'Even he,

to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.' - Douglas Adams (patently, no less!)

So, I had some fish and chips and beer with the exhusband the other night. The musician one, not the gay one. Not that that one isn't a musician, too; they both are, and they both even play winds, just to make it more confusing, and they both teach, and they were both born within twenty-four hours of the other one. One grew up on an island; one lives on an island now, and the one who grew up on one also lived on the island of Honshu, which is where my brother and his family live now, although, apart from some mad air-guitar, the brother is rather less a musician than my various exhusbands, making him, at least, easy to distinguish. They were also both brown-haired and the same height, unlike my brother, who is not the same height as anyone. So you see how it can get infernally confusing to distinguish between them.

Despite all that, the exhusband is, naturally, dismayed at the tone the blog appears to be taking. All I can say is, A) I tried to maintain the coyness as regards spirituality and belief as long as I could, turning to overt ethical stances stapled to implicit conclusions to guide readers gently, fluidly, and subtlely into an occasional New Thematic Realm. I still reserve the right to call down imprecations on Mobil stations disguised as El Greco paintings, forests, or Roman hippodromes, and I patently intend still (not only to continue to overuse 'patently,' 'unsurprisingly,' and 'manifestly' but also) to insert irrelevant photos of perfume bottles, typographical coups, Central Asian needlework, and obscenely adorable palm-sized animals. But the fact is that if my ethical preoccupations obtrude herein - and they do - then surely the basis for them should likewise. Still, I realize that there are very many sound and good people who can get behind this or that stance of mine, but not fully with what leads, in my heart, at any rate, up to it.



But then, for them, I think: read backward. Start and stop with the praxis, which many would argue is the meaty part anyway, and leave the θεωρία to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And, frankly, we end up at the same point, anyway, which is that if you are doing good, you're doing good, and if you're not - well, we both suspect you'll know it. The only difference is that I was pleased at some point to realize not only that there was an Urgrund behind all those values, choices, and yearnings, but that, conveniently felicitously, I already believed in it.

So, fine.

and B) I did contemplate, after a long-overdue recognition that having a multiply-segmented life was driving me a bit insane, the notion of having a post welcoming readers to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. But I didn't bother because I never tried hard enough to have it come out amusing. So I opted instead for the Invisible Awkward Segue. Of course that's never a good idea, even if you're not trying to be de Man or Derrida. And so I am sorry. It was obtrusive; it was steep, sudden, and unwarranted, and it was probably a lot like basking in the middle of an Elle article on comparative depilation and then at the turn of a page being caught unawares in the midst of the final, prescriptive chapter in the still-typo-ridden galley version of some hand-wringing dissertation on the loss of the second-person vocative particle amongst the last fourteen speakers of X.

So I do apologize. I thought sneaking in more farm workers and food banks would help pave the way for the occasional saint, particularly if I made mention of how hard it was becoming to maintain a consistent voice. Now, though, I think it might be more consistent as a whole by not excluding one or other topics for the sake of maintaining a particular posture. The fact is, my spirituality is a part of my life, so it stands to reason it would be a part of this blog, as well, even if I demand to retain my right also to lambast (using the alt. sp. helps keep images of dry turkey and high-hatted Puritans at bay) examples of bad design, poor taste, petty theft, and my own misdriving, misjudgment, and misnavigation when I please.

Therefore, children: Welcome to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. Except for all the parts that aren't. Including this pretty little display from Black and Spiro: