The Sinister Minister's Thanksgiving Confession

I repost this every Thanksgiving without apology, and, yes, I'm a member of the ordained clergy.

However, I will apologize to Edgar Allen Poe for reasons you will soon discover...

The Sinister Minister's Thanksgiving Confession

by Alan Loewen

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

It has now been a good ten years and I feel this desire to unburden myself of secrets.

Anyway, there is little that any of you can do. You all live far away and most will treat my tale as a jest, so ironically even in the midst of confession, my secret is still safe.

We talked in the privacy of my office, the day before Thanksgiving.

He was a newcomer to our congregation. He glared at me, pale and cadaverous with eyes that burned with the fervent heat of fanaticism.

“Pardon the dust,” I said. “We’re remodeling the church.”

Intent as he was on his rant, he ignored me and the dust even though an occasional sneeze would interrupt his diatribe.

“I insist on addressing the church, this Sunday,” he said, his fist weakly pounding his knee as he spoke. “From the pulpit! You shock me, pastor, and I am deeply offended! Last Sunday you spoke on Thanksgiving as a holiday, even a holy day. You let an opportunity to teach a lesson on true holiness to those gibbering simps pass you by. Even now, they are out at the stores buying turkey and pumpkin and yams by the bushel so their unproductive elderly and their squalling brats can shovel food into their mouths. Well, what about the third worlders who today will only have cornbread? What about the freshwater porpoises? What about the labor practices in South America?”

I nodded in feigned sympathy. “Our church,” I explained, “places a large amount of its budget into charity. Though I confess we do not have a world impact, our local circle of influence is quite large.”

“Not enough!” he screamed. “Not enough! Do those hypocrites still drive cars that burn gasoline? Do they still have their thermostats set above 60 degrees? Do they still eat organic meat?”

“Well, they are almost all hardworking farmers and have been for generations …”

“Soybeans! Soybeans make tofu! They could grow organic soybeans!”

“May we walk as we talk?” I asked. “I did promise to inspect the masonry work.”

He stood up from his chair to follow me while gesticulating wildly. “And why are we wasting money adding on to a building? This certainly is not the church that Peter and Paul would have attended!”

We wandered the dusty hallways to where the workers had stopped for the day and gone home to their Thanksgiving preparations. As my companion ranted and raved, I inspected a recently completed concrete wall.

“Forgive me,” I said casually interrupting my companion, “but this workmanship here has me concerned for safety reasons. Could you help me test it? Just stand there.”

I laced a steel chain through the eyelet of a restraining bolt wrapped it around my companion and passed it through the eye of another. A few moments work was all it took.

“What … what are you doing?” my companion stuttered.

“I believe that because of my sad and selfish bourgeois attitudes, I have driven these poor manual laborers--these poor day laborers--to produce shoddy and dangerous workmanship. Please tug on these chains. If their work is truly inferior, I can protect them and their reputation from the building inspector and they can still keep their jobs.”

My companion tugged on the chains. Years of fanatically strict fruitarianism had weakened him to the point of inability to put up much of a resistance.

“Well, they seem strong enough,” he said. “Now please release me.”

I picked up a concrete block and laid it on the tile floor in front of him. “You were talking about Thanksgiving. What should I do with the turkey and other comestibles my arrogant wife is preparing for my greedy family?”

Freshly primed, he launched into a plan to drop ship the entire meal into either the Third World or New Jersey with an ingenious contrivance of fair trade Styrofoam packing and dry ice.

I let him ramble on as I worked on my job of creating a second wall.

It was now five o’clock in the evening, and my companion still droned on how eating Thanksgiving turkey contributed to global warming.

Yet, my own task was drawing to a close. I had completed the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth tier of concrete blocks. I had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now there came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of my noble, altruistic companion. The voice said --

"Ha! ha! ha! -- he! he! -- a very good joke indeed -- an excellent jest. We will have many a rich laugh about it during church -- he! he! he! -- over our chicory coffee -- he! he! he!"

"Thanksgiving!" I said.

"He! he! he! -- he! he! he! -- yes, Thanksgiving. But is it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting you at home, your lady and the rest? I could treat you to some organic miso. Let us be gone."

"Yes," I said "let us be gone."

"FOR THE LOVE OF … "

"Yes," I said, "for love!"

I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I put an old Sunday School flannelgraph. For the last decade no mortal has disturbed it. After all, who uses flannelgraphs anymore?

The church’s janitor complains that for the last ten years on the eve of every Thanksgiving she finds a small paper plate with two Saltine crackers next to a paper cup of water before the wall they built in the education wing. The one they built ten years ago.

I simply shrug my shoulders.

So on Thanksgiving, I hope that all of us, without guilt, will enjoy a hearty time of fellowship and celebration around a table groaning under the weight of food. And that once a year, we taste a little of heaven and relax and enjoy the camaraderie and the closeness of loved ones in spite of our mutual humanity.

Especially my own very weak humanity.

But if you find yourself railing against this simple annual pleasure and your thoughts of disgust and self-righteousness and contempt mar the celebration for others, please come to visit me in my office and explain it all in detail.

Just forgive the dust in my office. We’re remodeling the church.

Is Your Life Magical? No, It's Something Better

The constellation of Orion the Hunter

Last night the heavens were crystal clear in their aspect and Orion, my favorite constellation, was a spatter of diamonds and rubies and sapphires that would have put the most illustrious jewelry store to shame.

The right shoulder of Orion is made up of a star with the name, Betelgeuse. 

Betelgeuse is 643 light years away and because it is a red supergiant it is so huge that if it was to trade places with our own Sol, the surface of Betelgeuse would almost swallow up Saturn. 

As I delighted in its beauty, the photons of light that struck my retinas had left the surface of that star in Anno Domini 1372, when Britain and France started wrapping of the 100 Year War. Columbus' discovery of the Americas was not to happen for another 120 years.

Because of its size and instability, at some point Betelgeuse will become a Type II supernova. In the fury of its death throes, the light will be so bright that for a short period of time, Earth will enjoy a second sun in the daytime sky, or if the star is visible in the night sky, we will have a light brighter than the full moon.

Actually, Betelgeuse may have already perished, but because of the distance, even though the star is already spinning into a dead neutron star, because light only travels 186,000 miles a second, we will not be aware of the loss of Orion's right shoulder until 643 years after the event.

The night sky is filled with such incredible stories of magnificence.

So is your life filled with magic? No. Something better.

It's filled with wonder.

The Ultimate Role-Playing Game. Wanna Play?

(Note: I posted this on an old blog many years ago and I want to warn you that I got a lot of negative feedback on it. However, I still like the concept because just consider this for a moment. What if your life really could be an adventure?)

I was reading an article on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test results and I thought of my counseling model and how everybody fulfills certain important roles.

Huh! I thought to myself, life is nothing but a big role-playing game!

PARADIGM SHIFT

I suddenly had a vision of you, gentle reader, sitting around a gaming table filled with the brick-a-brac of role-playing games: dice, pencils, paper, rule-books, little figurines, maps. I was there too along with all your friends. The Game Master (GM) sat in shadows.

We had played every RPG in existence. We had plumbed deep space, deep dungeons, and our minds. We were nothing but jaded players who had wore out all the novelty and we longed for the time when we first thought of the concept with the rush of excitement, the camaraderie, the unfettered rush of our creativity.

Now we sit in the gloom of the gaming room, but suddenly the GM makes us an offer of another game, a different game, one suitable only for an experienced player like you and me.

A tiny, nondescript box, smaller than your hand, is slid to you across the table. It is unmarked except for a small yellow button in its middle. To push it, the GM explains, is to enter the most creative role-playing game in the universe, but once the button is pushed, you must play the game to its completion. The rules are both simple and complex, but the game is in a free-form style. There is still a GM, but now it will be more up to you to decide in far more detail how you will live in the game. A character will be designed for you, but once the game starts, you have the freedom to do whatever you wish within the parameters of the simple and sane game rules. "And," the GM says, "the game is going to give you challenges that will make the past ones I've given you look like children's playground stuff."

Do you dare push the little button? If so, read on.

Congratulations, bold player.

You push the button and you find yourself within the game, sitting at the very computer in front of your computer, sitting in this body you now occupy, reading these very words on the screen before you with all the memories, experience, talents, and abilities you now have. You may not have liked the way you were rolled out (who has ever rolled out a perfect character?), but you have some ability to change those statistics.

Welcome to the game which is already in progress. You know the rules.

Time to play.

What's your first move?

Join Me On Goodreads!

It'll be fun. I only bite on days ending with the letter 'y.'

Link is here!

Somewhere Across The Multiverse, You Are An Evil Despot...Sounds Like Fun!

Not a complaint, but a lunatic observation about quantum mechanics. Last night, and I will not illuminate on the story, as I sat in a formal dining room, to the amusement of the surrounding tables and the stunned expressions on the faces of my parents, I received a public tongue lashing and I could not reason with the individual that lacking divine attributes such as omniscience, I could not have known what the angry individual claimed I should have known. In fact, it later turned out to be nothing but a serious misunderstanding and miscommunication between other people that involved neither me nor my parents.

This blog is meant to be light and silly and promote my writing, but in truth, my real life is already filled with madness and deadlines and sorrow and moments of sheer terror, so comparing the angry individual in relation to my real responsibilities, I blew it off as an insignificant event in comparison. Yet on the lengthy drive home I entertained an intriguing fantasy.

Quantum physics, or quantum mechanics or quantum whatever, presents an intriguing theory that we live in a universe that is merely one of many. One theory states that we are copied in multiple universes and for all practical purposes we all have a doppelganger that occupies every possible niche of existence.

As I drove home on the dark foggy roads of Michaux State Forest keeping an eye out for suicidal deer, I contemplated somewhere in the multiverse, my doppelganger sits at a table ruling as a barbarian despot. As I bang my oversized turkey leg on the cracked and warped wooden table and demand my massive mug be filled once again, I scream for my chattel to bring out the dancing bears. As I bray with laughter nobody dares raise their voice to me less they be turned into kibble for my dire wolves.

I chuckled at the mental image and for a scant second I entertained the seductive allure of careless evil, but, he says with a sigh, it matters not. In this universe, I have serious work to do, promises to keep, and loved ones with genuine needs that must be met.

You do too, so get cracking, but for a moment entertain the thought that another version of you somewhere across the multiverses (IF the theory has any merit) is having a ball. Then raise your coffee cup to your dopplegangers across the multiple cosmoses before returning to your unique and singular life in this one.

Strange Streets (Another Sample For Your Enjoyment)

Strange Streets is up to 2,000 words, probably the most I've written (as far as writing fiction) in the last two or three months.

"I love the madness my life has become," he said sarcastically.

Anyway, James and Darcy have continued their foray into a very strange part of Carlisle, Pennsylvania and James is getting rather weirded out.

The first sample is here. Another new unedited sample follows. Enjoy.

 *******

“James, look!” Darcy pointed down at the stream that flowed under the bridge. “What is that?”

Floating lazily in the water, a large fish, similar to a Japanese koi, broke the surface and looked up at us. A part of me, some alien observer deep within my brain, nonchalantly noted that it had to have been at least six feet long and its purple scales with streaks of green formed a color pattern I had never seen on any other fish in this world.

“We need to leave, Darcy,” I repeated. “We need to go back. Now.”

Darcy ignored me. She stood alert, her gaze fastened on a shop on the other side of the bridge. She whispered something, but all I could catch were the words, “here before.”

Strange Streets (Urban Fantasy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania)

Last week I found myself wandering the streets of Carlisle in south-central Pennsylvania marveling at the little odd shops and boutiques: doll stores, oriental noodle restaurants, stores that sold women's fashions modeled on those of the 1920s, and the seeds of a story began to germinate in my fevered little brain.

Life has become very busy with major responsibilities and I've temporarily retired my novel, Doll Wars, but I still have time to play with the short story format. Strange Streets is about a young man and his cousin exploring the streets of Carlisle and they find themselves in ... well let's say they find themselves in the odd part of town.

My only dilemma is that I'm torn between three very different endings.

Here's an unedited sample of the story itself:

*************

Yet, before I could come to the full realization of what I was seeing, Darcy had floated to the next window, I obediently following in her wake.'

The next window contained smoking pipes, but ones of a style and material I had never seen before. Odd arabesques of what appeared to be wood and meerschaum created fantastic structures barely serviceable for their intended use.

Open wooden boxes of what I first took to be tobacco lay scattered about the display, but this time my Darcy-befuddled brain saw through to see the absurdity of their contents. “Surely, they don’t mean to smoke that!” I said.

Darcy narrowed her eyes and peered through the window at the display. “Why is that, James?”

“It’s not tobacco,” I said. “Look, those are dried ferns there and that one is nothing more than a box filled with tiny flowers. And, see? Over there are dried mushrooms.”

“Maybe,” Darcy said after a moment’s pause, “they are there only for display?”

I laughed. “Then they are carrying the joke a little too far. They have prices per ounce on each box. I bet the police watch this place closely.”

As Darcy led me away to the next window, I saw out of the corner of my eye movement deep within the interior shadows of the store. The silhouette was certainly human, but something about it gave me a moment’s pause as if there was something slightly wrong about the store owner whose outline I had glimpsed. Probably, I thought with a burst of dark humor, the proprietor has been sampling his own wares.

The next store had in its display window a simple pile of broken tree branches. I looked at Darcy and shrugged.

“Maybe they are for artistic arrangements?” she mused aloud.

I laughed. “Carlisle is a college town. Heaven knows what oddities they sell and why.”