Can I Speak To You For a Moment?...Absolutely!

            I was in the middle of my morning ritual padding around in my flip-flops and robe, the V formed by the overlapping fabric at the base of my throat barely concealing the gray Brillo pad which was desperately trying to peak out, when there was a knock at the door. Standing before me was an elderly gentleman in a tweed sport jacket holding a weathered briefcase along with a smile usually reserved for the criminally insane and 3-card Monte dealers.

            I’ve been proselytized before…by some of the best pimps around…politicians, used car salesmen, prostitutes, but none of them can hold a candle or a sap like the true believer. The true believer is the purest form of salesmanship because there is no filler and no by-product. They are by nature 100% grade ‘A” absolute and nothing you can do or say will keep them from their mission of pointing out the heinous lie of your heathen existence.

            Twenty years ago if a Jehovah’s Witness had come to my door I wouldn’t have been nearly as pleasant as I was to this man even to the point of asking him to wait while I poured myself a cup of coffee and made myself a couple of pieces of toast as I knew he would oblige.

            Twenty years ago I would have given any religious zealot the bum’s rush by yelling immediately something inflammatory like “FUCK YOU! I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT!” punctuating the declamatory statement by slamming the door on his Sears catalogue ass.

            But having matured somewhat in the ensuing 20 years, letting my wife finish first would be the primary example and also by going gray and flabby both physically and philosophically, I decided to let this keeper of the flame chat me up and see if there was enough fodder in the next ten minutes for a blog on the subject.

            I am sure when most bourgeois, suburban habitués are confronted with this same scenario, they do what most polite society does after accepting the social contract, they smile and nod until it is over, take the literature, close the door, then call the beauty parlor to inform them that they are running 15 minutes late.

            Admittedly I have been dipping into a variety of philosophical tracts over the past 20 years. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Becker, Emerson. Cicero, Plutarch, mostly western minds of which I was one, and so I was eminently ready to battle the absolutist who had darkened my door.

            I pointed out to that it is not my job to believe because no matter how you define it or what you call it, it is all a mystery unless he happened to be God or the Ungod. By defining it in absolute terms, by putting a face on it or even calling it something by name, historically speaking bad things usually follow in the form of tremendous human carnage. I calmly told him that I’d rather just bask in the mystery. I was picked to be on the team. How I got here is none of my concern. It was dark for eternity before I was born, I have more or less 80 years to extract from life what I can with the chance that I’ve been given, only to be followed again by eternal darkness. That was all I absolutely knew until further notice.

            The Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims all think they have the secret to the sauce. Any reasonable man knows that this cannot possibly be true. Religion is one of life’s great thumb twiddling, time killers. It is the ultimate dilly-dally and a perfect nightcap to a recherché lollygagger’s dalliance with his own self-importance.

            So how can you sir, standing in my doorway, know this too to be absolutely, positively true without somehow cutting yourself off from other possibilities in the infinite universe?

            It was probably at this point when the Fuller Brush Man for the Lord first realized that “I ain’t no bandleader!”, to quote Jack Walz speaking to Tom Hagen in The Godfather. I certainly had nowhere to go and could take as much time as needed to convince this man that I was not going down easily.

            I believe It was the first time in the history of attempted door-to-door conversion, that the proselytizer was the one that wanted to run for the hills. This nice man, with such initially high hopes, bid me adieu. I smiled and said goodbye then flashed on the next 5 minutes of my fantasy as the defeated hero of this little one acter chucks his briefcase and brochures into the lake, then shambles off to the nearest bar to commiserate with the rest of the poor souls until last call.