Mark Twain Fried Chicken

[snurri]

Mark Twain Fried Chicken
Originally uploaded by Snurri.

Chicago's been kind of a lonely place lately, so I decided to turn 36 in Hannibal, Missouri. I didn't meet any ghosts, but I saw a lot of statues and several young fellows who may or may not aspire to become Huck and/or Tom. (Apparently, there is a tradition in Hannibal where a boy and a girl of the appropriate age are chosen to be Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher for the year. Hm.) I did not spend $70 on a set of Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn volumes illustrated by Norman Rockwell. I did go to the Mark Twain cave. I did not ride on a riverboat. I did eat a steak at a restaurant that was once a whorehouse. Also, I did take pictures, so my Flickr account actually has something on it now.

Also, ouch.

Comments

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Back in my HS composition class we had to do an anthropological paper on a subculture we were unfamiliar with, and I ended up doing one on Christian Scientists. A friend of mine's mom was an on-again, off-again member of one of the local churches, so I was able to go to a meeting. It was interesting. Almost more like group therapy than what I thought of as organized religion, which was the rote and ritual of Catholicism.

I grew up on the Mississippi (in St. Paul), but aside from a few day trips on riverboats I've not spent much time on it. And yet my novels, particularly, always have rivers at the center of them. I'm jealous of your trip! I'm going to have to take one of my own sometime.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Group therapy...except for the very fucked up parts that make most of us recovering CS folks bent in the head. Your body isn't real, your emotions are error, if you're sick it's your fault for not being pure enough, doctors are evil and by the way you should totally let your kid die instead of giving them insulin. I didn't get any immunizations till I was 6 years old. It's actually a really dangerous religion and one which has hurt so many people, and killed more than a few.

I recommend God's Perfect Child--it's a great book on the origins of the church that is not colored by the very powerful lobby of Boston.

And yes, go. It is a magic place. Clams and fireflies and herons and lockmasters who have been reading Huck Finn for five years and are only fifty pages in, green, green water and strange winds and coyotes. Worth every second.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I wasn't saying I thought it was group therapy of the good variety. I was kind of creeped out by the level of rationalization on display (although I couldn't have articulated it then), and by the way they hovered around me as if I was fresh meat. (The only time I've felt that weirded out was during my one visit to a Scientology center.) And of course the illness as a weakness of faith. Strange thinking. I'll buy that there is a psychosomatic component to health, but that's taking it too far.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a dying faith. There's not many left, and hardly any of them are young, so they do tend to vulture any new faces. I keep threatening to take my river-compatriots to a service, which I think would be hilarious, since one of them has asthma and probably could not make it through a service without horking on her inhaler.

But then, I have kind of a sick sense of humor.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Hee! That would be an expedition; get a pack o' folks to sit in the second row, sucking on inhalers, popping antihistamines, giving themselves insulin injections . . .