Boomerang

Lots of things get lost in the rush of everyday life. We neglect our children, we take our spouses for granted, we miss opportunities that scream an inch from our ears because we are so intent on following our noses. I missed out on the opportunity to blog about the snippet of a TV news story I heard the morning I left last week about a woman who claimed to see a miraculous image of Jesus in a painting of Jesus. And now I can't find mention of it anywhere on the web. Life presents us with these challenges. It is the wise among us who realize that once lost, they are gone forever. So fleeting is this mortal life.

I did manage to get quite a bit else done whilst called away by awful circumstance. I made it an unironical and literalist point to, during my sabbatical, attend an actual sabbat. I swore on the blood of our child sacrifice that I would not divulge fully the details of the ritual. It's an odd word, though, "sabbat." It suggests either Judaism or Satanism, but the good news for me there is, being Catholic, I make no official distinction.

I spent a significant amount of my time away in airports. Usually, they're a hassle and a drag. But if you're the parent of three children who are specifically not with you at the airport, that same airport becomes a haven of wonder and freedom, a gateway to unlimited human possibility. For me, there has always been something enthralling and intoxicating about the airport. It's probably just the jet exhaust, but it might also be the implied unrestricted freedom of movement, the potential to close the gap between yourself and nearly every other inhabited spot on the globe with a simple flick of your major credit card. In that way, the implied travel of airports is not unlike the implied sex going on in your average strip club: sure, you might be limited by circumstances (I hold tickets to Bismarck, SD, or, say, I'm married and my wife has been known to subject me to an unannounced sniff test if I'm out past 9), but if you relax your perception just enough to soften the focus, the possibilities seem endless. To sit alone and your home and fantasize about world travel you can't afford or aerobic pommel-horse fornication with silicon Amazons you'll never meet, that's just pathetic. Spend the money to roll into your local airport or "gentleman's club" and suddenly... well, it's still mostly impossible, but ooh, it's SO CLOSE!

I think that's why you usually find strip clubs and airports built in such close proximity. That's just basic metaphysical potentialities playing themselves out.

This is really a large pile of deflection and obstinate nonsense, but my personal distaste for the blog-as-personal-confessional and my hive-y allergy to sincerity in general are compulsions I dare not ignore. It only seems appropriate that I finish thusly:

A priest, a minister and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says "What is this, some kind of fucking joke?"

I do not apologize.