Monday, May 23, 2016

Everything is a Lie and This is Fine

That guy about town who is eternally wearing an anti (magic word illegal) immigration shirt. I've seen him about campus chatting up 20-year old women, Latinas and Mid-Eastern women as well as blonds in Elkhorn letter jackets.  He makes homework jokes or speaks to them of how lonely he is.  This piece has nothing to do with this man really.  It's just That Fucking Guy is all I mean to say about him right?  Perhaps he would feel less lost and alone if he lived in a culturally uniform village of <1000 but he does not. It happens that many of these prairie villages  are old "white ethnic" enclaves where English didn't prevail until the radio age; and this of course has become a fact that we are supposed to pretend to not remember, like the time that aunt whoever straight up murdered a guy back in 62. Illegal.

On my Mother's Day call home I was informed that my parents priest is getting booted up to the cathedral in Grand Island. His name is Father Jim and he seems OK. I've interacted with him for maybe ten minutes in as many years, and first impression had might as well be no impression I realize, but he seems OK. He owns a bowler hat like I own and it would give Mom a vicarious thrill if one of her priests made bishop one day so alright. He hails from Polish folk in the Ord/Burwell/Loup City area so he might be a distant relative of mine; or has descendants from the same old-country town who read the same flamboyantly fraudulent railroad flyers as my own.

Willa Cather was a hardcore Bouge and obsessively racist even by the standards of her age.  I would still have sex with most of her characters.  I am a patriot.

I happened to be flipping through the Catholic newsletter for the Lincoln Diocese the other day.  It was Mother's Day/Marion themed and May Crowning was given mention.  If you didn't go to Catholic school May Crowning is a thing where all the kids gather to sing stupid nursery derivatives of Ave Maria and then one of the upper grade girls puts a crown of roses on a Mary statue. Katie Sedlacek got the honor from my class.  I think she may have still been a virgin upon our graduation though I didn't pay all that much attention to such things.  I think she's still alive.

The newsletters content was pernicious to be sure though generally mild. There was a stab at "militant secularism" though what this is was left unexplained. Sleeping in on Sunday with a gun under your pillow or some such. There were no direct mentions of abortion believe it or not though it was heavily implied that motherhood was a universal ideal if not quite mandatory and there was a great deal written about the "sacrifice" of motherhood.  An insinuation that motherhood was good precisely because it was Sacrifice. Mater Dolorosa.  Tammy Wynett was as WASP as steamed beets but her songs have the same martyrdom fetish.

The day before my 6th grade May Crowning my stepdad made some crack about all virgins "these days" being either four years old or virgins, and was then saddened by my non Heyo reply. I really have no desire to discuss sex with the man who is doing my mom and he never seems to grasp how this could be. He has had no kind of social brohood beyond family for decades now, and more than that he seems obsessively fixed with the idea of One True Singular and Universal manhood, with a Singular lust among all men being a vital point of connection of all men. The absurdly perpetual sexual harassment in "Mad Men", set in a time when my dad would have been high school to college age; the obviously deliberate rituality of it all. Maybe it's loneliness more than all else that explains why one could actually want universal mandates, dogmas; some critical aspect of self to be determined by higher authority. At any rate I have sensed from a young age that sex talk among men does have an affected Shriner's back-slap about it.  The idea of all men being wired to be horndogs and all women being wired to be coy might be declared "common sense" but come off it. There are seven and a half billion of us and this is common sense proof that women enjoy sex well enough too now isn't it?

If men are wired to pursue and women to dodge; then it is nature's decree that men and men alone are the ones who Make relationships; which plays into the larger idea of men and men alone being the ultimate authors of the world.  This I suppose is how all of the Heyo bullshit serves our vanity.

I saw my stepdad and sister about a month ago when she needed to see a medical specialist in Omaha. I drove their car as both have come to see Omaha traffic as impossible chaos; though Wendy had lived there for many years. I also had free reign to choose where we had dinner which heartened me greatly. On previous family dinners in Omaha we'd stand in line for forty five minutes at the Crossroads Olive Garden, my suggestions to try a smaller place in Benson or Dundee dismissed as a poor student's modesty.   Standing in line was simply what one did when they went to a special restaurant like Olive Garden. On this day last month I wondered inbound on Dodge more or less planless until it occurred to me to try the Bohemian Cafe. At 13th and Dodge we passed a black man my dad assumed was derelict because; well he was jaywalking, and shame on him I suppose, but mainly because he was black and waiting for public transit at the bus stop.

We came to the Bohemian Cafe to find that it was closed on Tuesdays. Your guess is as good as mine as to why. If Tuesdays had some religious or other special value in Czech culture I would have known but no it's just fucking Tuesday. So I decided to take them to one of the small cafe's on south 24th.  South O was close and the food unfailingly reliable except not quite. After parking we chose a place at random that had milk shakes  as the featured desert but no milk shakes.  My torta was rather dry. we had to fetch our own silverware. Even the salsa was weak. My stepdad would later refer to the place as "disgusting" though bad as it was it wasn't that. The sound of Spanish on TV led him to see dirt that wasn't there frankly. He said he would have preferred Outback and this reminded me of the time I was ten and my uncle shittalked me for coming to the Lincoln Outback in a tanktop and sandals instead of dressing up for Outback.  Fuck all that. I'm a grown man who lives in 'the east' and yall are gonna be eating out of food trucks on my say so forever more.


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