So at work, people contact me to temporarily secure the services of my company. Sometimes they have funny names, like Mr. Fluck,* an unfortunate middle school teacher. Sometimes the names are so outrageous that surely they made them up. Surely, they are part of an SNL skit and picked the names for hyperbole.

Such was the case of a group I’ll call “The Temple of Nature Loving.” I’m changing the names just enough to make me feel less guilty, but these changes are like calling someone Kitty Face Meowcat instead of their real name, Puppy Nose Lickchop.

The head…shamans? shamen? shapeople? of The Temple of Nature Loving were named, approximately, Dr. Trout Flysabout and Cindi Glowing Stagheart. Ok, bless their hearts and all the religions of the world, odd and less odd, but were they trying to be a New Age Stereotype?

Isn’t this like naming your kid Assface Fartnip and then sending him off to 5th grade recess? Kind of asking for it, isn’t it?

 *Mr. Fluck really is his name.

I’ve partly decided to try NaBloPoMo, mainly because I need to have some kind of disciplined writing practice, but also because it ends with ‘PoMo.’  Which makes me think of my pretentious college friends (self included, when I actually understood what they were talking about) discussing postmodernism in our literature and religion classes.  Also, PoMo reminds me of MoFo.  So you see how it is.  Irresistable, really.

Speaking of said Pretentious College Friends, I was recently informed that one of them is going completely blind and will be so in about ten years.  That’s disturbing, of course, and I’m truly sorry for him.  The person who told me, however, interjected it into a relaxed, semi-comical conversation, and thus caught off guard, I thought he was joking.  And that it was a joke about this old cautionary tale.  I think I kept my mouth shut and my face relatively non-gleeful enough, but I bet he could see the mixed emotions: pity, satisfaction, disbelief, vengeance justified. 

This PCF stood out on our small Christian campus because he was pretty open about sexuality—his, in particular.  It was whispered that PCF had partaken of sexual congress “six times!”  I think most tenth grade boys would laugh at that record, but to us sheltered little girls, he was Bad. Ass.  A dangerous, ballsy, sinner.  We were in awe of him. 

So, regarding a person who challenged the prevailing view that self-pleasure was pervy, you can see (ha) how news of his blindness seemed like a perfect joke set-up.