Ditch Doc

And here’s how you all should have spent this past week:

Keep an eye on Corpus Christi Watershed, who put together this video. They were taping all week, and I hope they’ll have more to offer soon.

Then there was the aboriginal woman I picked up during paramedic preceptorship a few blocks from the notorious intersection of Hastings and Main in Vancouver. We found her lying in pain half on, half off her bed, surrounded by well used crack pipes, roaches, empty prescription bottles and a brand new box of needles she could only have stolen from a hospital. A stream of limp complaint poured slowly from her mouth. Her back hurt. Her head hurt. Her stomach hurt. She felt weak. She couldn’t walk upright. In the ambulance, I started a brief medical history, but ran out of paper before it was half done. She had diabetes, hypertension, depression and asthma. She was in an abusive relationship. “My kitney’s are no koot. My heart’s no koot either. My liver’s no koot.” (”Big surprise,” I thought.) “But my onions are OK.” My pen hovered over the paper as I pondered what organs could possibly be nicknamed onions, and I looked up just in time to catch her sharing a knowing grin with my preceptor. She nodded in my direction. “Blondy’s a little slow on the uptake.” The car errupted in laughter at my expense, and we traded jokes for the rest of the trip to St. Paul’s, most of them too off-colour to post on a Catholic blog. We left her to entertain the ER nurses, and for the rest of the shift, no one called me by my Christian name: ‘Blondy’ was more than sufficient.

The more Chesterton I read, the less that unmistakable smell of a Subway joint reminds me of food.

In a feat of ipsiflagellant Narcissism that shouldn’t be possible in only four words, the seemingly innocent phrase “free gift with purchase” manages both to restate itself unnecessarily and to contradict itself. Which makes it a redundant oxymoron. The species remains on the endangered list, but shows signs of vitality that give preservationists reason to hope for an eventual recovery.

The other day, I found myself speaking, as one will from time to time, with a man who thinks all the mainstream media are controlled by nefarious Jews. He even pronounced it ‘Jooooos…’. By way of evidence, he showed me the first few pages of a Google search, ‘media controlled by Jews’, which had produced about 270,000 hits. So it must be true. Of course this probably spells the demise of Western civilization, but I think we’re missing the real threat by a mile. Just Google ‘media controlled by cats’ and see.

A few weeks ago, a non-Catholic music student and friend of a friend attended our Extraordinary Form morning Mass to hear the chant. Her review: “Looks like not much has changed since the 9th century.” It was the best musical compliment I’ve ever received.

Ditch: “Pardon me, but how much liver would I need as a side dish for three people?”
Butch: “That depends. Are they eating it voluntarily or under duress?”

Step one when you buy a Liber Usualis is to flip to the very end and ask “Doesn’t this thing have an index?” To which my grandfather used to answer: “It’s a Catholic book. Of course it’s got an Index.” (Flip back about a hundred pages. Theeere you go. Sorry, I don’t know why either.)

One hears from time to time that we must study history, lest we repeat it. That’s never convinced me to crack a book. After a year and a half of classes and discussions amongst a university population largely unaware of history, I’ve decided why. The real danger of not studying history is that we WON’T repeat it. History is turgid with the rule of law, the scientific method and the development of the arts, not to mention countless individual examples of love and heroism. Most importantly, we live within the ever-present history of God’s self-sacrifice for our salvation. If we study history only to get rid of the evil bits, we risk rejecting the good with the bad and trying to reinvent humanity with no reference to the past, strictly according to what we can know by abstraction from the present. And that is how, with the best intentions, we repeat the despicable parts of history again and again.

The Synergese language, an English-Robotic pidgin favoured by the corporate underclasses of North-America, is notable for its peculiar treatment of first person pronouns. When the first person is juxtaposed with the third in either subject or predicate, the ‘me’ or ‘I’ form is replaced with the idiosyncratic ‘myself.’ For example:

“Copy the TPS report to me.”
“Copy the TPS report to Linda and myself.”

“I prioritized these actionables.”
“Either John or myself will action these priorities.”

This useful convention eliminates the need to distinguish subject from predicate, an insurmountably difficult operation for many Synergese. (See also ‘He, She and They: Gender neutrality in Synergese third person singular pronouns.’)