Gibblers

Monday, April 02, 2007

The Triumphant Return of Osteen's Mullet!


Now that a badass blogger like Ben Butler--AKA Carroll Gardens--has come on board, shit is gonna get settled right quick. But even a badass blogger like Ben Butler has to figure things out--get the lay of the land, so to speak--before he can really make his mark. One thing Ben does not know about me, for example, and may not even be able to comprehend...is my growing fascination with Joel Osteen. Few, indeed, could have predicted such a fascination. Sure, those who know me from my pre-Minnesota years are aware that I wuz once ensconced in the weird circles of conservative Christianity for a time. But, in the long run of 38 years during which I have limped along and not often run, my flirtation with the Southern Baptists and the Assemblies of God for three or four years shall ultimately be judged as Brush has assured us the, ahem, "difficulties" in Iraq will be judged: as a comma. Why, unlike Brush, I could even fit that comma into a sentence: "TXB briefly flirted with the Southern Baptists and the AoG for a brief period that could be likened to a comma, but ultimately he turned back to a kind of nonjudgmental, dispassionate, yet sometimes deeply spiritual belief system not unlike the Buyssesque Lutheran faith on which he had been raised. Except for the fact that he didn't believe anything the Lutherans said, either." But Joel Osteen and his mullet and his glittery, football stadium-sized church--all of which appear on my T.V. screen for a half hour on the weekends--have begun to woo me back to at least some bedrock belief system in the goodness of God and life. Can this be sustained? Who knows? Mullets must be trimmed, and sometimes it's hard to pack a football stadium-sized church when half the citizenry is undoubtedly beating off to those commercials for "Girls Gone Wild" videos (also to be found on your cable T.V. on the weekends...or any time after 10:00 on weeknights, till six in the morning). And sometimes TXB stubs his toe and screams out, "Fuck you, God!!!" But this too shall pass...

2 Comments:

Blogger Carroll Garten said...

I didn't know about your double life as a born-again Christian, but I understand how and why people get involved with folks like the SBs and AoGs. I got mixed up with the Intervarsity crowd when I first got to SSU. Anyway, I'm glad to read you've made some progress from your former signature line "if there is a God, he must be unimaginably cruel" to appreciating Joel Osteen's mullet. My mom gets some monthly magazine of the biographies of notable people and Osteen was featured in it last November along with Patrick Fitzgerald, Judith Miller, and Debbie Fields. Osteen is one of my favorite evangelists, along with Max Lucado and Jack Van Impe (even though he's nuts--I like Rexella). I've read Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life, as well as a lot of Philip Yancey and Tony Campolo, and I guess my point is that I can relate to the search for something that reaffirms the goodness of God and life (at the very least, the goodness of life).

9:46 PM  
Blogger TXB said...

Amen, brother. There wuz a good line on, of all things, "24" last nite where Ricky Schroeder--who before just seemd like some asshole on the show--talked about reading The Koran, The Bible, and the Upanishads (whatever those are)..."and anything else I can get my hands on." And then he more or less quoted U2: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for."

11:44 AM  

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