Barbara Stanwyck, and the down-south tradition of finger-pointing among spiritual persons.

Waylon and Merle.

Wayne and Earl.

Penta and Fenix.

Leopold and Loeb.

Vomiting and Diarrhea.

Pardoner and Summoner, just as peas follow carrots, chair-shot to the back of Kevin’s head begets pain, grits lead to gravy, and there’s this one donut, just one—and we are not exactly certain about it, anyway—the scorpion’s tail and the uppercut—never much sure, to the extent we can and very much do lump those doubts upon our familiars, our friends, and even the stranger in the grocery store.  Do not eat the donut, of course—a minute on the lips leads to its own burden.  Sweet, sweet nectar: you want the donut, oh yes.  But no.  He probably ate the donut, the fat f*ck, and yet I’m broader, myself.   (Baptist sin debt, to be continued.)

A lump of leaven services the entire loaf, as the Apostle states: a dab, as it were.  I had something along the lines that “the Gospel is so good that it sells itself!” Yet neither discounts nor coupons for something given so freely, and yet, also precious.

“Gospel don’t cost.”

And then:

The Miracle Woman(Barbara Stanwyck)

One of those things of the human condition in which we naturally impute some of our own sin debt towards others, and who but the loudest of the bunch?  (Of sin debt, formerly of the Southern Baptist persuasion, in which one mistrusts himself and assumes as much that anyone else has the same disreputable inclinations, so he curses them, too; and that even in the face of existential forgiveness.) A ministry inherited and taken up in earnest; the second to that one actually a disabled man, who finds his groove staring vacantly across the courtyard listening to a dressing down of a professional driver. It was something about a sort of open-eyed sleep, and the busy hands—the very avarice of inaction, the false nobility of laziness and the busy hands are the only ones that have the rank possibility of accomplishing anything, be it positive or negative.

We might say, like the Jews and the Greeks, some folks have their John Wick, while yet others have their Barbara Stanwyck, the Greeks alternatingly labelled “barbarians” or “uncircumcised”.

So even while clang-a-langing about on the freedom of the Gospel, what?

The old story of poaching the preacher: dispossessing the only one trying to deliver the uninformed from the cloud of darkness of ignorance.  Projection, the psychologists say.

Anyway, that was a theatrical defrocking as much as a ministry one, in the sense that Baby Face herself was cast against type, Stanwyck having been the fresh young innocent face of Hollyweird.  Continually, the creep of the skirt up the hip, and other, you know?  Those nudges by the studio executives that have become so known as to be cliché in the popular parlance—until what? 

The Big Valley.

It sounds like schizophrenia, I know—disparate elements, pyrite and so forth, a bar of soap supposedly pitched as having a prize inside.  The real prize, circa 1870, was taking the time to wash one’s rear end.  And the true impetus of the studio heads was a continued mystery about the whole thing.

Such is life as we know it. 

“We have found life!”