Weary Souls Day

Sister Nancy Beth had every intention of protesting last night's Halloween Carnival in West Hollywood ("Using Makeup to honor Satan is blasphemous to God!" said my placards, ready at the door), but I just didn't have the energy to deal with that whole scene. This is quite a change for me, since back in my days of selfish hedonism, the Halloween festival was one of the few things about West Hollywood I could muster any enthusiasm about. After accepting Christ as my savior (and a traumatic near-death experience last year where Jesus & I were nearly trampled to death by a gang of Tina Turner impersonators, in what could have been at outtake from Day of the Locust), I assumed I would bring that same level of fervor to seeing this abomination shut down, but no. Since I moved in with Jesus, I seem to only have ridiculously productive weekends, whether I want them or not, that leave me on the brink of exhaustion. I crash and burn with the start of each work week. Last night hit me especially hard, but it was a long time coming.

Saturday night I went with Sister Chandrika and a couple of other ladies from the parish to protest this party being held somewhere out in the hinterlands of Ventura-- it may have been Spahn Ranch, for all I know. Sister Chandrika received a hot tip that plenty of God's Laws were going to be skirted or disobeyed completely, so haul your outrage over to Agoura Hills (is it really productive to distinguish between Agoura and Agoura Hills when nobody knows how to get to either one?) and let those sinners feel your wrath! Sadly, there was a whole lot of nothing going on, so I sat and fumed quietly on the back patio swing; my only outrage was at Sister Chandrika for dragging my tired ass to the outer exurbs of nowhere. I finally got home at about 1:00 a.m. Jesus was lying on the couch in His underwear and watching Blade on dvd; it was pretty obvious who was going to be skipping out on church again the following morning.

After mass, I picked up Jesus we went to the Beverly Center to buy a suit for His upcoming interviews for grad school. Sister Nancy Beth would never own a suit, since even those intended for ladies blur the lines between the sexes in a manner I consider heretical. I had no idea there would be so many choices, but then again, I hadn't taken into account the possibility that the fashion industry had been so deeply infiltrated by homosexual activists intent on pushing their radical metrosexual agenda of pastel-tinted shirts and boldly contrasting ties.

Jesus seemed blithely indifferent to the feminization of American culture on display all around him and asked me, "Which one do you like best?" He had picked out two jackets, one brown and the other black, and was trying them on in front of a mirror with the assistance of this obvious nancy of a sales assistant. I have to admit that it was startling how different an effect each suit had on Jesus. Brown, His first choice, gave Him the humble earnestness of a lawyer from a small town out in the country. The black one had corporate raider written all over it; it was clearly the one to wear the day you announce mass layoffs to the shareholders. Blue seemed to say, "I'm vain enough to know that the wrong color clashing with my skintone could be ruinous to my career," so we settled on gray, which to me said 89th percentile - I may not be in the top ten, but I bust my ass trying. Jesus agreed it was a good choice and He picks it up this Friday.

My final Station of the Cross was today. The Praisemobile had to go in for its own day of beauty at the VW dealer, to the tune of $600. I dropped it off at 8:00 and hoped to make it into work by 9 -- Conchita goes over my timecard with a jeweler's glass these days. On the bus trip in, I had another blinding flash of inspiration: the riders of LA's public transportation system would benefit immensely from some divine intervention, Nancy Beth-style, so I'm going to propose some sort of outreach program to Father Joe where we hand out cosmetics to the needy. I'll let you know well he receives this idea.