always does, and as I always say I do.

Let's catch up then.  The bible is pretty useless as far as finding advice to run your life.  Money can't buy you love and it is too bad because money is easy and love is hard. 

I had read the story about the Michigan congressman claiming he was being blackmailed by a male prostitute to somehow obfuscate the affair with the congresswoman, and there was some kind of annoyed whistle-blower staffer involved.  I don't know why this story is not getting bigger coverage.  I love these kinds of stories.

In other matters, I believe we agreed that cannibalism is ok as long as you think there is nothing wrong with it, but not if you think there is.  Rationalizing and reasoning are two entirely different things.

So let's go to St Nicholas in 1957.  We both turned twelve that year.  I would vaguely put that as the year I started thinking about things.  The Catholics, you know I always felt that it was their world and we were just living in it.  Those big old churches were everywhere, and they were portals to a whole mysterious code of right and wrong and eternal life.  They were like the part of the museum where they keep the mummies, not that I ever stood foot in one of them, they scared me to death, those nuns in those big black habits and those priests in their outlandish display of hats, omigod the hats.  And all we had was that dinky little Elsdon Methodist church singing The Old Rugged Cross off key in the shadows of the cathedrals.

But for all that, outside of not knowing all those arcane laws, which truth be told our Catholic pals didn't seem to think much about, except to remember it was Friday before Uncle Ken could talk them into getting the pepperoni pizza, we didn't seem to think that differently from them.

The mid fifties on the southwest side were a time of rules, there was a rule for everything and it was up to you to pay attention to them and follow them and nobody would think you were a weirdo, and you could lead a pretty good life with a nice wife and a tv and a car.

You know morality, and here i mean something deeper than do onto others, which comes straight from the heart and is more a feeling than a philosophy, gets pretty complicated pretty quickly if you think about it, and then if you throw in that list of don'ts, no sex (outside of procreation), drinking, cannibalism, graven images, etc, and things like the nature of god, well it just gets really hard for a feller to figure out how do you keep out of that fiery lake.

That's what you have a priest for, to take on that heavy burden, not unlike Christ on the cross.  You know i always thought that part was way overblown.  Christ knew he wasn't going to die, he knew he was going straight back to Heaven.  It was probably painful, but three days of pain, what are they against eternity? 

Anyway you didn't have to worry your mortal little head about that, there was a rule for everything right down to that slice of pepperoni on a Friday night, all you had to do was follow the rules, which were a little constricting.  Why were all those things you wanted to do against the rules?  Why had God crafted you in such a way that you wanted to do all these things that were against the rules?