Untitled

I can't think of a title for today's post. The reason is not far to seek: I can't think of a subject, either. So I thought I'd just log on and let the fingers do the walking, or thinking, or typing, or composing, or whatever it is that fingers do.

Someone one said that writing flows down the arm and onto the page, or words to that effect. Must have been someone from the middle of the last century, since most writing these days flows down the arm and onto the keyboard (this post being a good example). In other words, the creative process is often an unconscious, or subconscious, one; and it is certainly true that your scribe will often start a sentence (like this one) without any idea of how it will wind up. The trick, then, is to roll up the sleeves, get comfortable in your chair, and just start writing (or typing, if you prefer).

Pretty soon you'll have to confront the fact that you can't just let the fingers burble on forever, and force yourself to come up with a topic. How about the etymology of the word "burble"? Nah - too easy - everyone knows (or should) that it comes from Lewis Carroll's epic poem "Jabberwocky". What about famous pen names from history? Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Samuel Clemens, Francois Marie Arouet - these are some of the names that come to mind which you will not find on a title page, though their books are well kn0wn. But we have more important business at hand, dear reader, than mere Trivial Pursuit questions.

"Oh yeah," you say? "Well, then, get on with it." I guess there are several things I want to share with you that I haven't quite come to terms with yet, but perhaps I have dilly-dallied long enough. Ready or not, these are the topoi swirling through my mind today:

1) The letter in today's Local Rag suggesting that Greenwich is becoming a dictatorship. I might not have couched my opinions of Jimmy Lash quite so forthrightly; but now I'm rather sorry that I didn't. In fact, I wish I'd said it first, truth be known.

And the concept is disturbing, because it suggests that my heretofore gentle satire about Town politics is a case of fiddling while our civil liberties burn. A fellow RTM member was quoted elsewhere today as saying that we have "the essence of American democracy" here in town, and suggests it is being traded for a "strongman form of government." Before he goes unquietly into retirement, Jimbo may try to gut the powers and cut the size of the RTM, as payback for our not slavishly enacting each and every piece of legislation he has brought before us. Yes, that letter-writer hit the nail squarely: if Jimmy Lash could become a dictator, I personally have no doubt that he would. And that means that the situation here in Greenwich is perhaps graver than any of us have yet thought.

2) Coupled with that is the number of police cars I have been seeing in my vicinity recently. This phenomenon could be unrelated to my sneers at Jimbo (0ur Commissioner of Police) or Jimmy Wawa (our highly-unpopular chief); or, perhaps, it might not. As I told you, dear reader, I'm still mulling these matters over in my mind, so you're getting a less than fully-baked exegesis on them. But you were the one who told me to "get on with it," remember?

3) Also disheartening is the two-page letter that came in the mail today from Christ Church. It is the first official communication from the church on the Bob Tate situation, and it did not fill your scribe with joy. As I read it, I could distinctly hear the sound of hand-washing in the background.

Remember, gentle reader, that Bob served this church for some 36 years with great talent and irreproachable behavior. As I have said before, I and the hundreds of other choir parents are convinced that he never laid an inappropriate hand on any of his charges. But he is, as we all knew, gay (as are a large number of church musicians); and he has the same human urges as the rest of the planet. Whatever he did in the privacy of his own life was no one's business but his own, IMHO.

But when a number of computer images were found on his laptop, all Hell broke loose. Even though the laptop itself seems mysteriously to have disappeared, perhaps while in the custody of one of the church's lawyers, a Zip storage disk is apparently now People's Exhibit #1. And so Bob did the manly (yes, manly) thing, and admitted his guilt. He is now in a treatment center in PA.

The letter made me want to wash my own hands. I found it sanctimonious, self-preserving, and casting all the opprobrium on Bob. Wait, you ask - isn't this the same church that recently hushed up a minister's sleeping with a woman he was counselling? And who then stole a dining room table from the Tomes-Higgins house? Is clerical adultery and larceny to be winked at, and a lay person's private sexual behavior to be castigated mercilessly? I must be missing something here, dear reader. I wonder what Jesus Christ would think of such a double standard...my impression is that He wouldn't be too pleased.

Well, I still don't have a title to offer you for today's post. Perhaps it's just as well that way.