Phantom Pains

I once wrote a poem about a game where you put a rattlesnake in a box and tried to take a cookie off its head. I don't know why people played this game in my hometown, but they did. It didn't, as people often say of something gone awry, even seem like a good idea at the time. Boredom, I guess. Or desire for drama. Like the time in a storefront church I attended briefly when someone claimed a demonic squirrel had been looking, no spying, on them every Friday for a month. At the same time. Let's just say that the first time I read Flannery O'Connor, I did not think it was a strange world she had created. For me, she told it like it was.

I suppose my world is just as strange as all that now except it's reflected on television. We've even left the weirdness of Michael Jackson behind (at least he had talent as a child even if it meant giving up his childhood in service of being forced to do complicated dance routines and sing love songs to rats) and have a slew of depressing dating shows where contestants vie for the love of a good woman, man, cougar (whoever invented this term needs to be shot), etc. I never watched "The Cougar" but did see an ad where the host, a hopped up Vivica Fox tried to make it work, announcing the arrival of the lovely lady to her group of young lads barely weaned off the teet, much less X-Box. "The girl's got legs," Vivica says. So does everyone I know except those men who got them blown off during the war or amputated because of gangrene. One such man was one of my dad's friends. He'd take off his prosthetics at the end of the day, content that there was nowhere he needed to go and pour himself a glass of Jack and Coke. He'd use one of his fake legs as a cup holder and watch "All in the Family." No taking cookies off the heads of snakes for him! Those snakes could keep their cookies and he'd drink until he fell asleep, a medication for all the pain from something that wasn't there anymore.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The hardest part of faith is the last hour." David Wilkerson

Cocktail Hour
Drinking scotch suggestion: Laphroaig

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!