Tuesday, March 14, 2006

One Lucky Bastard


Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Why would you listen to a single oboe when you could hear an entire symphony? Greet the bored gods today! If they ask for your spare change, well hey. Maybe you've been downsized yourself.

First things first. I would like to thank Athana of Radical Goddess Thealogy for solving my Ugly Gray Stripe problem! Not only did Athana have a solution, she also helped me to upgrade to this faerie-friendly background. I love it.

Okay, sifting through the Bible this afternoon, and sure glad I did.

Deuteronomy 23:2, "No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord."

I am assuming a literal translation for "bastard" here.

Oh, whee. Dodged a great big bullet on this one!

Not to open the old family closets and yank out the skeletons or anything, but my maternal grandma was a piece of work wild child. It's a long story, but my mama had two daddies, one whose name she bore, and the other one who dragged her along to the bar and bragged to his buddies that she was his, no matter what the name says on her birth certificate.

A paternity test conducted on Mama by the National Institutes of Mental Health in 1972 proved the drunken bragging guy right.

Guess Mama didn't read the Bible too closely, or else she would have stopped going to church right away and found a more hospitable bored god with whom to do business.

But gosh, there it is in Deuteronomy, right next to the Holy Scripture about men with crushed testicles not getting into heaven. Bastards don't make the cut, and neither do their descendants for ten generations.

I'm only Generation Deux. Eight more generations of my family to go before any of us qualify to get through that turnstile and into Hershey Park Heaven!

Imagine how disappointed I would have been to have jumped through all those Biblical hoops, only to discover upon arriving at the Pearly Gates that I don't cut it.

However, the point is moot because my reservations have already been accepted in Sidhe, providing that I don't hurt anyone knowingly between now and the day I croak.

It's getting close to St. Patrick's day, so there's no time like the present to thank St. Patrick for burning all the druid texts he could find on the island of Ireland. It would be a bummer if druids thought like ancient Israelites and cursed people for ten generations.

For those of you who want to get to heaven, I strongly urge you to do a thorough genealogy of every line of your family tree, back 10 generations (roughly the beginning of the 1700s). You don't want to be set up for a big, eternal disappointment.

If you already know about your rogue DNA, we here at "The Gods Are Bored" suggest you find a more user-friendly pantheon, one that will judge you by the content of your character and not the carrying-on of your grandma.

My final solace here is that I guess this disqualifies me from Mormon baptism even if they do find my name in some database 300 years from now. Talk about dodging a bullet! That's like dodging a freight train.

FROM ANNE
DAUGHTER OF A BLUE RIDGE BASTARD

Photo credit: dust wrapper,
Allison, Dorothy. Bastard out of Carolina. New York, NY: Dutton, 1992.

No comments: