Ornamental Amputees

In a moment of misplaced trust, my wife showed me her new Christmas tree ornaments that arrived in the mail today. I have it upon reliable authority that they are "cute," but when I peer at them closely, frankly, they befuddle me. The angels don't have noses, for one thing. Being spiritual beings, I suppose they have no need for noses, but all the same, it's just not natural. For another thing, they are holding objects that can only be described as "objects." One of them is holding a long cylindrical thing, appearing either to be a flute or a big stick, presumably for whacking the enemies of God. Another one has a big cone on his head (do halos come cone-shaped? I don't get it) and is holding something that looks like an accordion, or perhaps three doughnuts that have been glued together. Or perhaps the "accordion" is really an accordion-shaped bomb! After all, according to John Milton's Paradise Lost, angels were the ones first to invent missiles, and, by implication, the solarmanite, which we have never seen but probably looks like an accordion. Far from being cute, these ornaments are menacing: do these angels come with instruments of music ... or instruments of death?

I suppose what interested me most about the ornaments was that, along with the regular ornaments, she received a bag labelled "extra ornaments." Upon closer examination, it became clear that "extra" was the politically correct term for "broken" or "rejects." This motley assortment of amputees--a mouse with a clothing fetish, an ice skater, and a bearded elf (or is it Santa?) reminded me of what Christmas was really about. In the Christmas story, Jesus was born not to help the healthy but the sick, the lame (Isaiah 35:6), the footless iceskater, the legless mouse (see Jonah 3:8), the elf with his remaining arm outstretched for a hug. Besides, we have two cats, so all of the ornaments will eventually be maimed and deformed anyway. A recent reading from the church liturgical calendar includes Jesus' admonition that whatever is done for the "least of these" is done for Him (Matthew 25:40), and there is little that can be more bottom of the barrel than deformed Christmas tree ornaments. I would encourage you all to put deformed ornaments on your Christmas trees to help us remember what Christmas is really about. I have encouraged my wife to do this as well, but I have tried to do this when she is not in the same room.

I do feel that I need to make a comment about a striking double-standard here. What makes a noseless angel more acceptable than a footless skater? At least the skater presumably lost his foot in a bizarre, but wholly innocent, skating accident, perhaps while trying to rescue a friend who fell through the ice into the aqueous clutches of a maleficent pond. Noselessness, however ... I have read my eighteenth century medical documents, if not the twentieth century ones, and they seem to declare pretty indisputably that that sort of thing happens only as a result of syphilis. This ornament designer has clearly been doing too much midrashic reading on Genesis 6:2, and I fear that these supposedly friendly little angels carrying bombs are in fact fallen angels!

I have yet to see whether my wife will invite me to help decorate the tree this year. A couple years ago, before we were married, she did. Some people want their ornaments to be simply ornaments; I wanted mine to be rife with meaning. All she gave me to work with were satin threaded balls and long glass ornaments. Given these materials, I decided to combat gnosticism, reminding all that Jesus was fully human and was circumcised on the eighth day in fulfillment of the Jewish law and Scriptures (Luke 2:21). At the same time, it called attention to how Christ's coming transformed circumcision, proving it is not merely an outward sign but a circumcision of the heart (Romans 2:29). All my future wife could see was a long ornament with two balls and in the shape of a penis. In this Christmas season, let's not get so wrapped up in the ornaments themselves that we forget what they are meant to represent.

-Leopoldtulip

Pseudoprofanities

When I sent a link to my blog to family, one of my brothers-in-law was disappointed when he discovered that he had misread the link as "pseudoprofanities." Ironically, when I was looking for "pseudoprofundities" on a search engine to see whether it had been used by someone else (Google? Amazon? I can’t remember which I checked), it asked, "did you mean pseudoprofanities?" My wife has her own blog, "The Crockery," which links to mine with the words, "not to be confused with "The Realm of Pseudoprofanities." I fear that if I do not meet my audience’s apparently widespread interest in this phenomenon, my blog will never be free of pseudoprofanity’s pernicious purview. Pseudoprofanity has thrown down the gauntlet, and I have no choice but to respond, "$#$!@$ you!"

"Pseudoprofanity," or "false profanity," implies in its very name a deeper reality, a "true profanity." As Satan masquerades as an "angel of light," so pseudoprofanity masquerades as an "angel of dirtiness," obscuring this vision of vulgarity, this profanity in perfection. As I understand it, the essence of "true profanity" is to express anger, frustration, or disdain through the use of words that the speaker knows are found offensive by a significant portion of society, especially grandmothers. If we are not ever vigilant, we might easily mistake pseudoprofanity for that of which it is but the shadow. I have encountered five distinct forms of pseudoprofanity through my life.

1.Poetic Profanity; or, "Vulgarity Recollected in Tranquility." This is an instance in which a person uses offensive words not to express anger but to serve an artistic or comical purpose. For instance, my parents have an old female cat that (at the time) had some difficulty controlling its bowel movements, so I dubbed it, "Shitty Biddy." For a paper in graduate school, I looked at how the clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift used bathroom humor in his critique of religious enthusiasts. I concluded my paper with this sentence: "Swift makes no apology for employing scatology because it is an indispensable apologetic tool, a bodily function that serves a spiritual function: it is a holy shit that can demonstrate an opponent’s belief is wholly shit." These are instances in which profanity is employed not to express anger but to say, "Ha ha, look at me, I'm a clever boy."

2.Alternate reality profanity. This is when a person expresses anger using words that they pretend are profane, even though the other people living on earth aren’t too clear on what’s supposed to be offensive about it. For instance, I invented the word "Zoopazix," whose cuss value could only be inferred from the vehemence with which I uttered it. This is also the province of science fiction and fantasy writers. In the recent television series Battlestar Galactica, we see a new humanity which, despite offering us characters able to speak perfect English, has apparently lost the colorful panoply of profanity permitted in America and has only the multi-purpose swear word, functioning in verb, noun, or participial forms, "frak." I keep waiting for them to add "-le rock," but they don’t. Robert Jordan, inventor of The Wheel of Time fantasy series, has interweaved within his epic Tolkienesque landscape a complex curse system that seems chiefly concerned with blood and with things that can be set on fire. It is perhaps most scandalous that some children books inculcate the youth in this form of profanity, such as the infamous Harry Potter books, which teach children curses in Latin.

3.Quotational profanity. This is when you are not saying the profanity itself, but you wish to indicate that some nefarious personage has done so. Sometimes exculpatory dashes are included (e.g. "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a d–n").

4.Agnostic profanity. This is when the speaker doesn’t realize he is speaking profanity, or is stupid enough to think he is when he isn’t. An example of the former include the adorable little three year old playfully experimenting with rhymes such as "duck buck wuck ..." An example of the latter is the mischievous, devious little boy who thinks the recently discovered word "fart" is that four letter f-word he’s heard so much about and which he will now share with the rest of the four-year old community.

5.Wanna be profanity. This is when people want to say profane words, but don’t want actually to say the profane words, so they say words that kinda sorta sound like the words that actually are profane, except they’re really not. In this way, they think that they have achieved the resolution of the dialectical tension that divides their soul. Of course, they are wrong. Examples include "holy spit," "crap," "heck," and "darn."

-Leopoldtulip

Non Compos Dentis

In a bygone era, before the onset of my decrepitude and feebleness at the age of twenty-eight, my teeth were a thriving vibrant community, merrily passing around the bottle of highly acidic soda to and fro as a sign of unity. It was an El Dorado of orality, the best of all possible mouths. Sure, my gums would bleed if a dentist would poke at them with a pointy object, but that is a sign of common humanity: if you prick them, do they not bleed? Yes, my teeth were mortal, but they were robust, zappy fellows who could flex some impressive enamel. My teeth were laissez faire capitalists who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, not lazy good for nothing teeth that needed government handouts of floss to survive.

In all my life, I had never had a cavity. Even though I didn’t floss regularly, I did brush my teeth regularly. But when I went to the dentist recently, he discovered several cavities! Why is it that a filling has simply made me feel more empty inside? I feel like a cyborg, my mouth now the fusion of man and inorganic materials, something that is less than human. Prick the filling ... does it not not bleed? So now, any time my tongue touches the area, I must resist the urge to poke at it like a piece of food that's stuck there, since what is stuck there is now permanently attached, and if my tongue did successfully remove it, I'd just have to go to the dentist and have another squatter put there! I suppose the filling is teaching me about prejudices that I never knew I had, forcing me to see the plank in my own teeth. Sure, I had always accepted that other people might have fillings, and it was all right for them (their teeth were a bunch of pansies!), but I always saw it as a mark of their inferiority. I was unaware of how unwelcoming a community my all-white teeth neighborhood was, waving its sign, "grey inorganic thingies need not apply." I was close-minded and close-lipped.

Speaking of closing, I should probably end this now. I don't know if there are other tooth snobs like me out there, but I hope I've given you something to chew on.

-Leopoldtulip

Right here waiting for you--Smallville DVDs

Flashback: It is 12:30 am. My wife and I are sitting on the couch, struggling to keep our eyes open. My hand shakily grasps the remote control. "Must–must–hit select episode button–must–hit play button–must stay up until next episode is watched so we can put DVD in morning’s mail and not have to wait extra day for Blockbuster online to ship the season finale! Once more into the breach!"

Is this pathetic? Or is it instead the triumphant story of spirit over flesh, of perseverance in the face of adversity, of neurosis over comatosis? I am engaging in a life and death struggle eternally repeated since the dawn of time. The DVD is my friend and my nemesis, my lover and my viper. In the track competition of life, the DVD is not a discus but a boomerang, ever returning to me by mail, as I must ever return to my tv screen. We are co-dependents, the spectator and the spectacle, the voyeur and the exhibitionist. We are the remote controller and the remote controlled, yet I do not know which of us is which. I am the eternal Frodo, casting the DVD into the same envelope from which it was metaphorically forged, and Blockbuster is Sauron, the enemy ever bestowing his dangerous gifts upon the race of man for starting as low as 9.99 a month.

Now, many of you might be unaware of the concrete details of how one’s endurance is tested and refined by fire by watching Blockbuster DVDs. Is it simply by sitting on a couch for three hours consecutively so that I can return the DVD in the mail the next day? No. It is more. Much more.

It is the trudging through the snow to go to the mailbox in order to see that the mail has not come. It is the trudging through the snow an hour later to see that the mail has come, but there is no X-Files season 5 disc one. It is the trudging through the snow the next day to see that Blockbuster did not have X-Files season 5 disc one available, so they have, without sapience aforethought, sent you X-Files season 6 disc 1 and 2 instead, so you need to update your queue and wait patiently for the DVDs to arrive so that you can send them back without watching them. It is the asking of your wife to go trudging through the snow to drop the DVD off in the mail so you do not have to. It involves pacing yourself, planning ahead for the lack of mail delivery on Sundays. It involves shaking your fists in impotent rage and waving your foot at the mailbox in a threatening manner, shouting, "Who the freak made Columbus day a national holiday?" It means always being ready to reschedule evening plans at a moment’s notice, in case Blockbuster’s estimated date of arrival is off by a day; you might need to postpone a romantic rendezvous for a day when all the DVDs are still in transit. It means requesting Smallville season 4 and having successive seasons of X-Files sent to you because there are stupid people who rent the Smallville episodes from Blockbuster and never bother to watch them, training you in both the arts of patience and of hatred for your fellow man. Good stewardship over the resources we have been blessed with mandates that we watch the episodes as fast as we can, in order to measure up to the high standards of endurance that excellence demands.

In closing, I can’t help but notice that Christmas is fast approaching. In the spirit of Christmas, I ask those of you who have the later episodes of Smallville from Blockbuster to give a gift that costs you nothing, namely, show some courtesy by watching your freakin' Smallville DVDs and returning them so other people can see them!

-Leopoldtulip

Introduction: The Logistics of Neologistics; Or, Bazooka is my hero!

As a graduate student in English literature, I have been trained in the arcane arts of making the silly appear plausible and/or strangely compelling, and "The Realm of Pseudo-Profundities" is where I try to see the world in new ways without the benefit of illegal substances. Think of this blog as a sort of "funhouse mirror of the soul," if you will.

I would have begun writing a blog weeks ago if I could think of a proper title. Even now, self-doubt gnaws at me like a toothless German babe on a Wienerschnitzel. It was not always like this. About an hour ago, actually, I was trying to think of a title, when I remembered a word I coined over a decade ago in my teen years, "Pseudo-Profundities!" It was my joyous cry of re-discovery, the new sight of a celestial light once seen by the Wordsworthian eye of youth but forgotten because I have become too wedded to this world. Regaining this memory offered the discovery of a vast country that had yet to be mapped, and like Donne, I cried, "before, behind, between, above, below, O, my pseudo-profundities, my newfoundland!" "Pseudo-profundities!" Ah, the word is both exclamation and petition, a cry of fulfillment and desire, of dream and deferment, of logos and lacuna. And if the province of the pseudo-profound was not wholly mine, the word itself was.

Upon sharing this epiphany with my wife (I mean the business about remembering the word, not all the meaty symbolism it had goin' on), she remarked that she doubted it was original. Imagine my horror staring at google.com to discover that many others had used my word! My word had been false to me! The sound of the word is now naught but "Pseudo-pseudo profundity," a pseudo-fidelity to the high fidelity stereo system that was my heart. It had allowed others to glimpse its lovely juxtaposition of syllables. In a Proustian moment of past recollection, I suddenly remembered the past infidelity of a name ...

Flashback: there is a boy in second grade drawing his own comic books. This boy is me and is not me, and the two of us merge while I remain wholly distinct and separable. His super-hero Bazooka stands proudly on the cover. Tears stain the page. "Why?" he cries. "I came up with your name! Me! Why did G.I. Joe take your name for one of their heroes who doesn't even look like you, a clear instance of nomenclatural misappropriation! Why?!!" He looks down. "Maybe ... maybe I can re-name you. I can call you 'Biggest Bazooka.' But I know it will never be the same."

Present day: It was never the same. Both the names "Bazooka" and "Biggest Bazooka" were forever tarnished, devoid of celestial charms, the shattering of a childhood ideal. Yet in hindsight, I recognize that Bazooka was never false to me. The true enemy is "the establishment." Bazooka was mine and taken from me. Even if we granted that G.I. Joe came up with the name beforehand (which is begging the question), the fact remains that I invented the name operating under a significant handicap: the inexperience of youth. I, an eight-year-0ld, ill-equipped for mastery of three-syllable words, matched wits with corporate executives and lost only because I was not born to a life of privilege, not born with a "silver bazooka in my mouth," if you will.

There are far-reaching consequences for our methodological assumptions in attribution of "inventions." Would it be fair to an eight-year old who invented something comparable to Bazooka--say, the telephone--to refuse to attribute the invention to him, simply because Alexander Graham Bell was privileged by society to be born in the 1800s? What about recognition of the eight-year-old's handicap? What about the recognition of the true genius that it takes to invent the super-hero name "Bazooka" at the age of eight, or to invent the term "pseudo-profundities" when merely a teenager? I don't care if Google book search lists "pseudo-profundities" as having been used in a book published in 1989. Was the writer who used the term a teenager? I think not; no, I think not. Admittedly, I am not a teenager either. But I was. And it seems unfair to penalize me now for something that I am not even being anymore. "The Realm of Pseudo-profundities" is not then simply about my personal relationship with a word; it is a manifesto, a summons to take down the establishment and erect something new, made by very smart teenagers and/or eight year olds, or by those who have been so in the past.