The Voice of God

Every year in September, my wife gets a hankering for some of that good ol' fashioned religion. It's no accident that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur fall in September. It's the Jewish New Year, a time for spiritual renewal, repentance, and reflection.

But I'm not so into it.

It's no secret. I'm, at best, uncomfortable with the idea, and the practice, of religion. I don't like going to synagogue, where I am torn between reading Hebrew phonetically on the right page to prove that I can read it, because I learned how to when I was twelve but cannot translate it, or reading the English on the left page and feeling like a tool who doesn't know the tongue of his father, and his People.

And then I see people bowing and turning to the left and to the right and holding their hands up at very specific places and I feel like the scab actor who showed up four weeks into the run of the musical going, "When was I supposed to learn this choreography?"

Because, apparently, I never did.

I think it's wonderful that religion brings comfort to people, but I doubt I'm going to die with the Shema on my lips, like you're apparently supposed to if you're, you know, Jewish. Knowing me as I do, I'll probably die after saying something incredibly stupid like, "I've got this strange craving for marble rye right about now."

In the old books, God used to talk to people all the time, but He's never said anything to me. I guess that's a good thing because, these days, when God talks to you, they lock you up in a psychiatric hospital, like the one in which I work. Of course, sometimes they lock you up when God refuses to talk to you.

One of my patients, (we'll call her "R"), has acute psychosis, or so they say. She's waiting for God to talk to her, but He's not talking, and, although it sounds strange to say it, I kind of wish He would.

I met R on Thursday. She was sitting on her little bed in her little room with her legs crossed, looking at the wall, or nothing at all, really. I asked her if I could sit down and have a chat with her.

"Of course," she said.

R is approximately fifty years old. She has long, brown hair, parted straight down the middle, with streaks of gray running through it. Her face is smooth, unlined, and pleasant looking. Unlike most of the patients I meet, R has all her teeth, and they are far straighter than mine. She wears a colorful, striped sweater and beige capris. She does not look-- or smell-- like the typical psych patient, if such an animal exists.

R and I talked for a while. She expressed that she was feeling anxious because she saw on the news that a huge rain was coming and she was afraid that she would be discharged from the hospital.

"I'm homeless, you see," she said to me.

I was taken aback for a moment, and then I remembered overhearing a nurse and a psychiatrist talking about R earlier in the week. She gets admitted all the time-- a "frequent flyer"-- and she is indeed homeless, but she needn't be. See, she has approximately $500,000 in a trust account, or a savings account, or a checking account-- the result of a behest or a trust or a settlement or award, I don't know the particulars. But R refuses to withdraw any of the money until she hears God's voice directing her to do just that.

And God's not talking to R these days.

So she's homeless. And she won't qualify for medical assitance or any government subsidy because, well, as homeless people go, and even as landed gentry go, R's pretty well-to-do. On paper, that is. When we talked, I feigned ignorance and asked her about her financial situation. She minimized and was vague.

"Well," she said, "I have some money in an account, but I don't... have access to it. It's complicated."

The understatement of the year, I thought to myself.

The hospital has tried everything. They've brought in financial advisors to try to convince R to take out some of the money, even just to rent a modest studio apartment for herself. She won't do it. They brought in a priest with whom she had a good rapport to implore her, as God's messenger, to withdraw some of the money. She wouldn't hear of it.

Fortunately, R and I hit it off during our fifteen minute chat. Smiling at me, R said gently,

"Do you mind if I ask you a question?"

"No," I answered.

"Are you studying to be a psychiatrist or a psychologist?"

I smiled at her.

"No," I said, "I'm thirty-- a bit old to be starting that sort of thing."

"Well, I'm sorry to hear that," R said, smoothing out a wrinkle on her pants. "You have such a kind, thoughtful way of speaking to me-- you really know how to communicate beautifully, and I just know you would make a wonderful therapist. I feel very comfortable talking to you. Thank you for treating me with such dignity."

I thanked her and hastily concluded the interview, before the lump in my throat got unprofessionally-sized. I know I can't save R-- I'm no psychiatrist or psychologist, and I'm certainly not the voice of God. But the thought of that woman sleeping out on the streets is keeping me up at night. And I said I wouldn't let that place get under my skin.

I'm Frightened

It's true, folks. I'm very, very frightened.

Hold me.

I think.... I think..... Dick Wolf may be God.

I think he is trying to eat our brains through his numerous and bountiful "Law & Order" incarnations. I think he is trying to use Ice-T and the Belz as vehicles or body-pods to spread his metaphorical (and literal?) tentacles across the globe for the purposes of international, and possibly intergalactical domination.

I think he wants us to bow to him and eat our own children while muttering his name.

Sorry-- His name.

Dick. Wolf.

Speaking of his name: look at it. It is the essence of virility and dom. What do you think of when you hear his name-- I mean, besides Detective Stabler getting shot every third episode-- you think of a throbbing, veiny, bulbous cock, coupled with an insidious, salivating, stalking woodland creature, ready to pounce on you and eat your kneecaps-- possibly while raping you.

This is no coincidence.

I also don't think it's any coincidence that he's basically overlording over cable and network television at the same time. You can watch some iteration of "L&O" at any time the clock might read-- in fact, you can even invent a time that doesn't actually exist, turn on your television, and you'll be assaulted with a snarky interrogation room tango or the late Jerry Orbach's teeth. Try it at home, if you dare-- make up a time and see what happens.

I...... I think you will need to be held.

He's probably inserting subliminal messages into each episode-- he's doing it right at this very moment. No doubt his production meetings take place underground, and the writers wear crimson-colored hooded robes and chant his name while playing with themslves with one hand and ritually strangling kittens with the other. And there's Dick Wolf, at the head of the table, laughing hysterically-- rubbing apple sauce onto his nipples while he sets fire to Saturn simply by lifting his right eyebrow.

You know it's true.

You know he's eaten S. Epatha Merkerson's brain years ago and all that's left inside her cranium is Dick Wolf's vomitus, sloshing around in there every time she does a prescription drug commercial-- which only further his mission of total inter-global conquest. He will not stop until he's feasted on the brains of not only every fictional homicide detective in his faux-NYPD, but every wide-eyed actor and starlet who comes to New York dreaming of being on Broadway, but gets stymied as either a rabid psychopathic rapist or a bloodied, semenized victim, staring up at the fluorescent lights of the basement morgue.

Have you ever wondered why every single actor you ever see in a play in NYC has a "Law & Order" credit in their bio? It's because it's their first stop on the train-track to Hell. It's because Dick Wolf is always hungry for brains.

Blessed be He.

Mea Culpa, My Bad

As I sit down to write, the sun is setting. Ordinarily, I don't give too much of a shit about this particular, ever day occurance. A couple of weeks ago, though, when my wife and I were vacationing in Maine, we went to the tippy-top of Cadillac Mountain and watched the sun set, and I gave much more of a shit about the sun setting than I had in quite some time.

Tonight, I give a shit about the setting sun because I know it's going to be the last time I'll eat a drop of food until it sets again in twenty-four hours.

Yes, it's Yom Kippur, and I ask your forgiveness.

I know I can be an insensitive, brash bastard and I have an incurably big mouth, and I have no doubt that, at one time or another I've said something in the inglorious archives of this blog, or the last one, that upset you. Maybe I even did it deliberately, because sometimes I can be a spiteful, snarky little bitchwhore. Maybe you were put off by my urging you to rally around the cry of "Keep fucking that chicken." I don't know. I know I pissed some random person off about my post about staying in love. Well, I ask your forgiveness for all the times I've set you off, or made you cry, or that time where you got so incensed at what I'd written that you kicked your poodle down the stairs.

My wife and I atoned for our personal wrongs tonight, and we kissed and we hugged, and that felt really good. I hate having to atone to my wife, because that means that I haven't been the perfect husband, but then, of course I'm not. And she's not the perfect wife. The crumpled tissues I find in between the sofa cushions tell that tale. She told me that, in the true spirit of Yom Kippur, you are not supposed to say, "I'm sorry," you are supposed merely to ask for forgiveness. It's not an easy thing to ask for, like a dime or a piece of Juicy Fruit, but it feels good and humbling and warm to do so. You should try it, at the risk of sounding like your rabbi. Or your mother.

Sometimes I think that my heart will fall apart if I think too much about all the rotten things that are littered through the past of my life, even the very recent past. There aren't so many misdeeds, just mostly bad words. My tongue is sharp and cruel when it has to be, and sometimes when it wants to be, and it has always been my primary means of defense. And offense.

Yom Kippur can be dangerous if you really let it get to you. Your mind can take you to all kinds of unpleasant places, if you let it. Not only will you start to get extremely sad by thinking about all the people whom you've wronged, upset and angered over the past year, but you'll also inevitably start amassing negative thoughts about all the deedledicks and whorebuckets who have hurt you, too. And then it starts getting all cyclical and negative and just plain bad. Yom Kippur, if well observed, though, can be like flushing the toilet after a violent, vitriolic shit. It's pretty fucking cleansing. It's Roto-Rooter for the Jewish Soul.

There a certain person out there to whom I should be asking forgiveness, but I won't be. I wonder how God feels about that, if He notices at all. My boss randomly asked me if I believe in God and I just stared at her. I suppose, if I do believe in God, I believe in a God who thinks you're a shit for not asking forgiveness from your former best friend, and loves you anyway. I believe in a God who looks at streaming web porn, too. I believe in a God reads blogs, because they're funny and inconsequential and mean and sometimes better than the newspaper columns. I believe in a God who thinks it's okay to sit on your ass watching TV and be sad on a rainy afternoon, even when the rest of the street is out mowing their lawns and trimming their hedges. I believe in a God who knows that Yom Kippur is better in principle than in reality, but fasts anyway.

I believe in a God who wears a shirt and tie on Sunday, even if he has no place at all to go.

I also believe in asking for forgiveness, even though it's hard and messy.

I hope God can forgive me for not asking for forgiveness from my friend. He probably will. After all, He created humans, and nobody knows how fallible and petty, stubborn and stupid they are more than He does.

Best Wishes and Love

Like a lot of twentysomethings, I struggle with God. And I don't mean that we arm-wrestle.

It's always been a tenuous alliance, ever since I asked, "Daddy, are we Jewish?" on a family car ride at age 6. My father answered by reaching behind his driver's seat with his clumsy, bear paw of a hand in a vain attempt to control the car whilst simultaneously trying to pull my right leg off.

Of course I knew we were Jewish. In those days, we walked to synagogue, for Christ's sake. What the fuck did I think we were doing-- cardio? I was just trying to stir up the pot, to push my father to the point of explosion. To goad God.

My wife and I had a little picnic dinner out on one of the local college campuses, the one with the duck and turtle pond, and, as we sat there on our blanket, feeling all collegiate again, our post-dinner conversation drifted seamlessly proto-philosophical dimension to another. Just like college conversations do, except without the pot or frisbee-golf.

"Do you think some extremely religious people are crazy, or were they crazy before they got hyper-religious?" I asked, her head resting against my sternum.

"Well, I think there's something in the rituals that appeals to a certain type of person who is obsessive," she replied.

"Right," I said, "like wacko Orthodox Jews. Because the people who convert to Orthodox Judaism have a shitload of rituals and rules, not only that govern prayer, but that run their entire lives-- and you can really get obsessed with that bullshit."

Seriously, the laws dictating what you can and can't do (mostly can't) on Shabbat could fill up a goddamn bookcase. And it's very easy to get so bogged down in whether you can dunk your tea bag on Shabbat or whether or not you can eat bagels that were prepared on Shabbat (well, only if they were prepared by the black non-Jew in the kosher kitchen, and, was the water boiled on Shabbat? etc, etc, etc) such that you can totally ignore or at least forget the meaning behind all of these things.

And, of course, what is devout and pious to one person can really be regarded as totally clinical to another person. Of course, it's the sum total of a person's beliefs and behaviors, attitudes and lifestyle that determine if you're religious or crazy. I mean, it's great that you're in synagogue a lot and that you study the good book and that you pray all the time, but, if you do all that and you live in a one room shack covered in filth, don't pay any bills, count your eyebrows and eat hamster food, then I think we might have a problem.

I've always been skeptical of hyper-religiosity, because I worried that it was a veil covering something unpleasant, that it is sometimes used as a mask or a venetian blind. It's sometimes the case, sometimes not. Child molestation, mental illness, birth defects, social ignorance, racism or other prejudice, sometimes hyper-religiosity is just an innocuous-looking cloak to be worn over these most regrettable negatives. "Ah, but he is such a learned man-- studies the Torah night and day!" "Oh, but he goes to mass and confession every week!"

Well.

At 29, I wish that I had a better handle on my views on religion or God. The pragmatist in me knows that the whole thing is made up, that every people on this planet has their own spin on it, their stories and their legends and their books-- their guides to morality and behavior. And I don't resent or make fun of any entity that desires to prescribe morality for human beings, because, really, we need it. We're a scandalous lot, we are. But I know that religion is always going to be manipulated, either from the top or the bottom, by people who want to use it for their own nefarious reasons, and that depresses and upsets me. As a generally pessimistic person, I tend to focus on this darker aspect of religion, and that, I suppose, is my own failing. Fallen from grace.

On Sunday afternoon, my friend Bob, who is 64, came to our house to put the finishing touches of trim around the master closet that he built for me and my wife. We met Bob through my various Gilbert & Sullivan activities. He's a wonderful man, a music educator and a conductor and, thankfully for us, a pretty skilled carpenter. He popped in some nails in some thin pieces of trim with his pneumatic nail gun and, as he was getting into his truck, we shook hands warmly.

"You know," he said to me, "you gave me too much money."

"Maybe you didn't charge enough," I said. I felt guilty. He said he was giving us "The Thespian Rate," and originally quoted us a price of $500-$600. He eventually finished the job, after multiple trips out here, and he said he wanted $500. I gave him more.

"Well," he said, "you're very kind. Oh, and Winnie sends her best." Winnie's Bob's wife, who accompanied him to our house last weekend with bagels and cream cheese for brunch.

"Well, send her our best wishes right back."

"Oh," Bob said, "and I'm heading to Julie's tomorrow to supervise some guys who are putting in $10,000 worth of fencing at her house, and I spoke to her on the phone and told her I was seeing you guys today and she was so excited. She said to please send you her love and all her best."

Julie's another Gilbert & Sullivan friend of ours. My wife and I love that woman to bits.

"Oh, send her our love, too."

"I will," Bob promised.

"Jeez, all these best wishes and love-- it's like God's singin' in our ears today," I remarked.

"Well," Bob smiled and said, "that's what God is, you know." He waved out the window of his truck and drove off.