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For the record, this is being written Sunday night. The internet connection is down, though, so it won't be actually posted 'til sometime Monday. But it really is being written on Sunday. Just so you know.
So. Nice weekend, huh? It was fuckin' beautiful here in Memphis, and the rest of the country, as far as I could tell. Fuck winter! I think the cold weather is here now, though. The wind was blowing hard when I went to Sonic earlier.
Friday night Sonya and I wallowed in our status as no-longer-broke-couple. We went out to eat at Don Pablo's, a Mexican joint in the suburbs that came highly recommended by James and Jen, who were with us. It was spicy! And the Dos Equis was good and cold. We ate and ate.
Then, it was over to the Malco Majestic to see Dogma, the latest Kevin Smith opus.
A word here about Dogma. I thought it was great. While Sonya and I agree that the writing wasn't nearly as sharp as Chasing Amy (this was, apparently, the first thing Kevin ever wrote) it was still very, very good and better than most movies out there. Smith has a way with dialogue. It might bother a stray Catholic or two, but I think it would more likely make them consider things long and hard. It certainly did me. Without the big names and special effects this is a smart, funny and very introspective look at the director's view of religion. I thought it was touching and strangely sweet. It's obvious Smith was very concerned that his beliefs, in the framework of this story, were stated very clearly. This is the declaration of someone who's spent some sleepless nights pondering the issues of his own faith.
And this made me think: where do I stand, religion-wise? I was raised nominally Southern Baptist, with ten years of indoctrination in Catholic and Church of Christ schools. I'm familiar with a wide range of conservative belief, I assure you. Still, I'm not a terribly religious person. I couldn't tell you the last time I went to church that wasn't for a wedding. 1995, maybe?
Here's my thing. I know people - coworkers, family, people I love and admire - who talk about "talking to God" and, more importantly, how God talks to them. How can that be? Shouldn't someone who has a direct line to God be a prophet? A preacher? A leader of God's people? Does God really chat with all these people about selling their house or how to raise their kid or how to deal with coworkers?
I believe in God, but I don't know that there's a God, if you catch my meaning. I have seen or heard no evidence that God exists. People talk about having faith and knowing that God exists in the same sentence. Maybe this is just semantics, but how can you do both? If you know - and by knowing I'm assuming you mean you have proof, even if it's just the voice of God in you head saying, "yo, big guy, I'm here!" - that God exists then you don't need faith, right? Faith is belief in something without overt evidence. I have faith that God exists. I can't prove it to you, though. Does that make me less of a believer? I can say without hestation that God has never spoken to me, and I've never received any verification that God has heard what I've said to him. If God should speak to me, I'll tell the world about it.
Maybe that's why those crazy guys stand on the sidewalk, yelling about the judgement of the Lord. They're not crazy, they're just trying to get the message out. And here at the end of the twentieth century anyone standing around insisting that God talks to them will be ignored.
Yesterday afternoon was fun! Sonya and I slept late, then we got up, drove through McDonald's and took our lunch to Overton Park. We horked down some meatless cheeseburgers (and burger from McDonald's without meat taste exactly the same - what's up with that?) and then we went to the zoo.
I love the zoo. The Memphis Zoo is old, but it's changed so much in the past ten years. Where it was pretty primative in the eighties (lots of bars and tiny outdoor pens) now it's got state-of-the-art enclosures and it's really, really nice. The big cats and the primates have all moved out of their old buildings and into big new outdoor areas and it has made all the difference in the world.
They also have a nifty new thing called Animals of the Night, which is a big windowless building that's kept dark so you can see all the nocturnal animals doing their thing. You can't see them very well, 'cause it's dark, but you can see enough. And the bat run, with hundreds of bats flying back and forth and eating fruit, is not to be missed.
Call me a traditionalist, though, but I like the bears. The bears have old style rock areas, with a nice big pool and a cave in the back. There's a deep pit between the bears and the people, but it didn't seem terribly wide yesterday. To me, it looked just about right to provide a challenging (but do-able) jump for a grizzly bear.
There were three grizzly bears. One sat back on his butt like a person, grabbing his back feet with his front feet and stretching. then he reclined, front feet resting on his knees, looking very comfortable. All he needed was a beer and remote control and he would have looked uncomfortably like me.
The other two grizzlies weren't so pleasant. They both stood on the very edge of their areas, staring coldly at the people watching them. One in particular stood in one spot, staring at Sonya and I. Every once in a while the other mean one would come up to him and talk for a second.
"Go ahead, man," he urged, "you can make it. It's not that far. And those people will be so sweet. If you can make it across I'll come right behind you and we'll just swallow people 'til we're stuffed."
The bears didn't make their escape attempt. Not while I was there, anyway.
After the zoo Sonya and I went to Toys R Us. We've adopted some kids for Christmas, and I can safely say that there's nothing more satisfying than filling up a shopping basket full of toys.
Today? Not dick. I ate pizza and watched the football.
Saints win!
And now we commence the Monday-written portion of the entry. Please enjoy yourself.
In the last entry I recommend Young's Double Chocolate Stout as a fine beer. Let me clarify: I'm speaking of the draft version only. The stout in the bottle is a fairly generic dark, with only a hint or two of the rich chocolaty candy-like wonderfulness that is its draft counterpart. Find a bar that serves it, then order it there.
Not that I'm not drinking the version in the bottle. I did buy it, after all.
Okay, first thing: I was looking at some journal-related sites today (Diarist.net and Metajournals; it's interesting - journals are updated often, these sites can't seem to get their shit together enough to update every few months) and I put together the criteria for a journal I'm likely to like:
Let me know if you read some of these; I try to hunt around every once in a while but there's just so much crap out there it's hard to sift through.
And, while on the subject of journals: do you think it would be in poor taste if I started writing this journal as if I were a caring, concerned parent and Roxy was my developmentally challenged five year-old?
"Roxy bit someone again today, and she'll only walk on two feet if we offer her ice cream. The rest of the time she goes around on all fours. And she refuses to use the bathroom; she'll only pee outside."
Just a thought.
I went to the grocery store this evening after work and ran into Heather, a girl I went to college with who has also migrated to Memphis. Running in to her set off all manner of college memories, like these:
The Biggest Zit Ever: I have a zit under the surface of the skin just above my upper lip. It probably won't develop further. But once upon a time...
Picture it, if you will: December, 1990. Hendrix College, one of three colleges in Conway, would have parties at the Greenhouse, an unfinished storage building in some farmer's field. These parties consisted of a U-Haul trailer full of kegs and lots of dance music. These parties ended when the cops showed up.
The weekend before finals that semester Sonya came to visit, along with Jon and Donnie. We, along with several other friends, all went to a Hendrix Greenhouse party. Late in the night Sonya went to kiss me and a yelped in pain.
This, friends, was no ordinary blemish. It sat just inside my left nostril. By Sunday evening it had swollen to fill that nostril entirely, cutting off half my breathing. Of course I was too ugly to even look at and I couldn't touch it without my eyes tearing up.
"It's not content to just ruin my looks," I told my friend Christie, "it wants world domination as well."
Late on Sunday night I knew I couldn't wait any longer, and I certainly couldn't take my finals with this horrid thing attached to my face. I sterilized a needle with fire and alcohol, took a deep breath and jammed it through the hideous thing.
For a second, I thought my entire face was going to come off. The gout of blood and pus that gushed forth was truly upsetting.
But then it was gone and I felt much better. Harold 1 - Acne 0.
Hocked CDs: No so much a single memory as an observation. Sonya and I would constantly join those "Fifty CDs For A Penny" clubs. Then, when times got tight, we'd go to the pawn shop and sell those motherfuckers. We've probably sold more CDs than most people ever own. I sometimes wonder just what we'd own if we never started selling CDs, but there's no use living in the past.
Pornography: Through various means in college I acquired several porno tapes. That's individual tapes, mind you; each one had several pornographic features on it. They're gone, now. Sonya saw fit to loan them to our friend Donnie. While Donnie is truly a wonderful guy loaning something to him is like flinging it into a black hole - it's gone and there is no possibility of it ever coming back. Best to foget about it.
Anyway, about that porn: one of the movies was set at a place called (I kid you not) Camp Quim. Camp Quim was, apparently, where rich men sent their horny twenty-something daughters in the late seventies/early eighties. In this movie, you see, there was this huge carved wooden sign that said "Camp Quim." I always thought that would be a hell of a prop to have in your garage.
"That's got a story behind it," you could tell your neighbor.
And man, those turn-of-the-eighties chicks had great big beavers, didn't they? I swear, they'd have hear from hip to hip and from navel to knees.
"Hell, baby, what do you go swimming in? Overalls?" I mean, come on. Groom a little bit. The movie was, actually, pretty sexy - except for the huge hairy pussies.
"Hey, Chewbacca, what are you doing between that woman's...oh. That's not Chewbacca."
This particular tape had several more recent movies on it, too. Besides playing up the difference between hairy cunts versus shaved twats (I bet the search engines will go crazy over that) there were several between-feature bumpers advertising the station they were recorded off of, one of those satellite porn networks that were so common once upon a time. One of these bumper segments was highlights from lots of different porno movies edited to go along with the 1812 Overture. You can imagine what happened on each and every cannon shot.
Speaking of vaginal nicknames, Jen and James and Sonya and I got into reeling them off on the way to see Dogma the other night. We agreed that "cooze" is a nasty one, while "cunt" and "pussy" are both serviceable.
"Slit in the box! Slit in the box!" Jen said gleefully over and over. I think she liked that one.
And any oyster-like bivalve-type sea creature can lend its name to the cause.
Bearded clam.
Drain the anemone.
Grab the geoduck.
We're gross, aren't we?
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