I hit 50, and suddenly I took an interest in death, figuring I should start reading up on it to make as sure as I can that I'm good at it. I'm a bookish kind of guy, in spite of spending most of my life in Third World shit-holes as a lingering war tourist. Books, libraries, museums, art galleries, fields of corpses, burnt cities, fleeting relationships, emotional distance and an ingrained suspicion of strangers. The usual stuff of long-term travellers. So, engrossed in a book on death, sitting quietly alone in soft and clean, sweet-smelling surroundings of Modernity, a fabric chair without a hint of blood-stains, painted walls with no papered-over bullet holes, electric lights that shone continuously and bright, I sat turning pages, turning ideas over in mind, turning like the unhappy deceased in their ditches. Life is so good.
And then, cutting through it all, came the invasion a reader so much hates: the sense of People Around Me. Tense, ready if need to lunge, to plunge, to stab with pen in hand the nostril, the ear, the eye of a foe who could well have come to kill, I raised up my eyes from the page and saw-- a half dozen wide-eyed teens, kids baring their teeth at me, skinny, scruffy boys and girls, the leader of whom, the druggiest looking of all, lilted and wafted a question at me that to this day has my mind agog: "Do you know J'EEE-zuz?"
More about Dag's Conversion to moderate Christianity.
5 comments:
Since I'm in confessional mood here, let me say that I always fear that I'm repeating something some other writer has covered here, and that someone else has done it far better than I. If that's the case here, please let me know so I can slink away in quiet embarrassment.
Dag, that is surreal and amazing. If anyone else has covered it, they certainly haven't done it that way. For the type of "but Islam means Peace" Christian out there who needs to understand the real nature of what they feel so virtuous for "tolerating" in others, that might just work. At least on someone intelligent and appreciative of irony enough to get the message. The rest will just accuse you of being "raaaaacist" or something.
I did have some fun writing that piece, I admit it. Not everyone is getting it, moderately speaking.
Thanks for the comment. For those others,
"I'll kill ten innocent by-standers for that remark!"
Wow, you sound just like Ahmed the Dead Terrorist!
OK, to those not "getting it": Think about describing Mohammed's actions but changing the name to Jesus. Doesn't work real well, does it? On the one hand you have a "perfect man" who murdered innocent people and raped children. On the other you have a "perfect man" who the closest he got to initiating violence was hassling the money-changers in the temple. And cursing out a fig tree. (Anyone who has been up at dawn and found the coffee shop closed will understand about the fig tree.) One way of making people recognize what a turd Big Mo was is getting them to try to imagine Jesus doing the same things. I mean, your head explodes.
Getting people to see Mohammed clearly for what he was is a big part of getting them to suspect/reject Islam. All the evidence is right there in the koran. Use it. If it means giving the PC/MC play-nicies a verbal kick in the pants, then use it that way.
I had some fun writing that post, using the persona of a psychopathic serial killer whose early family life consisted of life in a highrise building with a water-cooler, an office for Communists, parents who, in celebration of Christmas thought it fine to allow children to randomly bomb "the masses" below. That my character is obsessed with death, never having had a human relationship otherwise. That the character in the narrative finds a group of starry-eyed suburban Christians to be drug-crazed street urchins baring their teeth at him, he calmly ready to kill them. That his only understanding of Christianity is some parody of such as told him by a Wahabbi street preacher. And so on. Yeah, it was fun writing it. Glad you liked it too.
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