"Well, that sounds just swell, Jimmy. Now, why don't you hop on over here and help me out of this robe."Ah, to be young and Catholic! Between 1950-2002, 4,392 U.S. Catholic priests have been accused of sexual abuse, which is close to 4% of the entire clergy. It's almost gotten to the point where I have to stop telling people that I am a Catholic. "Oh, you're a Catholic, huh? Fuckin pervert! Fuckin pedophile piece of shit! You were an altar boy, too! How many times were you molested?" Actually, I've decided to just tell people that I'm Muslim to avoid the suspicious looks. It's hard being a Catholic nowadays; sex abuse scandals, right-wing religious nuts are dominating TV, making every Christian look bad, and more and more explanations regarding the nature of the world are getting a bit too sciencey. It's no wonder people are losing their faith. Hell, I said in a previous blog that I stopped attending church because the parking was bad. So on Judgement Day I will have to sit in front of Jesus Christ and explain that I became an atheist because I couldn't find a spot without a meter...and why I'm so into bondage porn...Anyway, my faith may be dangling by a single thread today, but this was not always the case. Back in the day (early nineties) I was right there in church every Sunday and right there in CCD classes after church. Of course, I only went to church because my mom and dad made me go, and I spent most of the hour looking at the asses of girls in front of me, but that's not the point. I liked going to church, I liked the pageantry of mass, the sacred tone of everything, the quietude, the reverence. I dug that shit. Now, I had already completed my First Communion, where all the little Catholic boys and girls are finally allowed to walk down the aisle and officially receive the body and blood of Christ. Now, for all you heathens and nonbelievers, when a Catholic receives communion, he is actually consuming the body and blood of Christ. Literally. There is no symbolism, no pretending, we believe that God changes the substance of the bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ. It's called transubstantiation, bitch. Anyway, the next sacrament in line was reconciliation. Reconciliation is the time when the young Catholics must go before a priest and confess their sins, be absolved of all wrong-doing, and say a penance. Now, at the time I was eight-years-old, and very nervous about having to talk with a priest-a stranger-about all the bad things that I have done over my past eight years on earth. I understood the idea of "sin" and had a basic knowledge of "hell", but it was all strictly surface-level knowledge. I knew more about the Land of Oz than hell. Sins were bad things and hell was a big place of fire where bad people went. Now, we could get into this whole existential argument about the nature of good and evil and what constitutes bad behavior, et cetera, et cetera, but that would cut into all the pussy fart jokes I've been saving up. But I digress. Unless your black or Hispanic, you don't get into too much trouble when you're eight, so I was kind of at a loss as to what I needed to tell the priest. Besides, I had no frame of reference, no guidelines to tell me what was a sin and what wasn't. I mean, I knew the ten commandments, but once again, unless your black or Hispanic you probably haven't killed anyone or stolen anything at eight. So really, I had no idea what God considered to be a sin. I horded my sisters' nude Barbie dolls, was that a sin? I humped the cushions on the family sofa, was that a sin? In school I would use opportune moments to bend down to tie my shoe and try to peek up the teacher's skirt, was that a sin? I once took a shit inside my friend's Technodrome that he got for his birthday, was that a sin? I told my older brother Dale that he was born without a penis, was that a sin? I was fretting over what to say, but when the big day came I just decided to stick to the basics: I fought with my mom and dad, I fought with my siblings, I told lies...simple kid bullshit. Also, when one goes to confession, one usually has the option of talking to a priest face-to-face or kneeling behind a grill to remain anonymous. When I started I opted for the grill, which would come in handy when my confessions grew more and more humiliating. Now, for those who don't know, little boys are filthy-mouthed, disgusting human beings, and I was certainly no exception. My only problem was that I was woefully behind when it came to new things for me and my buddies to joke about. In the fifth grade, we always played football on this field next to the school. One day before a game my buddy Joe said, "I say we name this field Field Sixty-nine!" Everyone laughed and cheered, until I said, "Or Field Twenty-five!" My friends just looked at me with their WTF expressions. Twenty-five was my favorite number at the time, and I had absolutely no fucking clue that the number sixty-nine had sexual connotations. There's a scene in the movie Billy Madison where Adam Sandler laughs when his teacher tells the class to turn to page sixty-nine...yeah, that joke went right over my head. What can I say? I had really no experience or knowledge when it came to sex. I was ten. Up to this point I had seen my old man's Playboys from the 80s, so I knew that all women's breasts looked like ski-jump ramps and they had enough hair between their legs to feed a family of lice for years. But my old man never had a sex talk with me, so if it was not explained in the VHS copy of Bachelor Party I had I didn't know about it. Eventually, though, my knowledge of sex began to grow. Once my family got the Internet my brother Dale and I began a quest to build a vast library of porn, the likes of which Southwest Iowa had never seen. By the time I was thirteen most of what I knew about women came from the porn I saw on the family computer. The first time I saw a shaved vagina I went into my room and just stared at my reflection in the TV. Why would a girl do that? I wondered. Now, as it turns out, looking at pornography is considered a mortal sin by the Catholic Church. It's one of those, "do not pass go, but go directly to hell"-type sins. But at the time I had no references, no person or literature to tell me that looking at porn was a sin. So Dale and I just went right on looking at Dad's Playboys, downloading porn, and watching Skinamax at night. My rationalization was, "Looking a naked women makes me happy, and being happy is not a sin." This changed however, when my mother gave me a book that listed out everything or close to everything that could be considered a mortal sin, and sure enough the one I zeroed in on was the one that read "Viewing pornography or sexually explicit material." Well fuck me. This put me in quite the pickle. So now I was officially confronted with the fact that what I was doing was a sin. However, at the time I did not have to confess this to a priest, because if I didn't know it was a sin, then it does not count as a sin. So, from that day on I decided, no more porn! I meticulously deleted all the pictures off the floppy disks my brother and I had, returned my father's Playboys to their rightful xerox box in the furnace room, and made a solemn vow to never look at porn again...that might have lasted about a day. So here I am, on the tail end of puberty, struggling with a borderline addiction to porn, and I have to confess this to a priest. This shit is gonna get weird. I can vividly recall going to church, going to confession, sitting directly in front of the priest this time (I thought maybe he would shame me into never wanting to look at porn again) and confessing to him, "looking at pornography" as one of my sins. He nodded. "What do you do when you look at this stuff?" I just looked at him, horrified. What did I do? Nothing. Just tried to memorize every vagina I had ever seen. "You pull on yourself?" The old priest asked. Pull on myself? What the fuck did that mean? Because at the time, I had not once jerked off to the porn I was looking at. I was just...studying it...Bundy style. I slowly shook my head. "You pull on a friend?" he asked me. Pull on a friend? Who is this guy? I shook my head again. "So it's just you?" I nodded. "OK, that ain't so bad," he assured me. I left the little room trembling. How terrible! How humiliating! That day in church I made a solemn vow to never look at porn again, lest I must shame myself in front of the priest...that vow lasted about a day. Now, as fucked up as my relationship became with my priest from looking at porn, it was nothing compared to what I had to endure when I began jerking off. Now, I knew self-abuse was a sin because of that book my mother gave me, but after the first time I did it at about age 15, I thought, "This is what I want to do with my life." Soon, jerking off became as routine for me as getting the mail, except getting the mail required less Kleenex. But when it came time to confess my sin of self-abuse to the priest, I realized that I could not face him. I could not sit there and tell him I had "pulled" myself. So, when confession time came I decided to kneel behind the grill so he could not see my face. Then I mechanically listed my sins as though I was naming state capitals, and I topped the list off with "committing self-abuse." I got a good talking to, was told to not do it again, was told that people can become slaves to their lust. I then said my Act of Contrition, got absolution, and was about to leave when the priest said, "Be a good boy...You are a boy, right?" "Weh..." I muttered, then left. Apparently as a 15-year-old male, I sounded like a seven-year-old castrato trying to hit the high notes. As time went on I made many a solemn vow to give up porn once and for all, but teenage boys are essentially just vehicles for their dicks to get around, and I always ended up back in confession, behind that grill, saying the same shit I always said. As I got older though, I started going to a church in downtown Omaha, because it only lasted thirty minutes, and you didn't have to sing. They always had confession before each mass, so I attended it regularly. There were three main priests that heard confessions. One priest was really old, and dragged each confession on and on, so only two or three people actually got in before church started. A second priest was a lithe, middle-aged man who went through confession like he was scanning groceries. He could hear ten to fifteen confessions before doing mass, and his penances never varied: two Our Fathers for your sins, three Our Fathers if you killed someone. The third priest that heard confessions at this Omaha church was a short, Filipino priest who looked like he had won runner-up at a Herve Villechaize look-a-like contest. I disliked going to him to most, because his penances were always rosaries. I never liked saying the Rosary because it took forever and it was so boring. If you want to date-rape a chick, fuck the roofies, have her say the Rosary. Anyway, the little old priest always gave out the longest penances, so I never liked going to him. Also, at this church, you had no choice but to use a grill. The confessionals were set up in a very old school manner, so you never had to see the priest. Well, I must have gone to that Filipino priest one too many times with the same bullshit, because after rounding out my confession with "masturbating" he said through the curtain, "You're still doing that?" "Weh..." I muttered. Ahhh, good old confession. I haven't been in a while, but it's good to know that salvation is always a short drive away, if I can get a fucking parking spot. Next time I go I'll still be confessing to the same shit I was doing ten years ago, plus I'll have to add this damn thing (I probably shouldn't have said that stuff about the Rosary).
The Moore You Know: Something has been bothering me lately, and I feel I need to get it off my chest. I really hate Twitter and Facebook condolences. Now, I am sorry if that offends you, but it's true. We have all lost people we have loved, and during those times it is nice to have the support of friends and family, but I cannot stand it when someone dies (usually someone famous) and all of a sudden Twitter is ablaze with assholes writing things like, "U wuz the best...goin 2 miss U 4eva!!!!! RIP!!!" Or, "Sad day 2day. World lost gr8 person. I know UR in heavin right now. LUV U LOTS!!!" Jay-zus Christ. Can you really sum up how you feel about a person in 140 characters or less? Twitter condolences are absolutely the very least you can say about a person, and they honestly just some off as lazy as hell. Send a sympathy card, attend the funeral, make a donation in the deceased person's name, but don't fucking Twitter about it, it will never do the person justice. And honestly, Twitter and Facebook are supposed to be fun places of laughter and revelry. These bleak, half-hearted posts really take the air outta the room. I dunno. That's my two cents.
© Eric Moore - 2011
