Death Before Dishonor and Always Before Dinner

Revenge:A Klingon Thanksgiving Favorite  

 

	50 jumbo tribbles	1 large fire
	1 lb. bloodberries	Insults
	10 gallons of any oil	Mockery
	Enemy-tear Salt	25 long sharp sticks

Dice and sneer at bloodberries (sneer less if substituting bileberries,) and place on ice. Over a large fire, burn all of the hair off of the tribbles before de-pitting with a tribble corer and set them aside. Fill a large vat or cauldron with lake water and bring it to an angry boil over the fire. Add tribbles and allow to boil for one week. Remove the tribbles with long sharp sticks, skewering two tribbles on each stick before standing the sticks in the ground evenly around the fire and leaning them slightly inward. Make a girl run around the fire and rotate the sticks one quarter turn every pass until the tribbles are evenly caramelized to a deep shade of dark black. Remove from heat and season to taste with enemy-tear salt, then pepper them with insults and mockery until satisfied. For Sweet Revenge, sprinkle tribbles with fresh orphan tribble tears. Dispose of the stock in an approved container, then pour the oil into the unwashed vat or cauldron and bring it to an infuriated boil.

Plate tribbles with chilled bloodberries, and follow ancient Klingon tradition by serving it cold along with iron mugs of frothy boiling oil!

Beware: Revenge is a hearty Klingon dish for hearty Klingons. If your Day of Honor guest list contains Vulcans, Vegans, Catullian Space Hippies, or others who may be too weak to survive, you may serve them Algae puffs in a mild seaweed broth along with chilled mugs (not to heavy) of diluted water. Try to make your presentation look like the other plates so these guests do not become "uncomfortable" and start to snivel and whine even more than they probably already will; and next year, maybe you will try to use a little more discretion when you make out your guest list.

Salad Dressing: FAQ 24: Spiritual Gifts

Do you have any spiritual gifts, or super powers?

Yes, I like to think so--at least one or two anyway.

I mean, beyond simple Christian faith, there's nothing as great as the other stuff you might read about in the New Testament or see in snows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or  Heroes, but alas, we shine the light we have, right?

I believe that faith is a gift from God, but I had faith long before I ever thought of it as anything special, and it took me an inordinate amount of time to come around.

When I first got mixed up with other Christians, they said it was important to figure out which spiritual gifts you had, so I tried most of them. There was one called "discernment" that I seemed to have to a degree spooky enough to qualify as supernatural. I can pick out thieves, liars, and charlatans like they have yellow stripes painted down their backs or something, but I don't think this comes from the Holy Spirit as much as from having developed considerable skill in the areas of stealing, lying, and... charlataning, so it probably just seemed like a super power to those guys.

I was really confused about the gift of faith. I knew I had it, but my understanding of it made it more  like something supernatural than what most of the Jesus people seemed to be talking about when they used the word. By their understanding, faith seemed to have a property of degree that mine lacked. They would say things like they wanted "more faith," or that someone had "wandered from the faith," or even that so-and-so had "LOST their faith," which puzzled me because my faith felt more like a racial distinction than a lifestyle choice.

Actually, sometimes my faith seemed more like a congenital Maori tattoo that started at the bones and grew out. I felt like someone who had just never realized they had a Maori tattoo until it was pointed out and maybe they had a general idea of the essential meaning behind the marks, but didn't really understand much more until they picked up a book on the history of the tribal people of New Zealand, and even then, they couldn't say how anything in the book explained why a white guy on the other side of the planet would pop up Maori. When I felt out of place, I could try to hide my mark, but I didn't really want to because the only thing I liked more than having it was seeing it on a fellow tribesman. The way I understood faith, I couldn't wander away from it any more than I could wander away from my own ass, and try as I might, I certainly couldn't lose it.

OK, I could beat this analogy to death if I haven't already, but it's probably not as great as I think it is right now, so I'll drop it after pointing out that even the most ardent modern ink junkies eschew the ta-moko. 

Hey, don't run.  I'm just trying to share my FAITH with you.

I'm not questioning anybody's faith, but I sometimes wonder if it makes the same kind of sense to them as it does to me.

The Jesus people didn't emphasize it much.  They just told me that faith was a sort of starter gift that you had to get before you could get any of the others. You would just know it if you had faith or not, but the only way you would find out if you had any of the others was to try them out, or in rare cases, you might find out early if the official discernment guy told you that you had one. Ironically enough, the discernment guy didn't seem to like me very much. I suspected it was because he got his discernment "gift" from the same palace I got mine and he knew I knew, or more likely, he really did have the real thing and knew what a pathetic excuse for a human being I couldn't help continuing to be even on the rare occasion I tried not to. In either case, it was probably for the best since it was a small fellowship and two discernment guys would have way overstaffed the office.

I was really hoping for the gift of miraculous healing because that seemed like the most useful one, but when I tried it I couldn't even take out a wart, let alone something more serious like a strong head cold, so I decided to let that one go because all I was doing was disappointing people.


For a while I thought maybe it was preaching and teaching, but that was only because I like to talk a lot and while I can be fairly persuasive, most people seem to find it easy to dismiss anything I tell them simply because they heard it from me. I knew it was spiritual, but in the opposite way that I think a spiritual gift is supposed to work, so I left that one on the table too.

I took a brief interest in the various "word of _____" offerings on the menu, but it seemed like those were only for prophets, and having read about a few of those guys in the book, I decided to check out the speaking in tongues thing first. I wasn't expecting much there either so I was surprised when I hit the jackpot.. At first I couldn't get the hang of it so I asked, and the other tongue people said to just pray silently and relax until my spirit language started to form itself in my mind, and then just say it out loud when it did.

When the flood gates first opened I discovered that I had a rich spirit language with an unlimited vocabulary and a structured grammar complete with phrasal verbs and gender rules. I just knew I was on the right track because everyone else's spirit languages sounded like baby talk compared to mine, and a few people even stood up and started translating for me; sadly however, after a few months of charismatic bliss, the flood slowed to a trickle, and then stopped altogether except for a single six word phrase that would just repeat in an infinite loop.

muhbeauh sode muhkaiyak en bode ahkhanu

Several of the Jesus people that had taken up the daunting task of interpreting the abundant flow of new revelations from my spirit language sessions usually got something that sounded like what a much more spiritual person than me might say, so I never had reason to doubt.  This time though, they said all they knew was that it sounded important. Much to their consternation, and even more to mine, nobody had anything for this except for the discernment guy who didn't know either, but prophesied that it would change the life of whoever interpreted it.

I laid off gift seeking and redirected my efforts to helping out with the sound-system and filling in for the regular drummer when he couldn't make it to Church and the other back-up drummer wasn't available. We had a complicated sound system, and drummers are, well, you know---drummers, so that kept me so busy I all but forgot about finding my spiritual gift until one Sunday morning a few months later when I was having breakfast and a mouthful of cornflakes and milk exploded out of my mouth along with the following:

MAYBE I SOLD MY KAYAK AND BOUGHT A CANOE!

...dammit.

I never had a spirit language at all. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was probably all just a bunch of random speculations  about trading native American water-craft wrapped up in everyday English and obscured by a contrived accent that my subconscious was generating in response to an unreasonable demand for something spiritual sounding. I felt totally disillusioned and shocked at how long it had taken me to figure out... HEY! WAIT.A.MINUTE!

The Prophecy!

Indeed! Had not the mystery message had been interpreted? Yes! Yes it had. I had interpreted it myself, and with the same absolute degree of confidence in the accuracy of the interpretation as I had in my only other spiritual gift--faith itself!

As if to vouchsafe the fulfillment of the prophecy, the change in my life was profound. For one thing, I gave up speaking in tongues, but then that's probably not all that miraculous considering how it had dried up, and that my personal feelings about being a speaker in tongues-er had caused my enthusiasm to wain considerably.  Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that it happened, but you have to admit it would be a tough gift to enjoy for long. I mean, the only way a Maori can be more out of place in modern American culture is if he suddenly starts giving a speech in his native language. I also called off my personal search for spiritual gifts.

The truly important and abiding change came when I was cleaning up the milk and cornflakes and I said to myself out loud (in plain English,) "Well, I guess faith is enough." and realized I had said it in an almost perfect intimation of Eeyore.  It wasn't total sarcasm, but it sounded less enthusiastic than a kid that really needs socks getting a pair for his birthday. Sure, I have faith, so... so what?  I guess I'd just have to use my faith to trust that God would give me any spiritual gift He wants me to have whenever he wants me to have it , and just not worry about... HEY! WAIT.ANOTHER.MINUTE! HOW DO I KNOW THAT?

Oh, right. That's pretty much what "faith" means.

I suddenly realized that not only is faith enough, it's so much more than enough that it eliminates the need for anything else! Which,on reflection, is pretty much the definition of "enough," but at the time it seemed like divine revelation.


Another lesser change was that I started consulting the dictionary more frequently.

I still see faith in pretty much the same way, but I hold it in much higher esteem. In spite of the social baggage, and even though I never asked for it, faith is unquestionably the best gift I have ever received, spiritual or otherwise, and I've come to understand that I was right about another thing: there's really nothing "natural" about it.

I think I have another spiritual gift, but it's one that's not really ever mentioned in the book unless the "do it cheerfully" part was meant to expand the meaning of the "showing mercy" gift at the end of the list in Romans twelve to include humor, but that's a wild stretch.

It's probably not worth mentioning, but I guess I still worry that I only have one string on my gift guitar, so: I have a sense of humor that even I might describe as overdeveloped, had I done anything to develop it. Like faith and opposable thumbs, it seems like something I didn't appreciate until long after I received it,and maybe more suspiciously, it's more complex than anything I could have come up with, so at least in that rearguard it's kind of spiritual I guess, but there is more to a spiritual gift than irriducable complexity and solid biblical reference, and I suspect most of that more is practical utility.  Is it helpful?  Does it serve others in some way?  I think my sense of humor might qualify.

Not only can I usually find something amusing about any given situation, but I can almost always help others to see it as well, and when I do, they usually seem better off for it. It's not restoring sight to the blind exactly, but a few people have even gone so far as to thank me for cheering them up. Probably a lot more than you might think and way more than have yelled at me for not taking things seriously enough, so yeah, I'm going with qualifies.

Of course, I recognize there are some things so serious that there is absolutely nothing funny about them, but when I encounter those things I have learned to consult more serious men, and I know quite a few because most of them are the ones that confronted me for not taking things seriously enough.

N.B. New Zealand is a beautiful place with beautiful people that I would love to visit, but I've never fully eliminated the irrational urge to get an actual Maori face tattoo, so it's probably better if I don't risk it, besides---I hear Tahiti is a beautiful place too.

The Phenomenally Mild Tragedies

... of New Years Eve '80-81

Cricket's folks had a cabin by The River near Amarillo. I never knew what Cricket's actual name was, and I didn't know the name of the river at the time. I think it was the Canadian River, because Amarillo is pretty close to Canada, but it never mattered. There was only one river with water in it anywhere near Amarillo, so there was no need to disambiguate. Anyway, Cricket's folks had this cabin, and seeing as how they were away in Mexico for New Year's, Cricket invited about twenty ne'er-do-wells out for a party.

I was planning on taking my car, but my VW's fan belt had done what VW fan belts do, so I called up a frenemy who lived close and got a ride. We loaded up Mark McLheran's perfectly restored 1965 Chevy Impala with four grocery bags of leftover Mexican fireworks, two cases of Coors and a shoe-box full of 8-tracks before setting out from Amarillo at about sixish.

We were jamming along screaming out the lyrics to all the tunes on "Get The Knack" by The Knack. We had listened to it on 8-track so much that we knew where all the track changes were and made a point of looking at each other and saying "ka-chunk" every time one rolled around.

Everything was going along fine until we turned off the highway onto the twenty mile stretch of bad road that twisted around into the river valley; that's when I looked at the domino. I pulled one of the Roman candles out of the bag in the back seat and deployed it out of the passenger side window. If you've ever shot a Roman candle from the window of a moving vehicle, you know how cool it is. What you might not know is how disproportionately UN-cool it is if one of the little fireballs reverses out of the wrong end of the candle and enters the passenger compartment. Trust me here. It's bad.

We batted it around a few times before it wound up in the shoe-box of surprisingly flammable 8-track tapes. The car choked up with thick black smoke, so being spry and fleet of foot in those days, I jumped in the back and grabbed a Coors that I tried to pour into the shoe-box. Mark was so profoundly distracted that he swerved off the road, drove up a berm, and launched us into unrestricted airspace.

The Impala flew over a small ravine and landed so perfectly on a tree stump that all four tires were an equal distance from the ground. The impact knocked the wind out of us and we both thought we were dying. We fell out of the car choking and after we got our wind back, spent the next hour cussing and rocking the now remarkably less than perfectly restored 1965 Chevy Impala around on the tree stump. It would still start and when we got it at the right angle, the back wheels would spin. At one point, I stood in the back corner of the open trunk to keep one of the tires on the ground while Mark held the gas pedal down. We didn't get enough traction to get off the stump, but it was a lot of fun because we got enough traction to spin around a few times and dig a nice moat around the posted Chevy. When we finally gave up it looked a lot like a Stanley Marsh car-sculpture.

This having all taken place when phones were still non-mobile household appliances, we set out on foot in search of a house where someone would let us use theirs to call Mark's dad, "Red." Red was a genuine Appalachian Mountain hillbilly. He had red hair, a redder face, and the typical Scottish tendency to violence. On the way to find a phone I argued that the Impala wasn't going to be any more screwed January 1st than it already was on December 31st, so we should call Cricket, go to the party, and deal with the Chevy-on-a-stick issue first thing next day. It was a hard sell, but I had beer and fireworks on my side, so when we finally found a phone we called Cricket.

It turned out our wreck was pretty close to the cabin, so Cricket walked over and met us at the car. After he suggested we try all the same stupid ideas we had already tried, he left us there, walked back to the cabin, loaded his wife, his baby, his dog, and two elderly hippies into his beater pickup truck, then dropped by to pick us up for a trip to the gas station to get ice.

I was supposed to bring the ice. I didn't forget to get the ice. I just forgot to bring it. No worries; it being January in Amarillo it didn't melt, and I was able to take it to another party a few weeks later.

Cricket wanted us to ride up front, so he put his wife, his baby, his dog, and the hippies under the camper shell in the back of the pickup and we tore out for ice. I was recounting the part about the Roman candle to Cricket who was so amused that he almost hit a stray dog, but skidded into the ditch and rolled the pickup over one and a half times instead. We came to rest on on the passenger side door. Cricket and Mark climbed out of Crickets window, but I just laid there awhile because I didn't want to see all the dead people. After a few minutes Cricket stooped down in front of the shattered windshield and said, "Are you OK? Yeah, you're OK. Everybody is OK. Come on. Get out."

Now this may strain credulity, but no one was hurt at all—not even a scratch. After we all climbed out, the baby was actually laughing. Mom was fine; the dog excited and a little freaked out, but OK; Hippies same as the dog; Cricket, Mark, and I same as the dog and hippies, but using a more colorful string of expletives. We all assembled next to the ditched truck and when the hysteria died down, we came up with a plan to get everybody back to the cabin and send someone else for ice.

THE BABY WAS FINE!

On the way back, we stopped by the post Chevy and got the beer and fireworks, then went back to the cabin and settled in for an otherwise uneventful New Year's Eve party. The fireworks were great, but the beer had run out around one o'clock—-and yes, the baby was still fine, so we watched an episode of Love Boat, and then we all just went to sleep. We never got around to getting any ice because we had a group epiphany and realized there was absolutely no need for it.

In spite of being so nearsighted he couldn't see beyond his fingertips, Mark didn't notice his glasses were missing until the next day. I didn't notice either---until he woke me up in a panic about it. Apparently, the glasses cost more than the Chevy, and this was what was going to earn him the lash. We set out to search the various crime scenes we had created the day before. The glasses were nowhere in or around the cabin. They were not in or around the post Chevy, but we did stand in awe of it for a while. The whole car was kind of drooping over the stump, and in the calm morning light, it had moved out of Stanley Marsh art-car category and now looked more like a Dali work.

At first, we didn't find the glasses in or around the ditched pickup truck either. We had both become very solemn and for the first time, we realized just how lucky we had been. Now, here goes any remaining credibility I may have had; I was so overwhelmed with gratitude that, having been raised Baptist, I looked to heaven and yelled, "Thank you God!" Mark, having been raised Presbyterian, looked up and said, "Yeah. No kidding."

Then, as I lowered my gaze, I spotted Mark's glasses hanging off the tip of a windshield wiper that was twisted out and pointing straight in the air. They were just hanging there as if someone had folded them up and put them there, and unlike every other piece of glass involved, they were unbroken. When I climbed up the bottom of the truck, took his glasses off the wiper and handed them down to him, he broke out in a spontaneous fit of Presbyterianism that included a ten minute prayer highlighting most of his sins, all ten commandments, and the better part of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. After that day, he took to calling me "Saint Andrew." Apparently, Presbyterians can just beatify people right there on the spot like that.

Encouraged, we contacted Red who drove out in his perfectly restored 1956 Chevrolet Apache pickup to get the impaled Impala off the stump. He met us at the point where we had left the road, and without a word, we calmly walked over the berm and crossed the ravine. When we reached the moat, Red calmly took in the scene, and then calmly started slapping the shit out of us. This wasn't weird. Red always hit us—sometimes just for practice, but on that day he was hitting us with an unsettling lack of emotion that seemed to actually give force to the blows. He started asking questions and any time we tried to answer he would just slap us again. He slapped us all the way back over the berm and into his perfectly restored canary yellow 1956 Chevrolet Apache and all the way to the gas station to call a tow truck, then all the way back to meet the tow truck guy who seemed half afraid that Red was going to hit him too.

The canary yellow Apache was Red's prize possession and he never (no kidding) drove it over thirty miles an hour, so it was a long drive back to Amarillo. When he calmed down enough to speak, Red started shaking his head and periodically whispering, "IDIOTS" over and over. We took this as a good sign. He finally stopped and we drove along for hours without speaking like guys are supposed to do.

It was about sixish again when we got back into our neighborhood. We were on 35th, just a few streets from the turn to my house when a girl in a Ford Galaxy ignored the Yield sign and t-boned us. She struck us on my side going maybe twenty, so it was jarring, but again, there were no injuries—at first. Galaxy girl jumped out and ran circles around the scene screaming about how she was sorry and how she hadn't seen us. I was just sitting there, kind of tracking her around the arc and wondering how anybody could not see a canary yellow pickup truck, when I noticed that Red was purple and that he was an especially bright shade of purple around the area of the teeth he was gnashing. He turned and looked at us like something he had to fish out of a septic tank before he punched Mark in the side of the head so hard that his head slammed into mine which bounced back off the window and set up a kind of Newton's Cradle reaction.

 I got a goose egg above my right ear from hitting the window and one above my left ear from hitting marks head twice. My goose eggs matched the ones on Mark's head that he got from hitting my head, and hitting Red in the fist with his head, respectively. We looked like Micky Mouses wearing fright wigs.

Later that night, as I held a couple of packs of frozen corn on my head, I realized I had been in three car wrecks in the span of twenty four hours, and the only injuries were four temporary hematomas that were not even crash related.

Red called later that night to apologize for hitting me in the head with Mark's head and promised the next time he punched me that he would do it directly. He said it was unlikely because he had a strong desire never to see me again, and he wouldn't do anything to me unless he did. Mark spent the next six or eight months chained up in Red's garage doing repairs on the Apache until it was perfectly re-restored, but early on the morning of January second, the day following what I have come to understand as the day God delivered me from the gaping maw of my own stupidity, Mark called to thank me for finding his glasses. I thanked him for not ducking the punch and apologized for setting his car on fire, but after that, I didn't hear from him until a few years later when he started sleeping with my girlfriend. It all comes out in the wash I guess.


I don't know what ever happened to Mark's Impala, and I don't really want to know because I like to think it's still twisting around on top of that stump, maybe serving the locals as an avant-garde weather vane showing the direction of the infamous High Plains wind while sending oscillating strains of "My Sharona" echoing through the valley all the way down to the cabin where Cricket is retelling his version of this story to the child of the baby who has grown up and had children, but is still just fine.

OK, probably not, but it's my delusional fantasy, and I'm keeping it.