Not so punny

10 March 2011

Dear Anne,

Cole came and said, come on let's play volleyball. Volleyball? Volleyball, he said. Volleyball, I said? yeah. Volleyball? And I thought of nothing as the white globe floated and stopped and hovered. Then techno beat and acid trip hallucination. My hands set the ball. It came, it went, and it went over. Steve said, "We're playing three on three." Cole and I waited to the side; we waited with need for Elijah. And my weight settled on the automatic running machine and to stay on I walked, to stay on I jogged, and then I ran sprinting. My heart was back in Africa at the beginning. I felt ancient. To live I put my hands down on my friends, the railings, and lifted up my feet. The worrying stopped, permissive again. "Okay, let's go," Cole said and I enjoyed.

"Hey Spicer, you gay? There's a debate in the unit. I don't care if you are, just give me a straight answer. No pun intended."

It's been said before but is worth saying again. Brilliance is the ability to hold in the mind the possible at the same time as the impossible and not be paralyzed. Ghandi said that if --in the case of a youth who wrote him that he had been verbally assaulted and antagonized to fight -- that if the youth had not pitied the opponent from the beginning, and for a moment flinched under the insult, then the battle had been lost already. Thus he advised the youth to fight for his honor since he had already lost it. Friends, you intervened like angels and it was a beatific sight. Instead of seeing his bald head and snake tattoos, I saw your faces. I smiled and said nothing. He laughed at his own pun and was satisfied.

Thank you, Lord. I asked you for humiliations and you give me just enough to learn my weakness. I cannot undo all the homophobia of a man's life nor a culture of it. You will show me the way of noncooperation; I trust in you.

Chris