Everyone always marvels at the funny things you can buy on the Internet, but if you’ve ever looked at the “services” tab on CraigsList.com, you know how really serious Internet buying has become.

Porn and iTunes are the Internet products of yesteryear – now it’s all about roommates, international calling and … prayers?

Google “prayer” and the first entry is Wikipedia, attempting to define the word as the act of attempting to communicate with a deity or spirit. The next one’s a Web site that offers 10-minute original prayers all updated daily. The next few are the evangelical and cultish sites you’d expect.

Well, the only deities in my life are Ben and Jerry and I regularly communicate with them over a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk. Not to mention the idea of reading a prayer off the same computer I glance through “FiRsT WeeKeNd PiCZ 2k8!” photo albums seemed even cheaper than the shots Palin took during her speech at the Republican National Convention.

And I was surprised that those 1-800-PRAYER Web sites didn’t take one look at my UVM server signature and flee back to their mega-churches on their side of the Mason-Dixon line.

I’ve always disregarded the utterances of balding, sexually repressed men and so mostly mis-translated words about walking on water or parting seas in some thousand-year-old paperback don’t really mean anything to me. But for some reason, I had it in my brain that I wanted to pray legitimately, with real words and thoughts from a book, just like everyone else does. I didn’t want to just clench my hands, mumble some hocus pocus mumbo jumbo and wait for mountains to move.

The more I surfed for psalms, the more I realized that maybe it doesn’t matter what book you clasp, the head covering you own or the language of the words you utter in prayer. Maybe the words themselves don’t even matter.

Maybe the only thing that matters are the fluttering thoughts that those Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Greek and Swahili hands futilely aim to capture, jar into words and press into their religious scrapbooks for future reference. Somewhere along the way, though, we all forgot that, like fireflies, thoughts don’t ever survive long when they’re held hostage and forced to “ooh” and “ahh” the crowd in some sick Sunday morning show-and-tell.

Also, like fireflies, the thoughts in prayers easily attract the Draco Malfoys of the real world, eager to pick off a wing and distort the thought’s intention and meaning. This realization of the perversion of prayer resulted in a slammed Dell Inspiron and my own type of private, pervert-free prayer.

Maybe I should start writing for that 1-800-PRAYER hotline.