After I first left my job at Ricky’s, I used to go in for coffee so I could write. I was already planning my suicide but it was a safe place to go where I knew I could write in peace. It didnt hurt that I was still getting free coffee from the owner. There was a server who didn’t like the fact that I would take up one of her tables in the corner and not have a full meal so eventually I started going to the local Starbucks to work.
At Starbucks, I could be left alone and I made sure I was a gold star customer there, entitled to free refills on their coffee and teas. The only drawback with trying to work at Starbucks in this area is that the church crowd comes in for hours at a time each day to congratulate themselves on being born into the correct Christian belief system, as opposed to one of the tens of thousands of other religious systems. One day, I made the mistake of engaging with them and pointing out the holes in their logic to which they were not impressed and explained away my points by saying that you just had to have faith. Leaving quoting George Michael’s most famous song on the table, I resolved to never debate them again and always have headphones with me so that I wouldn’t have to even acknowledge them ever again. It was a peaceful solution which worked for me and if they saw me as a heathen deserving of hellfire, so be it.
Covid has put a kink in that solution. A place to sit in any of the local Starbucks is a rarity these days and because I rely on transit to get out and about, an anxiety riddled problem in its own right, I could be trapped at a coffee shop without a place to sit and work without my ride home coming for at least an hour. I could ask my mother for rides but at 78 I don’t like bothering her or her aching back unless it’s a necessity. I could also use taxis, Uber or Lyft to get around, but the problem of seating still applies and I could be paying upwards of $20 each way for the privilege of standing with a rapidly cooling coffee and nowhere to get any writing done.
Now, I don’t want you to think that me not having a chance to write is anything more than a first world problem to most people but to me it’s a little more important than that. Writing is often the only time I get out of the house and when you’re a shut in like I am any chance to be comfortable in an environment outside my home is, for lack of a better word, a real blessing. Going beyond that, my writing is also often the best distraction I have away from my mental illnesses. I need to write to keep somewhat sane. NUmerous attempts have been made over the years to write at home without any success: I am uncomfortable trying to do any mental work in the condo to the point where I get nothing done. When I was back in school I could not get any work done at home. If you were a forty-something man living with your seventy-ish mother I doubt you’d ever get totally comfortable trying to accomplish any task which is completely self serving.
So I write when I’m not home.
And that brings us today. I am doing the fruit and veggie shopping today so I stopped at Ricky’s, hoping the staff would leave me alone so I could accomplish something of substance even if it would only be myself who would appreciate it. Two tables away, that distance being welcomed due to social distancing, is a group of three men from one of the three local Christian schools how to organize a prayer group for a COVID stricken household. Putting aside how useless prayer is and how much more help they could be if they just did some practical things like shopping for the household, that means I’m stuck once again next to a group of men whose ideology I find morally repugnant and have to listen to while I am trying to get some creative juices flowing.
Sitting next to groups like this is not the same as if they were a Christian family. It seems to me, based on my experiences, that once you introduce a woman into the mix the arrogance of men believing they are chosen to be above all other than God herself is tamped down to a background level. A pseudo humility seems to kick in, keeping the conversation at a polite if not secular level. Instead, one of the three men just compared himself to Peter from the Bible. Imagine the arrogance which must exist in a person’s mind to see themselves as equal to a person they see as an actual saint.
Now I have been accused of being arrogant throughout my life. I am smarter than the average bear and I have known it for all of my existence but no matter what my opinion of myself was, at any particular time, it was never so high that I thought I was better than the majority of the people standing beside me. Drug addicts, most criminals, and especially women and other underrepresented populations in our world were always just another group of people who existed with me in this crazy broken world.Sure, there are criminals (and politicians) whose existence makes me reconsider the idea of non-violence but they are the minority of this world. These men to my left are not like me. They see the world as fallen and themselves and those who agree with them as the only ones worthy of saving. No matter how far I stretch my mind, even if I go back to the days when I too was a believer, I cannot ever remember or consider that the rest of the world was beneath me in that manner. Even now, as I listen to these arrogant men I am unable to see them as anything more than victims of a cult-like belief system which has twisted their morality beyond its breaking point.
So, here I sit frustrated and only able to write about what it is which is bothering me rather than the things I would rather explore. There is the most important election of our time occurring in America in 5 days. There is potentially going to be another Armenian genocide any day now. Roving bands of government “police” are killing random citizens in Nigeria. But I can’t concentrate on those things this morning. Instead, I am forced to listen to three men planning how to cram as many people as possible in their school’s gymnasium for Sunday’s non-socially distanced religious brainwashing session. At a time when even close relatives are being warned against gathering together due to the exploding numbers of infections these men are planning, with a clear conscience, another of their weekly superspreader events.
Another grumble of laughter comes from the table and I am forced to wonder if they realize they are planning the potential death of one or more of the people they are claiming to care for? Somehow, I doubt it. After all, the afterlife matters more to them than anything which happens on this planet, any situation where they can be tangibly helpful, any outcome which comes from the actions they take or fail to take in this world. I wish they could see the world as I see it: a chance to help people escape suffering in the only life we know we will ever get.
