Archive for September, 2005

Everywhere you go…

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005

Yesterday and today are the days that I spend months of every year waiting for. When, first thing in the morning, you step outside and the clean breath of Autumn slips around your chest and wraps its arms around your back, it’s the most comforting experience I have, outside of maybe the first breath of spring. I hate the summer’s heat, and I always hated the oppression of school, but there was something liminal and promising about September that gave me just the faintest hope of happiness.

It was gone from me for years when I lived in California. I moved to California for the first time at the exact same time that I had finally lost hope. I know that sounds melodramatic, but it probably goes a long way to explaining what happened to me between 1988 and 1998. In the summer of 87, I lived as if I was a special person, an artist, a person who’s average intellect was at least enhanced by a wild and sweeping fantasy life that I could bring out on stage or in song.

It had taken a fair number of years to beat me down, years of failure and frustration. Every September, I would believe that the coming school would be different, that the coming year would be different, that I would meet the people who would be able to answer all of my questions in a language I understood, but year after year I was ignored and mocked and belittled. Not by my fellow students, I am not one of those people who romanticize a dorky existence, I was disregarded by anyone over the age of 20 and finally, by my junior year of high school, I agreed.

So, that first autumn, 1998, that came with no seasonal change was the first autumn I had given up. Failure had become not just an option, but a fail-safe. I couldn’t actually do anything, I wanted to fail more than I wanted to succeed, my failure was the only thing that assured me a position outside of judgement. I CHOSE failure, I didn’t fail. I had succeeded in failing, which is actually enormously liberating.

There was a long stretch where my hope was buried in self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, when I would walk around all day talking loudly and passionately about my own greatness and lie in a pool of sweat all night knowing it wasn’t true. I could tell that the people I was looking for were all around me, those people who were smarter than me and knew answers to stuff, I could tell they were around me, but I had quit looking, I had given up. Fuck em. Maybe they knew, maybe they didn’t. My “career” as such, was fueled entirely by vengeance. All I wanted was to deny other people the roles they were auditioning for, to make enough money to do the small things that I enjoyed, and at the end of that to maybe borrow or steal enough money to get by once my first wife took off.

I’ve said it before, poets and madmen take the weather personally, and I’m neither really. But that first spring, the spring of 2000, when I got to New York…

Guys, it’s here. Autumn is here in New York. Hope is here, the people here who are talking, the ones who are writing and singing and producing plays and publishing poems, the people here answer my questions. The heat has broken, the melancholy skies promise and deliver, the whole of the season wraps its arms around me like the answer to a prayer. When I find an eyelash, I don’t know what to ask for before I blow it off, I don’t know what to wish for over my birthday cake, I don’t know what the first star will bring me that’s anywhere near as beautiful as the feeling of finally being home, finally feeling – not hope – but that feeling that lasts after years of hope when you still hope.

I just don’t know why y’all aren’t here. I know, there are things to do and businesses to take care of and money and lives, but God, you guys, what it would be if we could all be here. The sun rises here, I’m at the beginning of America and y’all are all the way at the end. I can’t make an argument for being here, it’s hard and we’re barely keeping our heads above water. I know that what you are doing is important, I’m not lying, I know it is. It’s just that I found hope here, I found love and I found the people who answer my questions and even, astonishingly, ask me some. I found the language I’ve tried to speak my entire life.

I can’t infect you from this distance, I can’t wave my hand over the pot to make you hungrier for dinner. But I know you remember the smell, I know you can feel that first tiny sting of Autumn, and I genuinely hope it brings all of you home soon.

The Inability to Talk

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

I have not wanted a blog about pedophilia to remain up for several days. That blog was essentially a joke, a challenge that I gave myself and stepped up to in some sort of juvenile dick measuring contest against the world, one which I find myself in all the time and which I have absolutely no respect for.

There is an inherent flaw in my writing, one I’m not sure how to address. I write what I mean, and then it is misunderstood on some level, and I go back and clarify, and it makes things worse, and I give up. I’ve grown up with one foot on either side of the digital age, so I think I kinda understand what the problem is. The more one writes, the more one gives space and breath to a point of view or an argument, two things happen; you make your point of view more refined and more specific, but you also give more tiny tributaries of thought a chance to be argued with.

I noticed early in the digital revolution that the best way to communicate via email was with lots of short emails. You were guaranteed to get more in return, you would be able to clarify as you go, and you could be assured that someone was gonna actually read everything you write.

There is a problem with bullet-point arguments. Internet trollers will certainly have noticed by now that message boards and blogs are littered with comments where a person’s larger thought is picked apart by focusing on each of the smaller details. It’s very effective and important, definitely. Our lives are littered with false syllogisms, one shouldn’t be able to get away with saying “because of A,B,C,D,E and F, this is thus” without someone walking through each example and showing it to be wrong.

The problem is semantics. When someone says “The Ramones were the backbone of the punk scene” someone can tear that argument apart. But, if someone is saying “there was a sort of punk rebirth in my high school in 1995. It was ridiculous and it only lasted for six months, but there were guys with mohawks and safety pins through their cheeks, and it was all because three or four guys read the same book about CBGBs. We went and bought all of the music we could get our hands on. The Ramones were the backbone of the punk scene…” then you can see how picking this apart doesn’t mean anything.

This may seem to be a polemic directed at Nate Williams, a gorgeous and brilliant young man who’s only relation to me is that I am also a gorgeous and brilliant young man, but it isn’t. His writing is important and he’s one of the best thinkers I know. But he does make a biblical argument about Christ, trying to make sure I understand that it has nothing to do with the fairy tale Christ I seem to love. He does this despite my introduction, explaining that I was inventing the Christ of my choosing, the same way that everyone else does.

This blog isn’t something I use to change minds or to take on issues. This blog gives me a chance to keep my intellectual claws sharp is all, I get to think things out in an organized way, something that is really good for my massively ADHD brain. I don’t really ask you, the reader, any kind of questions usually, I’m interested in engaging with y’all in person or over email or, really over drinks would be the best way.

I have this mess of ideas that shoot around my utterly average mind, and this blog gives me a chance to wrestle them down and sit on them long enough to look at them and figure out if I like them. I might, in two or three days, write a blog entitled “I Am Not A Christian” and it will have as much meaning as the earlier post.

Honestly, I wrote a blog several days ago where I talked about how excited I am about our upcoming play, and how much of the thrill of that comes from the fact that our last play got away from me, but the production company asked me to take it down. So I did. A blog for me is a chance to hone the public aspect of my diary. My actual diary would contain dreams and frustrations and techniques for dealing with the people in my life, but I would hate if anyone ever read it. This is, at least, meant to be digested in public, but if I don’t ever really engage in debate on this blog, I hope that it’s apparent why. Almost everything I write is only partly true, in that I believe that almost everything *everyone* writes is only partly true, and real debate and exchange of ideas is only possible face-to-face and aided by alcohol.

The Case for Pedophilia

Monday, September 19th, 2005

So, I remarked last week that people who regurgitate opinions they read without any analysis, particularly people who ingest information from one source and then vomit it back as if it were their own opinions, are the worst kinds of people there are. People commented on this, and many disagreed with me. Ironically, some people only barely read what I wrote and when I insisted that helping New Orleans fell under the purview of the federal government, I was taken to task using tangential and regurgitated information, only making my point clearer.

(Not to be a dick, but the people dying in Iraq under Saddam are the responsibility of our federal government, but the people drowning in New Orleans under Katrina aren’t? That seems dumb to me. I’m sure it makes sense, but on a gut level, that seems wrong.)

However, one rejoinder said that pedophiles were in fact worse people than those who refuse to think. I disagree, and I’d like to explain why.

Sexuality has to be the most hotly debated aspect of western culture. There isn’t a single thing we spend more time thinking about, talking about and arguing over than sex. If America had nothing to discuss when it comes to sex, if there was nothing sexy about it, then there would be no abortion debate, no gay-rights debate, no gender equality debate, our advertisements would certainly look different, and pedophiles would be, simply, criminals.

But it isn’t that easy. We celebrate youth culture. We celebrate the youthful body. All of our models look pre-pubescent, or just post-pubescent. The perfect male body is hairless, thin, the perfect male face is smooth, youthful. All of our attitudes, the “what do I care” blase way that teenagers make their way in the world is, when put on or embraced by men in their dating years, enormously attractive.

The astounding inclination for our culture to try to be younger, hipper, thinner and, frankly, dumber is, in its own way, a kind of pedophilia, a sexual love of children.

I had sex starting really young, and I never really stopped. Lots of partners early on, not so many now. Down to one, if you must know the truth. And I’ve seen a change in my mind, a way that my brain has shifted so I look at young women now as, honestly, foolish. I look at young boys, and youth obsessed men, and I have no respect for them. There are young people that I love, but sexuality does not come within a country mile for me. I know very beautiful women in their late teens and early twenties and, my hand to God, I think of them as daughters.

But the discussion is important. Why are we so obsessed, and where is the line? I had sex when I was thirteen, with a fourteen year old. I had a lot of sex between 14 and 17, and some of it was with people over the age of 18. I had a lot of sex because it was the 80s, and everyone thought that they had to, AIDS and Reagan’s Political world hadn’t yet sunk in the way it did with the youth of today.

Why do men find 15 year old women attractive? I know why I did when I was fifteen, but why do older men? And why do adult men and women find themselves sexually drawn to children who are not yet sexually viable, who are not yet capable of even having sex?

Do you think these people are just lazy? Do you think the rest of us, all of us, are attracted to children, and we just have the fortitude and maturity to turn our backs on these pecadillos? I shouldn’t get too much credit for *not* being a pedophile, I find the whole thing distasteful, but the existence of pedophilia is an aspect of our culture that merits discussion because it is an illness that goes beyond simple brain imbalances. We are a nation that obsessed over Britney’s pre-adult virginity, we’re a nation that bemoans the way teenagers dress but which gawks as much as we mock.

You can say its wrong, you can say that pedophiles are the worst people there are, but I think that’s an easy answer. People who aren’t willing to ask, “Why? Why a child? Why sex?” people who stop, shrieking from the horrible honesty of human sexuality, people who stop LONG before even getting to anything that uncomfortable, the people who stop listening the moment someone even asks a question about the person they voted for or the person who went to their college or played on their team, the person who yearns for their life to be free of questions, free of answers, free of the responsibility to make a decision and then to find out that it’s wrong, the person who wants the slippery slope of life to carry them to a warm comfortable death with their illusions and fables intact… I think this is the worst sort of person there is.

Of course, pedophiles might be a close second. Or maybe they’re worse, I’m willing to hear you out.

Pedophiles who tell old jokes and don’t have an original thought in their heads (besides having sex with children) are the absolute worst.

Sad

Monday, September 12th, 2005

I gotta say, that I’ve done some things in my life that make me sad. I’ve cheated on lovers and had to admit to them that I did. I’ve failed classes and shown up with homework not done. I’ve been at rehearsals for shows I didn’t like and wasn’t willing to work hard on. I’ve had to ask my parents for money. Man, I’ve done a lot of stuff that bums me out.

But for some reason, every time I break a glass it makes me terribly sad. It’s the sound of the glass coming down, it’s the destruction of something so lovely and so useful. And there’s the horrible wait as the glass is heading to its doom, it always takes a certain amount of time for it to drop… in fact, there’s a moment before it drops, when you know it’s going to… Jesus, that’s awful.

I mean, a lot of times there is a drop that’s about to happen and you catch it, and you congratulate yourself. Think of how many times you’ve been so relieved, and felt so smart and fast, when you’ve caught that glass right before it falls. And sometimes, the glass doesn’t fall, doesn’t break, it just tilts over and you dump water or milk or diet coke or whatever all over the table, and it never occurs to you how bad it could have been because you’re pissed about spilling shit all over everything.

And that’s the thing, no-one ever gets mad about a broken glass. There’s something universal about it. In fact, I gotta say, if someone comes over to your house and breaks a glass and you get mad at them, it says something about you. It says that you don’t understand that people genuinely are trying to do the best they can with their lives and that sometimes we don’t live up to it. If someone breaks a wine glass at your house and you get mad at them… I mean, what the fuck, they were drinking wine at your house, they got drunk, what were you *thinking* was gonna happen? You should look at glasses that house alcohol as essentially disposable, and if you get to re-use them, you’re ahead of the game.

I just broke a water glass. In fact, I broke it on my brand new poured concrete floor in our kitchen. And, seriously, my night was over when that happened. I was just so fucking bummed. Jordana and I were talking shit and watching a dumb movie and she asked me to get her a glass of water, and in the course of doing it, I fucked up and dropped a glass, completely full of water, right into the drying cement.

(Jordana and I realized something today. We like asking the other to do things for us, because we like doing things for each other so much. A lot of times, she’ll ask if I want her to make the bed, or I’ll ask if I can get her something from the kitchen. It’s stupid little stuff, and it’s actually just a game, like we’re flirting with each other. But it’s nice that we both understand what it is. It’s not the kind of thing we keep score on, and, in fact, we can totally refuse to do the nice thing without any hurt feelings because we’re asking for stupid shit anyway. But it seems to be a good part of being married for us.)

(The bad part is talking about money. She doesn’t like to be stupid about money, and I’m teetering on the edge of stupidity always. Plus, she’s wrong.)

I dropped the glass because I was pouring water into it while I was checking my voice mail. I thought I was being awesome. I wasn’t. I broke a glass.

God, it sucked. I’m going to bed.

Wipe Hands On Pants

Friday, September 9th, 2005

About ten years ago, I was coming out of a rest-stop bathroom and I asked my brother Ian if he could tell me what someone had written on the bathroom hand-dryer, in lieu of the actual instructions. Even though he hadn’t been in there yet, he knew what it said. It used to be that instructions were needed on the hand-dryer in bathrooms, but now, apparently, there’s just a picture of someone pressing the button and two hands rubbing together.

(As an aside – these hand dryers (which don’t work) don’t really need instructions any more because people have basically gotten the hang of them. But for some reason, we still need directions on shampoo? I gotta assume that, unless you’ve been following Phish since you were in diapers, everyone, even in third world countries, can figure out how to wash their hair. I mean, seriously, if you live in the most desperate circumstances possible, don’t you think that learning how to wash your own hair would come months and years before learning the English required to follow the instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle?)

Anyway, there were instructions on the hand dryer that said this.

1. Push button
2. Rub hands under warm air.
3. Turns off automatically.

And almost always, I mean in about 90% of cases, the dryer instructions were altered with a knife or a pen or whatever so that they read.

1. Push butt
2. Rub hands under armhair
3. Turns off automatically
4. Wipe Hands On Pants.

Someone went to every single bathroom in America and took the time to write in the fourth step. Because, frankly, you do have to wipe your hands on your pants. The same pants you wiped your hands on after you coughed last. After you sneezed last. The same pant legs that caught steaming molecules of your last meal. That’s where you wipe your damn hands when the air dryer doesn’t work.

But that’s not my point.

See there are things that people say that they think are funny. A dog will lick its balls, and someone will say “If I could do that, I’d never leave the house”. Someone will say “what do they call 100 (fill-in-the-hated-profession-here) at the bottom of a river? – A GOOD START!”

It’s boring as hell. GOD it’s boring. You people should be fucking ashamed of yourselves.

You know that guy on the train? The guy that woke up just long enough to locate his bottle of cheap liquor and drank from it before passing out again? That guy who just peed on his own clothes? That guy is serving a purpose. Those of you who repeat a joke that someone else told, you are the worst people in the world. The absolute lowest.

But wait, there’s more.

Because it isn’t just repeating a joke. It’s repeating the same fucking idea. Y’all who have lines to pick up girls? Especially lines you’ve tried before, and they’ve worked? Y’all should go fucking kill yourselves. The years are ticking away, jackass, the years are running down the drain and you are gonna path-of-least-resistance your way right down to the day you die. You’re gonna have kids with one of these dumb ass mental cripples that falls for your line and you guys will have fights that don’t make any sense and your kids are gonna grow up and try the same lines you tried and they’ll work and some other fucking idiot is gonna procreate and the world is just gonna spin down to dust while NOT A SINGLE ORIGINAL THOUGHT COMES OUT OF YOUR FUCKING HEAD.

But wait one second. That’s not my point. This is.

For you fucking idiots who have found a way to jam your heads up your asses about Bush’s total failure as our President this last week, purely because you feel like you need to constantly return to the idea that those on the left are ALWAYS wrong and those on the right are ALWAYS right, you’re done.

Months of us taking off our shoes at the airport, and all a terrorist had to do was blow a hole in a levee in New Orleans. They could drive an SUV full of fertilizer and fuel oil to the levee, and thousands would have died. But they didn’t. We had years of warning, everyone knew the levees would break, and no-one did anything. The Republicans didn’t, the Democrats didn’t, America is a teaming mess of classism and racism, and these things need to be dealt with on a Federal level.

You can support President Bush after this, of course. This was a monumental mistake, but, provided you believe the rest of what he does makes up for this catastrophe, I don’t mind you supporting the President. But if you tell me that the federal government isn’t to blame for this…

You’re just writing what you’ve read someone else write. You don’t know anything. You are too stupid for me to listen to, and, especially your idiotic blog comments… I mean, you’re no better than the wall in some truck stop bathroom, and twice as full of shit.

clarity

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

So, one interesting thing that happens when you produce a show is that you find out just how clearly you communicate ideas. When you are writing a musical, you have three writers (sometimes more, sometimes less) and so even from the first moment, you have a combination of ideas.

Coming clean, somewhat, and speaking for only me, I felt that we were writing a Dadaist musical, and anti-musical. It’s tough for me to try to follow up on it, because I thought the basic point of this musical is that musicals are completely absurd. In order for that to have been the clear message, we would have needed to be a lot more aggressive in how we produced the play.

In some ways, the problems are systemic, because we don’t ever have one person on stage who is deriding the ridiculousness of the circumstances. We’ve asked the audience to be the person calling bullshit on the show, and for a lot of people, they just dismissed it as “silly” instead of reading our minds and realizing that we consider the entire genre somewhat silly.

But the truth is, we didn’t make that show. Our show had a sweetness and a purpose that snuck it’s way in. It happens with every one of our shows, somehow we can’t help but add a second layer of something completely seperate. Sometimes it’s like adding vinegar to oil and putting it on the salad, but this time it was more like adding a second dressing to an already dressed salad.

How can we claim that the show was meaningless when it so clearly has a political point that we were trying to make? How can we claim that we were mocking musicals when we so clearly worked so hard on crafting the songs? We ran into a problem early on because I hate parodies that aren’t as good as the thing they are parodying. “Wet Hot American Summer” is amazing because the thing it’s choosing to make fun of, retarded 70s camp movies, is actually dumb to begin with. I didn’t like “Urinetown” as much as I might have because I actually really love the musicals they were mocking.

Anyway, one can’t complain when one’s writing is not taken in the tone that it’s given, it means there is a flaw in the writing, not in the audience.

So, let me clarify what I was saying in my post about Christianity.

I believe that the love the Christ child received is what made him the messiah. I believe in the parable. I have made my own Christianity, and I feel allowed to do that because everyone else does it too, and in my mind Jesus isn’t a real man, he is a story. His lessons are all told in parables, and I’ve chosen to believe that the story of his life is a giant parable.

A child is born in desperate circumstances, in abject poverty. His mother never had sex with his father, but his father doesn’t ask any questions, he loves her and he loves the boy without question. Out of nowhere, shepherds came and stood watch over the sleeping baby, giving him love. Three men, in their wisdom, brought gifts to a baby they didn’t know, out of love.

When this boy because a man, one by one people turned to him and said, “I will give you my devotion, my love” and because he received their love, he became more and more divine. He was able to turn the love he was given into a source of magic, he was given so much love that he could heal the sick and feed the hungry, always claiming that the power came from a source beyond him, the source that created him. He said “God is love”.

His father was love, that which made him divine was the basic human element of love.

He said things like “what good is it to love only those who love you? Anyone can do that. Love those that don’t deserve it.” And he said that because he knew that, as a baby, as a boy, he was given love for no reason. I don’t believe in a corporeal Christ, I don’t believe that these words mean what Christians think they mean. I’m just saying what the story means to me.

I have been remade because of the love I’ve received, love that I didn’t deserve. My brothers and my sister love me despite my years of not giving a shit about them. My parents love me despite the years I spent disregarding them. My wife loves me despite the fact that I have never treated women well, despite the fact that I never deserved it. I’ve been remade because of the love I’ve received, and that is the story of Christ to me. It’s why the story means so much to me.

So when Jesus says “the path to my father’s kingdom is through me” what he means is, in order to become a holy man, you have to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, to be forgiven for one’s trespasses, one has to forgive those who’ve tresspassed against one. I’ve decided that my love for the story, and my belief in its truth, makes me more a Christian than any other religion. It’s one man’s decision, and it isn’t that important.

I am a Christian

Thursday, September 1st, 2005

There are a number of reasons that people choose one faith over another, I guess. Mostly, though, it’s hardly faith, it’s ethnicity. Your great great grandparents are Catholic, every one you’re related to is Catholic and Surprise! you’re Catholic. There was a time when your religion was your people, and now the whole idea of ethnicity is so muddied, we’re all such mongrels (not Mongrels, I suppose) that we call it a faith or some-such.

So, everyone gets to pick and choose. There are Catholics out there that are pro-choice, and that makes sense to them. There are people who are basically agnostic, but they’re *POSITIVE* that Scientology is crap. Everyone is inventing their own rules about this stuff, so I get to as well.

On our first date, Jordana asked me what my favorite childhood story was. Apparently, she’d been told that you can tell a lot about a person by their favorite nursery rhyme, and she thought it was an interesting thing to investigate. Although our first date was actually a passover seder, I told her the truth, which is that the most powerful nursery story I was told was the story of Jesus Christ.

We were raised on it, even though our parents had no religion. My dad was totally disdainful of religion, openly mocking my mother’s Mormon relatives. But our lives have been shaped by the Christ story, totally and completely.

Every Christmas, for years, I spent almost all of my time singing carols as part of a choir. From the age of 15 until I was about 23 I performed every single Christmas, and a large chunk of that was the standard fare. God Rest Ye, Here We Come A’Wassailing, that kind of stuff, and every year we had to sing “Little Drummer Boy”. And every year, at some point, if it was during the 13th or 30th or 300th concert, I would listen to the treble voices tell the story while I rum-pummed my way through, and I would cry.

I recorded some 1800 or 1900 songs over the course of ten years. Songs from every influence, songs that I loved, songs that I *wrote* even. And these songs moved me to some degree, sometimes quite a bit. But when we were recording the Christmas album, when we recorded the songs my mom wrote about the Christ child, I actually had a hard time with it. She asked me to sing the Stableman’s Carol, a song about the man who ran the stable, who tried to keep the animals quiet so the baby would sleep, and I couldn’t record for about ten minutes because I couldn’t stop crying. It had never happened before, it has never happened since.

I don’t know what it means to have someone die for your sins, and it makes even less sense pre-emptively. I don’t know why hate-filled controlling monsters call themselves Christians, I honestly don’t know what the hell they are reading. Jesus didn’t hate homos, he didn’t hate Jews and Arabs, he didn’t say a word about abortion, and he didn’t say anything about taking over America. I don’t know where the hell these people are getting it. If they’re getting it from the Old Testament, they should check out the part about “I came to complete the law…” Or maybe I should just butt the fuck out of it.

I’ll tell you why I’m a Christian. The story goes thus; a baby was born of two poor people, and a kindness was performed. The shepherds came and stood watch. The inn-keeper gave them room when there was none. The kings brought gifts. I don’t know that the child would have been the messiah if he had not been loved, but he was. His is the example, that kindness can bring peace.

This baby, it could have been any baby. It could be Skylar or Polly. It could be Lucy. The child is born the child of God and the more love it gets, the better chance it has to save the world. I’m a Christian because I believe in that hope, in the hope that love creates love, that love makes people better. If the shepherds had turned away, if the kings hadn’t followed the star, then who knows. Maybe he wouldn’t be Christ.

I’ve been saved by the love of the people around me. It doesn’t matter how late it starts, it doesn’t matter. If you are 50 years old and you haven’t yet been loved completely, then you are still the child waiting to be born. And even now, no matter when it happens, someone’s love can save you, and your love can save other people.

The last entry was about Puppetry of the Penis, and I promise you, there will be more like that. But I just want to say, the allegory for me, the reason I am a Christian, is because I believe in the promise of humanity, I believe, firmly, that the love I’ve been shown has made me able to love others more and better, and the gifts that the shepherds and the stablemen and the kings gave to Jesus made him able, later, to cure the sick and heal the blind and gave him the courage to say “love your neighbor and pray for those who persecute you”, and that as soon as you love someone else, it comes back to you ten fold. That is the promise of heaven, that’s what he means when he talks about the kingdom of his father, about the kingdom that doesn’t exist on earth.

When I hear the Little Drummer Boy, it makes me cry, because that boy made Jesus into Jesus Christ. And if it makes me cry, then I’m a Christian.