The Return Of Blog
I took a bit more than a month off from blogging. As I had said before I left it, I was a bit bored, I had not been saying much, or often, and I was busy, so why have people check back every day only to find that I hadn’t mustered up the interest to say anything. So I didn’t. I would like to say that during this period of hiatus that we underwent extensive R&D on a new look, new blogging technology, improved CSS as well as integration with stand-alone blog technology… but that would be bullshit. I basically ignored it for most of the last 5 weeks or so, with the odd post of the dog.
I will probably re-do it shortly. If I can find a template that does not make my eyes bleed, or require too much fecking with to make it work, then I’ll update that. Otherwise, I won’t. In any case the month off has been fine, we’ve been up to our ears in dog. It’s all about the dog now. But that’s fine, he’s unbelievably cute, it’s clearly some evolutionary thing that stops us from eating out young, or something. But really this pup is adorable.
In other news Eric and I went to a wedding on Saturday. It was a huge Italian-Ecuadorian affair with 350 people, and more food than you could imagine. But while sitting in the church (Catholic, full mass etc.) Eric and I came to the same conclusion. We discussed it later, and both agreed that is the last wedding we’ll attend. There are a couple of reasons for me.
I am an atheist. I feel extraordinarily stupid sitting in a church hearing people talk about god and Jesus like it’s true or meaningful. I am sorry if I offend anyone reading this who’s a believer, but that’s the truth of it for me. I can’t fake it anymore. Imagine you have a friend who’s really into Star Wars and wants a Jedi wedding. And moreover wants everyone to pretend, with no sense of irony, that it’s ‘real’. You’d be very uncomfortable for sure. And I am at religious weddings (which for me have so far been every brand of Christianity, no Jewish or Muslim weddings yet.)
Before anyone gets their knickers twisted by my comparison of Christianity with Jedi, well hold off, I’m not, I’m comparing how I feel about them, not the things themselves. I know that the major argument against my point is something like “well it’s not about that, it’s a celebration, and you should be there to celebrate your friends’ love” etc. Well I’ll show up to the reception and celebrate their love by getting drunk at the open bar and buying them a nice Henkel knife set. I don’t need to play make-believe for an hour in the afternoon with them for that.
Which leads me to the second, and in fact, more important, reason for not going anymore, and the reason I’m not willing to suck it up and just go for “the celebration” of it. Churches are antiethical to me. The people who run them hate me. They don’t recognize my right to have happiness in my life. They work very hard to inhibit my freedoms. They believe that the worst punishment that can befall a human (the same one reserved for murderers) will befall me because of what I am.
I’m not going to sit in a room that belongs to that organization, I’m not going to be preached at by them, and I’m sorry, but I’m not going to celebrate your love, when you are celebrating it with people don’t even recognize my capacity for it. I know people will say that I have to see beyond the dogma, and see that the people are not necessarily the same as the organization, and that my friends are clearly not homophobic, because I’m their friend. But you know what? I don’t care. They are responsible; every single catholic is responsible for each other. Every Baptist for each other and so on.
It is as unreasonable to ask a gay man to come to a Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) wedding as it would be to ask a black man to come to a KKK rally. So there are only 2 weddings likely to come up in my future that would cause me any kind of consternation should I be invited. One is an agnostic fag, so no likelihood of being at a church. And the other is my 15-year-old nephew. He hasn’t been inside a catholic church in 14.5 years so I’m not worried he’s going to get married in one, but still, you never know. But I feel confident that if/when that was to happen, I’d be able to have a conversation with him about it.
I know this blog post is all cranky sounding, and I really don’t mean it to be. It was actually a really freeing moment in the church on Saturday. And so perfect that on the steps after we both just agreed that we’re done with church weddings. We were freed up in that moment. Yay! No more weddings.
