Cheesecake & brimstone.

In February of 2003 I visited Mister James Douglas Morrison in Pere-Lachaise, Paris. "Pere-Lachaise" translates as "Father Chair," which means absolutely nothing except it was some friar's last name, but I found chairs aplenty in small shack-like mausoleums with Madonnas in painted glass. Places to pray for purgatorial souls hundreds of years after the fact, I conjure.

There was a small cheesecake at his grave, and I thought "How odd, I wonder if he liked cheesecake," and all this time later I never bothered to look it up for fear I might find that he didn't and this was another moment of absurdity instead of sublime praise.

I saw Abelard and Heloise's graves too, but didn't understand the significance, didn't know the story until just recently and found out that monks sin, too. He wooed and made love to some sweet seductive pupil of his and they cut his balls off for it. Castrated him, with the merciful finale of killing him shortly thereafter, which I guess in the greater scheme of things could've been worse.

When I was a raging adolescent under the tutelage of glorious Churchianity, I once considered castrating myself. The millstone guilt of self-pleasure and its various associated wives' tales of brimstone-laced fury or blindness, trimmed with a narcotic-like misunderstanding that if I plucked the offending eye out I'd be just damned fine... well, that was too much. I figured I'd use what we called a "Cheerio," a tiny toroid of green rubber that clamps over a lamb's tail to cut off circulation, and then it just falls off. Fairly painless, from what I could gather, excepting the occasional bout of gangrene.

Whoo! Imagine if I'd gone through with it! Think of all the fun I'd have missed. Nosir, no thank you, and brimstone be damned.

I'm not sure if that story came out exactly as I wanted it to. But what if someone was telling you their history and said, "No, wait, that's not how it went. Let me start over and get it straight this time, right as rain." Wouldn't that be something? Nobody ever starts over and I for one would sit right back down and listen, 'cause who knows what you'd be missing?