Missing My Middleman

I don’t really feel like writing an essay. My middleman has gone missing anyway, so it’s probably just as well. Maybe I'll just write whatever I want and do the best I can without him.

My friend Larry says that a writer is like general contractor. His job is to bring the right people to the project at the right times. There’s the creative guy who drops off the idea, outline, and title, then runs off to wherever it is that he goes. There’s the closer who does the polishing at the end. He reads it out loud until it goes down smooth. If he does his job right, the thing reads like you're running downhill.

Then there’s the guy in the middle. He has the hardest job of all. He brings order out of chaos and asks the hard questions like, “What are we writing about anyway?” He makes the tough calls, cutting my favorite paragraphs because “they just aren’t getting us where we need to go.”

Well, my middleman is nowhere to be found. I think the book might have been too much for him. One thing is for sure, his absence is really gumming up the works. Creative Guy keeps dropping off great essay ideas like “I Think of You as Roughly Five-Hundred People,” and “Elements of Primal Worship.” I tried to convince him to take a few days off because things are piling up, but there’s no controlling that guy.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I kind of blame Larry for coming up with the whole “writer as general contractor” idea in the first place. That is SO Larry.

Larry, by the way, was my roommate at seminary and is now a pastor near Dallas. You know what that means, don’t you? It means that somewhere there is actually a church that has a preacher named Larry.

Is it just me, or does that seem a little off? Like naming your dog “Paul” or something. What do you think they call him? “Pastor Larry?” “Reverend Larry?” Actually, Larry has a Ph.D. in ethics, so I guess they call him “Dr. Larry.”

I can’t tell you his last name because I think you're not supposed to do that. Larry would know, what with the ethics degree and all. I can give you this hint: The next time you're at the supermarket looking at the spices, his last name will be on one of the jars. It’s not cinnamon, tarragon, or curry. It’s one of the greenish ones. That much I can tell you.

So any-who, there’s this church near Dallas that has a pastor named Larry with a spicy last name. Like I said before, that just seems wrong to me.

Larry, that was for all those weekends you left me alone at seminary while you went to be the big fancy youth minister in Jasper or to visit your girlfriend in Waco or wherever-the-hell-else you used to go when you left for days at a time.

Oh yeah, and it’s also for making me laugh that time Old Man White the landlord kept sticking his head in our oven and sniffing because we told him it wasn’t working.

Hey, remember the time I went over to Old Man White’s house to pay our rent, and he had shot a squirrel in the back yard and was getting ready to eat it? I guess there's no reason to be talking about Mr. White and his squirrels. I mean, so the man ate the squirrels in his backyard. Does anyone really care after all these years?

Okay, I seem to have strayed a bit. See what happens when the middleman isn’t around? That’s all I’m saying.

Oh yeah, I was talking about Larry and his weird, spice name.

I have lots of minister friends like Larry. Some of them have regular names, and some of their names are a little strange. I know of a minister here in San Antonio whose first name is Soapy. I swear on a stack of bibles. If I told you what his last name was, you wouldn't believe me. You would call me a damn liar. 

The world is filled with ministers of all kinds. Seriously, truckloads of them. You can meet some if you want. They’re around. I met most of my minister friends either at seminary or at one of those preacher conferences they’re always having.

I don’t know if you're aware of this, but they have a lot of those. Conferences for preachers, I mean. You can tell a preacher conference because it will usually have one of these words or phrases in the title:

• Purpose
• Emergent
• Seeker Sensitive
• Post-Modern
• Felt Needs
• Contemplative
• Contemporary
• Demographic
• Twenty-First

I don’t remember what any of those words mean to preachers. I used to know what they mean, but I started forgetting when I had to get a real job back in ’98. If all preachers had to have real jobs along with their churchy jobs, there would be a lot less seminars on emerging purposes for the felt needs of twenty-first century post-modern people or whatever.

I do remember one thing from the days when I used to go to preacher conferences and all that. When you go to a preacher conference, it’s weird being in a room filled with people who have all had some kind of soul-blistering religious experience that inspired them to attend four years of seminary and go through all the crap you have to endure before you can actually get hired by a church.

Seminary’s even stranger. The religious experiences that brought people there are still fresh and raw. And the natural selection process of church employment hasn’t weeded out the ones who are just there because they want people to love them. In seminary, there is no end to the weird haircuts, the appalling lack of social skills, and the absolute seriousness of everything.

I think the only thing that got me through seminary was having Larry there and having Old Man White around to keep us properly grounded and very afraid.

So okay, thanks Larry. Forget all that stuff I said about your name. If middleman were here, he would probably edit that out anyway. Maybe he’ll come back soon. Thanks for all the years and the silliness and the memories. Thanks for being a minister friend who takes all the right things seriously and takes everything else with a grain of salt. You are the salt of the earth, my friend.

And that brings me to the end, which isn’t much of an end since my middleman isn’t here to fix it up and make it pretty. I'm all over the place with this essay or whatever you want to call it.

It's a shame.

I think the guy who picks the artwork is taking
some time off too. I don't know who picked
this picture or what it means.

rlp

Soapy

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