the teflon god

I came home and went for the bed.  I left the grotto this morning with a headache and returned with one though the location of pain moved elsewhere.  I got up at five and knew I wasn’t going to make it to mass.  I lit a candle for the boat people who refer to themselves as dead goats who don’t fear the butcher.  The butcher would be the sea which even on a clear day is treacherous if you’re in a boat that leaks, is overcrowded, doesn’t have a captain or if you’re a Christian and Muslims want to kill you.  @#%$!!! Christians are just in the crosshairs everywhere, Ethiopians losing their heads to Daesh, Coptics in Cairo, the terribly terribly unfortunate in the rest of the Middle East for reasons God cannot permit without being called into the office for questioning.  At least here, no one else connects the fate of believers to God, right?  He just gets off the hook every time, it’s amazing.  The Teflon God. 

Say why don’t you give up blaming God and just stop believing?  That would be too easy, humans are capable of the worst and we know it.  No, God is the one and as long as there is humanity made in the image of a master creator the master creator is prime for scrutiny.  Aren’t you afraid this God will finally crush you like a grapeseed for questioning such counsel, well that would mean God heard and didn’t like what I was saying and that would mean I hit a nerve and wow I’d be pretty jazzed, say God heard me, so go ahead God, release the pigeons above. 

The students were surprisingly cooperative this morning and I don’t know why.  I finished my lesson and let them go.  After the break there was a birthday party for one of the students, she must be popular for there were four bags of gifts in the back for her.  I nibbled on the slice of cake and drank the warm pepsi, everyone’s revved up let’s practice writing conclusions and thesis sentences. 

The wayward soul went all the way down to Uruguay today.  Just go and you are guaranteed to find work, sure why wouldn’t they want to hire me once we met?  Uruguay, the thumbprint country, the second smallest on the continent but it looks pretty cool.  Just fly down, that’s all.  Then I looked at Morocco, I look here seasonally, but left the country quickly.  Africa is one $#% up place I tell ya.  If it isn’t islam it’s poverty and drought and who knows what the hell else.  Sorry, I feel bad but I don’t wanna work on the dark continent even though those who have visited it say it’s pretty special.  Yeah, sure, for a visit I’ll go.  

And then I return to Detroit.  Nothing exotic about this place.  Hey, tens of thousands of migratory Africans and Middle Easterners would love this place, ‘you mean this building, no people?’ I live here family, I bring family, big family, before war, big family, brother, sister, cousin, nephew, some in Lebanon, some in Paris, I no hear long time.  What would be more rewarding than pulling up a folding chair close to Aziz in Dearborn or Hamtramck and saying hey shabob, all I know how to do is take photos and teach English and one of those things I don’t get paid for so let’s practice.  The red light means….the yellow light means…flashing red and blue lights mean….

Gosh why do I find a girl thirty years younger than me attractive?  I do not hope for such an absurdity, I’m merely wondering, there’s really no one twenty or ten years or even five years younger coming across my radar, that is simply unfortunate.  If there is no other reason to give up this economically suitable lifestyle it is to fraternize with the other gender.  Really, I'd never be a good hermit. 

Six years ago I was on a journey into other dimensions and six years later the only dimension I see or hear or smell is the one everyone else experiences.  There is one student, though, whose smell baffles me.  I haven’t brought it up with her and I won’t, but she smells of Tibetan incense.  I wanna say you burn incense in your home, do you, your smell takes me back to the mountains.  She’s also a student who is always looking at me the way you’d look at a bag of tortilla chips.  No, I’m not going there.  Nothing is worth what you are thinking right now so stop it.  I think it’s time for bed again.  Thank God.