blaming Michelangelo for my fascination with art, religion, and naked men
Restaurants,
comic clips,
cats and dogs,
don’t make it
to the feed
right now.
I open the news
in trepidation.
Who have they
terrorized
today?
Whose fear
brought them
pleasure?
Whose distress
made them feel
powerful?
How can the
church lady
post
Disneyland pics
while her heroes
destroy
her neighbor
as herself?
I was bullied in grade school. I hate bullying passionately. It breaks my heart. It makes me angry.
But I was disturbed by this story about a Ft. Hood, Texas father who, upon hearing that his son was bulling his fourth-grade classmates, forced him to stand at a busy intersection holding a hot pink sign that read, “I am a bully. Honk if you hate bullies.” The father made the case that “we don’t need another Columbine.”
Continue reading “bullying & empathy: honk if you hate bullies”
The first little paint stroke of Mercurochrome to my upper lip seemed like an interesting idea at the time. I, after all, had grown my first mustache and beard over the summer of 1972, between eighth grade and my freshman year of high school. To my adolescent mind, it was a badge of maturity that went with leaving behind Catholic grade school and the redneck bullies I had endured for eight years. The next day would be my first day at Rockhurst High School, Kansas City’s Jesuit high school, several miles and mindsets away from the Hickman Mills area where my family lived just at the edge of where the suburbs met the cornfields and hunting woods. Grateful to be moving on, I had spent the summer gearing up for what I hoped, if not was almost certain, maybe, would be a new life, and part of the passage included not shaving for three months just to see what kind of beard I could grow.
Continue reading “un-fair pigment: red hair, pale skin and mercurochrome”
seeing god naked 