Enervate the Mendicant (Pin the Tail on the Donkey)

> This morning as I made my way through the inclement snowfall en route to the Marriot Center for the Tuesday devotional, "What I Got" by Sublime began to play on my iPod. As the cannabis-inspired lyrics (if you know Sublime, you know what I mean)tickled my ear drums, I lost myself in chimerical reverie amidst God's dandruff, which fell softly, gently kissing my cheeks. The sultry voice, shuckin' and jivin' with my brain, attenuated my rage at the weather. For two minutes and fifty-one seconds the inexorable deluge of snow seemed a venial oversight on God's part. The song worked its magic and I soon felt as if Mary Jane and I had agreed to go steady, and feelings of tranquility and serenity enveloped me. As I looked at the falling snow whilst enjoying the high, I decided it wasn't God's dandruff that was falling, it was more like angels dusting their feet off after some supernal waltz, or angel dust for short. Contrary to what that name would imply, however, sniffing the white substance produced no notable effect.

By this time the song was about over and so were the good feelings. I came back to the exigent reality of the falling snow, and I was cast into an abyss of icy contemplation. Looking at all of the faithful and pious BYU students on their way to be spiritually fed, I realized we were all being punished via the weather by the impiety of the UVU and UofU* students. They had incurred God's displeasure and he was demanding expiation.

*A brief caveat - there is a small oasis of righteousness amongst the vast desert of debauchery at the U, or at least that is what I am forced to posit based on the U's exceptional football season. So long as there are a few righteous men and/or women, God will not destroy a university.

If God is demanding expiation, I pondered, then the snow is the sacrificial knife and my fingers and toes are the Isaac-sacrifice at the altar of the wrath of the Infinite. There seemed to be no ram in the bushes this time. Ah, but my heated home! My heart lit upon this potential escape from pain and punishment, but soon I fell yet again into despondency as I remembered my last utilities bill. It's as if Abraham, upon learning that Isaac was to be saved, was then told his son would forever remain a pubescent teenager, and that he would have seven daughters.

Trying to somehow ameliorate the situation, I sought for some other explanation of the malevolent, malign manifestation of man's mistakes. I recalled the words of Isaiah, "Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow." Perhaps, I began with hope, this is a beatific reminder that though we make mistakes, we may always return to a state of purity and innocence, the white of the snow being the operative symbol of innocence. Cold, ugly snow. Like a Polish nun. Maybe Isaiah should have compared innocence to a lamb. It's also white, has more inherent religious symbolism than snow, and moreover is warm and sumptuous when cooked. That is the kind of innocence I could really get behind, the kind you can eat with A1 sauce.

Later that day I was in my Women Studies class and we were having a discussion on gender roles and traits. As I reflected on cultural norms for masculinity and femininity, I realized that I failed in a number of andro-normative benchmarks (all those football conversations I remained mute in, laughing at UFC fights, never going to any BYU sports games, preferring to talk through problems rather than find solutions, loving Pride and Prejudice, deciding that I'm a feminist, declaring Women Studies as a minor), and a high number of my personality traits fell on the female side, and yet anatomically I was precluded from the esoteric convent of womanhood. To my credit I am very physically active and scared of commitment. I felt what Cyclops (X-Men) must have felt that portentous day in his youth when he realized that not all children shoot deadly lasers from their eyes when they take off their glasses. Having thus been ostracized from my species, I made my way home through the snow, which obstinately continued to fall despite my virile, yet ineffectual, efforts to make it stop. I turned on my iPod. The song "What I Got" came on for an encore. Bradley Nowell's voice again wafted through my consciousness like a cool breeze across the carbuncular face of a man with horrific, blistered, oozing burns.

A certain line he sang filled me with a superlative gratitude, for I felt at this moment and in these lyrics (below) an ineffably sacred bond of shared experience with another male at a time I felt my masculinity threatened. On top of this virile bond I was reminded that no matter how hard and long it snowed, no matter how anfractuous my life's journey became, at least I've

"Never had to battle with my bullet proof vest..."

If nothing else, at least I have that.