Letting it all hang out, sideways sort of

We live today in a tell—all—let—everything—hang—out society, a society that believes that keeping certain things to oneself is psychologically unsound for the individual and for society as well, and therefore the best thing to do when confronted with personal matters you would rather not discuss with anyone is, counterintuitively enough, to discuss then with damn near everyone you can think of. I should blame Sigmund Freud for this, but I don’t, not really. He merely theorized that discussing your innermost thoughts and emotions with a medical professional would help his patients understand why they were so miserable; he never promised anyone that spilling their guts to him would make them permanently happy—it would only relieve the misery of existence for a short time, in much the same way as a priest granting absolution after a sinner’s confession understands that the sinner will need to come back and get relief for the sins he will commit during the following week. It may not make you happy, but you will know why you’re not happy. 

No, I blame Phil Donahue and his principal acolyte, Oprah Winfrey, for the current obsession with knowing more about people that we really care to know, and, of course, I blame Philo Farnsworth for inventing television in the first place, which gave Donahue and Winfrey the platform they needed to display their emotional basket cases to an unsuspecting world. I suppose, given the popularity of the format that Donahue and Winfrey pioneered, that I am in a minority about this, but I would just as soon not know who is copulating with whom or to discuss reproductive biology, my own or someone else’s, with complete strangers. I do not inflict unwanted confidences on other people and I should like some reciprocation from them, but I know better than to expect it. I realize that this reluctance is an anachronism in this day and age, a cultural artifact of an Irish Catholic childhood that has no place in the modern world, but there’s nothing I can do about it at this point. I am what I am, said Popeye the Sailor Man, and if it’s good enough for Popeye, it’s good enough for me.

I wonder when we here in this our Great Republic began treating the most intimate aspects of our private lives as fodder for mass entertainment and the stuff of everyday conversation. You may not credit this, but once upon a time here in this our Great Republic the only people who would talk about such things in public were the mentally ill. But the mentally ill have a reason for their tell-all mania: they are, in fact, maniacal. They are nuts, clinically, psychologically, one hundred percent by a doctor who went to medical school and everything certified bonkers. The rest of us, however, don’t have that excuse. So why do we keep displaying our psychic quirks in public?  The question remains a Rosicrucian mystery to me and all the evidence points to the question staying that way. I suppose people keep doing this sort of thing because emotional caterwauling makes them happy and it makes other people happy to watch them roll around in their psychic traumas. There is something more than a little gruesome about all of this, I think, but as I appear to be the only one who thinks so, I must endure what I cannot stop. It all seems horribly unfair to me, but I don’t think anyone cares what I think of all this one way or the other. Ah well, what can you do?

Storms

And so the monsoon came to town yesterday, complete with intense flashes of lightning and downpours so tremendous that one could forgive an impartial observer for wondering if Noah and the Ark would be floating down Main Street any time soon, and, if so, would they stop at Subway’s to pick up some sandwiches for the wife and the kids and the two of every sort of creature that walketh or creepeth upon the face of the Earth as they headed off towards the mountains of Ararat?  The wind howled in a suitably gruesome manner and the sky turned black in the middle of the day and all the denizens of our happy little burg trembled under the fury of the storm.  And then, of course, there were the people who braved the wrath of nature and went forth into the storm in order to get a gallon of milk or a pound of ground chuck at the supermarket, brave men and women who refused to bow down before dictates of nature but who wandered out, umbrellas in hand, leaving this observer to wonder just how much of a dumbass do you have to be to go outside in a thunderstorm holding a metal spike in the air?  First, when the winds are lashing around at about sixty miles an hour your umbrella is not going to help you; it will not even make an adequate sail, should you find yourself in a situation where you need an adequate sail.  I’m not saying that will ever happen in real life, you understand, but it might, and an umbrella that the wind has turned inside out is worse than useless.  It won’t keep the rain out of your face and it certainly won’t help shield you from the rest of the elements, which, I have noticed, tend to be fairly nasty during these meteorological temper tantrums.  Sec0nd, during the aforementioned meteorological temper tantrums the abundant lightning whips about striking both willy and nilly, deep frying them to a golden toasty brown. Given this, I repeat my previous question: why are these dolts going outside holding a metal spike in the air?  To me, this appears to be almost suicidal behavior, almost as if these poor saps were volunteering to have Nature in all her mystery and majesty remove their clearly bargain basement chromosomes from the gene pool in as expeditious a manner as possible.   While I am all for improving humanity and its morals, this appears to me to be a very short-sighted, if not more than vaguely painful way of accomplishing this altogether laudatory goal.  Wouldn’t all of these people be much better off if they simply stayed indoors until the storm blows by and then go out for a gallon of milk?

Writer's block, or the revenge of the incredible zombie rats

If you are a long time reader of these pages then you are probably accustomed to my more than occasional bouts of writer’s block, which is a most annoying affliction to suffer from, no two ways about it, and leads me to look at blank pieces of paper in much the same way someone suffering from chronic constipation looks at toilet bowls; relief will come when the page or the bowl is full, but getting from here to there is a Sisyphean labor in reverse.  I wish I knew when these dry spells were coming, but life does not reveal such things for reasons best known to itself.  You wouldn’t think that it would be hard to write satire at a time like this, when the former junior Senator from Illinois and his malfeasant crew of hacks, henchmen, and horse thieves are falling all over themselves trying to deny that the public has caught them with their pants down around their ankles in the middle of Main Street USA, but writer’s block is a vile condition that respects no condition save illiteracy and spares no sufferer from its ongoing psychic distress, and so the public nudity of our prairie solon must go uncommented on for the time being.

People familiar with my unending fight with this horrid condition understand just how much I loathe its never-ending mental anguish and try to help, offering me all manner of solutions to the problem.  I should try, for example, to suffer through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and by taking a pencil to this sea of troubles, end them, which is a nice way of saying that I should write through the dry spell as if it wasn’t there as well as showing that they’ve actually read Hamlet.  This is a nice idea if you want to drape the occasional bit of Shakespeare over your cocktail party conversation, but I don’t go to cocktail parties, largely because I have all the personality of a wet newspaper, and Hamlet, if you remember the play, winds up dead at the end of Act V, a consummation devoutly to be skipped, if you want my opinion, and to be skipped for as long as medical science can arrange the skipping.  And, of course, if I could write through the dry spells I would be writing and not suffering through the tortures of writer’s block.  In short, if I could, I would, but since I’m not, I ain’t.  That’s just the way this puppy floats.

People who know about this sort of thing also suggest that I should restrict my intake of caffeine.  I must admit that this particular line of reasoning took me surprise; I had never heard that caffeine ingestion caused writer’s block, ingrown toenails, or any other malady that I had ever heard of, although I do suppose that caffeine probably causes cancer in laboratory rats, but then again, at this point what doesn’t cause cancer in laboratory rats? Laboratory rats seem susceptible to a whole slew of diseases that ordinary rats seem to shrug off without any problem, so it seems to me that laboratory rats should probably stop hanging around laboratories so much; it’s clearly not good for their health. In any case, let me just say that while I appreciate the suggestion, cutting back on the caffeine is not going to happen.  My intake of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi will continue at its present ridiculous pace and no amount of do-gooding by well-meaning friends is going to change that.  The science on that may not be settled, but my opinion is and my opinion is the one that counts here.  

If I wanted to I could blame the block on my encounter with the knockout game, an activity in which socioeconomically disadvantaged urban youths wearing hoodies and shorts polish their boxing skills on unsuspecting passersby, but that hardly appears likely; the young practitioner who tried this on me didn’t even manage to knock my glasses off, much less knock me out, and I doubt such a feeble attempt would have caused writer’s block of such longevity.  I mean, really, if you have the advantage of surprise and you still can’t knock a gimp’s hat off of his head in one mighty blow then you should learn to play something that is more your speed, like Chutes & Ladders or Parcheesi.  

So I must sit and wait this thing out, I fear, and my apologies to one and all who come here. I realize that my wild inconsistency in posting must be irritating in the extreme, and I assure you that no one is more irritated about these seemingly endless dry spells than I am.  Having the syrup and not being able to pour, to use Gertrude Stein’s quip about a blocked member of the Lost Generation, is frustrating to the nth degree. I do promise, however, that I will be back posting just as soon as the dry season ends. Really. I mean it.

Some good news, or at least I think so...

...and on the good news front, two more New York State Assemblymen have been indicted for corruption, although the idea that indicting a politician for corruption in New York actually constitutes news of any sort is a little odd, now that I give the matter a little thought, I have enough money to go to Paris (I think), and all of us here in our happy little burg are looking forward to the arrival of the 17 year cicadas, vast squadrons of which will be bursting forth out of the ground in a sex-crazed  megaswarm any minute now. (God, they are ugly little bugs, aren't they?) And last, and certainly not least, the public approved our budget and we are now looking forward to a week of temperatures in the sixties, not that those two facts are in any way connected with one another.

And now, for my next trick...

...SCIATICA!!! I apologize for the constant barrage of bad health news, but if I had any good health news I would send it along in a heart beat--okay, there's good health news, my heart is fine! So the pace here is going to be even slower than it usually is, assuming that such a slowdown is even possible, given that I already work at a snail's pace, and a narcoleptic snail at that. Just a font of cheery news today, aren't I?

A statement of the obvious.

Yes, I have not posted in a while. And yes, I am being lazy.  I will try to do something about it…or maybe not.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be

 The following is something I wrote about six months ago, at a time when it was not warmer in my refrigerator than it is on my front porch.  I just love nostalgia.



As you might have heard, the weather in the northeastern United States has been nothing short of hellish these past few days. With temperatures in the high 90's and humidity hovering close to 100%, all of us here in the Vampire State have spent the last few days sweating like Mrs. Murphy's pet pig and I fear that I am no exception to the rule. In short, it's been too hot to think, much less sit down and dream up the usual confections for the Passing Parade. The weather having moderated somewhat after last night's storms; my mother is doing well, thank you, even if she is now in her fourteenth hour without electricity, which, like the deer eating her hedges, is somehow or other my fault; I will apply myself sometime during the week and have something fresh here as soon as humanly possible. I thank you all for your patience.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland!!!

You know, what I really want right now is for someone to explain to me yet again why global warming is such a bad thing, but before you do, I want my fingers and toes to thaw out so I can enjoy slugging you in the nose and then kicking your guts out on the cold, cold sidewalk. I want to be one with the experience. And while I am on the subject of sidewalks, I would like to point out to all and sundry here in our happy little burg that when you have completed shoveling out your sidewalks, an act mandated by municipal ordinance back in 1946, for those of you interested in such things, it would be useful for you to shovel a small passageway into the street. I do not see the point of shoveling out a sidewalk and then leaving the passersby stranded in the middle of a sea of snow, unless the point is to watch the passersby strand themselves in the middle of a sea of snow and then vent their frustration at having to return to where they started from on the kids, the dog, the postman, or anyone else who comes wandering by at the moment, or watch them wallowing through snowdrifts as tall as a house like Nanook of the North's clumsy little brother trying to get to the next cleared patch of sidewalk. This is a peculiar form of sadism, to be sure, but then most forms of sadism are peculiar to begin with and I suppose that this is a more benign form than enjoying setting fire to household pets or selling life insurance for a living.

ANNOUNCEMENT:
Yes, I am working on something for here; I am not on vacation, although I’m sure it appears that way to everyone. I trust that everyone will understand that with Miss Irene bearing down on us here in our happy little burg the piece I am alluding to will not be posted until sometime next week, when, I presume, the local utility will have cleared away all the fallen trees and restored the power the falling trees will have knocked for a loop. In related news, it seems that there is very little beer left anywhere in this neck of the woods, beer being a major component in any hurricane readiness plan, and that the former junior Senator from Illinois is apparently going to ride out the storm on what one of his predecessors referred to as “that women’s island.” Given that the former junior Senator from Illinois’ let it be known that his elevation to the highest office in the land would be the time that the oceans began to recede, I think it is high time that he get busy and start receding the damn ocean before the Jersey Shore becomes one with the Continental Shelf and Snooki has to go find a real job, provided there are any suitable jobs available for Italo-Chilean princesses of Poughkeepsie* these days. Or was this invocation of the tidal power of Knut just one more phony campaign promise our fearless leader has thrown under the wheels of his black Canadian bus when reality started to stare him in the face? It also occurs to me that, other than the promoters of demolition derbies, the former junior Senator must be one of this country’s largest consumers of monster wheels, seeing how many people, promises, and situations he chucks under said bus at a moment’s notice, but that may just be the cynic in me speaking. I do hope he buys American monster tires, though; I’m sure the boys in Akron can use the work.

*As a longtime resident of Dutchess County, I am compelled to point out that Snooki is from Marlboro, which is across the river in Ulster County, and not Poughkeepsie, which is the county seat here in Dutchess. Far be it from me to deny Ulster County the laurels it fully deserves.

A BIT OF EVERYTHING HERE: We are having scattered showers and thunderstorms here in our happy little burg today, which makes me wonder whether or not the lexicographical skills of the meteorological staff at radio station WTF [CLASSIC ROCK N’ROLL FOR THE VALLEY AND OUR HAPPY LITTLE BURG, ALL DAY ALL NIGHT ROCK WITH WTF!!!] are entirely up to snuff. As I understand the concept, scattered showers are patches of light to moderate rain that may occur here and there in a more or less random pattern throughout a certain geographic region. My understanding of this concept comes from the meaning of the word scattered, which meant, the last time I looked in a dictionary, to occur at usually random intervals rather than all together, and that of the word showers, meaning a light fall of rain, sleet, or other precipitation. So it was this understanding of the term that I went forward with my plans today, only to find that my understanding of the term and the meteorologists’ understanding of the term were not the same. First, the scattered showers involved seemed to be damn near everywhere, which would seem to contradict the meaning of scattered, and second, the showers themselves, while not of Noachic intensity, came down with enough alacrity to wash the pigeon crap off my car in no time flat. While I appreciate the free car wash; getting a free anything in today’s economy is a good thing, no two ways about it; I could have skipped the drenching I took getting into the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread. I wore light colored trousers today, so by the time I got into the building they looked like I’d spent the day peeing on my leg and telling me it was raining, as opposed to the other way around, which is what happened.

My apologies, but since I wrote the above about two weeks ago the weather has improved tremendously in this neck of the woods; it is sunny and warm outside, with very little humidity; but as the weather has gotten better over the past two weeks the state of my health, an always dubious proposition to begin with, has gotten worse. At the moment, I am waiting for my doctor to come back from vacation in whatever Third World hellhole he originally came from so as to find out whether my current state of more or less permanent discomfort is the result of rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, gout, or Lyme disease. The last of these is the current favorite here in our happy little burg, especially with me, as it is a disease treatable with antibiotics. After Lyme comes gout, which is a disease one can treat with changes in diet and some medication, albeit said treatment will no doubt come with a visit from my grandmother from heaven, her dwelling place. My grandmother was an intensely devout Roman Catholic, but her social views were a product of her time and upbringing as the daughter of a stevedore in Liverpool, and could verge on the positively Red in certain matters. One of these matters was the gout, a disease she held to be a rich man’s disease and one no child [or grandchild] of hers could ever contract. I learned all of this one summer when my father came down with the gout while Grandma was vacationing with us. That the news upset her would be one of the greater understatements of the family’s history; I am still trying to figure out how my father managed to survive those two months [or was it three? I forget now] without Grandma killing him or him killing her.

The two least desired alternatives, of course, are the ones that friends and neighbors insist on telling me are controllable these days. Permit me to say that as a diabetic I’ve already had my fill of incurable but controllable diseases and that I would prefer to have a disease that I can get rid of entirely in one fell intravenous swoop. The clap comes immediately to mind, the clap being a disease you can enjoy contracting and then enjoy getting rid of, although the morning after you acquire the problem can be a bit of a drip. Since my life does not work in this manner, the most desirable of the bad options is probably not going to happen and I will be stuck with the least desirable of these none too desirable options, rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that not only runs in the family, it has its own racetrack. In any case, please forgive the dearth of posts hereabout; it has not been for lack of ideas, laziness, writer’s block, or all the other usual excuses for not buckling down and getting on with the work that I usually inflict on the readership. This time around it’s because I have had other things on my mind recently. As soon as the dust settles down around here, I will continue onwards and upwards, and I thank you all for your patience.

UPDATE: The tests are back, boys and girls, and it's definitely rheumatoid arthritis...shit.

LEAVE OF ABSENCE: Hi there. If you are a long time reader of The Passing Parade, you will, no doubt, have noticed the extreme paucity of new posts here these past few weeks. I wish I could say that this sudden shortage was the result of yet another of one of my frequent dry spells, and I have to admit the idea of attributing the decline to writer’s block was a tempting one. I am, however, not running for office this year—my presidential bid in 2060 is still on, though, and I am currently going this year’s crop of kindergarteners looking for a suitable running mate—and therefore I have no immediate reason to fudge the truth: it was hot and I was lazy. If you have paid any attention to the Weather Channel for the past week or so then you know that we here in the northeastern United States have endured temperatures in the high 90’s Fahrenheit and humidity on the order of 157.973%. In short, we are all sweating like Mrs. Murphy’s prize pig—even the mosquitoes are sweating blood—and the heat is making us all wish we were dead and that you were, too. It is not enough that we must suffer, said Sigmund Freud in one of his many throes of autopsychoanalysis brought on his need to rationalize the high price of gasoline for his four door Oedipus complex sedan with optional sunroof and an antilock brake system that is the best on the road, according to Car & Driver magazine, others must suffer as well. The calm devotion to rational thinking and sweet reason that distinguishes the population of the Eastern Seaboard from the more emotional and irrational sections of this our Great Republic is buckling under the weight of the heat, as the calm devotees of rationalism transform under the meteorological duress into a maddened perspiring stinking mob of foul-mouthed guttersnipes prepared to gut their own mothers with a dull fish knife to get into a building with working A/C. The picture is not pretty here, folks, not by a long shot. Five will get you ten that if we had a nuke, we’d use it on someone.

The other thing about the dry spells is that while I’m in one, I usually can’t think of anything to write about. This was not true in this case. I’ve got any number of good (well, I think they’re good, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Most people are not all that objective about their own ideas until large numbers of their fellow citizens point out how really awful the idea really is. I mean, come on, Michael Dukakis—what the hell were they smoking when they dreamed that one up?) ideas—I’ve even started a couple of different pieces, but I haven’t bothered to finish any of them yet. Sloth, as I’ve mentioned here a couple of times, is my abiding vice, except for that silly thing with cold cuts and lemon Jello, and I haven’t been able to work up the willpower to sit down and finish what I’ve started writing. Maybe I’ll get around to it when the weather improves in the fall.

In the meantime, I am busy with obituaries. You may not believe this, but at one point or another just about everyone in the known universe passed through our happy little burg and some of them stayed just long enough to drop dead. This may seem strange to you, but after going through the fortieth obit of a man or woman who was born here, lived eighty or so years, and then died without every moving more than a couple of hundred yards from the place he or she were born, the obits of the commuting corpses are actually a relief from the relentless sameness of small town American life. Don’t get me wrong—I like Americana and Norman Rockwell just as much as the next guy—but too much is too much. I am pretty sure that I could drop some of these obits (I am doing 1954 at the moment) into today’s paper and no one would notice it at all. Obviously, I’d have to rearrange the dates a little, but other than that, I could leave the rest of the obit alone. A lot of the family names are the same; even the first names are the same, in many cases. I’ve already found about nine decedents whose descendants I went to high school with. I don’t often criticize the goings on here in our happy little burg, but all in all, I’d say a lot of us are in a bit of a rut these days, and apparently we were all in the same rut in those days too.

Now you may be wondering why I am bothering about obituaries at all, especially obituaries from 1954. Except for the Roberts Taft and Capa, did anyone you ever heard of die in 1954? Probably not, and it’s not that I haven’t tried to find them. But the local newspaper, which, I should point out for those of you who don’t know this already, was the worst newspaper ever published; Pravda was a beacon of journalistic truth and technical prowess compared to the local rag, whose owners apparently believed that the John Birch Society was a Communist front, although in its defense I should say you could roll a pretty good-sized joint with the paper, not that I would know that from personal experience, of course. But they did publish the local death notices and the attendant obituaries, and the equally attendant advertisements for the funeral homes. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found ads for funeral homes particularly ghastly. No matter how gently you phrase your spiel about attending to the needs of the grieving family, you’re all about dumping dirt on dead people, unless the deceased is going the cremation route, whereupon your business is turning dead people into dirt (just a stray thought: is there a point in that oven when, for the first and last time in your terrestrial existence, you are medium rare and go well with a nice red wine?)

In any case, I am compiling an obituary index, so that travelers from such exotic places as Oregon and Massachusetts can come to the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and look for the obituaries of their ancestors. The travelers tend to be very nice people; they are usually on the cusp of old age themselves and I figure that they want to trace their families back as far as they can before they join the ancestors in the choir invisible themselves. This is an inspiring, even noble, venture, I think, and one I applaud wholeheartedly; it’s just that I see no earthly reason why I should be the one who has to compile this damn thing in the first place. But there are times when we are not the masters of our fate, I fear, and this was one of those times. My contribution to the mold pit’s genealogical resources is wholly involuntary, a command performance if ever there was one; in short, I was drafted. Our leader was very nice about it, as she is wont to be, but my plaint that I was ill qualified for a task so burdensome, that I was slow of speech and tongue, found no more resonance with her than when Moses used the same excuse with the Almighty when he tried to duck the Ten Commandments gig. At least I won’t have to split the Red Sea, unless you count parting the waters on the men’s room floor this morning, but I didn’t need the Lord’s help for that; I had a mop. The Lord helps those who help themselves, you know.

WINTER TIME BLUES: My apologies, everyone, for the lack of posting since this past Tuesday. As you may have heard, the northeastern United States, in which section of this our Great Republic you will find our happy little burg situated, has had any number of problems with precipitation this past week. I would not mind this so much; I ordinarily take such problems in my stride, treating them with an aplomb that astonishes and amazes all those around me; but this week the shear pins on my snow blower took the eponymous opportunity available to them and sheared right off, rendering my blower useless. It would have made little difference if they hadn’t; the snow, followed by icy rain and then more snow, was as hard and heavy as an IRS agent listening to a tale of financial woe, and subsequently I had to chop nature's own concrete up before shoveling the vile stuff away. After several hours of this, I had aches and pains in places I would have thought too small to hold such a large collection of agonies, a condition that left me largely devoid of the necessary spirit of humor and whimsy needed to pump one of these screeds out.

The Sanitation Department, however, is doing its usual bang-up job when it comes to removing snow from the city streets. Having called five times to ask them when they were going to plow my street, I’ve learned that they are now officially thinking about plowing out Main Street, if they can get around to it before August. As you might imagine, large numbers of the citizenry are not happy with the idea of cross-country skiing in an imported car and so have taken to shoveling the snow out the streets on their own. I noticed one such more or less unsuccessful attempt at the local Reformed Church yesterday. The Reformed Church used to be the Dutch Reformed Church, before a synod decided that maybe salvation was not a condition limited to Dutch people in particular or Calvinists in general. So they have dropped the ethnic modifier and are now merely Reformed, and when they are not busy reforming themselves they are busy pushing the snow out of their parking lot and into the middle of the street with a backhoe. I don’t think they were actually trying to do this; I think they were trying to find a way of clearing their parking lot and the street at the same time, but found, to their chagrin, that there was no way of having their meteorological cake and eating it, too. There was no way of clearing their parking lot without dumping the snow in the middle of the street, and no way of clearing the snow without putting it back in their parking lot, thereby defeating the whole purpose of moving the snow in the first place. Complicating this, of course, was a good healthy dose of Calvinist guilt, which came from these good folks wanting to be selfish and clear parking lots for themselves at the expense of others, and Christ’s command to love your neighbor as yourself, which doesn’t explicitly forbid dumping the snow from your parking lot in the middle of the street, but does seem to frown on the practice.

What was especially interesting in all of this was the sign in front of the church, which announced to all who passed by that they should wear the colors of the Cross. I found this fairly interesting, in that while I’ve heard many debates one way or the other about the philosophical, theological, and historical meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, I’ve never heard a debate about the event's meaning in terms of fashion. In fact, I’d never heard that color coordination was theologically relevant to the Crucifixion at all; I suppose this is one of those dogmas, like predestination, peculiar to the Calvinist confession. I know that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which are usually pretty mindful of fashion trends, don’t have much to say one way or the other about what to wear to crucifixions, although I am told that the Church of the Nazarene holds that one should always wear a seersucker suit and Argyll socks to a hanging, and that the Assemblies of God think that a nice navy blue blazer is the thing to die in if you’re going to a lethal injection. I haven’t heard about any other denominational preferences in terminal fashions, but I am sure that the one thing all Christian denominations would agree on theologically is to make absolutely sure that if you are going to an execution, make absolutely certain that you are wearing clean underwear.