Yes, I pluralized boyfriends above and it was not an accident. There was a brief period of time that I courted about town, not one, but, two gentleman. Judge me if you must.
3a, as we’ll call him, is a great guy. The kind of guy, in fact, that would move to Africa and dedicate his life to a charity organization which saves orphans and introduces them to Christ. 3b, is a convicted felon serving 7-9 for manslaughter. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, indeed.
3a, The Missionary is, in fact, a man of God and, trust me, for those who know me that’s a punch line all on its own. He still remains in my memory as one of the most interesting humans ever created on earth. He had dreadlocks and a giant, wild beard. He wore a black studded belt and faded band t-shirts. He drank expensive tea out of gourds but refused to pay more than sixty cents per meal. He would buy a frozen package of rib flavored mystery meat and eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until they were gone. He played guitar for his church’s band and considered himself a “born again” Christian.
I went to his church once to watch him play in the band. I woke up late (hung-over), and sat through five minutes of a Catholic baptism. After a while (too long), I remembered he wasn’t Catholic and realized I was in the wrong church. I’m a Christian sectarian racist; they all look the same to me.
He still remains the only person to ever make Christianity seem appealing. I am immediately turned off due to the inherit threat of eternal damnation. I don’t like to be threatened. Also, I don’t like living with obvious logical discrepancies. However, he was able to maintain faith and acknowledge the inaccuracies at the same time. He lived with the Bible’s broken myths and, as a result, made religion seems aesthetically legitimate, and wise. Plus, he wasn’t annoying about it.
He was, and I’m sure still is, an amazing person. Unfortunately, I like people to have a little filth to them, which leads us to 3b, The Felon.
3b, The Felon, was hilarious. He was funny in a “let’s smash mailboxes” kind of way. No, we never smashed mail boxes, I just mean the kind of fun that’s reckless and usually at someone else’s expense.
While 3a was being all, optimistic and Churchie, 3b was being a real life Candide. Candide is like the Bible’s Job, but better. Like Job, Candide is faced with life’s atrocious suffering but instead of remaining a pious believer, he comes to the conclusion that God can’t be real due to all the terrible evil in the world. And, if he is real, then he’s a dick.
Candide’s life was so terrible that it reads like a dark comedy to me. It just gets so ridiculous that all one can do is laugh. You name it, Candide has suffered it: rape; murder; war; death; torture . . . And, that’s the life of 3b; a complete disaster.
When he was young, he had an accident that left him unable to “perform.” (So you see, I never physically cheated. Feel bad for judging me?). Can you imagine that, though? Also, his dad was a drunken abuser and his mom died when he was young. He was basically an orphan and, as a result, developed a drinking problem. But, can you blame him?
A few years ago he was driving a friend home from a night on the town, but his friend never made it home. She never made it home because 3b was driving drunk and flipped his car into a telephone pole. She died and he is now in prison for manslaughter.
I wonder if he has maintained his Candide spirit? Probably not—Lord knows people have a way of finding Jesus in the clink.
It’s only in retrospect that I’m able to pick out the irony between these two people in my life. It must have been that I was developing my spiritual identity by surrounding myself with the most fascinating minds I could find. So here I am, an empathetic thinker who believes in social change, yet, prefers Candide to Job. It doesn’t seem to make sense but, I have learned to live with broken myths.
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