Running Off Friends

"There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship."

-Thomas Aquinas

So, I've been a little churlish these days whenever anything even remotely political comes into view. I found myself calling a very old man a very bad name implying he was a serial engager in fellatio, while standing in the checkout line at Wegman's on Saturday, because he had the temerity to show up in a MAGA hat. I would've punched him in his stupid face if he'd been within reach.

Then yesterday a guy I've known for nearly forty years, my son's godfather in fact, sends me a video I "need" to watch by one of these incel evangelical podcasters who remind me for all the world of Joe Rogan, but with more Jesus. I knew I was in trouble when the speaker referred to himself as strictly a "Gospel Guy" (which Gospel, I wondered, and what part of the message was he thinking of right then?), and then he went on to explain that some gentleman he knew from South Africa had regular conversations with Jesus himself . . .

Okay, that's a red flag. I always find myself assuming that anyone who recounts speaking to an angel, a deceased saint, the Virgin Mary, a Burning Bush, or the Messiah himself is either a liar or a paranoid schizophrenic. We never meet the privileged African, or maybe Afrikaner, but rather hear indirectly about his message.

And oh, what a message. Jesus told him, more than once, not to make any big plans for the FIFA World Cup because Christos had something very big coming just before then.

I've always believed, like all Americans, that the Heavenly Host pays close attention to college football, and in particular the Georgia Bulldogs. To find out Jesus is a soccer guy sort of makes me wonder what sort of wussy we've been eating at communion on Sundays.

At that point I couldn't listen on. All these young, white thirty-ish Bible thumpers live in this fantasy land, totally unmoored from two thousand years of tradition and thought about what it means to be a Christian, where they carry on conversations with the Divine and figure that their lives will be more meaningful if their inevitable personal eschaton coincides with the one prophesied to sweep away this fallen world and make all things new, complete with all of us libtards being cast into the lake of fire.

Yeah, sort of like that, but the Chosen men will be jacked on steroids while the women will look like Noem or Bondi. And all very tanned and manscaped (or ladyscaped, as the case may be).

So anyway, I snarled rather intemperately at my old friend about how these stupid Christian Nationalists all long for judgment day in their screwed-up Trumpian universe, and I wish I could propel a couple of them to their personal eschaton. The bastards.

This was not well-taken by my friend, an evangelical MAGA person who lives at home with his wife while his mistress is on social media touting her MAGA bona fides, despite being the child of immigrants as near as I call tell. Not mine to judge, but it's all a little galling.

He expressed surprise that we couldn't talk religion without me turning it into a political fight. All he wanted, he said, was to talk about Jesus. Then he signed off. I'm pretty confident our last conversation was just then, roughly 38 years from when we first met.

I need to lighten up a little. At the same time, I've had all I can stand of the distortion of Christianity by these JuCo Aquinas's, who wallow in a belief that their Nordic-looking Jesus wants nothing more than to bring back a white nation where there was forced prayer in schools and apparently the Ten Commandments (again which version?) would hang above everyone's beds as wives made themselves servants of their husbands. All pretty screwed up.

So in my defense, my reaction to the loony video isn't much different than when a Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness shows up at my door with offerings of a life most folks would love to live. The problem is that under the sugar coating is bullshit; scrape away the marzipan and you'll find a cult.

It's toxic simply to deal with these people. Better to be alone.

Today we're celebrating our ghost's 200th birthday. Oddly enough, I can't find any geneological data on when Lucia Marvin Olcott was born. We just know she died, likely there at Tara, on August 25, 1850, aged 25 years. So Peg's framed this more as a celebration of her life, and is excited about putting together a menu straight from the mid-19th century. Then we'll set out some candles for Lucia to blow out around the new condo, and maybe a couple of those cheap battery powered numbers she used to love to turn on at Tara at all hours of the night.