Curses!

Am I A Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 30, 2007

If I hear your wicked words every day
And you used to be so sweet I heard you say
That my love was an addiction
Where we'll be our love is strong
When you go you're gone forever
Just dream along, just dream along

Karma karma karma karma karma kameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold and green
Red, gold and green
-Boy George

In her second column in a row, Maureen Dowd goes current-events-free tipping us off that this column could have been written anytime in the last six months. She opens with a New Agey bimbo prancing about her apartment.

Faith, the faith healer, is twirling a crystal over my green couch.

That would be the same couch that she sits on while Stephen Colbert guest writes her column for her.

Faith — yes, that’s her real name — explains that there are two common forms of curses. If you send out something negative, you also hold on to it. It’s like a cosmic fax machine. “So,” she says, “it has a definite negative impact on the soul.”

“I hope that doesn’t include writing critical columns,” I mumble.

I hope that this is not another hint that we are looking at a kinder gentler MoDo in the new year. Faith and Maureen dredge up some older bad karma:

The second kind is when someone curses you.

I think back. There was that time John Sununu, Poppy Bush’s raging-bull chief of staff, blew up at the White House after reading one of my stories about his arrogant behavior.

“I will destroy her,” he growled. “If it takes me the rest of my life, I will destroy her. I don’t know where or when, but I’ll get her.”

Could Sununu’s curse be hanging around my house, like gooey green smoke?

The Sununu Curse goes back to a column from July 16, 1995 called Running For My Life where she first found out that she had crossed George the First’s chubby chief of staff. From that column:

Naturally, I was thrilled. I knew about epic curses, the kind they have in Rigoletto and the Bible and "The Count of Monte Cristo," marked by fearsome magnitude and eternal duration, red plagues and green smoke.

But I never thought I would have one of my own.

I immediately called Mr. Sununu at home in New Hampshire to see if he was still trying to destroy me. But his wife, Nancy, said he was out. Uh, oh.

Mr. Sununu never called me back. It's just as well. I have had a change of heart about making up. Lunch I can always get. But an epic curse -- that's hard to come by.

But back to Faith, and the lack thereof:

Faith Green, a pretty, curvy 31-year-old green-eyed blonde, says she has studied tribal shamanism, rolfing, Pilates, tango, movement and stretching. She calls herself a “kinetic therapist.”

And a Google search reveals that rolfing is not what you do after drinking too many Dirty Cosmotinijitos. Rolfing is some sort of mystical variation on massage therapy and spinal adjustment, just without any of chiropractic medicine’s rigorous scientific underpinnings.

Her crystal pendulum also identified some “discordant energy” in my house from angels who were meant to protect me but who had fallen prey to bad energy themselves, and from disconsolate spirits who may have been in a religious order.

“Was I a nun in a past life?” I ask, conjuring up a glamorous image of myself as Audrey Hepburn in “The Nun’s Story” rather than Rosalind Russell in “The Trouble With Angels.”

No, Faith explains, these bummed-out trapped souls are lurking from the past. She suggests they may just be unhappy with their vows of poverty, chastity, celibacy and obedience. You don’t need a Ouija board to know that.

And I think its safe to say Maureen hasn’t taken any of those vows in her current life.

Faith puts stones under my back and tells me she can feel my heart opening like a flower blooming. I don’t really feel the blockages or the bloomings. But it’s a lot nicer lying on a table and listening to floaty, flute-y New Age music than it is sitting at a table and making a long list of insincere resolutions.

Finally, some hint at the year to come. No insincere resolutions, but definitely more resolute sincerity.