April is in the Bag

As April prepares to spend eternity in the record books …

Hello Spring!

Let’s have a month of sunny, humidity-free, 70 degree weather!

All month long!

(Me and the girls wanna read some books out on the deck …)

Core

At the risk of offending any past, present, or future readers (which I hope will not take offense!), I felt it important to firmly state my core beliefs in a short little post. Partly to get things straight between my own ears, and partly to make a public statement.

Ahem.

First and foremost, I believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church.

This took me some time. Twenty-five years, in fact, before I had my first “conversion,” and it’s been slowly solidifying over the past two decades since. My three-week hospitalization in 2009 did for my faith what Guthian inflation did for the early universe, to throw out a physics reference and prove I don’t hate Science. I am living proof there are no atheists (or agnostics) in foxholes.

I feel it prudential to mention here a well-quoted remark by Fulton Sheen: “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”

Second, and this flows directly from the first, evil cannot be done that good may come of it.

Thus, for me, abortion is wrong. Torture, no matter what euphemism it goes by, is wrong. The death penalty is wrong. Gay “marriage” is wrong. War that does not meet “just war” criteria (you can look it up easily) is wrong. We cannot do evil that good may arise. The ends do not justify the means.

This tends to leave me without a political party. However, though I will never vote for a Democrat, I will vote for a Republican, conditionally.

Third, aside from the Catholic Church, there is no “truth” out there. I’m thinking here about our daily non-spiritual lives. Specifically, every outlet you get your information from comes at you from a slant. There are two points here. A) Every information outlet has an ideological outlook that wants to get you all hopped up hoppin’ mad because B) every one of these outlets wants to make a buck. That’s it. From your children’s college to Fox News to talk radio to the New York Times. That’s it. Tune it out.

Fourth, Life is a puzzle or a riddle to be solved. How theologically sound this is, I don’t know. It’s a belief I’ve adopted years ago and just hold to be true. Subjective, yes, but something that feels right to me. Perhaps it dates back to my pre-adolescence, when I would read with pounding pulse of Newton and Einstein and Bohr solving the mysteries of the universe, detailed in my beloved physics book. It certainly contributes a great deal to my everyday frustration. I’ve tried changing this core metaphor, but I always fall back into it, like a comfortable pair of slippers.

Fifth, the most pleasurable and productive pastime one can do by oneself is … reading! I can experience life way, way back in the past or centuries into the future. I can experience war in all its terror. I can travel to other continents and cultures, other worlds. I can become intimate with a historical figure and learn every detail or his or her life. I can understand – in theory – machines without having to turn a wrench and contemplate the coolness of higher math without deforming an eraser. Well, sort of. You get the drift. But the best part of it is, when I start reading words sentences paragraphs chapters, all the troubles of the little riddle of my life … dissipate.

Sixth, the greatest book ever written – the Bible aside, of course (see Belief #1) – is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. That’s above debate. What the third greatest book may be … well, that’s anyone’s guess and I suppose there’d be at least a million answers to that question. Though I’d be willing to venture a half-dozen or so.

Seventh, I will never ever be able to decide, once and for all time, via some sort of objective criterion, who is a better guitarist: Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix.

There. My core beliefs.

YMMV.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Is what he said, and then he said it again – actually, several times – for emphasis:

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

He looked like Clay Shaw as portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in Oliver Stone’s biopic, JFK. Hard to pin down an age to him; a round sixty seems to fit, though he carried himself like an ex-athlete, still muscled beneath his suit. An air of confidence sat upon his shoulders, and he spoke at the volume of one who is well accustomed to it. A quarter of a million cigarettes had passed those vocal cords, and his bottomless Texas twang could sand the paint off my house.

The bride had asked him what time his flight was the next morning. Eight a.m., he replied, swinging that perpetually-filled glass of red wine around in the air. She sympathized that maybe he could get some sleep on the plane.

“I’ll sleep when I’d dead,” he exclaimed.

“I ain’t got time for people who tell me they ain’t got time,” he boomed, catching both the eye of me and my wife, next on line. “I say to people, what are you doing between one a.m. and two a.m. Sleeping! they’ll say. Well, I say, I ain’t got time for that. I’ll sleep when I’m dead!”

“So, what do you have to show for it,” the bride asked, half-expecting a rags-to-riches millionaire success story. After all, there were quite a few successful men and women at the wedding. “What are you doing now?”

He laugh-coughed. “Well, not much at the moment. Oh, I did this and that, here and there. I been with Neil Young for a little bit – ”

Neil Young! That caught my attention, but he left no opening for verbal exchange.

“Then I moved on, did a little bit more of one thing, then another – but I’ll sleep when I’m dead!”

The children were antsy and the party was wrapping up. The wife and I interjected, said our goodbyes to the bride, followed the rest of the guests out the door of the winery.

“He sounds like he’s been smoking a pack a day since he was a baby,” I said to my wife later that night.

“No wonder he can’t sleep,” she said.