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Jul. 11th, 2005 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickToday started at 3:30 AM, an hour when all good little girls are asleep in their beds. As it happens, I was also asleep in my bed, at least until the fucking phone rang. Phones that ring after about midnight never have anything good to say... well, no, I tell a lie. I have gotten two decent phone calls at obscene hours of the night, both of them to inform me of the birth of new relatives. But on the whole, if the phone rings after midnight, it's not good.
While I have an answering machine, had gone to bed a scant three hours earlier, and was deeply asleep when the phone rang, I got up to answer the phone. It's a thing I do, answering the phone. It doesn't matter when you call or what I'm doing. If the phone rings, I will answer it. Apparently I'm an ideal subject for operant conditioning...
This morning, it was 911 on the phone calling me to tell me about a reported break-in in one of our apartment buildings. Apparently Ardell, in #2, called 911 because he heard footsteps in Scott's apartment, #7. Now, Ardell's apartment isn't very much underneath Scott's. It might be, a teeny bit, but it's nothing like 100% underneath. Maybe part of one bedroom... Adding insult to injury, Ardell is a mostly-deaf old man and is not entirely likely to be hearing things anyway. Okay, yeah, Scott was away for the weekend, but I don't imagine Ardell hears him on a regular basis even when he's home. Finally, Scott doesn't have anything worth stealing. He's a shiftless drunk who used to be of an age and relative prettiness to be someone's boy but the drunk portion of the program has made him look tired enough that nobody wants him for a boy anymore. He does not have a job, though he does have a parole officer or caseworker or some damn thing who shows up occasionally carrying a briefcase and wearing a suit. The parole officer or caseworker or whatever (could also be an attorney) is smart enough to come early in the day -- this is important because most days Scott isn't sober after about eleven in the morning. His parents pay his rent to keep him from moving back in with them, though since his dad died here a couple of months ago, he's been making noises about moving back home to take care of his mother. That might not be a bad thing for him, though demon rum has quite a hold on him and I also suspect that his folks never were very happy about the sucking of cock and the fucking of butt. Honestly, if he's not doing that sort of thing it in front of them, I don't see the problem -- the drinking and lack of gainful employment would be bigger problems for me. *sigh*
The 911 person, who seemed very concerned about the whole thing, allowed as how I was supposed to get dressed and drive twenty-five minutes into town to let the cops into Scott's apartment so that they could see if there really was a stupid-ass burglar trying to steal from an aging, drunk rentable boy who didn't actually own anything worth stealing. Actually, the 911 person felt that there should be someone CLOSER than twenty-five minutes away. And people in hell want ice water. I didn't say the ice water thing, which is amazing considering how few of my civilization filters are actually in place at 3:30 AM.
Since it was easier than arguing with the 911 lady about the uselessness of trying to rob Scott, I got dressed, drove in to the building, let the cops in to Scott's apartment, waited the approximately fifteen seconds it took for them to discover that there was nobody burglarizing the one-bedroom apartment, relocked the apartment, put the keys away, and went back home to bed. Hooray for making the world a safer place. Yippee. I got home at 5:00 AM. The alarm for getting-up-for-work went off 45 minutes later, so I got a little less than four hours of sleep. That's not really enough.
When I got to work, more hilarity ensued and I'm certain I would have appreciated it a bit more if I hadn't had a splitting headache due to a significant lack of sleep. At work, M (the receptionist, bookkeeper, institutional memory and otherwise useful person on the front desk) informed me that the lady to whom we are renting the downstairs store (which sells things like incense, guided meditation tapes, DVDs on spirit-walking to find your totem animal, and rose quartz focus crystals) told Hank (who is pastor of the fairly evangelical church a couple of doors down from us) that she is a witch, worships Satan, prays to him during her healing circle ceremonies, and can feel the power pass from her left hand, through her body, to her right as it travels around one of the aforementioned healing circle ceremonies.
*sigh* I'm surrounded by lunatics.
Hank isn't in favor of witches or people worshipping Satan. Apparently it does not matter to him if they are witches with floral incense, totem animals, and rose quartz power crystals or witches with cauldrons, dribbly candles, pentagrams, and goth fashion accessories. Witches is witches, apparently, and they're all bad. It would appear, from Hank's stance on the subject, that nobody is allowed to have a higher power except for his personally-approved, vetted, good for you higher power because, of course, that's the one that's real. Er. Yeah, right.
Meanwhile, witch lady in the store downstairs is now antagonizing local religious folk, which isn't good because this is a small town in a conservative area where something like 80% of the population voted for W and most of them are the religious right, damn it all. I don't want pickets. I don't need that. All I want is a tenant who pays the fucking rent and doesn't cause a stir. Is this too much to hope for?
I'd have a lot more patience for all of this if it had, y'know, any grounding in reality. However, it doesn't. IT'S ALL PRETEND. All of it.
Look. Healing circles are pretend. Worshipping Satan is pretend. Power crystals, unless you can use 'em to make with the lasers for a phase-conjugate tracking system or to power the Enterprise, are pretend. Totem animals are a nice idea and I like the Pacific Northwest totem pole designs. Those are very striking. They do not, however, have jack shit to do with reality beyond a certain amount of placebo-type effectiveness. Incense is a real thing but it doesn't DO a whole lot. If burning it makes you feel better, go for it. All of that stuff is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretend.
Similarly, the Lord our God Jesus Christ is pretend. He is. The trinity thing? Also pretend. Crucifixion was real, the Romans did that for fun and profit. Last supper? I dunno, but it makes a nice story. Rising from the dead?: I'm not buying it. Virgin birth? I don't believe it and I bet her parents didn't either. Eternal damnation and original sin? Nope. Pretend. Yeah, the threat of eternal damnation is scary as hell (pun intended) but you know what's scarier? Your three score and ten or whatever, that's all you get. That's it. This life you're having now, this one here? This is as good as it gets. Right now, you are having your life. Right now. You aren't going to get a do-over. This is not a practice run. When you die, you change from a moderately-interesting individual (Yes, we are all individuals!) into a tube of meat. That's what happens. I don't know where the part of you that was you part goes... probably the same place the electrics in my computer go when I turn it off. Just, with life, one minute you're you and the next minute you're meat. It's kind of sucky, I know, but that's the way things are. You're a fucking tube of meat. Get over it. The way I see it, eternal damnation is the story that people prefer to the tube-of-meat (Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!) reality.
And so I sat in my office this morning with a splitting headache from lack of sleep and tried to look like I was listening to M telling me about these two people who are spending their adult lives in King Friday XIII's domain. This would all be a lot more funny if I didn't have to pretend to take it seriously in front of other people so as to avoid offending them. *sigh* I hate having to be a hypocrite to keep the peace.
I propose a new rule: If you're going to have some flavor of supernatural worldview, you are NOT ALLOWED to kill the people who think you're a loon and/or laugh at your beliefs. I'll grant you the right to feel smug and superior about your not-going-to-hell thing or your better-karmic-incarnation next time you're passing through or your Canadian Tire Money or whatever it is that you think you'll be getting out of your practices... but you have to let me laugh at you. You can laugh at me if you want. I don't mind, and you'd not be more than a drop in a cup that already runneth over on that front, anyway. You can try to convince me of the rightness of your path, if you want. I can try to convince you that you're living in clueless land, if I feel so moved. But nobody is going to be killing anyone over this stuff. Nobody. Not even if they're completely wrong. Visit the Infidel With Explanatory Pamphlets, damn it, and stop bombing the London Underground, while you're at it.
While I have an answering machine, had gone to bed a scant three hours earlier, and was deeply asleep when the phone rang, I got up to answer the phone. It's a thing I do, answering the phone. It doesn't matter when you call or what I'm doing. If the phone rings, I will answer it. Apparently I'm an ideal subject for operant conditioning...
This morning, it was 911 on the phone calling me to tell me about a reported break-in in one of our apartment buildings. Apparently Ardell, in #2, called 911 because he heard footsteps in Scott's apartment, #7. Now, Ardell's apartment isn't very much underneath Scott's. It might be, a teeny bit, but it's nothing like 100% underneath. Maybe part of one bedroom... Adding insult to injury, Ardell is a mostly-deaf old man and is not entirely likely to be hearing things anyway. Okay, yeah, Scott was away for the weekend, but I don't imagine Ardell hears him on a regular basis even when he's home. Finally, Scott doesn't have anything worth stealing. He's a shiftless drunk who used to be of an age and relative prettiness to be someone's boy but the drunk portion of the program has made him look tired enough that nobody wants him for a boy anymore. He does not have a job, though he does have a parole officer or caseworker or some damn thing who shows up occasionally carrying a briefcase and wearing a suit. The parole officer or caseworker or whatever (could also be an attorney) is smart enough to come early in the day -- this is important because most days Scott isn't sober after about eleven in the morning. His parents pay his rent to keep him from moving back in with them, though since his dad died here a couple of months ago, he's been making noises about moving back home to take care of his mother. That might not be a bad thing for him, though demon rum has quite a hold on him and I also suspect that his folks never were very happy about the sucking of cock and the fucking of butt. Honestly, if he's not doing that sort of thing it in front of them, I don't see the problem -- the drinking and lack of gainful employment would be bigger problems for me. *sigh*
The 911 person, who seemed very concerned about the whole thing, allowed as how I was supposed to get dressed and drive twenty-five minutes into town to let the cops into Scott's apartment so that they could see if there really was a stupid-ass burglar trying to steal from an aging, drunk rentable boy who didn't actually own anything worth stealing. Actually, the 911 person felt that there should be someone CLOSER than twenty-five minutes away. And people in hell want ice water. I didn't say the ice water thing, which is amazing considering how few of my civilization filters are actually in place at 3:30 AM.
Since it was easier than arguing with the 911 lady about the uselessness of trying to rob Scott, I got dressed, drove in to the building, let the cops in to Scott's apartment, waited the approximately fifteen seconds it took for them to discover that there was nobody burglarizing the one-bedroom apartment, relocked the apartment, put the keys away, and went back home to bed. Hooray for making the world a safer place. Yippee. I got home at 5:00 AM. The alarm for getting-up-for-work went off 45 minutes later, so I got a little less than four hours of sleep. That's not really enough.
When I got to work, more hilarity ensued and I'm certain I would have appreciated it a bit more if I hadn't had a splitting headache due to a significant lack of sleep. At work, M (the receptionist, bookkeeper, institutional memory and otherwise useful person on the front desk) informed me that the lady to whom we are renting the downstairs store (which sells things like incense, guided meditation tapes, DVDs on spirit-walking to find your totem animal, and rose quartz focus crystals) told Hank (who is pastor of the fairly evangelical church a couple of doors down from us) that she is a witch, worships Satan, prays to him during her healing circle ceremonies, and can feel the power pass from her left hand, through her body, to her right as it travels around one of the aforementioned healing circle ceremonies.
*sigh* I'm surrounded by lunatics.
Hank isn't in favor of witches or people worshipping Satan. Apparently it does not matter to him if they are witches with floral incense, totem animals, and rose quartz power crystals or witches with cauldrons, dribbly candles, pentagrams, and goth fashion accessories. Witches is witches, apparently, and they're all bad. It would appear, from Hank's stance on the subject, that nobody is allowed to have a higher power except for his personally-approved, vetted, good for you higher power because, of course, that's the one that's real. Er. Yeah, right.
Meanwhile, witch lady in the store downstairs is now antagonizing local religious folk, which isn't good because this is a small town in a conservative area where something like 80% of the population voted for W and most of them are the religious right, damn it all. I don't want pickets. I don't need that. All I want is a tenant who pays the fucking rent and doesn't cause a stir. Is this too much to hope for?
I'd have a lot more patience for all of this if it had, y'know, any grounding in reality. However, it doesn't. IT'S ALL PRETEND. All of it.
Look. Healing circles are pretend. Worshipping Satan is pretend. Power crystals, unless you can use 'em to make with the lasers for a phase-conjugate tracking system or to power the Enterprise, are pretend. Totem animals are a nice idea and I like the Pacific Northwest totem pole designs. Those are very striking. They do not, however, have jack shit to do with reality beyond a certain amount of placebo-type effectiveness. Incense is a real thing but it doesn't DO a whole lot. If burning it makes you feel better, go for it. All of that stuff is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretend.
Similarly, the Lord our God Jesus Christ is pretend. He is. The trinity thing? Also pretend. Crucifixion was real, the Romans did that for fun and profit. Last supper? I dunno, but it makes a nice story. Rising from the dead?: I'm not buying it. Virgin birth? I don't believe it and I bet her parents didn't either. Eternal damnation and original sin? Nope. Pretend. Yeah, the threat of eternal damnation is scary as hell (pun intended) but you know what's scarier? Your three score and ten or whatever, that's all you get. That's it. This life you're having now, this one here? This is as good as it gets. Right now, you are having your life. Right now. You aren't going to get a do-over. This is not a practice run. When you die, you change from a moderately-interesting individual (Yes, we are all individuals!) into a tube of meat. That's what happens. I don't know where the part of you that was you part goes... probably the same place the electrics in my computer go when I turn it off. Just, with life, one minute you're you and the next minute you're meat. It's kind of sucky, I know, but that's the way things are. You're a fucking tube of meat. Get over it. The way I see it, eternal damnation is the story that people prefer to the tube-of-meat (Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!) reality.
And so I sat in my office this morning with a splitting headache from lack of sleep and tried to look like I was listening to M telling me about these two people who are spending their adult lives in King Friday XIII's domain. This would all be a lot more funny if I didn't have to pretend to take it seriously in front of other people so as to avoid offending them. *sigh* I hate having to be a hypocrite to keep the peace.
I propose a new rule: If you're going to have some flavor of supernatural worldview, you are NOT ALLOWED to kill the people who think you're a loon and/or laugh at your beliefs. I'll grant you the right to feel smug and superior about your not-going-to-hell thing or your better-karmic-incarnation next time you're passing through or your Canadian Tire Money or whatever it is that you think you'll be getting out of your practices... but you have to let me laugh at you. You can laugh at me if you want. I don't mind, and you'd not be more than a drop in a cup that already runneth over on that front, anyway. You can try to convince me of the rightness of your path, if you want. I can try to convince you that you're living in clueless land, if I feel so moved. But nobody is going to be killing anyone over this stuff. Nobody. Not even if they're completely wrong. Visit the Infidel With Explanatory Pamphlets, damn it, and stop bombing the London Underground, while you're at it.
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"Visit the Infidel With Explanatory Pamphlets"
Date: 2005-07-12 03:09 am (UTC)It does remind me of the day last summer when I was eating lunch with my ne'er do well group of regular lunch guy attorneys. Someone came in with a pamphlet that gave us all a tremendous case of pamphlet envy -- an alphabetical listing of sins. It was the talk of the lunch table for days. Simply uttering the term "vain jangling (http://www.google.com/search?q=vain+jangling&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official)" was enough to set off gales of laughter. Of course, we all tried to decide who had committed the widest variety of sins. The pamphlet turned, more or less, into an unintentional purity test.
Notably, after the first person came in with one, we all wanted to have our own, so after lunch, there was a parade of men in 3-piece suits going down to the corner where there was a crowd of nicely-dressed people handing out pamphlets....next to the guy holding an f-ing big cross. We asked about getting more copies of the specific pamphlet, and they nicely said, just root through our display until you find more (more or less that's what they said). They were very polite about the whole thing. We found several more copies, and thanked them politely. The pamphleteers were quite earnest and asked if we had been saved. We admitted that, well, no we hadn't been saved, but that we were certainly very interested in the pamphlets on sin, thank you, and maybe our people will call yours later, or something like that.
Oh, and by the way, thanks for the comments about the acceptable late night phone calls.
Re: "Visit the Infidel With Explanatory Pamphlets"
Date: 2005-07-12 10:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-12 02:08 pm (UTC)