And Saint Thomas Doubted

And he probed his fingers into the wound, and it was soft and not yet supperating, and he was cloaked in darkness and in fog, and his fingers came away bloodied and in the same instant a tidal grief flooded through him and leaked out his pores.

And centuries later a monk thinking that the path to purity lay in pain wove himself a shirt of horse hair.

And centuries later a fictitious heroine injested arsenic at her prie-dieu.

And centuries later another heroine kneels at her lap top to fling her far flung aches across the invisible reaches, language to language, country to county, to text on a cell phone in Katmandu... remember when the world was still large enough that the very mention of Katmandu was a curious signifier for some greatly exotic local that may or may not be a pinpoint on any map. Something mythic, something ancient, full of mysteries and deep secrets, come to find out it's just another teeming city with cultural variations on architecture, full of people who live, love and die, scrabble for money and food. Same as here, same as anywhere.

Like Babylon, just another ruin, trampled by Marines, just another myth defeated. Saint Thomas doubted, and his fingers were bloodied, Christ was just another man, another charlatan, loaves and fishes a tremendous sleight of hand.

And the good Commodore says to the media, it's fun to kill people.

And kind ladies and gentlemen, let Emma remind you that it is the season of the pink heart, little bucking pink hearts everywhere, cherub's, moribund cubits dangling from asbestos free ceiling tiles, neglected and forlorn, spinning in infinity. It's the season of boyfriend oneupsmanship, lo to the poor fucker who sends his girlfriend carnations. It's the evening that waitpeople and bartenders universally dread. Oh, the fights, the tears, the shitty tips.

Full disclosure, as much as I spurn the marketed trappings of VD day, that's venereal Disease day to you, I cannot help but feel like some kind of mutant because I have never received roses on that day. And for the third year running I will be the only dateless wonder at our venereal Disease party, and as much as I would like to resort the cavalier and insouciant, it's sort of dispiriting to be the perennially dateless wonder. And to be quite frank, I'd rather cut all of the awkwardness of a first date and cut to a mutually gratifying hop, hop, hopscotch in the sack, and dispense with all of the vagaries that accompany "getting acquainted".

anywho. that could be the aimless gnatterings of a 33 (last quarter) tepid dish water blond in deep need of highlights and highly undersexed woman without a cat, who is very shortly to meet her former spouse's lovely new girlfriend.

Gah. (side bar to D, I jest of course)

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to MM in the farthest reaches of Maine for validating my dreams of possessing a gineormous cock, thank you for making me feel less freakish.... we should compare notes. Thanks to Vinnie for confirming the existence of rock candy, which makes me think of your sister, who lent me the Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Steigner -- which I still have.

I have got to find me some rock candy.

And for anyone who is looking for a book, may I recommend John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, I usually gobble books like devils food and I have been savoring it. P asked me why I hadn't finished it and I said it was like looking at paintings in a long gallery.

"Glowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spider-web bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink.

Like sap at the first frost at five o'clock men and women begin to drain gradually out of the tall buildings downtown, grayfaced throngs flood the subways and tubes, vanish underground.

All night the great buildings stand quiet and empty, their million windows dark. Drooling light the ferries chew tracks across the lacquered harbor. At midnight the fourfunneled express steamers slide into the dark out of their glary berths. Bankers blearyeyed from secret conferences hear the hooting of the tugs as they are let out of side doors by lightningbug watchmen; they settle grunting into the backseats of limousines, and are whisked uptown into the Forties, clinking streets of ginwhite whiskey-yellow cider-fizzling lights."

The entire book is like that passage, it is a wordsmith's wet dream