I smell, ridiculously, like pork. Pork and olive oil. This does not always happen but sometime when I make pork in a pan with olive oil I come away smelling like a pork chop.
I went to my 181 to pick up what seemed like a clandestine shipment. A CD with data for me to use, from someone I do not know personally but whose murky connection to me is a product of the payphone portion of my life. The house that payphones built is this.
I signed a new lease on my apartment, making it 11 years that I have lived in that place. No reason to leave, plenty of reasons to stay, I find I give the numbers of years there not even a second thought.
I wasted this day, this opportunity for greatness, this marvel of chance that is another day. I wasted it. Walking around, looking around, remembering stories from my high school’s literary magazines, I did nothing with my hands, nothing with my reason. More more I see symptoms of my rotting eyes. Apparently the white cast that has hovered over everything in my eyesight for years now could be related to MD. It does not obscure visioni or reduce focus, it just puts a ghost around most things. I am amazed at what a difference daily doses of the correct type of Ocuvite do for my vision. I took a different kind of Ocuvite for a while, thinking they were all the same, to find they were not the same. The stuff I should have been taking gives me laser vision, drawing sharp focus on tiny words 30 feet away. It does nothing about the white cast, and it only helps contain the real problem of the decaying macula.
I had a dream a few weeks ago that included my eyeballs sitting on a table, scooped out of my head for some kind of surgical procedure. Is that even possible? I have heard that the eyes are not connected to the head. The dream may have been related to my reading about the Lucentis treatments, which involve sticking needles in the eyes several times a month. I can’t remember the childhood singsong chant that included the line “stick a needle in your eye” but I guess that was guerilla marketing for Lucentis? Nah.
I spotted an intersting word: Unhouseled. The unhouseled are those who have not received communion. I don’t know if its derivation is weighted toward non-Catholics who have never received communion, but when I saw that word I remembered the small number of people at my Jesuit high school who were not Christian, and who remained seated during the communion ritual at the school’s monthly masses. Attendance at monthly mass was mandatory regardless of your faith. I knew a Buddhist and a couple of Jewish kids who had to sit through the services, and while these masses were boring enough to most of us they must have been *really* tiresome for those guys.
I never knew there was a word for those people. The unhouseled. While most of us stood in line to get that tasty communion wafer the handful of students who remained seated lingered like shadows in our peripheral vision. It was different from a regular church service, where one would assume non-Christians attended voluntarily. There was something different about *these* unhouseled, though I can not put a finger on what that difference was. I know I heard occasional gripes about this situation, not just among non-Catholics but among some who felt we should be allowed to decide for ourselves if we wanted to sit through a church service which barely interested us. But as I remember it now the arrangement was described as a small price to pay for a quality education, and that it was not any kind of a secret that this was part of the deal for a non-Catholic at a Catholic school. I do not know how I feel about that now. Not tonight. Maybe next week I’ll have an opinion.
I wish I remembered more about the dynamic between students, faculty, and administration at that school. There was a lot of unspoken, and a lot of that unspoken surfaced in mutterings at the lunchroom tables and in the gym.
The unspoken I remember most clearly involved homosexuality and sexual deviance in the context of the priesthood. It was an unspoken that if you were gay, thinking about being gay, or possessed of some sexual pecadillo or other then you should consider the priesthood. In fact, you should consider yourself obligated to remove yourself from normal society.
I remembered this years later, when the priest sex scandals caused headlines around the world. It seemed bizarre to me that the world was alarmed to learn that priests could be sexual deviants. as the storieas unraveled I began to see the priest’s collar as the clown-like uniform of the homosexual and the pedophile.
….
Hokay, enough about that for one night.
….
I just explained to a friend one of my gripes with the sportt of baseball: Baseball is the only major sport in which one team can not score. The pitching team can never score a run in baseball. My favorite play in football is the interception, but there is no equivalent to that in baseball.
But don’t get me started.
