Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 11:38AM | by Otter
Updated on Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 12:57PM by
Otter
It’s not that complicated, Dr. Piper.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 8:23PM | by Otter Thanks to the literary agenting chops of my friend and RipChurch poetess Kim, Geez Magazine has published this from The Otter.
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Standing near the bus stop on Common Street in New Orleans, I am watching an interaction between a tourist in cargo shorts and a man who hasn’t showered, it seems, in weeks.
The unwashed man’s name is Mike.
Silver and gold have I none, says the tourist (okay, he phrases it differently), but (and here he jabs at his iPhone), there is a shelter just that way. Six blocks on the left. Can’t miss it.
The tourist gives a friendly wave, and turns into the French Quarter, still punching with a thumb at his iPhone. Maybe tweeting about the homeless guy he helped.
It reminds me of politics, really. Hey, here’s a road map. Just walk this road, and it’ll be better. Maybe “better” isn’t buried in those layers of hip digital architecture, or those piles of pages in .pdfs on my liberal MacBook. It’s just information. Information is nice. It’s good.
But as I look appraisingly at Mike, I’m not so sure it’s much use here. A map to the shelter might be a good thing.But here is a man who needs somebody to walk with him to the shelter, to lie down next to him in the hot stench of dereliction, to wake up and wash him.
There’s no app for that.
Mike stays where he is. He knows where the shelter is, and the pavement is too hot for his feet. He marks me for a local, and tells me frankly, “I need a drink.”
When he looks at me with those watery blue eyes, and I look back, and he looks away, I’m tempted to buy him one.
Book of Otter, Geez Magazine, Justice, Poverty in Culture, Spirituality Friday, June 4, 2010 at 7:20AM | by Otter 
"Such readers are probably right to accept all this justice-talk 'blindly' (because I think it really is blind): their religion begins (? and ends) with the Bible, which by the way is not biblical. But they should understand that they're using language in a way that the rest of us have no access to. Justice no longer means what we recognize as just, it just means what the most powerful person on the block (their god) is capable of doing. Might makes right, whatever he does is okay.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 7:30AM | by Otter If all horror is "just" in that sense, and therefore you and I are incompetent to even talk about justice, what possible sense is there in saying "God is just"?
If we don't even know what justice is, it's meaningless to say "God is just." Might as well say "God is prfmgnsuths." We have just as much (or little) understanding of what we mean.
