My Road to Damascus

It is 7:22 on a Thursday night and I’m brokering my first drug deal. The air is cool with fall. The sky is hidden by the clouds in one glowing gray mass. I’ve just left work and I’m on my phone driving home through the Midwest suburbia, the branches of oak and maple trees transform the streets into tunnels populated by gray squirrels and sparrows. My hands should be shaking. My voice should be rattled. My heart should be racing. I flip on the lights as the sky dims.

Dave laughs out loud. He’s a big hairy mutt. He admits it. His penis is Polish, his hair color Native American, and his skeletal structure is that of a 6’5” Asian, he tells me. There’s a full color tattoo of a leaf-tailed gecko creeping down his arm. He works construction during the day and is a bouncer at The Purple Pig at night. He’s also my boss at Scaly Dave’s Herp Shack. He’s Dave. The shack is his.
Dave laughs out loud. This is the first job I’ve had that keeps beer in the back for its employees. He’s laughing because I’m awkward, and because today I’m asking Lucas for marijuana and shrooms. Lucas tells me he has two-five of weed in his personal stash, but the town is dry. It has been for a while he adds vaguely, hesitantly, like he doesn’t trust me. Lucas has long hair and wears clothes from thrift stores. He has a girlfriend who looks like a cracked out Twiggy. I never remember her name, but she’s like a shadow that I barely notice but is always there.
I know Lucas is a stoner as well as he knows I am not. I know Lucas’s girlfriend is a stoner. Dave knows too. Lucas doesn’t hold an actual position at the store. He comes by to help out with the leopard geckos now and then. He doesn’t work because he’s a full time stoner. So me asking Lucas for weed is more than a little absurd. Maybe he’s telling me the truth. Maybe the town is dry. Maybe he doesn’t want to give it to me because he knows I don’t smoke, inject, snort, or lick. I could turn him in, there is always the inherent risk of the stoner life. I could be a cop. Or a bastard. Or both. He might not want me and my naivety haunting his conscience; some stoners are very moral, I’ve known more than a few. Our motives are our own and we don’t know each other. The town is dry, he says. Dave laughs at me.

I’ve never been offered drugs. Not for lack of opportunity, most likely it is a lack of charity . Experienced stoners look at me, through me, past me and I don’t exist. I’m sitting on a porch with my on-again-off-again girlfriend. There are three stoners facing us, all hammered, and one joint between the five of us. Kristin introduced me, and they know I don’t smoke without asking. It’s the dripping discomfort, the grimace as I inhale the secondhand smoke, the neatness of my haircut, and the labels on my clothes. A girl is standing behind them. She is dressed in all black with darkly dyed hair against pale skin and a glowing neon green necklace. “Shrooms,” is all she whispered when we walked past her, she’s standing on her tiptoes. Her lips were wet and her eyes held that distant gaze of post-sex euphoria. For her it wasn’t night, she wasn’t standing on the edge of a balcony, she wasn’t in Kansas, she wasn’t alive, she wasn’t dead; she lifted her hand upwards, palms open, reaching.
The joint goes from Stoner A to Stoner B. He offers it to Kristin. She shakes her head. Stoner B laughs; he has a shaved head and doesn’t like me because Kristin’s hand is somewhere in my shirt, massaging my stomach. The joint goes back to A and then to C and back to A. It’s an intricate game of keep away, a complicated monkey in the middle and I’m the chimp.
Kristin really is a beautiful mingling of French and Sweedish decent. She’s Swedish from the waist up, pale and curvaceous; and French from the waist down, long and slender, but boring. Blonde hair hangs past her shoulder blades and is as smooth like a stream, blue eyes, and skin stretched tight against her generous breasts; Stoner B blows envy through his lips. I imagine that I might be able to accidentally get high from the fumes. It wouldn’t be my fault then. Right? I could ask for a tug, but I cannot ask.
“Is this your boyfriend?” Stoner A asks Kristin.
She smiles as if she knows a secret. “Are you my boyfriend, Matt?”
I watch the smoke drifting upwards to the stars and the heaven that the hallucinating shroom-girl is reaching for. “When I feel like it.”
Her hand grows cold. Kristin takes me home.

“It’s creatine.” I’m back seven years, a freshman in the Corbin Independent School System. I’m watching Bram shaking his bottle, skim milk and a scoopful or two of a purple powder. He’s my height, but he’s huge where I am not. In the weight room, with the baseball team, I’m with the other skinny slack-jawed all natural kids watching Bram pile on the forty-five pound plates. His chest alone can lift almost three hundred pounds of laminated iron, where my arms quake and I hiss and spit fighting with a buck seventy-five.
“COME ON SHOELINE!” he roars in a bull voice at me on circuit day. I’m stumbling on the hurdles. Bram used to be me I’m told. Small, weak, crying, vomiting in the trashcan, and I’m supposed to become the new Bram. He’s sweating too. But he’s sweating Arnold Schwarzenegger sweat with the light of utter thrill in his eyes. He should be wielding a mace or battleaxe on some medieval battle field. I can see him hammering his foes with some sort of crude blunt object and using severed ears to decorate his shield. My sweat drips into my eyes and mixes with tears, I lick it off my lips and taste salt.
“Two inches on your arms, three on your calves,” the football players want me to put on helmets and pads and carry their football into enemy territory. Bram does it every Friday night; he plays both football and baseball. It’s the cries of the town drunk with passion, seas of red and white fans, the gods of school spirit envy us. And Bram is Achilles, beautiful mortal who clashes with titans. They measure me up and tell me how much larger I need to be; “An inch or two on my neck, two on the quads, and four around the chest.” Bram did it. I can do it. I’ve cheated on tests. I’ve cheated on friends. Why can’t I swallow this grape flavored drink? All I see of Friday night fame is from a sea of red and white, watching Bram’s lighting show on earth.

What holds me back? “Do you ever hit it?” It’s my friend Josh asking, or Ghram, or my boss Dave, or my cousin.
“You party in college don’t you?” Josh is fat, rude, vulgar, fifteen, and wants to know. He suffers from the syndrome of parents who could never say no, in a society where restrictions are the limitations that keep our children from corruption.
“No. I don’t hit it.”
Josh is surprised. He looks disappointed. I’ve failed him as a role model.
“You smoke?” I don’t want to know.
“Yes.” He lives in New York. Should I be surprised? No, I just feel depressed, like a toy taken from the attic that can’t interact with the modern imagination. I’m tired, archaic. Put me in the museum and let me collect dust like I’m supposed to.

“It’s religion isn’t it.” Josh is telling me. He knows me somehow. He’s a good-natured boulder of a man, sweet because he is to slow to be cruel and too lazy to change. I’m not sure where his head ends and his neck begins. He works at the pet store and lives with Dave and Dave’s wife Alison, sucking from Dave’s calf like a leach, drawing out a meager existence. It’s what they all say, because religion is their enemy. Not just any religion. Not Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Sikhism, or Taoism, or Shinto, or Bushido, but my religion or more accurately what they think my religion is. What is more thrilling than to have God against you?
“Yes.” I lie. I answer his assumption with false conviction, and wonder if it is for his sake or mine. I am a liar. Holden Caulfield would scream his goddamn head off at my phoniness.

My roommate’s name is Bloon, and he reads his bible every day. He is an amazing young man. He has a kind heart and a rudimentary grasp on the fundamentals of his faith. We entered each other’s lives at the right time. My sophomore year of high school, my family completes another migration. For the first time we find ourselves on the other side of the muddy Mississippi. I miss Kentucky, and Friday night football, and even Bram. Kansas is in the throes of winter when I arrive. The snow is piled up on the sides of the road. I have never seen snow like this; I have never seen so much snow. It blankets the ground like a blank canvas. I think of Hemingway and “Hills like White Elephants.” I see my future on their backs, stationary herds lining the roads; my moving tires splash the modern mud on their darkening backs. I hate Kansas. I hate my future, and fate, and predestination. I don’t hate God, but I don’t like God.
It is because Bloon so nice that we become friends. This is his best quality, and his worst headache, he cannot say no. He is always there for a ride, or to pay for lunch, or to take Kristin to my prom because I asked Lauren . And he spends hours in the bible. He reads it, prays with it, and I swear I’ve seen him asleep on it; or trying to learn through osmosis. The youth pastor in high school tells us that Bloon had one of the most serving hearts he has ever encountered; he confides with Bloon and others that I am the most disrespectful. It is the yin and the yang. We are set up on stage to be foils, but we mistake each other for brothers first.
His devotion is a lake with no river, as mine is a trickle of faith. The fervor, that at times impresses me, disappears. After a retreat or missions trip, or listening to an evangelical motivational speaker he is full of conviction.
It is a Thursday night, Bloon comes home from Navigators and accuses me and Jare of not putting forth effort into religion. This is a common occurrence. We ignore him usually. Bloon is Jare’s younger brother. Jare is tall and lanky, with fine wispy hair, and a concave chest. Bloon is tall and lanky, with fine wispy hair, and a concave chest that is further accentuated by his horrible posture. Both are stubborn. As Sunday draws near every week we wait for Bloon, and lately I’ve put a Buddha statue on my desk. The fat little man stares at Bloon all day. I acquired Buddha from a store that sells incense and Bob Marley tee-shirts. Buddha only costs you 994 for a pocket sized version, which is very convenient if you don’t have a shrine, or any intentions of making a shrine. I started taking him to class on test days. Bloon threw Buddha the other day when Jare and I told him we were converting. I told Bloon that Jesus wouldn’t have thrown my Buddha, he disagreed.

There are numerous names for him at our house. Bloon is to his face. Behind his back we call him The Hobbit, The Gimp , and The Hermit. His secret names, he earns by living within a 5 x 5 area around his desk. The only time spent away from the room is in the half-bath that we allow him to have.
Most of us grew out of acne when we graduated. Bloon’s too Charlie Brownish, and his acne stalks him. The harder he fights it the worse it gets, the more he worries about it, the more time he spends in the bathroom. It’s MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, trade out the fission and fusion for blackheads and whiteheads, firming cream and Benzoyl Peroxide.
In last year’s apartment, with only one bathroom, I relieved myself on the tree outside regularly. It became habit. I’d even urinate on the tree in the dead of winter in my shorts with no shoes on, and realize when I got back inside that he’d gone home for the weekend. He gets his own half-bath at the new house to medicate. I call it primping , Bloon hates that. From the bathroom he tells me I care too much about how I look as I pull on my Express jeans over my Calvin Klein’s. Personally, I believe that the acne breeds in his bathroom. It clings to the walls, pools on the floor, and oozes back up the drain waiting for its next victim. I went into his bathroom once. He never cleans it. He cuts his hair almost daily; a mound of fur or hair huddles in the corner like an oversized rodent disintegrating from the chemicals. I never enter barefoot.
He was christened Bloon in August of ’05. The brain waves and the voice box rarely seem to be able broadcast and receive on the same frequency. Whole sentences, ideas, and theories will be flung out unexplainable and untouchable. Jare and Tay come in and announce his new name. It was at dinner, over BBQ ribs and soiled napkins, Bloon was in the middle of a story when he stumbled on the word Balloon, ruined it, and cast his own fate. I don’t like it, because it is a bit mean, a bit cruel, but Bloon is indifferent, he wouldn’t say if he cared.
So he tells us to come to his church, a church that everyone has boycotted for the past two year. I don’t like it because it is one of those churches that is large and wants to get larger, and their lust for growth has caused them to lose their sincerity, and the theological points that the pastor makes each Sunday are trite and tasteless. They use movie clips to illustrate points—tying The Matrix with worldly illusions and The Bourne Identity with shepherds and lost sheep—and you’ll be stuck singing the same chorus on the same three chords for fifteen minutes. The battle is the same every Sunday morning:

Excerpt from Sunday Morning Wars:

Bloon: Are you going to church?

Matt: No.

Jare: No.

Bloon: Why not, man? Come on, you need to come.

Matt: In that case, fuck no.

Jare: I turned Buddhist with Shu, remember?

Matt (Shu): That’s right! We have temple.

Bloon: Shut up.

So…

Are you guys coming?

Chorus: No!


If Bloon asked us if we were going to “a” church we might not be so cruel. We visit different churches, find faults in all of them, and laugh at their pride. I laugh at the search for “church homes.” Shouldn’t you be able to find God anywhere; shouldn’t he be able to find you anywhere? Is there some secret spiritual-Geiger counter on the black market? Someone is doing something wrong and I can’t blame God. I’ve never seen him do something wrong. I see Catholic priests rework the job description of “altar boy,” and the fat southern preacher at First Baptist spends a month on the atrocities of abortion, before having an affair. Somehow he forgot small towns have no secrets, and abortions will find their way home. We talk about it in Mrs. Kinsel’s World Civilization; we whisper it between downs on Friday night.
There’s a man named Isaac. I found God at his church. I saw it in him. I heard Jesus in Isaac’s quavering voice as he pleaded with us to forgive him for being so fake and so horrible, but he’s laughing now, he’s smiling, because he’s been forgiven. And it is a matter of humility that most of the people who christen themselves with the brand of Christendom do not have. And without humility we are just radicals, screaming and claiming something not rightfully ours. I weep with Issac inside because he gives everything he has and everyone is taking and it makes him glad, but we’re all greedy. With one hand we take and with the other we slip our knife into Isaac’s good intentions.

Jare and I are sitting in the back. The church is in the gym of a Christian school. We’re late arrivals, and more than likely soon to be early departures. Its two Sundays before we boycott Bloon’s church.
The pastor tells us a story. “So we wanted to go to the basketball game.” Jare and I are sipping on mochachinos, listening him speak. He sounds falsely enthusiastic, like a telemarketer who’s excited to be selling magazine subscriptions to Home and Garden. He continues, his voice is nasal and always sounds complaining; “But we didn’t have tickets.” My phone starts to vibrate.
“Hello,” I keep my voice down. Jare is snickering.
“So we went to the game and figured we’d buy some off the scalpers.”
“I’m in church actually. Yes. No. Tonight?” People are starting to stare.
“The guy wanted seventy-five, but my friend, he Jewed him down to fifty.” The preacher’s words escape before we notice. Amplified by the speakers, it bounces off the hardwood floors, the chairs; it rebounds off the backboards, dribbles on the rim, and slam-dunks our attention.
I hang up. Even Jared looks surprised. It’s funny. It’s damn funny. It’s shocking though. I’m shocked. Jare is shocked. The pastor looks a little unsettled, but no apologies; he pauses for a moment with a ripple running through the congregation, but finishes his story and his sermon. Jare and I come back the following week to see if he’d apologize. He didn’t.
An abortion warrants an apology. I look back and see the fat southern preacher sobbing and slobbering his confession, asking for forgiveness, wailing like a baby. It’s the converse of rebirth. He crawls back into the womb of the world. Sympathy and stone is etched in the faces of the congregation. He’s jobless, homeless, professionless, townless. I believe he is sorry.
Racial slip ups are not permissible, and there are six million dead Jew’s who’d probably agree. And it’s casting stones to criticize. I see my transgressions piled up beside me, but I don’t bury them. I don’t sweep them aside with an uncomfortable pause as if they never happened, I’d apologize.

Bloon bitches to us when he has enough energy. And I spit back at him. I don’t understand. He doesn’t understand. I tell him I can find God in a sunset, and he never looks up from the red letters. I say I want to be a conservationist. He says he’d laugh at me for wasting my time. He tells me to be less Korean and embrace American culture because it is “the best.” I want to break his hawkish nose and tell him about Native Americans and Japanese internment camps .
He goes to a retreat at a Colorado resort; I work a job downtown to meet poor people where I meet Mario who’s from Venezuela. It’s a tough job on an assembly line. My fancy high school diploma, my college classes, they add up to nothing here. I feel ridiculous because I slow everyone down. But Mario guides me through each station. He’s twenty-two, fatherless, and fascinated by what I can tell him about the rainforest where he came from. He tells me about insanity in his family history, an uncle who went mad and wouldn’t stop raving shouting expletives and random words in English and Spanish. He’s afraid that the madness could infect him. I tell him I go to school, that I study English, I don’t really drink, I don’t smoke weed, the only tobacco product I touch is a cigar, and the little poison arrow frogs he used to see in Venezuela are called Dentrobates azureus.
Mario thinks I’m cool. I’m “a smart motherfucker,” but I’m cool because I’m not “conceited,” I exist right there next to him throwing boxes onto the skids and labeling them for the forklift drivers. I wish Stoners A, B, and C could hear him.
Jesus spent time with the blue collared workers. He went away to the mountains and didn’t go white water rafting. He didn’t eat for forty days, and he got to meet Satan . I scoff. I laugh when Bloon says he’s going to Ireland on a mission trip and that I should go too. There are kids starving here. There are beaten mothers in Kansas City, whose sons and daughters scrape out a life I’ve seen, but still can’t understand. Why do we need to spend fifteen hundred to find lost souls? I’ll give you five bucks for gas and I’ll take you to some lost souls right now.

So when Jare tells me that he wanted some shrooms I say, “I’ll make some calls.” He needs to relax, he can’t relax. I know shrooms will be difficult, but weed will be easy. Jare is not a stoner. Jare has an open mind. He’s smoked weed five, maybe six, times before, bumming off some buddies back home who I know only as background voices in late night drunk calls.
Lucas was being a prick. I call Ghram after I leave The Herp Shack. He tells me twenty for seven grams and a dollar for delivery. He’d have to look around for shrooms first before he could get a price quote. Dry town my ass.
“I don’t know if I want seven grams.” Jare’s voice is breaking up; my reception is lousy in this town. Its 7:30 and I’m sitting at a red light behind an oversized pickup.
“The price is twenty for seven. It’s a good price.”
“I’m not sure,’ says Jare.
Neither am I.

I’m standing in front of Scaly Dave’s Herp Shack. Dave has me selling hotdog lunches and raffle tickets. Five dollars gets you a hotdog, a bag of chips, a Pepsi, and five chances to win a fifty-five gallon aquarium. The store has its own cult following, our die hard customers who know Dave by name. One mismatched family group that consists of fat old lady with yellow teeth, a reasonably attractive overly thin girl, and a man in his late twenties with short hair and a black tee-shirt that says “John 3:16.” They come at eleven, and again at one, and a final time around three. They buy over a dozen lunches, some sixty raffle tickets, and three leopard geckos. Dave watches them leave for the final time. He’s eating a hot dog.
“John 3:16,” he says. “What the hell does that mean?”
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. That whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” I’m trail off, whispering behind him.
“What?” Dave turns to look at me.
I’m sheepish, I shouldn’t be. “John 3:16, it’s a verse from one of the Gospels. John’s I think.”
“You know that?”
Doesn’t everybody, I think to myself. “Sunday school, Dave.”
“That’s crazy.”
What isn’t?

“So how’s your walk going?” No build up, Bloon can’t ask you how your day was, but when it comes down to religion he’s blunt as hell. The boldness is admirable, but I never respect it from him. I don’t respect a twenty-one year old who’s on diversion, evaded arrest, and still claims that it was the cops fault. It involved New Year’s Eve, a girl, a state line, and mace. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but I saw the video tape. It wasn’t the cop’s fault. It was the cop’s fault that he got away. It was the cop’s fault that his parents didn’t leaving their party early to pick him up at the police station. There is a point where you have to accept ownership of your own life. And we all have lapses, but I claim my mistakes, I don’t blame girls, or cops, or eight hour work days, or the position of the moon.
I don’t respect his friends who are, “Really cool,” who get bored and spend afternoons and nights on sprees inspired by Grand Theft Auto. Our collection of street signs is confiscated at the beginning of the year because we left it the carport, visible from the street. I liked the “3-Way” sign; the “4-Way” was even better, but more daunting to live up to. They never came back for the buoy that they said was a federal offense. I never saw the video of the intersection on fire, but Jare says three cop cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck showed up, their personal best showing so far. I yelled at them for tearing down the windmill, because I like the way they stand alone in open fields, proving that the wind keeps them company. For fun they tally their estimates. Generous counts put the damage at $10,000 within the last four years.
I answer Bloon’s question after some thought. I’m not sure though, because our cool friends, Bloon, Jare, and I are all from the same church. I’m confused on what my walk is supposed to look like. I’m frustrated at fraudulent faith that is folded up and put aside in deliberated destruction.
“I tend to make my own rules. I live by my own code of morality.” I tell him, and I pause, because I know he wants me to admit how little attention I give to religion. “It’s between me and God.” I don’t leave him room to talk, I suffocate him in silence.

We’re in the old football stadium. My toes fell off thirty minutes ago; I’m blowing on my hands to keep up the circulation. The sun took his heat with him when he dipped behind the horizon. Selfish bastard. The man on the stage builds a cross. He throws out handfuls of gold chain links; they represent the bondage that sin once held us in. Come to the cross. Come to the cross and trade your sins for a link and start a new life. Our sins are written down on a note card. I’ll need a couple stacks, but all I have is one. One note card to condense all of my sins, I couldn’t even fit the table of contents on a note card. I guess that they just want a summary. This is a stupid idea.
Bloon prods me. I’m supposed to get up and go down to the cross and the stage and get my gold link. He gets up and leaves. I’m still sitting, note card in my left hand, pencil in my right. The average person has to hear the message seven times before they accept Christ. Where did I learn that? Which church? What pastor? Where do they get their facts? Daniel and Brice take their sin-cards down. I’m still sitting. There’s the obligation to follow the crowd. But I want to leave. I want to get up in front of everyone and show them that I don’t need to nail my note card to the cross that the curly-haired man just made to find redemption. Doesn’t everyone see? It’s just a metaphor; I want to scream at the top of my lungs. This will do nothing for your soul! And we need physical acts to equate spiritual meaning, but I’m feeling angry, like the biggest guilt trip has been offered to us all and we’re gladly apologizing.
I scribble on my card. I get up and walk down. There’s a little voice screaming in me. I like my sin. It’s not that I enjoy being sinful. It’s a burden, but somehow there’s a uniqueness that’s me that’s tied to my sin. It’s not something that I’d show my parents, or enter into a talent show. It’s rancid, disgusting, ugly, and not something I’d hang above the mantle; but it’s mine. Like my brother’s baseball hat, our mother wants to wash it and he refuses because it is his messy hat. He was with it every step of the way as it became torn, worn, and caked in salt. I reason with this voice, it might be a demon, it may be me. The contents of my card are inconsequential, but the principles are tearing me apart. I hand my sins to a girl who passes it to the stage to be nailed to the cross. I feel sick. There are no more gold links left, first come first serve. I come back empty handed as usual. Bloon is waiting. He puts his hand on my shoulder. I want to punch him, but it’s my fault.

Love the sinner not the sin. And I know that sin is of this world and our end design is not meant for this world. But yet here I am. Living, breathing, sinning. I paint paintings for Ben and Betty in the nursing home with one hand; and throw a high school sophomore into the lockers with my other. With one voice I sing, “I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me,” and another tells Bloon to, “Fuck off.” The duality of my existence is remarkable. And I straddle the line between that which is right and Godly and that which I do not wish to release, and I don’t understand. Fence straddler. Fake. Hypocrite. There’s a line from a song by the Christian folk group Caedmon’s Call, “This world has nothing for me, and this world has everything. All that I could want, and nothing that I need.” I remembered that line after hearing it once. I’ll remember it forever.
The funny thing is how easily I slip into different social spheres, the heathen and the Christian. And somehow I don’t see them as being very far apart. What they described at First Baptist as a chasm that only The Cross could bridge seems to only be puddle with the water’s glassy reflection hiding its depth and danger.

My brother’s are young and at the age where what I do matters. I don’t do drugs for Jesus. I want them to keep open minds. It’s okay to know how to operate a 9mm, how to talk your way out of a speeding ticket, and how to let a girl down easy. It’s okay to not know the difference between a bong and a beer bong. It’s okay to hold open the door, give your seat to little old ladies, and ask the girl in the corner if she’d like to dance. Listen to your mother, roll in the grass, be home before midnight. It’s okay to question why you should believe what the man at the pulpit would ask you to believe, but you have to be smart, smarter than him, not more knowledgeable, but more inquisitive. And stop. Read the red letters, watch the red sunsets.

Stoners and saints, they’re both looking for salvation, in a leather bound book or in a seven gram bag. The town is dry, as dry as its people going through the motions of finding nothing but grape juice and stale bread . And they eat it, and it can get them high, but in the end it turns to ash in their mouths; because they want religion, when I need flesh and blood. And I feel a movement behind me. It could be only the wind, but it might be angry generation after generation, with compounded fury from centuries of lies. And we cry for salvation because we’re afraid. I’m scared of Isaac, potheads, hard drinkers, Polish penises, back alley abortions, cretin, girls, collapsing windmills, and cold Christians who don’t conduct current. Because I’m one of them; I’ve felt the power behind this elusive faith. It is terrible and peaceful, wonderful and painful, but even the pain is wonderful. Duality isn’t something I understand, so I confuse myself. My vision is too sharp to step out with blind faith, so I rock on my heels, eventually I’ll fall forward or backwards it doesn’t matter because the direction is down when I need to go up.

I’m back in the car. The sky is still gray. I could make some more calls. There’s more than one stoner in my phone. But somehow I’m tired. I let it drop, my cell phone bounces around in the passenger seat. Jare lets it drop. I never make the purchase. It’s not religion. It might be my conscience, my brothers’ innocence, Bloon’s relentlessness, Isaac’s quavering voice, my future, my past. It might be Jesus.


I’m back in the car. It’s starting to rain. My windshield wiper blades are smearing the water, blurring my line of sight. Somehow I think about the disciple Paul ; before he was Paul he was Saul. I’m driving home and all I can think about is Saul on the road to Damascus. This is crazy. Why must we all be blind before we see? My heart is racing, my voice is choking, and my hands are shaking. I can hardly see the road.