Walkin' In the Park and EWWWMAHGAHD!

August 14th, 2012. Lovely evening for a stroll in the park, admiring ducks, enjoying the shadows and sidestepping used condoms.

To be fair, it was only one condom. I saw no others the entire hour or so I was there. This particular park is clean, busy, and not of the sort where one expects to find such...artifacts...of human interaction. I suppose that is why when I spied it on the pavement it caused me to do a double-take.

A condom. In the parking lot. Used.  Eeeep.

I was on my way to a nearby trash can, wrapping up after a thoroughly enjoyable evening of shooting black-and-white film photos (with my two favorite cameras) and there it was in all its dirty un-glory. The condom (hereinafter known as The Artifact) gave me pause. I mean, really, I actually stopped walking to get a better look so I my eyes could verify what my brain was telling me was there. It was in between two cars, not far from the bumper of what I think was a little red sports car. I looked up quickly to see if anyone was in the car.

Nope. No one there. Plus, The Artifact was looking begrimed and weathered, suggesting it had been in its current location for some days at least. I looked around again to see if anyone was watching me and perhaps wondering what I was doing leaning over and staring at the ground. There were couples strolling by, some with kids, joggers, and other folks just out for an evening constitutional. No one was looking at me. And everyone but me seemed perfectly oblivious to The Artifact. I started to chuckle.

Why is I notice such things? Furthermore, why do I feel compelled to document such things? Not that I spend my days seeking out empty liquor bottles, smashed light bulbs and discarded prophylactics. I'd much rather spend time seeking out trains in motion, animals in light, the diffraction of sunlight through leaves. Such things are much more uplifting and edifying, in the main.

Yet there is this curiosity about the cast-offs of human behavior that leads me to notice that which many others would rather not see. Maybe it is just my crow mind tendency to believe that almost anything can be interesting, can exhibit some form of attraction if only we can catch it at just the right moment. At the very least, we can gain some insight or clarification into some aspect of the world or humanity that fascinates or repulses us.

This is what occurred to me, standing in the parking lot and meditating on an object that most of us would agree was not something with which we care to contemplate. Because I am the photographer that I am, I couldn't resist snapping a picture of it with my phone, being out of film. I laughed again, thinking that while I certainly wanted nothing more to do with The Artifact, I had to admire the caution of whoever had left it there for some hapless soul to discover.

Now I Don't Know What To Put On My French Fries

WTH, G**gl*?

The targeted ads?  You think you could improve the algorithms that govern how the sidebar ads get selected?  Because I've seem some bizarro stuff in my sidebar, but this takes the cake.

Right now, on the side of my email window are four ads.  Three of them are for new cars.  Nothing in the email that was on display said anything about new cars, but not so out there, ya know?

The fourth ad?

It says "Vinegar Douche: Learn about new ways to freshness."

I didn't see any references to condiments, seasonings or flavorings.  How does this even happen?

(sigh)

I'm feeling a little uncomfortable about my next order of fries.  Thanks, G**gl*.

When Office Supplies Attack...

As if the workweek hadn't been enough of a drag, I got injured on the job, as only Irish Gumbo could do it.

I was assaulted by a binder clip.

You know the type: those blue-black metal ones, made out of spring steel and two chrome steel wire loops for handles.  The kind that have the crushing pressure of a small shark when they clamp down.  Which, by the way, is the main reason to NOT clip them on to any part of one's body.  Just sayin'.

It happened at my desk.  I had a stack of papers, a specification I was working on, that was almost two inches thick.  That measurement turns out to be at about the upper limit of what a large metal binder clip can hold.  I had clipped the stack together earlier in the week, and it had been doing a sort of Brownian motion dance around my desk as I constantly shifted it from one spot to another in pursuit of other pieces of paper.

During the course of all that movement, the clip had begun to work its way loose.  The paper was slowly slipping from the jaws of the binder, unbeknownst to me.  Until, that is, I picked it up not 30 minutes before I was due to leave the office for home.

I lifted the stack...
...noted that the clip looked loose...
...thought 'I better point that thing away fr--!"

BINNNNNG!

The clip sprung off the stack like a bullet and hit me with the sharp edge on my upper lip.  Almost dead center under my nose.  That hurt!

How I managed to avoid blurting out a curse word, I'll never know.  My eyes were watering and I could taste blood.  Sure enough, the clip had split my lip.

(sigh) Only I could get hurt like that.  And now I can't shave off my beard/mustache until my lip heals!

Pleased to Meet You, Won't You Guess My Name?

Assignment, Part Deux:

Continuing along with the them of yesterday's post, on the class assignment I am working on,  I am (was) supposed to write a post introducing my blog and myself.  Welllll...I am pleased to recall that I had already done something (or several such somethings) already right here on Irish Gumbo.

But it never hurts to have a refresher, does it?

To wit, I dug up some previous posts of mine in which I explained or attempted to explain a little bit about myself.  So if one is so inclined as to dive into the mental Loch Ness that is the brain of Irish Gumbo, please go for a linky drive on the following bloggy backroads:

Irish Gumbo, Explained

Portrait of Irish Gumbo As a Punk Rocker

Dudes Who Lunch, Or What I Learned About My Animal Nature

So if you are interested, the above can hopefully offer some insights into This Person Who Blogs.  Or at the very least, you can point and laugh at the dork who writes this stuff!

-----

This is one of the things about blogging I find fascinating:  this recursiveness, the ability to metablog, to figuratively step through the looking glass.  Dr. Wesch was right in some ways...nothing for it but to dive in!

You Say Your Last Name Isn't Damnit?

Mr. God
Suite #∞
Everywhere, Universe

Dear God/Allah/Yhwh, etc.:

Do you mind if I call you just ‘God’? Seems easier that way, plus it’s all Judeo-Christian and stuff. Yeah, that’ll do, seeing as I have to go with what I know, and what I know is a lot of stuff I have forgotten about being a Christian. Plus, who spells their name without any vowels at all? Huh? Who does that?

Oh. That’s right. You do. Another example of something that is supposed to be deep, but really just doesn’t make sense at all. Jeez, talk about the name fitting the thing being named.

Writing this letter seems nonsensical too, so I guess were even in some way. After all, I don’t believe in You, do I? I don’t think I do. No, I am confused about whether I do. Believe in You, that is. I believe I am writing to You, I can tell because I am hitting the keys right now. Hitting the keys is one if the indisputable facts of my existence. I can hear the clickclickclicketyclick and I can see the words forming on the screen. So there.

I don’t really know why I am writing to you. It isn’t like you have paid attention to me before whenever I have asked you for some of your time or a blessing. I won’t count praying for you to pleasepleasePLEASE get the prettiest girl at Portsmouth Catholic to dance with me, or letting Ravens win the Super Bowl. (For the record, G-money, she DID dance with me. But seven years between Super Bowls? Not cool, dude). Praying for stuff like that now, well, that seems a bit like masturbation: great fun for the person involved but ultimately it doesn’t produce life.

Life. I don’t quite understand it. And the one entity in this effed up multiverse who I thought could help me figure it out doesn’t return my calls. Yeah, You are a busy dude, I know. Don’t you have assistants for this stuff? You are omniscient and omnipotent and you can’t take FIVE minutes and give me a hollaback? My local DMV looks like a textbook on customer service compared to You. People keep telling me to give you a shout out, good things will happen, but even You have to admit, it ain’t looking great.

“Either He doesn’t exist, or He is unimaginably cruel” I heard that on a television show, one of those one hour hospital dramas, and it has stuck in my head ever since. I love a good joke, I’m sure you do as well. Knowing that I have heard some of the most profound statements ever from something as mundane as television makes me laugh like a hyena. Funny, yes?

So which is it, Mr. God? Non-existent or unimaginably cruel?

There is no shortage of reasons to believe you don’t exist. All I have to do is read the daily news to see all the misery and carnage going on in the world. And no, you don’t get off the hook by blaming it all on the bloody-mindedness of human beings. If You did create us in Your image (which may have been a huge mistake) and You created all things, then You created evil and pain and war and sickness. You created the Ebola virus, for God’s sa--, for PETE’S sake! What a hoot, dying by having your insides liquefy and shooting out of every orifice. Of course, if You don’t exist, then that just falls under the heading of Random Bad Shit That Happens. There are some advantages for not having You exist, I see. No Judgement Day, no being lorded over by the All-Powerful Father, and a huge laugh when certain religious extremists go to Meet Their Maker only to find the house is empty and nobody was ever home. Exquisite irony, don’t you think? Your nonexistence also confers upon me some security. I no longer have to worry about all the times I took Your name in vain. I no longer have to worry about all those bad things I said about you. Friends and family can sit near me without fear of being caught in the blast radius should finally decide to extract the ol’ Divine Vengeance (‘vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord, blah, yadda, blah..’) on me the blasphemer. Good, no penalties for having called you a liar and a hypocrite and a bastard. I guess that takes the sting out of being told You love me; it was never true because You were never true.

Maybe what really bothers me about Your apparent non-existence is all the wasted energy and effort I put forth in praying to You. All that crying I did. The frantic prayers for help as we drove to the hospital the night my daughter died. The down on my knees, pounding the floor in the NICU hallway BEGGING you to please let my son live when his lungs started to fail. All for nought, as You must know. Led me to believe that all the praying I did, when their Mom was so sick and pre-eclampsic, was just a palliative, that it ended up being dumb luck after all. I could have used all the energy I burned to better keep from losing my shit.

I did lose my shit. You know that, assuming You exist and that You care.

Which brings us to unimaginable cruelty. Oh my G--, I mean, wow look at all the reasons to believe this! You give us brains and heart and feelings and then cancer and war and good people dying of horrible causes, and You expect me to believe in Your infinite goodness? As we used to say back in the day, what kinda bullshit is THAT? Yes, here my Son, take this most precious gift of life…PSYCH! (HaHaHaHa). What is the point of all that? I cannot believe, do not want to believe it was simply to teach me a lesson and make me appreciate the good things that do exist in life. I DO NOT NEED A BRANDING IRON ON THE ASS TO MAKE ME REALIZE THAT FLOWERS ARE BEAUTIFUL. Remember those brains and reason you gave me? Well, I am many things but I am not stupid. Allowing my wife to become dangerously ill, forcing my kids into emergency delivery, letting them live an existence of days only to have them die, and then expecting me to believe it was all part of a PLAN? A PLAN? You sick fuck. The Almighty Father. Pffffttt. If my earthly father had treated me the way You have treated me, I don’t think there is a jury in the world that wouldn’t have convicted him of child abuse and mental cruelty.

I know what You are thinking. Well, I can guess, anyway. A short time later, I was graced with the presence of my Wee Lass. A more beautiful child I have never seen, and that proves God loves me. See, He answered my prayers. Right?

Wrong. A little secret You probably already know: when I found out The Spouse was preggers with Wee Lass, my mind went blank. I kept it that way until the day she was born. I avoided praying, asking for anything, as long as I could because I couldn’t have borne the crushing pain if something had gone wrong. I couldn’t have taken having asked for help a second time only to be denied yet again. I had no energy to put faith in an entity that was just going to severely fuck with my head. In that case, I don’t know if I can give you credit for anything. My little way of sticking my finger in your eye for being so abusive.

Here’s a quote from a famous Italian dude, name of Galileo, perhaps you have heard of him:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Amen to that, brother! (amen. That’s a little sarcastic humor for You. Thought You’d appreciate that). See, the problem is, I have been trying to use my sense, reason and intellect to understand You. But nothing is making all that much sense, no matter how hard I try.

It reminds me of the miniature train set my brother and I had when we were kids. It was one of those little tiny ones. Cool looking engines about the size of a Snickers bar, tiny tracks, the whole bit. I loved watching that train go around the track. Big Bro and I even staged the occasional train wreck with Matchbox cars. Good times. But my big headed self was mighty curious: just how did something so small do what it did? How did it work? I really wanted to know. So one day, I raided Dad’s tool boxes and got a tiny little screwdriver. I sat down and disassembled that miniature engine, one tiny bit at a time. I was fascinated. The screws and wires and gears were so small and compact. Everything fit together and it all worked. I was delighted to see the mystery revealed!

The real problem came when I went to put it back together: I couldn’t do it. In my wonder I hadn’t thought to keep track of all the screws and wires and how they all fit. I ruined that engine. And as you may know, Dad was pretty pissed. Those engines weren’t cheap, and as the old man kept reminding me “Do you think I shit twenty-dollar bills?”. So I learned a valuable lesson.

Life is like that train set to me. Amazing, intricate, complex, beautiful. But unlike life, the train parts were all there in front of me. There really was no mystery, I just failed to keep track of all the parts. You are a different story. Put You together? I don’t even know how to take You apart! Where do I start, where’s my screwdriver?

Ah, enough. I have taken up too much of Your time already. All I can say is this:

I hate You for what happened to us.
I love You because You are the only place I have to turn.

The problem is I don’t know if I believe in You. What am I supposed to do with that?

I look forward to your response.

Peace,
Me


(So there it is: my 100th post in 100 days. Can you believe it? I can barely get my head around it. I am exhausted. I know the rule of thumb is to do a “100 Things About Me” on this occasion, but anyone who read my post of yesterday will probably understand why I didn’t do it that way. Perhaps later.

I cannot let this pass without mentioning the earthly impetus behind this post. The idea of it has been in my head for a long time, on the order of years. But it took some lovely ladies to kick me in the rear and get the boulder rolling. So I’d like to especially thank Charmaine (for the gentle encouragement), ChurchPunkMom (for making me really think about it) and Heather (for giving my Cúchulainn plenty of reasons to keep getting in the chariot). What can I say? I am a sucker for pretty Irish lasses. Thank you all so much, from the bottom of my heart.)