For Christmas, X got me a Starbucks sampler thing with a couple coffees and teas and a package of hot chocolate mix. When I took the hot chocolate mix out, the box had this to tell me:
"Salted Caramel: The drink you loved as a child - now all grown up."
How the hell do you know what I loved as a child? Like most kids in the 80s, I drank Ovaltine. And I didn't have the inclination to pour salt in it because that sounds disgusting. A typical holiday drink at Starbucks already has more calories than a fucking Big Mac, and apparently they don't skimp on the salt content either. And just so readers are aware, the taste is something I'd imagine you could recreate by melting a gourmet sea salt chocolate bar in a crock pot and thinning with two cups camel ball sack sweat. Point is, Starbucks, don't assume to know what I like or assume that any normal healthy human being mixes salt into their sweet drinks. Well that's presumptive of you, Starbucks!
On to my day. Today I went to church. That doesn't sound so weird, so let me elaborate. Today I want to MEGACHURCH. There is a local mega-church that my friend D told be about - the kind that sends out amusing broadcasts containing some incredibly sexist rhetoric. Here's an example:
"Men are beer mugs, and women are wine flutes. It's a man's job to teach a woman to love her weakness, so she doesn't become a firefighter, because a woman can't rescue people from burning buildings."
Don't know what kind of chicks these people hang around, but some of my female friends could rescue Andre the fucking giant from a school of starvation-crazed hammerhead sharks. But that's besides the point. We didn't the good stuff today - the nutbag preacher didn't do the sermon. Instead we got this twenty-something black kid, and I only say black because I mean black in the way that Halle Berry is black, as in dark-skinned-but-not-African-looking-because-those-folks-scare-off-Whitey.
The "sermon," if you could call it that, started with the church band playing some Christian rock with the lyrics projected onto matching screens in a cheap purple-backed Power Point macro (no photos, sorry. Use your goddamn imagination). The entire hall was more like a community college theater than a church, and the facade of the building looked like a downtown Washington DC mattress outlet store. The only thing identifying the church as a church was a business style overhang with some hipster scribble of a Jesus fish that looked like someone's two-year old nephew got ahold of some markers and the owner just said, "Meh."
Anyway the band played some songs, then the young preacher got up and started preaching. I'd quote from the sermon but there really isn't any point - it was a wonderful display of perfectly circular logic. The point was essentially that, God doesn't care about your good works, only that you accept Jesus as your savior and get your sins forgiven at regular intervals. I felt kind of insulted with this little bastard in his Imma-Hit-The-Clubs outfit telling me not to aspire to everything because I'm shit, you're shit, he's shit and we're all just shit. There was some anti-science logic in there but it was so safe and under the guise of faithfulness that it didn't really turn into comedic gold (saying that we don't need to move passed the cross as opposed to launching into totally batshit loco theories about how evolution is wrong). The only time it got juicy is when this kid talked about how he traveled to the Middle East and totally told some Jews and some Muslims that he was like, better than them, which as D explained, is kind of the church's shtick. Overall it was pretty interesting seeing a bunch of forty and fifty year olds raise their hands in praise while they're getting yelled at by the most passive-aggressive community college sophomore in known universe.
Part of what freaks me out so much is the insistence that Jesus or God or whatever is talking to you and speaking to you through signs. Here's an example: I spent the last week vomiting my major organs out thanks to a nasty stomach virus. Interesting thing about my stomach virus diet of Gatoraid, rice, and Pepto Bismol is that it is not conducive to taking dumps, so after the virus I was a bit backed up. Today that ended, coincidentally, after going to the church sermon. Had I been a real believer, I'd think that basking in the greasy cornrows of the preacher man healed by bowels. But when you think about it for two seconds, it probably had more to do with the fact that afterward, I ate pancakes, Taylor ham and three fucking cups of coffee.
The religious mindset would dictate that Jesus felt sorry for my neglected anus and put the poor guy back to work, and even though to most religious people that probably sounds insane, that is the fundamentalist belief. That you take no credit for anything and that the mythic daddy in the sky does it all for you. No risk. No responsibility. No consequence.
Mega-churches scare me, as they should anyone, as should fundamentalism in any sense scare anyone. But when churches arrange gigs like this with unenthusiastic life music and debate team dropout inspirational speakers blaring hipster slang at a bunch of fucking soccer parents, you can't but giggle (I almost lost it during a song where the bridge had a vocal "oh-oh" and the projector kept showing the lyrics, "oh-oh"). It reminds me of North Korea. There is no way one can deny the kind of horror and human misery that exists in that nation, nor the fact that their militaristic presence in that part of the world destabilizes the entire Eastern sea board.
But when they make it a state sponsored truism that the new dear leader learned to drive at 75 miles per hour down winding mountain roads with perfect accuracy at age eight, they are So. Fucking. Funny.
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