Holiness or Hell, Pt. 2.

The man’s breath smelled. He put his hand on my shoulder and prayed….

My church camp xperience was in 1984. Twelve years later, I had just moved out on my own and was staring my career with the Post Office. As is often the case when small town people have kids moving to the big city, my parents tried to connect me with people they knew—relatives of someone who went to our church, a friend of my grandmother’s. They'd invited me to church that Sunday...they attended a church that was affiliated with a semi-major televangelist, which was super common in Tulsa back in the 90s. I attended the morning service with them, had lunch with them, and ended up returning that night [Pentecostal churches are big on going to church on Sunday night, it's usually when they cut loose.]

Looking back, I can really understand how a lot of these churches operate. They break you down, tire you out, and then try to push you into certain actions. You stand and sing for hours, then the pastor gives his message. I remember they'd sing this song where they'd talk about "Blood and Fire...we call upon blood and fire...a stream flowing strong...it's flowing from heaven." They'd sing for at least an hour or two, and you'd stand the whole time. AFter the pastor spoke, you'd stand yet again while they try to get you to come forward. They appeal to the sick who want healing. They appeal to those who feel the need to confess and be forgiven. And they appeal to the lonely. They often call this “the altar call”, though in this case we were meeting in a convention center and there was no actual altar.

In Pentecostal type churches, people often believe that God can give them special abilities, almost like powers. They’re called “the gifts of the Spirit.” Though this sounds very strange to everyone else, for someone growing up in the church it didn’t seem unusual at all. Someone would give “a message” in tongues, which would just sound like someone speaking in a foreign language. Our pastor had “the gift of interpretation,” and after several moments, he would say what the message meant. That night, it was my turn to break down, at least sort of. The man sitting next to me put his hand on my shoulder. He told me "You've got some heavy burdens there." He prayed for a moment, and then turned to his wife, who laid her hands on me as well. "You have a spirit of rejection that has been following you since you were a little boy." The man asked me, "Would you like to receive the Holy Ghost?"

I've been in that situation before, and it is almost impossible to resist. I wasn't able to do it now. It was not like the time at church camp. He simply prayed and then asked me to just speak. I figured he would be able to tell I wasn't really doing it, but I made sounds with my mouth. He was none the wiser, and got all excited, and told his wife, "This young mans just received the Holy Spirit!"

I felt like a fraud, but I told my parents I had been filled with the Spirit, and they of course were very happy, as was my grandmother. I started attending that church, mainly in the hopes of meeting people. I joined the group for young people my age, but as usual, didn't really fit with the people there. I knew people kind of gave me the side eye when I'd speak in tongues. I soon stopped. I eventually quit going to church at all, when it became obvious I really didn't belong there.

I don't really have an explanation for what happened---other than I was a young person and probably looked pretty downtrodden so it might have been an easy guess to think I had the problems the couple at the church thought I had. They believed in it. Mass hysteria is a powerful thing, we see it more and more these days. I think the way my brain works though, I could never give myself fully to whatever it was. Years later, I tried attending a non-Pentecostal type church, though I didnt fit in there either, though I at least didn't constantly feel pressure to display spiritual ecstasies.

I don't regret it, because it makes for an interesting story. Like most things that have happened to me in my life. I still wonder though if I might end up in the Devil's Hell....

The Birthday Party

Not the band, though I love them a lot.

My birthday was today. I was alone, but that was fine by me. I actually enjoy my own company and though it would have been fun to spend some time with a couple of the recent acquaintances in my life, I had a fine time on my own. Like many people, I consider my birthday to be basically New Year's. This last year has been a turbulent one to say the least, even if you ignore everything happening in the larger world. Let's be frank. I'm in the process of divorce and moved to a new city a few months ago, took a new job, basically had a lot of major life changes. Had to get used to living alone again. I feel like I've gotten through it really well. I discovered I enjoy living alone. I started dating/chatting online and have made friends all over the world. I've started new types of creative projects I've never done before. In so many ways, life has never been better. My job kind of leaves something to be desired, just due to typical shitty government job onboarding, but that's to be expected.

At any rate, I had fun today, visiting new parts of the city, taking photos, petting a dog, and drinking a lot. Then chatting with friends online. I've been casually dating and I'm sure there will be more of that in the future, but I'm perfectly fine with myself right now. So there....

The Joe Jackson girlfriend

When I was in high school, I had the idea that someday I would become a corporate lawyer and move to a big city such as New York. I listened to far too many Joe Jackson records in 9th grade--not the early ones that everyone knows, but the later ones like "Body and Soul" and "Big World." I'd listen to the instrument "Loisaida" repeatedly and imagine what I thought my life would be like in 15 years or so. I knew I'd have some kind of girlfriend that was some kind of professional and we'd go to fancy parties and it would look like the opening montage of Saturday Night Live [the one they had back in the late 80s.] A world of all night restaurants, diners, and jazz clubs. We'd have dinners with friends and I'd make funny remarks. The complete opposite of life in rural Oklahoma.

I figured my future girlfriend and I would fight and eventually break up, since that's what always seemed to happen in Joe Jackson songs---lovers were always under stress and tired. It was a fast changing world, and love rarely could withstand it. I remember constantly listening to "Not Here, Not Now," and mourning the end of a relationship I didn't even have. The fantasy really grew for me once I started reading Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney [though I never could quite get into him as well.] I didn't really know what a corporate lawyer did, but I figured I could do it.

Of course, none of that exactly happened. I can't remember when I lost interest in law school, but it was pretty early in my undergraduate career--though I considered it again in my late 20s at once point in a potential escape from the Post Office, which thankfully I ended up not doing after looking into it more and realizing how bad the outlook was for most law school grads. I also took a practice LSAT and bombed it...not just in the "didn't study well enough" sense, but in the sense of "have no idea what this is even about" sense.

So now it's nearly 1:30 AM here and I am going to be a bit closer to 50 at the end of this month and I'm listening to some of those Joe Jackson songs for the first time in probably 20 years or so. I think about what an odd duck I was then even outside the normal realm of oddness. I enjoyed punk rock records and other things weird kids in smaller towns liked, but I had this weird affinity for the jazzier Joe Jackson records--basically white people jazz. I wanted to be a yuppie because it seemed completely different than the world around me, where very few people even worked in offices or had jobs at all. I feel fortunate to have escaped that, and to have escaped my life at the Post Office. I also admit to myself that I am much happier being single again. I became an accountant and at least was able to work in areas where I cared about the mission of my employers. I live in a large city that I enjoy so far, though it doesn't seem that big.

No real point to this trip down Memory Lane, though sometimes I think I'm still looking for that worldly, difficult woman so we can break apart and leave me with with a life of torture and regret.

The book as time travel device.

Even as a younger man, I had an affinity for “middle aged man in trouble” novels, of which there are many. I especially enjoyed those of Larry McMurtry, who wrote excellent novels of male ennui when he wasn’t writing Western [as in cowboy] novels. I especially enjoyed his “Thalia cycle,” which chronicled the lives and loves of the people of a small Texas town through oil booms and busts, beginning in the Fifites and ending in the 00s over five novels written over a four decade span. I believe I've written about them in past posts here.

When I was around 18, I loved the second book, Texasville. In that one, the main characters were in their late 40s. I was especially interested in the various crises and dramas of Duane Moore, the oilman who did not seem to particularly enjoy the oil business, his family, or much else. The occasional affair gives him a momentary spark, but then it’s back to melancholy. He is not in touch with himself, as a man who most likely rarely thinks of such things and perhaps thinks they’re for other people. For whatever reason, as an 18 year old I identified heavily with Duane without understanding why. Perhaps I thought this was what adulthood was like; being tired of things and having the occasional affair to spice things up. Young adult ennui also matches up with middle-aged ennui, despite different motivations. I know some would say that younger people’s angst can’t compare to the stress of the older set-- faced with mortgages, kids and other family pressures, but I’d say their worries are no less valid, just different. But Texasville doesn’t have the same appeal for me it once did—it’s a very dialogue heavy novel, with a lot of short scenes. It’s a very funny book, and I think the charm of it is that despite financial and marital pressures, no one in the book seems to really take anything too seriously. Going broke, ending marriages, having affairs, or feeling like your life has become a movie of which you’ve long ago lost track—none of those things seem to really weigh on anyone in the book except possibly Duane. I’m the same age as Duane in the novel, and perhaps the reason it no longer works as well for me is that I know it’s a glossed over version of what tends to really happen at this age. Things bruise and sometimes even scar. The events of life take a toll no matter how stoic we try to be.

The jewel of the series is the third book, Duane’s Depressed, written in 1999. Without realizing why, Duane suddenly decides to walk everywhere, almost as an act of rebellion against his entire life up to this point. He eventually ends up in therapy. The character is in his early 60s at this point. I was in my late 20s when this book came out and I enjoyed it, but I became especially attached to it in my early 40s and still read it every couple of years. I like the notion of evaluating your life and deciding it isn’t enough or that at least it’s time for something different.

Proust also figures heavily in this novel, as Duane’s therapist advises him to read all of Proust as part of his therapy. In many ways, these [and other] books are like madeleines for me, though when I indulge in them I am specifically trying to invoke memories and imagine the type of person I once was, my routines, responsibilities, and concerns. Life was easier and somehow more difficult at the same time, if that makes sense. My responsibilities were few, but my cares were many, and I seemed less equipped to manage them. I suppose it makes sense that I’d find refuge in the story of someone who suddenly decided they were done with whatever they’d been doing up to that point. Duane’s Depressed speaks to me especially now, as I go through so many personal changes which seem to difficult at first but have already felt worth it. I hope to eventually be as Duane at the end of the book, prepared to travel to places he had always dimly imagined wanting to visit but had never taken the steps to do so. Maybe in another 10-15 years I’ll feel the same about Duane’s Depressed as I do about Texasville, but I doubt that will happen.

Holiness or Hell

I have a memory that may be half fiction. This much is true: I was in a Wal-Mart with my father during the Seventies. This was back when Wal-Mart was more of a regional chain. I remember seeing a blacklight poster of a devil with a pitchfork, in what I presume to be Hell. I was there with my father, and was probably six or seven years old—I gauge this by remembering where the store was located at the time in our little town, since I do remember the building, and that the Wal-Mart moved to a much larger location in the early 80s, that this must have been the late 70s.

The possibly fictional part---I recall my father pointing to the poster and saying, “That’s where you’ll go if you’re bad.” This isn’t too unlike my father, who occasionally took great joy in frightening us as children, but it seems a bit out there for him, so probably not. Hell was something I spent a great deal of time thinking about as a child. I was raised in the Pentecostal church, and Hell was a great motivator. Pentecostals were, as a group, far more interested in the stick than in the carrot, and especially in the idea that said stick would be applied to those who believed differently. I think the idea of love and the hope of Heaven seemed meaningless compared to the relish of non-believers roasting for all Eternity. It was a hard faith in which to grow up.

Baptists had it relatively easy in comparison. We found their theology questionable since they believed in “once saved, always saved.” We believed you could live a Christian life, say “Oh Shit” before dying in a car accident and end up in “the Devil’s Hell,’ as our pastor often called it. Being saved wasn’t really enough either, it was important to “get the Holy Ghost,” and to start speaking in tongues. It wasn’t required, but strongly encouraged, and you were considered spiritually immature and weak if you didn’t get it. Almost all of my family members who attended the church had “gotten it.” When I was around 11 or 12, it seemed like there was somewhat more pressure for those of us in junior high to “get the Spirit.” One summer, my cousin and I went to church camp for a week. That was my first attempt at it….

The camp was terrible, and looking back I see a lot of similarities in what people say about cults when they try to break people down. Instead of normal outdoor activities, we were in church sessions almost all day, so it was like non stop church. They gave us a break during the afternoon where we would just hang out in our bunks, then after dinner we’d be back to church. Eventually, you got worn down, and towards the last couple of nights there was a push to try to get all the kids to get the Holy Ghost. We sang and stood for what seemed like a long time. I had my eyes closed, praying. One of the counselors came up to me and said, “Raise your arms and listen to Jesus!” The pastor at one point tapped my head like he was trying to dislodge the contents of a stubborn bottle of ketchup and commanded me to speak in tongues. Nothing was working. I eventually tired and was lowered to the floor.

I was there for what felt like hours, though it most likely just seemed that way. I tried repeating things I’d heard, I tried praying, I tried everything, but nothing seemed to work and I wasn’t acting or feeling anything like what I’d seen from my fellow campers, not to mention what I routinely saw at my own church on Sunday night. Back home, people routinely spoke in tongues, occasionally interpreted the uttering of others, jumped pews, and ran laps around the sanctuary. As we went home from camp, I figured something must have been wrong with me.

Post Office Characters, Collect Them All #2

I should save this for later, but I’ll probably ditch the character profiles after this anyway. This is about the strangest person I ever met at the Post Office, and possibly the strangest coworker and person I’ve ever dealt with.

I called him Camo Guy. Wearing camo gear was not that unusual at the Post Office. Most guys [and it was always guys] had a jacket or shirt in the traditional pattern. Some might have a hat or pants. Camo Guy took it to another dimension, never mind level. He had berets, desert clothing, and attire from countries that probably hadn’t existed since the end of the Cold War. He had attire suited to seemingly almost any terrain. The only thing I never saw him in was winter gear and I’m surprised he didn’t have some kind of all-white outfit for when it snowed.

His attire was the least strange thing about him.

Camo Guy’s two main interests were karate and Jesus, and he displayed both of his passions throughout the workday. On the flat sorter machine, you would occasionally have to “sweep,” that is, place the full tubs of mail on the conveyor belt and replace them with new ones. It was a good chance to move around a little bit, and boy did he ever. He spent his sweeping time practicing his karate forms, singing hymns, and yelling out his favorite Bible verses. Often, one of his fellow religious comrades who worked at a neighboring machine would shout out verses in response, all evening long. I still remember one hymn he sang, “Jesus on the Mainline,” which is one that the older people used to sing at the church where I grew up. I had never heard it anywhere else until hearing him sing it one night. “Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline, tell Him what you want, Jesus on the mainline now….” I was told later that he went to a smaller Pentecostal church that didn’t have a lot of younger people. Since there were so many televangelists operating out of our city, we had to run a lot of mail from them, and he would often point out ones with whom he had doctrinal disagreements.

Camo Guy was married, I think to someone he’d met while stationed in Germany. She was odd herself, and always wore this awful perfume that smelled like a sour pina colada. She was one of those people where you know something is off, and I disliked working with her. One night she got into it with one of the older regulars, this grey haired biker guy and I think she got walked out of the building after that. I believe they may have split up sometime while I was there.

Most people just worked around him, since although he did his basic job duties he wasn’t all there. People generally didn’t give him a hard time, even in a workforce where most people had anger issues. I don’t know if it was the karate or his childlike behavior softened people or at least made them less inclined to get impatient with him. I rarely saw him cross with anyone. Supervisors would try to get him to pay more attention but they usually just gave up. I sometimes thought he was playing a long con with everyone, convincing them he was too dumb to bother with and so he was left alone. One of the union stewards said they once saw three supervisors all yelling at him once and all he did was sit there and grin. He may have been the smartest guy in the entire building.

I sometimes look up former coworkers in this federal database just to see if they’re still working there, and I see that he’s been driving a truck for the Post Office for some time. This frightens me greatly.

Post Office Characters--Collect Them All #1

I've decided to swerve a bit and take a break from the linear narrative. I encountered a lot of odd people at the Post Office, especially once I got to the mail processing plant where I worked graveyard shift. Here's one of them.

His name was Rex King, so in some ways his name was King King. He was a maintenance mechanic. We had several different machines through which we ran mail. The machines were of various ages, but had one thing in common, they were always breaking down, and when they did,, we had to call an Equipment Technician [or E.T. in postal lingo.] They had varying degrees of expertise. Sometimes it just involved pulling some of the paper residue out of the machine, and sometimes it was more complicated. About six months after I started, they got rid of all the old machines that were probably from the 70s-80s and replaced with a fancy new elaborate flat sorter known as "the 100." It had a conveyor belt, a bunch of flashing lights, and required at least 4 people to operate properly. It was also temperamental as all get out, and would quit working if someone looked at it wrong. So time to call the E.T., which often meant Rex [there was also a gang of three ETs who would occasionally show up, including one of them we called "Gray Sweats" because he always wore the same gray Old Navy shirt and gray sweatpant combination every day, but there was nothing remarkable about him other than that.] There was also Jim the Surly Maintenance Mechanic who swore we were conspiring against him by causing the machine to break at what apparently was the worst possible time for his schedule. but those are pretty much all there are to write about that group.

Rex had a nickname, "the Rexpert." I think he probably was competent enough at fixing the older machines, but could not get his head around the 100, which was way more computerized. If the machine broke down and the Rexpert was up, we were probably going to be down for a while and should start expecting to be sent elsewhere in the facility for a while. One night he had different schematics strewn all over, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. They were supposed to fill out incident reports and I happened to see one of his after a particularly bad breakdown. The last question on the report was "What can be done to prevent this from happening again" and his answer was "No idea."

He was an older guy, with big grey mutton chops and mustache. I ran into him once outside of work, I had the idea that I was going to go to a pancake breakfast one day after work at the Lutheran church down the street. I walk in, and there's the Rexpert, who had put up the flyers at work. So I felt obligated to sit by him for whatever reason, and I awkwardly ate my pancakes while he talks about cults and terrorists [he was interested in that Aum Shinriyiko cult from Japan who had gassed the subways.] As you might guess, conspiracies, cults, guns, and military history were popular topics of conversation among the men of the Post Office, at least at that facility. Once i was in the locker room and saw one of the mail handlers [kind of the Post Office version of longshoremen]reading some kind of John Birch Society newsletter while he was massaging Cornhusker's Lotion into his hands....