Today is 'National Pancake Day' according to IHOP, where from 7am to 10pm local time we're all entitled to a short stack of buttermilk flapjacks at no charge.One at a time, folks, one at a time.
The sacred holiday was actually last week in England, but here in the States nothing is legit until it has a corporate sponsor.
National Pancake Day has yet to sweep the nation, however. Maybe because it was incepted as a charitable promotion at IHOP only three years ago. Or maybe because the only people still eating pancakes are in the Bible Belt -- the few stories I found this morning were in community newspapers like The Chattanoogan, Tulsa World, the Monroe (LA) News Star, and my personal fave, the Northwest Arkansas Times.
Back in the day my family in working-class Glendale Heights would drive up to Wilmette for a religious service at the Baha'i House of Worship. The Willmette area rocks because its a progressive, scenic town -- and the home of Bill Murray & the FallOutBoys.
Never saw those guys at the Bahai Temple, but after the service we'd swing by a small International House of Pancakes that was down the road. It was the old, pre-IHOP one with the weird angled Scandanavian styled blue roof. Never saw Bill Murray & the FallOutBoys there either. The diner was designed as weird as the design of the Bahai House of Worship, which looks (and feels) like religious temples everywhere: a climate-controlled Spaceship of "worship".
Consider me underwhelmed and under obligations by the underworld banter. No matter the landscape architecture, organized religion will never cut it for me. There is so much more to our wickedly magical universe that can ever be revealed by religion's anesthetizing other-planetary jargon. While growing up in such environments, my father and relatives somehow couldn't fathom that I didn't want to be a card-carrying member of ANY religion, especially one as 'organized' as theirs. That there shouldn't be an "inner" versus "outer" life if we're to live in One Piece, with no Divide Beings in between.
As a writer I can see write through it. Ever notice that the people who speak of the "afterlife" are usually the ones who don't have much hope to become a significant, notable person here on our beautiful Earth? Now call me crazy -- and believe me, they have! -- but I prefer Mother Nurture than Mother Goose.
Speaking of my own mother's temple in the west, she snapped a great photo in 1977 in Wilmette of me inside her pregnant belly as she posed for a pic with Baha'i member Dizzy Gillespie. He ruled. While the Dizster never got a chance to perform with Bill Murray & the FallOutBoys, I just might. Inshallah.
