Spirit in the Sky - Earthquakes, God & the One Who Got Away

I miss God.  Not in that aching, “We used to ride bikes every day until her parents moved back to Waukegan and the next time I saw her she was grinding onstage at a bar in The Dalles with singles tucked into her underpants” kind of way, no.  I miss the sense of scale that the idea of God brought to the world, and the Old Testament sabre-rattling that used to keep in line a people which comedian Lewis Black once described as “ten hairs away from being baboons.”

When I was younger and rounder my very Catholic grandmother decided that I needed to be placed in Catechism so as to begin honing my sense of guilt.  For the uninitiated, Catechism is Catholic religious school, usually held on sunny weekends so as to prepare you for a lifetime of the church ruining things you enjoy. 

Ringing in the New Year, Victoria-style

We are in the twilight of another year, that brief break in the ryhthmic breath of the universe when we pause to consider the mistakes we made in the last 12 months and prepare to repeat them.  As always, everyone will ring in the new year in their own way.  Some will already be in bed when the big moment comes, some will be off their face on Jack Daniels and glue, some will be hurriedly packing their mountain caves with ammunition and tinned ham in preparation for the big showdown in 2012, when everyone's favorite feathery serpent will rain down the kind of destruction we haven't seen since Y2K.

I Gave Up My Bus Pass For This? - Driving in Victoria

Until this August it had been seven years since I’d driven an automobile.  In some circles this declaration would be cause for games of celebratory hacky-sack and lengthy speeches about how everything cruel and savage in this world is powered by the internal combustion engine.

I’d like to say that my reasons were ideological.  That I abstained because of some objection to the way Mother Earth has been viciously subjugated by the demoniac heralds of that brutal warlord Henry Ford.  This would be a craven lie.  In actual fact, for years I have simply been too lazy to take a driver’s test.