GROUP NAMES A - F

We're all animals and if animals deserve anything, they deserve names. I've got a name - Sadoo.  You've got a name - Thanatos, Mooty-Socks, Wee Willie Wilbur, Alice Nd Çurap Mazlum ... whatever moved your mother in the weird reaches of the night.  But when you see a pack of chefs sauntering down the street, you don't (or shouldn't) say, "Hey, look at that pack of chefs."  You say (or should say), "Hey,  look at that arrogance of chefs."  And just as a pack of cats can be called a clowder, clutter, pounce, dout, nuisance, glorying, or glare (but not a pack) and kittens can be called a kindle, litter, or intrigue and cats wearing glasses can be called a geek, surprise, or impossibility and wild cats are simply a destruction, so those chefs can be many-named.


We'll do this in segments (beginning with A-F), interspersed with thoughts about pants, no-pants, underpants, uberpants, and--of course--farting.  Add your own names, your own groups.  Disagree with me.  Share the names with your friends and enemies.  Start using them in public.  Let's get them in the dictionary before we die.

adulterers	transgress, alibi, caprice
accountants	deceit, morgue, receipt, conceit
agents	veiling, unveiling
anarchists	constitution, vacancy, non-existence
architects	erection, fenestration
baptismal candidates	cowardice, wetness, confession
bastards	stew, confusion
believers	lobotomy, earnestness, syllogism
bums	query, emancipation
cashiers	catastrophe, mausoleum, flirtation
chefs	competition, arrogance, suicide
children	amorality
consultants	semiotics, jealousy
couriers	illegality
cowards	comfort, tradition, omnipresence
crossword addicts	cabal
cuckolds	camaraderie, barnyard, greenhouse, serenity
dancers	anorexia, diet
doctors	obfuscation
donut-lovers	cancer, exegesis
dropouts	icharus
engineers	balustrade, catapult, kingdom, input, euphemism (sanitation)
entrepreneurs	resurrection, hummer
epileptics	unpredictability
executives	clone, treason
farmers	reduction, irrelevance
fashion students	aggression
fathers	memory, poverty, absence
fornicators	ingress, confession, condom
freshmen	syphilis

A PEJORATIVE OF TAXONOMISTS

It was 20 years ago today not that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play but that I received a vision.  Like any normal sadoo, I’ve had visions of everything from braless angels descending countless ladders in fluttery bliss from heaven onto my priapic bed … to vermiculous apocalypses so horrific the very retelling of them would kill you.  But on January 25 1990, shortly before my final son was born, three de-wombed children sweetly farting in their sleep, in the happy desolate hours of the night, after an evening of far too many Brussels sprouts, I received a vision that united time, myth, nature, technology, humanity, art, and god; in the morning, over a breakfast of vast toddler demands and oatmeal, I determined that the vision was conceptually sound and imaginatively potent.

It was, I confess, a taxonomic vision.  Which sounds less healthy than it should.

The sadoo—a human type I do not advocate but only describe in a shadowy attempt to name what I seem to be—is, among other things, a competent taxonomist.  There are those, naturally, who despise taxonomists.  Back in the days I mingled with the named, I met with Eric McLuhan—one of Marshall’s many Catholic-spawned children.  More ignorant than I should have been about the politics of such a statement, I referred to Northrop Frye in a vaguely positive way; this provoked a terse dismissive response, of which academics seem to be particularly fond.

Frye, McLuhan said with religious and contemptuous finality, was a taxonomist.

What a vile tribe I belong to! I thought, pained and bleeding.  How despised and rejected of men, men of sorrows and acquainted with grief, are we taxonomists!  I went home and built Lego fairies with my children to escape the horror of the new knowledge of what I was.

Even now, recalling that trauma, I find myself slightly weepy and realize I may not have the strength today to share my taxonomic vision with you.  Please believe me:  I so want to tell you what makes a beautiful taxonomy—one so magnificent politicians become poets and the Fortune 500 forget how to count.  I so very very much want to tell you … when I’m ready for it, when you’re ready for it, when the world’s ready for it … what my perfect taxonomic vision is.  But I must wait, Dearly Beloved, until the proper time.

It’s all about waiting.  It’s all about the proper time.

In the meantime … to wet your pants … here’s what’s coming next in The Secular Sadoo … something you need, something you’ve been waiting for—a desperate lacuna in the very miasmic fabric of language:  group names for groups that don’t have names.  That is:  if a bunch of crows is called a murder and a bunch of waterfowl is called a knob, what should a bunch of lawyers be called? A bunch of administrative assistants? Pimps? Desperados?  Should they all be called a bunch?  No.  Oh no no no.

I have been given the names for such bunches, people.  In another vision.  And I shall share these names with you.  I shall share them with you soon.  And your lives shall be changed.

THE SECULAR SADOO

I am a sadoo—not a sadhu—and this blog is the imaginative wandering of this particular sadoo.  Let me explain.

I am not a sadhu because:

• I was born a Jesus-thumping Christian near the epicenter of the West, not a Hindu in poop-mad India;
• I do not believe in liberation, renunciation, or asceticism;
• I experience yoga’s practitioners as gummi worms thrashing in a sea of processed sugar.

I am a sadhu because:

• I am a mystic;
• I am a wandering monk—attached to no cause but wandering—which in the language of the West might be called a flâneur;
• I am adept at curses.

This condition I-am-not-I-am I name a sadoo—vile, sensuous, amoral and apolitical, cosmopolitan, aesthetic, religious, skeptical, gleefully intelligent, verbal, and witty, detached, happily and acutely judgmental, raunchy.  I name this combination of attributes holy, for it sets the sadoo apart both from the common fawning hordes overtly or covertly seeking money, fame, power, reputation, security, admiration, and pleasure and the sadhus—and their spiritual relatives across the religious world—who strive (or pretend to strive) to transcend (or pretend to transcend) the bloody, schizophrenic, bound condition of flesh.

As a sadoo, I do not believe in striving, for there is nothing to strive for.  The world is perfect in its imperfection and this thought—that there is no other world—is the one thought that is anathema to civilized humanity.

So I wander in the world, watching its possible demise through the human clambering for progress, and blow bubbles of words in the greater bubble of blog.