Update 12-16!! -
Okay, the bid stands at $200. Um, I have no response to that. The
questions people are asking are funny, but not nearly as funny as
Reggie's outrageous answers.
Update 12-14-
Unbelievable.
The ebay thing is actually happened. Reggie made good on his threat. AND,
believe it or not, some
people have bid on it! Reggie is going to give whatever money is received to our
church building fund. What a strange turn of events.
We do the classic “white elephant” gift exchange at
our church Christmas party every year. For those of you who have never heard of
this, I’ll not bore you with too many details. The white elephant game is common
to Christmas parties here in the United States. People bring presents; some are
serious, some are silly, and some are a little tasteless. There is a game you
play, and you see who gets stuck with the bad gifts.
I know you probably think that’s pretty lame,
but you have to play this game over time with the same group of people before
you can understand its appeal. Over the years, stories accumulate and traditions
develop. We’ve been doing this at our church since 1989.
People still talk about the year that Lyle got
a huge pair of boxer shorts with hearts on them. He went into the bathroom and
came out wearing them. Then there was the nose hair clippers that reappeared for
three or four years in a row. There was also a legendary, gaudily-painted toilet
seat that came back so many times it became sacred. It
was understood that whoever got the toilet seat had to bring it to the next year’s
party, wrapped creatively enough to fool someone into choosing it.
Now my own talent – at least I see it as a
talent – is to bring extremely bizarre gifts that are on the edge of being
frightening. I often include notes of explanation that I spend a fair amount of
time crafting, so that they will be as funny as possible.
One year I gathered spent, red and green
shotgun shells and put one shell over each bulb in a strand of white lights. It
made a spooky string of redneck Christmas lights that was also kind of pretty,
in its own weird way.
Another year I baked 20 foil-wrapped potatoes,
put them in a box, and gently laid a copy of The Book of Mormon on top of them.
If you are a Mormon, I hope you’re not offended. I make no statement about your
theology or your scriptures; it was the sound of it that I liked. Listen: “A box
of baked potatoes and a book of Mormon.” See what I mean? That sounds better
than a box of baked potatoes and a Bible.
A box of baked potatoes and a Bhagavad-Gita
sounds even better, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up my only copy of
the Gita for some Christmas party. You can get a Book of Mormon anywhere. There
are usually people walking around the neighborhood handing them out for free.
But this year I came up with a white elephant
gift so strange and unusual, so weird and unexpected, that it tops anything I’ve
ever done before. I might have to leave the church now, because I’ll never top
this one.
I spent the entire year 2006 collecting the
lint that gathered in my navel – sometimes called “belly-button lint” - and
storing it in a tiny glass bottle. Yes, an entire year.
Oh yeah, I’m just that twisted and determined.
Let me tell you that I learned a lot about the
lint that gathers in men’s navels this past year. New cotton t-shirts produce
the best lint. You need to have a little hair on your chest for this phenomenon
to take place, but let’s not go into the physics of it. What kept me interested
were the pretty colors.
I’ll tell you, this thing changed the way I
bought clothing. I would stand at a rack of t-shirts thinking about what kind of
lint they would produce for my collection. I know I bought at least one shirt
because I thought that particular shade of green would help balance the colors
in the bottle.
Surprisingly, the highlight of this year’s lint
crop is a foreign object. After a boisterous fiesta party last Spring, I woke up
in the morning to find that a piece of confetti had miraculously made a journey
down the front of my shirt and ended up in my belly button. I was absolutely
delighted with this and felt that after such an amazing journey, the confetti
ought to be included in the collection. I’m nothing if not very inclusive.
I’d like to take this moment to thank my
wife, who put up with my madness this past year. I guess she stays with me
because I’m a nice enough guy, if you can get past my bad hair, freakish sense
of humor, and tendency to offend major world religions at Christmas parties.
Can you possibly imagine my excitement as I
wrapped my little bottle this past Saturday, after a solid year of collecting?
Here is a picture of the bottle and the text of
the note I included with it:
What you hold in your hands is a 2006 crop of
high-quality belly-button lint, grown and harvested over the last year by Gordon
Atkinson.
The colors of the collection reflect the
variety of new shirts I wore over the past year, including a very rare bit of
lime-colored lint from a Habitat For Humanity t-shirt.
Also included in the collection is a single
piece of confetti from a Fiesta party. This miraculous bit of confetti, working
with all the vigor and optimism of a salmon going upstream, managed to find its
way down the front of my shirt and ended up in my belly-button, where I found it
the morning after.
I, Gordon Atkinson, certify on my honor that
every piece of lint in the collection is genuine and was gathered by myself from
a period beginning at Christmas of 2005 and ending in December of 2006.
Note: This collection contains no lint gathered from
the dryer or any other source.
It was the perfect white elephant gift, or so I
thought. Unfortunately there was one thing I had not counted on.
Reggie.
Reggie freakin Regan. The only man in the
church with a sense of humor more twisted and diabolical than my own.
Reggie Regan: husband; father; nurse;
bat house
builder; and corrupter of ministers. It was Reggie who introduced me to the
pleasures of a real Cuban cigar. And once you’ve had an authentic Cohiba, there
is no recapturing your innocence.
Reggie managed to attain my little bottle of
lint in the white elephant game, not that there was anyone trying to take it
away from him. He vowed publicly, before all present at the party, to put it up
for auction at ebay.com. Apparently, he is actually going to do this.
Heaven only knows what horrors will come of
this, once such a private and intimate part of me has been made public. The
shame of it is almost more than I can bear. I beg anyone with a few spare
dollars to purchase this abomination and cast it, like the great ring of power,
into the nearest fiery mountain you can find.
Failing that, just drop it in the trash,
please.
I don’t like the idea of it being out there,
somewhere, hidden from me, mocking me with its very existence.
Help.
Real Live Preacher
