Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

Greedball mega-preacher Franklin Graham has proclaimed Sunday a National Day of Prayer for Donald Trump, ignoring the recent example of the three flyover Republican governors who called for a Day of Prayer for drier weather over the prairie, only to have their states buried under about six feet of fresh snow within 48 hours of imploring the Lord for less precipitation. God does not hear the prayers of people who ignore the long-range weather forecast is the Biblical lesson here.
 
Some of us are hoping for the same sort of result—that a multitude of prayers ascending to the heavens on behalf of Trump will result in him finally choking to death on his final cheeseburger before Monday morning. But you can’t count on prayer for much, as we’ve noted here before, and even if all of Evangelical America hosannas to the Almighty on Trump’s behalf on Sunday, he’s still going to do things like inspire his toadies to cover up the name of the USS John McCain so he won't go off-script and start berating a dead hero while he's on a diplomatic mission, accept North Korea’s endorsement for President in 2020 and try to fill senior Administration positions from Craigslist.
 
Sunday was already National Bubba Day, so Graham risks alienating the entire Bubba demographic, which tilts heavily towards Trump, by ignoring them on their special day.
 
But Bubbas be damned, Graham wants us all to pray for Trump on Sunday. The utility of praying for anything has been examined in this column before, many times, but the usefulness of praying for Trump, even for those who believe in its power, can be confidently compared to trying to teach a clam to yodel.
 
Plus, I’ve been down this road before. Here were my thoughts back in December 2016:

God appeared to me again, as He sometimes does. Usually He has a message for me, and this time it was no different.

​"I am He Who Am, and I'm here to talk about Franklin Graham."

“Billy Graham's heir? The preacher who said You personally selected Trump to be President?"

“That peckerhead. I had nothing to do with Trump getting elected. It’s caused Me all kinds of grief already. With Trump’s finger on the nuclear button, I have to really get serious about motivating Jesus to get back here and judge the living and the dead before Trump blows the place up, and that’s causing discord Up There. My Kid has been putting off His return for 20 centuries now. He has bad memories of the place. Claims He has PTSD from getting crucified.”

“Could be, huh?”

“Slacker. Whenever I mention the fact that there’s currently 7 billion plus souls to be judged nowadays, and the number ain’t getting smaller, He mutters ‘Intercourse those feces,’ and goes back to drinking wine and playing poker with the Apostles, using the souls of the faithful departed as chips. I need you to tell everybody that Franklin Graham is full of crap.”

“Why me, oh Lord? You know everything, so You must know that most of my readers are elderly alcoholics. From a demographic point of view, they suck. Why don’t you appear to Franklin Graham Yourself?”

“Because he would have a heart attack and die. I don’t need him up here, fawning all over Me. It’s creepy enough getting worshipped by him from afar.”

“You could send him to the Other Place.”

"Nope. Satan has evoked a clause in our contract to keep the Pit of Darkness free of any more money-grubbing American preacher types until at least 2020. He’s sick of them, too. Why do you think Pat Robertson is still alive? What is he, 99?”

“Aren’t You supposed to know that?”

“I’m not a detail Guy, which should be plenty obvious to anyone who’s taken a careful look at My work. That’s how Trump slipped in. I was tinkering with a couple of quasars, you know, routine Supreme Being stuff, during the election year, and the polls all had Hillary winning, so I just back-burnered the whole Trump question. I was as surprised as anyone else.”

‘It’s not too late to fix it, My Lord. He’s a seventy-year old guy living on cheeseburgers and Viagra. You could call his number and nobody would be surprised. Grant him eternal peace before the Inauguration. I hear he even went to church on Christmas Eve.”

“Yeah, but all he prayed for was the chance to have sex with Ivanka without anybody finding out, including Ivanka. It's his usual prayer. I whispered in his ear, ‘Why ask Me? You already know Bill Cosby."

“Trump in Heaven? NO, and I mean one of My great big I’m-going-to-kill-all-your-firstborn sons NO'S! You think I want to issue chastity belts to all the Cherubim to keep Trump’s fingers off of them? And Satan’s already put the kibosh on letting Trump into Hell. No, he’s going to live until we’ve constructed a special eternal existence for him. We’ve already broken the ground for it. We’re calling it the Trump Towering Inferno.”

A Dallas evangelist told his followers that an "anointed cake" baked by "hookers" turned a gay man straight. News item.
 
The importance of cake in establishing sexual orientation is brought home, and I mean brought home with a police escort, by this story straight out of the Dallas Morning News.
 
Those who have decried the sincere efforts of Christian bakers not to make cakes for same-sex weddings will have to shut up, as it is now apparent that the Lord works in two ways: 1. Mysteriously. 2. Through cake.
 
The parable, in which none of the actors are mentioned by name, possibly for legal reasons and also possibly because the speaker of the parable does not wish any of them to dispute the tale, goes as follows: Once there was a bar owned by an anti-Christian gay man. (An ACGM, as he will be referred to in this account from now on, because one thing we can all agree on is that the world needs more acronyms). The bar nonetheless had a Christian regular, and he converted a few of the hookers that hung out at the bar to Christianity.
 
I hear you skeptics clucking with doubt. Well, bars where hookers hang out with Christians are more common than the naïve among you might think, especially around Republican national conventions.
 
To celebrate their acceptance of Jesus, the hookers promptly baked a cake, and then “anointed” it. What they anointed it with is not made clear. Whether they prayed over the icing or just dabbed it with a little of the spermicidal jelly they happened to have in their purses will never be known. Whatever they did, the power of Jesus moved through the baked goods, and when the ACGM ate of the cake, he promptly became a straight Christian man, and banged one of the hookers on the bar for her customary rate to celebrate, and in lieu of a tip, gave her free drinks for the weekend.
 
All right, I made that last part up. Whether the Godly hooker certified the ACGM’s conversion to heterosexuality personally is not made clear by the Morning News account. But it could have happened that way, and how else could we be sure of the truth of this story?
 
What is important to note is that just as Jesus can make miracles through the sacred sugar and Godly gluten of a hooker cake, so can Satan move through the hot fudge icing of a gay wedding cake. Tales of resolutely Christian men  who arrive at a gay wedding in a Dodge Durango extended cab pickup with a gun rack and a hound dog in the bed, take one bite of a gay wedding cake, and then leave in a Mini Cooper convertible with a Bichon Frise next to them in the passenger seat, are no longer to be regarded as merely apocryphal.
 
And let us hold in our disdain for those good Christian bakers who have forsworn baking cakes that celebrate sodomy. Let us not refer to them as “homophobic, and probably racist and misogynist, too, cracker hypocrites.” Nor shall we call them “hate-filled, Bible-thumping, low-IQ yick-a-doos,” for they are doing God’s work, preventing Lucifer from infesting the flour of Christian cake with his Weevils from Hell.
 
Also, there are Christian hookers that will bake you a cake. But it still costs 500 bucks an hour.

Family tragedy led me once again to my ancestral shores, the green (for now) woods of suburban Philadelphia, so once again I found myself at the feet of Our Lady of the Overturned Boat, a two-and-a-half foot plaster representation of the Mother of God that has sat in the mother of me's yard since the last century.
 
OLOTOB has fallen upon hard times. No longer does she rest in a shaded grove by my brother's upside-down and slowly rusting watercraft, alongside a stone bench which only lacks a cupholder to make it a perfect spot to enjoy an adult beverage. My mother has sold an acre of her backyard to a developer, and will soon have two new neighbors. The grove where Our Lady sat is no longer on her property, and She has been transferred to a green spot by the back door. 
 
That brother now lives in the house permanently, keeping an eye on Mom, who is frail at 89, and he sleeps in the guest bedroom, where the other icon of Catholicism in my mother's house dwells. I speak of Hot Mother Cabrini in the Closet, a statue my mother and another elderly Catholic woman purloined from a rectory in another Philly suburb for their own reasons, and is still in transit to its rightful owner, my mother's favorite priest, who hasn't quite enough closet space for it himself, apparently.
 
Thus, I no longer sleep with Hot Mother Cabrini. My brother does. I don't resent her transfer of affections. Long distance relationships are so difficult to maintain.
 
My brother Matt's memorial service was not religious, because he wasn't. Mom has set up her own formal funeral Mass in a few weeks, because no one should be laid to rest without a Catholic service, in her opinion. Fine with me, because I wasn't about to fly back and forth to Philly twice in two months, and thought I had escaped another Mass.
 
Not so. Mom made it plain that I was taking her to Mass the following day, and furthermore she was exercising her powers as a bereaved mother to make sure I attended the Mass, instead of just driving her to church, having a cup of coffee at a local Dunkin’ Donuts, and picking her up when the service was over—my preferred method of assisting her at worship.
 
I am ecumenical in my dread of religious rites. Any ceremony that does not involve human sacrifice or, at the very least, snake handling, I find intensely boring. The only advantage of a Catholic Mass over the others, in my case, is that, having been shepherded to a thousand of them in my youth by my above-mentioned mother, I know when it’s going to end. I was stuck at a friend’s kid's bar mitzvah a few years back and nearly suffered a public panic attack when I realized I had no idea how long it was going to last.
 
My mother’s favorite priest has been transferred from a regular Catholic parish to a Catholic nursing home, where people who have lived Catholic can waste away and die Catholic for $6,000 a month. This made the Mass even less inspiring than most to me. There were no striking Catholic women in tight skirts to admire. Most of the faithful were in wheelchairs and even hospital beds. My mother is not that feeble—she picked a pew for us to sit in. The orderlies promptly blocked us in there with two wheelchairs, one on either end. If a fire had broken out, we would have had to hurdle cripples in order to save ourselves.
 
The lady in the wheelchair to our right kept trying to get out of her seat to participate in the usual Catholic gymnastics, and had to be restrained by two orderlies so she wouldn’t go face-first on the floor trying to get closer to God. Apart from that and two Alzheimer’s victims in the back having a completely demented but loud conversation about only what they knew for sure, the Mass proceeded ponderously along.
 
There is a point in the Mass where it is considered proper to leave, if you are unworthy of receiving Communion, which is me for sure, and I mean unworthy squared, and it is right before the hosts are distributed. Unfortunately, I was blocked from bugging out at this juncture by those wheelchairs. I had to sit through the distribution of the hosts. Ordinarily, Catholics line up and approach the altar where the priest and his assistants wait with golden cups full of the Eucharist. Due to the nature of the congregants at this service, though, the priest and his helpers had to scatter through the room to serve Communion. Inevitably, one made the mistake of drifting towards me, host in fingers.
 
“Body of Christ,” he said.
 
Then I panicked. I had forgotten the response. In retrospect, I think it is a simple “Amen,” although there are other standard Catholic phrases which might apply, like, “And also with you,” and “Blessed be the Father,” etc.
 
Couldn’t come up with it though, so I settled for looking him prayerfully in the eye and replying, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”

​After passing the nation’s most restrictive abortion law, Alabama’s legislators are not sitting on their laurels.
 
“After making certain we have honored human life by giving Alabama women the joy of birthing their rapist’s or step-daddies’ babies, we need to focus on the other side of the reproductive coin—the sperm rights of our male citizens,” said one of its Republican members, who wished to remain anonymous because the pending bill has not been finalized. “An Alabama male has an average of a hundred million  sperm in his testes at any time—that’s one hundred million one-half fetuses. If a blastocyst has all the rights of a born human, how can we ignore the rights of the potential ½ human that God might make out of that sturdy little wiggler?
 
“Just as any pregnant woman carrying merely one baby should be able to use the car-pool lane in Alabama, any male with at least one testicle remaining, who is potentially the father of a hundred million Alabama citizens, should be able to do likewise. And he will be able to, once we build some carpool lanes in this state.
 
“Too little attention is spent on these other sacred creations of our Lord, just left to bounce around on the seats of pickup trucks in their hairy casings. Just because God has chosen to place these potential lives in men who lack teeth or don’t have enough crystal meth left to attract an Alabama woman does not mean their sperm does not deserve a chance at life. Alabama women are too demanding when it comes to things like meals, wedding bands, Netflix subscriptions and child support before allowing an Alabama man to fill her with his tiny, slippery creations of God.  ‘I need to put my sperm in you,’ is all a man should have to say to get a girl to admit him into the chamber of childbirth that the Almighty has created. Even if that man has the unfortunate habit of grunting ‘Roll Tide!’ when he ejaculates, his sperm rights need to be respected.
 
“If a man is absolutely too shy or too gay to make this simple request, the state will set up medically safe settings with comfortable recliners and HD porn where he can induce a discharge, which will then be immediately frozen and stored for future use or possibly even export, as long as we can settle this trade war thing. In Alabama, crusty socks and soggy tissues will no longer be the final repository of the will of God.
 
“We’ll put them where those abortion clinics used to be. All right, we might need a few more locations. We can’t have guys lined up outside like it was a woman’s bathroom—that would be too embarrassing for them.
 
“And it will be absolutely forbidden to call these sacred places spank banks. Just putting that out there.”

A sharp rise in the number of atheists and agnostics nationwide was reported last week after the President, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, claimed that God helped him get through the Mueller investigation.
 
“No one believes that God would let Trump lean on Him if He existed,” said one former Presbyterian that was willing to speak on the record. “I mean, it’s one thing to believe that God is working in mysterious ways when He allows school shootings, tsunamis, gas warfare, and un-vaccinated brats to wipe out huge swaths of innocent humanity, but it’s another thing entirely to believe that He would let Trump touch him.
 
“We formerly religious people weren’t expecting anything really dramatic when Trump claimed to be snuggling with the Lord. A giant, booming voice on every earthly wind, bellowing, “GET THE FUCK OFF OF ME! JUST LIKE MELANIA TELLS YOU EVERY WEEKEND!” would have been spiritually uplifting of course, but we don’t demand that much of God. A bolt of lightning from the clouds wouldn’t even have had to kill Trump in order for us to maintain our faith in Him. Even if the lightning just turned him a different shade of orange, that would have been enough to keep us strong in our belief. Heck, God’s favorite prayer boi, Mike Pence, was right there with Trump when Trump claimed to be groping Him, and had Pence’s pants spontaneously dropped to the floor at that moment, we would eagerly have accepted that as a sign. One thing about being a religious person—your portent standards are pretty low.
 
“Now I look back on my faith-filled years and laugh bitterly. All the thoughts and prayers I sent Heavenward in the face of tragedies personal, national and world were just vain attempts to persuade myself that making little electrical connections inside my skull would have an effect on the unknowable future, or cause someone’s soul to soar into some unlikely Heaven. I won’t have to persuade myself that the results of the movement of tectonic plates or the direction in which hurricanes swirl is all part of the plan of some beneficent Deity anymore. I feel liberated. And it’s all thanks to Trump. I almost feel that it was the President who personally granted me the gift of rationalism, when he said he connected with God.”
 
Consider that he might have been just lying.
 
“I did notice that Trump lied a lot, even when I was praying for him to be a good President.”
 
See how well those prayers turned out? Welcome to the club. We drink beer on Sunday instead of going to church--another plus for being a rationalist.
 
“Well, if he was lying, God could have rightfully ignored him. Would have had to, really. Maybe I made a mistake doubting Him.”
 
Oh, shit. Are you going to say, “Praise be?”
 
“Praise be! My faith is restored! It was God that sent me to you!
 
Oh, Jesus!
 
“Him, too.”

Reportedly stung by Trump’s remark that “Alfred E. Neuman can’t be President,” the MAD Magazine icon is forming an exploratory committee for a run at the Democratic nomination.
 
“Not only was AEN offended by Trump’s assertion that he couldn’t be President, he was equally taken aback by fellow candidate Pete Buttigieg’s claim that “I had to Google that,” when the President compared Neuman to Buttigieg,” said a spokesman for the nascent campaign.
 
“Alfred E. Neuman has a record of public service that goes back to the Cold War. Baby boomers fondly remember MAD as the first magazine they owned that they had to hide from parents and teachers, which was great practice for concealing their copies of Oui and Hustler later in life.
 
“AEN was born in 1954, which makes him younger than Biden, Bernie and Trump. It’s true he got a draft deferment during Vietnam, but his, unlike Trump’s spurious bone spurs, was legit—our candidate is dimensionally challenged. Throughout the years of Watergate, Carter, Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton and Obama, he has been a figure on the public stage, making jokes so obvious you could see the punchline coming from the orbit of Uranus, and padding out his magazine with heavy-handed parodies of popular movies and TV shows.
 
“His thoughts on foreign policy have been documented in countless episodes of Spy vs. Spy, forming a formidable body of research which he can draw on when confronting international challenges. Bad actors like Kim Jong Un don’t intimidate him—he’s already made roughly a thousand fat jokes about Un.
 
“Unlike his opponent, our candidate has never had a hair transplant or needed an XXL tanning bed to maintain his youthful looks. We think his obvious need for a dental implant will play well in states that supported Trump in '16, states like Kentucky and Mississippi. It’s true, compared to the other Democratic candidates, he doesn’t have detailed, thoughtful positions on many of the pressing issues of the day, but neither does Beto O’Rourke, and he’s in third or fourth place. We’re confident that a quick, barely noticed change in Neuman’s personal motto will result in a groundswell of support. We’re going from “What, Me Worry?” to—are you ready for it?
 
“Alfred E. Neuman—He’s for Real!”

This column seldom makes predictions, owing to the author’s terrible record in activities in which soothsaying is useful, like betting on horses or winning the lottery. But we’re willing to go out on a limb this particular Thursday, and say that one day, Mike Pence will become President number 46.
 
Not that he’ll ever be voted into office. There are less appealing Republicans out there—Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell—but saying that there are less appealing Republicans than Pence is like saying that there are less appealing pastimes than watching Dr. Pimple Popper while eating lunch. There are, but you don’t even want to think about them.
 
The only way Pence avoids the Presidency is if Trump wins in 2020, which he seems determined not to do. He is trailing every single Democrat this side of Anthony Weiner in the polls. The Traitor Tot has even proposed that he be given an extra two years in the Presidency, because he “lost” two years while the Mueller investigation methodically proved he was a mendacious bag of feces. He has a point—neutral observers knew that all along. But the Presidency is not a hockey game. You can’t earn an overtime.
 
There are several ways that Pence could make 46. Trump could die of natural causes, if you could call a fat guy snarfing down a fatal cheeseburger on the golf course natural rather than merely predictable. “I’m a vibrant young man,’ he could choke out, as his arteries finally slammed shut. “Somebody call a doctor.  And kick my last shot back onto the fairway.”
 
The result would be both dancing in the city streets and a great wailing in the hinterlands, as Trumpists everywhere would claim that Trump had sacrificed his health to save the country from caravan hordes and Muslim baddies, although the only documented sacrifice Trump has ever made was of 130,00 beans to screw a porn star. There would be a rush to name things after the fallen leader. In red states, bridges and community colleges. In blue ones, sewage treatment plants. Also, we would get President Pence.
 
Or Trump could get impeached and removed from office. The head Dems are on the record as reluctant to impeach, because they know they won’t get the Republicans in the Senate to go along and convict the guy, even as those same Dems poop a little in their pants in fear. Justified fear, because they know for certain that at least half of their party is dumb enough to think impeachment alone will remove Trump from office, and will turn on them in the next election. And they’re right—Republicans will never convict Trump, unless Putin gets salty at not getting Venezuela along with the Ukraine, and finally posts the pee tapes to Pornhub. And even then, it will be close.
 
But if that happens, we get President Pence.

What will happen for sure, though, if Trump is defeated by any of the horde of Democrats who currently seem up to the job, he will not go gracefully. He will naturally claim that the six to nine million votes he will lose by will have been illegally cast. He will rumble about overstaying his term, but in the end, he will realize that while Fox News and Moscow put him in the White House, they have no legal power to keep him there.
 
So, he will resign, along about December, after pardoning himself and anyone else who ever lied, stole or cheated on his behalf, and getting assurances from Pence that he will get a pardon, too.
 
And we get President Pence, the lame-duckiest, most useless President the US will have ever had. Evangelicals will gush that they finally have the President they've always dreamed of, one that is absolutely opposed to abortion and gay people not being ashamed of themselves, although their joy will be limited to about seven weeks. Pence himself will get what he’s always wanted—a portrait in the White House and a T-shirt that reads, “I was # 46.”
 
I predict this because Trump will refuse to stand on the same Inaugural stage as the man or woman who beats him. He doesn’t have the class. Prove me wrong.

As I’ve pointed out before in these ramblings, atheists have no business forming congregations. What’s there to say? Here’s an example of atheist prayer:
 
“It’s a nice day, thanks to the accidental juxtaposition of this planet and a nearby star, and the angle of the planet’s declination towards that star at this particular point in its orbit, and the fact that there is no local visible moisture blocking the rays from that star from us. We are well fed, thanks to the gradual development of agribusiness, ground transportation and food storage technology, which keeps our local refrigerators and restaurants well-stocked. Most of us are healthy, because of modern medical technology and taking the advice of nutritionists and personal trainers at least some of the time. For this, we only have the accident of our existences at this wealthy juncture of human history to blame or thank. We’re all just here. Amen.”
 
And then there would be the first atheist schism, as some of us would form our own atheist church that left off that final “Amen.” And the rest of us would be bored. Atheist kids would shuffle in atheist pews, antsy with ennui and ready to get out the second the last atheist bell was rung. Atheist women would check out each other’s clothes, and atheist men would check out the atheist women. One inspirational atheist would lead the non-prayer, and get to pass around the collection plate.
 
His is the job I want. I have struggled to increase my own flock, in the Church of Dollar Store Camouflage Jesus, with hardly any followers to show for it. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, with promises of His Noodley Goodness, and Dudeism, with its sacred tracts that consist of solely of funny lines from The Big Lebowski, both attract more worshippers than the Church of DSCJ, which, I admit, promises little more than a chance to die face-down in the mud for His glory, or, if you live, PTSD.
 
Sure, I’ve daydreamed about a church with a 900-foot tall recreation of my icon in front, with lines of worshippers making pilgrimages to it like it was Vatican Square or Mecca. I’m formally renouncing those dreams now, though, as it becomes increasingly apparent that worshipping together can get you killed.
 
Jews, Christians and Muslims have all been shot up at services in recent years by people who hate Jews, Christians and Muslims. And nobody is more hated than atheists. Or athetits, as we are often called by people who are threatening us with death on Facebook. Gathering together in an atheist non-prayer space would just be asking for it. Although being raked with automatic weapons fire by a religious lunatic is probably a less painful way to go than being burned at the stake or being broken on the rack, which are more traditional ways to dispose of nonbelievers, why give them a chance when you can stay at home and watch football?

Not gathering together and proclaiming that we know the truth better than anybody else, which is essentially what any church is all about, will admittedly not increase the chances of an official atheist holiday being instituted. This column has always advocated for Darwin Day, a day on which atheists get a paid day off, eat and drink as much as they want, and tell their children that if they are good, a kindly old bearded man in a magic flying sailing ship will will arrive in the middle of the night and bring chemistry sets, cheap telescopes and annoying puzzles to smart kids all over the world. Later in the day, the family will gather round to eat mock turtle soup off of the Table of Elements and decorate the Evolutionary Tree.

Or even a week of festivities, like the Jews. Or a month, which we would respectfully call Rama Dama Ding Dong, when we would drink and eat all night and sleep all day.
 
Haven’t had a month like that since I was in college.

From the drafty monasteries of the Middle Ages to the pristine wildernesses of the American West, this world has always abounded with hidden places where young boys can be furgled by adult men away from prying eyes. Confessionals, sacristies and box canyons have all had their share of incidents where a trusted priest or troop leader suddenly turned to his favorite charge and dropped trou.
 
The Church gets all the ink, and admittedly has the far longer history, but the Boy Scouts have been coming on strong. A stat I heard while stuck in traffic last week said that over 12,000 Scouts have been molested by over 8,000 Scout leaders. Most Catholic dioceses have had only a couple hundred pedophile priests outed to the public. Altogether, they can’t possibly add up to 8,000, although when you count priests in the rest of the world, particularly Ireland, you might come up with an equal number.
 
But that’s not fair to America. There are no Boy Scouts of the European Union. Pedos outside our borders have to come up with some other excuse to unzip in front of little boys. Let them. In America, where we love our conveniences, a child molester does not have to go to a seminary and take a vow of celibacy, although if he really wants to wear gowns to work, he may. If he is not inclined to put in that much effort, he merely has to put on a drab green hat, knot a bandanna around his throat, take an oath to be trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent, and immediately he’s allowed to go camping with his prey. It’s like letting Donald Trump run a beauty pageant. Oh, wait…
 
I’ve said in these ramblings before that I survived my Catholic childhood without being molested by any of the distant, terrifying priests and nuns that made my church and parochial school places of dread for me. Their hearts were cold, but I couldn’t tell you personally how cold their fingers were.
 
Likewise, I was a Boy Scout, in the worst boy scout troop ever assembled—Troop 555, the Triple Nickel, out of Lenni, PA. There were no Eagle Scouts in Troop 555—anyone who aspired to be one would have immediately been pummeled by the rest of the troop. There was one First Class Scout, who was routinely bullied. I had the good sense not to rise beyond the rank of Second Class. The alpha Scout of the troop was a gigantic Tenderfoot, a kid who was taller by a foot and heavier by a hundred pounds than any of the rest of us. He had no merit badges and an instinctive hatred of anyone who did.
 
In winter, we went to our Catholic school gym for Scout meetings and played basketball and buck-buck and otherwise tried to injure each other. In spring and fall, we would go camping in the freezing Pennsylvania woods, accompanied by our Scout leader, a devoted beer-drinker, who was helped by his assistant Scout Leaders, who were the men he liked to drink beer with. Sometimes they would make us sing songs around the campfire—it’s where I learned the lyrics to “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” but mostly they just drank beer and let all of us run around the woods with knives and hand-axes, looking for stuff to kill.
 
In the summer, they would take us to Boy Scout summer camp, where we camped with other troops. Our leaders would abandon us, sneaking into town to drink in a bar. Those were truly 555’s glory days—we specialized in waiting for other troops to fall asleep, then raiding their camps, piling on top of their tents until they collapsed, and then holding the canvas down with our weight in the hopes of suffocating the occupants. Then, when we were tired, we’d retreat to our own encampment, where one of our number, virgin as the rest of us, would entertain us by extemporizing songs about all the vagina he hoped to eventually get.
 
Good times. But no molestation was involved. Maybe I was just an ugly kid.