witless jehovah

my dad and i lived in the foothills of palomar mountain in northern san diego county, for the 4 short years that i knew him. the community we lived in was called valley center and was recently one of the communities evacuated ahead of the latest wave of fires to hit southern california.

my father was a very complicated person. on one hand he was a conservative to an absolute, which i attribute to his being drafted into the army and being forced to fight in vietnam. he had a copy of better dead than red on his night-stand the years i knew him. on the other hand, he did more psychedelics than anyone i've ever known. loved andy warhol, zardoz, david lynch, had the greatest record collection i've ever seen, packed to the gills with can, amon duul, captain beefheart, zappa and others. mind you, he bought these records WHEN THEY CAME OUT! he loved music so much that it was he who introduced me to new wave music. every friday, he would buy a new cassette for me. one week, devo, the next, oingo boingo. then i really got into it and started playing stuff for him. i remember him getting stoned one day and requesting that i put something on. i found splintered in her head from the cure. he loved it. he took me to my first concert - the thompson twins, flock of seagulls and weather girl at the del mar racetrack and almost got into a fight. he took me to my second concert as well, with his date and her son, who just happened to be a friend of mine. it was the cure's head on the door tour.

his views on religion were equally complicated. when he and my mom were still married and she would drag me to church every sunday, he would always tell her to "say hi to god for me." after the divorce, he kept a jehovah's witness bible handy and seemed to read it often, although he was in no way a christian, at least in the traditional sense. i think he was someone who respected jesus, but had no use for religion.

around this time, i had a good friend, who was a jehovah's witness. after a while, my visit's to his house would include a lesson on the jehovah's witness religion. one week, i am told that jesus was crucified on a stake and not a cross. another week, i get told that the reason why my friend nathan's family was not grieving the immanent loss of his mother, who was dying of brain cancer, was because after she died, she was gonna get her own planet or something. at the time, i was attending a baptist church and the witnesses were doing what they do best - witnessing on their version of jehovah.

eventually the witnessing shifted from going to nathan's and getting a lesson to an entire family paying a visit to my father after church. my dad hated this more than anything, but he was remarkably well behaved during the visits. i would come home from a friend's house to find a station wagon pulled up in the driveway and a houseful of jehovah's witnesses selling their brand of religion to my skeptical father. i don't know why they even bothered, we were poor as dirt anyway. i would walk in the living room and take one look at his face. i knew what the score was, they thought they were the one ones selling, but little did they realize, he was trying to make a sale as well. he was attempting to sew the seed of skepticism in them, to make them realize that what they believed in was bullshit, but they had their armor on. they weren't going to buy.

this happened over the course of about a month or so. every sunday he would be paid a visit. eventually they realized that this was a waste of their time. so on the last day of their visit, i roll up to the house and see the station wagon, walk in the front door and see them basically wrapping up, looking dejected and a bit angry. they grab their children, which included a newborn baby and exit the house. as they are walking out, my father and i see them off. we walk outside and stand in the driveway, watch them get into the car that, after a minute or so of fidgeting, backs out of the driveway and drives off.

as we watched them drive off, i noticed a white object in the driveway that wasn't there before. after inspecting it, i realized what it was - a still warm, freshly used disposable diaper, wrapped up into a neat little package.

praise god.

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