The sickness. It had started I suppose. It was sickness in the sense that I hadn't necessarily brought it on myself. Atleast... I hadn't developed and immunity to the contagion that I had run into. Just like when you get a blood transfusion... you know because you are a kind of sick of a different sort. But then antigens in the new blood give you yet another illness.
This one had a three month incubation period, and started evidencing symptoms immediately. But honestly, I loved the fever and the chills. I loved it all. Every tiny molecular construction. I breathed it in. And it became compulsion. So much more than the addiction brought to you in part by Phillip Morris and the lust for the American dollar. Hard core. Leather-headed, furious, blundering... enigma.
I can't just blither on in that direction for the entirety of this post though. Suffice it to say that X had become the whole of my thought life. I no longer gave even feigned interest in any other sort of religion. It had grown and wormed its way snake like up and around in behind the back alleys of my heart. And in the truest sense became the botany of my desire.
We traded texts about minutia. It was perfect and it felt like absolution. Texts during class. Text during chapel. Texts that kept you from sleeping and then made sure that you had happy dreams when you finally did. Texts that said 'good morning' and 'goodnight' and 'i miss you.' I never even bothered turning my phone off silent. The repetitive motion of flipping open my motorazer became so familiar that even now I instinctively check my phone 289 times a day. Thank gaga that I didn't have to pay my phone bill back in those times. And that there was an infinite sms allotment. All the same I utterly destroyed more than 4 motorazers... entirely though the pursuits for which the device was intended.
Thanks also be... for the fact that my parents never had the gumption to order transcripts of those conversations over that 3 month incubation period. They would have been shocked into their graves.
I wasn't even planning on going. Between the two off campus jobs that I had and the fast approaching piano examinations towards the end of the school year, sitting in a crowded stuffy room and listening to some old wheezer explain the changes that I needed to make to my personal life wasn't precisely the first thing on my list of afternoon delights. But that's what Bible Conference was really.
In the place of the typical collegiate experience of Spring Break, which as I've come to understand it should be filled with dry mouthed sandy covered scantily clad frat girls and boys challenging each other to drink themselves blind; we had something else entirely. A week of church.
Kind reader, and pray understand... Church 4 times a day. Follow the link if you'd like to have it make a little more delusion.
Forms had to be filled out and filed with the Deans Offices for all of the services that I would be missing due to work obligations. But that was the best that I could do. I was still ending up enduring 5 or 6 before the week was out. Friends and co-workers out and about are still surprised and sometimes a little confused when I relate this past requirement. I get "But... so you don't get a Spring Break?" or "Why... didn't you just skip..." alot.
One memory of these times stands out above the rest. I had managed to make nice with the members of the senate. I tagged along forgetting my Bible on most occasions. I just reasoned that if the entire audience brought theirs, they would be able to fact check the things that the lector said... Who was I to doubt the cross referencing of 6,439 fellow Christians. This was an error on my part. I had taken a seat high up in the balcony of the exhaustive and cavernous building. I did in fact bring along my rather large sketch book and a sharp pointed black sharpie. I knew there must be some value in the story telling and didactic eclecticism I was being bludgeoned with and thus decided to take note. Pictorially.
The preacher started talking about the old ways and customs of the times before internet and cell phones. I immediately began sketching a puritan who I named Gilgoroth. Gilgoroth was a good man. A hard working German immigrant who had sailed to America to grow potatoes, impregnate his smallish wife Olga and practice religion freely. Happy with the way this looked I flipped the page and began listening to what Preachy Face was saying again. hmmmm.
"Our highest moral obligation is in the service of Christ the King! The inspiration for the fabled ASLAN THE LION AND THE KING OF THE TRIBE OF JUDAH!"
Bit much I think Preachy. Never the less I began sketching again. A sort of end-times lioness/siren creature who began stalking Olga from the previous page and luring her away from Golgoroth with the intention of luring and subsequently murdering Olga and her unborn daughter. I named the lioness Aaaslana. Go Aaaslana! Go!
Alright I thought! This is more like it. Make entertainment of you entertainment! I was soon to be noticed by a peevish little blond man with a Bible he had borrowed from some library in Carthage. Massive table sized thing. His quick little eyes shot over to me two rows in front of him. During a standing spell while the crowd was being required to say some chant about how they loved school and hoped that it would live forever, he weaseled his way into the aisle and poked me on the shoulder.
"Where is your Bible?!" He demanded pensively. Face in an angry glare.
"I think your Bible ate it..." I responded listlessly. The people talking around us and I don't think he got it.
"You should be taking notes." He got louder.
"Oh... I am!" I showed him the pages of the sketchbook explaining how the drawings were representative of the Preachers stories.
I don't think he got the creative import of the finely reproduced image of Aaaslana dripping in black human blood... but he got the drift.
"Huff! Well.... Bring your Bible next time!"
Sure... I thought. "You're exactly who I want to be like."
