#driftglazz

So for the past 2 months and the foreseeable future, I’ve been in closer contact to Catholicism than I ever really expected for my life. I was raised completely agnostically by my parents, and had only ever been in a Christian church of any denomination for a handful of weddings and funerals and one high school sleepover event that a friend had invited me to. I’m not in close contact with it by my own choice, I have almost zero percent leanings toward spirituality or religion. But I am curious about the idea of religion in general and the ways it works on a personal and social and civilizational level. Thinking about it through the lens of Dune and Octavia Butler, and J.D. Vance’s conversion (fuck that guy), and bureaucracy, and myth, and sin vs. shame and social control, and anything else that pops up. Just digging around in literal millenniums. And so I’ll just be tossing stuff up on my dash if I find it compelling or noteworthy (to me). Apologies in advance. I’m gonna try to tag everything with #christianity and #catholic just fyi.

It's a Saturday night in November, I dropped off my partner with our two youngest kids to go see a play, my teenager is next door at his friend's D&D sleepover birthday party, and I have 1.5 hours now before I have to leave to pick them up after the play is done. Yes, I believe I shall clean up the kitchen and blast Los Crudos really loud. Great idea!

I took the my two younger kids to a taco-themed street festival this afternoon. And an old friend of mine was there as a stilt-walking clown (I see him at these types of events pretty often), and my kids (and a gaggle of other kids) were all clustering around him as he spun plates and juggled and did lasso tricks and generally had them seesawing between silent awe and eager giggles. Anyway, the size of my kids’ eyeballs when their clown spotted me and stilt-strolled over to squat down and give me a big bear-hug was, well, I’ll just treasure that for awhile if you don’t mind. I have plenty of nights I look back on with regret or wasted potential, but if you never had a period in your life when you at least hung out with a pack of feral train-hopping circus kidz, then I feel sorry for you.

What the fuck did I just witness?! Went to a museum in town, the whole family, it started out great, there happened to be an installation piece about air pollution which is of highest interest to me, and saw a bunch of other arts, and none of them were mind-blowing but it’s always interesting to think about art with a beer in hand. Anyway, there was a band playing in the outdoor garden area for their Friday night event and the band looked like a bunch of young weirdos and freaks, “art-y” kidz, and they set the band up and its six young white fellas, a drum kit and a bass guitar, and 4 FUCKING ACOUSTIC GUITARS and they’re all singing and harmonizing and it was like the Eagles if they were boring. Listen, I fucking hate The Eagles but you have to admit they had tunes, and some catchy ones, even if you hate them. And strummed guitars! Not one of these 4 is even playing leads or countermelodies (and I fuckin hate “guitar leads” too!) These fucks were doing like predictable 4-part harmonies playing Eagles tunes at half speed and a quarter of the melody. All 4 strumming away on a standard acoustic guitar. What the fuck. I even saw two dudes switch guitars between one song. Whyyyyyyy?!? It was so bad it made me physically seethe. This only happens like once a year that I get so fuckin righteous about something really insignificant, but I guess tonight was the night.