An atheistic argument for the existence of God

How does a Chilean apple tree differ from one standing in Washington?

Am I bad at communicating or is everyone else hard of hearing?

To be young, gifted, destitute, and belligerent - that's the ultimate dream.

Soon we will all be priced out of the life market and forced to peddle death.

My, what inspiration Christians can derive from nothing! It brings a tear to my eye.

An atheistic argument for the existence of God - sure, She exists. She is Mother Goose. She's the tooth fairy. She's the well-stacked multi-breasted goddess of war or peace or sex or something. She's an inaudible whisper traveling along a favonian stream. She's a hurricane - blindingly destructive. She's a tornado and She wants your ruby shoes. She makes the ground move beneath your feet. She's as real as you wish her to be.

The question is: why do so many wish their deity to be some bedraggled chump with roman columns for legs, dressed in a dirty toga, and has a bloody cross for a face? Exist? Sure. But there's no material, no flowing beard or sandals or manly sarong - shit, surely it could be Socrates if I squinted the right way. If deities are dreamed up for amusement, why the fuck would your God resemble an ancient Greek pedophile? But alas, of course existence, in the flat purely material single dimension, eludes deities - beauty too.

Man dreams up perfect forms to fuel necessary neuroses and anxieties. How would he bemuse himself without neurosis? What meaning would there be for an existence less ordinary? A giant predatory Socrates plodding around on Roman column legs, smiting the unbelieving?

But let's face it, God is a neurotic - Socrates be damned. She is everywhere, but constantly craves attention. She's the barstar who attracts all sorts of "unwanted" attention and goes home alone. She exists in your mind - but, poof, gone like that. She's spectral. She's everywhere, but nowhere to be found. There she is, your God, hiking up Her skirt, begging for a hagiographic gaze.

Contacts are condoms of the eye

I'm tired, but can't get to sleep.

'Something' is tired. I need a new fudge word.

Contacts are condoms of the eye.

I've abandoned all things good and turned wholly to atrophy.

Anxiety. Anxiety about age. Anxiety about time - that untimely concept, time. No one thinks about time - time thinks us up.

'We' is an amusing creature. We are free to choose. We are free to burn. 'We' is no more than me. We are free, but everywhere in chains.

Water, water, everywhere, nor a drop to drink - Samuel Calvin Coleridge.

Honorific horrors inhabit a collective psyche posing as zeitgeist.

Information, knowledge, everywhere, nor a drop to drink. Our filters are nominally on high alert, yet utter rubbish - hollow polemics, empty supplications, facile images, excess, verbosity - is hailed as knowledge, currency of enlightenment. Knowledge came to be commodity - owned, marketed, and sold - and ferocious haggling passes as debate. But isn't knowledge always elusive. Is it not ineffable, indissociable from essential ambiguities underlying existence itself?

I close my eyes. Still cannot sleep. I close my eyes to the disaster but something, someone within does not allow me to ignore it. I'm tired but cannot sleep. My drooped head - heavy with silent anxiety - lies still on my pillow, contemplating finality and its prophet, Hegel, cackling with mischievous delight at Jackass. On the screen, Johnny Knoxville holds Geist in his palm, stroking it, teasing it, preparing it for its trip off of the edge of abyss. All the world watches on with glee. Contacts are condoms of the eye.

Unaltered course. Finality. The viewing public no longer needs to read. We watch shit unfold. We watch trials. We watch sex tapes. We watch watches tick down second after arbitrary second. We watch banality, since we tire of living it.

Where the fuck is Johnny Knoxville with the weed? If he brings back a dimebag, Hegel's gonna go apeshit. Oh, wait, is this where she answers her cell in the dark?

Amazon. Rainforest. Save the forest. Save the whore. The world cannot redeem itself I 've been told. Humans are too flawed for the business of salvation. Look, they say, to the big fluorescent glowing sky for salivating salvation - available for the all time low price of ....

Closing eyes. Eyelids heavy. Still awake as silence pounds harder at my exasperated skull. Where the fuck is Hegel with the pizza? I thought he knew how to get there. Damn that nightvision crap is harshing my stiffy.

Moon. Half-moon casted over the land of harvest. The rising tides, the imperfect waves of ephemeral, passing time, stroke the land with sensuous languor. The strokes grow carnivorous and its all gone. There will be no harvest. It was pronounced in stone long ago in a faraway, far gone, today. Finality.

Sunk. We're sunk. All was lost and my chariot cruising without drive or care shattered the face of God. Shards rained down to hopeful rabble. Rubbish. They took the rubbish to be gold and worshiped reified fragments, installing unity and totality. And, of course, finality.

Closed my eyes. Sleep comes. The nightmare is no more.

Masks

Masks. We all wear masks in order to live in an unbearable world. If each and every one of us had a choice, we would kill everyone else so as to live in perfect, still, undisturbed quietude. Kirilov found that impulse to be excessively arduous. He chose to kill himself, affirming One’s divinity. But, alas, so many yearn to be with others. The reason? Because they think they should. They think they should find flesh to defile, find labour to exploit, find love…because we should all find love. But what solves the perpetual boredom of should? Fucking, lots of it, preferably finding as many victims as possible. Misery loves company – so the cliché goes.

Beneath the excuses we concoct for being with others lays the raw, purely instinctual and primal, desire to copulate and procreate. Vanity dresses it as something less temporal, and, gasp, eternal. Vanity justifies craving for hot bodies as perfection or Destiny – the ultimate should.

While I wandered around the bunker-shelter, images of apocalypse adorned the walls: black and white photos of mushroom clouds, a grey kitsch painting of four men on horses, an ominous group of dog conspirators playing poker, and a poster featuring a woman performing oral sex on another woman. Somewhere in my old uncle’s mind was this fear: if women ever figured out how god-damned incompetent men were as lovers and found comfort with each other, the world would cease to be. I assume, of course, women would somehow master parthenogenesis and produce a peaceful, productive, and vibrant society freed from the tyranny of testosterone. But I digress.

[digress]

He gazed at the lesbians in the poster. A dim smile appeared on his face. He was aroused. It had been five months, two weeks, three days, eight hours, and forty minutes since his penis – six and a half inches in length, two and a half in diameter – entered a vagina. The drought caused the king of desolation a great deal of physical discomfort.

[digest]

The art of conversation runs parallel to sex. A person who rushes through conversation, ostensibly to get it over with – coitus being the aim in most cases – makes for a careless, selfish lover. He or she who listens, who approaches interaction with patient care, likely displays a similar demeanour in the bedroom. The impatient individual plunges headlong into unseen doom. He who is careful and meticulous lets action bear fruit. But, then again, neologisms and platitudes remain theoretical until put into practice.

Can boldness be taught? Or are you just born bold or not? Assert oneself in all you can do, capitalism teaches its automaton acolytes? Tragically, one must have a decision, for better or for worse, and accept whatever affective consequence follows.

“He thinks on the page and is choked by encounter,” my mom said about her brother, my uncle Vance. Uncle Vance was a middling academic. He graduated with honours in Anthropology and embarked on a PhD in English. Seven years later, he failed to complete it. “Vance just overthought it,” mom said, “He actually is a really bright guy.” And he was. He published his memoirs, ­Seven Ivory Years, to rave reviews and over two million copies sold. The true appeal of his memoir? All of it was fictional. The now legendary mesculin trip, the psychedelic out-of-body love affair with Queen Elizabeth I, and even his daily trips to a local pub in Cambridge, all of it was made up. How did nobody ever find out? The subtitle for the book was an unfortunate, yet opportune, cliché: Stranger than Fiction. His supposed mesculin buddies mistook reality for fiction and confirmed the story. Queen Elizabeth I, ostensibly dead since the seventeenth century, was unavailable for comment. As for the patrons at the local pub, they were convinced all those improbable stories happened some forlorn yesteryear and myth became reality.

Actually, my uncle rarely commented about the first two stories – leading me to believe there was some truth to them. But he certainly debunked the last one. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that mausoleum nominally called a pub,” he told me and my brother, Wyatt, as children. “The place to find primo ass,” he continued, “is any university library. Those women are desperate, neurotic, severely self-conscious creatures, who would, despite appearance, polish your pole just like that.” I was nine, Wyatt seven.

In hindsight, I appreciated how candid Uncle Vance was, how he effaced the demarcation between childhood and adulthood. “If you gotta find out sometime, better know it now than be caught with your pants down.”

Fortress of Solitude

Bountiful. Abundant. Excess. He lived without excess - an exemplary ascetic. Austerity was his agonistic response to what he referred to as "a ubiquitous and grotesque preoccupation with status'. "I'm as lowdown as you can go," Vance said. "But I'm no fool, in spite of what you might hear."

He scoffed at those normal lives of moderate excess and inferior luxuries - the short skirt waiting for a suit driving a BMW, the severely insecure car enthusiast, who invests in tail pipes and decals as a way of displaying taste, bored pastel suburbanite IKEA addicts, so on and so forth. While other renowned authors were doing moonlight readings at the Guggenheim prior to another blockbuster release, Vance lived in a shack, somewhere between Jasper and Radium, masturbating to a Traci Lords cooking show when his second book debuted.

"I wanted to be in Belize," he later confessed to me. "But I have no idea where it is on the map..."

Uncle Vance's most intimate desire was to chase hurricanes in Belize.

"You gotta have brass ones for that," he grabbed his balls. "Staring a hurricane right in the eye...saying to that chicken-shit old fart of a watchmaker, 'Hey here I am, you ain't got shit on me, ya old decaying decrepit crank!' - that's fucking life."

Vance did not fear hurricanes or lightning strikes or the wrath of God. What he did fear was publicity and accolades - and by extension, criticism and scorn. So when his followup work was set for release, he shored up supplies at his obscure and undisclosed hideout and planned for a very long stay. When I say undisclosed, I am dead serious. No one knew. Not my mom, not his literary agent, not even his publisher knew where he would disappear to for weeks and months on end. They chalked it up to the eccentricity of an ingenious writer and left the issue at that. I would doubt that military satellites - capable of literally finding a needle in a haystack - could find Vance's hideout. For the longest time, I thought it was a psychosomatic construction. I was wrong. When I did find him, it was a matter of utter serendipity.

Drunk and without my pants, I wandered away from my campsite while spending a weekend in Kananaskis. It had been approximately five months since Vance's second novel, It's all @%&*#@# because of the Turret's, and I was wasted. Stumbling through the trees, smiling lecherously at the owls looking on, I heard a booming shrill voice shout, "Fucking cocksucking mother...", or so it went. It was a loud virile voice. Having nary an idea where my campsite was and still monumentally hammered, I gravitated to the forceful profane sound.

"God, good God, good goddamned sodomized faggot God." As the voice became progressively louder, I knew that I was getting warmer. As my arms hacked through the brush, I notice another foreign sound: the bloodthirsty breath of a pack of hungry wolves.

Needless to say, once I was aware of their appearance, I bolted towards the humane profanities. Slashing through brush and trees - cutting up my arms mighty badly - I burst through to see my dear bedraggled Uncle Vance. He laid on the ground, semi-conscious, still cursing, as his severed hand laid on the chopping block. Before I could get to him, the wolves dragged the hand away.

"Shit, crap, fucking Hemingway in his petite ass..." his ribald grievances continued. I could understand why.

"Where the fuck is my hand?" The wolves were out of sight by then.

The sight of that bloody stub where his hand used to be sent a surge of sobriety through me. I grabbed my cantine-flask and poured its contents over a towel, wrapping it around my uncle's wrist. I told him there was no time to waste, grabbed the bloody machete, and bolted in pursuit of the wolves.

All told, I had little idea on how to subdue a pack of wolves and retrieve a severed hand - much less coming out of it unscathed and in one piece.

Beauty is truth?

Isn’t life simply philosophical or literary or magnificent artifice? Although there is truth in beauty, life frustrates beauty. Beauty is truth, ain’t it? Beauty is truth.

I beseeched divine forces and heard an emptied silence. Thundering upon my Neanderthal skull was a desire for love, a need for acceptance, and an insatiable craving for belonging. But I was left alone, neglected, left to rot by accursed misfortune.

Ennui. Ennui. Boredom, heavy, gentle, pulsating boredom, inspires conformity. The herd follows; the crowd acquiesces. She opened herself to hurt and tried vainly to disentangle from regret.

A series of encounters, entanglements, and estrangements – that’s life. By dodging encounter, a solitary individual pursues imperfect desolation. Fragility, delusion, distended egotism, cruel whim and unfortunate circumstances encircle the broken-hearted.

Her heart was shattered long before their love was affirmed. Heartbreak – a ubiquitous tableau – lingered, casting an indelible shadow over her numerous entanglements. As indistinguishable existence rushes by, she stares at a shadow.

She’s heartbroken – left without palliatives. Untreated scars provide stolid comfort. Victimhood, that simple and readily accessible indulgence, grabs hold, mesmerizes, and engorges her being. The chasm between the world and her is left at an irredeemable distance. All the while, she stares at her scars, awaiting propitious pus.

Absorbed in denial, neither beauty nor truth can be grasped.

Manifestos

Manifestos dissipate upon being expressed. One cannot depend on singular statements of truth for change and progress. One-off pronouncements of belief are structurally dogmatic – parochial in scope. Change and repetition, hence, are inseparable. In order to produce change, routine is requisite. To triumph in an argument, absolutely displacing an adversary, is not disagreement. In such a case, brute force dominates by manipulating logos. Dis-agreement involves continuous contention, without clear distinction between winner or loser. Manifestos - ubiquitous doctrines of revolt - die the moment of their birth - erroneously staking claim to metaphysical triumph.

Lychee

Brave. Courageous. Too stupid to know any better. He knew better. My great-grandfather, born a Canadian citizen in 1896, fled the country upon being conscripted for the Great War. Back in a foreign homeland, everything - the bugs, the heat, the toothless farmers, the rancid rice wine - exasperated his better sensibilities. It was 1917 and a twenty three year old Robert, stuck in a tiny village that modernity forgot, harboured a single thought, a singular dream - a nurse named Betty Ng.

Betty looked at the distant explosions, the vertiginous front was tantalizingly close. Death was now commonplace. She could not recall normalcy. Another group of causalities arrived at the tent, she finished her smoke and returned to work - forgetting for a second the hellish reality unfolding in the distance.

Robert sat in the middle of the Lychee Orchard and stared at the tallest tree. An unripened lychee nut teetered and plummeted from its branch. It bounced off the earth and rolled to rest at his feet. He picked up the nut and peeled it. He gazed at its glistening flesh for a while, lost, and awash in wonderment. A soothing southerly breeze caused the branches to rustle, knocking ajar more lychees. He wondered if the tree was already dead.

All or Nothing

My journey began with an all or nothing: she loves me; she loves me not. She gave me no response. Her answer was clear. She loved me not. I grin at it now, if only in denial. But her non-response gave me an invaluable gift: an acute awareness about my death.

Death, my ubiquitous companion, floats along from catastrophic failure to modest triumph – waiting to collect. I’ve thought about surrendering willingly without an epic struggle or an interminable delay.

“Damnation,” my father shouted, “the boy’s trying to hang himself.”

He walked in mere moments before my neck reached the noose. I panicked and hurried the job with calamitous results. My head slipped unceremoniously from the noose and plummeted towards the floor. My jaw smashed into the chair, losing several teeth in the process.

That night, after a quick trip to the hospital, I overheard my father’s voice. He was disappointed with my screw-up.

“That boy ain’t the brightest. He couldn’t even kill himself without mucking it up.”

Proper. Apropos. Fitting. It was fitting the way my father passed on. He smoked three packs a day since he was ten, but died from the bird flu that was so en vogue those days.

“God damned chickens,” he cursed the bucket of fried chicken, brought to his deathbed by his doting son. “Avenge me, son.” While I’m, admittedly, not the brightest guy, I was understandably perplexed about how to avenge my father’s death. His eyelids fluttered slowly and shut for the last time. He passed on – invariably worried his son was a homo. I wasn’t. Indeed, I planted the family seed in three different ladies of the night.

There was Destiny – who moonlighted (or is that daylighted?) as a waitress; Monique, a tall ex-contortionist; and Bea, a former accountant turned heroin fiend. Bea died during a back alley abortion. Monique had her kid - he grew up to be an incredible athlete – All-American in everything – and turned out to be a promiscuous prick like his daddy. But that’s an entirely different story. Destiny, well, Destiny was a different breed.

She wanted the suburban home, the white picket fence, the mini-van, and the two and a third brats. Think about that. All of that for a whore? I think not. I strung her along for a while – going house hunting, leafing through bridal-wedding magazines, and even keeping a steady job – and left her just as her water broke. But that’s me - all or nothing. Destiny was nothing to me.

Thorough. Disciplined. Organized. I organized a protest and nobody showed up. I planned to protest a most hideous plight on human life: vaccination. Most thought it was absurd and neglected to show. Others, bored and uncreative cretins, took to heckling the lone protestor. Some threatened me. Others simply laughed. A handful of them bypassed both threats and ridicule and lobbed stones. Who knew vaccination was such a sacred and inviolable institution?

Night brings anger. I am desireless without it. Only anger drives me. But it does not endure and I return to nothing.

Staring out of the enclosure, my mind paints a nauseating canvas: a boy and a girl sitting along library shelves, sharing a bag of starburst while ostensibly studying. It was my portrait: a portrait of young love and innocent ideals. A portrait of my past painted with equal strokes of kitsch and pastiche. It was my accursed Eden, my unforgivable original transgression.

FINI

{...}

I drove frenetically to the edge of the church lawn. I stood there, agape at the sight of the steeple. The bells rang, I neglected to move, and forgot to act. Nothing changed. Out they bounded, bride and her adoring groom. I stared despondently at my elusive beloved hand-in-hand in matrimony with me.

{fini}

Where have all the cowboys gone?

Harrowing - that was how he described marriage and prison. "They're both harrowing experiences," were his precise words.

He had been locked up for the past five years for the murder of his wife and daughter.

"I didn't do it."

Odds were he did. DNA cast a large shadow over his assertion of innocence. It was his DNA, afterall, that investigators found all over the crime scene - his home.

He provided an obvious alibi, but one that nonetheless did not hold up in a court of law.

"It's...it was my home, so my DNA is naturally going to be there."

But what about his prints being on the murder weapon - the infamous bloody steak knife buried in his wife's chest - and a bull rope from which sixteen-year old daughter hung from when the authorities arrived, not before, according to investigators, she was strangled while being raped?

He could not answer without being choked up.

"I used that steak knife on many of occasion, only to enjoy a juicy 8 ounce. That bullrope..." he paused. "That bullrope was once my pride and joy. It was a gift from my brother, a true cowboy, after he won the steer competition at the Calgary Stampede, before he passed on in an auto accident."

"But that's not an alibi," I said with unexpected coldness. In the end, it was all hearsay. He said he didn't. The prosecutors said he did; the jury was swayed. And that was the endgame.

"Endgame, he whispered, as if to himself. "Endgame."

A slight quiver in his voice revealed the unspoken incidences of sexual assault that was visited upon him on a daily basis. He was now soft-spoken, lacking the grand, bold, gruff inflection of a cowboy. His downset despondent eyes told of sustained punishment and unparalleled desolation.

"Where have all the cowboys gone?" he asked.

"Heaven I suppose."

A smile lit up his dark face.

"I sure hope you're right son."

That instant told his innocence. He walked back down the hall, escorted by a massive prison guard, wrists and ankles shackled. Before he walked through the threshold, he turned back and looked at me through the plexiglass enclosure.

"Bless you, son," I read his lips. He dropped his head and made way towards his cell.

What use are ya?

He strolled down historic Gastown. On the way to the Lamplighter, he met a bedraggled transient named Shane. Shane asked him for a few bucks - ostensibly for a sandwich. He enthusiastically agreed, with one condition: "I'll get you the sandwich." Shane, unimpressed by the absence of cash, reluctantly consented.

As he walked down to the nearest late night sandwich shop, he asked Shane where he was from.
"Saskatoon."

"I'm from Calgary, Shane. How did you end up in Vancouver?"

"My pa left us real early on. My mom barely made enough cleaning hotel rooms and I had to drop out of school at 15 to keep us afloat. I worked on my uncle's farm for a long while, until we had a falling out. I was seventeen when I left home and headed out West to find work."

He interrupted. "We're here."

They walked into the shop.

Git

He tired of it. The neighbours once again shouted futilely at their disobedient dog.

"Git down here, you fucking mutt."

It didn't respond.

"Git, git, git, you lousy piece of shit."

They got increasingly drunk and gratingly loud.

"Git."

They ducked under the patio table when the shot went off. The dog laid motionless. They scurried out to catch him walking back into the house and took another swig of Colt.

Pained admiration

With exaltation and despair, he looked longingly at the wreckage. Startled eyes reify minute, banal, routine events. The past demands pained admiration.

The image of his unborn brother tumbling down a set of stairs remained unseen, a repressed unreality, never to be invoked. He never was, nor would've been. When he asked mother about him, she grew quiet and retreated inward. Her answer would be uniform. "I don't know what you're talking about."

His hero, Van Gogh, experienced a similar exulted pain. Van Gogh saw a reality undeniably foreign to others. In a mad Absinthe induced fit, he sliced off his ear, possibly to test 'reality'. There was no true being, no singular reality, only the sight of his bloody dismembered ear lying in a crimson pool. Reality is not merely a particular or a universal. It is the violent incommensurable interstice of the two. He stared at the portrait of the single-eared genius on the wall and laughed uncontrollably. It was the absurd and he understood it now.

Wretch

A caged animal, they fed me banalities. Middling luxuries decorated my enclosure. They first installed a bookshelf system. It played monotony - the bland sound of a strummed acoustic guitar spliced in with grating psuedomasculine vocals unenthusiastically reciting 'Layla'.


I wretched.

Myopic Dystopia

A dreadful thought shook me from my slumber: humanity has perished and, in concealed solitude, I gaze disinterestedly at robots making love in an airport handicap washroom. I tapped my right temple twice before I massage it lugubriously - sadly still flesh.

I stumbled out of the washroom stall, my nap complete, and went in search of supplies. A headless torso, projected onto stadium screens, read the morning decrees.

"Praise for obedience; death to the belligerent."

"Abandon flaccid flesh."

"Pro-D requires the exceptional to report to the Waltemple at 1500."

"Mass purge at 1600."

"Thank you and have a productive day."



[incomplete]

My eagle and my serpent

"When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his house and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he had the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude and he did not weary of it for ten years. But at last his heart turned - and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus:

Great Star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!
You have come up here to my cave for ten years: you would have grown weary of your light and of this journey, without me, my eagle and my serpent.
But we waited for you every morning, took from you your superfluity and blessed you for it.
Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.
I should like to give it away and distribute it, until the wise among men have again become happy in their folly and the poor happy in their wealth.
To that end, I must descend into the depths: as you do at evening, when you go behind the sea and bring light to the underworld too, superabundant star!
Like you, I must go down - as men, to whom I want to descend, call it.
So bless me then, tranquil eye, that can behold without envy even an excessive happiness!
Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the waters may flow golden from him and bear the reflection of your joy over all the world!
Behold! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be man again.

Thus began Zarathustra's down-going."

Powder Blue Tux

"Forever is a long time," Marcus confessed before arriving for the ceremony.

"It won't last forever," I replied. "Death will snuff you both out eventually. That or divorce - whichever comes first."

A lapse in judgment compelled Marcus to name me best man. I was far from an ideal choice.

As the wedding congregation buzzed in anticipation of that beautiful, ostensibly transcendent, moment, the groom's face grew green with uneasy about his upcoming nuptials.

Marcus shifted back and forth in his seat, looking like a five-year old who needed to piss but was afraid to ask teacher for permission.

"Forever," his mortified expression expounded upon the two syllable utterance. "Forever," he repeated.

At one point, I considered pulling over to let my pale-faced friend vomit out his apprehension. But the sight of a jittery Marcus amused me to no end. I couldn't possibly sacrifice my personal amusement, no sir.

My imagination took things a step further: an image of him wretching onto his bride just prior to their kiss. Alas, he would hold it in for another thirty years.

As we pulled into the Church parking lot, he asked me the obligatory question, "Am I crazy for doing this?"

"No, the powder blue tux - that was crazy. This, this is just marriage. Nothing to fret about."

He calmed down decidedly - heart rate, breathing rate returning to normal levels. "Yeah, I mean, what's the worse can happen," he said, trying to manufacture confidence.

"Well, she could turn out to be a cheating whore who takes half of your stuff in a messy divorce."

He froze, grew a couple shades paler, more horrified than before.

"That's the worse thing that can happen?!?" He was incredulous. The five-year old shuffle returned.

"Well, either that or she's actually a dude."

"No, she's not a dude," he said rather bluntly. "I know that for sure."

"Well, what if she was a dude - same difference?"

Silently amused by his reaction or lack thereof, I watched intently as he recollected the rare moments of intimacy they shared, trying to locate any clue - obvious, insignificantly minute, or otherwise obscure - that may confirm or disprove my whimsical proposition. He turned an even paler shade. I suspect he found something disconcerting in his mnemonic perusal.

"Man, don't worry. I was just joking." I wasn't. "She's 100% woman, right? You know better than anyone." Apart from her cosmetic surgeon. "You tapped that, excuse my frankness, fine ass many of nights. You know for sure."

Ah, male bonding cures all that ails a frozen groom.

"Yeah, you're right, she's all woman. And she's all mine," he laughed, looking for a high-five. I reciprocated, out of obligation if nothing else.

"Now go in there and marry that girl." The best man cliches were out in full force. Now I felt like hurling.

"Here I come, girl." He placed an elongated emphasis on girl. He bounded into the cathedral, on an emotional high, unaware of the chasms ahead for him and his blushing 'bride'.