I like heresy

Frog!

We tore out the creeping cypress vine and a frog hopped out and kept certain folks, all of us, actually, entertained for the better part of an hour. I like how it looks like its eyes are being pushed out for our amusement.


A wreath of vines

While I was up on the ladder trying to extract this bushy thing from the pergola and the power line without falling or being electrocuted, we were making fun of poor old John Lennon on what would have been his seventieth birthday. There was the breathy retellings of close encounters with The Beatle filling up NPR that morning - how ironic that he mentioned dying in your interview and then he did? Good old Ironic John, coming through with death so he can become a martyr. See? I'm horrible.  I was imagining instead the septuagenarian and his wife shilling for the Tea Party, staging a Tea-In with corny full page ads in Rolling Stone with him and Yoko sitting around a tiered setup of trifle, their faces cast in bored humorless stares,  holding teacups aloft, captioned Won't you join us for tea?



I don't really think he and Yoko would have done that, though who knows what politics would emerge in their dotage. If the Tea Partiers would get behind marijuana law reform and push to get us out of the war, and war in general, instead of just being desperate pawns for corporations that will sell them off for meat the second the fools let them make it legal to do so, maybe the sweethearts of the old rodeo would have signed up. Just saying, I like John and love Yoko but heresy is of great amusement to me. I appreciate a good liar and enjoy the warm glow generated by a hypocrite. I don't trust them or necessarily want them in charge of things, but they are fun to have around.


My buddy Steve Babcock going deep meta at the reading.

I like heresy because it pulls everything apart like a stoned person does an alarm clock, exhibiting the base human desire to see how things really work. The Word Storm reading Friday night was a great success; I think 5 out of the 7 short pieces I read were hits, which is better odds than old Ironic John had in his solo career, and he kinda invented The Hit. My friend Steve won the night, if there is anything to win, with his live deconstruction of a theoretical bad movie script inna pedagogical slam poet stylee. By the fourth iteration, we were groaning when he approached the podium, the "not more of this" that accompanies a group reading, but each time he pulled us off the ledge and had us in the palm of his animated hands. I need to do more readings. This was only my second one and it is instrumental in determining what works and what doesn't.


I imagine the realization duped Tea Partiers will one day have will look a little like this.

After the reading, my search for a celebratory beer found me with friends at a bachelor party at the karaoke half of a local Thai restaurant. This is the hell to which my heresy will one day bring me. I like this place because they have these great tables with those intricate cork-carved landscapes inset and covered in glass. The tables suck to eat at, for all the added bonus makes the lip of it too low for my fat American legs, but again, it's like heresy. Let's turn the tables on tables! See what happens! The devil always needs another advocate!


They got peanuts for while you wait, too.

Once the vine was torn away and the frog's patience worn thin, we noticed a balloon caught in the neighbor's tree. There is a discrete charm to such a thing like there is a discreet one of the bourgeoisie. I mention this for two reasons: 1) we went to the new Five Guys with the exact same excitement as everybody else in Baton Rouge did last night - a lady from the news was there eating with her family! I texted my wife! - while realizing that rallying around a new chain restaurant is about as Baton Rougeoisie as it gets and whatever, it was good, and 2) I had to look up the movie and then the difference between discrete and discreet, as well as hermeneutic to make sure it means what I think it does for an article I am going to write RIGHT NOW, lest I become the worst kind of karaoke-of-writing heretic imaginable. Imagine.