People are funny

As I left my UU Sangha this evening, I waved to one of the women there and said, "See you next week."

She replied "Inshallah." (One look at her will tell you without doubt that her ancestors must have been English and Scandinavian.)

Then she caught up with me and explained. She has an Iranian neighbor, you see, and so she and her neighbor got in the habit of saying "Inshallah" to each other years ago. Today it's something they find totally natural.

Only she realizes that nowadays, with all the political turmoil in the Middle East, some people get very sensitive about using any conventional phrases from Arabic. So now she feels like she has to watch herself, to avoid saying something that will bother people.

I suggested that she could always just translate it to English as "God willing."

But no, she balked at that. I think it's because she's a Unitarian, and so feels squeamish talking about God.

Even though she clearly has no problem saying "Inshallah," … which is an abbreviation of "in shāʾ Allāh" … which literally means "if God wills" or "God willing."

So why is she willing to talk to God in Arabic, but not in English? (Note that she doesn't speak Arabic or Farsi, or not more than her neighbor taught her.) I think it is for the same reason that profanity never sounds as bad in a foreign language. I have known Germans who are perfectly willing to exclaim "Shit!" but who are far too inhibited to yell "Scheiße!" just as loud. And I've known Americans who feel the same way but in reverse. It's probably the same thing going on here.

People are funny.  

Thoughts on prayer

One evening while I was sitting with Ma Schmidt—I had almost a week to go before coming home, and it was maybe eight or nine days before she died—I suddenly had an idea. She had been moaning "Help me" over and over, even as she was totally unable to answer the question, "Help you do what?"

And suddenly I wondered, Is that how God (or the gods) experience human prayer? Everybody knows that the great majority of prayers seem to go unanswered. Could it be that the problem is on our end, not God's? To flesh this out a bit: Maybe it's the case that there is a limited range of things that God can do for us, but "Make It All Better" isn't one of them. Or, well, it might be one of them if we could specify exactly what we mean. But maybe (for whatever reason) we can't ask God to figure it out for us. Maybe He's willing to help if only we can spell out what we want, but remaking the Universe from scratch so that I personally am never unhappy, … well that just isn't on the menu. (And after all, what I want out of the Universe is probably different from what you want.) So the end result, so far as we can perceive, is that our prayers go unanswered. And we blame it on God. Ma Schmidt probably blamed it on us that her pleas for help fell (to all appearances) on deaf ears.

Hymn to Hekate

There is no Homeric Hymn to Hekate, or none extant. There is an Orphic Hymn to her, and Hesiod praises her extensively in the Theogony. But when I was sitting for days on end with Ma Schmidt as she drifted towards death, I found myself musing. Hekate, like Hermes, is a psychopomp—a guide of souls of the newly-dead. who steers them from their bodies (recently abandoned in the world of the living) towards their new home in the Land of the Dead. And wouldn't it be nice if She could arrange that Ma Schmidt die without pain or fear? Of course I mean "die at the right time"—I had no desire to murder her! But if she could avoid the pain and fear, wouldn't that be nice?

In the end it didn't work out that way, or not obviously. But even after returning home I found myself wondering if I could write a hymn to Hekate like the ones I have written to some of the other gods. I've mulled it in fits and starts since then, and tonight—nine days after driving home—I think I have four verses of rhyming dactylic tetrameter. So maybe this will work.

Shining Hekate, beloved of Persephone,
Lady of crossroads and Mistress of night,
Your silver hand draws down the moon from the stars for
Thessalian witches intent on their rites.

Torch-bearing Maiden, a spark in the darkness, 
The mistress of magic, Protector of dogs,
You pass through the skies and the earth and the ocean,
And then disappear in the night and the fog.

Friend of the husbandman, laboring farmer,
You dole out success to whomever you choose.
Honor and profit and victory in warfare—
You pick who's rewarded and who is to lose.

Nurse of the newborns just op'ning their eyelids,
And guide of the dying, who close them again,
Help me prevail in my contests while living,
And shelter my soul when I come to you then.

     

Blast from the past: The Baptists and the rest of us

I've explained how Wife started attending Christian churches, and how she ended up at an Evangelical Baptist church. (OK, strictly speaking I don't have a story about how she ended up there in particular. But she was church-shopping, and that's the one she settled on.) I've told you a story which let you know that the Senior Pastor was willing to go out on a limb and try something unusual. How did the rest of us end up there?

[What follows is an account based on a long email I wrote to Marie in May of 2016, with minor additions or adjustments where suitable.]

Once Wife settled on a church, she started asking us to go with her. The boys had no special interest, but they were still little kids at this point. Clearly it wasn't up to them. I had no special interest either. Wife insisted that it made her look bad if we didn't come with her. I told her this was silly, but I didn't have the vocabulary to explain that the whole idea was absurd. Really, Babe, it's not all about you.

Now, this was while I was out of work. [Let's call it 2003.] And Wife was being particularly unsupportive: indeed, it felt like not only did I have to be looking for work 8 hours a day but I had to be managing her anxiety (and her consequent shrewishness and regular threats to divorce me) something like 16 hours a day. It wasn't much fun. Anyway, I finally sat her down to talk earnestly, and made a deal with her: I would attend church with her (and put the boys in Sunday School) if she would commit to behaving in a Christ-like way. (And of course I meant this in the sense that her church was teaching her to understand the word "Christ-like": I certainly didn't want her to behave like the rabble-rouser who smashed up the tables of the money-changers in the Temple!) She said she didn't think she could possibly do that; I said "Of course not, not under your own power. So if you succeed in doing it anyway, that's proof that God is helping you; and in that case God must be real and I'm willing to go to church." Well, the bargain didn't hold forever—after a while she had started an everything-but-physical-sex emotional affair with the Lead Tenor in the church choir—but for a while it bought me a bit of peace. So sure, hell, why not? Besides, this gave me a whole new vocabulary with which to try to talk her out of her crazier and more destructive behaviors.

 [Now that I think about it, I give the details of the contract itself in this post here. Go read it. But I don't talk about the aftermath.]

Blast from the past: Stigmata

Strictly speaking this story isn't necessary to explain how we ended up attending a Baptist church for a few years. That story will be adequately covered by the previous post and the next one. But it fits nicely between them, because it took place after Wife had started regularly attending the Evangelical Baptist Church near us, and before the rest of us started attending as well. And maybe—just maybe—it might help add some layers of nuance to the generally dismal and dispiriting picture that I have painted of Wife in this blog. (See also, for example, this post here.)

One Sunday morning, Wife left for church at the normal time. By this time she had passed through the Pentecostal churches of he church-shopping phase, and had settled down at an Evangelical Baptist church not too far away from us. While she was gone, the boys and I did whatever we did. I assume they played in the back of the house somewhere. I might have done the breakfast dishes, or just sat in the living room to read.

At more or less the usual time, Wife's car pulled back into our driveway, a little sloppily. A minute or two went by. Then Wife opened the door and came out of the car, stumbling and lurching as if she were drunk. She got up to our stoop, came in the front door, and lurched her way into the living room, where she collapsed on the sofa. Her speech was not very coherent. And when I went over to ask if she was OK, I saw that the palms of her hands were a bloody mess.

So I wiped off her hands—I don't remember seeing a visible wound, or at least there was no fresh blood coming out once I cleaned them off—and asked her what happened. What follows is her story, as I remember it.

Blast from the past: Wife and the Baptists

Did I ever explain how Wife—who started our marriage as a Wiccan—ended up attending a Baptist church? I don't remember if I ever did, but it looks like I didn't. On the other hand, the other day I was looking through some of my old emails, and I found one of my old emails to Marie in which (among other things) I discussed about half of it. At the time I thought I should paste that into here, and then I realized I should go one step further and give you the whole story. Or as much of it as I can remember these many years later.

So this all started in … well, I think it was the early 2000's. Wife started getting terrible migraine headaches. Or rather, she'd always had migraine headaches from time to time, but they were getting worse and more frequent. So she went to her doctor, who ran some tests and finally took images of her head. When the images came back, he informed her that she was suffering from pseudotumor cerebri. This is a condition where some blockage in one of the vessels in her brain stopped the spinal fluid from draining out the way it should. So she was developing a pool of spinal fluid in her brain, that was acting like a brain tumor. It wasn't a real brain tumor, because it wasn't a growth of excess brain tissue. It was just a pool of spinal fluid. But it put pressure on the rest of the brain just like a brain tumor would have done. Hence the name "pseudotumor cerebri."

Great, so now Wife had a diagnosis. Heaven knows she collected diagnoses the way some people collect baseball cards, and now here was one more. So she asked her doctor what could be done about it? 

Her doctor suggested that she put her affairs in order.

Παλλὰς ὁρμάστειρα

In the Orphic Hymn to Athena, the grey-eyed Lady is called "ὁρμάστειρα" [pronounced "hormá-steira"]. One translator renders this word as "impetuous"; another, as "advocate." How could it possibly mean both?

Technically this is Liberty and not Athena, but the
difference is subtle. Either way, anyone who tries
to make a pass at her is going to die quickly. 
Eugène Delacroix, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course really it means neither. It comes from the verb ὁρμάω, which means "to set in motion, urge, push on; to stir up; to rush headlong at," and so forth. So to call Her ὁρμάστειρα is to say She's the one to set people or events in motion, to stir people up and urge them forwards. She's the one to rally the troops, to sound the alarm, to whisper through the barracks or the squad in the field, warming hearts, quickening pulses, putting eyes and ears on alert for the signal to leap into action. This is far more than the work of any "advocate." But it's not "impetuous" either. You are impetuous when your stirred-up energy overrules your reason, and I assume that Athena never once makes a rash or heedless decision. But it can also be the part of rational prudence to understand that deliberation by itself doesn't win battles. Sometimes the most prudent thing you can do is to stir up the kind of passion that allows you to smite the enemy. "Dr. Banner, now might be a really good time for you to get angry." I think that's what the hymn is really saying about Her.

And if She sets armies in motion, maybe it's not crazy if I hope for the same thing for me.

Blast from the past: Wife on the prayer line

[I'm not sure why this story came to me this evening. Well maybe I can trace how the notion bubbled to the surface of my mind, if I try really hard; but I suppose it doesn't matter. So far as I can tell, it's not a story I've told before now. It's ancient history, but maybe helps flesh out the picture I have tried to draw of those days.]

__________

Hosea's log: Star date ... early-to-mid January 2005.
Location: back in the house we sold in 2013.
Wife's romantic status: Deeply enmeshed in her short but torrid affair with Boyfriend 3.

I think I've mentioned (in an off-hand way that I don't expect anyone to remember) that for a while Wife was an active volunteer on a prayer line. This was in the years not long after she went onto Disability and stopped working. At the time she was exploring the local Evangelical churches and looking for ministries that she felt called to. This was one of them. She would volunteer to man the phone during certain hours, and they gave her a little gizmo to attach to our landline. [That's how long ago it was.] When her time came, she switched the gizmo on, and calls to the prayer line would be routed to our phone. (Or to anyone else who was on-duty at the same time, of course.) The phone would ring; she would ask the strangers at the other end what they needed prayer with; and then she would pray with them. Rinse and repeat, until her time was done.

Anyway, one day Boyfriend 3 came over to visit—sorry, I mean "came over to fuck"—while the boys were at school and I was at work. 

Imitating Homer

Wow, another post referencing Homer in just under a month! I guess I must be on a roll ... or, umm, something ....

I thought about posting these over on the Patio, — just because they are Greek and pretentious, I guess. But there's really nothing philosophical about them. They are hymns, sort of — supposed to be in the mode of the Homeric Hymns. The first four are, indeed, directly adapted from specific Homeric Hymns, and date from the autumn of 1990; the next two are merely inspired or suggested by Homeric Hymns, and date from the last week or so.

For other dactylic poems of mine, you can look here and here.

To Athene (Hymn 11)

I sing of Athene, who watches our city,
With Ares she thrills to the waging of war!
Who keeps safe from harm the host charging to battle,
From shouting and plunder to come home once more.

To Hera (Hymn 12)

Golden-throned Hera, the daughter of Rhea,
The Queen of Immortals and fairest I sing,
Whom all of the gods high on lofty Olympus
Do honor with Zeus the loud-thundering King.

To Demeter (Hymn 13)

Awesome divinity, bright-haired Demeter.
You and your daughter, dear Persephone,
The fairest of maidens -- I sing in your honor.
Hail Goddesses! Guide both my city and me.

To the Most High, Son of Kronos (Hymn 23)

Of Zeus I shall sing now, the greatest in heaven,
His far-seeing wisdom puts all to the test.
With Right he takes counsel -- she sits near beside him.
Be gracious, O Kronion, noblest and best.

To Hermes

Cyllenian Hermes, begotten of Maia,
Who shyly stayed home in her cave, out of sight. 
Olympian Zeus came to visit in secret;
And they lay in love through the dark of the night.

Fortunate Hermes – your first day of life, you stole
Phoebus’s cows while pretending to sleep.
You strung the first lyre and high in the mountains
Of grass-rich Arcadia tended your sheep.

Luck-bringing Hermes, the master of speeches,
whose honey-dripped words can achieve any aim.
Guardian of travelers and merchants and thieving, 
For whom all our finding and losing's a game!

Olympian herald, you shepherd dead spirits
To meadows of asphodel, pallid and grey;
I sing of you now, and will sing again later.
Be gracious and grant that I not lose my way.

To Athene

Pallas Athene, spear-brandishing goddess,
Who bears the Gorgoneion — terrible shield!
Fearsome in battle, you scatter your enemies,
Stealing their wits till in terror they yield..

Pallas Athene, the guardian of cities,
Rejoicing in Justice and Right undefiled;
Who teaches the know-how of civilization,
That sets us apart from the beasts and the wild:

The bridle for horses, the loom to weave fabric,
the flute to make music, the olive for oil.
All these and more are the tools that you give us,
To bring productivity out of our toil.

Friend of the crafty and peerless in counsel,
Your sight probing deeply, your eyes shining grey;
I sing of you now and will sing again later.
Be gracious and grant that I not lose my way.

  

Blast from the past: Trying to cut a deal with Wife

[Here is something else I found in the old files on my computer. The document that I reprint here is dated September 23, 2003.]

Back in 2003 and 2004 I was out of work for a year and a half. Oh, I spent plenty of time every day looking for work. I must have clicked "send" on 800 applications, and I had lots of interviews. But one way or another it just took a really long time for the penny to drop. (Wife had stopped working and gone out on permanent disability because of her lupus just a few years before.)

During that same time, Wife had been church-shopping, and she had found a Baptist church that appealed to her. So she started attending it regularly, and kept asking me and the boys to come along ... not for the sake of our souls, but because she felt that it reflected badly on her to attend a church but not have her family with her. (This reason sounded crazy to me at the time, but I did not yet know the word narcissism.)

Somewhere along the line she told somebody in her small group about the trouble I was having finding a job, and also about how she couldn't persuade me to join her. They told her, Ask him what he needs from you. It's your job as his wife to support him through this trial, so get him to write out a list of what he needs from you: retyping his resume, making dinner, doing the laundry ... whatever it is. Then make sure you do everything on the list as well as you possibly can. And then you can ask him to join you at church in return.

So she asked. I thought about it for a while, and this is what I came back with. You can see from this that getting my resume retyped or dinner made was not exactly where I thought the problem was. 
____________________

What I want from you

High priority

Right now, I am told by everyone that my highest priority needs to be finding a new job. (Everyone except M---, who says I should also spend 2 hours a day writing; and somewhere in there I should also exercise.) But I often feel like my real job is negotiating major emotional upheavals between us. This can take hours a day, and it leaves me in no frame of mind to hunt for work. The best way to support my job hunt is therefore not to make my PowerPoint slides for me, but to lift this particular burden from my shoulders.

1. Be a walking example of a Christian:

• Let the love of Christ keep you happy, even – no, especially – when you don’t get what you want.
• Let God handle vengeance in his own time and his own way – therefore do not harbor grudges.
• When life dumps mountains on you – and it’ll happen! – rely on God’s infinite power and love to turn them into molehills.
• Trust in God, even when what he is doing is very bizarre.
• If Christ is with you, then the bastards can’t grind you down – so be not afraid that they might.
• Whatever happens to you – and sometimes it is pretty bad and horribly unfair – remember that Christ knows exactly how you feel and is suffering there with you. He too suffered from injustice, and his divine power could have left Golgotha a crater like Sodom and Gomorrah. But he didn’t. Let his friendship and en­courage­ment help you bear the troubles with a good heart.

2. Hold to the Truth as to life itself.

• When we get into big arguments (which I hope will be a lot rarer), you tell me about things I allegedly said and did that bear little or no relationship to anything I remember.
• Sometimes you can even quote whole conversations back to me that never happened, and I will be able to tell that the conversation grew out of one or two words that I did utter but that meant something totally different in context.
• When this happens I become truly frightened.
• I don’t know if this ever happens when you talk to others about things, and it may be out of your power to do anything about this; but so far as you can please try to hold fast to what really happened instead of allowing your memory to embellish it to what “should have happened”.

Low priority

(There are probably a bunch of these and – like any husband –I could probably keep adding to them if I took the time. But they are not central. If you can tackle them, great. If not, OK fine. I have not bothered trying to choose only the important ones because these are all lower priority.)

1. Remember that just because I yell about something doesn’t make it important. 

2. Eat foods that are good for you, at times that are good for you.

3. Don’t let yourself be helpless unless through illness you really can’t avoid it. (This means don’t let yourself be a victim of other people’s thought­less­ness, even if it is mine. For example, buy fruit if you need fruit and I haven’t gotten around to it. It doesn’t mean “Don’t rage against victimization,” because that is already covered under high-priority item #1 above.)

4. Do what you can to keep the kids occupied while I am job hunting. (You really already do this to a very large extent, so I’m not asking for any change here; I just need to mention it for the sake of completeness.)

5. More sex would be nice. (smile)

6. Let’s make dates to go to the gym a couple of times a week, regularly.

  

There will doubtless be other things I might want to ask until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

What I will offer in exchange

1. I will go to church with you every Sunday. Not till Christmas. Not till Easter. I will go to church with you every Sunday as long as you carry out item #1 on the “high priority” list in the other column – because as long as you can carry that out successfully, it proves to me that Christianity is not a fraud. If God’s infinite power can’t help you to accomplish item #1, then Christianity is a fraud and it’s not worth my time to play along. [I'm not sure this actually follows, but it is the reason I gave her at the time.] If you do your best but stumble because we are all fallible … let’s discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

2. Ditto with sending the children to Sunday School, for exactly the same reasons. Same caveat.

3. When I yell, I will commit to getting over it right away, and to apologizing to the person I yelled to.

4. If you need to eat while I’m fixing another meal, I will not complain providing you eat foods that are good for you.

5. I will commit to exercising a minimum of twice a week, and try for a third time, whether or not you choose to join me.

6. I will drop the issue of Boyfriend 2 once and for all, permanently. (Notwithstanding this, I’d like to know who we get to do the repairs around our house or hear the kind of gossip I might hear about our other friends … if you feel inclined to share such gossip and not otherwise.)

There will doubtless be other things you would like to ask of me until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

____________________

Her friends at church thought this was a wonderful offer on my part, and a great opportunity to rope me in. In the end she wasn't all that successful at being Christlike, but I guess it was worth a try ....
   

What’s wrong with the “Purity Culture”? (a rant)

This really is a rant. It started as part of a letter to Marie, and it built up a head of steam until it was altogether out of control. What's more, I think it sounds like a sermon, and Heaven knows nobody ever asked me to preach a sermon on this, nor ever will. But what the hell, right? Nobody still reads this blog either, so it's a fine place to try out stuff like this. Don't tell me I didn't warn you.

[Begin in the middle of the letter. Marie had mentioned something about Purity Culture, and I took the bit in my teeth.]

... Because of course what I want to say is that training a girl to be afraid of sex is like owning a Lamborghini and only driving it to the corner market once a month for sprouts and tofu. The female sexual response is one of the most sublime creations on God's earth, proof for anyone who thinks in these terms that the Creator is not only beneficent but powerful and energetic and deeply creative beyond the wildest imagination of men. (Yes, in that context I mean "men".) The other exhibitions of Demiurgic power that are equally awe-inspiring are dangerous and deadly, like volcanoes and tornadoes and earthquakes. But the female sexual response is our size, it is healthy and life-giving, it enriches and fructifies our lives on every level you can imagine, while being as stultifyingly awesome as any volcano. To repress it, to fear it, to bottle it up, to deny it, and to teach others to do the same, is to spit in God's face. It is as treacherous as Judas selling Christ to the Sanhedrin, and as cowardly as Peter denying him thrice before cock-crow. If ever any human act were villainous and wrong, that is.

Of course, that doesn't mean you have to peddle it cheaply, or squander it carelessly. That doesn't mean you have to get drunk and pass out at a frat party so the boys can do you from all angles while you're unconscious and then post streaming videos on YouTube. It doesn't mean you have to pick up strange men in bars and then do them on the living room floor in front of your children. It doesn't mean you have to be callous or manipulative or uncaring, that you have to compete for the most notches on your bedpost or otherwise exploit yourself or others. It doesn't mean any of that; and so far as Christian teachers are saying you don't have to do squalid things that you will hate even as you are doing them, things that will cheapen and coarsen yourself in your own eyes ... so far as they are teaching that they are absolutely right.

But when they say that anything can cheapen you irreversibly, they have abandoned Christianity. At that point they have turned their backs on Jesus after spitting in his face and telling him they know better than he does; they have become Manichaeans, heretics, and heresiarchs. Because innocence is always an option. Forgiveness is always available, both from God and — what is often far more difficult — from yourself. 

There is more. God chooses different paths for different people. And God lets us choose for ourselves; then if we paint ourselves into a corner he can help us learn from it and move on. So if some girl does go hog-wild with her sexuality, if she does go crazy and do things that her family and church can't understand or approve, and that make them shake their heads in wonder ... that's not the end of the story! What happens next? Does she stay there for the rest of her days? (Theoretically possible but really unlikely.) Or does she get out of her system something she had to get rid of, and does she then learn from it how to lead a more mature life after? Does she maybe learn things that will let her help others who also find themselves careening towards dangerous and risky behaviors? Because if she can help people, even if she's outside the circle of her home church's morality pamphlets ... that too is the work of God. Rescuing people who are at risk in the sketchy margins of life — savingthem, redeeming them — that too is the work of God. And if she was strengthened and enabled to do that work by her own checkered and unconventional sexual history ... well, God works in mysterious ways, his ways are not our ways, and no human understanding is broad or deep enough to encompass his own. So our job in that situation, as bystanders and as her family and church community [supposing for the moment that those are the people I'm talking to], is to love her, to offer our supportif she wants it, and then to shut the fuck upand let God do the work that needs to be done by whatever means necessary....

See what I mean?

Sent from my iPhone

Career counseling, 2

A week ago I said I had figured out why career planning has always been so hard for me. Today I had another thought along the same lines.

Whenever I've thought about the issue in a grand way I've pitched it as "What am I supposed to be doing?" Then other times I've realized that's a really bad way to think about it. Still, in some form or other there is a lot of career advice out there that says to figure out what you love doing the most -- who you are -- and then do that.

Then this morning I had an idea about it. Can't remember if I've had this idea before or not. But basically ....

• I've called myself a philosopher manqué because I spend (some of) my free time thinking about philosophical questions. But I realize that inside the general area of philosophy, an awful lot of those questions are about religion or theology.
• I got interested in Greek mythology by the age of 4, and have never given it up.
• I'm reasonably certain that part of what attracted me to Wife was precisely that she was Wiccan (at the time); it was interesting, exciting, different ... and not mundane.
• And of course I've had experiences like this one.

And all of this makes me wonder ... am I wrong to think that I "naturally belong" in a university, in the liberal arts and sciences? Is it possible that -- to the extent I "belong" anywhere specific -- it's in Divinity?

Because you know, 150 years ago that wasn't a particularly strange career vocation. In some parts of the country it still isn't. And I wonder if maybe that's what I am particularly "made" for? Of course there's no way I would ever have pursued a pastoral or theological career. My father was a strident atheist back when I was growing up, and I would never have done anything to risk his ridicule. Pastoral or theological studies would have done just that.

But I wonder ... in an alternate universe, one where I grew up in a more conventionally devout household, is that the direction I would have gone?

There's no way to know for sure, of course, but I have been puzzling on it ever since. And of course now my dad is dead, so if I wanted to make a change there's no way he could ridicule me now from beyond the grave.

Hmmm.      

Rage

Just this morning something clicked for me, and I really don't like where it points. It's about my relationship with Marie.

Once upon a time I had a fantasy that I would post our emails online here, in which case I could just link to them. But that was too much work and I'm too lazy, so I never did it. All of which means that I have to pause now to give you some backstory.
__________

I. Last year, when Marie and I were first courting by e-mail, I explained that technically I am still married to Wife. I said the topic of marriage wasn't a big deal for me, by which I meant Debbie broke up with me because I wasn't going to divorce Wife and she didn't want to be involved long-term with a married man; but I don't see a problem with it because the marriage is just on paper at this point.

Marie, however, took me to mean, Marriage? Either way is fine. Sure, hell, why not? Then as the discussion progressed she realized that I have no intention of divorcing Wife, and that if Wife suddenly dropped dead I would have no intention of ever marrying anybody again. Been there. Done that. Got the bruises. No way.

Only it turns out (what I didn't understand at the time) that Marie had fantasized about marrying me ever since we knew each other in college. That she had always wanted to be Mrs. Tanatu. And that she figured now, in her fifties, was finally her chance to fulfill this lifelong ambition. Right up until I made it clear that it would never happen.

And Marie went ballistic. Thank God it was over e-mail and text messaging, but she said things that made me want to slap her. Or else cut her off permanently. Fine, I was overreacting too and I didn't do any of those things. I waited until I could be calm, and then called her and we discussed it patiently over the next week or so. Crisis averted.
__________

II. Another time the subject of sexually-transmitted diseases came up, and I said something which made her realize that I didn't worry too much about them. I haven't fucked that many women, and for the most part I think those women have been reasonable choosy about their partners. (Wife was becoming less choosy there at the end, but she and I had long since stopped fucking at that point.)

Now it's not like Marie herself had always been ultra-careful about condoms during her previous relationships. But she'd had only two male lovers in the 34 years since I had known her in college, each for a matter of weeks (well, maybe months). And she'd spent a lot of years in love with a woman who fucked other guys, but she and Marie seem to have gotten naked together maybe once or twice. So for all practical purposes, Marie had lived her adulthood celibate.

But she had these friends, see, who were a practicing non-monogamous couple and who explained to her the elaborate rules they had concocted to conduct their amours by. Anyone new had to provide a current medical test. All physical contact was mediated by latex until then. On and on the rules went. And so Marie somehow got the idea that this was normal. That everybody who ever fucks other people besides one single spouse follows the whole protocol. That any other behavior is by definition "high-risk".

So again, out of the blue she sent me this email that she was going to call her doctor right away to say that I was amazingly high-risk, and something something something. She went on, but I don't remember the rest. Again, I waited until I could be calm (which was a bit of an effort), then called her back and talked her down off her high horse. We both went to get STD tests. Mine came out completely clean, while hers showed positive for herpes. To be sure, my doctor said that was a meaningless result, because anybody who has ever had this or that kind of a cold will test positive for herpes. But Marie was a lot quieter on the subject after that. And we don't use condoms.
__________

III. Marie is very political (she's a left-wing Democrat) and so got very wrapped up in the 2016 election. She was one of the crowds of people who thought the world was going to end in a blaze of fire within 24 hours after the election was called for Donald Trump. And it turns out that her brother voted for Trump.

My point of view is that people have a lot of reasons for voting for whoever they vote for, and for the most part I try to stay out of other people's business. You will notice that I don't discuss politics very often on this blog, and I tend to assume that whichever party is in power will end up doing some things OK and will screw up others because that's pretty much been my experience. There are some people whose speeches I enjoy more than others, but there's a difference between being able to talk well and being able to govern well.

But Marie sent her brother a savage note demanding, "If I kill myself will that make America great enough for you?" She didn't tell me this. I heard it from her sister, who contacted me urgently asking if I thought Marie was genuinely suicidal. Their father blew his brains out when Marie was 12, so this family doesn't joke about suicide. So I called Marie, talked her into a calmer space, and then reported back to her family. And since then, her simmering hostility towards her brother (based pretty much entirely on his politics) has been unavoidably part of my business too.

Recently she told me that she had started to distrust her brother -- to think of him as an enemy -- ever since they were teenagers. She told me something about it and it seems that his biggest sin at the time was to stop playing with her and to play instead exclusively with his male friends. And I couldn't help thinking, ... ummm, ... isn't that kind of normal?
__________

IV. For the last few months we've had a long, lingering conversation about religion. Marie was brought up Catholic, spent a little time in her teens as a Born-Again, and then reacted violently against all religion by becoming a strident atheist.

Of course you know that my own point of view on religion is a lot vaguer than that, that I focus less on doctrine than on lived experience, and that I can feel something recognizable behind very different religious traditions. (See, for example, this post ... or just click on this filter.) And so we've been talking intellectually about the differences.

Until last Wednesday, when I sent her a note that included (among other things) the casual, flip remark that atheism is as much a matter of dogmatic faith as belief. I also called Richard Dawkins a Fundamentalist, and said that "trying to fight Scripture with geology is just as idiotic as ... [trying] to fight geology with Scripture."

And Marie lost her shit again. I won't quote from her reply. But I sent her an answer this morning saying that I was sorry for having hurt her, but that we also had to talk about her rage. What the fuck is going on? No other topic of conversation matters at this point.
__________

V. The thing that disturbs me -- to get finally back to the opening of this post -- is that I think I might know what it is. When I realized that her rage was sparked equally by the four incidents above (five if you count her experience with her younger brother in adolescence), I also realized that they could be reframed or restated as follows:

Marie fell into bouts of uncontrollable rage when:

1. I failed to comply with the script she had written for me as her future husband.
2. I failed to comply with the script she had assumed implicitly for me based on what her friends told her about how to protect against STDs.
3. Her brother expressed political opinions different from the ones that look right and obvious to her, and voted for a man she loathes.
4. Her brother ignored her as a teenager and went to play with other kids instead.
5. I denied her self-proclaimed identity as a follower of scientific empiricism, and insisted that her atheism is just as much a faith commitment as that of any Fundamentalist.

You know that I used to read The Last Psychiatrist blog. You know that I still read the archives. And his single biggest theme is Narcissism. What I've learned from TLP is that the five sentences above are all textbook tells for Narcissism.

Holy shit.

Not this again.

Memo: As TLP points out more than once, if all your relationships fail the same way (read: if all your girlfriends turn out to be narcissists to one degree or other -- and I still have to write how or to what extent that applies to D and [a lot less strongly] to Debbie), then the only common factor is you. The problem isn't the relationships, but You.

Why do I keep choosing these women?
    

Full moon

Marie and I were discussing theology (it's a long story) and out of the blue she said she wanted to read a poem by me that expresses reverence or awe. (I'm not sure if this is because she thinks I'm fundamentally irreverent, or for some other reason.)

So after about a day I sent her this. It's a re-creation of what full moon rituals were like, back when Wife was healthier and we lived together. (I told you all that Wife used to be Wiccan, right?) 

Then she had a bunch of detailed questions about the rituals. But it's another poem, so let me record it here lest I forget it.

The biographical details are all a jumble, conflating different decades. Don't expect any of the names to be right, either.

——————————

 

"George and Lynn just arrived."

        "Is that everyone? No wait -- where's Sun-bear?"

"He called and can't make it. You'll have to take the part of priest."

 

That's my wife, the priestess. Earlier we bickered about her latest parking ticket.

"There was no sign," she said. "They didn't post No Parking."

Or else she never looked, never saw. Oh well, too late now. Money down the drain. Again.

All afternoon she whined about her work. Her boss is a fool; her co-workers are lazy idiots.

Can't she ever make friends on the job? She's been fired enough, you'd think she'd try a little honey now and then

Instead of always vinegar.

 

We're all here so it's time to set up.

The altar goes to east. Let's use this table.

East means in front of the television, more or less.

Here's the candles, the chalice. Do we have some wine? Of course.

How about cakes? There's crackers -- kind of stale but they'll do.

Oh look, there's Ak-Mak. That's always good. We'll use that.

Move the chairs so we can make a circle. George, can you take one end?

Meanwhile my wife's in back, donning her robes and cord.

Is everything in place? Yes, and the sun is down. The kids are in bed. Let's start.

 

I exorcise the salt, to make it pure.

I exorcise the water in the shell,

Then sprinkle salted water round the ring,

With flame and incense mark the compass points.

My priestess wife holds out her athamé,

And casts a magic circle in this place —

To keep in magic powers, so she says,

Or else keep out the dull mundanity

Of seeing our suburban living room.

At compass points, by sawing in the air,

We carve out pentagrams and call the gods,

To guard our circle and to watch the rites.

Then we join hands and say the Blessing Prayer,

That calls the Cosmic One and other pow'rs

To bless this time, this place, and those with us.

 

Then stands the priestess still, hood over face.

I perch down on the floor in front of her

And call an invocation to the Moon.

"Come down, possess your priestess, use her voice,

Her eyes, her hands, and all her body else,

To speak to us who stand and wait for you."

I seal it with a fivefold kiss: her feet,

Her knees, her crotch, her breasts, and last her mouth.

Then hold in silence while I wait to see

If it's a goddess who looks back and speaks,

Or just her daily, unexotic self.

 

Lady dark and Lady fair:

The sudden stillness of the air,

The chills I feel, my clutching throat,

Your voice that sounds a low, clear note,

The radiant light behind your eye —

By all these things I know you nigh.

 

You speak — the very stars stand still —

You ask me gently what's my will?

I don't remember what I say.

I tell you why I fret today.

I fear my wife's health's getting worse.

(That's you, except it's not of course.)

I hope my boys, now eight and ten,

Will grow up into fine young men.

 

You pause, and then you start to say,

To gods we're like the flies of May.

My day has nought to trouble me,

When looked at from Eternity.

The road marked for my wife is hard,

With pain and sickness closely barred.

But those who will to serve the gods

Must meet their tests, despite the odds.

And then you bless me with fire and earth,

For Love, Abundance, Home and Hearth.

 

She steps aside to greet the next in line,

A mere six inches from my elbow; but

I cannot hear a word that either says.

And so around the circle, aye, she goes,

Advising, reprimanding, blessing too;

Leaves one in tears, one with a shining smile,

And all in silence – so far as I can hear.

Then, when at last she's gone clear round the ring

And talked to everyone she turns away,

Stands vacant-eyed, sways, tries to stay erect.

The spirit leaves her and, emptied, she falls.

 

"What's next?"

        "Now we can do magical work, if you need a spell cast."

"Can I get my housemate to turn down his stereo?"

"Can I get a raise? It's been too long since the last one and prices keep going up."

"I need a job."

So we stumble through the spellwork, share cakes and wine, thank the gods and watchers and take down the circle.

And then we sit and talk about it all.

Some don't have much to say; others, more.

I say the Lady spoke clearly, the possession was strong and sure.

"Did you ask Her about my health?" pipes up my wife.

"Am I going to get better? After all this shit will things finally get easier for me?"

"No, not exactly...."

 

It's late. Our guests have gone. My wife's in bed.

I'm tidying up the litter, putting the chairs back where they go.

Taking out the trash.

Above, the full moon shines almost like day.

I look at Her and smile: so You were here,

To walk and talk with us, and bless us too,

Even as you shine o'er all the world.

 

I watch your lovely visage bright.

Thank you, Lady, and good night.

 

Prayer and the charging rhino

I've made notes for half a dozen posts -- probably more.  I might even write a couple of them one day.  But this will be quick.

I saw this article the other day:  http://www.independent.com/news/2014/sep/24/pray-tell-hocus-pocus-happy-thoughts/

And so I wrote the author a fan e-mail:
__________

Dear Ms. Roshell,

First, I'm sorry that someone you loved had to go through a Year of Intolerable Shit.  I'm sorry that in the end nothing worked.  You don't need some idiot stranger to tell you how bad it is for all that to happen, but I recognize that it's really, really bad.

All that, though, is a prologue to saying, Thank you for your article "The Hocus Pocus of Happy Thoughts."  In the midst of Intolerable Shit you say something important about prayer, and you say it well.

Or rather, you say two different things – and that is part of what makes your article so good.  On the one hand, yes, there is the side of the discussion that involves a certain kind of … let's call it metaphysical reasoning, which gets murkier the closer you look at it for exactly the reasons you identify.  What good does prayer do?  Isn't it even a little insulting?  Or is there an angle you can choose from which it doesn't look so bad after all?  And so on …. 

It is true that a lot of ink has been spilled by a lot of people trying to answer these questions, and it's no surprise that some of those writers say interesting things of their own.  Fine, whatever – you're not trying to write a treatise or cover the literature.  That's not the point right now.  And the theoretical objections you make are sound ones that have to be answered by anybody who encourages others to pray.

What is particularly good about your article is that you also recognize the emotional side of the question which is more or less impervious to metaphysical quibbling – the side that recognizes "This may make no sense, but I'm hurting too much to care."  The side that says, finally, "I could do nothing more, and it felt like a betrayal to do anything less."  That's exactly right and perfectly said.  I can't read it without tearing up … just a bit.

There's a puzzle here.  It's important but I don't pretend to understand it.  Thank you for an article that is open to the puzzle, accepts it for what it is, and doesn't try to force it into some tidy, Procrustean solution.

I'm still really sorry that nothing worked.

 

Best regards,

Hosea Tanatu

Better

I took another carload of stuff from our storage unit to Wife's place today.  (You remember the last two times I did this, here and here.)  And it was better this time.

I had e-mailed her yesterday that I'd be coming up, so it wasn't a surprise.  (Shouldn't have been anyway, at this point.)  She invited me in to give me some paperwork to take care of ... bills to pay for some of her medications.  We talked a little bit about how to plan next weekend, when both Hogwarts and Durmstrang have their Commencement ceremonies, and when Son 1 graduates from high school.  And I asked to borrow a book.

The book was The Cloud of Unknowing, something she had acquired as a graduate student in medieval literature many years ago.  I was interested because the fellow who led the meditation retreat last Christmastime had mentioned it as being all about meditation ... though it is usually advertised as a classic of Christian mystical spirituality.  Anyway, she located the book and we talked about meditation for a few minutes.

Wife started by saying that people had tried to teach her to meditate in the past but she assumed that she had failed at it because she could never get her mind to go blank.  I replied, "Well of course it won't go blank. The brain is an organ, just like your heart or your adrenal gland. The job of the adrenal gland is to produce adrenalin and the job of the brain is to produce thoughts. The job of the heart is to pump blood and the job of the brain is to think. The only way any of these is going to stop is when you die."

I went on to explain that the idea behind meditation isn't to stop your thoughts but just to be aware or watch them as if from the outside.  Sit in the audience and watch your thoughts parade on stage, so you can see what it is that you are actually thinking about.  Then after a while maybe you'll get an insight into why you keep thinking about this or that. 

Wife remarked that she has been praying daily, and this is what she finds in prayer: her thoughts always meander.  That's fine, I said.  When you get to the point that you want to train your mind just a little more, the way to do it is to treat it like a highly energetic three-year-old.  Don't berate yourself or set impossible standards.  Just ask your mind, "Why don't you come over here and sit by me for a while?"  It will ... for maybe a few seconds ... and then will start racing around again.  OK fine, just smile at it and suggest softly, "Why don't you come over here and sit down with me again?"  Repeat as needed.  Your mind will never stay in one place very long, but over time it may become less frantic and agitated.  And as you watch yourself think, you may get some more insight into what kinds of things preoccupy you.  With luck this could, in turn, help you understand yourself a little bit more.

Wife said she was glad to hear this.  It made her not feel such a failure at meditating, and maybe she could put to use in prayer some of what I'd told her about meditation.  Sure, why not?

It was a short visit, but all in all a very calm, civilized, and grown-up one.  And I'm grateful.

Being married to God

Hosea's log, stardate February 9, 2001.
Almost seven years before I started this blog.  I was thirty-nine years old.  So was Wife, or almost.  The boys were four and two.  This was also ... I think ... back when we were attending church regularly.

Earlier today I was poking around in some of the old files on this computer and found something I wrote thirteen years ago.  It was addressed to Wife, but -- as will become obvious -- I never, ever, EVER intended for her to see it.  Pretty clearly, I wrote it in an attempt to come to terms with the turmoil in my own mind, with my anxiety and chronic anger.  I was clearly trying to sublimate it, to make (if I could) something beautiful out of all the violent energy that was kicking around in my head because I found marriage to Wife so frustrating.

In the end, of course, it didn't work.  That's why I'm here now.  But it's interesting to look back and see where my head was.

Damned good thing this is an anonymous blog.  It's hard to imagine how any of you could look me in the face after reading this and seeing how over-the-top earnest I got.  And back then I still loved her too, or thought I did.  That's part of it, no doubt.

Without further ado: ....   

Being married to you is like being married to God.

At the most superficial level, God knows the future while ordinary men do not. But so do you. [This was a reference to Wife's seeming psychism.]  God can intervene in the world in ways that appear magical. But so do you. [Remember she was a Wiccan.]

God comes to light in all the stories as asking people to do things. But God doesn’t ask just any old thing. God demands the best, the ideal. Nothing half-baked or half-assed is acceptable or even considered. God expects and demands perfection of men; whether men can measure up is another question – and of course, as fallible creatures, we can’t – but none of that is God’s concern. God simply sets the standard of measurement and expects nothing less.

All this means that the relationship between God and men can sometimes be stormy. There are many stories of the Jews – for instance – quarrelling bitterly with God, arguing, remonstrating, reproaching. I do not say that being married to God is easy, or serene. Nor do I think it would even be easy for God – and in this one respect, you are more like the Hebrew God than like any of the Greek gods. The Greek gods are capable of serenity, and are fundamentally indifferent to men (though they have their favorites here and there). The Hebrew God cares way too much for that, and is way too involved with his creation. And so he is always struggling, always in turmoil, always in motion; struggling to create the world, struggling with other gods, and always – always – struggling with the stiff-necked, recalcitrant, stubbornly imperfect Children of Israel.

But why? What does he want out of them? Not just to make their lives harder, but – and this is the key – to make them better. And this is what I see in my own life. We struggle, we argue, we fight – but always you are a force for making me better. Always you are a reproach to my flaws and imperfections, a challenge to me to take myself in hand and work – hard – to be better. It’s not easy. It’s never easy for any mortal – flawed, weak, and pathetic as we are – to meet the challenge of a god. But the alternative is to stay forever merely mortal.

"That thing"

As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I'm currently reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche, a novel set largely in the San Francisco area in the first half of the twentieth century about a young girl who stumbles into an early career as a fraudulent psychic but who then runs away from that life and ... things happen to her.  I suppose in a sense it is a modern Bildungsroman, except it covers her whole life and not just her childhood.  But hey – education (Bildung) is supposed to be lifelong if you do it right, isn't it?

Anyway, one of the things that happens to Mei-Li Murrow, the half-Chinese protagonist, is a totally unexpected mystical experience as she sits on the beach one day, an experience in which the daylight suddenly seems to shoot through her and suffuse her in orgasmic waves of energy, and in which everything she sees on the beach – the dog playing in the surf and then shaking his fur dry when he comes back to the shore, the fisherman standing there casting and reeling and casting and reeling over and over, the children intently building a sand castle – all suddenly appear intensely beautiful and deeply meaningful.  And then it passes, of course, and the world goes back to being the world.  Except it doesn't, quite, because the memory of that event sticks with her ever after, and starts affecting everything else she does (such as prompting her to bail out of the psychic racket even though she has just then reached the point where she is about to make serious money at it).

If you know any of Dorothy Bryant's other work, this scene won't surprise you.  I think she has used that kind of experience in only one other book – The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You – but if you know any of Dorothy Bryant's work you probably know Kin of Ata.  And if you know Kin of Ata it will be no surprise to you that this experience doesn't suddenly make everything in Mei-Li's life all better.  She sees it, she knows it is there, she knows it is possible ... and she goes right on making the same ham-fisted choices in her life that she made before, with the same kinds of unexpected (and mostly unwelcome) consequences.  She even needles herself about it – "Why did I do or say this or that mean / petty / bitter / spiteful thing, when I should know better ... when I should remember that there is a glory in the world that makes all meanness and pettiness unnecessary?"  But knowing better doesn't stop her.

The same way it doesn't for most of us, come to that.

It's an interesting idea to see pursued in a story: How does this kind of experience (which any number of people must have had from time to time) get incorporated into one's life?  And it is refreshing to see Bryant not handle it simplistically, as if having the heavens open for you suddenly makes all your problems go away.  Because I assume that it never does, at any rate outside of didactic propaganda or moralizing hagiography.  So, ... what then?  Does it help you to live any better at all, or does it just help you to be dissatisfied with yourself without helping you to change?

I haven't finished the book, so I don't know Mei-Li's answer.  (Well, I've skimmed ahead the way I do impatiently in all books; but I won't say anything here because I'm sure I haven't picked up the whole picture.)  And I've never had that kind of mystical revelation myself, so I can't speak from personal experience.  I suppose the closest I've come to experiencing "that thing" (Mei-Li's name for it) is maybe two different things.  One is what I called "the Voice" in a post a couple years ago, when I talked about the quiet that I would hear in my head after I had finished shouting at God for Wife's most recent damned-foolish short-sighted betrayal (whatever it was that time), and the quiet would almost be shaped like words, or like an answer.  The other is the experience I used to have in Full Moon circles, back when Wife was a practising Wiccan priestess, when the officiating priest would call a god or goddess (usually goddess) into her body and she would go around the circle speaking to each of us in turn ... only it was plainly not Wife looking out through her eyes or speaking with her voice.  Other than those two experiences, I think my life has been pretty mundane – certainly I've felt nothing like Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light – but it's true that those have been enough for me to trust that there's Something More to the world than it looks like at first.

In fairness, I should add also that I would never have listened for the first of those if I hadn't already experienced the second.  That is, I would never have thought to yell at God over Wife's latest outrage – much less listen to the silence that came afterwards, when I finally stopped yelling – had I not earlier had the experience of speaking viva voce to Demeter or Hestia or Cerridwen (usually Cerridwen) in my living room or back yard, through the mechanism of the Wiccan ritual that allowed Her to use Wife's body.  In that respect, I owe to Wife my knowledge that the world is larger than it looks.  Like Sara Teasdale says in the poem on my sidebar, for some things you should "count many a year of strife well-lost."  Teasdale's "white shining hour of peace" is probably closer to Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light than to anything I've experienced, but I'll take what I can get.  And therefore, for all my snotty-nosed whining, my marriage to Wife may still turn out – in a very odd calculation – to have been a net positive.  Sorry, this whole paragraph has been one long parenthesis.  Where was I?

I was saying that I haven't experienced the kind of vision Mei-Li say, but I've seen something; and I was about to ask if it made any difference in my life.  The short answer is: not enough, but maybe some.  By "not enough" I mean mostly that I'm still far from wise; and wouldn't it be nice if the awareness of a reality beyond surface appearances made us all wise?  On the other hand, for one example, I think I owe to this awareness my comparative nonchalance over the concept of failure.  I wasn't always able to be relaxed about failure.  You can read plenty of posts in this blog where I've whined about failure of one kind or another.  But finally I began to think about it differently.  After all, if there is a whole layer of reality behind the one that we see every day, and if there's anything valuable about that layer (which I can tell that there is just by feeling it, when I see it), then at any rate that means that the ordinary scale of values that we are used to in the workaday world isn't the only scale.  It also makes it look a little bit more like the things we do every day are a kind of game, or a play, in which I just happen to have been assigned this role and you just happen to have been assigned that one.  Well OK then, if there are multiple scales of value I don't have to feel too bad when I get my high school alumni bulletin and hear that guys I went to school with – guys I thought I was smarter than – have just been appointed to the state superior court after many years as partner in a firm that does extensive pro bono work for the poor, or own a technology startup whose market capitalization just hit forty-nine gazillion dollars, or just sailed alone around the world.  (I made up that last one, but not the other two.)  Yes, these achievements demonstrate virtues it would be nice to have; no, I don't begrudge them their congratulations.  But one way or another it just so happens that I was dealt one hand and they were dealt others.  I got one role and they got others.  It happens.

Sorry, I realize on re-reading that last paragraph that it drips with envy.  That wasn't how I meant to write it.  That it came out so makes me think there is still a level in which my emotions haven't moved beyond envying my classmates, beyond thinking that I "really shoulda done something better with my life."  Fair enough, but my emotions can be stupid.  My mind understands that my classmates and I really were carrying around different virtues from the get-go.  I got a lot of praise in high school for being smart and doing well in my classes.  But success in the real world requires other virtues far more than it requires intelligence – virtues like energy, determination, vision, and a knack for making good decisions.  Me?  Sure, I'm smart.  But depression saps my energy (even when the depression is medicated, which it long wasn't), I dither over things, and I have (like one of our ex-Presidents) trouble with "the vision thing".  As for good decisions, ... well, I married Wife didn't I?  You tell me.

This post has evolved in a direction totally different from anywhere I thought it was going to go when I started writing it.  And actually, it is starting to bleed into another one that I got the idea for Friday night, as I read the latest Atlantic Monthly over dinner.  So maybe it's time to end this one and start that one.  Then I'd better get dinner going, if I expect to eat it tonight, because it's going to take a couple of hours.  Either that or go do my laundry ....