What Goons Do On Sunday

We don’t go to church on Goon Island.

The main reason is that we don’t have a church on Goon Island. Never have had one. We know what they are, but having one has always seemed an odd notion to us Goons.

For one thing, they take up a lot of space. And what are they for, really? They’re for providing a place where a bunch of like-minded folks can get together on a regular basis. Well, we have the bar-b-que pit for that. Heck, we have the whole of Goon Island for that. We’re pretty much always getting together, one way or another, and we’re naturally about as like-minded as you can get. So having something like a church standing around taking up space to facilitate that kind of thing would be redundant.

And then there’s the whole religious angle to churches. Houses of god, that kind of thing. I have to tell you, we don’t put much stock in the idea of gods here on the Island.

Don’t get me wrong – metaphysics is a hot topic around the fire on many a night. But for all the speculating we do about the nature or natures of the universe or universes and who or what if anything may or may not have been responsible for the whole deal, we’ve never seriously entertained the idea of anything that needed a house.

Goons need houses, or more accurately, caves, that’s for sure. Which, incidentally, have most types of houses beat by a long shot as far as we’re concerned. But if you took all the time and trouble to actually built a church, I can’t imagine you’d find anything in it when you went there except you and whoever you came with. Nobody home.

A church on Goon Island would just be another place filled with Goons, and like I said, the Island is pretty much that already.

Now, that’s not to say that Goons don’t have religion, sort of. It’s just that the connection between religion and churches has never been very clear to us.

I can see how the notion might have gotten started, though. Under different circumstances, it could have happened with out Sacred Clippers.

Here’s the story behind those, and I have to tell you up front, it’s pretty dull. Not the clippers, the story.

Anyway, for millions of years, Goons had been clipping their arm, leg, and pelvic fur with anything that came to hand…sharpened rocks or groat bones or whatever would take an edge. Goon fur grows pretty fast, and if you don’t keep it neatly trimmed, it gets matted and nasty and can become an impediment to walking or food gathering or having sex. Life just goes smoother all around when it’s kept to a reasonable length.

And the trimming of our fur has always been something we looked forward to getting together to do. That’s not saying much, because we like getting together to do just about everything, but you know what I mean. All our hair grows at about the same rate, and when it gets to a certain length, we just kind of decide that it’s time for Fur Day. There’s nothing quite like spending an entire day getting together, yakking and helping each other trim those hard-to-reach places.

And the benefits are two-fold – not only do you end up with a handsome group of well-trimmed Goons, but you also end up with a big batch of Goon hair that can be used to make just about anything from food gathering baskets to...well, food gathering baskets. That’s pretty much all we make out of Goon hair. We make lots of other stuff, like bongo drums and bar-b-que spits and basting bowls and dominos, but Goon hair isn’t much good for those.

Anyway, like I said, for millions of years all we had to use on Fur Day was whatever we found laying around that we could make reasonably sharp, and these items never got any special attention from us. It was the trimming that counted, not the trimmer.

But then, the Sacred Clippers arrived.

A hundred or so years back, we were down on the beach bringing in the daily fish catch when we found something washed up on shore. This happens from time to time, like when we found the Magnavox console television or the big bundle of I’m With Stupid tee shirts.

This time, though, it was something extraordinary from several points of view. It was a large wooden crate that had been tightly wrapped in thick, wax-impregnated burlap. We removed the burlap and cracked open the crate. Stu the Goon reached in and pulled out something wrapped in oil cloth. When the oil cloth came off, there is was.

A shiny new Sheffield #1 bow-spring hand-operated sheep sheer.

The crate was full of them, all individually wrapped in oil cloth.

Stu turned the shear over in his hands, getting the feel of them. He settled the handles in his palm and gave the shears a couple quick snicks. Then he just sort of looked at the hair on his other arm. He held up his arm and found a straggly bit of fur that had escaped the last trim, and before any of us could blink, he snicked it off with the shear.

It was kind of a magic moment.

We instantly bagged the usual routine and called a Fur Day on the spot. We carried the crate up to the caves and examined the entire contents. Row on row of clippers, all nestled neatly in their oil-cloth wraps. We took out one more – just one – and we stowed the crate and the remaining shears in a nearby cave. Then we luxuriantly trimmed each other with those incredible tools of efficient and highly satisfying personal grooming.

I tell you, when something like those shears wash up on your Island, you get a special feeling.

There were 224 shears in the crate in all, counting the original two we removed for the first Sacred Clippers Fur Day. We knew we’d go through them sooner or later and have to go back to stone and bone, and that made them all the sweeter to us. So we actually dedicated a corner of the empty cave we stowed them in as a special spot reserved just for the Sacred Clippers, and over the years it’s become sort of a shrine for us. A shrine to great things washing up on the beach.

And honestly, that’s our religion. We really like these sheep shears that came to us, and we’ll be really sad when we can no longer get a good cut out of the last one, so we savor our Fur Days and get a lot of enjoyment out of them while we can.

Which, long story short, is how I can understand how churches may have become popular in the rest of the world.

Let’s say you have something, like the Clippers or maybe a meteorite that fell from the sky or a shiny stone you fond in a fish’s stomach or a food item that looks like it has the face of somebody you know on it. You want to keep it safe, protect it, find a special storage place for it, because it’s something special to you and you’re amazed that it found its way into your hands.

And let’s say that you’re not a Goon and don’t have the benefit of a tight community of well-rounded, sensible individuals constantly around you, so you go way overboard with this. You’re prone to wild flights of fantasy and imagination, and you start making up stories about this special thing. Like it must have come from somewhere special. Like somebody special must have wanted you to have it. Like you are someone special because this special thing was sent to you. Maybe by god.

So you build the thing an even more special storage place, and more and more people, seeing how special this thing is getting treated, start to buy in to the notion that this thing really is important and might be from someplace special and could be charged with all kinds of mystical energy or something.

And, believe me, there are folks in the world who will happily buy in to something like this, even if the thing in question is actually a lump of iron or a fish bone or a moldy piece of bread. Don’t ask me why.

Pretty soon, you have to actually hide the thing itself because it’s become way, way too meaningful, important, and desirable to everybody to keep out in the open. But this ever-more-elaborate storage house you built for it starts to sort of stand in for the thing itself, and people come to the place just for the idea of the thing that used to be in it. Pretty soon you don’t even need the thing itself anymore. The building does the trick.

The church.

So like I say, I can see how the connection between religion and churches might have started.

Our Sacred Shears are in the same crate in which we found them, and we keep the crate in the same corner of the same cave where we originally stored them. We’ve used about 20 of them over the years, so nobody is getting too worried or excited yet about not having them any more.

And when they’re gone, they’ll just be gone.

But you never know what will wash up on shore. Sometimes you get Sacred Clippers, sometimes you get I’m With Stupid tee shirts, and sometimes you get dead squid. That’s life. The only thing you can be sure of is that something will inevitably be waiting for you on the beach sooner or later. The weird and the wonderful and the disgusting just keep on coming.

We haven’t found anything on the beach yet that we can reasonably say came from god, but we really don’t expect to, and that suits us fine. Most of us think that god would just complicate things…especially our religion.