Author Archives: Joel Derfner

This is a modification of a traditional Hebrew prayer:

It is ours to praise the beauty of the world,
Even as we discern that it is torn.
For nothing is whole that is not first rent,
And out of the torn we make whole again.
We live with promise in creation’s lap,
Redemption budding in our hands.
Let us begin.

Though usually I think I’ve successfully rooted out all traces of hope from my life, every once in a while I stumble while crossing the street and there it is.

How could I possibly have gained three pounds yesterday when I didn’t eat anything?

Not too long ago I went to the bookstore, fiercely determined to get control over my tendency to slobbishness and disorganization, and bought a book called How Not to Be a Messie. It contained lots of good advice about getting rid of clutter once and for all, and I started reading it in preparation for the day I’d be able to start implementing it.

Now of course I can’t find it.

Today at the gym, the instructor introduced a particularly grueling exercise and said, in honor of last week’s holiday, “We’ll call this one Pie-B-Gone.” After the glimpse I’d caught in the locker room of the tiny love handles that weren’t there this time last week—I actually thought I saw Jesus in one of them but then realized it was just a freckle—I redoubled my efforts with Pie-B-Gone. Wish me luck in getting results.

Then I started thinking about the time when this woman [link no longer active] took the summer musical theater writing class I was co-teaching. One day there was a guest instructor who introduced us to the principles and practice of sketch comedy; one thing we had to do was come up with a commercial for a product. She and I were paired for the exercise, and we came up with an idea for a product that I still think somebody ought to put on the market. It was called Enemy-B-Gone, and it was a machete. The commercial included several illustrations of the various uses of Enemy-B-Gone; all of these illustrations are long gone from the sieve that is my memory, but I do remember our tag line, which was “Enemy-B-Gone. Because some people just deserve to have their heads chopped off.”

It’s occurring to me now that what would really sell, though, is a two-in-one product: Pie-‘n’-Enemy-B-Gone.

Does anybody have any contacts at the U.S. Patent Office?

I am now back from western Maryland, having survived a week in the middle of nowhere with this man, his dog, his boyfriend, his boyfriend’s sister, my dog, and some very scary movies. On the drive back, we passed a site on which someone was rebuilding Noah’s Ark. We knew the structure was Noah’s Ark because of the sign that said, “Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here.”

The thing is, we passed the very same structure with the very same sign on our way back from western Maryland when we went last year. And it was in the very same state of completion.

Clearly, somebody has been falling down on the job.

I mean, come on. How long can you really think it’ll be before God destroys the world again in a flood the likes of which hasn’t been seen on earth for millenia?

Except wait. The whole point of the damn rainbow after the flood was over was the covenant God made with Noah that He would never destroy the world in a flood ever again. So what the hell is the point of rebuilding Noah’s Ark?

I guess the builder came to that very same realization.

Too bad he was out all that lumber already.

It was in seventh grade that I was first introduced to Latin. We started out with Marcus puellam amat and progressed through by the end of the year to Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, etc. Or perhaps it was in second year Latin that we first hit Caesar–this was almost twenty years ago, so my memory is a little bit vague.

At one point we were assigned a project about Greek or Roman history or art or architecture or culture. The exact parameters have escaped me by now but I do remember that we did this project in pairs, all of us except E.T., who, being the class loser, was naturally anathema as a project partner. If memory serves, he came in dressed as a Roman gladiator and demonstrated various combat techniques on a stuffed dummy; this was pretty successful as a Latin project but did nothing, alas, to raise his standing in the class hierarchy. W.E. and W.N. made a Greek temple out of garbage; rumor had it that there was a piece of cat poop inside. The fact that they flunked the project lends credence to the cat poop legend, but as the motivations of the powers that be are often shrouded in mystery, I’m not willing to stick my neck out for this one.

At any rate, I worked with C.O. for my project, which was more or less all my design: we made a working model of Tartarus, the classical version of hell, using Legos and Star Wars figures.

This involved a cardboard box on its side with a lot of wires and string and holes in the back. There was Obi-Wan Kenobi as Sisyphus, pushing a clay boulder up a posterboard mountain colored with brown marker. Whenever he neared the top, we would jerk the string attached to the boulder and let it fall back down the mountain; then Obi-Wan, by means of a wire wrapped around his waist and running through the back of the box, would follow forlornly down after it and start the whole thing up again. On the other side of the posterboard mountain was bound Han Solo as Prometheus, attended by some vultures (on wires) to eat his liver every morning. (Technically this was a concatenation of the punishments of Prometheus, who was bound to a mountain but who didn’t actually end up in Tartarus and whose heart was eaten by an eagle, and Tityus, whose liver was eaten daily in Tartarus by vultures and snakes but who wasn’t actually bound to a mountain, being spread rather over nine acres of land. But we couldn’t spread Han Solo over nine acres, even to scale, so we figured we’d fudge it.) Princess Leia was a Danaid—there were 49 of them according to Greek myth, but even my extensive collection couldn’t produce that many women in the male-dominated mythos that was Star Wars—forced eternally (again by means of wires) to fill an ostensibly leaky jar made of Legos by means of an ostensibly leaky cup from the Lego Town House collection. Luke Skywalker was Ixion, turning forever on a burning wheel (also posterboard) as punishment for dallying with Hera. And Ice Planet Han Solo was Tantalus, always reaching up (pull the wire) for the fruit on the branches above him (pull the string attached to the twig) or down (push the wire) for the water in the pool below him (let go the string attached to the blue posterboard).

In hindsight, we should have had Darth Vader as Hades sitting on a throne above it all, but we were thirteen, so perhaps we can be forgiven.

And we got an A+ all the same.

Yesterday, before watching Let