Tuesday, October 17, 2006

i seen 'em

It's been a week full of semisignificant synchronous signs and symbolic postrational parallels here at Rancho FirstNations. Inevitably we find Billy woven throughout the cosmic mesh of it all.
Here's how it all lays out: (I swear to you I did not do that intentionally)
1a. Billy is hitting that stuff like the fist of an angry god. Yay!
1. Larvae come from eggs.
2. Larvae are freaky.
3. Cute little baby chickens come from eggs.
4. So do baby GEESE.
5. Some people like geese A LOT.
6. If you make a burrito with scrambled eggs it is still called a burrito
7. The face of Jesus has appeared on both EGGS and BURRITOS.

Chickens (like ducks* and other birds and some reptiles and one mammal, unless I am wrong about the platypus and she just poots her eggs out all over the woods without regard for their aesthetic appeal) shape the egg in their cloaca, an oval sort of waiting room that exits under their tail. The finished egg bloops down into the cloaca while the chicken is going about it's daily chicken business, and when the shell hardens a bit, the mommy chicken runs back to her nest and squits it out.

Not all cloacas are created equal, and thus, not all eggs are created egg shaped*. We raised chickens when I was very small, and we saw all kinds of bizarre eggs... round, empty, solid, teardrop, dumbbell, conjoined, peanut, and oddly textured. Any particularly unusual example would get put aside and hauled out of the 'fridge to show company. Then consumed. No big deal.

I remember hearing older people talking about having seen chicken eggs with the face of Jesus on them*...Apparently these showed up mainly in the South, during the Depression Era. Nobody made too big a deal out of it because everyone knew chickens had artistic butts. I wonder where all those Southern Miracle eggs are now? Hopefully emptied and preserved. You never see oddball eggs any more. Nowadays the bumpy eggs are the ones that get put aside for dehydration or preshelling. They aren't pretty enough to make it into a store dozen.

Aha; see, but Jesus was prepared for this; and apparently He had a backup plan already in place . One that involved the humble tortilla.

(Digression follows: skepticism raises it's ugly head)
The questions that always burned in my mind were
1. How did chickens know what Jesus looked like?
2. How did the person who discovered the egg know what Jesus looked like? Did they throw the ones that looked like Sandy Duncan in the trash? What about Andy Griffith?

Well here's how. How the farmer, I mean, knew what Jesus looked like. (The rest is a mystery, like the Antikothera device and how to make the alarm on my new wristwatch shut up.)



Everyone in America owns a copy of this picture. Everyone in America has seen this picture except Stevie Wonder. My parents had a huge copy of it hanging in their bedroom, in fact. Which is teh sexy.

(Digression: I was too young to hallucinate something this tacky)
Now I remember a picture of Jesus from my youth which showed him with long blonde hair. The damn thing was everywhere; and the lower down the redneck religion scale you visited, the more likely it was to be sitting on top of the T.V. It was a really creepy version of this one...

but full face, with large, almost Carolyn Keene-style eyeballs
that regarded you with an altogether-too-knowing expression.


For Catholics in our class, 'Blonde Jesus' was considered far too tasteless to display in the home.


Remember, these were people who thought nothing of putting this

up all over the house. Catholics in my youth were big into bleeding, flaming internal organs and thought nothing of using them as decorating accents. But a blonde Jesus? Come on.

So anyway, you have nothing to worry about because I cannot find the Blonde Jesus image anywhere on the net. It's nowhere. This really really bugs me. I cry 'revisionism!'
I remember it played a significant role in the set decor of 'Raisin in the Sun'.
I remember my best friends' grandmother had a huge one on her wall that lit up.
Steven King mentions one in the book 'Tommyknockers'. As would not surprise anyone who had to grow up with one of the things in the house, it talks this lady into shooting her husband.

( LENGTHY 'I AM NOT NUTS' DIGRESSION) Years ago this section of the Tommyknockers was published as a separate short story in Cavalier magazine...a publication known for its unique layout i.e. picture of a broad on a couch with her innards on display, story, picture of Seka, story, picture of a naked chick with one knee behind her head, story'. It got passed around a motel I worked at in Portland, back when Steven King was barely a blip on the screen. Damn good story, too, I must say. Pictures not so much. And years later King admitted to it. I felt vindicated for all the times I'd told people about seeing Kings' writing published in a porn magazine and everyone told me I was dreaming. HA!.)

Now the image above is only one of a number of popular depictions of Christ wallpapering the Americas. For example, here's what people are seeing on tortillas and burritos:

















Kind of a combination of



















and














isn't it? Variations on a theme.
Here's Jesus the way the early Christians saw him


















Here's a Mediterranean person of the day




















Here's a Semitic man from modern times



















Here's Eleanor Roosevelt and a hot dog












There's Catholics and quasi-Catholics all over the world and whatever else they may or may not hold in common, they all believe in miracles and apparitions. Yet you see no Jesus faces appearing on the hum bao of the devout.
Nestorians do not see Him on their toaster pastries or Fig Newtons or whatever Nestorians eat. The Orthodox aren't running through the streets brandishing Jesus on rye.
In other words, nobody else in the world is seeing Jesoids on their ethnic bread products. Just the Catholic indigenous people of the Americas.

To me, it all points to one inescapable fact.


Jesus wants me to eat more burritos.





*Hey, nerds? Remember this one?

**Drop a hit of acid and visit
here to view the ROTATING DUGONG RESEMBLING EGG OF DIRE PORTENT.

*** Go
here
Now don't take this explanation at face value,comrades. Ask yourself these questions:
A. Might the discussion of sex with geese at
Billy's place the other day have had other, more sinister layers (not intentional I swear) beneath what at first glance seemed a mere exercise in speculative sexuality? One involving ALIENS?
b. Goose down is known for it's warmth. Might primitive man, shuddering in the chill of the last Ice Age, stuffed a live goose onto the head of his infant and forgot and left it there long enough to make the baby's head egg shaped? Because I could never keep a hat on my kid. What is it with kids and hats? Should I have tried a goose instead?
c. Is this what happens when you don't cut the head off Billy's goose, and it escapes and limps away and blends in with all the other geese, and then nine months later you're out in the goose house and you findOH DEAR GOD NO!!! RUN!!!RUN AWAY!!


For those of you who think I need to increase my medication:http://skepdic.com/pareidol.html

18 comments:

  1. Good heavens FN......
    We are big on bleeding flaming internal organs Chez Beasty , a good hot curry never did anyone any harm , unless you happen to visit the lavatory , just after someone has evacuated last night vindaloo , along with most of their intestines , the atmosphere could sometimes bleach your hair , strip skin and dissolve the lungs.....keeps the toilet clear of limescale tho.
    Why is Billy having sex with a goose ???? he needs to get out more.

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  2. Anonymous1:43 AM

    I remember blonde jesus (or at least really mousy jesus) and the picture of him with the bleeding heart was on the wall in my grandma's dining room.

    My nan though, has a picture cut out of a local paper from the 1940s/50s which clearly shows a cloud formation in the shape of jesus' face.

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  3. I've never had sex with a goose or any other avian creature although I did once flirt with a guillemot.

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  4. I say decrease your medication cause I loooooveee where these things go with you!

    I see a skeletal Darth Vader in the tortilla! Am I in trouble?

    As for Eleanor Roosevelt, oysters would have been more fitting than a hotdog...

    Artistic chicken butts? Everyone except Stevie Wonder?

    No wonder I love thee... you are a brilliant pot o' bubbling crazy and funkified gold!

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  5. i remember blonde jesus all too vividly. that picture hung on the wall of every single classroom i ever sat in for 12 years. right next to the flag. prayer, pledge. every morning. in that order. for 12 years.


    i am damaged.

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  6. beast: tmi. and billy? is not boinking the goose. he just wanted to hear stories about goose boinking.
    hendrix: yeah! that one travelled around my moms religious buddies too!
    billy: you are an unfortunate victim of guilt by association. notice my restraint in not making any off color puns using the word 'association'. guillamot are dev'lish cute, tho.
    mizB: i thank you and eleanor thanks you. are you finished moving house?????? are you HERE????
    cb: no shit? in catholic school? i guess it was the midwest though, huh. (note how these prejudices persist over the years.) lord, 12 years...*weeping at the thought* you have a spirit forged from high tech shuttle grade ceramic and spidersteel alloy, my dear.XOO

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  7. Anonymous8:56 AM

    fn - please decrease your medication. you're having delusions again. and you obviously have WAY to much time on your hands. blonde jesus? now that i think about it, most pictures i've seen depicting him show him as blonde, at least up until the past decade or so, when they started portraying him as a brunette. doesn't matter really what color hair he has, just that he's there for us.

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  8. we had a couple of those blond, bleeding heart pictures, too.

    Eleanor Roosevelt and a hot dog. That's brilliant.

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  9. i've a feel that i have to be american, catholic or eat burritos to fully and intimately digest this post.

    i'm happy to report that i am none of the three and thus live happily ever after.

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  10. pink: it's sad, isnt it? good on ya. you totally got it, girlie!
    claire: where did they all go? i mean, on an internet where you can find pictures of a japanse lady in the shower imitating the trevi fountain, if they ran mustard through the trevi fountain...but none of the gazillion blonde jesus pictures i am not alone in recalling....? weird.
    trees: just relaaaaaaaax. let it happen. flow with it. ommmmm.

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  11. Ray Charles may not have seen that image, either.

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  12. TAJ: and a hearty Hi ho, "..." to you too.
    Champ: Yes, he did. Ray Charles was lying about that whole 'blindness' thing. Ronnie Milsap only saw a vague blur but he could make out the unnaturally light hair. One glance was enough to send Roy Orbisons' corneas into a tailspin.

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  13. If I do a handstand and clench my butt cheeks , I look just like Eleanor Roosevelt.....scary huh

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  14. Where's my comments gone!!!

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  15. btw, eleanor roo and a hot dog made me laugh so hard i bled from my nose, as did our lady of the fried eggs. i studied iconograpy for 2 years under a russian master, and i swear to you now that my next creation will have an egg halo.

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  16. btw, eleanor roo and a hot dog made me laugh so hard i bled from my nose, as did our lady of the fried eggs. i studied iconograpy for 2 years under a russian master, and i swear to you now that my next creation will have an egg halo.

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  17. I think your medication level is just right. BTW the image on the tortilla looks more like Che Guevara than Jesus.

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