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The sermon for Apr. 14, 2003 is: takes the skinheads bowling
2:54 p.m. Oh, today had begun as such a good day. I awoke at something like 4.45 am, drinking deeply in that deep violet milk of the early morning, looking at the walls of the room. I had rearranged the furniture about the day before, in an effort to expand my horizons; and this morning my horizons did seem in fact expanded, or at least different. For some reason, my mind drifting along with the slowly emerging morning, I was put in mind of Marcel Proust. I imagined being Marcel Proust in his bed, listening intently to the utter lack of noise, swaddled warmly in his bedclothes in his cork-lined room. I really felt like I had grasped a sense of his actuality, you know, Proust-an-sich, the sensuality of him; something that I cannot recapture now. It put me in mind of a scene in Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth, when Adrienne Shelley's character starts talk at length with her big mouth about George Washington, what a cool radical guy he is, he grows hemp, he's such a radical, he has ginger-coloured pubic hair. If that doesn't give a sense of Washington-as-I-knew-him, then I wouldn't know what will. Ah but that was long ago, that morning; and all the lazy, beautiful thoughts that moved through my curly brain like milkdrunk cats prowling through alleys and byways for a saucer of rancid milk, those thoughts and their flicking tails have disappeared from me now. It's raining, and this boy Todd, who I knew but not well, but anyway, Todd died last night, and it's raining, and I am sad. So instead let me tell you this story my sister tells about her daughter. My niece, Emily, is two years old; and yesterday, my sister and she went to church for Palm Sunday (my sister is out of tune as a Catholic, but she is desparately practising). Emily, bored out of her mind as any other rational human being would be during Mass, started making noise; so my sister said, "If you keep doing that, God will see and send you to Hell." Just like our mother used to do, awwwwwww. So Emily, like anyone remotely related to me who is threatened with the fear of god, stands up upon the pew and starts shouting, "God? God, where are you?" Then she shouts, "God! I see you! Hi, God! Hi, Grandpa! Hi God!" Then she grabs my sister's head, hugging it tenderly, and starts crooning into my sister's scalp, "God, don't take my mama away. Please, God, don't take my mama away." I wish I could end this story with God humming to himself, and finally after a little contented burp, saying, "Okay." But right now, oh, I can't end the story that way, not while it's raining and Todd is dead. Sigh. Oh well. If you'd like to read what I was trying to write in my forty days and forty nights of Lenten fast, you may; log in as "reviewer," and use the password "reviewer." Dear Diary, I hope you are well. I remain, forever yours, Jonathan.  
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