So last Wednesday was our beloved nephew's first birthday...big news in the Olson/Elsea world. For those of you who don't know, the Olsons - the name my sister Emily took when she married that ne'er do-well preacher husband of hers - live in Pipestone, Minnesota. How they ended up in this God-forsaken place, who knows. Something about a "divine call," though after visiting there I was surprised they had telephones at all. I certainly had no service. And I have an iPhone (yes...this place is so desolate and removed from the civilized world that an iPhone, an iPhone!!!! cannot defeat its black-hole like warp).
But I digress. I thought for my inaugural post on this blog I would share with all of you fine folks my gift to Mr. Paul, the soon-to-be-recognized official Most Photographed Human Being in the History of the Earth. As is fitting for any story about Paul, I can't help but use at least two pictures to show off my gift, finally putting to use at least a few of our collection of 349,217,481.5 snapshots of the Great One (yes, there is a .5 in there...use your imagination).
For my gift, I decided to preemptively steer Mr. John Christopher away from his almost inevitable vocation as a pastor - something ingrained in his DNA from the moment that Emily, still in diapers, burst into tears when she learned that we in the LCMS don't do female pastors and, well girlfriend, that was the end of the story. His fate was further sealed when she married a humanoid Lutheran Encyclopedia (forgive me, I've seen the two Transformers movies in the last week), and the two of them genetically combined their otherworldly Lutheranism into One theologically omnipotent, rapid-fire confessional stud.
In lieu of a divine call, the result of which he would be doing nice things like dispensing grace, saving souls, visiting the elderly and the infirm, feeding the hungry, and other stomach-turning acts of goodness, I schemed to plant dark seeds in Paul’s subconscious to receive the opposite call. I refer, of course, to the temporally-obsessed, morally ambivalent, subjectivist, and downright satanic field of the…the law. I know, I know. You're thinking: what a heartless, callous monster! How could he do this to his sister and brother-in-law? The answer, I can say with a shrug and a clear conscience, is easy: I'm gonna be a lawyer. So here’s how it happened. I finagled my way into the kid’s presence without the SuperLutherans around. We were sitting there, just to the two of us (cue Picture 311,519,625).
As you can see, the boy has no idea of his impending Faustian journey. Confident of my plan, I opened his head and poured the entire body of the law into this brain (incidentally, I found the entire body of the law as a hidden track on a Mercy Me album. Who knew?). He struggled for a moment, but quickly it was apparent to me that my stratagem would pay choice dividends. As you can see from picture 311,519,626, infra (a term we use in the law), Mr. Paul J.C. Olson, Esq., is well on his way to the second-most exclusive profession on earth (stupid doctors and their Emmy Award-winning TV shows!...also known, I'm told, as the second-oldest profession on earth...but the first-most annoying, so...at least we have that).
Happy Birthday Paul! I love you. And if your parents are curious about your now-obviously bloated intellect (a natural byproduct of knowledge of the law) and ask you about it, just glare at them like Jack Nicholson does to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, but instead of stupidly self-incriminating yourself, growl something impressive like "that question lacks any rational basis in furthering the evidentiary inquiry at hand, and, in any event, should you continue your line of questioning, I shall be forced to take judicial notice of Blackstone's principle of ei incumbit probatio, qui dicit, non qui negat; cum per rerum naturam factum negantis probatio nulla sit." Or something like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment