Stream of Consciousness

[ER]

Anyone want to write something in a free-flowing stream of consciousness style here? Aw go on, give it a try and you might discover you'll always been in love with your third-grade babysitter.

Something like:

I've always found cats slightly intimidating because they clearly are sure they are better than me, and sometimes I wonder if they're right since I could never be sure I was cool if I had to "go to the bathroom" in a sandbox in laundry room corner, but as I have a pizza in the oven right now I can't elaborate so instead I'll recall that I had a killer sandcastle going when we were on a beach in Florida in 1984 but I took so long constructing it (it was to be as tall as me) I never got to finish it since we had to leave, tide was coming in, my dad said "El, get up here or you'll get washed to Cuba," and I think that sense of disappointment about not completing my project carried on for all the later Reagan years, maybe it still does, residing deep in my consciousness as unfinished business, rather like when I passed up a chance to throw a live chicken to an alligator in the fall of 2003 (oh gee a breakthrough, see this works) and I wouldn't because that was mean but I only bought the chicken another thirty seconds of life since this Florida good ol' boy who was with my co-worker's former school friend and he unhesitatingly tossed the placid chicken into the canal full of four to six foot alligators, who lunged at the chicken so it did not last five seconds in that water, and now I have to dry my last remaining dog off when she comes in from the sprinkling rain and should I do that before the pizza is done or after that's the question so I will stop now

(I had no idea I was going to write any of that when I began. Kinda fun. But crap my pizza really is burning.)

[RCMerchant]

Most everything I write here is stream of conscious. Unless I am making list. Even when I review movie I don't really think about it.

I'll give it a try-except-I can't you just nulled that by saying "write stream of conscious". That means I have to plan what I write. So-No-this won't work for me. Unless I wake up in the middle of the night and post babbling s**t. And that would NOT be planned. Stream of Conscious-what the f**k does that mean? My concious stream is always running-sometimes it goes over a waterfall and crashes onto the rocks of reality and I feel like I AM alone in this f**king world. And i float like a dead fish tossed by a fisherman who just caught me for sport. And what then? NOTHING! Your gutted and scaled until you conform to the norm-and you have to suck theyre shriveled gray dicks untill they bless you with theyre money.

[RCMerchant]

Seriously ER-Im a drunk-I write my babbling drunk s**t all the time-I never think about anything unless it involves movies.
I'm drinking now.

[indianasmith]

Ok, here goes . . .


It's 10:30 and I really ought to go to bed but I want to finish reading these new posts here and play some DS3 and I really ought to write some more on the new chapter that I started and monkeys are funny but if I start writing this late I'll be up till midnight and 5:30 comes awfully early and if I play DS3 I won't know if my best friend writes me back or not and I could sneak upstairs and surf HBO for awhile but my wife is already asleep and I don't want to wake her but I like surfing through the movie channels and speaking of movies I need to watch BUBBA HO-TEP sometime between now and Saturday when I have to take it back to the Forbidden Gallery which is a decent place to rent bad movies but OH MAN I miss Hastings so much, why did they have to close, and why can't Greenville get a bookstore to replace them?  At least there is Half Price Books in Rockwall and I have a signing Saturday but I never have time to shop there when I am trying to sell books and my phone just chirped is  that her writing me or is it another stupid FB notification or a Nigerian banker who needs my help getting $40 million out of the country does anybody ever fall for those well I'll never find out if I keep typing this so

[RCMerchant]

ER--I think most folks who answer anything on a dying forum just spout any f**king thing that comes into their head. I know I do. No regrets. Nobody REALLY knows me-or cares. If I died tommorow-the world keeps spinning and fanboys will keep plugging away about arcane films nobody watches or even cares about in the real world.It's like the Led Zeppilin song-"if I leave here tommorrow-" nobody cares about our puny scribblings on an obscure website where the very founder of said gave up-because he realized the real world needs attention-MEANWHILE-his drooling lackeys cling to a dead horse like flys on s**t.
SO! Is that "stream of whatthef**k"enuff?
PS-Im one of those "Lackeys" clinging to a dead fantasy dream that "I am important. What I say means something."
Hahaha.
Theres a stream of f**ked up thought.


I dont give a rats ass if anyone reads anything. I love you all. I don't come here to be important-I come here like I would go to a freind-to unload and enjoy the good people. I'm an ass and unload too much sometimes-but you folks are the best. And I love you.

[indianasmith]

We come here to see what RC Merchant is going to say next! LOL

Oh, yeah, and sometimes we talk about movies, too.

[Pacman000]

This site still is a top result for the key words "bad movies" on Google and DuckDuckGo. Checked yesterday. Probably same results in Bing and Yahoo too, but I haven't tried them in awhile.

StompTokyo? That's a dead site.

https://duckduckgo.com/html/

https://www.google.com/search?q=Bad+movies&btnG=

Let's try Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex while we're at it:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=bad+movies&qs=&form=QBLH

https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AwrBT4O7p7pZ41wATSpy.9w4?nocache=1&nojs=1&ei=UTF-8&pvid=QuJQOzk4LjHkCiBmWa3EpgDxMTA3LgAAAABh3ZdC&gprid=&fr=sfp&p=bad+movies

Yuck. Look at that URL. Just a mess.

https://www.yandex.com/search/touch/?text=bad+movies&msid=1505404944.74302.20939.27948&mda=0

[ER]

Why is this post here in a stream of consciousness topic instead of Anecdotes or Random thoughts? I guess because it's less well-punctuated.

Overnight I was inflicted with a rare species of insomnia, rare in that I typically sleep fine when I can go to sleep, which I can all except maybe a couple nights out of an entire month, but last night I fell asleep and some time later I was awakened by my husband mumbling, "Turn over" and I realized I was mostly lying on him, back-facing him, all the way on the right side of our bed, and that's extreme even for me, a mobile sleeper, rolling around a lot compared to his composure and rare movement.

So I laid there in the near darkness for I don't know how long, unable to get back to sleep, maybe a couple hours, and I finally gave up, got up, did a few things around the house, realized I did truly need to sleep more than I did,

so I sat down and read the Bible, the King James no less, to show how serious I was about needing to dose off, I began with Old Testament genealogies and census accounts in that archaic 17th century language, begat begat begat all extolling the fertility of Hebrews, and nothing worked,

so I turned to the Gospel of Mark and read it for actual effect and got into it, which was technically the last thing I wanted, an interesting read, and finally I gave up and stayed up, but had no energy to do anything constructive

so I cursed a little and just went with it and sat around waiting on my family to get up, usually my littlest is the blue ribbon winner for rising earliest, gee I'm glad I accidentally got knocked up and had her, I toyed with waking her up and seeing if she wanted to make waffles with me or take a walk in the (VERY) pre-dawn, but I didn't though I'm certain she'd have had no mercy on me were I the one sleeping (five year olds can be absolute sociopaths, she taps me none too gently on the forehead to wake me up)

so I killed time, ruing the lost sleep and even the lost productivity, but I did think.

I thought about once when I was sixteen I'd stepped through weeds over a rusting chain link fence that was being held down for me late in the night and was standing on a cliff in this park near a university with someone and he wasn't worried about the fact limestone crumbled with little advance warning because he said our footing was solid and I suppose it was, but we were easily eighty feet above a sheer drop onto (again, not reassuring) fallen limestone boulders, and he said the trick about heights is you quit thinking of the what-ifs, you take reasonable caution and then you enjoy them because they do have a lot to enjoy, the view, the thrill, the uniqueness, being somewhere most people won't go,

and that was true, it was beautiful there in a tingly-palmed hey I suddenly hafta pee way gazing southward at the twinkling city lights of the basin.

He was closer to the edge than I was but he said, "Ever known me to do anything stupidly risky?"

(Ask me in another five years.)

I said I guess not, which was not entirely true, he was out late with me which was risky, he'd attended the University of Michigan even though he was from Ohio, which was risky during football season, he went to Jesuit school and was an intelligent boy and therefore recruitable by the Jesuits, and that was really risky,

but he said,"Then why would you think I'd start now? I wouldn't do anything with you that was dangerous. Besides as long as we don't deliberately leap off we're perfectly safe."

PeRfEcTlY sAFe

I asked what if we tripped and fell and he said, "Trip? What are we, toddlers? You're sure-footed. I've seen you leap onto park benches without breaking stride."

Well that made me think of a time I did fall and fall hard, and nearly died as a result and I think he knew I was thinking that so he did step back but looked at me like I'd maybe moved down a letter grade in his book, which left me all the rest of that night feeling like a wuss for worrying when everything turned out fine since above almost anything else in life I wanted him to think well of me I wanted him to think I was this fearless Celt who was at least his equal, and he was not afraid of anything but I knew I was a fake if I tried to pretend nothing frightened me because lots of things did, the top of that list being afraid of not living up to his image of me

and you know that's the nature of life, isn't it? Risk/reward, risk-reward, risk and reward, they go hand in hand, and he had a point in his attraction to heights, there is a lot of reward lost in life by those unwilling to take risks and that is probably what is in the minds of those insane Russian kids you see on YouTube hanging one-handed off some ninety-story radio tower. Sure they die sometimes but the thrill they must get when they don't, that must outdo any drug. I get that I just would not do that unless I was saving a loved-one's life or something because there is basically nothing I'd shirk at doing to save someone I loved.

But risk reward, my mind was going there, wasn't it? So let's go on

Which leads me to the time my father, in taking a significant risk for his employers in exchange for a reward, was nearly killed in Angola when I was a child, and he was working there with a Canadian company that was handling high-profit high-risk business deals with the Angolan government, which was basically controlled at the time by the Cubans, who were themselves being told what to do by the Soviets.

One day my dad was working and all was fine, money was good, the west African climate was terrible living conditions were...okay for a Third World setting, no flush toilets just these holes in the floor, lots of flies but they got HBO, believe it or not, even the bottled water was suspect, but the money WAS good, and the next a local man they dealt with, Milo, his name, a Jehovah's Witness and therefore anti-Communist, came hustling up and saying,

"You have to leave right now! They are coming for you all!"

So my father and his co-workers did what they'd drilled for and been ready to do for all the time they were there in that dangerous place, they ditched on the spot and fled with the man as well, Milo their paid lookout/informer, knowing if he stayed his life was forfeit for helping them, and the next thing my father knew, several hectic hours later, he was in Kinshasa, Zaire, having had to literally run to a car to reach an airfield and be flown along on a none-too-dependable prop plane with those co-workers who survived a police raid. They almost ran out of fuel and the flight was hell itself, second worst option only to staying behind.

Several of their Angolan employees, including women, were hauled away by police and never heard of again, and not all the North American workers made it through either, and a close friend of my father's, a man from Tennessee, was simply never heard from again, a man with a little girl about my age, a nice man,

and much later in the 1990s, after a change in governments, someone Dad knew there in Luanda, Angola told of the police ransacking everyone's apartments, the office, tearing everything out, beating up people who were guilty of nothing more than living next to the foreign workers, aka my father and the others, interrogating violently.

What had happened, they later learned, was the paranoid leftists running the city and nation in the 1980s, who were not fond of westerners in general, though still, like most Communists, hypocritically dealt with them out of economic interest, had been told by a Soviet asset active in Toronto that the Canadian company my dad was working with was a front operation set up by  the US to spy on and undermine the Angolan government, and that message from the Soviets in Toronto was all it took to activate their brutality, and a lot of people died, including nearly my father, who says it was more luck than anything that he was where he was in the office that day to be on-hand for the warning from that man.

If there is a God, as I believe there is, I should owe God the rest of my days for saving my father, and if there is not, then thank you Fate. As for he lived and others died, isn't that  a mystery as old as time?

They escaped by mere minutes, and I often think of that, I nearly lost my father as a little girl, all the memories we've had together for thirty-some years I never would have had, I would have grown up not knowing what exactly became of him but accepting he was dead, his bones in some unmarked tropical "grave" along with others, and that's bad enough but Jesus in a handbasket, that means my mother, who had one foot back home in the best of times, marrying and coming over at seventeen, that's insanity, really, would have taken me to that Holy Land the rest of the world calls the Republic of Ireland, and I would have had to grow up there going to an Irish f**king Mass every morning of my life, saying rosaries with my grandmother, getting beaten up on my my fat Irish cousin Magda instead of my hot American cousin Dana, getting threatened with the correction of the Magdalene Sisters every time I dared to breathe the wrong way, and dear God there is only so much horror my mind will take.

Which leads me back around to something I was thinking about this morning or overnight and that is if most stereotypes, however offensive, are true, then most cliches are as well, especially the one that says, "Make every day with your loved ones count."

In a world where far too many rules exist, that should be one of only a few etched deeply into our brains:

Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you

Wear clean underwear in case you're in an accident

Don't run with scissors

Don't believe him, he eventually will there no matter how many times he promises he won't

AND: Make each day with your loved ones count.

S.O.C. done, I now return to my normally shut mind.

[ER]

"Doooo you have the time/To listen to me whine?"

Reality, thy name is hunger. Evil, thy name is Bethany.

My godson, he of the many fears and issues, is spending the night with us/me tonight, so he can go to Oktoberfest with us all tomorrow, which is going to be a big deal since my parents are going as well, and in fact my oldest daughter is spending the night with them, very nice, and my mom is picking her up after school.

My daughter's parting comment before leaving this morning was, "Mom, please make sure HE does not get in my stuff or touch anything that's mine."

I told her I would and said I doubt he wanted to do that anyway, and it was an uncharacteristically stringent edict from my normally generous future nun there, but it is kind of indicative of the reaction my godson brings out in others, even adults. Not good, not good.

Maybe we should make him take up boxing, and then bribe the other fighter into taking a dive? Would that work twice?

But this SOC ramble is not about my godson, it's about me, containing lots of that beautiful 9th letter.

With a special guest appearance by my arch-enemy....Bethany. (Shudder and twitch.)

As for me, I am kind of loopy right now since I got gypped (or to be politically correct, I got "Romany'd") out of my Northern Indian lunch today because my godson's sissy grandmother had another weird "panic attack reaction" from her allergy medicine, which, in fairness, does say right on the bottle, "side effects, etc etc etc etc panic episodes and anxiety etc etc etc," so maybe she did  genuinely believe Roseanne was trying to break into her car and smother her under her breasts, but I think she just goes all runty (oops, typo) sometimes, especially where I am concerned and was all whiny and hey person who was going to buy lunch, come rescue me even though I'm a loathsome shrew whose claim to fame is she used to look like Cheryl Ladd in the 1970s and who once produced the most awesome human being Evelyn ever saw but I'm just a sneering troll today and I don't even live in the same zip code as you despite having a marriage certificate with our names on it, blahblahblah, me, me, me, no lunch for the starving, I'm worse than a war criminal.

She does not like me and yet another side effect that bottle could have said was, "makes Bethany happy when she can screw Evelyn out of something, be it a house or a lunch."

Sooo, screwed out of Indian food for the second time of late, not to mention, yes, literally denied a house years ago because of the same woman's high blood pressure fueled oh-I'm-going-to-lose-my-health-and-sanity protests, here I sit munching Muncho-s (what are the odds) and cheating one interns out of her Cheetos (a trend?) since they leave orange stains on fingers and Germans do not want orange fingerprints on their 40,000 announcement post cards we are sending off to der Fatherland and being paid 16.4 cents above postage and printing for each.

In other words, yes, I'm hungry, and it's the evil crone's fault.

"I'm going to get you, my pretty, and your little dog too". <---That quote comes from her autobiography, it really does, and since I did lose a dog recently, I think I may be next and hunger is her weapon.

Things Bethany has done against me include but are not limited to:

1995-2000: Being really mean from afar.

2000---present: Being even meaner from anear.

I swear, sometimes my life feels based on the Armenian starvation genocide of WWI, with Bethany being the Turks. You wanna talk Trails of Tears, people, did I mention I was supposed to go to lunch today? And now I'm not? And it's because of Bethany? Now I am this close, this close, to ordering lunch and actually having to pay for it myself, despite the fact I wore a dress, for the love of all creatures great and small, on casual Friday!?

If you've read this far, recall, I did warn you this was a whine.

Okay, I better get something because no way in heck am I going to try to face what lies ahead of me tonight (horrors) on an empty stomach and with low blood sugar. I might do something rash like make my godson close the door while he is in the bathroom, or not button his shirt for him before Oktoberfest's chicken dances.

So thank you, Bethany for making me have to pay for....my own lunch.

I guess there's a first time for everything.

[ER]

Okay, I ate. I'm closer to sane now. 

[Alex]

You know, hit men are not as expensive as most people think.

[ER]

when we go downtown today i will be nice to everyone even scientologists who come up and ask  me to take their personality test

i will be calm in the face of any and all thug mentality

i will give panhandlers the free store tokens and not real money but if one actually says to me i want to get drunk can you help i will buy him the largest beer oktoberfest sells

i will not stand outside a port o potty while my godson wizzes no matter what arguments and twists of logic he tries to employ there's nothing wrong with you lad you can pee by yourself

i will remember each day i spend with my mother is giving a gift since she will surely outlive me

i will be gracious when someone thinks she is my sister

i will think of my german ancestors on my father's side as purveyers of chocolate and music and philosophy not as the distant relatives of jew-beating wagers of world war

i will offer to eat one (1) bratwurst despite being a vegetarian if the person urging me to do so vows to grant me one undeniable request to be redeemed at the time of my choosing sometime between now and next oktoberfest

i will tell my oldest the father huber story when i show her the inside of saint xavier's church which is how in confession the venerable jesuit got to hear two sides of the same story from me and someone else yet had to walk a tightrope of not telling either what the other party had said since he did not want to burn in hell for breaking the seal of confession

i will not drink alcohol in any form despite it being oktoberfest

i will avoid clouds of gaga smoke that always arise at recreational events yeah like they're authentically oktoberfesty right

i will tell one hitler joke to honor my uber-jewish friend edie and may the ghost of joan rivers inspire me to think of a good one perhaps the one that starts what did hitler name his junk

i will take everyone who wants to go which excludes my godson naturally on the observation deck of the city's tallest building

i will shoot no one unless they really got it coming

[kakihara]

"Its not an erection!" I shouted. "its a pudding spoon".
My explanation didnt calm her suspicion. She continued to stare unapprovingly as I approached. lucky for you, I thought. If it were an actual boner, I would be shouting "Im a samurai!", and there would be hell to pay. Not today. So as our paths cross in this death tunnel. I give her the "look". You know, that "its 7:00 am, I havent had coffe yet, and I will stab you with a broken John Denver record look". After surviving the first micro aggression of the day, I come face to face with one of the ruling class demi-gods. Time to punch in. Time to enter the matrix within the matrix.

Swipe that plastic.
Beep.
I am now in the system.
I am now sub-servient.
I am now without will.
I am now a corporate whore.
Civilian life is indefinately suspended.

I'll make that money for you. I'll make you proud. I'll make you a top-fortune-500-Super-Mega-God.
Your products will infect the cosmos in a pan-spermia Tsunami. All lesser gods will fall.
They will beg.
They will dispair.
They will be eaten, and we will cling to your back and relish  in the debris. We will sing our praise and give thanks for many a fallen crumb. So it has been written in blood and eco-friendly recycled 8.5x11 copy paper.

[ER]

"Its not an erection!" I shouted. "its a pudding spoon".
My explanation didnt calm her suspicion. She continued to stare unapprovingly as I approached. lucky for you, I thought. If it were an actual boner, I would be shouting "Im a samurai!", and there would be hell to pay. Not today. So as our paths cross in this death tunnel. I give her the "look". You know, that "its 7:00 am, I havent had coffe yet, and I will stab you with a broken John Denver record look". After surviving the first micro aggression of the day, I come face to face with one of the ruling class demi-gods. Time to punch in. Time to enter the matrix within the matrix.

Swipe that plastic.
Beep.
I am now in the system.
I am now sub-servient.
I am now without will.
I am now a corporate whore.
Civilian life is indefinately suspended.

I'll make that money for you. I'll make you proud. I'll make you a top-fortune-500-Super-Mega-God.
Your products will infect the cosmos in a pan-spermia Tsunami. All lesser gods will fall.
They will beg.
They will dispair.
They will be eaten, and we will cling to your back and relish  in the debris. We will sing our praise and give thanks for many a fallen crumb. So it has been written in blood and eco-friendly recycled 8.5x11 copy paper.



[/quote




Ah, you capture the madness of both a sleep-deprived morning and the grim reality of corporate servitude with a Coupland meets Barker acidity. Nice.

[ER]

"Did you see Regis this morning?"

Bang!


I have almost always lived life in a hurry, doing most everything early-on, from skipping crawling and going straight to walking, to reading The Books of Blood when most of my peers were lip-moving their way through The Babysitter's Club, to making my cousin show me her coffee table volume of Robert Mapplethorpe's The Perfect Moment, when at home I was not even allowed to watch Twin Peaks. (It had owl-demons and incest.) The fact I felt like projectile vomiting after seeing some of Mapplethorpe's images (a man putting an entire middle finger down another man's hose was good for a whole day without me eating) I would not have admitted under torture, since if my cousin thought the pictures were cool, hey, they must've been since she was way more awesome than I was. She still is, in fact.

I wonder, though, is my rushing along because I innately know I will live a short life? In My Life With Martin, which I read at ten----case in point---Coretta Scott King said she felt that was true of her husband, and he died violently as I think I will.

About all I know is I really like italics.

And trees. I do love tall old trees.

And the smell of gunpowder.

And the two L's in my life, one who keeps my secrets, the other who loves me no matter what I do.

But while on the subject of death and Mapplethorpe, did you ever read Andy Warhol's diaries? If not, then let me tell you something. When you reach the last few pages of 1986, maybe very early 1987, the uber-neurotic Mr. Warhola muses wistfully about seeing Mapplethorpe sick with AIDS, and how sad it's going to be having to go to his funeral, he dreads it, and then...SLAM, Worhol suddenly died himself, predeceasing Mapplethorpe!

Death tends to be like that, it likes to slink and sneak and indulge its wicked sense of humor, and above all it loves, loves, loves to live up to those lovely Biblical lines etched on the tomb in the long version of Once Upon A Time in America:

Your youngest and strongest shall fall by the sword....

Or drug, or car, or undiagnosed heart defect.

I really do hate death. I wish I could play it chess on a board made of lunchmeat, or at least kick it in its bony crotch.

A post-Mass recollection ere I go face the afternoon as the fifth wheel at my monster in law's house.

When I was in school I dreaded nothing so much as the annual Right To Life Day they'd impose on us. It was like carved in granite, you HAD to be there for RTL Day, no exceptions, None. If you were out for any reason whatsoever, be it your great-grandmother went on a shooting spree and was put down by the cops or anything else, you had to then make up for it by volunteering for a set number of hours at an RTL center, answering phones, handing out leaflets, counseling someone in "your peer age group." You had to do that or they'd not let you pass that grade. Given that, it was the one day a year when the school nearly always had perfect attendance since no one save a few masochists wanted to have to do that.

Every year they'd divide the girls and boys and have, I suppose, a custom-tailored event depending on what 'nads you had, and the main presenter of the ghastly slide shows they made us sit through was this woman named Mrs. Bierce, who was always sweaty-looking, blotchy-skinned, red-faced and utterly humorlessly sincere in her message. Why she failed to become a nun I still don't know.

One time she told us about the impending warning signs of "loss of judgment" if ever we found ourselves alone with a boy doing what the Church would not want us to do, and she concluded by saying it was our body's way of telling us to put on the red light. Now I know she meant red light as in stop, but to me and judging by the giggles I heard, it sounded like she was saying red light as in wow, you're turned on, why, just go start a cathouse, you little harlot.

Realizing this gaffe she flushed an even deeper crimson across her chins and redoubled her efforts lest we find humor in her serious subject matter, which probably only served to desensitize more of us than it affected in the way she wanted.

The high point of one year was as I sat there brain closing down, I spied a strange light crawling across the floor, creeping toward the desk behind Mrs. Bierce, reaching her leg and advancing sloooowly up her gridiron-size thigh. I saw it was caused by some equally bored girl reflecting sunlight off her watch and she was going for Mrs. Bierce's eyes. Oh, please yes, blind her, I thought, but the other girl lost her nerve somewhere around Mrs. Bierce's nipple line and stopped. Sigh.

Oh, well.

I think that was seventh grade and I remember making it through Mrs. Bierce's half-day long presentation left me giddily shell-shocked, and when I finally made it downstairs to the lobby to go home, I could not stop laughing this nerve-spent, semi-hysterical giggle. Naturally my mother was late in picking me up (no bus service) but joy to the world the coolest human being on the planet who was working there in the afternoons said we should go wait in the cafeteria, and I gladly did and he found some snacks in a back cabinet and I sat there with my head down laughing and laughing, while he looked at me like he knew all girls were crazy and I was crazier than most, but I couldn't stop my laughter because I couldn't stop thinking of all the terrible sights I'd just been shown, dumpster babies with spaghetti innards spooling out, and that infamous photo of that Florida woman flopped kneeling over herself abandoned in a puddle, dead, dead, dead in a motel room. And every time I'd stop I'd try to look up at him and start laughing again so I'd have to put my head down on the lunch table and cover it with my arms.

This continued for probably five minutes.

It was all too much, as it was every school year.

But he sat down across from me and talked about how if I thought we had it bad, imagine what it was like at his school, the Jesuit Order, those Navy SEALS of the Catholic Church, slamming it into their heads that they must NOT fornicate, lest they get girls pregnant. If they got a girl pregnant, why Purgatory for ten million years, even if they managed to avoid Hell. He did make it sound even worse over there but neither of us believed in any of that or took it at all seriously.

He said, "Ever read the Book of Romans? I think the entire religion is off target." Then he told me about his weekend and it was the most interesting day I'd ever had there.

I think by the time my mom came, forty minutes late, some internal Irish clock running in her goofy, non-linear brain, I would have spent another session with Mrs. Bierce, just to be down there alone in the cafeteria getting consoled like that.

Pathetic but you took what you could get there in Catholic school.

As for Mrs. Bierce, she collapsed from a stroke one day years in the future, little surprise considering what her blood pressure probably was, Death probably didn't want her but Death is dutiful if nothing else, and I can't imagine whoever does RTL Days in the 2010s is putting those captive girls through as much as she did us, so, good riddance. There are only so many vacuum cleaner sound effects the ear can endure before gallows humor sneaks out.

All right, my daughter's done changing from church clothes to play attire, so it's off to my mother in law's barony of passive-aggression! Thanks for letting me ramble, gang. It's Toweringly useful.

"Did you see the sunrise this morning?"

Bang!