While Stepping Over Bum Piss in the Parking Garage . . .

. . . it occurs to me that the social ills of this city must be self-perpetuated to some extent. I know we're supposed to call them homeless, and I do believe that there are many who deserve that less-stigmatic label. But if you drink from a paper bag during daylight hours in public spaces, and choose to piss in the stairwell of a parking structure, you're a bum. But in Portland, the bums and the homeless are all lumped together and receive the same social services, food, and shelter options, and I must say, it gets tiresome to see the residue of the bums every time I arrive near work.

To Godbag, or Not to Godbag? Is It Really a Question?

Squidlet wants to go to church. He's asked about every four days in the last three-four months, and while the Huz and I really keep hoping this interest will go poof, like so many others do for a busy almost four-year-old, it keeps coming up. Well, now, what's a good liberal feminist to do? To say? Because Christianity makes my skin crawl, do I have an obligation to keep him away? Do I say, "Oh, wee bairn, you would not understand this yet, as your penis is not yet the center of your existence, but I cannot hand you over to the people who have systematically supported the classification of women as property and meatsocks since the system was established"? Do I find a nice liberal church that offers God Light and at least will perform civil unions for same-sex couples, which is the very least I would expect of an institution that claims Love as a cornerstone? But even then . . . I fear they will refer to the Bible often as if it had some validity, and that too, makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. One of my friends thinks that the Church (by which she means Christian, because there is no other for her) offers a good cornerstone of morality that one can build critical thinking upon, though I would argue it hasn't done that for her, as she still buys the spiel and can't get past gay "marriage," though she says she believes homosexuals have every right to every State-sanctioned benefit allowed to any heterosexual couple--she just can't get past the word "marriage," she says, because "marriage is religious." Really? Tell that to the het couple drunkenly married in Vegas by one of the State-sanctioned Elvi--unless God is in the sequins, I don't buy it. Marriage is now and always has been the contractual establishment of a small business, with assets (home, hearth, cattle and offspring) conjoined and, until recently, no escape clause. It's just that up until very recent history, the Church was the State. But I digress.
So, the Huz and I have been discussing this, and I was at first thinking, "Ehhhh, a couple rounds of Jesus won't kill the kid, and the basic tenets really are the same across the board," but the more I watched Huz twitch in memory of his fundamentalist Godbag upbringing, and the more I heard his discomfort with the exclusionary and downright meanspirited approach to "salvation," the more I wondered--what if they get their claws into him young? I mean, we don't let him watch TV, why should we let someone take him into a closed room where we aren't welcome and indoctrinate him in the company of his already-singing-along peers? The pressure there would be enormous, and he very much does like to please, and he's smart, so there'd be Psalm-spouting in no time.
Part of the conversation with the Huz made me recount my spirituality, and where I find God/Creative Life Force/Wilma. I was thinking, my church is and has been getting out in the woods for a hike on Sunday. It's finding that spiderweb glistening with dew stretched impossibly between four fern fronds at opposing angles, or listening to old old Gospel at full volume . . .

More on this later, probably, as we just finished up a fine dinner--split pea soup with ham and a new addition, SPINACH--it's a perfect hider for a fuckton of greens--and homemade cheddar bread. Yum!