Cellos, wine, beef & Catholics: It's what's for dinner

First, I'm worried that I'm tone deaf. Last week, my cello instructor removed the tape on my fingerboard that indicated the sweet spots to hit the right notes. I was having some nice playing there for a while, but ever since she took off that tape, I have sounded like the hounds of hell.

I'm sliding my fingers all up and down the fingerboard, and I just can't seem to find the notes. I don't know if that's because I'm moving my fingers too much or because my ear is just not sensitive enough to the notes to hit something in tune.

At this point, I would not blame the diners at the Thai place below me for complaining about my "musical" efforts.

Now, on to more interesting things:

So I've gotten some interesting feedback about one of my previous posts: "Grief, beef, wine and news that REALLY sucks." Some of these are posted on the blog; others came in e-mail. Thank you all for your comments, but I would like to clarify one or two points:

Regarding the wine: Believe me, there is not one ounce of guilt about how much wine I have and how much wine I consume. I was simply remarking that I have a LOT of it, and that *some* of it I don't necessarily want to drink. This is a matter of *quality,* not *quantity.*

I have imposed a two-drink minimum on all visitors, and thus far, I have managed to polish off a bottle and a half of rose that way. ... I am, as I write, finishing off some French white. I will never cease to collect and consume wine -- god willing and the creek don't rise, as we say in the South.

In fact, once upon a time, I dreamed (and, frankly, I still do) of a career as a sommalier. I love wine; it is a passion that has been percolating with me for many years, but I've never gotten serious about it. One of the reasons was that, with my smoking, I knew I couldn't quite get my nose up to snuff to actually discern the necessary scents. It has been several weeks since I smoked, however, and I notice that my sniffer -- which has been exceptionally sensitive in my non-smoking periods -- is coming back into form.

So maybe someday, I'll get around to learning how to tell wines apart with my eyes closed -- and my mouth dry. We shall see. But, just to clarify, I have NO GUILT about wine. It is a staple in my diet. It shall stay so.

I do have some feelings of guilt, however, about the beef consumption. I'm going to have to get over that, obviously, because I've been feeling lately such strong cravings for bloody red meat that, if penniless, I would probably whore myself out to get some.

But I do hear what you all are saying about getting it from good sources. There is NO QUESTION about that. ... One of the things that prompted me to give up beef many, many years ago (aside from watching a friend's aunt die of Mad Cow disease) was the drive past Harris Ranch down there on I-5 between L.A. & S.F. I call that place "Cowschwitz," even though that's probably really insensitive to the what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. (The way I see it, however, the Nazis were treating the Jews, Catholics and my gay breathern no better than cattle, so there is some parallel between seeing all those thousands of cows awaiting slaughter and the genocide carried out in Europe.)

But I digress.

I get my beef from a good source. I hope there are no funky prions waiting to turn my brain into mush, but if there are, I'm quite certain it came from the brain tacos I used to eat down in SoCal and *not* from the high-quality, free-range, no-antibiotic, grain-fed beef I'm eating for $13 a pound.

And, now, on the matter of guilt in general.

Ctrl-freak asked if I was a Catholic. He said my "guilt is so familiar." Man, you *do* know your Catholics. You need to turn yourself into a witching rod and flush out all the current, wayward and former Catholics around you and start a support group for Survivors of Catholic Guilt.

I am not a Catholic any longer. I'm an atheist and have been for a LONG time. But the guilty attitude that was culturally engrained in me as the descendant of generations of Catholics (with a lot of priests and nuns in the family, mind you), as well as eight years of nun-infested Catholic school in my formative years has left me utterly scarred.

As a gay boy, C-F, I think you probably know the doubly damnable business of even conceptualizing of any sexuality whatsoever, much less queer sexuality. Getting the Catholic church off my back was Step One in a long road to living freely and openly as a lesbian.

The funny thing is: The gobbledy-gook of Christianity never really took hold with me. I *never* believed all the silly stories about God, Mary and Jesus. It always seemed ... ludicrous. I had no problem declaring I didn't believe in god and whatnot.

However, I was nevertheless really spooked by the concept that all my dead relatives could see everything I was doing -- and that they would be compelled to pray and pray and pray and pray for me to compensate for each "sin" I committed. I was raised to believe in ghosts (and to some degree, I still do), so it made sense to me that dead people could see me doing ... EVERYTHING.

For years, when having sex or masturbating or eating cake or littering, I was not so concerned about god's wrath as I was the thought that my dead uncle Jean, a priest, might be watching me and consequently wasting a whole bunch of his time in eternity (as if he had anything better to do!) praying for me so that I would not be in purgatory for too long.

Purgatory was some kind of weird thing to me. Like an eternal waiting room from which only a certain number of prayers could release you. I knew that, according to the Catholic church, I was sinning right and left: Everything from talking in church to picking my nose to fighting with my sister was a sin of one form or another. I was really into the venial stuff, right? But then, with sex, I moved into the motal sin category, and that was really problematic.

This was mainly because I thought it would require soooo many goddamned paryers to get me out of purgatory that all my dead relatives -- this is who my grandmother told me I needed to rely upon to do all the work -- would be praying and praying and praying and praying and praying to get me cleared of all this stuff. I felt REALLY BAD about that. Because, like, that's demanding someone's time.

And I knew that those dead relatives -- such as my dad's mom -- who might do some of the most ardent work WEREN'T EVEN CATHOLIC. So that presented its own set of problems. Because, I guess, they weren't going to be doing the work necessary, on accounts they didn't share those beliefs.

That apparently didn't stop them from watching me from beyond the grave, however. Especially when having sex.

Jesus. Is that the most fucked up thing ever, C-F? In my book, it's ridiculously, absurdly, Catholically FUCKED UP.

Suffice it to say, I don't have these issues now. I no longer think about my dead relatives watching me have sex. And if they *are* watching, I no longer feel concerned about it. If they feel the need to pray excessively upon seeing me engaging in oral sex with a woman, that's *their* problem. I figure: Well, what's a little praying when you've got eternity. To my dead relatives, I would say: If you get tired of that shit, try reincarnation. Or go hook up with Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia and find something a little more *interesting* to do with your Dead Time, alright?

But that Catholic guilt? It remains. It is as much a part of me as my bones or my eyelashes. How very strange. How very permanent. It's like white on rice. You just can't get that shit off of you.

So nice of you, however, to notice.