rustypants speaks

when i was in middle school my family went to catholic church every sunday.

it was lame no matter how “cool” they tried to make it (the “guitar service” at st. theresa’s comes to mind…) and it always seemed to take forever – but i always loved staying overnight at my best friend’s house on saturdays – besides the fact that we had a great time being silly and staying up all night, ken’s family went to St. Simon’s church – NOTORIOUS for the 15 minute sunday morning mass!

wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, drop your dollar in the hat, dominus vobiscum, sit, kneel, stand, greet your neighbor, “body of christ” “amen,” Christianos ad leones, “great sermon, father!” *ken’s dad starts car up* back to the house you go.

surely our motivations were wrong, but doggone it – it’s middle school, dude! long live st. simon’s 15 minute mass!!

Download Great Blue Heron Burgers – It’s What’s for Dinner!

one painful aspect of having been subjected to catholic school education was the weekly grade-level church service we had to go to.

my school, st. antoninus, didn’t have a lot of good choices of priests at this point in my catholic school career. the old one was father hagedorn – he was probably 107 years old, shook uncontrollably, smacked his lips a lot, and paused too long and too often. father mick was no better – he was probably 21, a little too chummy with the guys and waaay too physical with the girls – we didn’t care for him and it was obvious that he was either on the lam or made too hasty a decision to enter the priesthood.

my best friends and i did our best to keep it as low key as possible but still eke some fun out of the experience. we sit together each week against better judgement but up to this point we’ve not gotten into too much trouble.

catholic church, in and of itself, has always been a boring thing for me. too pious, too organy, too… churchy, i guess. and when we had to go with our grade each week, oh, sheer torture! what’s worse: being in CLASS or being in CHURCH – haha, it’s a hard choice!

so picture this: four 14 year old guys: ken. brian. tony. scott. it’s spring. thursday morning. eighth grade church. front row. bored. hyms. father hagedorn. jesus hanging on the cross. robes. solemnity. holy water. communion. sit. stand. kneel. stand. sit.

and when the next hymn started up, my friend tony had apparently had enough.

we’re singing this hymn and this garbled noise starts coming from my left. it sounded like… a cat stuck in a washer? no. a record being played backwards! YES! that’s it!!

i and my other friends look at tony and he has his hymnal turned UPSIDE DOWN and is singing… backwards.

i’m not sure who started laughing first, but it was SO FUNNY. oh, we tried so hard to stop, but there was no place for the laughter to go. we grabbed our faces, nudged tony, laughed and hoped no one noticed. then, since we couldn’t stop, we started singing backwards, too. and laughed even harder.

we were lucky – no one came over and smacked us or told us to stop. we managed to get ourselves together enough that we got through the service and back to class in one piece. short bursts of laughter still plagued us during the day, but we were ok.

and then. at the end of the day. the very end of the day… we came back into our homerooms and sitting on our desks? THREE DETENTIONS EACH. signed by the director of catholic education for our school. he had been sitting in one of the wings of the church, hidden, and had seen everything.

and church, my friends, was NOT where we were to be goofing off and screwing around!

was it worth it? oh, when you can still laugh almost to the point of tears 26 years later – it’s definitely worth it.

i’ll admit it.

the first time i ever gave blood was to get out of work for a little while. i was 18 and working for a department store when an announcement was made that anyone who gave blood at the bloodmobile that afternoon would get an hour off with pay. after giving, there were cookies and pop! omg! an hour off AND cookies AND pop!!! WOO-HOO!!!!

so i gave. and continued to give, long after the benefit of an hour off expired. it was helping someone, didn’t take much time, and hey – cookies and pop!

so i finally went to the NW FL Blood Center last week to give. nice folks. free t-shirts. free pop. free little debbies. there was a lot of attention given and you felt like a minor celebrity.

and then yesterday i get a call.

“mr. rust, this is _______ at the NWFLBC and i wanted to call and talk to you about donating again.”
“so soon?” i asked.
“well, you donated whole blood last week, and of course you have to wait 8 weeks between those donations, but mr. rust, your platelet count (insert long explanation of how rustypants’ count is THREE TIMES the normal count)!!”
“uhh… wow. should i be worried?”
“oh, no! this is great! you can give platelets every three days!!!”
“hey, cool,” i said, blind to what was coming next.
“platelets are crucial for cancer patients, leukemia patients, and others who have blood diseases! and because of their short shelf-life, we’re in constant need of people like you who have extremely elevated levels in their blood. think about all the people you will be helping – your one donation will probably help three people! (insert continued unnecessary encouragement on the importance of donating)”

i felt like a rock star. no lie. i was being courted with facts, t-shirts, candy, drinks, bring a dvd to watch if you want, we’ll sign you up to win a new car, your platelets are so sexy, mr. rust, i wish i could be the technician who centrifuges your blood, everyone should be so lucky to have your platelet count, would you sign my shirt, let me stroke your arteries…

“ok. sign me up.”
“really?”
“umm.” now i’m confused.
“it will take up to two hours to complete when can you come in?”

and then the sun rose. the lightbulb turned on. the cold water of realization hit.

they will never stop calling now, will they? i’ll be their rock star until my platelets rebel and stop kicking it so hard. then, and only then, will my star fall. and i’ll just be another has-been. a washout.

hey! helping others! cookies! pop! it’ll be worth it.

a couple years ago, while attending a youth minister’s conference in atlanta, i got to see cannibal corpse in concert. they were playing at the masquerade. i knew i was in trouble when the lead singer said in a very soft-spoken, southern drawl, “this is a song i wrote about chopping my girlfriend’s head off with a rusty hacksaw and having sex with her neck. it goes something like this…”and then launched into the most aggressive and awful rock song i’ve ever heard. the crowd went(?) nuts and i was thinking i might be killed.

secretly, though, i was having fun. i mean, cannibal corpse!!!

i was once shushed by the librarian at the gallaudet university library for being too loud.

when i asked if that wasn’t a bit like a blind kid getting scolded for sticking his tongue out at another blind kid, i was warned & shushed again.

dang, the library police at those libraries for the deaf are tough!

or is benjamin linus really jon weatherly?

linus: the leader of The Others
weatherly: refers to the other CCU profs as “those others”

linus: buggy eyed
weatherly: bugs eyes out at incredulous statements

linus: condescendingly sarcastic
weatherly: well, duh

linus: asks cryptic questions that rarely get answers from dumbfounded captives
weatherly: asks cryptic questions that dumb students don’t know the answers to

linus: is cruel to his captives
weatherly: routinely abuses students trapped in his courses

linus: uses classical conditioning to train his captives and underlings
weatherly: uses classical conditioning to train his students and underlings

linus: always has a way out planned in case of emergency
weatherly: thinks several steps ahead of the present situation “just in case”

linus: has lived his whole life on an island
weatherly: thinks he is an island unto himself

linus: ends up in Tunisia
weatherly: likes dizzy gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia

linus: frequently uses aliases such as henry gale and dean moriarty
weatherly: frequently uses aliases such as SWNID and michael j. fox

linus: captured, imprisoned, and attempted to brainwash his daughter’s boyfriend to end the relationship
weatherly: promises much of the same for any boy trifling with his daughter

uncanny similarities.

i’m trapped at saturn of pensacola having some work done on the car, minding my own business.

well, trying to.

there are three unrelated people sitting in the waiting area talking at FULL VOLUME about things which they obviously know little or nothing about. it’s an opinion-fest and the person who talks the loudest and with the most faux “knowledge” wins.

topics thus far have included:

• the state of roads in pensacola
• the governmental infrastructure of michigan
• their relatives who have lived in this state or that state who say __________________ about __________________.
• the mindless talk show playing on the tv
• what state spends the least on its people

i don’t try and listen in on other people’s conversations. what makes my experience unique here is: my hearing (or the lack of it) prevents me from eavesdropping. i can’t eavesdrop on a conversation that i’m included in sometimes! but this one is coming through loud and clear. unwilling fly on the wall.

social cues, folks!

“… i have a prayer language,” he said, almost hesitatingly, as though i might suddenly storm out of the restaurant.

“oh, cool,” i said.

“i’ve had it since i was younger. i’ve never had any kind of public pronouncement or anything, it’s something done in private, during my personal prayer time.”

“Oh, well that’s Scriptural.” and it’s true.

despite my background in non-charismatic churches, i have no problem with tongues and prayer languages that are exhibited in a Scriptural manner and context. why? um. well, it’s Scriptural, duh! now, having said all that, i have never been so moved by the Spirit to speak in tongues or prophecy, or any other type of Spirit-motivated manifestation of messages from God.

but the conversation i had with my new friend greg the other day brought back a rather amusing conversation had several years ago during bible college.

several of us were sitting around talking about the fruits of the spirit – my college was not a big tongues kind of place – if i remember correctly they believe that speaking in tongues ceased a couple generations after the apostles. i must’ve been sleeping during that class.

but there we were, talking away, and one of the guys was from the church of god movement – a charismatic / pentecostal / full gospel denomination that, if this dude represented all we knew about them, then the representation would be rather frightening – he began telling us how, when he was a young boy in the CoG church, they would “help the Spirit along” with certain phrases.

and we genuinely didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

“certain ‘phrases’ – what does that mean?”

“well, if we were at a revival or something and we weren’t speaking in tongues, we were taught that after a while we should start saying the phrase ‘my knee, my toe’ over and over, slowly at first, then faster, ‘mykneemytoemykneemytoemykneemytoe’ until the Spirit finally kicked in.”

“kicked in,” i said, “like a lawn mower or something?” i had begun to visualize the Spirit waiting for the gas to meet the spark and then saying, “ok! here i come! you got the right combination at last!”

“well, kind of. it seemed to produce the right atmosphere for the Spirit to come.”

and the rest of us didn’t know what to say. so we said nothing, sitting in awkward silence until class started.

later, two of us were recounting this conversation with one of our professors. he said the phrases varied and the one he heard the most was “see my tie, tie my tie” – again, starting off slowly, increasing in speed until miraculously you were “filled with the Holy Spirit” and suddenly you’re speaking in genuine tongue-like fashion.

that kind of “priming the pump” completely takes away from everything the bible says about this type of spiritual gift – there’s no magic incantation or phrase or hokus pocus that will suddenly motivate the Spirit like this.

but when greg talked about tongues as a private prayer language, there is evidence of this in Scripture. to be certain, we could argue (and many have) until we’re blue in the face on the question of whether speaking in tongues genuinely exists in the present or not, but the bottom line is that the focus needs to be on the giver of the gift, not the recipient – working yourself into a babbling lather with ‘conducive’ phrases gives no glory to God.

gosh. i have no pithy one-liner with which to end this post.