How to Be a Strange Loop

If during Singing Competition-style auditions at the marina the Warden inquires, “Why turn away so many statuesque babes? Rarely takes more than a tractor to appease a northern Ontarian, ” realize you’re merely trying to cast the girl you’ve been thinking of, and that girl would but can’t be Catherine.

One: Appease The Warden by accepting any young lady above a 36 B.

Two: Agree with Warden Jöns that most flagellants come off as far too desperate. Advise flagellants to conceal their ugly need more guilefully unless they can survive on the validation scraps found in that saddest of all possible worlds: the periphery of the entertainment industry.

Three: If now perceiving flagellants as affronts to the truly pious, i.e. ‘Look at all my sinning and melodramatic atonement, ’ wonder what percentage of your blog-based evangelism, e.g. ‘bitching and moaning about dead sister, ’ falls under so ignominious a banner.

Four: Hire humbler flagellants as stagehands. Prefer those not actively flagellating, those wearing hair shirts or cilices instead, garments made of harsh cloth in antiquity, steel wool in this contemporary scenario. Request the flagellant with the coolest cilice fashion you something similar. Rub your steel-wool’d cilice in boar waste per this flagellant’s advice.

Five: Stretch your Tommy Hilfiger polo shirt over your mortifying new duds. Resemble an umpire. Suffer and stink.

Six: If Compassion on the Run’s opening night in Nairn Centre is attended by only three bubonic sufferers—each drunk on home brew, each belligerent, each on the Borderline—then your preaching of fiery penance will fall on deaf ears. The come-hithers of the A1 babes will fare somewhat better. The Billy Joel covers crooned by Warden Fermat will be aggressively boo’d, such that he leaves the stage in tears.

Seven: If the production requires re-jiggering, commence a Gantt Chart with the Warden on how to best salve the spiritual and physical bubos of your upcoming audiences in Merkabah, Meconium, Tarbutt Additional, among the Thessalonians, and in other regions of indeterminacy. Balk piously when Warden Fermat loses interest and says, “Ughh I’ve got a Serpent River Correctional Facility to run, ” boards his Polaris Slingshot, and abandons the production. Read to the thin air from The Decameron, Tedious were it to recount how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbors scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinfolk held aloof and never met…nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended unvisited, to their fate.97 and then think of Marcel_Proust left untended, unvisited, impelled to his fate in some elsewhere sustain, and realize you have no moral standing from which to judge the Warden.

Eight: With the storm in your eyes, in Tarbutt Additional, remembering as always the first day that you fell in love, espy nothing but ichors and sanies, and perhaps worse: the ennui borne of northern Ontarian living. If Tarbutt Additional’s residents don’t need song and dance, nor B-cupped bosoms, but only amputations and tourniquets, and the nearest hospital in Thessalon is obviously overrun by Thessalonian Borderlines, then roll up your sleeves and look for the nearest accretion of boar scat so as to outfit Tarbutt Additional’s citizens with efficacious shit cilices.

Nine: If some of the A1 beauties abandon their calling once triage and cilice production becomes the priority of the theatrical company, i.e. “I’m classically trained in ballet and tap not pig poop, ” then bid them adieu. If a cilice’d penitent abandons his vocation, shoot him in the skull with your pistol.

Ten: Work for your fellow man. Observe with wry amusement the cyclical Ubikianism of your Good Works. Read earlier blogs on your phone. Notice cyclical shortening; ‘repetition as recapitulation, ’ 98 as Ricoeur argues; Majthenyi’s 97 (Boccaccio, 1313-1375) 98 (Ricouer, 1984-1988) sustains even less believable than your bluffs of charity and faith. Amputate necrotic digits and kiss bubos. Contemplate the eternal golden braid. Try to think of a way out, or maybe a way in.