American Fez

Faith Based Gambling

I have a lot of time for Pascal's Wager, time I spend at the roulette wheel of life, shouting "everything on lucky seven." I've never broken the celestial bank but I've never lost my hair shirt either. I simply make a few bucks, enjoy a complimentary cocktail and the buffet, then quit while I'm ahead. Hallelujah. Faith, after all, is basically just another form of confidence and we all need to be confident that we backed a winner, otherwise why are we even at the table. Luck be a deity tonight, you might say.

My cardinal rule is: never bet against the house, especially when it's the House of God, and the odds will always be in your favor. For God moves in mysterious ways, like a croupier in a casino of the clouds whose unseen hand distributes gaming chips according to your prayers: 'Oh Lord, may the spinning ball come to rest upon number seven, and in thy mercy deliver to thy humble high-roller another scotch and soda. I knoweth it shalt not be top shelf stuff but that's okay because I am humble, as I said. Amen'

Cynics often claim that Pascal's Wager is little different than the Power of Positive Thinking, insofar as you may as well think positively about life since negativity will get you nowhere. However, positive thinking is merely a meditation on Keno numbers when compared to the glory of God's benevolent Monte Carlo on high. For there you sit in tuxedoed serenity, calmly watching the roulette wheel rotate as two glamorous angels with sequined wings drape themselves across your strong shoulders. How can you lose?

 

Parley Voo

Footsteps fell on deaf ears; cobblestone ears slick with recent rain, undrained and consequently clogged. Somebody was pacing back and forth in Rue Cranium again, top hat and tails, folded umbrella employed as a walking stick, waiting for the lamplighter. But he stops suddenly in front of Chez Thought, regarding its forbidding facade with suspicion. Behind this big cerebellum of a building is the long and winding Avenue Proust leading to the tree-lined Boulevard de Blanchot, an upscale neighborhood where pompous opinions of oneself peer from behind net curtains at callow inspirations playing in the street. You could give the man in top hat and tails directions, chapter and verse, but he'd probably get lost. Unfortunately the map is the territory here, and the map is falling to pieces. 

Salty Air

These sentences, driftwood words washed-up on an unpopular beach of language. Readers need to read between the strands of seaweed to collect the meaning then carry it back up the beach in their buckets of a brain; or they can just stare into the oil-slicked rock pools like a carbuncle encrusted Narcissus; or perhaps they might even skim rune-stamped pebbles back at me across the shallows? But nobody lingers long enough on this bleak shoreline. It isn't Dover Beach with its picturesque metaphors nestling in sandy dunes. No, alas, the surfing here is terrible and so is the sunbathing. At least the parking is free, I suppose.

The tide is coming in, or maybe it's going out, hard to tell from my standpoint on the crumbling bluffs. Nevertheless, here is the first washed-up driftwood of 2024: a short, bleached-brown stick of tempest-tossed words. It's not, to be sure, the kind of elegantly curvaceous, antler-like artifact worthy of exhibition on a seaside cottage mantelpiece next to the scrimshaw whalebone, but merely the whim of an ocean that doesn't know what to do with itself.