A meditation:

A wooden pew makes standing on a Sunday morning seem comfortable. This woman has gray hair styles like an old woman would. A cheese ball. She smells. Too much perfume or hairspray or perfume and hairspray.

“Make a Joyful Noise” is the name of the painting. The wall is white, creamy, white. My mother is religious to say the least. She “prays in tongues,” it sounds like nonsense to me. I can mimic it if I want to. I used to mimic it when I was younger and mom thought I too had the Holy Spirit inside me. Young children always emulate their parents.

Make a Joyful Noise was painted by my mother. I am singing in the painting. My vocal chords might look like old frazzled wires one day but I don’t care. I am singing “fuck your god” in the painting of the picture, and the picture too. Real life, too, I really screamed those words. There were other words in those songs. I wrote the lyrics and gave them out because I thought they needed to be heard.

“1658 R. FRANCK North. Mem. (1821) 54 Must I be didactick to initiate this art? 1661 WORTHINGTON To Hartlib xvi. (T.), Finding in himself a great promptness in such didactic work. 1756 J. WARTON Ess. Pope (1782) I. iii. 101 A poem of that species, for which our author's genius was particularly turned, the didactic and the moral. 1824 DIBDIN Libr. Comp. 682 The dullest of all possible didactic and moral poetry. 1830 MACKINTOSH Eth. Philos. Wks. 1846 I. 59 A permanent foundation of his [Hobbes'] fame remains in his admirable style, which seems to be the very perfection of didactic language. 1878 R. B. SMITH Carthage 130 Polybius..is too didacticseldom adorning a tale but always ready to point a moral. 1878 R. W. DALE Lect. Preach. viii. (ed. 2) 226, I do not mean that sermons addressed to Christian people should be simply didactic.”[2]

I am screaming in the painting of the photo taken by Ashley.

We once talked on the phone from 2 a.m. until 6 a.m. Not really saying that noteworthy, I remember phones kept running out of batteries. Most of those four hours were spent playing silly games of phone switching and keeping all three conversers connected. Kelsey too, she was the third person in this ménage à trois. The three of us were on the phone all night. Not talking about much. For a while we played one of those conversation starter games—the games boring people play at parties to pretend they’re not boring.

Blah blah blah god so loved the world [insert football reference here]

This is all he ever has to say.

No, this is all I ever hear him say.

If enough football references to football are made does that keep the men from sleeping in? Will they not simply send their wives and kids off because it is god’s will for him to wake up five minutes before kickoff?

For god so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life

I have that memorized but he’s still telling me.

Jesus is the real reason for the season

Cliché phrases make me cringe. More than the smell of this woman. I momentarily forget how much this liberally applied perfume from the rich old lady’s department at Marshal Field’s is bothering me.

Why do I love my mother so much that I allow her to convince me to go with her to church? I could have made his sermon more rhetorically effective.

“1846 WORCESTER cites Biblical Repos. 1856 MRS. BROWNING Aur. Leigh I. Poems 1890 VI. 38 Didactics, driven Against the heels of what the master said. 1860 EMERSON Cond. Life, Consid. Wks. (Bohn) II. 412 Life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. 1881 J. G. FITCH Lect. Teach. ii. 36 The art of teaching, or Didactics as we may for convenience call it, falls under two heads.”[3]

I’m screaming at a group of high school kids. They’re picking me up. I’m above them now. Still screaming. I have much to say. Today is the first anniversary of the most recent Iraq war. They all know it.

Fuck this war. Fuck George Bush. Fuck anyone who disagrees with me.

I was in a band. We played angry music. I had a lot to say and those suburban kids were going to listen. We were grindcore, speedpunk, hardcore, whatever you wanted to call us. We were called History of the Decline—HOTD (hot-duh) for short. They’re listening to the shrieking coming from my pipes.

“didactic- adj. Having the character or manner of a teacher or instructor; characterized by giving instruction; having the giving of instruction as its aim or object; instructive, preceptive.”[1]

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[1] Oxford English Dictionary. "Didactic."

[2] Same as above

[3] Same as above