The Letter of Paul to the Procrusteans

Greetings brothers and sisters. I’ll keep this relatively short in anticipation of my visit to your homeland. Please feel free to accommodate your image of me as you see fit, but once I am in your company, keep your hands off of me and my actual details and dimensions. Yours in ambiguity, not either/or, but both/and, for Pete’s Sake, Paul

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N.B. I’m adding this additional information several days after the original posting date to shed some additional light on this rather esoteric post for the benefit of my brothers and sisters, ethnographers and evaluators, cartographers, food critics, and exegetes. Knowing something about temptation and Procrustean Solutions will help you better understand the post, but that will only get you so far. For the rest of the story, much more of it at least, it might be helpful to know that, before my monastic exclaustration, I was also a seminarian, and that I had a classmate from the Pittsburgh Diocese named Robert Barie. Bob was a gem of a person…and a hoot! Remember Norm Crosby and his malapropisms? Well, Bob suffered from the same inflection, as it were! One day it was his turn to read at mass, and so he heads up to the lectern. Now, because Bob was Bob, we’re sitting there, his classmates, already chuckling sotto voce. He gets to the microphone and without looking up, without even a pause he says, “A reading from the Letter of Paul to the Macadamians.” Naturally and somewhat explosively, our subdued chuckling rose up from the crypt and filled the chapel in a collective, sidesplitting belly laugh. After only completing his third year of theological studies, Bob died of cancer in 1988. May he forever rest in peace.

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