Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Godless Neighbor

Pavowski4 Comments

We got one of those church mailers the other day. You know, envelope written out by hand, and inside there’s a brochure with a smattering of scripture and a blurb about the church, usually with a little note like “hope to see you there!” These I put directly into the trash.

At least, that’s what I thought this was. In this one, however, was the obligatory brochure, but also inside was a little handwritten letter. “in these trying times…” “need for community more than ever…” “God’s love will provide…” all that stuff.

And, I dunno, maybe because my neighbor went to the trouble of sitting down and writing out this letter (and for goodness’s sake, I imagine he wrote out hundreds — our neighborhood is huge), I felt compelled to read it.

And because I’m a godless heathen, I also feel compelled to respond.

Here is the letter I will not be sending in return.

Dear neighbor,

Thank you for your invitation.

I will not be attending your church. I do not think you should attend your church anymore either. You rightly point out that the world is in disarray and that we are isolated due to Covid. If you think that God is the answer to all these problems, I must ask you — where has God been up until now? Is it not Her will that all this should have transpired exactly as it has?

Are not the 200,000 American deaths from Covid part of God’s handiwork? If not, why has She not saved those who have died, or answered the prayers of those who have lost friends and loved ones? Is not the animosity so many Americans feel for their countrymen of a different political persuasion exactly as God intended? If not, an all-powerful God could surely unite us. Is our isolation due to the outbreak not God’s will? If not, why has She cursed us with such a deadly and highly contagious plague?

And is it God’s will that we now congregate, in an enclosed space and in great numbers, to aid in the transmission of this plague, to our entire community?

God is not the answer to our problems. Only we can help ourselves, and I will not bring my family to a super-spreader event to hear tales and celebrate the glory of an invisible creature who “loves us” but who also visits such terrible suffering upon us. I advise you likewise to abstain from such endeavors.

Yours,

Your godless heathen neighbor

Ahem.

My dad told me recently that I sometimes lack tact.

But if somebody’s gonna send me a hand-written letter, I feel like they at least deserve a response.

Rest assured, I will not send this letter. But it is what I will be thinking when I compose something a little less harsh.

Slightly off-topic: I know *I* see these things and simply toss them in the bin, and think no further about it. I imagine most people do the same. I wonder what the sentiment in my neighborhood would be if I put out an Atheist brochure of the same tenor?

Something tells me it would not be nearly as charitably received. In fact, I wager I might have some God-loving souls knocking on my door or complaining to the HOA.

BS

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Within the last 8 hours at work, I’ve had no less than two major long-term projects fall apart with no discernible way forward.

I’m not surprised, because everything is terrible in 2020, and to be fair, I was kind of expecting one or both of the projects to come apart at some point. COVID gonna COVID, after all. But I wasn’t expecting to get hit with both in the space of just a few hours. That’s a gut-punch.

Sort of makes me wonder what the last few months have been all about, makes me feel aimless, useless, powerless.

It’ll pass, I’m sure. But not a great look for the start of the week.

This morning I mused that we should just rename Monday to “BS”. (The full word, of course, not the two-letter-euphemism.) Not BS-day, just BS. “That meeting? I think it’s scheduled for BS.” “Weekend’s over, time for some more BS.”

I did not particularly intend to be prophetic, but the world is funny like that sometimes.

**edit**

Oh, and let’s not forget my beloved-and-behated Atlanta Falcons play tonight, so more pain is in the offering!

I love wearing masks, I hate wearing masks

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Never have I had such a love-hate relationship with a thing as with masks.

On the one hand, I actually really, really like wearing one. For one thing, having a practical way to gain some protection against illness — that nobody is asking questions about since everybody is doing it (or at least they should be!) — is fantastic. For another, it stays bloody cold in my office and, silly as it sounds, I sometimes keep the mask on even when I’m all alone because it literally keeps my face warmer.

Truly, though, I have a bit of RBF and the mask just helps to cover that up. (I’ve heard that I intimidate students — those who don’t know me, at least — because I just “look scary”. I don’t see it.)

So, masks are great!

But they’re, unfortunately, not all that comfortable. I end up smelling my own breath a lot more than I’d like, which is … strange. And they get in the way of reading faces, which kiiinda screws up communication with people.

But more than anything, I hate just how divisive they’ve become, in light of everything in our country. They’re symbolic, somehow, of the chasm that’s opened up between the right and the left in this country, and I heckin’ hate it. Because the mask itself is an item utterly without content. It’s there to protect you and others around you from the spread of disease, that’s it, full stop.

But because everything in America is political now, wearing one or not wearing one can be a signal to everybody else about how you think about issues as wide-ranging as abortion, gun control, free speech, religion … the mask has become entrenched in all this other crap and it’s keeping us in this hellish liminal state, this limbo between “getting back to normal” and totally locked down.

And because masks turned all controversial, we’ve been stuck living these half-lives for months while much of the rest of the world is moving on. It’s like watching a rescue boat sail away as you’re going down with the Titanic.

Jesus, everything feels so depressing.

Anyway, you should vote in November.

Alternative Realities

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I heard somewhere recently (it may have been Joe Rogan’s podcast, but who knows really) how strange people’s beliefs really are … and how little it matters.

Like, for example, you could be at the grocery store, and on the other side of the conveyor belt from you could be a person who believes that Mohammed flew to the moon on a winged horse. Or that God literally created the earth in seven days about six thousand years ago. Or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that we never walked on the moon. Or that evolution is a hoax.

People believe all kinds of crazy stuff.

Thing is, there was a time — and that time feels like it was not even so very long ago — where that kind of thing just didn’t matter. Sure, you’ve got people believing all sorts of madness, but when it came to the day-to-day reality they walked around in, we could all pretty much agree on what reality was and what mattered in the here-and-now.

Sure, we may have different beliefs on how life came to be on this planet, but right now, these groceries are here. They need bagging, and I’d like to pay for them. And the world shuffles on.

That feels, somehow, less true, now.

Because more and more out beliefs seem to glom onto one another and fall into us over here and them over there thinking. Wearing a mask, for example, seems to send the message that you just might be an ultra-liberal, Biden-voting socialist, and not wearing one seems to say you just might be a Trump supporter in a death cult. And that seems to contaminate even the simple act of checking out at the grocery store. (How can we carry on a relationship, no matter how brief, when one party seems concerned for the well-being of the other — as evidenced by mask-wearing — when the other thinks the first is foolish for even thinking about it?)

Less and less it feels like we even inhabit the same reality. It’s almost as if you can choose the reality that you live in, and the differences between those realities are vast and significant. And the differences in our realities seem to matter more and more.

Social media, and even media generally is no help. All we see are the extremes.

This is poisoning everything.

How the hell do we get back from this?

Lights in the Sky

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Strange lights in the sky on my run this morning.

Double-strange given it was cloudy.

Huffing along between home and the soccer fields, something lit up the street; flickering and flashing like an explosion, electric blue and omnipresent. It cast my shadow in a leaping, stuttering stop-motion in front of me.

I turned, but whatever caused it was gone. Heat lightning? Some distant transformer explosion? Impossible to tell. It struck again a few seconds later, and was accompanied this time by the flickering of the street lights and distant field lights of the soccer fields. And then the light stopped, and did not come again.

No big deal, I guess. When I got home there was no sign that the power had gone out. But what if it had gone out? For a few hours? For a day? A week?

What if the power went out and didn’t come back for years?

(I think there was a show based on this concept; one of those gritty dystopias that were so popular a few years ago.)

I wonder how life on the local level would be disrupted if we had to do without all our electronics, even for just a few days. Or how it would be for the country as a whole.

On the one hand, I almost think it’d be a welcome development. On the other, I don’t know if absolute utter chaos is a strong enough description.