I know one of the great social movements of our time is a return to orthodoxy in all religions, but you’ll not catch me on that train. I’m enjoying the great cafeteria of secularism and pick-and-choose religious entrees too much.

Also, I mix my metaphors into a great big melting pot. What-evuh.

Anyway, last Friday was the memorial …I guess service isn’t quite the correct word. OK, memorial party for my old neighbor Chuck, who died last month. It was a blast, I must say, and if my own memorial has half as interesting a guest list, generates one-third as many funny stories and has food even a quarter as good, I’ll consider it a life well-lived.

In the middle of it all a half-dozen Buddhist monks showed up and chanted. I missed the beginning, but someone said it was one of those send-your-soul-to-the-afterlife chants, and I loved it — so strange and hypnotic. To my knowledge Chuck wasn’t a Buddhist, but in the photo collage in the dining room was a shot of him posing with a bunch of monks, so they must have had some sort of connection. As a rule I’m not much for new-age religion, and I think Madonna and her kabbalah is just silly. But I’m grateful I’ve reached a point in my life where monks and I appear on the same guest lists.

I just read a story about elections in the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church; apparently they’ve been squabbling amongst themselves, ever since a post-9/11 prayer service in which one of their clergyman participated in an ecumenical prayer service with non-Christians. This is a violation of their doctrine, and the synod leader’s failure to suspend the offending minister is cause of great offense among more conservative members.

To which I can only say: Sheesh. Chant on, monks.

Saturday: Fabulous fellow Fellow Fatih came up to the lake with his preggo wife Idil for one last lazy afternoon before their yankee doodle dandy shows up later this month. We drank wine and did the usual lakey things, including ice cream with raspberries from our very own bushes. Isn’t summer wonderful?

Sometimes a girl’s gotta take care of herself. No, sometimes a girl’s just gotta touch up her roots. I tried a new place today, figuring what the hell, let’s make a fresh start.

I like a haircut, personally. I take off my glasses — the hair color gets all over them — and the world goes all swimmy. I hold the fashion magazines right up to my nose, so it looks like I’m really, really interested in 10 Fun Looks For Summer. Today, I read Us, which is not a fashion magazine, more like a gossip rag for people who find People too intellectual. I marveled at all the stars who’ve flown under my radar — who the hell is Marc Anthony, besides the new Mr. J-Lo? Could you pick Tara Reid out of a police lineup? I couldn’t. In the midst of all this, a handsome blur appeared to my left, and asked if I’d like a complimentary hand massage.

Why, certainly.

As he got closer, he came into somewhat sharper focus. Young guy, the new massage therapist at the salon. Works on men and women, prefers an eclectic rub style, said he likes to get to work and then “see what I find,” which sounds sort of dirty when I write it down, but really it wasn’t. He squirted some Aveda lotion on my hand and got to work. Of course it felt marvelous. We made small talk, although I noticed my voice was getting softer and quieter, doubtless a side effect of having my palms rubbed and my fingers handled the way a farmer handles the teats on an udder. It’s hard for me to make small talk without slipping into reporter mode: Where did you go to massage school, young man? Las Vegas, really? What was that like? Have you ever been to the Bellagio? And so on.

Asking questions gives you an opportunity to drift away between them, although I learned a bit — Bellagio waitresses wear fitted suits, with short skirts, but otherwise somewhat tasteful. Las Vegas is a strange place to be a permanent resident. It wasn’t so bad for a while, but he’s glad to be back. He worked as a lifeguard while he went to school, at a hotel pool.

He finished up after about 10 minutes, and there was an awkward tip-me moment, which I ignored. My mitts were feeling too good in the immediate afterglow to go diving into my purse for a fiver, and besides, he said “complimentary.” (Relax. I tipped him when I left.)

People should touch one another in a massage-like manner more often. This is something I firmly believe. Ten minutes with this guy, and I was ready to set him up in an apartment. I liked my cut and color, too, so it was a pretty good afternoon.

Alan’s downstairs listening to “After Bathing at Baxter’s.” All that Grace Slick wailing — sometimes our domestic soundtrack is a little strange. Me, I’m old-skool; you’ll never top “Surrealistic Pillow” in my book. When I had my radio show, the engineer sometimes used the long intro to “She Has Funny Cars” for bumper music, at my request.

Linkage: When Jon Carroll is funny, he frequently captures a certain effervescent goofiness that’s as light and delicate as a soap bubble, but still, just right.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand nyah nyah nyah nyah nyahs.

“July Surprise” = no surprise.

You have a swell weekend, and I’ll see you after it’s over.

It looks as though we’ve found a bit of breathing space. Chores are more or less caught up, the home front is in confident hands (i.e., not mine), we’re only two days to the weekend. Yee-haw.

One reason I’ve been a bit discombobulated of late is the extreme schedule adjustment since Ann Arbor. I now arrive at work at 5 a.m., an hour so early it generally needs an extra adjective — “ungodly,” say. But little by little, it’s growing on me, sort of. The 3:55 alarm is always a shock, but as early birds all over the world know, there’s some pleasure in being one of the few, the proud, the ambulatory-before-dawn.

My drive to work is over in a jif with so little traffic, but there’s lots to like about it while it lasts. The just-getting-home people, out wandering Creighton Avenue. The members-only Black Pistons MC storefront, frequently still open, with a sturdy bearded biker or two shooting pool until last-man-standing. The sleepy faces in Tom’s Donuts. The open-all-night Taco Bell, downtown. And, of course, “Coast to Coast.”

It’s been a good while since I was up in the wee hours doing much other than nursing a baby or having insomnia, and neither activity is well-suited to radio listening. So I missed the whole Art Bell era, when “Coast to Coast” put itself on the map, with its all-night collection of ghost-hunters, paranormal spoon-benders and, of course, aliens.

An alien called the other morning on my drive in. He said he was a “visitor,” or a “newcomer” or an “ambassador” or something like that, the gist being: He was just now realizing his human form was an illusion, or maybe closer to a shell. He was a one-man sleeper cell for an alien force, and he was awakening to his mission, although it wasn’t entirely clear yet.

“How does one know if you’re one of these?” the host queried.

“You feel estranged from your family,” the man said, among other things. Well, that’s helpful.

The best thing about a 5 a.m. factory whistle? Quittin’ time comes at 1 p.m. One of these days I’ll figure out the magical bedtime that enables me to get through the rest of the day without needing a little nap. It is summer, after all; I should be working on my tan.

A few things you might enjoy reading:

Gwynne Dyer speaks the uncomfortable truth about our involvement in Iraq:

So once more, with feeling: the 9/11 attacks were not aimed at American values, which are of no interest to the Islamists one way or another. They were an operation that was broadly intended to raise the profile of the Islamists in the Muslim world, but they had the further quite specific goal of luring the United States into invading Muslim countries.

The true goal of the Islamists is to come to power in Muslim countries, and their problem until recently was that they could not win over enough local people to make their revolutions happen. Getting the U.S. to march into the Muslim world in pursuit of the terrorists was a potentially promising stratagem, since an invasion should produce endless images of American soldiers killing and humiliating Muslims. That might finally push enough people into the arms of the Islamists to get their stalled revolutions off the ground.

And my friend Jones speaks the somewhat less compelling truth about Bob Knight. If anyone still cares, that is:

Let me tell you something. Knight would never allow anyone to see it. But he’s hurting right now.

And, for a competitor such as Knight, this is indigestible. It’s the cruelest of punishments.

Irrelevance! Who doesn’t know that feeling? Sometimes, anyway.

More tomorrow.

I may have found a true anomaly, even for Fort Wayne — a 50-cent movie house. The holiday snuck up on us, and the forecast threatened rain off and on all day, so we decided to bag a trip to the overcrowded lake and stay in the Fort for our nation’s birthday. Isn’t that what Independence Day is all about? Doing something different? It’s what I always say, anyway.

So off we went to the movies, something we haven’t done for a while. I can’t wait until I can take Kate to “Godfather” film festivals and the like, but for now I have to sit through “Ella Enchanted.” Which, I reminded myself, at least isn’t “Garfield.” And at $10.50 for two admissions, a large popcorn and two drinks, you can’t say the price isn’t right.

What to say about “Ella Enchanted”? How about this: Sometimes Roger Ebert is too kind. And this: If they gave an Oscar for Best Rip-Off, it’d be a shoo-in. Any more would be a waste of words, but it did get me to thinking about when you start telling kids that stuff stinks. I had a neighbor who believed, strongly, that it’s wrong to express value judgments to children on things like movies, TV shows and books. He thought you had to respect children’s opinions, and if they thought “Dragonball Z” was art, well, then that’s what it is.

Not surprisingly, I disagree. “How are they supposed to develop standards of taste?” I asked. The conversation went nowhere. But it’s something I’ve wondered about ever since, because I’ve loudly and frequently shared my opinions about TV and books and movies with Kate since she was big enough to listen. I tell her she can watch Mary-Kate and Ashley TV shows and movies, but we’re not buying book versions of the same stories, because they’re for dull-witted children who can’t be persuaded to read otherwise, so check out this Narnia story instead. This is going to blow up in my face one of these days, I know; her teenage rebellion will probably take the form of writing novelizations for Strawberry Shortcake cartoons, or at the very least I’ll insult someone’s mother. But I don’t care. I remember my mom scowling when a second-grade birthday-party entertainment included seeing “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.” But she took me to see “The Godfather” when I was in seventh grade, something lots of parents would have found equally inappropriate. I got the message: ’70s cinema rules.

But for today, I told her I thought “Ella Enchanted” was OK, but “Shrek” was better. We’ll leave the rougher film criticism for a few years down the road.

I did a little traveling last week. There’s nothing like flying into Fort Wayne, especially from O’Hare, to convince yourself you live in a first-class city. How long has it been since you boarded a plane from a major airport and didn’t use a jetway to do it? At O’Hare, you get to Fort Wayne by passing through gate F1, going down some stairs, crossing a long stretch of tarmac past three or four small, idling jets in whatever cursed airline feeder service has the contract at the moment. Then you board your own Fort-bound aircraft by climbing the steep stairs the fold out of the main door. Where are we going? you think. East Methane? No, East Methane probably has a bigger airport.

Advantages: 1) You don’t have to wear roller skates to get from one gate to another, because there are only eight. 2) Free wi-fi in the airport.

And now the sun is setting on the Fourth of July, so it’s off to the fireworks. Which are already going on in our neighborhood at the moment — the illegal stuff sold on every corner for a month previous are now exploding right outside. You have to sign a form saying you plan to take these illegal fireworks out of state to detonate them; astonishingly, these documents are ignored! We stopped at one of these models of modern capitalism today, to buy sparklers (legal). The clerk sat smoking under the “no smoking” sign, but she let us pet her pit bull puppy. Somehow, I think this says everything there is to say about it.

So happy Fourth of July! Set off some rockets’ red glare, or the terrorists have won!