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Sunday morning

We went to church today. There were no Wallace Stevens parrots on the rug while I drank tea in a kimono and wondered if God existed, there was no appalling void as we went to Whole Foods for a pizza and I saw everyone dressed up and knew where they had gone, because I was dressed up too. But during the service, I quite literally thought my brain was coming out of my ears. Maybe it was Satan coming out of me.

This was my second Unitarian experience. To read about an idea is one thing, I guess, but to worship with it is another. It is tiresome to say that I am tired of being uncomfortable, but I yearn for a church where I am not constantly stumbling over unfamiliar words and practices. Is it routine I crave? Horrible thought, and horrible too to crave comfort I guess. But I feel desolate worshipping in a church that makes no mention of Jesus, and glancing up at the altar to see a quilt hanging behind. It's not even heretic or pagan, it's just nothing. I long essentially not merely for the faith of my adolescence for, if I were ever to regain it, I swear I would improve on it as I never did. Equipped with greater intelligence I might make it so much more, and I have a debt to pay to it, to the church, for tempering me just within the bounds of decency when I would spill out everywhere like quavering jell-o, I owe it that much, just one worship, just one hymn, one backache, one stomach cramp, one moment of comatose boredom.

(And one more thing: I refuse to worship in any place that calls itself liberal. I am tired of politics and religion mingling so.)

I still love the Transcendentalists, but it's not spiritual to worship nature. Nature just is, and nothing more. I am not the blades of grass, nor the clouds, I am just myself and I am more complicated than them and I need more.

Then after church we went to the Guitar Center and I played on an electric guitar for the first time. I liked the frustrating pain of holding down several strings at once that were obviously meant for hands stronger than mine, I liked the heavy thing, the sound it produced and the satisfying idea that I might sing and play it at once and, if I could master the chords, play whatever I liked. But for a true love, which it may well be, I may ruin it by striking in so soon. I want to finish my many distractions at present.

Last night Nathan screwed my scrapbook together after I almost wept with frustration over it and the damned thing is done now. I am printing out pictures for the front of each book, then I will throw them on the shelf and forget about them for a long while or, at least, forget about doing further work on them. I almost made my deadline for completing them, though not quite.

Now is the time for fixing together my stories. Next month? Write my novel. December? Recover? January? Electric guitar? In all of this, find a LBW priced less than $40 and a Lutheran church that does not offend either of us, so that I may satisfy my self-punishing faith?

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