Sins of the sabbath

I spent Saturday deciding on my preferred Sunday sin. What would it be? Theft? Adultery? Murder?

Worse. I thought I’d get up on the sabbath and pound out a blog post.

The act, according to the Bible, will doom me to hell.

Go ahead and heap scorn upon the content here, but wouldn’t sending me to hell for blogging be like sending Al Capone to the pen for tax evasion?

Yet, it’s right there in the Revised Standard Version of my King James Bible; Exodus 20, verse 8: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work.”

Not only that, it goes on to say it is our sacred obligation to see to it that our sons, our daughters, our cattle, our slaves and any traveler who comes near us is prevented from doing any toil.

Frankly, that last bit sounds like a lot of work.

I’ve been troubled by the Fourth Commandment ever since reading A.J. Jacobs’s 2007 book, “The Year of Living Biblically.” In it Jacobs follows all the arcane and obscure laws in the Bible. It’s uproarious fun mingled amidst a gentle message about how our lives could be better if we really did try to follow the basic tenets of the Bible.

I remember being struck by his devotion to not working on the sabbath. It gave him great serenity, he said, and has subsequently written he still does no work on Sundays.

I met Jacobs when he was assigning stories for Esquire and he was kind to me. In my book (unpublished, of course), that makes him a sort of holy man.

But when he decided to cease sabbath work, he was accepting manna from some prestigious publisher so that taints the whole endeavor. He was, in essence, getting paid to not work on Sundays, a heavenly loophole if ever there was one.

The idea, however, never left me and now it troubles me every weekend.

What is work?

I know real men who do real work in factories and if the boss says so they do it on Sundays for time and a half. These men sneer at me when they talk about work. They no more think writing is work than, say, butterfly collecting.

Who am I to argue? I’ve never collected butterflies, but it can’t pay much worse than writing. Plus, I can’t imagine a butterfly ever calling me up to scream I’ve misquoted him.

Still, I try not to write on Sundays.

You know what that leaves? The honey-do list.

I have gutters to clean, creaky screen doors to fix, bathroom floors that need re-tiling and all the seasonal chores that go hand-in-hand with homeownership, marriage and fatherhood.

Each of those chores fits my definition of real work because I detest doing them and can’t do any of it while sitting zombie-like on the couch and watching March Madness.

But I’d catch holy hell if I said, “Sorry, babe, I cannot prepare the flower boxes for spring planting. It’s Sunday and the labor might anger the Almighty.”

Talk about damned if you don’t, damned if you do.

And what about the holy part? Does that mean we’re supposed to spend the whole day in church? Heck, I fidget when the service runs longer than 57 minutes.

Is flying kites with my daughters holy enough? I can’t think of a more soulful exercise on a Sunday.

It’s all very troubling and very vague. And why is that commandment before murder, adultery, theft, lying, coveting and being sweet to mom and dad?

I think the only safe and wise choice for a guy like me is to spend the day on the golf course.

I have to figure 18 holies is the perfect solution to avoiding the sins of the sabbath.

A wee bit 'o bummin' on St. Patrick's Day

I opened the newspaper this morning and it dawned on me: these could be the best two days of the year.

Yet, I’m pessimistic it’s going to work out that way.

On the plus side, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, a great reason for boozy merriment.

I like any holiday that prioritizes drinking over exchanging gifts and greeting cards. There has to be some mathematical formula that proves the more greeting cards that are involved -- Christmas, birthdays -- the worse the holiday.

On the flip side, three of my favorite holidays are St. Patrick’s Day, the Fourth of July and April Fool’s Day.

Nobody gives out “Happy Fourth of July!” cards, thank God.

Then there’s the drinking. The psychoanalysts won’t advise this to their morose patients, but every activity is better when it involves at least some alcoholic consumption.

But today’s shrinks don’t make any money off prescribing things like Jameson or Jim Beam over things like Xanax so that’s not likely to change.

It’s a real pity that all life’s most aggravating endeavors with which adults must wrestle -- commuting, working and wise parenting -- require at least some degree of sobriety.

So we have St. Patrick’s Day, a day when heirloom drunks like me can usually indulge. But I can’t afford to vaporize a day to hangover so cutting lose isn’t an option.

It’s like someone told me I need to send a dozen “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” greeting cards to people who could just drop dead, for all I care.

Then there’s the start of the NCAA basketball tournament. I always plan on spending the day in the bar with good friends all day watching college basketball from around the country.

But two days ago I got a call from an old buddy who used to run a bar I’d frequent.

Note: Nearly all my old friends have at one time or another either run a bar, tended bar. Today, they’re either fundamentalist Christians who wouldn’t dream of touching Demon Rum or are serving prison sentences and looking forward to their release and their first beer in 5-10 years, pending time off for good behavior.

There’s no middle ground.

But my old friend is trying to revive his sagging bar business by opening at 3 p.m. He called to personally invite me to be there to watch the afternoon Pitt game.

This I will gladly do.

Yet, it’s taking me away from my core bar and my core friends on one of the best bar days of the entire year.

Now when my primary bar owner finds out I’m returning to my former bar owner, he’ll be furious at the betrayal. He’ll think the former bar owner will charm me in ways that will lure my affections back to my ex-bar.

And, yes, I’m aware of all the Freudian undercurrents here. But it’s not like that, I swear.

A lot of lonely adolescent boys dream of a day when they’ll have two girlfriends and all the illicit fun that implies.

Trust me, son, it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

And I guess the thing that’s bothering me most is Paul. I’ve for two years looked forward to Paul’s arrival. I dreamed about Paul. I couldn’t wait to see Paul.

Well, tomorrow, Paul will be here.

“Paul” is the new Simon Pegg/Nick Frost movie about two sci-fi geeks who find an smart ass alien.

Pegg and Frost made two of my all-time favorite movies, “Hot Fuzz” and “Shaun of the Dead.”

They couldn’t be any funnier. So I’ve been eager to see their new movie. But as details emerged, I began to feel a sort of dread.

First, there’s Paul himself, a little alien voiced by Seth Rogan, who’s never made me laugh.

I sensed what was happening was Hollywood producers wanted to take these two comic geniuses, Brits, and make them more palatable to dimwitted American audiences who’ve made Rogan and movies like “Super Bad”  and “Knocked Up” big hits.

Early reviews on the reliably accurate www.rottentomatoes.com are, “eh.”

Well, I don’t want, “eh,” I want, “Ah!” I want, “Oh!” I want, "Ha!"

So I feel bad about feeling bad that my perfect little world won’t be all I’d hoped it would be.

I wonder if anyone near the Fukushima Daiichi plant is bumming because their St. Patrick’s Day isn’t working out how they’d hoped.

Merry March Madness!

You can judge how much a guy dislikes any given holiday based on the number of greeting cards he has to send or see.

So far, there are no “Happy March Madness!” greeting cards.

And, make no mistake, March Madness is the number one guy holiday on the whole guy calendar. It has gambling, drinking, saturation coverage and the kind of buddy-buddy camaraderie that’s been absent from even professional football ever since the NFL decided to feminize the sport with women’s outreach programs and things like Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez.

I have gainfully employed friends who are taking the day off because their employers don’t put March Madness on equal footing with all the repressive religious holidays that involve sermons and in-laws.

So, of course, I’m taking today off, too. Instead of falling short of my thrice-weekly goal to write one coherent 750-word blog post, I’m posting this multitude of shorter, equally incoherent ones.

And I’ll leave it to you gainfully employed folks to wonder what a guy who doesn’t do or earn anything does differently when he takes a day off from whatever it is he does or doesn’t do.

• If the people who sold beer and booze with ads that earnestly urge “Please Drink Responsibly” were the least bit honest they’d say, “Please drink lots -- just don’t get caught breaking anything!”

• There are well-regarded sitcoms with million-dollar budgets and squads of witty writers that fail to produce anything as funny as either of the Old Spice deodorant commercials involving the black guy on the white horse and the dashing gent who makes an elegant meat portrait out of carved turkey for his girlfriend. If I didn’t already use Old Spice, I’d be switching.

• As a proud alumnus, I couldn’t be more thrilled about the Ohio University upset over Georgetown. It’s the biggest victory in the school’s history. I just had to fill out a questionnaire that asked the offbeat query: “Where would you most like to be?” I put “1985” because it was my senior year at OU in Athens, Ohio. I don’t want to diminish all my other years, but it was just such a great time and, for better or worse, Athens was where I became who I am. Still, I’m happy right where I am. But putting “1985” sounded like a more creative answer than “Outer Banks” or something new agey like “Stuck in a Moment.”

• I like to joke that the only thing I learned during my four years at OU was to never mix Ouzo and beer. It’s an exaggeration, of course, but the essence of the wisdom should not be overlooked: Mixing beer and the volcanic Greek liqueur will inevitably lead a foolhardy drinker to wake up in a strange place, with a killer hangover and no recollection of what happened to his or her pants.

• Anyone who thinks the election of our first black president has done anything to dent our historic racism ought to spend an afternoon watching college basketball in a bar full of rednecks like the one where I imbibe. Your average redneck bases for whom he is rooting solely on the number of blacks on each team. It doesn’t matter if they look like gansta rappers or young Denzel Washingtons. If they’re black, the redneck wants them to lose.

• Still, these are great guys and I prefer their company to that of many more fair-minded bores. It just says something about where the country is right now. And, yes, there’s this: They think Sarah Palin’s going to be a really swell president.

• I’ll be following the recent celebrity breakups of Sandra Bullock and the effervescent Kate Winslet. Too soon for me to play matchmaker, but I’ll figure it all out soon enough. I prefer Winslett to Bullock, but if either of them ends up with Jon Gosselin I’m canceling my People magazine subscription.

• Me and the boys back in Athens used to think we were great wits when we’d say things like, “You can’t spell Ouzo without OU.”

• I’d love to know how many days Tiger Woods devoted to saving his family. By his returning to golf so soon, it’s clear saving his family is driving him right back to the lifestyle that jeopardized it in the first place. I love my wife and kids, but one of the reasons I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize my family is because I know I’d be forced to spend more time with them. We already spend plenty of time together. Any more and they’d be sick of me and all those friendly rednecks would be the poorer without access to my enlightened insights.

• But I wouldn’t recommend the way I live to many others. It’s like the great Capt. Augustus McCrae says in one of my favorite books, “Lonesome Dove.” “Boys, what’s good for me, ain’t necessarily good for the weak-minded.”

• You can’t spell bourbon, voudka or Scoutch without OU either. See, I learned something in Athens!

• Merry March Madness to one and all!