Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 15:17:27 -0500 (EST)
From: danceswithcarp <dcombs-AT-bloomington.in.us>
Subject: Re: Supreme Court Decision




On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Senex R. Rupicapra wrote:

> 	having stones in yr shoes makes it difficult to 
> walk, dont it? 

Self-infliction of pain as a means of penance has a long and illustrious
hystery, and not all of the nuttiness is limited to xtians.  There's some
shi'a branch of islam that annually flails themselves with chains or briar
branches as they march down a streeet; a guy who was in the super-max
while I was wirking at The Jerynt felt so badly (he said) about his murder
of a kid that he regularly ripped his flesh open as sel-punishment; and
then there's those people who have themselves nail to crosses every Good
Friday.  The latter is now popular in Mexico whereas formerly it was
limited mainly to the Phillipines.  (The really good thing about Good
Friday being only 48 hours from Easter instead of the 72 like it says in
the book is that these people get to get unhung a full 24 hours earlier
than the one they're trying to emulate.)

But best of all, damn, I forget her name, is a suth'rn womyn author
(she made her pen-name sound masculine in order to get published) who
wrote several short stories and novels about offshoot baptists who were so
ate up with religious guilt they'd put glass in their shoes, pebbles in
their socks, and would wear briars in their underclothes.  Damn, but I
can't remember her name.  She won several national prizes for capturing
the essence of suth'rn relious fanatacism and I had to read several of her
wirks for a literature class.

Whatever.  Ever since I read her I've been getting stoned in my shoes for
penance.


carp