nuinca

The part about narcissism

Diana made me go to church on Sunday. Gasp, I know, church isn’t Jonathan’s idea of a great time, but when I’m absolutely forced to go, at least we make it to a local Presbyterian outfit whose minister has had some impressive things to say in past sermons.

Except for this time.

At some point the minister started comparing today’s narcissistic society and the good ole days – and used our “selfless” and “prideless” victories in World War II as an example. Culture in the 30s and 40s, our minister said, was not personally prideful and people carried on with the larger benefit of mankind as their reward.

I wasn’t sure who was more upset at his oversimplified and obviously contradictory statements – me or Jesus. From what the history books have told me, the early/mid part of this century hosted McCarthyism, women’s suffrage, segregation and gross war-time cultural stereotypes. How did any of those benefit mankind?

Of course, I can’t argue against how personally narcissistic society has become, but I do have an idea of why it’s happened. If I was a 26-year-old man in 1940’s America, know what I would have been proud of? Being a white man in 1940’s America. I could be proud of my gender and race – cuz hey, at least I’m not black or a woman.

Today, however, being proud of one’s race/gender/greed (I’m purposefully excluding religion, because that’s one place people are still total assholes) is mostly unacceptable, and mankind’s need to be proud of something has forced us into being proud of ourselves. Not a totally bad thing, I says, since maybe we’ll all soon be too busy with ourselves to worry about how much we hate the other guy.

If any of this sounds too FOX-esque, forgive me. My recent 4-day trip to Augusta, GA left plenty of tv watching time, and I spent hours on FOX news. God, I hate Glenn Beck

The impossible

Slideshows suck. Wedding slideshows suck even more. Mine doesn’t. Watch it!

The best birthday that wasn’t

I have had some great birthdays in my life. On my 21st, the group I was with got way more drunk than me, which doesn’t make much sense but did end with someone leaving a puddle of fish-n-chips-n-whisky in the middle of Main Street, Greenville.

Before that, I remember my pops getting me a cream-on-white Fender Stratocaster (a la Clapton) on my 16th birthday. Problem was, he wanted to surprise me and asked me to get his cigarettes out of the car. I did, and somehow managed to miss the large, guitar shaped box next to them. When I came back in with the smokes but without a guitar, dad had to improvise.

There are plenty of other memories, but the point I’m getting to is this – recently, my birthday has been the worst day of the year.Last year I had a root canal.

This year, I went to ER.

Diana and Luis planned an incredible surprise party for me at some meat and swords place out at the beach. Everything started well enough, including me being genuinely surprised at a room full of people dedicated to telling me Happy Birthday. It was awesome – for the first 15 minutes.

Pretty soon, I was in the bathroom throwing up so hard my lungs were having a hard time refilling after each yack. Lucky for me, the bathroom in this busy restaurant was movie-scene deserted, and I had plenty of time to wretch in peace. After an hour of praying for death, Luis got me out of there, and around 2:00am I felt like I was going to die and went to the emergency room (after stopping by the paper to retrieve the insurance card in my desk, natch)

The lovely ER nurse with the personality of a moldy sponge pumped me full of relaxing meds and sent me home with a diagnoses of food poisoning around 4:30am.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that I missed a night full of sword meat, booze and friendship, Luis and Diana had a custom-made robot cake for me at the party. Luis brought it over the next day and I spent the next two days picking apart the remains, eventually cutting the head off and keeping it in the freezer.

The moral to this story? Always cut the head off a robot.