I took some time off from the ol' blog, as some of you may have noticed, the long weekend after the fourth. It's always a question how to maneuver a national holiday that falls on a Wednesday. Because if it falls on a Monday or a Friday, you've got a three-day weekend right there. Tuesday or Thursday you're gonna have to take a four-day weekend—sorry, that's just how it goes. But what do you do with a Wednesday? It's a recipe for indigence.

Idle hands do the devil's work, and mine are certainly no exception. I stuffed myself with various meat products (and yes, it's as wicked as it sounds) and got moderately drunk on Wednesday, worked a wee bit (but just for show) Thursday and Friday, and got scandalously drunk on Saturday and actually went out and danced shamelessly in a seedy, slutty bar, and went home with someone I didn't know (at least not in the Biblical sense).

Sunday morning I felt like Lucky Jim, in the old Kinglsey Amis book:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself here. I've got a backlog of notes from the fourth for you before we get to any of the good stuff. After all, if I had to suffer, so do you.

This was my first fourth since moving to Davis Square, and it was definitely a change from my last in Dorchester.

First of all, the, um, local fireworks shows on every street corner and in every backyard didn't start a month ago and go randomly but relentlessly on for week upon week so that some nights it felt like you were living in Gaza, and had to be treated for PTSD by summer's end.

In fact, I didn't hear a single firecracker on the fourth in my new neighborhood. Not one. Dorchester, everybody buys enough to last them through next Independence Day. Because, heaven forbid there be a night without some random explosive of some sort going off somewhere in the neighborhood and putting someone's eye out. It just wouldn't feel like home, would it? You'd think you were in Newton or something.

Dorchester needs a Who-Can-Be-The-Quietest Day. Bitches need to chill, you know what I'm sayin'? CHI-DOUBLE-L OUT, y'all.

In my new neighborhood, it was twilight-zonishly quiet when my mates and I got back from Salem. We'd taken the ferry to see the Joseph Cornell show at the PEM, where it was eerily quiet as well. We were told by the kid at the museum coat check that everyone in Salem goes to Revere Beach for the fourth. Which suited us just fine. We had the run of the place (more about which in a minute).

Back in Somerville, I was telling Jay as we walked to the liquor store to pick up some beer and fixins for our burgers and brats, that this is what it'd be like if everyone who'd gone to see the fireworks on the Esplanade got raptured.

And wouldn't that be something to see? Even better than fireworks!



But Jay didn't like the idea of it too much, because of the "unsavory"—I think was the word he used—fate of those "left behind."

Pshaw, I said. All that talk of Tribulation is rubbish. It's just to get the gullible to agree to be raptured in the first place. The Bible is like that manual To Serve Man in the old Twilight Zone episode: IT'S A COOKBOOK!

No. Just joking.

Jay says The Rapture isn't even in The Bible. Rapturistas might protest, pointing to a couple of lines (4:16-17) from some old letter from Paul, a guy who never even met Christ in person, to the beleaguered, badly behaved Thessalonians.

It's pretty clear that Paul would've said just about anything at that point to keep what was still a fledgling sect from imploding in a storm of incestuous squabbles. Paul had the original "vision thing." He was a man with a mission. (If only he'd had Blondie around as his marketing chief. Her version of rapture is "finger-fucking and twenty-four hour sucking". Hey, don't get left behind!)

Whether Paul was serious or not about what some call The Rapture, hysteria's built into Christianity, as it is most organized religions. Hysteria is, in fact, the organizing principle of most religions.

Consider the early days of the Christian Church, such as it was, which could never have survived without Paul. In The Acts and the Pauline Epistles he's pretty much front and center, sort of the Lee Iacoca of Christianity. And personally, I think everything from The Acts on should be required reading for Business 101. It's all about building a viable brand.

Paul recognized that early Christianity had a big PR problem among gentiles, a key demographic if it was ever going to break free of Judaism, of which it was basically a tiny little sect on the verge of oblivion when Paul came along.

The problem was this: the Jews' version of the Nike "swoosh" was circumcision. Peter and his gang were all snipped, just as Jesus himself had been. But the rest of the world—a world full of potential converts—was not, and likely didn't want to be.

The covenant of circumcision is mentioned several times in The Acts, and, coinciding with Saul’s conversion in chapter nine, Peter has a vision (Acts 10:9-16), and the issue of whether the uncircumcised are eligible for membership becomes basically the first big debate of the infant church.

The rift in the church is severe enough that a meeting, the Council at Jerusalem, is called to resolve the whole thing once and for all.

Both Peter and James (the son of Alphaeus, not Zebedee, the brother of John) speak in favor of the conversion of gentiles. Peter says, "God...put no difference between us and them...why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither fathers nor we are able to bear?" (15:8-10), and James is like, "my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God."

The original Apostles were clever. They knew nobody would want to join their religion if a condition of it was that they had to submit the ol' schvantz to the meat cleaver. Um, no thanks. I'll keep mine and worship Caesar instead.

It’s one thing to do it to eight-day olds, who can’t do anything about it and won't remember a thing (although the trauma will resonate through the unconscious mind and manifest as acute neurosis in adulthood), but what grown man is going stand there and let you hack away at his? And that’s a natural-born fact.

If adult circumcision was the price of admission, the only people you’d have joining your religion would be absolute fanatics and kinky-pervs.

(Yeah, I know it kind of ended up that way anyway. But you have to give the religion's founding fathers a little credit for seeing it coming.)

Point is, this was a huge policy decision on the part of the Apostles. I mean, this determined the course of the church, and was the source of the first Epistle mentioned in the gospels, to Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia. I shit you not.

It began, "Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain which went out from us have troubled you with words, subverting your souls, saying, ye must be circumcised, and keep the law: to whom we gave no such commandment...it seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, to lay no greater burden than these necessary things; that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well" (15:23-29).

Whew. That was close. As you can imagine, when the recipients read the epistle, "they rejoiced for the consolation" (15:31). You bet your foreskin they did.

But there seemed to be some lingering confusion regarding the directive, as in chapter 16, Paul has young Timotheus, the Greek sidekick he’s taking with him on his tour through Phrygia and Galatia, circumcised "because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for they knew all that his father was a Greek."

So brave Timotheus made the ultimate sacrifice. He was perhaps the first to martyr his penis (or a portion thereof) for the cause. Gives a whole new meaning to tithing, eh?

Unfortunately, it didn't do them any good. He and Paul end up getting their asses tossed in prison anyway, which happened a lot.

But, no sweat, some angels come along and bust them out. Which happens a lot in The Acts, too.

You know, the angels are pretty chill in the gospels. Suddenly in The Acts they’re superheroes. Every time one of the apostles gets thrown in the can, here come some angels to spring him.

The Acts is like one of those sequels of a sequel of a sequel where the original star has finally said, "forget it, I can’t do another one." And what have you got when you kill off the star? A bunch of supporting actors, and no star, that's what. It's basically Cannonball Run. So they have to add all these car crashes, kidnappings, and rescues, a bunch of wacky subplots with cheap special effects.

That's what The Rapture's about, too, if you ask me. It's like following up Citizen Kane with Citizen Kane II: Electric Boogaloo. "Rosebud's back, and busting ALL the moves!"

So forget The Rapture, I told Jay. It was getting in the way of the point I wanted to make.

Let's talk about the bird flu.

When the bird flu comes, we'll have all of Somerville to ourselves. And no seven years of tribulation to trouble us.



Remember this? The First Wave Campaign? The bird flu's coming, people. We just have to pray for it.

And what a glorious new world it will be post-H5N1. Nothing like the post-apocalyptic picture painted by Cormac McCarthy in The Road, by the way, which I read a couple weeks ago because Oprah told me to. In that book, it's a post-nuclear-Armageddon world, not a post-avian-influenza world, and there is a huge difference.

McCarthy's book is about "the ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be." His method is literary chiaroscuro. The book is one relentless search for food and shelter in a permanent nuclear winter. A pilgrimage of sorts, where the pilgrims are "en route to their several and collective deaths."

In (and on) The Road, there are basically two kinds of people: people who eat people when the going gets rough, and people who don't (many of whom get eaten themselves by the people-eaters).

And that strikes me as true.

And that simple but profound truth is what informs this story, and very simply, without need of elaboration, lends this book the weight of verisimilitude.

(And if you think those were some ten dollar words in that last sentence, you should read The Road. I learned a whole bunch of new ones I plan to try out on you in the coming months and years, including "lave," "midden," and "cairn," "crozzled," "pampooties," and "swale.")

Anyway, if the fourth was any indication at all, post-bird flu Somerville will be a quiet, peaceful utopian community, guided by the wisdom, strength, good looks and generosity of its three surviving residents, one of whom should do his dishes more often. Not some safe-haven for crack-addled cannibals. Maybe on the other side of the Charles. Not in my backyard.

But back to the fourth. The ferry to Salem was nice. We didn't hit anything. But that story about two ferries colliding in Boston Harbor earlier this week doesn't surprise me a bit. On our way back from Salem it was chilly and wet, so we sat in the cabin behind the captain, whom we could see through a big window. He did not have the good sense to pull the curtains.

Transparency has its limits. Like all things it can be overdone. The captain looked to be all of fourteen, and spent the whole trip with his feet on the dash, noshing on nachos and salsa, and joking with his mates.

But it's a great way to travel, so long as you don't hit anything, and like I said, we didn't.

As you leave the Hahbah there's this breathtaking view of the ICA:



That is, if, like me, you have powers of x-ray vision that allow you to see through Anthony's Pier 4 Restaurant.

Where can those of you without x-ray vision get the dramatic, much-trumpeted view of the ICA you see on all the ads and articles about the building? This one here, I mean:



Only from Anthony's, it turns out. Oh, the irony.

But anyway. Salem was quiet on our arrival, except for the rickshaw drivers at the desolate wharf where we were dropped off who were shouting and jeering at us as we fled their "free rides."

As soon as we stepped off the ferry they started hurling insults at us: "Hey you! Fecktard! Yeah, you with the face! Are you so feckin stupid you're gonna turn down a free feckin rickshaw ride to downtown Salem?" one shouted in what must have been the, er, charming local accent.

"It's a feckin mile and a half to downtown, bitches!" hollered another one. "They didn't tell you that on your little faggot ferry ride, did they?"

"They lied to you, feckin douchetards!" Cawed a third. "How's it feel to be LIED TO?"

"So you wanna ride or not, asshats?"

And that was the soft-sell.

Even on our way back as we waited for the ferry to retrieve us and take us far far away from Salem's shore as fast as their twin engines could carry us, they were jeering and mocking us.

"How's your legs feel, walktards?"

"You coulda had a free ride!"

"Yeah, hey, by the way, your ass called. It wants your head back!"

We ignored them, but words hurt.

It took us about three minutes on foot to get to Salem's first big attraction, by the way. The House of the Seven Gables was about two blocks away, and Jay wanted to see it, for some reason. But none of us wanted to pay, so we had to settle for the discount tour. You only get to see five gables, from the bottom of a dead end street, but it's enough to get a rough idea. (I figure you see one gable, you've seen 'em all.)

There were a couple of things going on at the PEM worth seeing. The hands-on origami exhibit was my fave:


All the origami in one case was made of dollar bills, as you can see. There must have been at least fifteen bucks in there! They should watch that shit. That's enough for, like, three Big Mac meals. It's very tempting.

There was a lot of cool origami made of material that wasn't legal tender, too, so you had no idea how much it was worth, like these:



Very cool. And the PEM's hands-on exhibitions, while in some ways straining to find ways to be extra-hands-on, are always fun.

The aforementioned Joseph Cornell exhibit—Navigating the Imagination—although not as magical as it might have been, or maybe just not as magical as I had hoped it'd be—still had its moments of inspiration and flight of fancy.



The boxes, which we'd come to see, beg to be handled, but not only are they not handleable for obvious reasons, you had to squint sometimes just to see into 'em. The lighting was kept low throughout in order to preserve them. Understandable, but a bit defeatist. At the end of the last room was a big-screen HDTV with some lovely, well-lit images of the pieces we had had to strain to see in the glass cases in the exhibition hall. That was worth the price of admission.

Cornell is an interesting artist—the kind that doesn't exist, or isn't recognized as an artist anymore. I think his appeal to artists today is precisely his naïveté. Whether that's played up or not in his biography, I can't say with any authority. It seems not, though. He came of age during the Great Depression. Worked as a door-to-door salesman, and as a caretaker for his disabled brother. He did not go to art school, which did not exist in its present form in those days.

In a sense, what many artists today—one of the folks I went to the show with was a graduate of Mass Art and is a graphic artist nowadays, and she was taking notes—seem to strive for is the kind of authentic quirkiness Cornell's early works in particular show. (On the other hand, we're living in an age of high-irony where artifice is valued as a sort of mirror through which authenticity can be reflected—it's all very complicated and involves highly flammable materials and regular colonoscopies.)

It was all food for thought, anyway.

And then it was back to the ranch for bros, brews, and brats. A perfect way to spend the fourth.