An interesting meditation on themes of The Reformation:

As the son of a fire-and-brimstone Lutheran minister (oh that explains it) I’ve spent much of my life living in the reformation. Our nightly devotions echoed with the ringing of legal minded academic theologians wandering about Wittenberg wondering where they’d left their ninety-five thesis (I think Luther hooked them on the door over there). In many ways Luther was a mensch, he said that he who knows not the pleasures of wine women and song knows not God. I think he was onto something there. The campus bar at the University of Madison has that quote on the ceiling over one of the arched entryways. On Wisconsin! On Wisconsin! Fighting we will…..

In many ways Luther was not a mensch, writing quite a lot of anti-Semitic tracts that the Nazi’s later used for fun and profit. When Luther first broke with the Catholic church he harbored some delusions that European Jews would join with him and when that didn’t happen he seemed to have developed a great deal of resentment.

I was surprised to learn at some point that Nietzsche’s father and grandfather were both Lutheran ministers. I think that explains something essential about him. Lutheran theology is a kind of training ground for thinking in complex systems. There’s a great deal of logic, but it functions like hypothetical geometry – it’s a closed system that only makes sense in self-referential terms (shut up about the dinosaurs already – I’m sure he just forgot to mention them – there’s not a lot in the bible about giraffes either – that doesn’t seem to upset you).

So I’m thinking about reformation in terms of something I am going through right now. I have marched up to myself and nailed ninety-five problematic things about me to my ass and I am getting judgmental with myself and thinking about splitting away, with the help of the nobility, to form my own Karl. I’ve been through this before. I’ve dated lots of twenty somethings with this agenda as well. They pick me up, or I them, and they think they’ve gotten a great deal on a used car and if they can just manage a little bit of reformation then everything will be swell – “You’ve got so much potential if only you could see it.” “It’s true babe, you make me want to be a better man.”

But it never works. It usually ends up in Pinto crash fireball of guilt and recrimination and then I am left with just me.

Scene with Angela Bardo (Summer 1997):

Angela, “I don’t see what the big deal is. If it doesn’t matter to you and it does to me then why can’t you do this small thing for me.”

Karl, “It’s a metaphor. I can’t spend the rest of my life worrying if the cap is on the toothpaste.”

Angela, “You know when I met you, you were washing dishes in your kitchen. That was false advertising.”


What if I were to give up on Lutheran guilt, it’ll be Lent soon, and just accept myself for who I am – I am the prodigal son who is not headed home. To recognize that the very edginess and insanity that many of my exes and sometimes even myself want to contain or domesticate represent, are in fact, the very best parts of myself. Fuck all this scented candle crap – admit you have the capacity to be an out of control fire and as they say in the song, let the mother fucker burn.