Down the page a bit, I posed the following to guest blogger Cubeland Mystic:
“If Mary Karr showed up at your cave in sack cloth and ashes and asking for a word, what would you say to her?”
To which the Mystic replied:
“In the cave absolutely nothing. The cave ain’t for talking. The cave is for listening. In the Denny’s, I would encourage her to user her fiction writing talents to bring hope to people.”
In the Denny’s, yes!
Then, on my way to work this morning, I heard a story about a guy, possibly a friend of JOB’s, who walked into a Denny’s in Madison on Fat Tuesday and cooked himself up a burger.
But the story within the story is about writing:
DeSpain, a public information officer for the department — and former CBS affiliate employee — writes up many of the most important police reports each day. Sometimes, he said, he can’t help but stray from the often tame and boring narrative style of police reports.
“This one kind of wrote itself,” he told The Huffington Post. “Most days I’m knee-deep in stuff that’s not so humorous. But occasionally we’ll get one like this.
So my question is: What would you say to this guy — in Denny’s — Cubeland Mystic?
If he were mentally ill there is not much you can say other than to pray for him and that the state does not slowly execute him with drugs and neglect. I would ask St. Benedict Joseph Labre to intercede for him.
http://www.americancatholic.org/features/saints/saint.aspx?id=1356
If he were not mentally ill. I will tell him to not give into his cynicism. That it is possible to be sane in a world filled with madmen. Do not let the insanity around you drive you insane. That his only hope from sinking into despair and hatred of life and humanity is to take radical action by serving those weaker than him if he is able, or turn to a life a deep prayer and silence.
In the end words fail, sanctified action with few words is his only hope.
Amen!
The fact that Mr. Summers did this on Fat Tuesday is a hopeful sign for me — that he may have been acting on a semi-religious impulse, a little last hurrah prior to repentance — that and his seeming good humor about it. According to Kierkegaard, comedy is the incognito of the religious, or a border zone between the ethical and the religious — and I can see that as being possibly in play here.
I didn’t see the date, nor would that have occurred to me. The tazer disturbed me though. The arresting officer asked him if he had a C&C.
I agree, the tazer is the most disturbing detail.
tazer is the sad part because what he did could be a good form of protest. You don’t have to go as far as he did. It more along the lines of those flash crowds. I love some of those flash crowd things. When they sing the Halleluiah chorus from Messiah.
Imagine like 50 poets reciting a well known Poem in a flash crowd at Pike’s Place market on Saturday.
How about 50 Dylan like singers with their guitars all singing a singing a hope song.
Imagine 500,000 Catholics in the march for life singing Tantum Ergo in procession. Or just singing it anywhere in a public space.
I do get the comedy though.
Yup, any resistance at all and you get tazered by the fuzz. Now that doesn’t seem very manley. Shouldn’t any good cop view it as failure to have to tazer a perp. A club has more dignity.
I read an essay once by Elizabeth Anscombe on human dignity where she asserts that the death penalty is more dignified than torture. I kind of sense what she meant. Human beings are now problems to be resolved through technology.
Manly rather.