Introduction: Jesus. Indian.
Painting by ᐅᓵᐚᐱᐦᑯᐱᓀᐦᓯ.
Jesus was an Indian. If you don’t understand that, you won’t understand any of the rest of it, so you’ve got to get this first. Let me try to be clear about this.
Discussed in this post: 8 books (Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life; Radical Embodied Cognitive Science; Consider the Lobster; Sorcerer’s Screed; Angel Wings Splash Pattern; The Moviegoer; and American Gods) and 3 documentaries (O.J.: Made in America; Patience: After Sebald; and Fursonas).
[Going through some old journals, I came across some entries about an encounter I had once upon a time in a far away land — by which I mean at a pub in Vancouver about seven years ago. This is the story, as best as I can piece it together now.]
I was standing at a urinal looking at a poster advertising a beer that probably had a lower alcohol content than my piss when the guy who was at the table next to me, the guy who kept making jokes about the massive size of his dick (which prompted some seemingly good-natured eye-rolling from his tablemates), walked in and stood at the urinal next to me.
“Moment of truth,” I said to myself.
The fellow glanced over at me when I spoke but I don’t know if he heard exactly what I had said or if he was simply wondering why the guy at the other urinal was talking to himself.
Back at my table later that night, I stopped writing and closed my computer. I had passed the point of drunk-creative and was more at the stage of drunk-happy-just-to-do-nothing-but-drink-more. I continued to order pints and step out to the patio every now and again for a smoke. I stayed under the overhang and watched the rain appear and disappear as it blew beneath the streetlights. There are joys to drinking at night in every season — in the spring when the weather first warms up and you can go to a patio for the first time, in the summer at a campsite by the ocean with the mountains rising up behind you, in the winter cuddled up under a blanket and trading secret kisses with a lover — but always in the fall in the rain with the wind blowing was when I felt most wild and free.
When I returned to my table, I noticed that the dick next to me was now by himself. He nodded at me and I smiled because I like talking to strangers when I’m drunk. I ask them to tell me things people almost never discuss in bars when they are trying to get laid, trying to get happy, or trying to forget – their greatest joys, their hidden sorrows, their hopes and dreams – and it’s amazing what people will tell me when they, too, are drunk and find someone who is willing to listen. So, yes, I smiled and nodded and he got up and asked to bum a cigarette.
“I reckon I’ll have another as well.” He was talking about himself before we got out the door and I took that as a good sign. Lighting up, I took advantage of his first drag to say: “Tell me a secret you’ve never told anyone else.” He paused and eyeballed me awhile while he cupped his cigarette in his hand and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. Then, as best as I can recollect it, this is what he said:
I once met a girl who could read palms. She didn’t know that she could read palms until she was backpacking through Thailand and an old woman in a rural village grabbed her and pulled her into a hut. The old woman told her she was marked, that she had the gift, and then, there in that hut in that tiny village, she taught this girl how to read palms (this gal was also a twin, which seems to be relevant for this sort of thing). The problem, this girl explained to me, was that she couldn’t do it right when she was sober. Her conscious mind got in the way too much and she overthought things or second guessed herself too much and froze up and didn’t know what to say. On my birthday she got drunk (and so did I) and she came over and read my palms.
Half-heartedly discussed, with several items totally rushed just so that I can can get this done, in this post: 4 books (Independent People, Hunger, The War of the End of the World, and Evolution in Four Dimensions); 1 movie (Angry Birds); and 2 documentaries (The House is Black, and D’Est).
In the morning before school, Ruby gets out of bed and comes looking for me. She climbs up into my lap and curls up into a ball and I wrap myself around her, stroke her hair back from her face, and cuddle her like a dad who knows that kids grow old and that they do not always fit in the laps of their parents and that this, too, will pass.
Just last week, I was trying to sneak in a few more pages of a book in the early hours of the morning when Ruby came tottering out of her bedroom with sleep in her eyes, searching for me. I put down the book, pulled her into my lap, and rocked her like a baby. “I love you, Ruby,” I said. She turned her face, looked me in the eyes and, in a perfectly matter of fact manner, said:
“Everybody is going to die.”
