The grilled cheese sandwich.

Today, whilst attempting to be an upstanding citizen of the world, I went to CNN online to find out what's happening outside the corn (what's happening in the corn, you ask? Not a whole lot, let me tell you). Apparently a woman has gone on EBay to sell a used grilled cheese sandwich that she alleges bears the face of the Virgin Mary. She made it, she says, without butter or oil, and when she went to bite it (succeeding in that endeavor only once), she found the face of the Virgin Mary staring back at her. So, she did what any of us would do:

She packed it in cotton balls and has kept it for a decade.

The bidding now is up to tens of thousands of dollars. It's all I can do not to curl into a ball and weep like a little Londonian during the Blitz.

How does this happen? I mean, you hear about this kind of thing all the time. Flash to:

San Salvador: A young woman peeling yams finds one that is shaped just like Saint Anthony of Padua. She immediately erects a shrine, and several miracles are attributed to the yam, such as her not burning her shanty down in an unfortunate grease fire whilst cooking the midday tortillas.

Some unpronounceable village in France: A young woman finds a sword in a field while laying in the tall grass. A voice tells her that she is to go forth and save France from godlessness, and that in doing so, she'd likely be turned into a smoldering pile of cremains. Oh wait, that's Joan d'Arc. No, some guy in a field finds a rock by a stream that resembles Saint Cecelia, patroness of church music and whose botched beheading is martyrdom lore. He is suddenly able to play the organ, where he was not able to do so before.

In the shadow of Popocatepetl: Several small girls in a small town notice that the statue of John the Baptist weeps when they have been bad. So they all shave their heads, don sackcloth and go to live in a nunnery.

The list goes on and on. I myself have a stain in my bathtub that I bleach every now and again (when I start getting a foot fungus) that resembles the profile of Mao Zedong. Lately I have been catching myself being nasty to Taiwanese people, and further, I have been using phrases like "Praise Domonic Thought" and carrying a little red, bound copy of this 'blog and holding it in people's faces. When they squirm, I say things like "Down with Cow Demons and Snake Spirits" and "women hold up half the sky" and "better red than dead."

As a kid, growing up surrounded by stories of the saints and their miracles, I found them to be far more intriguing than most people my age at the time. Mostly, I was interested (morbidly, of course) in how they died: the way early Christians were martyred is testament to the depravity of the culture that was performing the execution. Rolled down a hill on a spiked wheel, fed to ravenous savage cats, flayed alive, crucified upside-down, suffocated in ovens, dipped in tar and set on fire to light midnight dinner parties, you know, nice, simple stuff like that. The part of me that cherishes ritual delights in things like the clot of blood held in the Cathedral of San Gennaro in Naples, which liquifies each year at Easter if the city of Naples is going to be protected from Vesuvius by the Saint that year. In 1944, the clot did not liquify... and Vesuvius erupted during the Allied liberation of the city. Interesting.

But damn! A grilled cheese sandwich? That bitch is crazy.

I have to go now. The stain in my bathtub is calling out to the proletariat to come and bathe the stink of capitalism off and to embrace pure thought. Mao may be a mummified, waxy corpse propped up in the Great Hall of the People off Tiananmen, but he lives here, still, and asks that I not eat so much Mexican.

Off to go burn in Hell.
Have a great one, Bloomington.

Dom