The Church of the Pistol-Packin' Non-Sequitur

Welcome back to the land of reasonably-priced early bird specials, gentle homegrown wisdom, and terrifying auguries of senseless genocides in places of worship. Yes, I'm talking about Heydays, and if you haven't yet read Ed's column from two Sundays ago, I suggest you do so now by clicking here.

Sorry for the extremely late update, but The Center for Heydays Studies (which itself is only one sector of the multinational Institute for Applied Hayesology), recently underwent a much-needed relocation to new headquarters. All of the Erlenmeyer flasks, Bunsen burners, Tesla coils and Van deGraaf generators (and other vaguely scientific implements named after weird European people) had to be wrapped, boxed, moved and then unboxed, unwrapped and thrown away. This necessitated a slight delay in updating, a delay which I hope to make up for during this coming week. Stay tuned. And watch out for that altar boy: he's got an uzi underneath that robe!



After the previous week's frightening peek into the void of the senior vehicular homicide epidemic, Ed is showing no signs of a retreat to the relatively sane sensibility that produced the Fourth of July tribute to soldiers. No, instead we're right back in crazy old coot territory, with this week's column, an extended riff on pistol-packin' priests, gun-wielding nuns, and other things that only make sense to Ed Hayes. It all starts with a rather bizarre sequence of fantasy images (or hallucinations?) experienced by our favorite Sentinel retiree as he sits in church on Sunday.

There's Ed, gazing at the "golden goodness" of the congregation and the "high, peaceful sweep of Technicolor windows," when suddenly he experiences an "urgent urge." To do what? Sneeze? Urinate? Shout "Hallelujah!" and dance in the aisles for the glory of the Lord God Almighty? No, no, nothing like that:

• "I sense an urge to stand up; an urgent urge to face my fellow parishioners with a question...Good morning, friends." That's what I want to say. "How many of you are parked on the street or the church lot, with a concealed weapon locked inside?"
  

That makes sense: Ed's just sitting there enjoying the church service, surrounded by smiling neighbors and fellow parishioners, and like a bolt out of the blue, he experiences an overwhelming, irresistible urge to stand up and interrupt the proceedings in order to cross examine the entire congregation to find out how many of them are packing heat. Who hasn't had such an urge, now and then? I'm sure many of you have experienced this very familiar sensation. Maybe you're waiting in line at the DMV, or checking out at the grocery store, and you just all at once get the notion to stop what you're doing, clear your throat and shout: "How many of you have concealed weapons inside your car?" That's a perfectly ordinary, rational question, and one which would cause no eyebrows to raise were it to be posed by a raving, white-haired oldster in a public place. In no way would this be grounds for a Baker Act or involuntary commitment to a high-security rest home with leather restraints on every bed.

Ed follows this up with: "Actually, it's not a bizarre question." Thanks, Ed. If you hadn't said that, we might have thought that it was, in actuality, the bizarrest question of all time. Thanks for clearing that up. No, I think we can all agree it's a pretty damned strange question, and I can't help but puzzle over Ed's burning curiosity about other people's level of preparedness for the coming return to the days of Old West lawlessness and daily gunfights. That last part is my conjecture. For some reason, I find it hard to take seriously Ed's passing mention of the Supreme Court ruling on concealed weapons. It seems more than a little perfunctory and disingenuous. There's something else going on here.



So, Ed's batshit insane reverie continues, with a fanciful, if horrifying, sequence of images combining religion and weaponry:

• "[W]ould my church acquaintances ever be so aggravated as to point a barrel at another human being and go boom?"
  
  
• "There he is now, the celebrant of today's service, on the altar, and I can't help conjecturing if he's packing a gat."
  
  
• "[I]t might be sooner than we think, the day when ushers come down the aisles with their collection plates with six-shooters on their hips."
  
  
• "It was a less-suspicious age, but I smile thinking of [nuns] wearing gun belts. Would it have been sacrilegious, referring to them as pistol-packin' mamas?"
  

It's hard to tell what sort of reaction Ed is aiming for with this parade of grotesque and possibly blasphemous imagery: laughter? terror? titillation? If he's trying to make a political point, once again he fails miserably. I cannot possibly parse out any perspective on the concealed weapon issue, reasoned or not, being represented here. It just seems like an extended phantasmagoria of spirituality and artillery, with absolutely no discernible point whatsoever.

The really frightening thing is that a mere week after Ed's bizarre tangent about guns in church was published, the nation was rocked by news that a lovable old gray-haired coot named Jim D. Adkisson had walked into a Tennessee church and began a pointless shooting spree that killed two and wounded many others. Is it possible that Ed's hallucinations, the product of Florida summer heat and the fact that his brain is slowly dying, could actually be predicting the future? Did Ed Hayes, 84-year-old Sentinel staffer, somehow receive a God-given vision of Adkisson's church shooting spree, and attempted to communicate it in the only way he knew how: by writing a stupid, inane column that no one even reads?



I'm leaning towards "no," on the above, but you have to admit the synchronicity is striking. Perhaps we should treat each Heydays column like one of Nostradamus' quaitrains. Any time we notice a ridiculous tangent, a particularly tortured metaphor, or the conspicuous usage of an unnecessarily obscure thesaurus word, we should try to decode it Qabalistically, and see if it's trying to tell us about a kidnapping or a political assassination that is fated to occur in the coming week.

Again, I'm going to err on the skeptical side of this issue, but if anyone would like to attempt a Gematria/Bible Code/Enigma Machine-style decryption of a coming week's Ed Hayes column, I will gladly publish your findings here. Remember that no prediction is too insignificant. If, once you apply the alphanumeric decryption key, it turns out that all Ed has predicted is a sale on adult undergarments at Wal-Mart, we want to know about that, too. Countless lives (and upholstered chairs) could be saved.

We'll wrap things up with a quick survey of some of the more delightful Hayes-isms in this week's column:

• The Stupid Internal Rhyme of the Week award goes to: "I can't help conjecturing if he's packing a gat. Will it ever come to that?"
  
  
• "[E]ven spleen surgeons have difficulty deciphering the ambiguous language of the courts and keeping straight all the handgun bans and anti-bans." I'm confused by this. Are spleen surgeons known for being particularly conversant in legalese and Supreme Court rulings? Is there any such thing as a spleen surgeon?
  
  
• "Afterward, we linger with friends in the courtyard. We talk, we laugh as always, but what's going on? It'll be all right, won't it?"
  

This last quote is another example of the "Dad? Hey, Dad?" brand of desperate, lonely, pathetic, utterance to no one in particular that Ed Hayes occasionally lets loose on the page in spite of himself. It's really very sad. So sad that I feel bad pointing out how pointless and ridiculous it is. But there, I've done it already.

I've asked it before, but I'll ask it again: does Heydays have an editor anymore?

And of course, the article ends with a typically unfunny Hayes-ian pun: "I feel snug, safe, my wife seated beside me riding shotgun." Though the pun is not funny in any way, this moment might still have the potential to at least be sweet or charming, had we not just read about Ed's harrowing fender-bender the week before. For all we know, a second later Ed's jimmy leg hit the gas instead of the brake and he and Betty Ann plowed into the side of a Dairy Queen.

No rest for the wicked. And no rest for the pious either. Any minute, a charming, wise old man in the golden years of his life might burst through the door and toss a live grenade into the donation box. Praise the lord and pass the kidney stones.