Category Archives: Snack Sack

Litter-ally Speaking

Posted on by

Litterbug, Litterbug, shame on you!

Look at the terrible things you do!

 

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

I have littered.

The other day I was going hiking with my friend, Bonita, and picked up a bottle of Snapple on the way. The trail was long, steep and rocky, tricky footing most of the way. Up top, I sat down to enjoy some richly-deserved refreshment, and set the Snapple bottle down on what I thought was a nice, even surface. Unfortunately, the surface was neither nice nor even, and the glass bottle fell over and broke. It was a pain, but not a big one, and I carefully picked up the pieces and headed into the trees.

Bonita says “Where are you going?”

I say “To get rid of this glass.”

She says “You’re not going to just dump it in the woods, are you?” It wasn’t really a question, Father.

I say “What do you expect me to do with it?”
“Carry it out,” she says. “You can’t leave it here.”

I say “Well, I’m gonna bury it. In the middle of nowhere. It’ll never turn up again, I guarantee it.”

She says “I can’t believe you’re even considering it.”

I could see Bonita was walking on the edge of violence, and very carefully tried to explain my reasoning.

I say “I guess I shouldn’t have brought a glass bottle, but I did, and now I know better. But if you think I’m going to head back down that lousy trail with a thin nylon day-pack full of razor-sharp glass shards slung on my back, you’re very much mistaken. One slip and I could have a bigger problem than defiling Mother Nature.”

Bonita says “What if a squirrel, or a bird, gets into it? It could kill them!”

My position, Vicar, was that if some chipmunk is stupid enough to eat broken glass, then that would make me a positive agent of Natural Selection.

Ooooh…I’m gonna pay for that one, aren’t I? You do know it was just a figure of speech, and not an endorsement of evolutionary theory, right?

Anyway, I wasn’t about to head down with a pack full of broken glass, and Bonita wasn’t about to let me bury it in the woods, and I was starting to think that one of us wasn’t going to leave that mountaintop alive when Bonita remembered seeing the disintegrating hulk of an old, lidless metal box rusting its way into oblivion a few feet off the trail only a couple hundred yards from where we stood arguing. Sometime, probably years ago, somebody had dropped a pop can into the box, which in Bonita’s mind, apparently, qualified the box as an approved trash receptacle. With her not-too-enthusiastic blessing, I deposited the glass in the box, where it will remain perfectly intact, visible to hikers, and easily accessible to stupid woodland creatures for ages to come. But then, putting the broken glass in the box was never really about doing the best thing under the circumstances, it was about satisfying the modern anti-littering lobby’s manic compulsion to put-it-somewhere.

 

Please understand, Padre, that I don’t like litter any better than any other right-thinking person. You might say I was raised in the Faith – pick up your toys, put away your clothes, throw away your trash. For much of my life, not littering has been more habit than conscious choice.

I guess the first time I gave any real thought to littering was as a young man, when I was fortunate to travel abroad and spend time in foreign parts where folks discard their unwanted surplus with almost child-like spontaneity, and without a hint of public condemnation. I have seen otherwise picturesque streets and plazas virtually buried in trash, and I can tell you it’s a pretty grim picture. Wading through seas of wadded-up newspapers, candy wrappers and plastic beverage containers, I’ve been astonished to wash up against government donation kiosks, drifts of rubbish almost obscuring signs pleading for contributions to help fight the nation’s chronic littering problem.

Was I wrong, Father, not to make a donation? I mean, if Jacomo and Jocasta Q. Publico can’t be bothered to drop their empty Pellegrino bottle in a trash can, I doubt my humble piaster will buy their cooperation.

Forgive me my digression, Father. I only mean that having seen first-hand how rampant littering degrades the common landscape, I had discovered, for the first time in my life, a rational reason to not litter. On the other hand, I also saw for the first time that not everybody considers the offhand scattering of rubbish a crime against civilization, a symptom of moral dissipation, or a brutal rape of Gaea. I guess you could say my general stance on litter, while personally unchanged, was still evolving.

After all, littering is what humans do. From coprolites scattered about an African cave, to llama bones moldering on the Pampas, to shell middens heaped along the Chesapeake, to lakes of stone-chips surrounding the pyramids, to fume-choked Newcastle awash in coal slag, creating waste is nothing more or less than the genetically inevitable byproduct of all human activity. It’s in our DNA. Altering and manipulating the natural world is Mankind’s principle survival mechanism, and both of those processes necessarily generate trash.

I can see you multiplying Hail Marys in your head, Father, but hear me out. 

It’s been my observation that just as humanity’s endless ingenuity produces no end of garbage, its inventive nature and native opportunism never stops finding new and better ways to deal with the mess. More than 90 percent of this country’s industrial waste winds up getting used again, and again, and again, for crying out loud!

Sorry for the outburst, Your Worship, but in this highly complex and diversified economy, one person’s dross is almost always somebody else’s raw material, and it’s cheaper to buy pavement-extender, or fuel, or compost, from a guy who’s got boxcar-loads of it sitting in his back lot than to make it yourself from scratch.

Littering, littering every place,

My, what a disgrace!

 

You make a good point, Father.

No, I’m not really an industry, and not really in the market for worn-out tires, but I’m equally impressed with our culture’s methods for handling non-industrial waste. Most people in this country – except maybe you, Padre – crank out about four pounds of solid waste every day. Subtract for curbside recycling, backyard composting, garage sale-ing and re-gifting, and that still comes to something like 250 million tons of public nuisance every year. Yeah, that is a lot of boxcars, Father, about 3.7 million of them, just in case you were curious, and all that trash winds up attracting crows and coyotes at one of the nation’s 3,091 clean, safe, efficient, and virtually inexhaustible landfills.

Why the disapproving cluck, Padre? That’s a good thing! If you want to know the truth, the miracle of modern trash collection is the real reason I’ve mostly sworn off littering. Let me explain.

To my way of thinking, littering is just the most public manifestation of laziness, or “sloth”, in your professional lingo. Face it, these days you’re rarely more than a few steps from a designated trash receptacle. They’re everywhere, from the mall to the park to the city sidewalks. And if you don’t happen to be next to a trash can at a particular moment, you will be the next time you stop for gas, or groceries, or a crunchy Gordita. And there’s no shame in dumping that Gordita wrapper on the floor in the back seat of your car until you get home, because how many wastebaskets are in your own house? Seriously, Father! How many do you have in the rectory? Oh. I would have guessed more than that. But of course you must be a very tidy person. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, right?

And honestly – in the unlikely event that somebody finds themselves on foot and miles from the nearest garbage bin, what could they possibly have to throw away that won’t fit into their pocket or purse? If they carried it into the wilderness, they can certainly carry it back out again, provided it isn’t bristling with pointy death, or on fire. These days there’s just not much excuse for not dumping your junk in proper fashion, because the responsible disposal of trash has become ridiculously easy and convenient.

Magical, really.

Where is that 250 million tons of trash? You don’t see it. You can’t smell it. It’s just…gone. Properly disposed of, every gum wrapper, every shampoo bottle, every orange peel, every Snapple bottle, simply disappears. That’s because a huge and largely unnoticed army of men and women – taxpaying, family-raising, society-contributing men and women – do nothing for 40 hours a week besides taking care of your four-pound problem. The cigarette butt is whisked away by night; the empty Tender Vittles tins vanish while you’re at your desk; if you don’t have an ant problem, it’s not because you’re some kind of domestic genius, it’s because those well-gnawed hot wings were long gone before the ants got wind of them. And that vast organization, operating 24 hours a day, out of sight and out of mind, is our society’s smooth-running answer to the 500 million cubic yards of garbage we create every year, a volume that works out to something like 5,300 Nimitz Class aircraft carriers no longer harshing our buzz, or 2.3 million Boeing 747s we don’t have to step over to get to the lawn mower, or 314 Saint Peter’s Basilicas stuffed to the rafters with carry-out boxes and soggy coffee filters.

Yes, I thought you’d like that, Vicar.

Okay, okay, I know other sinners are waiting, but here’s the thing – I don’t like litter for the same reason I don’t like vandalism. Something, anything, however humble or mundane, if maintained in its manufactured state is capable of performing its intended function, and is thus a net asset to the world. Break it, and it becomes a problem requiring effort and, probably, money, to be dealt with. The window in the abandoned house is, at very worst, a neutral object that may yet be salvaged to someone’s gain. Throw a rock through it, and it instantly loses any possible value and becomes a hazard to human navigation.

Likewise, the Snapple bottle thrown into the bushes, or the parking lot, or the street, becomes an obstacle to the smooth flow of human intercourse, and an affront to enlightened society. Properly disposed of in a trash can, it becomes part and parcel of that smooth flow, a sterling example of modern enlightenment, a symbol of all that Man can accomplish.

Do you see what I’m getting at, Padre? Simply by not littering, we can all participate directly in what may well be the single greatest achievement in the history of civilization – the American waste disposal system. And, to me, that’s worth the effort.

Abso-what-now?

Absolution! Right! I’m getting to that, Father. I thought priests were supposed to be patient.

Rusty box or no, I definitely littered, and in this day, and in this locality, I know very well that’s a serious moral transgression. And as long as I’m unburdening my soul, you may as well know that one time I drove off with a small stack semi-worthless pamphlets sitting on the roof of my car, which predictably blew off somewhere between Golden and Boulder, and I didn’t go back to find them and dispose of them properly.

It didn’t even cross my mind.

Whew. That felt good.

Does it count that I’ve never littered with malice aforethought? It should, because on those rare occasions that I have abandoned manufactured waste upon the land, I did so with only charity in my heart.

Maybe the devil made me do it, but I’d prefer to think I acted in the best Christian tradition by not risking my own well-being to comply with an irrational zero-tolerance littering policy, nor wasting my time and several gallons of gasoline looking for reading materials that were probably already halfway to Cheyenne. And what about our responsibility to future generations of archaeologists? What about that, Father?

For people like Bonita, and I guarantee your flock is full of them, even the smallest incidence of littering is the greatest evil Men can visit upon the Earth, and no justification exists for it. For me, the cure can sometimes – very rarely, but sometimes – be worse than the disease.

Lord forgive me, Father, but I think I could litter again.

 

It really makes one wonder what kind of house you keep,

When everywhere that you go is your personal garbage heap!

 

The Ghosts of Halloween Past

Posted on by

The ancient Halloween custom of Trick-or-Treat seems to have fallen out of favor.

The fashion these days seems to be to be the Halloween Party.

Lots of churches hold Halloween Parties, and a few clubs, and no few Highly-Engaged parents. The basic premise is that, instead of wandering the darkened streets, kids dress up in store-bought costume and sit around in a large, noisy, well-lit rooms gorging on Safeway cupcakes and getting cherry Kool-aid all over their rented outfits. Call me crazy, but that sounds a lot like every kids birthday party I ever attended, and not particularly spooky.

Another growing alternative to traditional Trick-or-Treat is that of the mini-mall variety. Instead of wandering around the darkened streets, kids get to march down straight, noisy, well-lit sidewalks and gather discount treats from merchants. Maybe I’m missing something, but accompanying my parents to the grocery store doesn’t seem to jibe with the holiday’s profound mystery. And note to merchants: Any coupon, even one for free stuff, is not a “treat”, it’s a marketing trick.

One espoused benefit of the Halloween Party/Mall Crawl vis-a-vis genuine Trick-or-Treating is that they provide secure environments in which childrens’ intake and behavior can be more easily monitored and controlled. Another is that, because the events are narrowly scheduled, participation can be more easily penciled into parents’ day-planners. Most often cited, however, is the perceived safety to be found in large numbers, tightly confined. Safety is, after all, the greatest of the modern virtues.

It’s also a shame.

When I was a kid, Trick-or-Treat was Halloween.

Sure, then as now, that curious holiday is a mental process that begins with the bone-deep thrill that comes when you see the season’s first TV commercial featuring a Jack-o-Lantern, or a vampire bat. But the thrill I felt was not rooted in anticipation of bobbing for apples or standing in line in front of Radio Shack, but on the vivid memory of Halloween Night, the strangeness of being outside, alone after dark, the weird anonymity I felt, and the excitement of blood-curdling possibilities that I utterly believed could happen, but didn’t really believe ever would.

Halloween should be macabre, not manufactured. Trick-or-Treat is Halloween on a kids’ own terms. On that night, after the sun went down and the Jack-o-Lanterns came out, I was filled with a delicious, giddy apprehension. All the weird and horrid things that seemed like excellent fiction the rest of the year suddenly seemed plausible, even probable.

On Halloween Night, the universe was off its plumb. Quiet neighborhood streets were haunted by the unseen, the cavernous shadows between homes populated by imaginations running on over-drive. Neighbors’ houses I knew very well became mansions of menace, each one watched over by short, squat demons whose breath carried the secret smell of scorched pumpkin. Pressing the doorbell took a mischievous kind of courage one could only feel on Halloween, and there was an odd thrill of triumph each time a friendly grown-up opened the door and presented candy instead of drooling fangs.

It was all just make-believe, and we knew it. But it was also very real, and we knew that, too.

Even today I can’t catch a whiff of burning pumpkin without flashing back to little knots of my costumed contemporaries appearing out of the darkness, and disappearing back into it just as quickly; to housewives wearing witches’ hats and door handles festooned with fake cobwebs; to scary records playing on outdoor speakers somewhere across the valley; to demonic flaming eyes glaring down from porches set back among the trees, luring me to certain destruction, or maybe a full-sized candy bar, or maybe something in between.

Anything could happen. It never did, but it could, and that was a powerful difference.

Halloween was special because it wasn’t just a party, and it wasn’t just free candy, and it wasn’t just TV Jack-o-Lanterns and rubber vampire bats. It was a nightmare come to life, but one that unfolded along known lines and could be met, and mastered, by a child without the interference of adults.

Removed from malls and multi-purpose rooms, Trick-or-Treat is the imagination set free, terror on a leash, your darkest and dearest dreads pressing up against a thin, black curtain. It is fear, and enchantment, and independence, and discovery.  It’s the beating heart of Halloween, and without it the holiday is a tame and toothless affair.

And that’s a shame.

Mountain Macabre – Taking a walk on Morrison’s weird side

Posted on by

Like many a small, Western town, Morrison wears much of its pioneering history on its face. Basking in the golden light of late afternoon, picturesque brick storefronts, rusty, weed-bound rail beds and moldering sheds, shacks and shanties bespeak the town’s busy, sometimes boisterous past. But night falls swiftly over that comfortable wedge of clapboard and sandstone bounded by high, rugged hills and, with the dark, a less casual, more secretive aspect is revealed. And revealing Morrison’s dark secrets is the not-too-serious purpose of the Morrison Haunted History Tour.

Forays into the town’s spectral dimension, hosted almost nightly during the witching season, are the province of Colorado Haunted History, a semi-formal partnership of three young ghost-hunters with a shared fancy for phantoms. Complete strangers at the time, Monica Ferrel, Renee Nellis and Joel Chirhart took the Morrison tour several years ago with spirit guides Dee Chandler and Beaux Blakemore. They soon became fast friends and, when Chandler and Blakemore decided to lay down their spectral chains two years ago, took on the frightful, delightful burden themselves. Of course, all three have day jobs since leading ghost tours is a precarious vocation, at best.

“It’s a hobby, really,” Ferrel says. “We all love ghosts. You know, ‘are they real?’” This is as much fun for us as it is for them.”  During the last couple years, Colorado Haunted History has hunted apparitions from Wyoming to New Mexico but, supernaturally speaking, they found pay dirt in Colorado.

Haunted

“We like to say that Morrison is the most haunted town in America, per capita,” Chirhart said, a plausible statement about a town of 450 (breathing) souls living amid the residue of 150 years of psychic turmoil. Still, Chirhart and his associates try to edify while they terrify. “It’s not just ghosts,” he says. “We try to give a lot of other interesting history about Morrison.” The town’s ghostly character, he admits, is based largely on anecdotal evidence and, while the partners’ researches have yielded little hard evidence of howling wraiths, they’ve uncovered plenty of salty morsels about Morrison’s unruly founders.

With reservations (the formal-arrangement kind, not the sensible, I-don’-wanna-see-no-ghost kind), the ghoulish trio will lead a tour in any season, but October is boom-time in the spook trade and nearly two dozen fearless metro-area citizens gathered at Morrison’s war memorial Thursday night, keen to sample the town’s spooky fare. It was a hardy crowd – sadistic parents escorting youngsters who just knew they were about to shake hands with a dancing skeleton, blissful lovers for whom the clubs on the 16th Street Mall are just too scary, and older couples who were going for a walk anyway and figured downtown Morrison was as good a place as any. Oh, and there were some gals wearing red hats.

Pre-haunted

“These are the ladies of Chapeau Rouge,” said a moderately dignified woman wearing a bright red cape and crown, “and I am their queen.” You know your tour is going places when royalty shows up. Though her majesty did not deign to explain how she came to lead her chapter of the Red Hat Society, she graciously disclosed her imperial moniker. “I’m Queen Cleora,” she said, proudly. Then, winking, “that’s Cleopatra without the ‘pat,’ if you know what I mean.” Alas, your magnificence, I do not know what you mean, and it is my fervent hope that I never do.

Shortly after 7 o’clock, following a brief recounting of Morrison’s 150-year-old origins, the three escorts led the group away from the relative security of the lighted street, across a narrow bridge and into the sinister, woody darkness beyond. Ancient cottonwoods loomed menacingly overhead, fallen leaves slushed mutely underfoot, and Bear Creek whispered like the furtive conversations of restless shades. It would have been absolutely terrifying if it weren’t so delicious.

After a short walk on a gravel drive, the party collected at the Horton House Bed & Breakfast, a charming, sprawling, pink clapboard manor and one of Morrison’s oldest structures. The inn’s densely-wooded yard teems with sculpted figures and artful trellises that, in daylight, give the property a friendly, occupied appearance. On a moonless night, by wavering lantern-light, they produce an eerie confusion of stealthy, three-dimensional shadows. In the late 19th century, Nellis explained, the lodge was home to a young woman named Amy whose passions included demon rum and crippling depression. Amy hung herself in the carriage house behind the lodge and, according to local lore, now drifts aimlessly through the rooms and corridors of Horton House, a benign, though sometimes mischievous, presence and a regular topic of conversation over crepes.

Definitely haunted

Ambling through downtown, it seems every one of Morrison’s celebrated restaurants and bars carries its own spectral freight, a convenience that allowed Chirhart, Ferrel and Nellis to provide a lot of town history without wandering off topic. Red Rocks Grill, Morrison Inn and the Morrison Holiday Bar are all said to be infested with unquiet dead, though patrons are rarely the target of ghostly pranks. In nearly every case, the bartenders – hard working professionals who diligently perform an honorable office and merit only the highest praise and gratitude – bear the brunt of phantom displeasure.

One extreme example deals with the angry spirit of a young girl purportedly murdered long ago in the building that currently houses Tony Rigatoni’s. Animated by hatred for all manly people, she is said to ambush passing Mars-type barkeeps with a small, swinging gate, vindictively focusing her attacks on their poorly armored nether regions. Now, that’s scary.

Totally haunted

To hear the guides tell it, Morrison’s north side is replete with haunted localities. Custodians flatly refuse to enter the old Town Hall after dark, they say, and two phantoms of indeterminate identity and motivation play havoc with the inventory and wiring at Lacy Gate’s Antiques.

Of course, in a town as haunted as Morrison, some ghosts are forced to visit terror in less comfortable surroundings. Witness the haunted stump, a twisted, gray remnant of the town’s “hangin’ tree” slowly rotting into oblivion in a dark corner of a dirt parking lot. There are some, Renee assured Queen Cleora, who will not traverse the lot after sundown, lest they attract the stump’s malicious attentions. A hundred yards away, historic Cliff House is said to be the eternal abode of a young man who, like poor Amy, hung himself in the barn. Why he would hang himself in a smelly old barn when a perfectly good tree was available for that specific purpose is an enduring mystery.

Hangin' haunted

Hella haunted

The summit of the high ridge defining Morrison’s northern edge features a long row of sharp, uneven stones, like witches teeth. Atop that menacing crest, legend says, the troublesome Ute chief named Colorow can sometimes be seen on moonlit nights, silhouetted against the sky. Also, up there somewhere, the Hatchet Lady of Red Rocks bides her wicked time, waiting to take an ax to disobedient children who meander near her foul cave. According to local myth, she is naked when she dismembers her misbehaving prey, proving that folklore can satisfy every taste.

The Morrison Haunted History Tour, an enjoyable combination of history, humor and horror, wound up at 8:30, but could have easily gone longer. Despite the spine-tingling October chill, nobody was in a hurry to leave, not even when an eerie wail arose from the dense, dark hollow along Bear Creek. “It’s probably just a raccoon,” Queen Cleora said, valiantly maintaining her royal composure while the blood drained from her face. That’s right, a harmless raccoon, nothing more.

Haunted, haunted, haunted...

It was surely no accident that the party broke up next to Red Rocks Grill. After the last tourist had disappeared into the night, Chirhart, Ferrel and Nellis went inside for a richly-deserved nightcap. Hopefully, they remembered to tip the bartender.

 

 

 

 

www.coloradohauntedhistory.com.

My Dinner with Madalyn

Posted on by

A while back a friend invited me to join an exciting new discussion group forming on our little piece of the Good Earth.

Lots of smart people had expressed an interest in coming, he said. One expected member had once run for the state legislature, he said, and another one worked in Washington. D.C., rubbing elbows daily with the nation’s movers and shakers. The very cream of the mountain area’s intellectual crop would be expounding for my personal edification, he said, and I would be a fool to miss a priceless opportunity to be so edified. I’ll admit to feeling secretly flattered that he thought me of a level to exchange words with such luminaries, but sitting around and talking isn’t really high on my list of things-to-do-tonight and I hoped he could flesh out the offer before I verbally signed on the invisible dotted line.

“Sounds like it could be fun,” I said, deftly hedging. “What kind of a group is it?”

“Nothing too formal,” he assured me. “Just some people who like discussing philosophy, and politics and current events. We’re planning to meet once a month over dinner. Very casual.”

He was playing to my weaknesses, and the supper-shot struck hard. Still, it takes a lot to get me out of the house after 5 o’clock, so I pressed for details.

“Does this group have a name?”

“Not officially,” he said, with an offhand shrug. “But we’ve been playing with the idea of calling it the ‘Freethinkers Group’. You seem to have strong opinions about everything. I think you’d really like this.”

There are many gaping holes in my cultural fabric, and the term “freethinkers” was one of them. I envisioned a sturdy cadre of lofty souls bravely pressing the boundaries of intellectual achievement.

“But that’s not firm, or anything,” he continued. “In fact, one of the purposes of the first meeting will be to give our group a name and decide exactly what we’re all about. The worst that can happen is you’ll get a good meal, and if you don’t like what you hear you never have to go back.”

What the heck. He was right about my love of endless argument, after all, and there were a couple of restaurants I was looking for an excuse to try.

“What the heck,” I said. The first convocation of the Evergreen Freethinkers Group was held at the local Himalayan buffet, and maybe 10 people showed up. The failed statehouse candidate and Washington bigwig turned out to be the same person and, as far as I could tell, she was selected principally to serve as a kind of celebrity recruiting tool. She styled herself an “advisor and consultant”, but it took me less than five minutes to divine that she was a Washington lobbyist. Her presence in the group was not reassuring. On the other hand, the head Freethinker and the chef behind our little banquet for the brain was a person I knew well, and liked even better. And if most of the others were strangers to me, they all seemed nice enough, and nice enough is good enough in my book.

Supper was tasty, conversation sparkling, and my seat surprisingly comfortable, almost ergonomic, enabling me to shovel pork masala down the hatch at peak efficiency while waiting for somebody to say something somehow related to the group, or freethinking, or thinking at all. Trouble was, nobody did. I hate to take things on myself, but felt pushed into a corner.

“So what’s a freethinker, anyway?” I finally asked, a little slyly, trying to sound like I totally knew what a freethinker was and the question was really designed to open a broader discussion of the deeper nuances of that species. The response left me feeling even more adrift. Most of my fellow diners became instantly engrossed in the remaining contents of their plates. A handful leaned back in their chairs and exchanged those pointedly expectant looks people get when they’re deferring the question to someone else. After a long beat, somebody finally took a stab at it.

“Freethinkers are people who explore different perspectives on a variety of topics.”

Uh-huh.

“So that’s what this group is?” I asked, feeling intellectually, if not gustatorially, unsatisfied. “We just talk about stuff? It seems like we should have some guidelines, or at least a theme. Otherwise this is just a once-a-month supper club, right?”

“Well what’s wrong with a once-a-month supper club?” smiled one wag, feigning hurt surprise to general and vaguely relieved laughter. As I knew I ultimately must, I was rapidly establishing myself as the squeaky wheel and malcontent in their cozy little chat room. I leapt to damage control.

“I just mean I was under the impression this was some kind of philosophical thing. Did I misunderstand?”

“Oh, no,” said the lobbyist, throwing me a kindly bone. “It definitely is a philosophical discussion group. Freethinking is all about philosophy.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. “Okay, so, just as a starting point, could you define exactly what the freethinker philosophy is?”

More plate-staring, more questioning glances.

“I guess you could say freethinkers have a humanist perspective,” said the lobbyist, finally. “In fact, I think we should call ourselves the Evergreen Humanists Society.”

Alas, once again my vast and comprehensive ignorance proved a humiliating barrier to understanding. In these enlightened times, I expect most everybody is familiar with Humanism, is versed in the Humanist agenda and prefers light Humanist tracts for summer beach-reading. I had exactly no idea what she was talking about.

“Okay, so what is a Humanist?” I pleaded, pathetically frustrated. “What is the Humanist philosophy?”

Uncomfortable silence. It was astonishing, really. I was sure that every other person at that table could have answered the question in their sleep, but clearly nobody wanted to. Perhaps feeling responsible for having evoked the Humanist specter before one so benighted as I, the lobbyist at last addressed me in that sweetly patient way usually reserved for the instruction of small children and the dangerously inebriated.

“Humanists believe in human solutions to problems instead of religious ones.”

Somewhere in the back of my murky mind the pilot light winked on.

“I’m not following. So we’re against religion?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “We don’t have anything against religion. We just don’t think it should have any influence on social, economic or political decisions.”

“Well I’m not sure there’s any way to avoid that, short of Thought Police,” I said. “People vote their conscience, and in America most people are religious. You can’t really separate one from the other, can you?”

“Oh, no, and we wouldn’t want to try. But we can educate people about the Humanist point of view and enact laws to prevent organized religion from imposing its moral agenda on the rest of us.”

“The rest of us being…”

“Anybody who doesn’t subscribe to the dominant religious viewpoint.”

With a whoosh and a roar the burner kicked in and I was suddenly afire with comprehension. My mess-mates, many of them pretty solid acquaintances, a couple of them good friends, were atheists. Well why in the world didn’t they just say so at the get-go? Were they afraid I was going to leap from my chair brandishing a crucifix and hose them all down with holy water?

“So humanists are athiests,” I pronounced, with a melting sigh.

“Oh, no. Many humanists are atheists, but they don’t have to be.”

“So a Christian can be a humanist, too?”

“Oh, yes, as long as they don’t let their private beliefs affect their public policy.”

“I’ve never met a Christian like that, but then I guess I haven’t met all the Christians, yet. So humanists think Christians are okay as long as they vote like atheists.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. We simply believe that the solutions to human problems lie in human reason, not in some higher power.”

“But if a Christian’s higher power tells them to feed, like, 10 zillion starving African children, that’s a solution to a big human problem.”

“But religious aid always comes with strings attached,” she said, plainly growing exasperated. “Christian charities have no right to impose their values on other cultures.”

I was going to point out that dead people have no values at all and ask how many shoes humanist ministries distributed last year, but the table was clearly losing patience with me. It belatedly dawned on me that no member of this discussion group had come wanting, or expecting, to hear a dissenting opinion. It was a meeting of the faithful, and I was the heretical fly in their communal bowl of thenthuck. Conversation continued in a desultory way for a few minutes, most of it geared toward soothing the lobbyist’s wounded psyche. I was uncomfortable, and I sensed most of my companions were by then uncomfortable with me. Still, the tapering banter was instructive of the humanist worldview. While they were wonderfully tolerant of virtually every religion on the planet, their indulgence did not extend to Christian philosophies. Any idea, concept or belief originating in the Bible but lacking the authoritative support of a competing philosophy such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and even Islam and some of the least restrictive Protestant Christian sects, was immediately and firmly dismissed as fruit of the poisoned tree. Their scorn was particularly bitter toward the Church of Rome in general and the Pope in particular.

“The Catholic Church is basically a religious tyranny,” said one fellow, with dramatic emphasis. “I personally find it incredible that anybody still buys into a bunch of 2,000-year-old superstitions.”

Heads nodded all around, and I knew I would not be returning to the Evergreen Freethinkers Group, or Humanist Society, or whatever other not-especially-descriptive label they ultimately chose to misrepresent themselves.

But please don’t misunderstand. People who know me will tell you I’m no champion of religion, Christianity or otherwise. In the interest of full disclosure, I was raised a Catholic, went to Catechism classes both summer and winter until my 16th birthday, and have always found Catholicism’s deep historical continuity among its most appealing features.

Then again, I dropped religion like a hot rock the first chance I got. Yes, it was partly laziness and late Saturday nights, and partly a general boredom with the monotonous sameness of Mass, but mostly it was because, like many teens of my generation, I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, took Philosophy 100 because it sounded like an easy A, and joined in many a profound and chemically-enhanced debate with others of questing minds.

Thus philosophically fortified, I decided long ago that the Big Questions are called that because they’re quite plainly beyond the reach of our small mental faculties, and that anybody who claims to know The Truth is taking far too much on faith. I’m not just not-religious, I don’t consider myself particularly spiritual in any sense.

On the other hand, I believe in a higher power, if only because the world is far too miraculous to be the product of mere happenstance. I believe in moral absolutes, because as a student of history I’m familiar with endless disheartening examples of the ease with which the human animal can slide into brutality when not restrained by conventional conscience. And I believe in the continuation of the soul because it has been my observation that Wise Nature wastes nothing, and it would seem out of character for it to discard my consciousness, or yours, or a bug’s, or a ferret’s, or a humanist’s.

If anything, my rudimentary philosophy is a shabby patchwork of Socrates’ “Credo”, classical Stoicism and Kiri-Kin-tha’s First Law of Metaphysics, with a strong dash of Adam Smith as observed by Plato’s Third Eye. But if I didn’t take the humanist rejection of Christian philosophy personally – and I really didn’t – it still bothered me on practical grounds.

Driving home from the restaurant I thought for the first time in a long time of a story I’d once written for the newspaper. The local Catholic priest was launching a series of philosophical discussion groups aimed at high school students. The talks were supposed to be non-denominational, and if I had my doubts about that I still thought it would make an interesting article, and I was pleased to see more than a dozen kids turn out for the premier. Clearly sharing my skepticism, the students started out by doing their best to force the priest into a religious corner from which he couldn’t possibly escape. I was tickled, and secretly hoped they’d succeed, but it quickly became obvious that we in the audience were both over-matched and out-classed.

To my surprise, the vicar displayed perfect mastery of philosophical schools from Buddhism, to Taoism, to Zoroastrianism, to Islam, to Druidism and even animism, and he spoke of them all with unmistakable respect and, I thought, a somewhat less-than-perfectly-pious enthusiasm. Apparently as nonplussed as I was, one of the kids asked him how it was that a Catholic priest came to be so versed in the faiths of infidels.

“It’s standard teaching at the seminary,” he said. “Philosophy is a search for truth, and all religions are just searching for the same truth by different paths. Catholicism is one path, but there are plenty of others that are just as valid. By dismissing a philosophy – almost any philosophy – you’re depriving yourself of the truth it contains.”

And that, it occurred to me, was the problem with my freethinking friends. At any given moment, I thought, thousands of monks, priests, pastors and prelates are studiously contemplating and debating, pondering and weighing, in a relentless search for truth, and they’d been at it for more than 21 long centuries. Surely among them they’ve come up with something worthy of consideration. Yet those prickly humanists will reject out of hand the hard-won product of billions of man-hours of concentrated philosophical thought simply because of its tangential association with a historical figure named Jesus of Nazareth.

Say what you will about the official Catholic stances on gay marriage and female priests, but throwing that baby out with that bathwater is just willful ignorance, and that’s just bad policy. While deeming themselves the most enlightened of humans, my dinner companions were, in fact, among the most closed-minded, certainly far more so than that well-read Catholic priest.

True, humanists will probably never wage violent crusade against Believers, but only because there will probably never be enough of them together at one time to make a good show of it – even freethinkers aren’t immune from base natural passions. And if they’re not already on a non-violent crusade to prevent fellow citizens from acting upon their personal philosophies as their consciences demand, then what was the point of our most delicious supper?

Love it or hate it, and for all its many abuses, past and present, organized religion is the greatest force for good existing in the world today. And whatever your thoughts on the Pope, Catholic Charities International will do more to alleviate human suffering today than the American Humanist Society will accomplish from the instant of its foundation until the end of time.

I would ask of the humanists of my acquaintance only that which they would ask of the Christians of my acquaintance: Live and let live, Brothers and Sisters. If you don’t want to give up your right to the free and unfettered expression of your faith, don’t expect them to give up theirs. It’s a free country, after all, and that’s a foundational American philosophy.   I never went back to the Evergreen Freethinkers/Humanists/Supper Club, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t miss me. I’ve been back to the Himalayan buffet lots of times, though. The sha momo is fantastic.

 

Mumbling movie mook mars mountain milieu

Posted on by

About two weeks ago, when she first heard something rooting through her garbage cans after dark, Evergreen resident Brie Kammhem-Behr was annoyed. Sunday night, after she staked out her driveway and caught the culprit in a flashlight’s accusing beam, she became truly frightened.

“At first all I could see was a dark shape hunched over a pile of trash and tearing at a half-eaten Hot-Pocket with its teeth,” she said on Monday morning, still clutching an aluminum baseball bat and clearly shaken. “Then he looked up and snarled at me and his eyes reflected the light like a pair of golden globes. It was Johnny Depp.”

Mook amok.

 

As unlikely as that sounds, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office investigators believe that Kammhem-Behr’s terrifying discovery may go far toward explaining the sudden rash of over-turned trash cans, frightened household pets and soaring Cutty Sark sales that have plagued central Evergreen during the last three weeks.

“It’s starting to add up,” explains deputy Gilbert Grape, carefully dusting a deeply-chewed, silver-tipped ebony cigarette holder for fingerprints. “A jogger found this in a porta-potty at Evergreen Lake that we think Depp may be using for shelter.”

For one Main Street business owner who wishes to remain anonymous until she’s heard back from her agent, the J.D. sighting provides the missing piece of a messy puzzle.

“Every morning when I come in, the delivery porch is littered with stale croissant ends and Galois butts,” she says. “Now that I know Johnny might be crashing in there, I should be able to get a fortune for them on e-Bay.”

Reached by telephone at his Los Angeles office, film-agent Morey Amsterdam declined to give Depp’s present location, or even say when he and his most illustrious client last spoke. He did confirm, however, that Depp walked off the set of his latest picture, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Planks a Million,” nearly a month ago, putting the project on indefinite hiatus

Still, one must ask what personal demons could drive a celebrity of Depp’s stature to such wretched depths. According to the megastar’s therapist, celebrity headshrinker Dr. Royce Carruthers, the answer is tragically simple.

“Basically, he began to feel snubbed by your community and it sent him around the bend,” Carruthers explains. “He fell in love with your town last year, and did his best to embrace it with his whole heart. He went house-hunting among your beautiful hills, shopped in your quaint groceries, noshed at your local bagelries, even took to walking around your lovely lake early each morning. Yet everybody acted like he wasn’t even there. For a film artist who’s adored by millions, that was intolerable. Medically speaking, he went Froot Loops.”

While the thought of an unhinged Hollywood icon skulking around Evergreen’s quiet neighborhoods is certainly disturbing, it’s not without ample precedent. In late 2002, cinema tough-guy Al Pacino terrorized the quiet township of Cactus Creek, Nev., for nearly a month after the local Bijou closed his latest picture, “The Sense of a Wombat,” after only two weeks. And just last year, Hollywood heavyweight Susan Sarandon, esteemed in industries circles as an actress of great seriousness, spent several days wandering the tiny hamlet of Quaker Oaks, N.H., sleeping in the park and eating from birdfeeders. According to Amsterdam, the episode began when Sarandon learned that the popular half-pound “Susan Saran-Ton” garden burger at Mimi’s Silver Screen Diner in downtown Quaker Oaks had been renamed the “Adam Sandler-wich” after the prominent ham stopped to disburden himself on a dwarf chestnut tree on nearby Rural Route 86.

A Sarandon scorned.

 

Even now, county personnel are bending their efforts to catching the troubled superstar. Authorities hope that deftly camouflaged snares laid in Dedisse Park and baited with plastic Oscar trophy replicas will snare the two-time nominee so that he can be safely darted and relocated to a less natural environment.

“We don’t want to hurt him,” Grape says. “We just want to end the fear and loathing in Evergreen.”

Do not engage!