So, I am coming home this morning and some fool has taken out the entire stop light. The pole is on the ground, severed cleanly and there is debris everywhere. The minivan is far from the scene, in a ditch on the opposite side of the road. I cannot fathom how any of this could happen but it clearly looks like a case of "too stupid to drive". There is a driving offense called that, isn't there? If not, there should be with one losing driving priviledges for a time to be determined by a judge or jury.
I wait in line to get the few blocks to my home for over a half an hour. I am very irritated, at this point.
I have come home to put a battery in my car. I had hoped to beat the heat, but it is now very hot and very, very humid. As I begin the task, things are not going well. The terminal simply will not fit over the post. The sweat is rolling down my brow and stinging my eyes.
That's when I see another minivan, similar to the first pull up in front of my house. A neatly dressed man with a tie exits the van with a book under his arm. Already, I know what this means. He is a Jehovah's witness. I live down the street from one of their "churches" and so, they stop by more often than I want (which is never).
I resolve to get be polite and to get rid of him as quickly as possible. He introduces himself with a handshake, and I glance down to verify that it is indeed a Bible. After his brief introduction, I say to him that if he is here to talk to me about Jesus, I am simply not interested. He smiles pleasantly and then begins his pitch anyways. I have heard it all before. I tell him I am agnostic and that if there is a God then he made me that way and will just have to deal with me accordingly. But again, saving my soul is far too important to him and also far more important than the task of fixing my car in the extreme heat.
Repeatedly, I try to be polite and to get it through his thick head that I am not interested. The amusing thing about all of this, if any humor can be found in it at all at this point, is that I am quite certain that I know more about that infuriating book than he does. I wonder if he knows that the earliest known copy of Mathew, Mark, Luke and James, contains no reference whatsoever to the resurrection. . .that it simply says "that was the end" after the crucifixtion. The miracles, it seems, where not added until Constantine the conqueror got involved in the whole unholy mess. But, I don't want to get into a theological argument with this guy because I still have a task to get through. Still, I tell him there is good and evil in the world and that there is no need to personify any of it. Whereupon, he explains to me something about God turning his back on the Israelis until he took his message to the gentiles.
Whoooooeeee. We are now in bat shit crazy territory here. I resume to being polite and to getting rid of him. Finally, at long last, with sweat just pouring off of my head and chest, my shirt sticking to me, I finally manage to get him to move along. He get's back in his minvan and rolls on.
There should also be a legal charge for being "too stupid to walk" too.