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Moms chose and gave us our names. Thinking ahead alphabetically-retardedly, she'll consider them repetitive invocations to God whenever our names are spoken, I presume.
Hair -ick was what Moms thought of holding the newborn in her arms. Eric has a penis, and Moms wants a daughter. Later I will have a notion Mom and Dad had a bet of some kind going, whether the first born would be a boy or a girl. Just a notion that never went anywhere, till now.
Grrr… egg hurry! was what Roman Catholic reared Moms thought of after her second child. I'm sure Mom and Dad would've quit with Gregory had he been a gurl (sic).
Kh– hurt!! is what Moms thought of after birthing her third male, and realizing a fourth will be necessary to bring her the daughter she wants. The anguish … .
Woe is me! is the sense within Moms when she brings a fourth male into the world. Ch–wrist-offer herp-all is really a mouthful, and I can only imagine something to do with her sister, one of my aunts having somehow lost one of her two hands. I'm in my late twenties and driving a taxi in New York, wondering what causes all this graffiti I see sprinkled on buildings and what not, and the first time I will spell and sound it out in my mind, K you are T, …, and now I know.
What a bunch of nonsense to be thinking about and including within the moments of the sixteen hours of your waking life, I thunk. But there are millions who thunk like this I realize.
•
Five, six years of age and Moms is still using rectal thermometers with me. It hurts. Really uncomfortable, so much so one day I just have to know what she's doing down there. I'll play War with the next door neighbors. I devise the notion that when you're dead you have to pull down your pants and stick your butt in the air. One of the boys I'm with has been shot, is now play-dead, and I pull down his pants like the rules say, and now I can see "it" on someone else – and I see what Moms is doing down there with me, and with my curiosity satisfied, that's it.
Decades later I'm to realize this day of War play in the woods must've not gone unnoticed, and like my sister with Down's syndrome, from this time forward to any and all who I will ever have the pleasure of their presence, family will make sure this person and everyone will know Kurt is a faggot who doesn't know he's a faggot, yet. I'm a congenital faggot, there'll be no escaping it if family is pressed to explain further this description of me.
Fourteen, fifteen years old and one Sunday morning my second oldest brother wants me to practice wrestling moves in the living room. Next thing I know he's sitting on top of me slapping his penis in my face. After a minute of this I free myself and first thing I do is kick him in the balls, hard. He goes limping off into the kitchen and I hear him talking with Dad for a moment. Moments later I listen as Dad says, raising his voice, "Oh, come on. It couldn't've hurt that much." Then waiting I am for Dad to come into the living room and ask why I kicked my brother in the balls, and after several minutes pass and no Dad, I call up the first kooky notions to mind that family is colluding to? trying to turn me into a faggot?
Weird. But no one is the worse for knowing, or not knowing. Especially I. Later probation reports to judges for pre-sentencing will undoubtedly state idiotic deviant psychology terms such as "latent repressed, regressed homosexual," congenital, schizoidal, sociopathic, schizophrenia of unknown origins. An Ulster County judge did say to me I was an incorrigible drug offender, but given sixty years of academia without knowing the hallucinogenic quality of those molecules trickling into the bloodstream of everyone at puberty, what else could he say to me? Perhaps one of the many judges in County court could've called me in camera and simply told me like a man, "In case you didn't know, they're trying to turn you into a faggot, so knock it off with the criminal behavior, dude. Once they got you locked up in a clinical environment, they'll dose you with those girly chemicals every day you're in there." But a talking to like this would've only blown their cover, so it was never to happen.
•
Sure, I sent myself out on reconnaissance missions with my sister and during an evening while babysitting to try to make sense of what those feelings and thoughts are that are appearing out of nowhere. Each time there are no exasperation of sexual thought or feelings to augment and impel me to further what I am doing. What to do? I'll never become a practicing faggot.
With the clinical environment of home and with those hallucinogenic molecules the university crowd discovered trickling into the young females bloodstream at puberty and now being synthesized and given to me in foodstuffs at home, what was a young man to do? Succumb? Swallow my pride? Not I. Instead I'll conjure notions of putting baseball bat slaps to the heads of my brothers while they sleep, and let Moms find them dead in bed one morning.
I didn't realize in my youth as much as I know today but at fifteen, sixteen to my nineteenth year of age the notion is generated: I have to get out of the house first chance I get. At nineteen I am out, and frequent the County jails too much.
•
One weekend morning I go into the kitchen and grab a box of cereal. Listening to my older brothers talking to Moms as I pour the milk into the cereal bowl, I hear Moms has that voice, and she's been crying, again. Many mornings Moms is up early reading at the kitchen table or doing something and one look tells you she's been crying …, for some reason. This early morning my brothers are trying to convince her there is no God.
"Just look at the trees," Moms is saying to them. I watch her standing at the picture window looking out into the backyard. "How did they get like that?" Years later I'm to realize my father has been making her do or he's doing "nasty" things to her in the bedroom, and this just doesn't sit well with her Roman Catholicism. I would've told her to leave the house were I asked, but no one has any solution. My niece Natalie told me my martial art brother Chris started pummeling my seventy-plus year old father when he first heard about it, this like years after my mother had died. She said it took both my brothers to pull Chris off Dad. No one has a solution to the problems in our family. Hundreds of thousands, millions of psychology students being churned out of Western universities the past five decades of my life and no one yet realizes the hallucinogenic quality of those molecules trickling into the bloodstream at puberty, only decades of word-salad from pathetic professors like Dan Dennett and Patricia Churchland.
On vacation with family and we're visiting the family of my Moms youngest sister Evelyn and uncle Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Just arrived at their house and not more than fifteen, twenty minutes of chewing the fat with my uncle, Dad, my three cousins, my brothers all hunkering at the kitchen table after the hour drive from Kalamazoo. Suddenly I listen to Aunt Evelyn's loud voice saying, "You're disgusting," and I turn from whomever to watch my aunt stepping up right beside and then past my father, looking at him while intoning in a louder voice for all to hear, "You're disgusting!" and she quickly steps out of the room. First thing my Moms did when we arrived was to inform her sister all the nasty my father has been doing to her, and the typical Roman Catholic response from my aunt was to heap public humiliation upon my father. My aunts response of Christian love only made matters worse. No one has words of wisdom for Moms. Moms is bugging out.
•
I'm surprised where they assigned me to work at Clinton Correctional Facility. Three and a half hours weekday mornings and afternoons I head on over to the pharmacy with full-time pharmacist Frank, part-time pharmacist and wife of a Clinton county judge Laurie, and secretary Sofia. Weekends, evenings are free time to read and contemplate passages in the Bible. I have no discussions with other fellow inmates with my Bible studies. Pensive silence from some inmates; parroted bible verses are the responses from others. I walk alone.
I have to ignore all these constant, blatant references towards subjects of sin, punishment, justification and righteousness. Paul is neurotic and bugs out on sin as if sin is the single most important aspect of God's nature. I'll gloss over and come back to them later I suppose. Because I did nothing to God. I didn't ask to be created, and simply stating matter-of-factly that I've "sinned" against God is an incredulous statement that one is somehow presuming to know the will, intentions, demeanor and purpose of God towards us, Its human creation. Paul was what he was, and his words and life are only words in a book to me now. But people today talk of the sin of Man to God as if past presumptions based on the thoughts of men written into the words of books almost three thousand years old must be true. Wow.
Passages of sin, justification by faith, blood of Jesus, etc., I gloss over and move on after the initial reading of them. I want to familiarize myself more with the structure of the bible and especially the culture, folkways, and norms of the times of Isaiah or Moses or Jesus as I read, to stoke and fuel my imagination. To engage my imagination with the realism of the times and the passages is what I want to do initially.
I have two categories where I'm placing the more notable biblical passages: events that happened and events that did not actually occur. Genesis and the story of creation did not happen as described, but the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning God, …" is a very good seed-thought to set the theme for everything else that follows.
Formed maybe three thousand years ago, the book of Genesis is a collection of stories that were initially memorized by sages of the Jewish tribes, and spoken around campfires for generations until these oral traditions were set more or less in written form. These stories served a purpose I'll leave to the reader to imagine, and move on.
The wedding at Cana in the book of John I place in the category of Happened. The main reason it is placed here is the following: not much difficulty for me to place Genesis in the category of Not Happened because I understand the context for how and why this book and the following ones came to be. All the books after Genesis are historical or in some way bolster the legitimacy of future social structures that developed within the Jewish community. I'm not too keen on where Jewish traditions and religious rituals were intended to lead humanity as time rolled forward. My focus and attention while reading the Bible in State's prison is to establish credence or falsehood to passages concerning the person called Jesus.
Miracles for instance. First readings of these passages where Jesus performs miracles are unbelievable. They did not happen. But the wedding at Cana is written almost as if a news reporter of their times had written it. Other passages in the New Testament are written similarly, as if they're just stating the facts, with or without fluff. And I wonder … .
I toy with the notion for why would anyone or group of people concoct what is known as the New Testament. Months pass and the best answer I could bring to myself is to usurp the Jewish religious authorities of the time. The Pharisees and Sadducees administering the Temple had deemed heretical a group of Jews and ostracized them to some caves at Qumran perhaps, and now this group of Jews have cleverly concocted all these letters and tomes … fifty, sixty perhaps ninety years after the important events in the life of Jesus have occurred? Odd. But with this reason I'll be able to tell myself why a verse or passage is too goofy to believe actually happened and to place it in the Not Happened category. If I find enough verses during my readings or if I find the one smoking gun I will eventually come away with my readings of the Bible, for as long as I live, and opine with good reason to anyone who asks that the Bible is a collection of mythological nonsense.
Why would any group of Jews consider plausible that the passages of the wedding at Cana would sway others? The intentions of these hypothetical disgruntled Jews are to delegitimize the Jewish religious authorities of the times by placing belief and faith with this other Jewish guy named Jesus …? by completely bogus thoughts and writings such as this passage where Mary said to Jesus, "They have no more wine" ? Who would seriously believe writing such a thought would be somewhat instrumental with everything else these guys are concocting to bring credence to the grand intention of wrecking the authority of Jewish religious authorities of the time? Because the passages of the wedding at Cana don't fit in the Did Not Happened category, they must've happened. Think about it: all the New Testament passages are simply a concoction, or they actually did happen. One or the other. Black and white, cut and dried; inside one category or not. No if, ands, or buts.
Those miracles of Jesus I read of so often though. I would be quite irrational to believe a guy who is said to have walked upon this earth as I myself has had the capacity to circumvent the laws of nature through his volition simply because so many people say so.
The events as described at the wedding at Cana happened? Jesus' first public miracle at thirty-plus years of age? Before I fall asleep in my prison cell, many evenings for months I want to drift off before full-tilt slumber kicks in and imagine being there with Mary and Jesus and the others at this wedding. I want to mingle around and …? whoa …! I'm a fly on the wall watching Mary and Jesus alone, sitting on the floor they are by the fire inside their clay mud structure called home. Jesus pours something into Mary's wooden cup (where is Joseph? is the fleeting, passing wonder) and Mary swallows from the cup before speaking to Jesus. I can't hear what is said between the two now …, Mary sits up and upon her haunches and placing her cup on the table, hands on her lap she faces Jesus and listens to him speaking passionately about something. Jesus stops talking and they're looking at each other for moments until Jesus smiles– it's more of a smirk, in actuality. I wish I had a mind to hook up and to understand whatever they're saying now.
So it goes.
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…, to be continued.
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