I'm Glad I'm not at St. Mark's Anymore

When Thurgood Marshall learned Clarence "Uncle" Thomas would be taking his seat on the Supreme Court, he remarked, "You had chicken salad.  Now you have chicken shit."  That's proved to have been an understatement, but it accurately describes the current state of my old musical home.

I spent seven seasons in the choir at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City.  It was great being back in a music group, especially one that was decent as opposed to the Turdville Chum Shovellers.  And we had good clergy.  Tyler Doherty, rector and then also dean.  And Holly Huff, rising through the ranks to assistant priest.  COVID hit, but we kept burbling along courtesy the powers of the Internet.

But it soon became apparent COVID had hit harder than we knew.  When I got it in January 2021, the gift it kept giving me was a torpedoed GI tract and a gut biome I had to rebuild and still have to monitor.  That was nothing compared to Tyler.  He couldn't get rid of it, and it was sucking the juice out of him.  He needed a cane to walk.  The services he conducted became fewer, and he had trouble standing for any length of time.   By the time he finally threw in the towel, resigned, and went on disability a year ago, he was practically a phantom.  His farewell service he had to sit through entirely.  Holly stepped into the breach to become priest-in-charge.  She was young (barely older than my youngest daughter) and managing a long distance relationship (a draining pain in the ass as I well know), but she held things together.  Then they announced the selection of a new dean, her partner finished grad school, and on my birthday she left the cathedral and headed for NYC.  Probably with a severe case of burnout and a deep reluctance to return to a second fiddle role, especially since the new boss will be far less than Tyler.

In the meantime they brought in another priest to help Holly and now fill in until the new dean takes over.  Steven Smith.  In all honesty I don't care much for him, and today's sermon was a good example of why.  The Old Testament reading was Jonah preaching in Nineveh, and Smith kept talking about how we know this and we know that with respect to the Book of Jonah.  No.  We.  Don't.  What we know is: 1) there likely was a man named Jonah in the 8th Century BCE in the North Kingdom, and he may have been considered a minor prophet and preached at Nineveh; 2) there was no big "come to Yahweh" moment at any point in the Neo-Assyrian Empire; and 3) the Book of Jonah was not written until several centuries later, after the rise of Aramaic.  The only people granting any historicity to the Book of Jonah are evangelical "scholars" like Donald Wiseman, i.e. hacks.  It's a fairy story, and while we know what it says, we do NOT know anything in it is a true story.  Quite the contrary.  If I wanted to hear sloppily ascribed Bible stories, I'd go listen to some vangie Bible thumper rant away.  It has no place in an Episcopal church.

But then he kept going.  Supposedly, the moral of the story is that God does not relent.  Right.  I would submit the moral of the story, as with so many of the stories in the Bible, is that God can't be bothered to do his goddamned job.  Time and again He sends frightened, barely literate bumpkins into harm's way to deliver His message, when He could do it Himself far easier and with greater effect.  So why doesn't He?  Apparently He's either cruel, lazy, a buffoon, a dick, or some combination thereof.  And in a hairy plot twist, God ultimately DOES relent.  Because Nineveh sorted itself out, God refuses to destroy it, much to Jonah's chagrin, who holds to the position that Nineveh should get what it has coming.  And God ends up having to chastise him about this.  And that's why many modern scholars view the Book of Jonah as misinterpreted satire.

And then he kept kept going, into the Gospel reading, the Parable of the Vineyard Owner and the Laborers.  Smith's takeaway, which frankly is the standard takeaway, is that the folks who have been saved a long time shouldn't be resentful of those who get saved at the last minute and still receive full salvation because God has infinite love and infinite salvation to go around.  Let's set aside for the moment the inevitable consequence of a parade of Musks and other evil rat fuckers receiving salvation on their death beds after lives of leaving nothing but destruction in their wakes, a result we can see as nothing but unjust (contrary to the message of the Bible) and reinforcing of the need to make them pay in THIS world (also contrary to the message of the Bible; fuck it).  The real takeaway is that finite systems do not scale to infinity.  God may be able to get away with payouts like that, but a vineyard owner can't, and he'd find that out in a fast hurry.  The next work day, all the laborers show up at 5, work two hours, and demand a full day's pay.  That can't work.  Obviously.  And contrary to what Smith preached, it isn't about "deserving", it's about earning.  The full-day laborers aren't telling the owner he can't pay the part-day laborers whatever; they're telling him he has to pay them more than the part-day laborers because they earned more.  This isn't some Golden Ticket for Salvation, where one is all you get because one is all you need.  This is their daily bread.  So the analogy is silly, worthy of C.S. Lewis, yet people have slurped it up with a big spoon for nearly 2,000 years.

And now we come to the crux of the problem.  This parable, and nearly every Bible story, was just an attempt by finite people to explain the infinite acting on the finite world.  People who had little if any idea that infinity existed in any sense other than "really effing big".  People who had little understanding of how any aspect of reality worked.  So their stories, when actually examined, have proved to be wrong or at least silly.  Churches should be explaining how these stories can still be considered to explain anything, if in fact they can.  This is the intellectual and spiritual heavy lifting that churches should be focused on.  And that they avoid every Sunday. 

Yeah, Complicated

Now back in Rottenwood Depths, I started packing shit up and getting it out of the house for real.  By the time I got done, I had four storage units in the rental center.  Rented a truck for the in town hauling, and it was pricey.  Looked into long-haul costs and about died.  They would have crippled us.  So I made a command decision and bought a truck.  Even with license, insurance, and repairs, the thing cost 1/3 what renting would have.  What a fucking world.  (As an epilogue, it's now sitting at the farm in need of more repairs.  Some wee, gnawing beastie chewed through the fuel line.)

So I loaded the truck, and on 10-11 June (with no license, title, or insurance because there was no time to wait for them) I did a straight shot back to the farm.  Unloaded, cleaned some more, then went back to SLC on 16 June.  Piano movers came 17 June, and I got the truck licensed and insured 18 June (Woohoo!).

21-24 June: Time to move Boy.  Loaded his stuff and other stuff and did yet another straight through.  He followed in his vehicle with his luggage and the cats, making a stopover along the way.  Got to the farm, unloaded, did a last check-through for deados and bait stations, moved him in, straight back to SLC for the final load-out.

To be continued.

The Beginning

Well it's July and I'm getting ready to head back to Iowa to wrap up a bunch of business, so I figured I'd better get this narrative back on track.  I've spent the time recovering, along with clearing underbrush (endless blackberry), maintaining the woodpile, cleaning and repairing the roof, doing house maintenance, tending the vegetable gardens, and performing household chores while Frau works.

As I said in the prior entry, in April LL Spurge and  PM 3D gave me notice in April, three months earlier than I'd intended to give them for an end-of-August departure.  The June deadline stole two months from us, so Boy and I were scrambling.  Spurge and 3D had been planning this since last year.  The routine for 10 years had been that 3D sent me a new lease in August, and I ignored it.  We spent the vast bulk of our time there as a monthly rental.  This time, though, instead of the lease running through the following August, 3D inserted a March termination date.  When she gave me the notice in April, she noted the lease had already expired and they were being generous by allowing us to stay through June.  I quickly added Spurge and 3D to the list of assholes who will meet untimely ends should I ever be diagnosed with an unfortunate condition, and I started working the problem.

First I moved a bunch of stuff back into the storage units, which was disappointing but freed up most of two rooms for staging items for what I knew would be a multi-destination move.  Then I got on the issue of what to do with Boy.  Fortunately, a problem arose that allowed me to solve two in one stroke.  Li'l Sis informed me it was no longer possible to insure the farmhouse without someone living there.  I ran it past Boy, and he agreed to move there.  I knew I would have to get there and clean it out first as I knew it was a mess.  That proved a gross understatement.

I left 7 May and drove straight through (Yes, straight through.  Until I had the farmhouse ready and was out of Rottenwood Depths, I knew I did not have the leisure for overnight travel.) and arrived at the farm on 8 May.  For a lesser mortal, what I found there would have been soul-destroying.  The outbuildings were all gone, except for the metal bones of the boxcar and the rubble pile of the old garage lying on its former contents.  Antique implements were standing around, and everything was decaying from exposure.

Inside the house was worse, much worse.  The place was stuffed full of stuff, piles of nonsense everywhere, with little pathways through it all in the dining room, living room, and parlor.  Grandma's desk was buried in piles of financial and medical records.  Everything in the basement was rotting.  The main bedroom upstairs that Sperm Donor had used reeked of piss because he had become incontinent and regularly soaked the mattress.  He'd wrecked Mom's mattress in the parlor in a similar fashion.  And there were dead mice (deados) everywhere.  Li'l Sis had simply had the exterminators put poison stations everywhere, and there were desiccated carcasses practically carpeting the place.  Hells, there were two in the washing machine.

We had a 20-yard Dumpster scheduled, but it wasn't there yet, so I went to work on what I could.  I cleared a small space in the living room to set up a cot, then I cleaned the kitchen so there was a place to store and prepare food.  I cleared out the office area and other spaces by dragging all the papers out west of the house to where the chicken coop once was and burning them.  Several yards of it.  The Dumpster arrived, and I filled it rapidly.  The refrigerator hadn't been cleaned since it was moved in, so I cleared all the ancient food out of it and disinfected it.  I dumped the smelly mattresses so I could start airing the place out.  Hauled a carload of clothes to Mom's nursing home in Wellman (At least they had treated her nicely, which was more than you could say for the fucking asylum in Lone Tree.).  And everywhere there were deados and poison stations that had to go.  I filled the Dumpster, wrapped up a couple of other things, and on 22 May headed back.  Again I drove straight through and arrived on 23 May.

Then things got complicated.

The Long and Winding Road

Well here it is, 13 December, Friday the 13th, and I'm just about to the end of this mess of a year.  25,000 miles on the box truck I picked up in June, thousands more on the car, and another 1,000+ by air.

It started in April.  I'd been planning on ditching out this year and rejoining Frau in Washington State.  Target date was August since that was the month we'd moved in and that was what had been the "annual date" even though we'd been on a month-to-month for years.  But Landlord Spurge and Property Manager Debby Does Deseret had apparently been plotting, and in April 3D told me I had until the end of June.  So I had to scramble and find places for Boy and Le Crap and then get myself hauled the 1,000 miles to Frau.

And I did it.  Nearly turned myself into a crater, but I did it.  Now I'm sitting in Salt Lake City wrapping up some business, Then I'll run the leg to Washington one more time.  Then I'll settle in for a long, Winter's nap.  And I'll tell this story serially over the next few months.  Buckle up, it's been a bumpy ride.

Back To The Actual Road

Well this has been a year from Hell, a substantial percentage of it spent on the road.  In April I was informed we had to be out of the Cottonwood Heights place by the end of June.  I started arranging moving Boy to the Iowa farm and me to Washington to finally rejoin the wife.  This resulted in seven, cross-country road trips between Utah and Iowa and two between Utah and Washington, with the ultimate monster, Washington to Iowa and back, coming up some time in November.  It's been a real bite in the pills, and I have many tales to tell that I shall spin out in the dark, wet Winter to come.

The Religious-Hate-Ure of the Theocratic Republic of Utardistan Strikes Again

Back in January, the Utah Bar offered an online CLE for that pesky and farcical "professionalism and civility" credit.  Since I didn't have to go anywhere, and since it was free, I signed up.  The program was our glorious governor Spencer Cox (aka Spence Buddy and Dick With Ears) and another governor bemoaning the incivility in current political discourse and solemnly advising us to be nicer.  What it really amounted to was a big promo for the status quo.  "Be nice.  Don't get angry.  Keep things safe and sedate."  That works well enough for those at the top of the hill and they treat each other more or less civilly because they don't want to mess up their cushy sinecures.  How they treat those down the hill though is another matter.  As I've pointed out with law firms, the tower firms treat the rest of us like something they just stepped in, and they do so with impudence because no one will enforce any behavioral rules against them.  That's the way it is across the entire system.  So if you want the people at the top of the hill to stop pissing on you and calling it rain, civility is not going to get you there.  You're going to have kick in some doors and then kick in some heads.  Sorry Friends of Gandhi (FOG, because that's what you're walking around in), but Stokely Carmichael was right: For nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience, and the US and the rest of the crapitalist plutocracies have none.

And this last week Governor DWE demonstrated yet again just how easy it is to control a flock of sheep.   At the request of the Fools on the Hill (which, like the RethugliKKKon Party in this this state, is really just an arm of the LDS Church), he signed into law a ban on all alcohol over 80 proof.  Say goodbye to all whiskey and a lot of other things.  This of course is religious legislation aimed straight at all of us who aren't delightsome.  It's part of Larry H. Christ's Parent's Empowered program, which I got to see up close and personal at its inception as a member of the study group at Dan Jones Research (Which is another arm of LDS fascism.  Dan Jones was at Utah State when I was there, a geography professor whose specialty was finding new and interesting ways to lie with statistics.  It got to be too much even for the goose-steppers running the university, they told him he couldn't do partisan politics on company time, and he left to make a mint ginning up bogus numbers to "support" LDS and RethugliKKKon shit-shoveling.).  It was a deliberate attack on everyone who wasn't ortho-Morm, and this is just an extension.  And they'll get away with it until the Hill-Top Temple is brought low.

 CORRECTION: Finally got my hands on the law, and it's 80%, not 80 proof.  Whiskey is safe.  Governor DWE is still a douche.

More Rubbish From My Alma Maters

As if I needed another Dunning Kruger case to make me question the value of my Utah State diploma, in waltzes (in the Spring 2022 edition of Utah State Magazine) Bliss W. Tew, Class of '78 (majoring in gods know what, probably remedial bugger eating) bitching about USU trying to increase diversity and wondering (Tucker says, "People are asking!") if there isn't a conspiracy because Why Be You (which he apparently also has some abomination of a degree from) is doing something similar, and concluding it must all be the result of Critical Race Theory (even though he knows no more about CRT than any other shrieking, fascist broflake).

Tew is a climate change denier.  And an anti-vaxxer.  And an ammosexual.  And on top of that, he's a John Bircher, which means he's a fascist and a racist (Since my father has been a Bircher for over a half-century, I have some knowledge of the topic.).  So his opinion can't be considered surprising.  But it is disappointing he's walking around with a degree from an institution one of my degrees is from.  And it's even more disappointing that institution platforms mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers whose primary goal is the destruction of American education and democracy.

Then there is the news I got last week.  I attend the Episcopal Church, but I was confirmed Presbyterian (as in what is now Presbyterian Church (USA)) and I keep track of what is going on over there.  A few years ago they revised the Canons to amend the definition of marriage from "the union of a man and a woman" to "the union of two people", basically green-lighting same-sex marriage.  In spite of that I am in no way considering returning for the simple reason the PC(USA) seems to be doing a shitty job of policing the Canons.  For example even in a liberal place like Seattle, University Presbyterian is apparently allowed to have only a limited and questionable adherence to same-sex marriage (It apparently has only a limited and questionable adherence to prima scriptura over sola scriptura as well, but I'll leave that for another day.).

Reich Wingers have been fleeing the PC(USA) for decades, the biggest schism being when the Presbyterian Church in America split to become a major player in the Reformed, Religio-Fascist TULIP Patch.  About 10 years ago another group split over LGBTQ+ rights and formed the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO, since renamed Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians but retaining the acronym because why not, I guess).  I guess I have to give these folks some credit for packing their bigotry off elsewhere rather than being crypto-bigots in a denomination they shouldn't be in.

Anyway, I learned last week an old friend jumped that fence.  He was a classmate at Michigan Law, nice guy, Grateful Dead/Rolling Stones fanatic, very liberal.  Practiced law here and then in Seattle, and then a few years ago dumped that and went to seminary, becoming a Presbyterian minister.  Came back here and was assistant pastor at First Presbyterian.  Then earlier this year PC(USA) released him, and he went over to ECO.  Makes me wonder just what he was preaching at First Pres since he'd already bought ECO theology while he was there.  It also makes me wonder if my alma maters were actually engaged in education or just in the planting of philosophical time bombs.  Or perhaps they were just miserably inept at identifying and defusing the time bombs that were already there.  While not bothering to do much education either.