Mr. Keillor’s Sermon at Lake Woebegon

I’m picking my nose at the nude beach in the northwest corner of Lake Woebegon when
Garrison Keillor like a Midwest Christ rises from the otherwise smooth waters and causes ripples
to lap the naked bodies of my fellow bathers who, evidently, can’t see Mr. Keillor, the disgraced
NPR poet-prophet who has risen and returned. He’s here just for me. He hovers over in a three-
piece Harris tweed suit that is somehow bone-dry, and I stand, flick a booger the size of the Cape
York meteorite across the lake, and say, “Where have you been, you big beautiful bastard?”
because these are my big beautiful bastard days, it’s what I’m calling everyone, don’t ask, but
truth be told, Mr. Keillor looks good, son-of-god stately, so I take a knee because this huddle, I
can tell, will be consequential, redemptive, holy, and we’re in the redzone here on these muddy
shores in the game of life, our center has a bum knee but the defense is tired, fleshy beachgoers
prance and fart and fondle in the shallows, our running game is unparalleled, the herons are
eating their fill of minnows, our Cowboy-collared fullback has the thighs of Achilles—Mr.
Keillor extracts a book from his tweed coat and announces “I’m going to give a reading” and I
groan a little because don’t get me wrong I like words as much as the next bloke (ain’t this word
salad your eyes are chomping through proof enough?) but a reading seems a little anticlimactic
as does the book, no stone tablets here, just a tiny, dogeared paperback of mysterious origins, but
I betray none of this disappointment to Mr. Keillor as he’s emanating god’s glory and wisdom on
this here lake, a disgraced and divine messenger delivering a sermon solely for me, and he clears
his throat and this clearing is like a bear licking honey, like a mountain stream running white
with glacial till, and he says, you paying attention, reader?, he says, get ready, reader, you’re
never going to believe it, you’ll never be the same after you hear this, your whole world will
change, you big beautiful bastards will need a brand-spanking new ontology after you get a load
of this, Mr. Keillor says, and I quote “