Pardon me, I have the wrong glasses on (the ones held together with the black Yacht Club straw which so many people find inexplicably endearing), though that certainly is no excuse for lying or being unavailable and so I would like to immediately apologize for having the output of a mock turtle since the late summer. If my memory serves me correctly (that caused me almost Christ like suffering to type by the way), I’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve and need a little pain as a life lesson, and certainly the thought of anyone in distress makes me physically ill. But I had a sort of a half-dream last night while still sitting up with a book in my hands, in which there was an alternate world where that is not true. And who would you be in that world? Thankfully there will be no specifics addressed re: this imaginary world, but on account of it being Thanksgiving and all, maybe it would be a good time to thank Her, Him, It that, instead of evolving something amazingly intricate such as a turkey’s succulence or a giraffe’s long neck, which enables those wonderful creatures to find food where nothing else possibly could, we humans have evolved this crazy, often self-defeating thing called a conscience. Boy, what a short-straw draw it sometimes seems.

So the other day I was nibbling on these delicious fruits growing way above the heads of all the other creatures around me who were intellectually starving to death and I thought to myself, “ Wow, maybe this is some kind of crazy Adam and Eve thing.” But don’t worry. Turns out that part of the bible was absolutely, literally true, and I was eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Whew! For a few seconds there I was actually afraid that I had stumbled across some philosophical conundrum. I mean, sure, now I was going to die but, well, seriously, at the time it seemed like an excellent alternative to living forever in a state of perpetual ignorance.

See how we always think we’re so smart? Turns out there are infinitely more torturous things to go without than food. Who knew?! Well, it turns out God knew. But luckily I still get to stand in a warm cozy bar five days a week while people in long leather coats (mostly stolen or “borrowed”) swill bottles of Budweiser and debate God’s lack of wisdom. And not a damned one of them has a neck even eight inches long.

One thing seems certain however to these post-adolescent intellectuals who I am privileged to get to listen to for hours at a time . . . the bible should be dismissed out of hand, especially if you’re stupid and can’t read. And even if you can read, you can always just rummage through it and find the things that seem really stupid ten thousand years after they were scribbled down, because there sure aren’t any decent, timeless philosophies to be found anywhere in there. (Irony snobs unite!)

As just the simplest example, nowhere in the bible does it even mention the way that the entire universe exploded into existence from nothing! DUH! Come on! Rewrite the stupid thing so it can at least keep up with modern science! You know how many black holes there are in the bible? ZERO! You know how many black holes humans have actually observed with only the aid of man-made implements? Well, none yet but you just wait! There’s bound to be a BUNCH! They’ll be like PCs, (or for you kids, cell phones!) in their ubiquity. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in every household by 2025AD. Oh my God, I can just hear my mom now in fifteen years. “It’s enough that I’ve allowed Facebook to poison my computer, but I’ll be damned if I’m allowing a microscopic black hole in my house! What if it blows up!? What if it gives me brain cancer?!”

Because I am (obviously) a disorganized thinker, and total fraud as a writer, I just played Bible roulette and drew Leviticus 10:1 The Death of Nadab and Abihu. Now, I swear I read the whole bible around twenty years ago, but it’s a lot like Moby Dick in its leviathanosity (How’s that for wiping your ass with Strunk and White?). In other words, I forgot an awful lot of it. I also forgot quite a bit of War and Peace and The Infinite Jest. But on re-reading about the deaths of N & A I was reminded of a book that, I think, was called Ridley Walker. Is that a book? Is it an author? I don’t have the internet so I have to do this the fun, old-fashioned way, which is to ask you to do the academic leg work for me (And by the way, many thanks to the now, gasp, 27 people who understand that I write this log entry on a computer that doesn’t have internet access by putting it onto a flash drive, and giving it to my dear, dear friend Tommy who then magically makes it appear on the internet. You know, after all this time, I still encounter people who look at me smugly when I tell them I don’t have internet access, as if they’ve caught me in a lie.) Anyway, if anyone knows anything about Ridley Walker, stop by the Yacht Club any Friday between noon and 4pm and refresh my memory. I have a really weird feeling that there’s something about this book that’s going to be really important to the Yacht Club this Holiday Season.

Don’t forget, Gingerbread Trailer Park December 4th. Don’t forget #1 Atlanta Falcons vs. New Orleans Saints Sunday Dec. 27th. Don’t forget Full Moon and First Day of Winter Tuesday December 21st. (Days will start getting longer! Woot! Woot! Woot!) And most important of all, don’t forget the true meaning of Christmas (and no, it’s not when Jesus rises out of the pumpkin patch to eat the flesh and drink the blood of virgins wearing white tights and shiny black Mary Janes) which is to remember how good it feels to give.

And I will always be here for you.

Happy Holidays.

Gino.

One more reminder. It is time for the second annual Yacht Club Short Story-Writing Contest. To simplify things lets just say all the same rules that applied for the Creative Loafing competition apply here, that way if you feel you need to look up rules you can. Only difference is the story has to be tangentially (stole that from the loaf too!) related to the Yacht Club! Good luck! Get it to us any way you can, snail mail, e-mail, moon-mail, pale ale. You can even give it to Scotty orally if it’s really good. Then there’s always 1768 Pennington Place Atlanta, GA 30316.