*
Beauty Bar would be a hell of a lot more conducive to actually meeting
people and having sex with them if the music was not always just loud
enough to make conversation impossible. Am I supposed to dance up to a
girl like a douchebag? Surely the proprietors can be made to understand that their male clientele does not consist of guidos.
*
A neighborhood marijuana dealer of some stature recently had $1,000 in
cash stolen from his house and came to accuse his brother-in-law of
having taken it. When his brother-in-law arrived on the block, a fight
promptly broke out. The two pugilists sort of danced back and forth for
a minute or so and exchanged unimpressive blows; the dealer was stuck
in the ear at least once. Then they yelled at each other for a while,
were separated by friends and family members, and yelled at each other
again. They are now back on good terms, I believe. Another fight broke
out a few days later just across the street from the scene of the
original skirmish, this time between some large black fellow and a
smaller Latina chick. The confusing thing was that another, apparently
unrelated fight broke out just a few meters away at the same time, this
one involving one PuertoRican chic who decided to start slapping the other one. Then two dogs managed to get loose in the midst of all of this.
* There's a totally sweet outdoor pool to be found on Marcy in Bed Stuy.
Admission is free, though you'll need to bring a padlock. The only
drawback is that the city employees who run it are among the most
malevolent people imaginable and take great pleasure in your pain. When
I first stopped by with a friend, we were immediately challenged to
produce a lock and swim trunks and to remove our shoes before even
approaching the entrance; I assured the woman that we were willing to
subject ourselves to her authority and meant no harm.
Notes from the Outside World
The universe has conspired to bring me a copy of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity
through a series of very improbable circumstances with which I won't
bore you. It is the finest flower of Christian apologetics, far more
readable than St. Augustine's Confessions, itself a staple of
Catholic meta-nonsense in which the North African protagonist confesses
to having stolen some fruit and mated with a woman. For a summary of Confessions, simply read this Onion article.
C.S. Lewis was converted to Christianity in part through the efforts of
J.R.R. Tolkien, who was soon miffed to see Lewis join the Church of
England instead of his own wondrous Catholic Church. Their short-lived
friendship ended altogether when Lewis married a divorcee, thereby
further offending Tolkien's
delicate paternalist sensibilities. We need not imagine what the status
of women would be should this crowd take back control of Western
thought; we have been there before, and in the memory of many still
living.
Having been written by a former non-believer and a particularly educated one at that, Mere Christianity
is supposed to be very persuasive. Perhaps a recovering drug addict or
middle-aged illiterate would find it to be so, but it would be hard for
any smart-ass worth his weed to take the book seriously. Lewis notes
early on that he'll avoid the theological issues surrounding the Virgin
Mary, but later takes it as a given that the Trinity is just what it
was proclaimed to be by those Roman theologians who spent the 4th
century poisoning and exiling each other until a consensus was reached
on whether or not the Father and Son are of like substance and whether
one created the other and other such nonsense; Lewis does not
anticipate that an educated non-believer might not take this process as
seriously as he presumably does. And like many theologians, he insists
on establishing arbitrary categories without showing his work; there
are, it is explained, four "Cardinal" virtues and three "Theological"
ones. Make a note of it.
Lewis and his fellows have today
been replaced by another set of university-oriented theologians, this
time centered in Texas rather than England and led to some degree by
professors William Dembski and Marvin Olasky.
The latter coined the term "compassionate conservatism," which helped
to win a crucial election; the former established the concept of
"specified complexity," which he hopes will win a place for
Christianity within the realm of science.
In conclusion, to hell with C.S. Lewis. He also wrote The Space Trilogy,
which I made the mistake of reading as a child, thinking it was actual
science fiction. It turned out to be more Christian apologetics. I
didn't figure this out until well into the third book; the disguise is
very thorough.