If you’re looking for a counterweight to my usual cheeriness, you might get yourself the latest issue of Ruminate, which has my short story, “The Glass Child.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

This is the blood, David tells himself. He twists open the bottle and pours its dark content into a blue plastic cup. The label declares that this is Balanced Nutrition^TM, but David whispers: “Sanguis Christi.” He feels a shiver of sacrilege. On the days when his strength has worn thin as thread, it’s the wisps of liturgical Latin, of all things, that give comfort. This is why he whispers Sanguis Christi as he fills his daughter’s cup.

Weary

Sometimes the words don’t seem like they’ll get close to the truth of anything, and so I just stop writing. That’s not completely true; I’ll write fiction perhaps, because those people in the stories inside my head haven’t yet worked themselves into corners where the words are like sunfaded fabric or covered-over grass or the sigh that comes after weeping. They can still say something that is true, or at least live for a few moments in a way that is something like true, like the way we were meant to live and feel and breathe.

I’m learning how to pray. I’m forty-one years old and only now learning how to pray. Thankfully the prayers don’t depend on my words. I needn’t even speak beyond the half-whisper, half-thought to Christ the Guardian, the Son, the Giver of mercy. Last week I thought I saw something like light. I even put out my hand, like this light was in front of my closed-lidded eyes. I slept like the dead for a few hours that night. Have you ever longed to sleep a thousand years? A thousand years might just do it. And on waking we’d have pancakes. Then perhaps a nap.

Last night I fell asleep praying. I dreamt I stood at the bottom of a steep hill in an alien city, in the middle of a broken street. There were thugs beating a car in the street, trying to turn it over. They saw me and came running, hurling stones and leering. Sometimes in my dreams I can neither fight nor run; I swing my fists and they don’t connect, I strain my legs but my feet won’t budge. This night, however, my fists worked. I downed one leering thug, then another. I threw their own rocks at them. They retreated out of reach, but no farther.

My wife was at the top of that hill. I could neither see nor hear her, but I knew she was there, waiting, wondering why I was taking so long to come back to her. I began to labor up that broken street, leering antagonists at the edges of my vision. It was so high, this hill. And I was so tired. Perhaps if I could sleep within my sleep, I would finally feel rested. Have you ever been that tired?

But at least the words are coming back. Sometimes when they leave I fear they’ll be gone for good. Other times I wish I didn’t have them, that I could just be normal and untwisted and reliable as the sun. The best times are when they pour from my fingers and it is like rain on scorched earth, or air when you think you’ve dived too deep ever to reach the top again, or rounding the bend in a crooked little road to discover that there is no more road, that you’ve stumbled your way up that hill you never thought you’d know the end of. Then you don’t feel broken at all.

I think maybe all of us are on our own crooked little streets staring uphill. Sometimes the haze clears and you see it stretches much higher than you imagined. Other times you lift your eyes to discover that you’ve come much farther than you ever thought you had the strength to go. Either way, you have to keep walking or crawling or sometimes even running, especially when people are counting on you. So you do, and if the words come you sing a song or write a verse or say a prayer, and all of these are ways of saying thank you, even at the bottom of this darkening hillside, thank you.

Some of you may enjoy my latest Wall Street Journal essay, about modern friendships. In a nutshell: though I have more Facebook friends than my four-year old Isaac, I’m pretty sure that’s a poor indication of who is more loved.

So, the snake

There’s this scene in Jaws, when poor Chief Brody, chumming off the side of Quint’s boat, has his first honest-to-God encounter with the beast. “We’re going to need a bigger boat,” he mumbles.

The thing is, I only have a 28-gauge shotgun. Yes, they come in 28’s. As some of you know, I’ve had an ongoing algae problem in my pond. And there’s that big mean water snake who thinks it’s his pond. Well, the only way I’m going to save that pond is if I keep the fountain working, but the fountain keeps getting clogged with algae. I’ve tried to row out in a little inflatable boat and hoist that monstrous fountain up to scrub it down, but that just leads to ridiculousness as I struggle not to fall in while the fountain goes one way and my boat goes the other.

I decided to wade out into the pond. I was going to wear waders, but then someone told me about his friend who fell over in a stream with waders on and drowned. The pond is about five feet deep where the fountain sits. So no waders for Tony. Instead I put on some old pants, tied on my hiking boots extra tight, and started into that fetid, murky pond.

That’s when I saw him. Sunning himself on the shore behind some reeds, basking in all his malevolent snakiness. I backed out of the water and dashed into the house to fetch the shotgun. My hands trembled as I shoved a shell in each barrel. This was it. Go time.

I crept down the hillside until I stood over him. I aimed my shooting iron. I squeezed the trigger.

It didn’t budge. Stupid safety switch.

I slid the safety switch. Something in the snake’s brain, apparently — though it senses no threat from my approach — knows to kick into gear when a safety is disengaged. Off he slithered. I fired. Reeds flew into the air. Water splashed my legs.

He was still slithering. I fired again. More dead reeds. Surely I got him? I edged down to the water and poked around with a stick. No snake parts. I’m pretty sure the reeds protected him, which brings me to my point: we’re going to need a bigger boat.

Lacking a bigger boat, I strapped a machete to my back — I am not even kidding — and waded out into the water. Everything that touched me, I was sure, was that big, mean, pissed off snake. I tried not to make frightened girl-type sounds, since Wife and all my sons had gathered at the shore to watch in amusement.

To sum up, I did not get bitten. I cleaned that fountain while standing in five feet of nasty water and praying. I made my way out of the water. I turned on my newly cleaned fountain. It stayed on for about fifteen minutes.

Which means I’m going to have to try a new algaecide and then wade back out there. But first I’m getting a real shotgun. And perhaps some napalm.

For those of you who are interested I have some thoughts on the Tiller murder here, and thoughts on Frank Schaeffer’s “apology” for it here.

For those of you uninterested in those topics, stay tuned for a series of snappy posts about deoderant, Michelle Branch, and God knows what else.

On not being dead

Six straight weeks of travel, several big writing projects, work, children, marriage, property in desperate need of attention, and one gun and machete battle with my resident ginormous pond snake have all conspired to keep me away. I was planning to post something last night, only an accidental overdose intervened.

This week it’s DC, and by yesterday afternoon I was nursing a serious headache. So in between my last meeting and dinner with a friend, I snuck into a drug store to buy Tylenol. Cheap dufus that I am, I opted for the store brand. Later, at the restaurant, I popped open the bottle and took three pills of what I thought was 200mg ibuprofen. Then I had a beer.

Thirty minutes later, I felt like I’d been sitting through a week-long literary theory lecture. I checked the bottle. Ibuprofen PM. Don’t take more than two, the bottle says. Don’t drink alcohol with it, says the little bottle.

Stupid little bottle. Suffice to say I slept well last night. And I think I could sleep another day or two.

Anyway, I know what you’d rather hear about the kids, and possibly my running battle with the snake, replete with shotgun blasts and flying debris, but that will have to wait, because I think I need to go back to bed.

Stumbling

You yearn for a holy place because, in the time between waking unable to recall where you are, and drifting again into the half-sleep that is all you’ve known for the longest time, you stand in the darkness of your sterile hotel room, peering into a mirror to see that you are nothing like what you were supposed to be. You see in this darkness that you are shadow and vapor, that the pretty words in which you wrap yourself are no more you than the dirty glass is water.

You yearn for a holy place because the stench of your unholiness, your un-separateness, your common, petty guile and smallness, is sometimes so stark that you would sooner go without air than breathe it in. You yearn for a holy place even if you think you may be damned, because to be in it is to know, only fleetingly, only with darkened gaze, that there is something more than you and the things that are so very much like you.

Your heart and flesh cry out for a space that is more than just a meeting house for commemoration and remembrance and symbols. You are desperate for a space where the God who is a love you can scarcely think on waits to commune with your pale, quavering soul. A place that is holy because it embraces the great mystery of death begetting life,  of the tomb containing joy, of sorrow and hope intertwined in a world that would deny you your full portion of both.

You are desperate for the soft spilling light of sun pouring through stained glass, for the rustle of your clothes as you kneel, for the cross by which even someone like you might be healed, for the trembling prayer, the whispered blessing. You cry out for a place that will remain holy even after you have been in it. A place so holy that you pose no threat to it, so holy that it can embrace you in all your smallness and be no smaller itself, no less clean nor true nor solid.

You are so very thirsty. The darkest part of night has gathered about you. There is no water here. There has never been water here. Why did you think there would be?

This is what you think as you lie down in your lonely bed with parched throat, as you wait for daylight that you hope will be bright enough to make you forget, for a time, this yearning. Where is your holy place? Where will you find it in this strange city, and in the strange city to follow, and in all the days you wander from home, perhaps even within the walls of home, because you have mistaken trinkets and baubles for sacred things?

You could spend a lifetime finding the holy place, rediscovering the sacred things. You should. For now the rocks and trees are silent in the close-drawn dark, but something within you is crying out, because it knows you were fashioned for more than this. Will you listen, here in this darkness? Will you stumble onto the hallowed ground and drink deep?

Dear United: Next time how about you kiss me first?

As I bribe my children with candy to find me one of the two dozen sippy cups cleverly hidden by the baby throughout the house, it occurs to me that I have a solution for that institution remarkably like children in its propensity to lose things and then disavow responsibility for them: the airlines.

After waiting at the Wichita airport until 12:30 this morning, only to be told that I was not a lucky contestant in United’s “Who Will Actually Get His Luggage Back From Us” Sweepstakes, I rented a car (traveler’s tip #437: never leave your truck keys in your luggage) and drove home for four hours of sleep before bringing Wife back to the airport for her much-needed R&R trip to an undisclosed but quite sandy resort. This leaves me the undisputed king of my castle, the lord of my manor, the suddenly single father of four boys who can smell the opportunities in a parent’s disorganization the way bankers sniff out federal pork.

To sum up, in the last ten hours I have lost my luggage containing one suit, one pair running shoes, one pair of those slacks with the secretly stretchy waist so you can load up at the buffet table without anyone knowing, one of my few ties that actually matches something, my Eastern Orthodox prayer book, various and sundry toiletries, two power cables, the pens I ripped off from a fancy hotel to give to the boys in lieu of an actual gift, and my only glasses.

Oh, and also a wife.

I’m not sure this newfound domestic authority is worth it. But you know me — other than broadcast my issues on the World Wide Web, I’m not one to complain. I make lemonade out of lemons. Perhaps margaritas. Or a Tom Collins after I move up the kids’ bedtime to 4pm. The point is, as I wait hopelessly by the phone like a girl who puts out on the first date, for that call from United that will never come (traveler’s tip #438: when they try to take your roll-on bag at the ramp, go ahead and dump it in the trash can, because destroying the contents yourself at least preserves a modicum of dignity), I am realizing that yelling at four boys for the next four days is not an efficient way to make things happen. This is not what I’ve learned about management, after all.

Which brings me to my airline solution. Here I am in the kitchen, trying to make omelets. Baby Isaiah is underfoot, asking in that endearing yet maddening way he has, over and over and over and over, for “juice, juice, juice, juice, Juice, Juice, JUICE, JUICE, JUICE!, JUICE!!, JUICE!!!” There are no sippy cups to be found. There is the one we bought from Wal-Mart, the one that tears up like one of those women on The View if you look at it wrong or, God forbid, put liquid in it. But no reliable sippy cups. So I tell the boys to find me a sippy cup. There is little action in response to my request. Instead they meander about much like, well, a United airline employee when you call him to ask where your bloody luggage is.

And then it hits me: yelling won’t work. Why do I know this? Because they are my sons, and yelling never worked for me. Try out a carrot, something inside me says. No, not an actual carrot. Something sweeter. “Alright,” I shout, “first boy to find me a sippy cup gets a piece of candy!”

Suddenly they’re like a posse tracking a mess of cattle rustlers. Within 60 seconds I have a sippy cup. Within another 30 seconds, the baby has juice, ending his infernal auditory siege. If there’s a problem, as Vanilla Ice sagely noted, yo, I will in fact discern a solution to it.

So how about this with the airlines. Instead of paying them the full amount right up front, we pay them 90 percent of the fare. The remaining 10 percent comes due once we have all our belongings in hand. I wonder if then it will occur to someone at United to start using those little sticky bar codes to track luggage, the way UPS tracks boxes. Or give ground crews bonuses based on luggage successfully delivered. Or, who knows, to simply start acting like they care when they lose a man’s luggage.

Not that I’m bitter. And that’s all for now. Busy day here on the Woodlief ranch. Once I get these omelet dishes washed I’m going to teach the boys how Daddy likes his drinks mixed.

Thanks, Mother Earth

It’s hard to get excited about Earth Day when you’ve got poison ivy.

Smitten

I have just come home, and Eli runs up to me. “Dad, I left you a Boxcar Children book on your nightstand. It’s your Easter present.”

“Thank you,” I say. He turns back toward where he has been playing. “Eli,” I say. “Where’s my hug?”

He smiles, and walks back in my direction, slowly now. “I don’t know,” he says, “but I’ll bet it’s on it’s way.” He wraps his arms around me. “Here it is!” I squeeze him tight, my little boy who is normally so shy. I wonder what raced through his little boy’s heart when he thought about me, and decided to give me a book. It dawns on me that just as I think about them all the time when I am away, they must think about me. I squeeze Eli harder, trying to press into his flesh all the love he will ever need, while there is still time, while he is still a boy and the sun is still shining. Then he is off to his little boy games again, and I am standing alone. My grown man’s heart is thumping, thoroughly in love with this boy, with all of them.

Shut it. Literally.

Okay, here’s the thing. “Literally” doesn’t mean “really.” It’s not a word that you put in front of some other words to show that, unlike the rest of your lackluster sentence, this is the part you really totally completely, like, absolutely mean. And it doesn’t mean figuratively, or metaphorically. ”Literally” means that it actually happened.

So if you tell me that you’re “literally going to hijack this meeting,” I’m liable to go all Jet Li on you. If you tell me that viewers of the latest Star Trek movie “quite literally get to pick up the very end of a new thread,” I’m going to imagine dorks in fake Spock ears crawling about the theater floor in search of a string. If you write that the Columbine murderers “literally put a scar across the American Flag,” I’m going to suggest that this is the least of their crimes. If you declare in your headline: “USA Today fights for its life, literally,” I’m going to insist that unless the newspaper’s representatives are in fact in a deathmatch, you are mistaken.

Here’s the beauty of a metaphor — it paints a word picture to take the stress off your feeble collection of adjectives. If you don’t know how to describe an enchanting girl except with the words “pretty” or “hot,” then you can say she took your breath away. We get it. You don’t have to supersize it by telling us she literally took your breath away. Though if you talk that way around me I might, in fact, quite literally, take your breath away.

Our words have entered the realm of fast food. They don’t offer much in the way of nutritional value, and so we dream up ways to enhance a flimsy burger by giving it extra-hot jalapeno cheese. We don’t just say, “I was frightened.” We say, “I was totally, like, so, so frightened.” For the love, people. Buy a freaking thesaurus. Literally.

Why the fuss? Because words, Derrida and a whole host of soul-killing word jesters aside, mean things. They are not just a bunch of grunts lying idly about for your summons, so that they can be haphazardly arranged for you to express yourself as you see fit. They are not minions in the kingdom of You. They do not mean whatever it is you want them to mean. So use them gently. Use them artfully. For God’s sake, use them properly.

Risen

“Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is Risen, and life is freed! Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of the dead! For Christ, being risen from the dead has become the Leader and Reviver of those who had fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power, unto ages of ages. Amen.”

                                                                                          St. John Chrysostom

Stranger in a land estranged

“Give thou me this stranger who from his youth has wandered like a stranger. Give thou me this stranger whom his kinsmen killed in hatred like a stranger. Give me this stranger at whom I wonder, beholding him as a guest of death. Give me this stranger who knoweth how to take in the poor and strangers. Give me this stranger whom the Jews in envy estranged from the world. Give thou me this stranger that I may bury him in a tomb, who being a stranger hath no place whereon to lay his head.”

Damned if you do…

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We don’t want Obama to speak at Notre Dame, because we don’t want the Church associated with his support for abortion. So we’re outraged about that. But we do want him to give a speech in front of a plaque representing Jesus, and so we’re outraged about that, too.

Well, you all asked

The completely unsubstantiated rumor from the careless reporter LOUD-talking on his cell phone is that Norm Coleman — presumably his campaign – has a lot of unpaid bills. Story to break next week. It will break, rather than air, or be published, because the reporter was all hot and bothered about breaking his story. You heard it here first, but only because half the airplane had no choice but to hear it in Chicago from Mr. Blabbermouth.

I need some advice on journalistic ethics

So I’m boarding a plane, and the guy behind me makes a series of loud calls on his cell phone, all about a “breaking story” he’s working on. The pitch of his voice seems affected to let everyone within a twenty foot radius know that he is, indeed, a Very Important Journalist. He’s looking for film footage of a certain Senator. Because he’s got an interesting bit of information about this Senator. Which he can’t help but spill out during one of his calls.

So what happens if — hypothetically speaking, of course – a blogger who couldn’t help but overhear this fellow posts on his blog the rumor he just heard? Am I unfairly scooping him? Am I stepping into an area that only a professional journalist treads?

Not I. I mean the hypothetical blogger.

What’s especially foolish about this fellow’s behavior is that he described a seeming ethical breach that can, should the Senator’s staff learn a story is forthcoming, be at least partly remedied in the interim — making it a less sexy story. Why in the world would a journalist worth his salt blab all that out, on a flight to Washington, D.C. no less? Did he think the rest of us are just orthodontists and accountants?

I’m no journalist myself, but I’m pretty sure this fellow’s no Cokie Roberts. With his big yapper he comes across more like . . . Julia Roberts.

Could have been anyone

The Columbine killers, a new book says, weren’t twisted little psychopaths who intended to kill dozens. They were one twisted little psychopath and his pathetic sidekick, and they hoped to kill hundreds. But otherwise they were regular kids. USA Today reports this as if it’s news, though the article is strikingly similar to Slate’s breakdown in 2004.

The point of “addressing the myths of Columbine,” I guess, is to conclude that it can happen, as Dylan Klebold’s father intimated, to anyone. Your kid could be a closet psychopath. Mine could be his erratic, depressed follower. I suppose that can happen to anyone, just as any of us could be killed in a car accident.

There’s little left to say about evil, in a secularized culture with a Christianesque patina, once the tired whipping boys of culture and video games and bullying are laid aside. They weren’t gamers? Weren’t bullied? Weren’t molested or obsessed or wrongly medicated? Well then. Could have happened to anyone.

Pagans centuries ago used to attribute catastrophes and miracles to the gods. We have no gods, and only a shadow of God, and hence no demons. Recently Barna reported that a wide swath of self-reported Christians believe neither in the presence of the Holy Spirit nor of Satan. These beings have been demoted, even in American Christendom, to symbols. Just like the Eucharist, come to think of it. We would do well to remember Flannery O’Connor’s remark about that.

I think perhaps the pagans were wiser. Having no knowledge of I AM, they still had a sense of things moving in the world that lies behind the world of sight. Peering out from their smoky fires into the gathered night, they imagined they could see spirits flitting through the trees. We squint beneath our fluorescent lights at the dissected corpse of a tragedy, and can see only DNA and synapses. Nature’s binary code arrays in most children to NORMAL, but tragically in some it twists to ABNORMAL. Why would two young men dream of slaughtering hundreds? A pin fell out. Could have happened to anyone.

God knows it could. This is why we pray over our children, because even after our lectures and the quiet talks and the good books and the protection from toxic culture, we know pins fall out. We believe as well that there’s a kingdom of darkness whose minions would love nothing more than to pull those pins, to see more confused children become, in their rage and hopelessness, monsters. We pray — how we pray — because it can happen to anyone. But not, God willing, to these little ones. Not on my watch. Not on yours.

Yet we have no language, any more, for saying such things in the national conversation. We conclude the Klebolds and Harrises were good parents because they spent time with their children and sought help for their disturbed psyches, or we assume they are culpable to the point of legal liability because their children were depraved. We none of us can ask whether these parents labored as best they could to bring their children to a knowledge of the Living God, because polite, educated people don’t talk that way.

And more, none of us are empowered — thank God — to judge the answer. But perhaps more of us could recognize that raising a child well is inseparable from showing him as best we can what it means to fall on one’s knees and cry out to the God who loves children. Precisely because it can happen to anyone.

Persecution

You should read my friend Ashley Samuelson’s piece in today’s WSJ.

Because sooner or later there’s gravity

The hardest part of watching the second video clip is not the stomach-churning numbers, it’s wondering what’s going to happen to the little animated diver.

The harmony of small crowds

Some insight into why global warming, predestination, the dangers of vaccinations, the inherent justice of gay marriage, the corruption of Democrats, and the wonders of American Idol are ”obvious” to the people who adhere to them. Short answer: most of us only talk to the people we already agree with, about the things on which we agree.

I’ll suggest a corollary to the study: most of us underestimate the extent to which we consume self-confirming information, and overestimate the extent to which we entertain arguments that contradict our beliefs.

Present company excluded, of course.

The fruits of indifference

A dispatch from Great Britain:

“Children were turning up to school socially undeveloped, increasingly unable to dress themselves, unable to use the toilet properly and unused to eating at the table. . .

Many of these children are not living in poverty; most have homes with televisions, computers and games consoles. What they do not have ‘are adults who are prepared to give their time and energy doing that most difficult but essential of jobs, raising their children properly.’”

Meanwhile, in Ontario:

“Those surveyed — professors and librarians in the Canadian province — said that freshmen arrived on their campuses lacking the ability to think independently, were weak in necessary writing and mathematics skills, and depended too much on Wikipedia.”

And in the U.S., when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposes to an audience of 400 middle- and high-school students that they ought to go to school year-round:

Instead of boos, Duncan’s remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.

Nothing could be finer

The sky today is a delightful shade of Carolina blue.

Practical atheists

Over at WORLD I brought some smack. Why? Because it seemed to me that the smack ought to be broughten. Here’s an excerpt:

“If a person isn’t spending more than a few minutes a day in prayer and Bible reading, and can’t remember the last time he fasted, kept silence, or poured himself out for someone in need, then there is no sermonizing in the world that is going to fill him, because he is living—for all practical purposes—as an atheist.

So he blames his pastor. And then the church shopping begins, as he looks for that special speaker who can tickle his fancy, bring a tear to his eye, give him the illusion that he is really ‘connecting’ to something.”

Here’s Fr. Schmemann on the same theme, only with greater authority and eloquence:

“Thus, the Church is founded on Christ. It is His Church, the response to His call, the obedience to His will. It is important to keep this in mind, because Christians themselves often forget and begin to view the Church as ‘theirs,’ as an organization essentially called to serve them, to satisfy their spiritual and non-spiritual needs and demands.”

Because the chicks dig a man on a hog

Last night I convinced Caleb that instead of saving up money to buy an expensive, super-complicated Star Wars Death Star Lego kit, he should spend that money on a motorbike. I’m fairly certain that as a result I’ve rescued him from a lifetime of involuntary virginity.

Some days this fatherhood thing is a piece of cake.

“Because I said so” is good enough

Rosemond defends the benevolent parental dictatorship.

His conscience made him do it

On NPR this morning I heard a clip of Arlen Specter explaining to his Pennsylvania constituents that his vote for the gigantic pork sandwich posing as an economic stimulus bill was a matter of conscience. I hope this isn’t the start of a new American pietism.

“Why did you eat all the cookies?”

I was acting out my conscience.

“Why didn’t you take out the garbage?”

I am a conscientious objector.

“Why did you loot the future income of millions of children?”

It wasn’t my idea; my conscience made me do it.

Maybe I’m overly cynical, but trusting a politician’s conscience seems a bit like trusting a prostitute’s sense of propriety. I’d far rather Specter and the rest of them trust an economics textbook.

Look at the calendar, ladies

Overheard in the break room:

“I’m so mad!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Driving in to work, I heard on the radio that they were having a contest at noon, where they’re going to drop a cat from a helicopter, and give a prize to whoever catches it.”

“That’s terrible!”

“It made me so mad while I was driving that I could barely see straight!”

“You should call the Humane Society!”

“I know! Isn’t it awful to do something like that to a poor animal?”

Heh heh.

Lucy agrees with me, Caitlin

I confess that whenever I get my copy of The Atlantic and see that Caitlin Flanagan has an article in it, I forge ahead with added vigor, so I can get to her. There’s nothing preventing me from going directly to her piece, but I like the anticipation of knowing her work is lingering in the back of the magazine, especially when I am neck-deep in one of Christopher Hitchens’s anecdote-within-an-aside-tucked-inside-a-literary-allusion things that he does so excruciatingly well.

The point is, I heart Caitlin Flanagan. Except that she doesn’t know squat about vampires. I’ll be more precise. She may know plenty of other vampires quite well, but Caitlin doesn’t know Bram Stoker’s Dracula from George Hamilton. This becomes apparent in her delightfully snarky reply to my recent National Review piece on our modern bloodsucker fetish.

I was delighted to see Caitlin engage the actual text of Dracula, but one can proof-text just about any claim with carefully chosen snippets, which explains more than a few religious sects, come to think of it. It’s worth considering, therefore, the text surrounding the sentences which Caitlin employs to make her case for Dracula as man-about-town.

Caitlin offers an account of Lucy after the first assault by Dracula, for example, which implies that far from being damaged, the little vixen thoroughly enjoyed it. Heck, she was probably asking for it, wandering about in a graveyard at night in her gauzy gown. But consider how Stoker sets up this scene, in a passage Caitlin conveniently omits: “There was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure. I called in fright, ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ and something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes.”

Now granted, all the gasping and shuddering Caitlin notes in the subsequent passage can easily, taken out of context, be used to suggest a sexual experience. But it’s quite clear that Stoker intended no such thing. Most shudders and gasps are not, in fact, orgasmic. People shudder and gasp, after all, when they are dying, or when they find a snake in the basement. Taking words like that out of context is akin to using a description of someone in a Victorian novel as “gay” to conclude that he’s really a closet homosexual.

But why let the text itself obscure a good sex story? Acontextualism is the only way Caitlin can accomplish her goal with another passage, regarding Lucy’s “dreamy state” upon seeing Dracula. The surrounding text tells us that Lucy is looking at Dracula’s red eyes. Caitlin wants to put the weight of this encounter on the word “dreamy,” because she has invested that word with a romantic connotation. In 1897, however, situated alongside the description of Dracula’s darkness and red, glowing eyes, it’s clear that “dreamy” doesn’t mean Lucy is thinking, “Oh my god I didn’t know old dudes could be so hot!” She is entranced, rather, by the monster’s demonic power. And a few sentences later we see that the effect has been to make her sad, not giddy.

Caitlin likewise infers from a passage describing Lucy as “languid and tired” that she’s had yet another delicious tête-à-tête with the man in black. But immediately after he has assaulted her we read that she is pale and clutching her throat. “There is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes which I do not like,” writes her friend Mina.

If we are not to descend entirely into misogyny for the sake of blinkered Freudianism, perhaps we can afford the last word to Lucy herself. This from her diary, after the ministrations of Van Helsing have temporarily retrieved her from Dracula’s oppression:

“It is as if I had passed through some long nightmare, and had just awakened to see the beautiful sunshine and feel the fresh air of the morning around me. I have a dim half remembrance of long, anxious times of waiting and fearing, darkness in which there was not even the pain of hope to make present distress more poignant. . . The noises that used to frighten me out of my wits, the flapping against the windows, the distant voices which seemed so close to me, the harsh sounds that came from I know not where and commanded me to do I know not what, have all ceased. I go to bed now without any fear of sleep.”

Back off pal, I’m an M.D.

“She’s taking it to the chiropractor,” smirked one Newton Medical Center technician to another as my wife waited for them to hand over an x-ray scan of baby Isaiah’s arm. We were twenty hours into an ordeal, sparked the night before when he came wailing to his mother, his arm held tight to his side. She took him to the emergency room, where they concluded, based on the scan, that nothing was broken. They theorized that he’d suffered nursemaid’s elbow, and that the tendon had somehow popped back into place on its own. They sent mother and wailing baby home with advice to give him Tylenol.

He hardly slept that night. The next day his pain was just as bad, and so Wife took him to our family chiropractor. She actually bothered to perform a manual exam. It was hard to tell with the swelling, but yes, it felt like the tendon was out of whack. She treated Isaiah with ice packs and laser therapy, notably reducing the swelling. She adjusted his elbow as best she could, and then the following day, after more treatment to reduce the swelling, she got the recalcitrant tendon back into place completely.

The total cost was under a hundred dollars, compared to the hundreds those geniuses at the hospital squandered in place of a competent manual exam. And the thing is, few medical professionals seem to actively seek to learn from their failures, or even admit them. Even if we call and complain, I doubt there will be some consideration by key staff of how they might have done things differently. In their system’s “eyes,” a baby came in with pain, he was adequately treated, and he went home to get better.

I’m just thankful we have choices when we run into professional incompetence. I wonder how that will change once a phalanx of federal professionals gets together to divine what magical blend of bureaucratic oversight can cure a medical bureaucracy overcome by arrogance, poor feedback, a fetish for expensive procedures over common sense, and slovenly administrative oversight. Color me pessimistic, but I don’t see how greater federal intervention is going to fix the bundle of problems that leads trained professionals to choose an x-ray over a simple exam, and to sneer when the patient’s mother goes elsewhere for help.

Bloodsuckers

Some of you might enjoy my call, at National Review, for a return to the old-school vampire:

“The modern vampire is in touch with his sexuality, but the community suppresses it. The modern vampire is coming to take away your girlfriend, and she kind of likes it. The modern vampire is the guy you wish you had been in high school, or the guy you wish you’d dated in high school. . .”