No escape from the rajas of erase

I’m an atheist. And sometimes I pray. Weird, huh?

I was raised in an unreligious household. That felt normal to me. Other kids I knew grew up with unquestioning belief in God because that’s what their parents believed. For me it was the opposite. When my parents finally introduced me to the concept, it sounded strange and implausible — just as a godless world sounds strange and implausible to the faithful.

My real introduction to religion came when I was 9 and was accepted into a top-flight boys’ choir at an Episcopal church. They never pushed religion on us, but it’s almost hard not to believe when you’re sitting in the chancel of a century-old church, gazing at the Tiffany windows as Bach’s “Passacaglia & Fugue” thunders from the 4,600-pipe Aeolian-Skinner Organ.

I got myself baptized and confirmed at the Episcopal church, then, shortly after my voice changed, began attending an evangelical church that had a remarkably successful youth program. I went on a retreat, and for a while I believed with a fervor I think is only possible for someone who really wants to believe but isn’t quite sold. Within a year or so the fervor burned itself out. Over the years I toyed with godless New Age hippy spirituality and Buddhism. But eventually I accepted myself for what I am: an atheist. (I still kind of dig Buddhism since it doesn’t really require a belief in God.)

Faith (or faithlessness) is a lot like love: It’s something you simply feel in your gut — whether it plants itself early on and takes root over the years, or suddenly falls down from the heavens when you’re least expecting it. It’s something you know.

So why pray? I pray for my friends, my family, and those dear to me, when they are being tested. I don’t really believe God or some intermediary will intercept my prayers and act on them. But I don’t completely exclude the possibility, either. And it therefore seems selfish to leave open the chance that my loved ones will suffer because of my lack of faith. And I believe that like so many religious rituals — confession, communion — prayer is healthy, no matter what we believe. It may or may not connect us with divinity. But it definitely helps us connect with ourselves, and others.

Hard times befallen

Finally, someone created a Web site for the three-legged crowd. Bring on the catnip.

I’m a bookkeeper’s son, I don’t wanna hurt no one

TSG is posting a play supposedly written by Cho Sueng-Hui, the suspected Virginia Tech killer. All I can say is, it’s more oedipal than Oedipus Rex.

Throw a kiss …

Chocolate better than kissing? Now there’s some research I’d love to disprove. Meanwhile, maybe Richard Gere should stick to giving chocolates to the beauties of Bollywood.

UPDATE: The study is bull.

Time Out Of Mind

My memory was never much good to begin with. And it hasn’t gotten any better after all those years of recreational drug abuse and heavy drinking. So I was intrigued when I came across this article touting the restorative powers of dancing.

Showbiz kids making movies of themselves

My mother takes a malicious, maternal delight in dragging out embarrassing photos of me and showing them to anyone who visits her home. (The photo above is the best I can do by way of revenge.) I’m sure my grandmother, too, had a file full of photos of my mom with her finger in her nose, sitting on the potty or running around in her skivvies in the backyard. I’m also sure my mom burned them first chance she got.

Of course, you can’t burn the Internet, which is opening up delightful new ways to embarrass your friends and family. In fact, on all over the Internet people are busy embarrassing themselves without any help from fiendish friends or sadistic siblings.

So when someone e-mailed me this circa-1980 video of my friend and hair stylist Jamie McGann singing for the Poodle Boys, I couldn’t just settle for just watching it. I had to blog it.

I don’t want to do your dirty work

Meet the new boss…

Clean this mess up

I’m in the middle of an Internet crisis. So I guess for the next few days I’ll have to rely on old-fashioned phones and mail. Hatin’.

I’ll rise when the sun goes down

When I was a kid growing up in Hamden, Conn., one thing became clear early on in my schooling: The most rabid delinquents, the drooling psychopaths, among my peers were, in almost every case, either the children of cops or child psychologists.

My own father was a psychologist, but not a child psychologist. He wasn’t even a sit-on-the-couch-and-tell-me-about-your-mother kind of psychologist; he was an experimental psychologist, which meant in his case that he made educated guesses about how people learn and remember things, and then figured out ways to test those theories.

So as I entered adolescence, I was a Caspar Milquetoast among delinquents, having never been quite able to muster up the necessary depravity to indulge in arson or torture small animals (other than my ever-suffering sister).

I was fairly normal as a younger kid — or, if not normal, then at least relatively untroubled. I did have trouble falling asleep at night. Particularly if other people were up and about in the house, I wanted to be part of the action, so I would toss and turn in bed until everyone had settled down.

My dad’s solution to this was pretty typical for a psychologist. He’d give me sleeping pills. Not real ones, of course. He’d feed me the same harmless sugar pills he gave to control groups in his experiments. He even called them by their proper name, figuring it very unlikely I would happen on this principle until at least junior high school.

A few times a year my dad would invite his colleagues (never “buddies” in his world) and a few favorite grad students to the house for dinner and drinks. They’d sit around late into the night, making fun of Freudians and cracking increasingly suggestive jokes around arcane topics such as Skinner and his wife’s box.

Of course it would drive me up the wall, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink with the mingled smells of hors d’oeuvres and cigarettes wafting through the ceiling, punctuated by random eruptions of laughter.

You have to picture the scene here: I creep bleary-eyed down the stairs and enter the living room in my fuzzy slippers and pyjamas. I politely wait for a pause in the conversation and then — in a silent room full of psychologists and grad students — I utter the following words:

“Daddy, I can’t fall asleep. Can I please have a placebo?”

I detect the el supremo

Watch this kung fool. Great example of the Bearded Master at work.