Buttonholed at the bus stop: A Talk To Muckefuck Story™

[muckefuck]

There's a special kind of sinking feeling that comes over you when you realise you're the only one waiting at the bus stop for a bus that you think is scheduled to come in two minutes. At first, of course, you wonder if you read the schedule wrong. Or if they changed it without informing you. Then you panic about making getting to your destination on time and begin worriedly considering other options.

My anxiety was extinguished when I checked my phone again and realised the reason the shuttle wasn't there is that it wasn't due for another hour. How I managed to convince myself that 7 a.m. was 8 a.m., I'll never know, but now I was stuck with the choice of waiting nearly half an hour for another shuttle or playing CTA roulette. A few stray drops convinced me that this was not a day for games of chance. I took a seat and opened my book.

Some minutes later, a well-dressed older gentleman came by and offered me a copy of Awake magazine, which I politely declined. That didn't discourage him from chatting and he launched us on a getting-to-know-you conversation. You're a librarian? My ex-wife was a librarian. She used to do storytime. You do storytime? For the first few minutes, I was tense expecting that fateful personal question which would change the whole dynamic; when it failed to materialise, I allowed myself to relax.

People I recognised began appearing and I realised the shuttle was nigh. I don't know if he realised it, too, but he wound down his disquistion on what a lovely place E-town is and wished me good things. And then it came:

"You have a family?"
"I do."
"You have a wife and kids?"
"No, I don't. I have a partner of thirteen years. We own a house together."
His face darkened. "Well, everyone chooses their own lifestyle..."
"And some lifestyles choose you."

Then he preached to me briefly about desire, about how if you lust after something long enough you'll give into it. I bit the insides of my cheeks to avoid saying, "You mean like desire for a God?" After he said his piece, he hurried off like there was suddenly someplace important he had to be.

There's a special kind of thrill you get from seeing a hot topless bear approaching. That thrill is heightened when it's a hot bear you actually know. Between the panic and the Witness, a friend of aadroma's I'd met at Bear Pride stopped at the light long enough for a bit of chat through his open window. "Work is that way," I told him, pointing in the opposite direction. "I quit my job there." he replied. "Now a full-time gigolo?" I teased. It was a fun exchange. It would've been even more fun had it happened about, say, ten minutes later.

Comments

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed that a divorced JW is judging other people. Divorce is usually grounds for disfellowship -- it's why my mother got booted the first time round. (The only reason my sister wasn't is that her husband left her, and she lived the life of a nun thereafter.)

I am so, so glad I never got more entangled with these people.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was very taken aback with how freely he called her his "ex-wife" and wanted to ask about that myself. But it just seemed too probing for the first two minutes of a casual conversation.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Maybe he was divorced before he joined the Witnesses?

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I bit the insides of my cheeks to avoid saying, "You mean like desire for a God?" After he said his piece, he hurried off like there was suddenly someplace important he had to be.

You are a better, or at least more restrained, man than I.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily, it's just that some things trigger the old Midwestern politeness. It would've felt like kicking a dog that wasn't even barking at me.

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

I think that a good reply to any Christian who has not lived a lifetime of celibacy and who accuses one of giving in to his desires is to point out that St. Paul recommended celibacy, but said it was "better to marry than to burn" - i.e. he gave a way out for those who didn't have the strength of character to keep it in their pants.

So if they don't have it, accusing you of not having it is the pot calling the kettle black.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Eh, I don't like giving credence to the notion that anyone will burn, not even for the sake of argument.

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, in this context "to burn" means "to burn (with lust)" rather than "to burn (in hell)", especially since he doesn't use the "burn in hell" idiom anywhere else that I am aware of.

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

I'd like to affirm your "burn with lust" interp as opposed to burn in hell - the latter has never surfaced in any of my NT stuff on that passage in Corinthians?, whereas the burn with lust thing, that was the implication very consistently

[tortipede.livejournal.com]

I got doorstepped by Witnesses a while ago, saying they'd like to talk to me about the bible, and was it a book I knew much about? I said that I did know a little bit, and was it true that Witnesses don't believe in Hell? They said that that was right, and so I asked them what they thought about Luke 16:23 (from the parable of Lazarus and Dives: "and in Hades, where he was in torment..."). The guy said he'd have to go away and ask about the interpretation of that scripture, and was it OK if he got back to me on it? That's about 20 years ago now, and I'm still waiting...

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

There is something spectacularly shameless about people who evangelize to strangers, or chat them up asking very forward personal questions and then passing judgement. When preached to, I find it remarkable that people think I will even consider abandoning fundamental aspects of who I am on the basis of their stump speech or that I will integrate their threats about a hereafter as stunningly real. What amuses me on some level their conviction that their witness, their uninvited, invasive witness is either appropriate, persuasive or something other than utterly repellent.

I can usually keep my game face on, the south has worn that very thin.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's funny, because the only thing that makes it seem less than spectacularly intrusive to me is being raised Christian and thus understanding what a fundamental tenet of the faith evangelism is (despite belonging to a faith that essentially treated it as something appropriate only for "pagans" in dark corners of the Third World). If it were anything else he were pushing, I'd have no compunction about telling him to get the fuck out of my face.

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

I can totally imagine that if you know the ethos of it that its easier to cope with and - *almost* doesn't register as disturbing.

At the Queer 101 at my institution below the Mason-Dixon I ended up using myself to create a displaced example of the "willfully fallen" so that it could be slightly easier to discuss homophobic behavior that people were refusing to recognize as such. A few people in the audience who were used to "just" evangelizing and witnessing as they had been socialized to do and calling out "pagans" and "sinful" behavior, were still trying to cope with the pagans and sinful among them in Div School. They were defensive about being told that in an academic setting and most public spheres outside of the South that it is not normal to casually dehumanize other people as inferior because they don't share their religious beliefs and act like their judgements are objective reality or acceptable behavior.

I broke the ice and tension by talking about being the heathen TA my first year and I how I was NOT what a lot of good M.Div Students were expecting to have grading them. My friends on the panel (officially fielding questions) and most of the audience were able to laugh at all the right places, but I could see the gears turning as the people who bristled at the notion of people not only "not comporting with their understanding righteous behavior" but also just very comfortable with not finding the "Conservative Christian Word" at all compelling.

yours truly and heathenishly, rrrowr!