Take that, Richard Dawkins!

I will not be able to go to Omaha to CatNats. I’m not quite sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The reason I can’t go is family stuff, so it’s good on that point. And my desire to see beautiful downtown Omaha isn’t as high as, say, my desire to see the Taj Mahal. And for all I know, we won’t qualify anyone, so this could all just be pipe dreaming. But then again, I usually enjoy CatNats. Often they set them up so that you are unable to find a meal in the host city after, say, 8:00 pm because the host city has already been closed for the last two hours. Except of course for Rochester, which had no city to close, and the only accessible restaurant was a BBQ joint with a ten-hour waitlist of Hell’s Angels. Detroit was fun, though: it took two hours just to get to the head of the line for the elevators, and then there was the whole stealing-of-the-cots that took most of the first night, not to mention the literal lockdown on the prairie for the actual rounds. Minnesota was great because we managed to break into Benihana just as it was closing by sneaking out of the awards after the first three hours of thankarama; I have no idea where everyone else ate. And who can forget beautiful downtown Albany, which is, uh, in Albany? If nothing else, CatNats gives you a menu of disasters from which to choose when one is by the fireside in the ensuing years, narrating tales of great debate adventure.

On the other hand, there is a tribal thing about the event, seeing people you don’t often run into. Although, come to think of it, mostly I’m trying to avoid all of those people I don’t often run into, so combine the lack of sustenance and the threat of tab disaster with the proximity of some schmegeggie you’ve been trying to avoid for the last few years, and toss in a cross-country trek to the middle of nowhere (defining nowhere as virtually every city in which they locate CatNats, with the possible exception of NYC, the last one of which I spent at Loyola emptying trash cans), and that whole good thing slash bad thing is seen in a totally different light.

Let me run this again.

I will not be able to go to Omaha to CatNats. Which proves that, yes, there is a God.