It was sheer luck that I was able to work in such an anachronistic role for four years. This is not the kind position a lot of newspapers have around anymore. But the New York Post has a fantastic paper clip archive going back to its “Shipping News” days in the early 1800s. It probably would have cost half-a-billion dollars to digitize. Much less expensive to hire me to swat the rats away from the stacks in the basement.

The research part of the job sometimes required, if not smarts, then certainly the ability to finesse data quickly for reporters on tight deadlines. We usually got a call from one of them right after Mike Hechtman yelled at them.

Hechtman, by the way, was as much an institution at the city desk as he was a newsroom “featured personality”. He was one of those fast-talking, street-wise tabloid veterans, irascible and high-strung, but who knew his stuff and, in my movie, is played by an old Jewish woman who just found out her son is marrying a goy.

To tell the truth, I loved dealing with Hechtman for all those qualities, but unless we were chatting about our respective cats, I preferred it be over the telephone. He scared the shit out of me. He’s probably the reason why I didn’t step foot into the newsroom for three years.

But even if I kept to myself in the library (which I regretted later), there were moments of excitement back there too. It was nice getting a call from the newsroom. Once in a while, it felt like you were doing something important. Then you realize you’re searching Nexis for clips on how much Eliot Spitzer paid for a blowjob. Then you feel really, really proud, to boot.

I liked the people I worked with in the library, mainly because I was alone most of the time, but also because they were good company. I even liked Bruce Furman, despite our  occasional differences. He liked to say that the librarians were “the ones that made the bullets”, in reference to our place at the paper. They were characters in their own rights, if not as brassily stress-inducing as Hechtman was.

For the most part, the reporters and editors were fine to work with as well. Except for Mandy Stadtmiller. She was something else.

Mandy Stadtmiller had the personality one might associate with the differently-abled love-spawn of two first cousins among the Landed Gentry; an outsized sense of privilege accompanied by a neo-cortex that only generations of inbreeding could come up with.

I came across Mandy Stadtmiller’s name today while pursuing a different blog idea.

I hadn’t thought about her since I left the Post in 2009. She is a standup comedian and a blogger who is now somewhat famous for writing explicitly about her painfully dull existence.

And she has received some attention recently, along with criticism for “oversharing” her personal life. I see her writing as the blog equivalent to a deranged stranger showing me the Biore strip she’d just pulled off her nose.

Speaking as an exhibitionist, both online and in shopping malls, I don’t see anything wrong with letting it all hang out. The problem with Mandy is that she doesn’t know how to finesse it. Just kind of chucks the dirty undies in your face while braying like a donkey.

Worse than her writing, and the more salient point to this post, is her personality.

****

One afternoon in 2008, Mandy emailed the library to ask for a search to be done. It was before the early deadline, which is the busiest time for Mike Hechtman to come talk to me about his cats. Requests for clips, addresses and dates of birth always piled up.

Mandy and another reporter were working on an assignment, and Mandy was in over her head. Every few minutes she sent a new request to the library for information, which were piling up and sometimes overlapping with the other reporter’s requests.

So I asked Mandy, “If it’s not too much trouble, could you please collect all subsequent requests in one e-mail?”

To which Mandy replied:

Sorry – I don’t have time –  I’m scrambling just as much as you are – ****** put me on this yesterday – I’m not a political reporter so I don’t have time to be perfectly organized in my emailing requests to library – thanks for your help – please. I need you to be here to support, make my life easier, do the googling requests & anticipate instead of me having to do & beg for ur help – I shoulda been gone @ 6 just like ***** ****** but instead am here working late, pitching in, being a team player, trying to do what I can – so please, please, please do what you can as we;ll, ok? It’s really, really appreciated. Thanks a million. Truly appreciated – all your help.

Then I says to her, I says, I go

Unfortunately, you’re not the only reporter on deadline. I’ll do what I can.

It bothered me for hours after finished working on Mandy’s project that I couldn’t anticipate milady’s caprices. She was even more upset and forwarded our entire email exchange to my boss, who must have asked Mandy if I had fucked up in some way. To which Mandy replied:

Nope – he above & beyond met the needs – 1nce the attitude chnged was all the difference in the world. If reporters are asked 2 go above & beyond then other people shld approach w the same attitude – I leave early all the time – was saying ‘listen work w me – I wish I was gone like laura – but iv been asked 2 do this ridiculous task so am trying – so please 4 the love of christ work w me.’ & he did. & I am super grateful not 2 hv 2 play the game of how I can I best make simon’s life easier – & instead he anticipated & helped & was awesome. Was grt. Gotta do another interview – thanks 4 writing bck & all you do.

I don’t have anything to say about what Mandy wrote, or whatever verb applies to the above passage.

But I do realize that I owe News Whore an apology. So, Mandy. I apologize. The next time I smell you, I’ll anticipate that you’ve left another tampon in your no-no zone, and call the proper environmental agency. The rest of the news room doesn’t need to suffer just because you forgot there was foreign body in your vagina. But, there are all kinds of stuff up in that thing. I’ve read it on your blog.

[[Slightly edited second revision]]

I’m referring to the small, family run fruit-and-vegetable operation up on Parnell Road, near the Japanese joint; one of them mother-daughter situations.

Until yesterday, I’ve only ever transacted with the daughter. She is courteous and efficient, doesn’t interfere, mainly because she finds the whole situation hopelessly dour.

At least that’s the impression she gives. It’s a resignation, but not in the slump-shouldered manner in which I carry mine. She just looks like she knows that every day, her customers rely on her to ring-up and bag their fruits and vegetables, which used to make her want to put a shotgun in her mouth.

Not anymore. She is a beaten soul who does her job adequately, and keeps to herself, which is why it’s always such a pleasure to see her. In and out. No chit-chat, no hard-sell. No wonder she’s been the Parnell Merchants Association “Produce Salesperson of the Year” three years running. Keeps one of the certificates on display somewhere under the mints and chewing gum.

The mother is a different story. Jacquie warned me a long time ago. “Stay away from that woman,” Jacquie said, dressed in a fortune-teller costume she sometimes wears to work, “Yesterday that woman used her evil powers to make me buy a half-eaten apple. And it wasn’t even that good.”

If only I’d listened to that crazy old gypsy woman. But then I never would have seen for myself how spot-on Jacquie was. I understand now why she always says, “Keep walking, keep your eyes down” whenever we’re shopping for fruit and the mother happens to be lurking.

Yesterday, I made dinner because Jacquie was in a temporary coma and didn’t have time. So I planned our meal and went for a few ingredients at the stand.

It took some time for me to shop. For instance, not being sure what an onion looked like, I walked the two aisles for about seven minutes. I was fine once I did a Google Image search. But my lingering attracted the mother’s attention, not out of suspicion, but out of hustle.

She started asking me if I wanted to buy something she was holding in her hand. It was labeled in Chinese, with a picture of something I wasn’t sure was intended to be eaten.

“You buy this,” the mother said.

I said I didn’t need it and she quickly put the box back on the shelf, and came back with a bag of yams.

“It’s good, you buy it.”

I said no again.

The mother spent a lot of time pushing a tray of various fruit sliced up. It was getting toward the end of the day, and she was anxious to clear the inventory before it spoiled.

“It will make you strong.”

I said no, but a few minutes later, when I went to pay, she came back out from the register to make one last pitch.

She picked a tray out and tried to put it in my hands.

“It’s good, you buy it,” she said.

“I have bananas at home.”

She drew closer, and patted me on the belly.

“It’s good. Fruit for dessert. You buy it.”

“No thank you.”

“Sliced apple, orange.”

“I have fruit at home.”

“Kiwi fruit, orange.”

“I eat bananas.”

“This has no bananas.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

I felt bad. This woman was really putting her all into the sale. But she didn’t provide any metrics, or demonstrate a total cost benefit analysis, and how she was working without a PowerPoint presentation, I don’t know. Let’s just say she couldn’t justify my $3.95 investment in fruit when, as I told her, I already had some at home if you count the chocolate covered cherries molding on top of the fridge.

I watched as the mother replaced the fruit and returned to the counter, looking at my purchases and rubbing her hands together. She was completely unfazed. She knew she was not closer to hitting her quarterly targets, or winning that set of steak knives, yet her spirit was not crushed. The mother pointed at each item.

“Onion, pepper and noodles,” she said.  “Stir fry for dinner. It’s very good.”

And she continued to praise my good taste and judgment in my evening’s menu choice, right through until I left the store.

 I thought I’d gotten away with it, but annoyingly, as I returned from the dairy with milk and bread, she stopped me on the sidewalk.

” You came back,” she said, and went to get the fruit.

Which I ate later for desert after the stir fry and chocolate covered cherries, which made me vomit, so none of this mattered anyway, in the end, but that’s another story.

It’s a meaningless observation made by self-styled technophiles to hide the fact that they’re sick of their moribund careers. It’s the same thing as saying, “I really do love my IT help-desk job.”

But it scares me. I worry that these technophiles secretly harbor a fantasy of launching a projectile at the moon. A recent survey showed that 17 percent of smartphone users believed they already could launch a spaceship using their phone. Another 27 percent said they they already have. (53 percent said, “pistachio”). So there is some cause for concern.

Just imagine the most disgusting person you know, force-feeding themselves a hamburger (with buns made from other hamburgers), a bag of jelly donuts, and a glazed ham, over the course of 20 minutes. With that image in mind, do you really think your mother should have the capability of launching what is essentially a missile? Think about it.

The big corporations have allowed this to happen. It’s all about the bottom-line. They recklessly disseminate perilous technology for profit. It’s not their problem if you’re stupid. They don’t care. In fact, if it means you’ll buy more pointless shit, they like you just the way you are: brain-dead. Which is good, in a way, because it’s always nice to be liked. So, there’s that.

But facts are facts. Everyone you know, yourself included, is intolerably stupid. Sure, some people can stand on their hind legs longer than others. But, in the end, they’ll be back with the rest of us, grooming us for body lice, sniffing our crotches and sharing termites off the same stick. Wait and see.

I wonder if technophiles sometimes fantasize about launching the smartphone itself into outer space. I bet when they’re alone they run around holding their smartphones in the air, making spaceship sound effects with their mouths. And who can blame them? But they never bother to think the whole thing through. If these phones are so smart, why don’t they just fly themselves to the moon and leave me the fuck alone.

This is not cute. It’s dangerous. Imagine your mother again. “The moon,” she laughs, spitting foodstuffs all over her smartphone. “That’s so 1969. ICBMs: that’s what I’m talking about.”

See why I’m scared? All we need is someone to figure out how to laser-print a nuclear weapon. Not only would it turn the traditional manufacturer supply chain on its head, but it would also kill everybody. If we let things get out of hand.

For the time being, you idiots should count yourself lucky to be allowed so much power on your phone. If this were a sane world, and we doled technology out based on some intelligence quotient, most of you would be lucky if you got a Speak & Spell.

On the one hand, I promised myself that I would lose my virginity by the age of 37.

It was a lofty goal that only crossed into the realm of possibility when Jacquie and I started to date.

Still, I wasn’t sure if she was “the one”.

In fact, it wasn’t until the third time Jacquie proposed to me that I finally acquiesced, after I had realized that our betrothal could benefit me, as well.

You see, another dream I’ve had since I can remember was to invent a pretext so credible that my family would have no choice but to excuse me from ever seeing them in person again. It would be christened the OMEGA Excuse, the justification of all justifications. No more birthdays! No more funerals! No more other boring bits in between!

I had known for some time that Jacquie was keen to return to the homeland 9,000 miles away from New York City. That might be some people’s idea of a “comfortable distance” to put between themselves and their family. But not most people. Most people would need to live permanently on a space station to reach their familial comfort zone. And I understand the feeling. But in my case, let’s be real. I wasn’t going to get a better offer than 9,000 miles. Before Jacquie, I would have been grateful for a one way ticket to Hoboken.

We quickly made plans to move to Auckland, and then I popped my cherry. Eighteen seconds later, we were back to talking about Auckland. It was a moment of triumph. No longer must I rely on my grossly inadequate neocortex (I was born breach) to think up new excuses to avoid personal contact with my loved ones.  with our relocation to Auckland arranged, if anyone in my family asked if I were attending this or that gathering, I had the OMEGA Excuse to save me. “Oh, I’d love to spend Thanksgiving at your house eating your dried out turkey and repeating the same conversation we had last year. Oh, no. I just remembered. I’m going to be 9,000 miles away living my new life in Auckland that day. Damn.”

It’s hard for me to say all this. I’m a sentimentalist at heart. But if I’m honest, I think me moving away was the best arrangement for all parties concerned.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and infrastructure, even separation by a continent and an ocean is not enough to suspend all contact with loved ones, unfortunately. Facebook and Twitter keep us up to date on important news from the folks back home, such as what they had for lunch, and how some of it is still stuck in their teeth. (The rest is made up of George Takei re-posts).

There is also gmail, for our semi-literate siblings and parents. And there is Skype, for those relatives who want to see how fat I’ve gotten.

This  multichannel, always-on, ever instant online access to anyone in the world means that we still have to deal with shit like Mother’s Day.

Which I only just found out it was yesterday.

I’ve been adequate keeping in touch on every occasion. Except for  Mother’s Day, which has proven a tough nut to crack.

My first Mother’s Day here, I woke up that Sunday morning, eager to beat my siblings to wishing mom a happy day.

I called her on the land-line, but what I failed to take into account was that, due to the International Dateline, it was still early Tuesday morning back in New York.

Needless to say, mom was kind of angry I woke her. She said goodnight, and then implied that of all her children, I was the one that came closest to being aborted. Then she hung up.

I decided I’d take the high road the next year, by tagging my mother in a photograph that, if memory serves, had something to do with Mother’s Day.

But by 2012, the demands of acknowledging this holiday, year-in, year-out, had pretty much exhausted my creativity, to say nothing of my interest. I ended up tagging my mom in a status update about how she can fart on request.

But this year, I was inconsiderate. The day passed without my notice. And that made me feel bad.

To make up for my neglect, I decided that for the next day or so, I would be nice to whatever mothers happen to get in my way.

Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out well, either.

On Sunday morning, for example, I stopped to say hello to my neighbor, Lucy, who had just come out of her apartment accompanied by an older woman.

I made a comment about the pleasant weather. I mentioned how much I liked Lucy as a neighbor, even though she doesn’t clean up the dog shit from the courtyard, and I think she’s been reading my mail, and that she must be proud.

This woman was very offended by what I said. “I’m her sister, you asshole,” the old lady said, before storming off.

Then there was the poorly timed “baby sea lion for lunch” joke I told to a mother who happened to be raising money for the SPCA, and the whole misunderstanding over my use of the word “bastard” in passing, and on and on and on.

So, I give up. I’m no good at this shit. That’s my new Omega Excuse.

I love it.  First thing in the morning, I’m on LinkedIn. Finding an endorsement for allegedly being able to do anything makes my day.

Without regular endorsements, I would be forced to go into the manager’s office and stab myself in the neck with a letter opener as I handed her that week’s time sheet.

Not something anyone wants to see happen. But at least I’d still get paid. And I may even get sick leave for it.

So, yeah, I rely on endorsements, within reason. How else are you supposed to know you’re good at something if strangers and casual acquaintances don’t tell you so?

As un-stabby as an endorsement makes me feel, I now have second-thoughts about their value, professionally speaking.

Endorsements are inherently qualified. In my experience, the only people who endorse you are the ones that know you well enough to be overcome with pathos and charity. Endorsing should have been one of the beatitudes. Blessed are they that endorse on LinkedIn, for they who love to be endorsed are some sorry-ass motherfuckers. 

So, maybe it’s your buddy endorsing you. Or maybe someone wants to be endorsed in return.

But what exactly are we endorsing?

Last week, I wanted to endorse my buddy so that they would endorse me in return so I wouldn’t have to stab my neck for the fifth time that week.

The way LinkedIn works, it asks you a question. So for my friend, it was “Does ___________ know about Newspapers?”

Well, I should fucking hope so. Newspapers have only been around for like more than two centuries. Who doesn’t know about newspapers? You’d have to have been freeze-dried in an avalanche 22,000 years ago in present day Switzerland to not know about a fucking newspaper. My 10th grade English teacher spent half a class period teaching us how to properly fold the New York Times for when reading on the subway. And they say public schools are going down the toilet.

LinkedIn sometimes asks loaded questions, like, “Does ___________ know about Proofreading?” Was their last email rubbish? Is this a rhetorical question to underscore  someone’s inability to string together two coherent sentences?

See? There’s just no way to know.

Some questions are rather vague. I really don’t know how to answer “Does ___________ know about Swedish?” Swedish what? Meatballs? Same goes for “Does ___________ know about Wireless?” for which I selected ‘yes’ because I happened to know what kind of bra this person wears.

There was a serious typo in one question: Does ___________ know about CRM? Uh, I have a question. Does LinkedIn know about Spellcheck?  The word you’re looking for is C-R-I-M-E, dumbass.

You get the picture.

The point is you have to be wary of LinkedIn endorsements. Sometimes, payforward is a bitch.

Brianne Abraham raves, “I am glad post. I will certainly comeback. I liked no less than you’ll receive done the next.”

Take your time.

They kind of suck, don’t they?

We all do. That’s what defines humanity as one big family that really, really sucks.

I’m not saying everybody sucks all the time. Far from it. But if we didn’t suck for a significant, notable portion of our waking days, would people ever have needed heroes, saints, or my blog?

This isn’t something that I just came up with. It’s from the hours and hours over the course of my life that I’ve wasted in supermarkets.

Supermarkets must circulate an airborne compound that reduces people to they way we were when we realized we had moved from the world of the simians to a new, elevated form of asshole.

It’s not that people’s intelligence quotient, per se, drops precipitously when entering a supermarket. (Assuming they survive the passage through the automatic doors). Supermarkets want you to spend, so they will leave people with an adequate supply of brain cells to remember their PINs with. Any more stupid-compound in the air, and the supermarket would have to initiate a “special needs” aisle just to keep the lines moving.

Which is, of course, an abortive concept, when considering that a “special needs” aisle would be completely lost on the shoppers that needed that aisle the most. Pretty soon, supermarkets would have to assign staff to round them up every so often just to get them to the special needs aisle in the first place. Sort of like what they do already with the carts in the parking lot, only with a moron attached.

No supermarket is going to do that. Are you kidding me? It’s bad enough they had to surrender the choicest parking spots to the preggos and toddler-laden. Supermarkets know full well that they would turn over a lot more cash per hour if the spots closest to the doors were reserved for the right demographic. These are the people guaranteed to spend the least amount of time shopping, making room for others of their kind on a regular basis.

This segment includes men shopping by themselves, OTC drug abusers, and shoplifters. I’m getting screwed out of a good parking space in three different ways.

You might think of a supermarket as the most reliable place to find life’s essentials. Why, you could be blindfolded, and still find the pork rinds, cheese-spread, word-search puzzle-books, and canned spaghetti, without knocking that many things or people over. Believe me.

These days I’m treating trips to the supermarket as sociological field research. As I’ve explained to the managers at Countdown over and over, I’m only trying to learn about the human condition when I follow people through the aisles, taking notes, and occasionally crashing my cart into theirs and blaming them for the collision. This isn’t some crazy stunt. It’s academic rigor.

Ultimately, the supermarket is where people go to suck the most. And wherever these assholes go, that’s where you’ll find the sociologists.

In this scientific-y light, looking upon supermarkets as dispassionately as I now do, you will come to understand that all supermarket shoppers, regardless of their class, ethnicity or gender, are assholes.

This is not completely their fault. A supermarket is never designed as a communal space, but as a conveyor of individual selection. So if someone is blocking the aisle because they can’t decide between Schwepps Ginger Ale and Home Brand, you would be technically correct to identify your subject as an asshole. But you have to be true to the context. It is probably the first time in hours, if not days, that this person has not been in a seated position at home, in a car, or in a cubicle. Try to remember that the next time you start hitting one of these assholes upside the head with a box of Cheerios. I can’t stress this enough. If someone had only warned me about interacting with assholes out in the field, I’d be published in a journal by now.

Don’t think that I’m excusing this behavior at all. Not everything comes down to nurture.

I’m having trouble categorizing my latest subject. It was 3:30 on a weekday afternoon. I had just pulled into the children’s parking lot to replenish my supply of word-search puzzles, before getting in the queue for the self-check out slots. There were three or four people in front of me, and it took longer than necessary to wait for a station to open, thanks to my subject. It seems that the woman decided that this was another great opportunity to teach her five-year old daughter about how the world works, and have fun doing it.

I give it up to the girl. It only took her 18 tries before she got the litre of skim milk scanned. She had a little trouble with the bananas, but after about an hour, it all worked out. As in so many cases like this, it wasn’t the child that was at fault, but the mother, who qualified under academically sound guidelines, as 100 percent asshole.

I really don’t think you can attribute this case to a differential between personal and public social spaces. After all, I’m sure this wasn’t the first time she took her child to the supermarket. Had she been paying attention all those other times, she might have noticed the line forming thanks to her sprog’s adventures in point-of-sales technology.

This is the pathology of a particularly acute asshole, one who imagines that everyone else in the world is going to love participating in her child’s personal development. Oh, fucking joy. Don’t these people understand that some people have places to go, like one of the stalls in the men’s room at the office, which is the only place where I can really get some word search puzzles done.

Of course, without more data, it’s impossible to know why this mother behaves as she does. One theory is that she has had so many children in quick succession that some of the blood that other people normally have flowing to their brain just said “fuck it, we’re just going to end up coming down here again”, which is not an efficient distribution of oxygen to anyone’s system.

But, as I say, one can never know. But one can make an educated guess.

Most of the time, they end up in the spam filter. (I informed WordPress of this issue and they assured me they would give it all the attention it deserves).

Here are just a few examples of the tremendous feedback Basement Life has received.

“Dear Basement Life: This piece of writing presents clear idea designed for the new visitors of blogging, that in fact how
to do running a blog.” — signed “Whatsapp”, (see also: Words that wound, and other Yuletide festivities)

But it’s nothing to celebrate. It is just the latest in a series of moral outrages eroding our finest traditions.

First, they came for our alchemy. But I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know how to change lead into gold.

Then, they came for our leeching. But I stood by, silently praying they would at least allow Doktor Schnabel von Rom to finish draining my Choler.

Now, the government has come for my marriage license. And there’s nobody to speak up for me here on Basement Life, the most popular blog on the Internet.

Somewhere on this flat Earth, someone must still have their god-given sense about them. But they don’t live anywhere near New Zealand. (For my friends back home, New Zealand is the country on the part of the map where it says “Thar be Dragons”).

In New Zealand, ever since Jesus walked the Holy Land, perpetually surrounded by 12 loosely garbed young men, their tawny skin glistening in the desert sun, The Gays have been busily pressing their agenda against our tight-fitting jeans. At first, we heteros didn’t mind helping a fellow out.

That’s why we gave The Gays the fashion and design industries. It’s why we invented softball teams for the women, and all-male choirs for the other women. We even conceded K Road, and just to be nice, we threw in an annual parade.

You’d think if any group of people in the world could be pimped with a parade, it would have to be The Gays. But no. Parades just weren’t enough for these ingrates. They wanted more. More, more, more, more. It just goes to show the old adage is true. Give them an inch, they take another seven inches.

How long must we heteros endure this persecution?  How long must we remain silent, cowering in one another’s man-caves, watching the rugby, rising in our seats as the beastly rivals grasp, and grab, and hold just to get their hands on a big ball? We heteros will not hide.

We will remind you that marriage is a timeless, static, god-ordained covenant between three people: a man, a woman, and God. Or five, if you count the divorce attorneys.

Oh, you will hear people say that for most of human history, marriage was a financial, political or community power sharing arrangement among sub-groups with vested interests in particular matches. These same people will also claim that the bride and groom had no say in the matter until modern times. They will say, ‘If marriage is a divine institution, and god is the same today, yesterday and forever, then why has the institution changed so dramatically in time and is so disparate by geography?’ They will say god at one time ordained polygamy, commanded a rapist to pay his victim’s father and to marry her, if she weren’t betrothed (which, by the way, isn’t in any Deuteronomy 22 of any bible I’ve ever read). 

Recently, I had a conversation just like this with one of these acrimonious atheist know-it-alls you meet sometimes, but you still love them even though they’re going to hell which is fine by me. Frankly, I’d only just met this man when we struck up a conversation waiting for a recent parade to begin. I could tell right away why he was an atheist. He was angry at god. It’s the same old story. You would never have to meet an atheist, let alone hear their reasons for their atheism, to know that. It’s just obvious.

Anyway, this atheist and I really had it out. Pretty soon it got really heated. We were both highly excited, barely able to catch our breath or to see each other in the dimness of the alleyway, as we exchanged blows. As our engagement reached its climax, the Atheist pulled a fast one.

‘Explain this to me,’ he said. ‘Your bible says it’s an abomination for a man to lie with a man. And that’s part of why you think you and I, let’s say, should never be allowed the sacrament of marriage?’

I agreed, seeing his logical trickery from a mile away.

“And yet, just a few verses above that, it says it is an abomination for a man to look at a menstruating woman.”

“Well, who wants to look at that,” I said. “Even when it isn’t her time of the month, my wife’s makes me a little queasy.”

“OK, but, have you taken any steps to ensure that other people do not look upon a menstruating woman.”

“Of course not.”

“Then under that logic, why the fuck would you bother telling me that you and I couldn’t marry? How is that even logical?”

“Because,” I said, basking in the glow of our denouement, “you’re using man’s logic. I follow god’s logic.”

With that, my atheist friend silently walked away, sighing.

But not before I gave him my phone number in case he wanted to debate some more.

(Note to self: Google ‘Leviticus’. Sounds like one of the books in the Catholic Apocrypha.)