Christmas Ravings from Mexico

It´s that time of year again, as opposed to that time of month, which affects fertile females under forty-five, roughly, and I do mean roughly-- though the implantation and successful pregnancy of a sixty-something Italian lady not long back did stretch the stretch marks of my nugatory obstetrics. Nugatory. Like that word? Amend your nescience and anoint it as your vocabulary word for the day, O idiot blogees!

They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but at this time of year, there being no flies to darken my blog, I take the liberty of insulting my absent audience, the same kind of audience the Pope afforded me.

Chinga bells, chinga bells, chinga all the way!

(Best sung in a Mexican bar where the patrons are spoiling for a fight from cheap tequila.)

I do want to wish all you who are not reading this a very Merry Christmas and say to those who are,¨"Get a life!"

And no, I will not take the Christ out of Christmas just as I won´t take the spike out of egg nog nor the Shrike out of Hyperion (by Dan Simmons) Great book, btw, for a late Christmas gift; for non-fiction I always recommend Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, though this may be a bad time of year to market the notion, being concerned with nativity and all, but remember "In my beginning is my end" which adorns the container of Eliot´s ashes at East Coker, and was also the motto of Mary Queen of Scots, though I wonder if it´s just about sitting down to dinner.

We´re having a nice repast of smoked turkey tonight with our Mexican hosts, in whose rooms we´ve now stayed for over four months. (Yes, Virginia, we are paying customers.) Luckily I left my guitars and desktop computer with them else there would be more to recover from the dastardly maid who is extorting us for the rest of our stuff, still unreturned, her fat ass still not in jail--but it shall be, O it shall be, if my name isn't the Gringo Grinch!

Carlos, the dueno of the posada, is a very intelligent man who likes to torture Jehovah´s Witnesses and Mormons. After he twisted the Witnesses he now innocently asks his Mormon instructors how there could be steel, cows and horses in Mexico before the Conquistadores, as their holy book recounts. I think they reassure him that this land, second only to Egypt in archeology, just needs a few more lucky digs to prove the theory of the lost tribe of Nehi, who instead of promoting soda supposedly crossed Asia and the Pacific to make those cool pyramids.

Still, how can you not like Mormons? There´s over a million here in Mexico and more official temples than anywhere else but the US. They even admit now that their founder had faults, perhaps why he was taken out of jail and lynched, in part for sleeping with his follower's wives. The revolution may eat its children, but I guess that David Koresh gene has some survival value after all.

Funny how the rules never apply to the prophets. Even Mohammed changed the rules in the Koran, where he made an exception for himself in order to marry his daughter-in-law, a practice he had formerly forbidden. The Koran is even more boring than the Book of Mormon, btw, so I recommend neither for your Christmas reading list.

I wander far afield where no angels sing inside my head. Which reminds me of Aldous Huxley´s wonderful essay, "Wordsworth in the Tropics," where he rightly asserts that if Wordsworth had grown up in the Congo he would not have honored the benevolent God of the English countryside, rather bloodthirsty demons as did Mr. Kurtz.

"Mr Kurtz, he not dead. He live on in delusion of Iraq. He live on in Mormon missionary zeal."

Again, how can you not like Mormons, whose skinny ties always remind me of David Byrne of The Talking Heads? That short-sleeve-white-shirt-skinny-black-tie look "could never die while you´re near me." One Mexican convert here was quoted in the paper as saying that he first followed Mormon missionaries around because he was so impressed by their ties, which in this climate certainly qualifies as a miracle. How The Book of Mormon can explain horses is another question, but hey, when did faith depend upon facts? That only applies to historical religions like Christianity (sadly not to Neoconservatism).

Hey, I better lay off the Mormons here before the ghost of Joseph Smith lays on my wife. Wonder if he still has the golden plates or just a bridge? Dental work is cheaper down here, you know.

So again, for Christmas, another gift item is a ticket to Mexico for dental work. Mexicans have clever hands and make good dentists; just don't ask them to think diagnostically or they´ll make up a reason to save face. ¨"Yes, it was a chupacabra´s bite that ultimately deformed your wisdom teeth." I'm not kidding about this, as any of you who certainly did no read my link below to ¨"Dead-End Thinking" don´t know. If you say to someome in Mexico, "Yesterday I saw a green pterodactyl," they will receive the news as if you mentioned the weather. Everything here is simply believed. Which reminds me of a conversation I had with one of the lawyers I fired, though not for her faith.

"My parents are Christian," she explained with some trepidation.

"And you?" I asked.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed. "I´m Catholic. Those poor Christians only get Jesus while we have Mary and the angels and all the saints."

Hard to argue with the advantage of a spiritual smorgasbord. Mexican Catholicism truly skirts polytheistic idolatry, but then in the U.S. we have opinion polls, so what´s the difference?

Having said all I want to say and then some, I hope this Christmas note leaves you in fine spirits, or if a teetotaler, perhaps with a contact high. Wish you could smell my breath through the internet ether.

"I do, I do, I do believe in Christ! Just not in flying monkeys!"


Thine as ever,

Dr. Chaffin