The First Spud-mas, When the Idaho Was Born

[Once again I present information about the Third Galaxy gleaned from the 21st Edition of the Absolute Truth. Please bear with me if I wander -- it is an enormous amount of information I have had to plow through...]

"In the bad old days, when the Mob ruled the world, Tutti Frutti, the Boss of Bosses let the word go out that everyone had to pay protection money..."

Thus begins the story of the first Spud-mas, when the Holy Idaho was born in a barn in Bedlam, a small town in Holy California.

The fact is, we have very few "facts" about the Holy Idaho, that is historical facts. Except for a few references in other literature, all we have are the four books of Mark, Look, Matthew and John, some letters and a diary which have been canonized into what we know today as the "Book of the Holy Idaho".
True, there are a couple hundred other "books", but they were all decreed "false" by a committee about 300 years after the Holy Idaho left our plane of existence -- that is if he was ever here in the first place. These books were not only banned, they were actively sought out and destroyed in a manner that would make a modern day dictator cream in his jeans for the sheer joy of it.

Even an incorrigible cynic like myself must admit that there is a text which begins with the words cited above. Whatever one may believe or not believe, the Book of the Holy Idaho itself is a fact as certain as the yellow pages of the telephone book. Furthermore, it should be obvious to a blind man that the Book of the Holy Idaho is closely intertwined with the much older "Book of the Great Potato".

In fact, some say that the story of the Holy Idaho is an extended parable or commentary upon a sequence in the Book of the Great Potato, the story of the binding of Laughing Boy when his father Broken Wing came that close to murdering his only son because he imagined the Great Potato wanted a blood sacrifice. The reader is encouraged to read the the story here.

According to the text, the Idaho was "sprouted" miraculously by the Holy Wind, that is without the intervention of any human hand or other appendage. One can of course speculate on the fact that it was common in those times to say that great kings and princes had been conceived with the help of one of their "gods".

In the Book of the Great Potato it is writ that "a virgin would conceive" and that would be a sign from the Great Potato of something. No matter how often one points out that the word translated as "virgin", simply means "young woman" -- the Peelers continue to maintain Idaho was sprouted, through the agency of the Holy Wind without the help of any man, woman -- or potato for that matter.

That is the story which all which all Peelers must at least pretend to believe in order to be considered Peelers by other Peelers. At times, it has had most serious consequences when other Peelers decided you were not a "true" Peeler. I know that it is hard for people who have the good fortune of living in such a sane world as our own to understand how it could be that people could be mashed, crushed, maimed, tortured in the most delicate manner and even burnt alive for failing to profess belief in on the many tenets of the Peeler faith!

But I wander, I've already written so much and have yet to touch upon that first Spud-mas when Holy Idaho was born in a barn. Many young children have been taught to think that it was so sad he had to be born in such a place because there was no room in the motel in Bedlam. The fact is, it was a most felicitous place to be born. It was a warm, secure place, the young Idaho opened his eyes in pleasant surroundings, dimly lit and smelling of hay and cow farts.

People are often surprised to learn that most of the names in these stories about Holy California mean something in the original language. For example, the very name Holy Idaho refers to the Special Name of the Great Potato, that is, SPUD, the name which no one must speak. Briefly, the name, Holy Idaho, could be translated to "He Who Cries Out to the Great Potato" -- this ties in well with what Book of the Holy Idaho says were his last words, "My SPUD, my SPUD, why have you forsaken me!"

The Book of the Holy Idaho makes a great deal of the "fact" that he was born in "Bedlam". In the language of the time, "bedlam" literally means "House of Bread" or "House of Struggle". The confusion lies in the fact that the word for "bread" is elliptic, that is, it refers to the kneading of the dough when one makes bread. On the other hand, the same word root is used to speak of war and battle. This makes more sense when you consider that war in those days consisted almost exclusively of hand to hand combat with swords, spears and axes one stuck or whacked rather personally into the flesh of other humans.

Whether these and the many other word plays in these texts are deliberate or accidental depends on who you ask -- if you ask me, the answer is of course, yes, they are deliberate and give these stories a richness often overlooked.