Lenten Musings

I met my first serious boyfriend at Random House of Canada, where he was a research assistant on a book that eventually died out, but would have looked something like this. His job was, essentially, to find out about weird shit.

In the course of his inquiries into weird shit, he discovered that many South Americans had at one time suffered a spiritual crisis: there weren’t enough fish to provide them with sufficient protein during Lent. He also discovered that the Pope had solved this problem not by advocating noble privation, say, or by offering them the same dispensation most North American Catholics would eventually award themselves–”Listen, fuck that rule“–but by, so help me god, expanding the definition of “fish.” Specifically, he declared that the cheap and plentiful capybara is a fish. Not merely that Jesus would totally give thumbs up to Friday-night capybara ‘n’ chips, under the circumstances, but that, per God, a mammal with above-average swimming skills is, in fact, a fish.

I think of that every time I see mention of the capybara, as I did today over at Lillet and Trey’s.

And I think, this is why I will never be able to cope with organized religion, no matter how hard I try.

And I think, damn. A rodent you can lasso. That’s kind of cool.