Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves

"Welcome to our Bible School - we're so glad you're here.
And we hope you'll with us stay, God's own word to hear.
Learn with us of Jesus' love - how from heaven He came.
Died to save us, lives to keep us - Praise His holy name!"

And with this humble chorus of invocation it began. Vacation Bible School. VBS.

For most lucky children, VBS was an annual event, a time to sing and rough house and learn about Jesus and make meaningful Holy Spirit neck lanyards. A fun week. Just a week.

Not so for the boy-child District Superintendent. He was what is known in the business as a serial schooler - a child who frequents VBS after VBS throughout the summer, sometimes overlapping morning and evening.

It wasn't hard to do really. VBS was a family business. Like Santaguida and Sons Italian Bakery or Welch Bros. Plumbing, Vacation Bible Schools were literally our intergenerational bread and butter. My grandparents and my mother made their summer living traveling from small church to small church, staging a week Christian education at each.

Through years of trial and error, the family had perfected VBS into a well-oiled machine of inculcation. Everyone had their roles and responsibilities. My primary occupations were puppet set up and playing the piano for song time. Puppetry was the cash cow of VBS and I was the puppet master. I carefully erected the stage and skirted it with fabric and thumb tacks. Each puppet - antique by any standard by the time I became their keeper - had to be carefully groomed and placed behind the acid green dollhouse that was their home.

This was no easy task. In fact, it was physically grueling. Elmer and Lopsy, the crocodile and bunny rabbit that mouthed morality tales from the dollhouse, were nothing. It was their sound that was a bitch. Scripts were recorded onto reel to reel and played through a Wollensak recorder that weighed as much as a Buick. Just making sure that everything was straight and the recorder in place was enough to overwhelm a lesser child. I flourished.

Far more glamorous was my role at the keyboard. I didn't play for the opening or closing - at least not yet - for I hadn't perfected the arpeggios and glissandos that were necessary for the full assembly. My musical genius was saved for a parade of classes that came for song instruction. First kindergarten, then primaries, then juniors. After you graduated juniors, you were either spiritually complete and on your road to the mission field or a derelict on the broad road to candy cigarettes and Mad Magazine.

Moving from church to church was no easy life. Being gypsies for Jesus took a lot of work. We pulled a large trailer behind my Grandfather's Oldsmobile and parked it in the patchy gravel beside the chapel du jour. The bonus was that in the hick towns of Seelyville, Indiana or Crestline, Ohio, we were minor celebrities. Kind of like a tatty circus with one tired elephant or Huck Finn's Royal Nonesuch.

The components of our VBS were as complex as they were prescriptive. The show was the same from town to town. Lots of sticky kindergarteners and a bumper crop of primaries - all learning their rote and incomprehensible King James Bible verses and screeching songs of salvation. There were portions though, that were mesmerizing. Of course, the puppetry which ended the night was much anticipated and way too short for most tastes. And the stories.

My Grandfather was a master yarn spinner, a scop who could enthrall the youthful audiences with his dramatically rendered tales of sin and redemption, parableized in Scene-O-Felt. The upscale cousin of Sunday School flannelgraph, Scene-O-Felt was handsomely painted on thickly swatched wool. Each night, a different set of figures appeared on the black-draped easel, their silhouetted shapes telling allegories of children who were wayward and willful who repented and lived lives of entire sanctification. I got saved hundreds of times under their mythical spell.

There is simply too much VBS for one post. This story, were it told in Scene-O-Felt, would not be through a mere half of the carefully numbered pieces, each waiting to be adhered to the story board. You, gentle reader, will have to return to VBS tomorrow night. Please bring a friend who was not here this evening: someone you believe needs the love of Jesus in a special way. And don't forget your dimes for the offering.

Remembering VBS Cookies

[This is the first in a series of Vacation Bible School reflections. -D.S.]

It happened with a glimpse of them in a supermarket parking lot today. A heedless view from the periphery really. But of course, I knew them. Instantly. Cheryl and Jane Skoker, and their mother Mrs. Skoker. Middle aged women and their slow-moving mother, together as always. A triumvirate of yeasty womanhood. How many years had it been?

Hmmmm...

It was 1980. Hot - oppressively hot. I can still smell the grass and the sweat and taste the metal of my trombone. Marching band. Summer drills.

Amazing the way the sensation of memory reinvents itself in the nostrils of my present.
She marched in front of me, Cheryl did. Sweet, untalented, walleyed and mammoth, chewing the whiny black clarinet that wheezed her into third chair. Jane too. A year older, a size smaller, a chair ahead, but sisters interchangeable, practically modular.

But it was Cheryl who mesmerized me, the flesh on her back burgeoning out of the triple hooker that failed to contain much of anything, let alone lift or separate. Orbs. Flesh orbs. Orbs of softness and desperation and isolation. Back fat. Ample back boobs that winked coyly at the row behind as she marked time. Left, right, left, right.

I knew her. Not just from band, but from VBS of years before. Mrs. Skoker had a small bakery in her home behind the Nazirene Church. From the peeling, aqua walls of the Vacation Bible School classroom, I watched her heave dozens of just-baked cookies to the lawn of the church and position them in tidy rows on the yellow melamine trays like stalwart soldiers in the Lord’s army. Beautiful. Sweet. Soft. God, is it snack time yet? If I squinted, I could just make out the varieties – and yes – they were there. My favorite: brown sugar butterscotch, baked in russet ovals of deliciousness. Their ambrosial goodness made Bible School tolerable.

And band.

Sometimes Mrs. Skoker would bake those same butterscotch cookies for the long band trip bus rides. She always went along, the strings of her apron a metaphor for the umbilical hovering over her daughters. But bake she did. And Cheryl ate. I ate.

As the cadence gathered us and the drills began, I wondered what would happen if I cupped her yielding mounds that teased me from a row ahead. Would she scream? Or perhaps just collapse into my reckless strokes, her loneliness split like a reedy squeak from her clarinet. Warmth and softness. Nudging and unrelenting, like the importunate mew of her enormous tabby.

Today in the parking lot I think I stared out the window of my car for an eternity. It was my turn to feel warmth. And weight. The pit in my stomach migrated, stirring a swelling southward heat that capitulated to my back fat fantasy. I knew what it meant. I knew what it always means.

I’d still go to second base with Cheryl Skoker for a dozen of those mother fucking cookies.

The Wheat from the Chaff

I chatted with a nice guy this afternoon who is a member of a large Nazirene church. The church is known locally for being "Non=Nazirene" and more of an evangelical mega-church. Okay, mega might be a bit of a stretch, but it is large and it is NOT your garden-variety Nazirene gig.

Growing up, I saw more than my share of the REAL Nazirenes. The following Top Ten list is what really defines a Nazirene church.

1) Holiness Unto the Lord. Jigsawed out of plywood and stained a warmy maple, this apothegm graced the sanctuaries of RNCs (real Nazirene churches). The words were a trademark of sorts, a reminder to all who entered that this was the 9th holiest place on earth.

2) No RNC would be discernible from some low-church Baptists if it were not painted seafoam green. Slathered on the rough stucco walls, this particular green created a shekhinah-type glow when viewed through the swollen eyes of a tearful testimony time.

3) Plumbing and heating in RNCs is always suspect. One never knows if there will be a warm Sunday School classroom or a flushable toilet come Sunday. The furnaces in RNCs tended to be pre-war behemoths that had bad attitudes when roused from slumber. They emitted a dusty musty aroma, wafting toxins throughout the service and certainly posing a biohazard to those napping in the nursery.

4) Paneling. Not the warm, knotty pine of a Vermont breakfast nook, but a thinly-laminated faux bois that added architechtural interest to the vestibule and the dank basement cubbies. The resulting warrens multitasked into classrooms, covens for the women's missionary society meetings, and even dressing rooms for the Junior Church Christmas Pageant, spewing tinsled baby angels into the choir loft like devout oompah loompahs.

5) Speaking of vestibules (and they ARE vestibules, not the affected "narthex" of the godless and/or Presbyterians), the anteroom to holiness was a veritable Library of Congress for the righteous. Lined with yellowed world maps with thumbtacks representing those serving in hostile mission fields, the vestibule was a place to exchange confidences (aka gossip) or pick up an Alabaster Box. Not orderly places, the vestibules typically held stacks of missionary books, back issues of "The Other Sheep", and bulletins from services that were to be remembered only as a few underlines in your New Testament.

6) RNCs do not have "multipurpose rooms" or gymnasiums with PowerPoint screens- they have fellowship halls. The kitchen in RNCs are spartan - no commercial appliances or espresso machines. There is nothing needed to feed the flock that a stained crock pot and a few dented ladles can't produce.

7) Real Nazirene Churches don't have grand pianos or Yamaha synthesizers or midi-spitting soundboards. Hymns are instead measured carefully out of spinet pianos and Hammond organs. The pianist and organist positions in RNCs are venerated only slightly less than missionaries or Sunday School Superintendents. Organists in particular came to their bench through a monarchial lineage, their sovreign right to play exclusively granted by the fact that they have been members since Roosevelt (the first one). No one would dare suggest she retire or share her throne, the fear of laity and clergy alike keeps her glued to the key manuals until she dies in situ during a particularly vigorous "Marching to Zion".

8) The importance of Christian education cannot be discounted: the inculcation of new Nazirenes is the primary purpose of the sect. Train up a child in the way he should go, yadda yadda. Sunday School is the conduit through which all piety flows. No DVDs, no high tech, no "Christian" rap groups - just the puerile rudiments of catechesis. Nappy scraps of flannel tacked to the paneled walls hold figures of disciples and vaguely middle eastern architectural backdrops that illustrate any of the major Biblical yarns: Zaccheus dangling from a Sycamore or Jonah being puked onto dry, painted sand. They made the point: sin and die.

9) Genuine article Nazirene congregations try in earnest to bring in the harvest of souls even if that means rounding them up from their broken homes. RNCs maintain a church bus, not a fleet of people movers that have Veggie Tales DVDs playing in transit. The church bus, a long ditched from a neighboring school, has only slightly less reliability than the tempermental boiler. Prone to cranking fruitlessly whenever the temperature hits the mid-20s, the church bus is also a surefire mechanical liability when found smoking roadside on the way to church camp. Forget the various harnesses, belts, restraints, and safety features of vans found in the Episcopalian parking lots, RNC busses leave the driving to God. He is, afterall, your copilot.

10) There are far more than 10 defining characteristics - tattered hymnals, violet-inked dittos of
prayer choruses, and posters announcing VBS or revivals, and on and on. The point is, be not dismayed, God is not mocked: these megachurches with their "sanctonasiums" and basketball leagues are Satan's playground. The Thursday morning Praise-R-Cize classes are little more than thinly disguised dances and there is nary a Manual to be had. Go to one of these fiendish facsimilies and you will be fondling backsliders, your own soul in peril. Just don't do it.

Hey Sistah, Soul Sistah

Before our offertory hymn (Almost Persuaded #351) , I would like to make a few announcements.

First, next week is Vacation Bible School at the Herald of Homoness. Each night we will reflect on the true meaning of VBS. Gentle readers are encouraged to submit their VBS memories for publication.

Second, and I hate to belabor this, really. I'm starting to sound like a broken record - a one trick pony, if you will. However, I'm inclined to believe that misogyny is the new black, coming back into fashion like low rise jeans or greed. As a bit of a disclaimer, I want to assure you, gentle reader, that there are many women I love or at least abide. Our discussion tonight does not include any of them.

Here goes....

I hate lesbians. Not all lesbians and certainly not because they like boffing chick on chick. I’m not talking about those quiet matrons who have shared the love of Sappho for decades or the militant über-dykes who call themselves “womyn” and do performance art with tampons. Love ‘em. You go sister.

I would, however, reserve a dirt bunk or two for those nubby Peppermint Patties who are guilty, in my reckoning, of the ultimate feminine crime: having no style.

I have always ascribed to the theory that there are really very few ugly women, but that there a LOT of lazy ones. Most women, if tarted up a bit, could pass as attractive or at least earnest. Not these bitches. Totally unblushed by anything color coordinated, they take the rugby-shirt-of-least-resistance to their jobs as Driver’s Ed teachers or assistant managers. Never really in a relationship of any ilk, they drive their Pontiac Sunbirds with rear spoilers to limited social events, perhaps a darts league or company volleyball team where they mouth-breathe and eat chips.

I think the thing that I find most vexing about these she-sloths is their disregard for the great things about being a woman. I’m not talking about the wisps of frilly pinkness that most people think of as feminine, but the ability to be concerned about niceties and details that make the world habitable: cakes from scratch and red lipstick and smelling amazing. They totally abandon themselves into genderless blobs of waxy lipid, their only adornment being a SWATCH and that little braided ducktail.

The acid test for determining if one of these stumpy creatures is in fact, the genuine article is this conversation:

“Dang, Cheryl smells kinda gamy today. Do you think she’s a…”

“…I don’t know, man.”

Workaday World

I work with a woman who is particular boil on the butt cheek of my existence. It seems that there is always one of her in my direct sightline, buzzing like a mosquito when the nightlights are extinguished. Unlike other objects of my pervasive misogyny, who might be excused from the undercroft if space were limited, I would happily exhume some of the others with a spork in order to place more of her in the dirt. Yeah, I hate them that much.

Picture it:
You’re in fourth grade and lumbering through the school yard, bapping younger kids with your lunch box and belching chocolate milk. You decide that sprinting is immediately called for, and break into bolting run. You are only a few meters into in when you hear, “WALK!”

The hiss comes from her. She’s the AAA Safety Patrol. Emblazoned with a fluorescent orange sash, she wears her title with the pride of Miss USA and the intensity of an air traffic controller. A mere year your senior, she nonetheless claims all of the authority invested her by the American Automobile Association, oddly the guarantor of all things safe on the playground. You look at her, her smug self-righteousness, and your belly oozes with rancor. I wish that I could tell you, little moppet, that the bitch with the neon badge will outgrow her sanctimonious score-keeping. However, she will never be any different than she is at that very moment – and you will have to deal with her or one of her sisters for the rest of your life.

For her, there is absolutely no gray – only the most polar black and white. She lives for rules and minutia and “what ifs” and her very presence causes little pin-prick hemorrhages all over the surface of your brain. Even as I write this, I find myself wincing in a grimace of loathing for this hell spawn, my mouth spewing frothy little flicks of bile which land on my monitor. I fucking hate her.

Invariably, she is in charge of safety or supplies or payroll – anywhere there is a tally to be made and lips to be pursed. She controls the keys to the shitter, noting on a clipboard the frequent urinaters, and inventories the toilet paper at the beginning and end of each shift. She is the one who takes the initiative to dock you eleven minutes of vacation time when you are caught by a train in the morning, and casts a shadowy, squinting glance when a coworker leaves early to take their kid to an organ transplant. It doesn’t matter that none of this is any of her fucking business, she answers to some satanic authority that compels her to be such a bitch.

Any, and I do mean ANY, change is greeted with extreme suspicion and a barrage of potential consequences. Move the water cooler a foot to the left and she announces that the secondary means of egress from the work area is now potentially blocked, possibly endangering the lives of all and incurring the wrath of Jesus or Zeus or the fire marshal. No one is safe from her judgment – it doesn’t matter if it is a hapless subordinate or the CEO. Rules are rules and she is the minion who must report.

She is universally disliked by everyone in the office. There is an unwritten bit of etiquette when you see a coworker being accosted by her, drawn into her hatey vortex over some infraction. The protocol is simple: do not help them out in any way. Don’t clear your throat, don’t walk in and change the topic to American Idol, and certainly don’t assert any sort of explanation or defense on their behalf. It is the exact same behavior that you would use should you happen upon a dingo consuming a baby – just keep on walking it has nothing to do with you.

She has been a serial character in my experience – different incarnations playing the same demagogic role – forecasting the demise of life as we know it if the over-utilization of Post-It notes doesn’t cease and desist. I hate her wherever she pops up – “confirming” your extended lunch for corporate records or chronicling your work-time internet shopping as if she were catching a Dateline sex predator.

I have found that a bit of guided imagery helps me maintain my psychic stability in her presence. I often go to my “special place of healing” and imagine myself ripping her fucking arms off and bludgeoning her to death with the blood-spurting stumps. It calms me, really.

Taming those nasty bones

This is absolutely hilarious. I love the "dead animal" section.

When I went to the ONU "counseling center" and told the dude I was gay, the "psychologist" gave me an MMPI and recommended aversion therapy. I was a confused kid but I knew even then that was retarded. I hadn't seen A Clockwork Orange yet but I had enough brains to know that aversion was WRONG!

Check this out!

Backslidden Rants

Don't be alarmed, gentle reader, by the District Superintendent's backslidden departure from all things sanctified. I have taken a leave of absence from being twice graced and on the road to Christian perfection simply to serve as a warning of what can happen when you let your holiness drop like a hooker's thong. Consider this an admonitory missive, issuing guidance for what I hope never happens to you.

That being said, aren't there certain types of people who consistently make you want to stack them in your crawlspace like cordwood, perhaps covering them with baking soda and lime to suppress the stank of their decomposition? I'm not talking about your alcoholic dad or your handsy uncle or the woman who ran over your kitty in a drunken stupor. Crawlspaces, by their design are very small and therefore require a certain economy of effort when selecting which of the legions of people who piss you off deserve a berth in the basement.

In order to organize my own space planning, I have developed a top ten list of the people who immediately create a visceral surge of rancor. I will submit one each day until we have a definitive list, a catalog of archetypes that gives fair warning to the sadly unsuspecting. While these are in no particular order, I would suggest that their rank in my consciousness intimates some sort of ordinal standing. In the event that I rediscover my sanctification, I will of course relent on the ninth verse of some cloying invitational hymn and confess my transgressions to a professional altar worker with a smudgy King James.

Until then, here we go...

1) You met her in my previous post. She's a white, 50ish woman. Critical and carping, she is joyless, sexless, tedious, and petty. She pretty much hates everyone but her own offspring, although there are many days that she would retroactively abort them given the chance. She wears her bitterness like a drag queen's feather boa.

She stopped loving her long-suffering husband about 15 minutes after she reluctantly consummated their union. Never fulfilled by anything, her only gratification comes from sneering at others and pretending she is more affluent than she is. She hates that she has to work, and never misses a chance to puke her passive aggressive antipathy on the women in her nondescript office, particularly if they are even slightly younger, leaner, or prettier.

Her weapons of choice are terse, demoralizing cracks that cut to the embarrassed core of their intended targets. Usually, they have to do with the most miniscule foibles - a tragic haircut, a pair of slacks that are slightly too tight, or one too many personal phone calls into your cubicle. She hates men as well, but recognizes that she is less likely to get under the skin of most oblivious males, and much more likely to dupe them with her veneer of a pained smile. She also knows that should she challenge them, she may get a full frontal in return.

The brilliance of this bitch is that she does this all while vocally metering faint praise and pretending that she is civic-minded and upbeat. If I shot one of them, on the hour - every hour - until the end of time, there would still be more.

Here is a sample of these bitches. Note that this image is purely representational, and in no way suggests that these women, unsuspectingly culled from Google images, are in fact women of this description. Draw your own conclusions.

My assumption is that (L-R) woman number 1 and woman number 3 fit this description. Woman number 2 has genuine warmth and woman number 4 has a mood disorder and low self-esteem.

Just one of the women I hate.

One of the things about growing up Nazirene is that it is a universe dominated by women. Sure, there are Nazirene men and there is the blustering of men being the Ephesianic household head.
Ha. Ha. Ha.

Women run the game. They wield their piety like a light saber and slice the man-nuggets off of their husbands and sons.

I hate women. Here's one I hate REAL BAD.

Now, I'm a person who is relatively tolerant of abuse. I am regularly the bitch of choice for most anyone who wants a patsy. People can do really big stuff to me (e.g. remove part of my small intestine with a spork) and I usually pass it off as them having a bad day. The big things roll. The little things, however, do not.

I suppose that it is one of those silly personality disorders that compels me to take disproportionate offense at an ill-chosen phrase, a subtle bump without an "excuse me", or a simple act of forgetfulness. And when the moon is full, and the bile is flowing like maple sap, I will bludgeon you.

To illustrate, here is a little morality tale that teaches us the important lesson of courtesy.

Last Friday, I was driving in a city about 2 hours away, looking for a place to do some recreational shopping. The traffic was murderous at 5:30 on a Friday, and cars were jamming like a teen garage band. Of course, I was in a relatively strange place and apparently only one of the 15 lanes could take me into the strip mall I was eyeing.

Traffic was at a dead stop and I needed over. Next to me was this older lady in a gold Buick. I gave her one of those "gosh, I'm new here" shrugs and motioned for permission to merge. I used the international hand gestures for "hey, help me out", and a nice toothy grin.

What I got in return from this bitch was the contemptuous eye-roll of a 14 year old girl as she edged her car into the rear bumper of the pick up in front of her. She slow-moed her head to look away from me, not in a "no, sorry you can't come over" way, but in a depersonalizing "you have less value than a chicken McNugget" sort of way.

God I hated her. Bad.

And I just couldn't let it pass.

By the time I finally merged, she had lurched seven or eight cars ahead of me, turning right into the mall. And I lost her. But unlike other losses - teeth, dignity, whatever - this loss was not to be permanent.

For the next 90 minutes, I snaked my way through the parking lots of 10 or 15 stores and restaurants - obsessed with confronting this malicious and condescending gorgon.

I thought I found her car in the parking lot of Lowe's. Fortunately, there was a parking space next to the sedan in question and I inched beside it. I was willing to wait. But first, a quick recon of Lowe's.

She wasn't there. Damn.

Now let's pause for a brief profile of this shrew. You have to know a dozen or more just like her. She fancied herself as upscale, more than the aged-out soccer mom that she was. Skin too tan, too many gold herringbone chains, pulsing with the hormonal fluctuations of a difficult menopause. Think Laura Bush with a mood disorder. There are only about a billion of her. And I hate every fucking one of them.

They emit their derision like sonar from a bat, bouncing it off of everyone and everything so they know where to move. Every hair of her expired Dorothy Hammill blow dry was an argument for misogyny. I milked every drop of reflected hostility I could and distilled it into a visceral liquor of loathing.

Needless to say, I kept looking. And then in Target, it happened.

There in the toy aisle with her daughter and grandkids was my phantom detractor.

I pushed my empty cart up behind her. "Lady, you have a manners problem," I hissed.

She looked puzzled, and then thinking that she had stepped in front of me or some such slight, she moved out of the way.

And I let it rip. I disgorged my indictment of her, and she was unrepentant. Her daughter, a predictable junior version of the she-devil, stepped to her aid, confused but able to muster her sorceress genes on a whim.

Not gonna work, muffin. Now it's time to greet the children.

"Your grandma is a bitch," I admonished the pair. I'll call them Caitlin and Cody, although they could have been any variant of Ashley, Dakota, Brittany, or Dylan. $50 says one of them has ADHD.

I was done and rolled the empty cart toward the door. Hag daughter had to have the last word about the quality of my example for children.

A gentle "shut the fuck up" closed the goings-on, and I left, obsession squandered, to be a nice guy until the next one.