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<h1 class="title">The Sixteenth Chapel</h1>
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<div class="dedication">Max</div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_pwLyeoqk">Canadian High School!</a>
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<div class="epigraph-attrib">David Letterman</div>
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<p>If Justin Bieber isn’t going for the sixteenth<br />chapel, I’m not either. I admit he is my role<br />model. He’s so current, so fresh and so new,<br />and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated.<br />Where is the love in those old paintings? All<br />I see is <a href="creation-myth.html">creation</a>, <a href="movingsideways.html">judgment</a>, and <a href="deathstrumpet.html">death</a>—</p>
<p>and I don’t get the preoccupation with death.<br />I’m about life! Ever since my sixteenth<br />birthday, when me and my two sisters all<br />nearly died when the car I was driving rolled<br />into a creek. Even though I’ve <a href="riptide_memory.html">forgotten the date</a>,<br />I think it keeps me thinking on the new,</p>
<p>something Biebs would be proud of if he knew.<br />I look at him, and see the <a href="death-zone.html">opposite of death</a><br />in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday<br />he may <a href="i-am.html">be a father</a>, and later host a Sweet Sixteen<br />for his daughter (who I know he’ll buy a Rolls),<br />death will never find him. Living will be all</p>
<p>he’ll ever do, because it will be all<br />he’ll ever need to do. He is the eternal new,<br />the <a href="about-the-author.html">forever youth:</a> this is the simple <a href="words-meaning.html">role</a><br />of every celebrity, to let us forget death.<br />Bieber didn’t make a mistake on the Sistine<br />Chapel’s name. He merely showed that someday</p>
<p>all old names must go, that on some day<br />a name must die so that the thing, which is all<br />that matters, can stay as it was in the sixteenth<br />century: fresh, ostentatious, and brand new.<br />In a way, <a href="nothing-is-ever-over.html">the name becomes a Christ</a>, experiencing death<br />so the world doesn’t have to. But I am wary of this role</p>
<p>for a name. It seems a name gives meaning, rolls<br />the general idea together with the concrete, daily<br />toil of the mundane. Are not life and death<br />intertwined? Is not everything tied up all<br />with everything? I guess I’m saying the new<br />necessarily comes from the old, as every sixteen-</p>
<p>year-old has a parent. <a href="ouroboros_memory.html">Life rolls to death</a>, and all<br />is tied together. Each day is born of night, and dies so new<br />morning can occur. Even the sixteenth chapel holds death.</p>
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