12.12

There is a quite a bit of web chatter today about Fox anchor Megyn Kelly's pronouncement last night on her show. You know the one I am talking about... Jesus and Santa are both white, don't you know?

“[F]or you kids watching at home,” “Santa just is white. But this person (Aisha Harris) is arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa.” “Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too.”

This kind of stuff makes my head spin like Linda Blair and sends me running to the medicine cabinet. First lets look at Santa, a figure whose image was concocted relatively recently, based on a loose amalgamation of the fourth century St. Nicholas of Myra, who hailed from the Anatolian steppes in an area now known as Turkey and a portly dutch figure more of us are familiar with known as Kris Kringle.

While the latter was certainly bred from good white stock, the former was most certainly one of the muddier shades. Ever seen a turk? They kind of look like me, but with my eyebrows maybe growing together. As Procul Harem might say, a darker shade of pale.

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I hate to even touch jesus but as a semite in search of a missing haplotype, I admit to checking the Caucasian box on the government forms and maybe he did too. Definitely not a Pacific Islander. I hate to break this to you but supposedly the guy was, get this, a jew. Really. Until he found christianity of course and then he had the rhinoplasty and got the curls ironed out and nobody but the good lord was the wiser.

I think that the man did exist, a revolutionary prophet who counseled that we should love our enemies and led an intellectual vanguard that was forming approximately 150 years before his birth, to a people hungry for a messiah to fulfill the biblical words regarding the roots of Jesse, which if memory serves, were first mentioned in Ezekial, surely one of Bob Dylan, Rick Griffin and my favorite chapters, filled with brilliant visual imagery but much more accessible and powerful in my eyes than the new testament's chapter Revelations.

A friend of mine was in Cusco and told me about seeing several different last supper paintings down there where the disciples were dark skinned indios and the gang was feasting on guinea pig. I believe that we humans tend to create our deities in our own image.

Of course there are people who take for gospel what others might not process quite so literally. And who the hell am I to make any comments on anybody else's belief system? Freaking worship the trix rabbit for all I care.

I was reading something from Oklahoma the other day, can't put my finger on the link right now but it definitely got me chuckling. Somebody said that if english was good enough for Jesus to speak, it should be good enough for the residents of the United States of America.

Now piety is one thing, this level of dumb goes beyond the pale. Sometimes our idiocy just floors me, I can't sugar coat it. Maybe our part of the species can secede and leave those people to happily inhabit their flat little earth.

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I didn't see a lot of churches in Canada, no little metal fish on cars either. Saw some Anglican churches, fairly low key. But one evening I was watching a local station and being really bored, tuned in to some religious programming and caught two guys having an interesting discussion.

These guys were talking about the many different religions and how they all claim to have a slightly different take and they all think that they have it about right and then there are those people on the outside who claim to have a slightly wider view and maybe figure out that man needs salvation, gods, hell in some cases, to keep them from killing each other and maybe fulfilling some supernatural or spiritual requirement.

And the guy says that the people who claimed that they had this wider, objective ability to understand religion and man's need for deities are really the arrogant ones.

And I kind of have a problem with this and it is one of the things I can't stand about the Judeoislamichristian faiths, the security of ignorance part. Man gets into trouble right off the bat when eve takes a bite out of that macintosh and tastes from the tree of knowledge. Why the entrenchment in ignorance, if not downright stupidity? What is wrong with trying to figure it all out, maybe get smarter?

I just know that my god wants me to be just as smart and aware as I can possibly be.

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I had my stitches pulled out today. Doctor says that I can lose the sling when I want to. Right now it is serving more as a psychological barrier so that people won't bump into me unawares or clap me on the shoulder, something that has happened quite a few times. Need orange safety cones around me. Found out that my health coverage doesn't cover rehab for shit so I am not going to get it. Doc says that I can find the proper rotator cuff rehab instruction videos on Youtube. Fine. I told him that I would be healing super fast and he said that he believed it. My mouse is back on the right side of the keyboard. I feed myself a hell of a lot better with my left hand than I used to.

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Got back to my store and heard a knock. A strange man at the door, said he was a friend. Must have been a friend of the wife. I got off the phone and tried to suss it out, he mentioned a name out of the past, a pre Fallbrook room mate, no it couldn't be. A bit heavier, darker hair but my gosh, it is the same guy, 35 years later.

How did you find me, Jerry? He searched my name a few years ago and found the blast. Says that I have a pretty big cyber foot print. Went back to the beginning and read every one. Don't know that he thinks much of the writing but he likes the pictures and Spain. Wonder if anyone else has ever read every one. I don't think I have. Every once in a while I follow a hit to an old post that I forgot I wrote that cracks me up. Like AirDong. But I applaud the valiant effort. And also thank new blast reader Ilana for now regularly tuning in.

My old friend said that he saw my spouse Leslie walking through Loews one day and wanted to say hello, recognized her from her many pictures on the blog, but didn't didn't want to freak her out.

Jerry is a very good guy, always was. Big wave surfer. Was a pleasure, so happy to see you again. Remarried, after a disastrous first like me. Another betrayal. But things have thankfully come around and most of us usually get what we deserve in the end. There, now I sound religious.