Memo to religious obsessives: YOU ARE DUMB.
I know, I know. How many times can I nail a dead horse to a cross? I do try to wait at least three days between instances, to allow the horse to resurrect itself, but still. On the other hand, punks keep getting up to get knocked down, as they say. Specifically, Southern religious punks. From the lovely small town of Alexandria, VA. Where God works in mysterious ways.
They say that when God closes a door, he opens a window. An enlightening analogy, yes, but somewhat inappropriate-sounding when you're talking about someone's bathroom. You see, in Alexandria, LA, there is a family. A family named Cross. And the Cross family has a bathroom, and the bathroom has a window, and outside that bathroom there is a store, and outside that store there is a light. And when the light shines through the window, which is yellow and frosted, some people say they can see... wait for it... a CROSS.
This has kicked off a bit of a fervor in Alexandria, LA, where schools apparently lump "refraction" in with "evolution" and "human sacrifice" as inappropriate subject matter, and where there is apparently nothing better to do than get yourself worked up into a Baptist frenzy over your neighbor's shitter.
Not everyone sees a cross, of course. Wouldn't want the bathroom miracle to remain consistent. Some people see many crosses. Some people see an angel, and some people see a crown of thorns. That last one kills me, because other than artistic representations, there aren't a lot of crowns made of thorns lying around for comparison. They're not next to the wicker baskets at Wal-Mart.
So you can imagine why I'd be a bit skeptical when, say, Zelma Seals McCoy is quoted as exclaiming "I see the thorns. I see the thorns. God is real."
I know that this column tends to be written from what might be considered a somewhat... secular perspective, but let's assume, for the moment, that the Judeo-Christian god is the one true god, as real as a Hostess fruit pie and twice as nice. What kind of fucking backhanded, half-ass respect do these people think they're giving Him? God is great! God is all-powerful! God has chosen to reveal His Divine Self through a stain on a rock, an oddly-shaped potato, and if that weren't low-rent enough, a LOUISIANA BATHROOM WINDOW. Behold the majesty of The Lord Our God, and don't forget to flush!
Now, if the waters of the toilet bowl were to part, and a bunch of silverfish, led by one silverfish holding a staff, were to then cross the bowl, we might be talking here. But it strikes me as incredibly disrespectful to attribute a vague light effect to your omnipotent uberbeing with such fervor and stupidity. Stupidity as evidenced in the Book of Lambert, verse 24, paragraph 2: "And lo, there shall come a time upon the Earth when the dull-witted shall speak, and their spakings shalt be recorded by a small-town journalism intern, and the recordings shall be posted upon the World Wide Web, and then reposted at a time known as the EPOCH OF THE DIVINE SPAKINGS." Which modern theologians prefer to translate as ACTUAL QUOTE TIME.
"It's shocking to see so many people, people my age, people I went to school with." - Roncey Miles, daughter of the Cross matriarch, and the first to see the cross. Yes, in a small town in Louisiana, many of the people who came to look at a cross in a bathroom window are peole Miles knew and went to school with. It is as if they never left the small Southern town of their birth. IT IS LIKE UNTO A MIRACLE.
"It was so amazing, so breathtaking." - Andrewnette Sampson, leaving me the perfect opportunity to make another "stinky bathroom" joke. But instead, I will take the high road and just make fun of all the names listed in the article, like "Andrewnette Sampson", "Roncey Miles", "Ricky Beauregard", and poor, poor little 7-year-old "Keraneicia Aaron", who is destined to spend her entire adult life sighing with exasperation before spelling out her name a fourth time to outsourced call center employees in third world countries.
If God wanted to work a miracle, he should have shown up in a delivery room seven years ago and saved the poor Aaron girl from her fate. Unfortunately, He was much too busy at the time painstakingly forming the image of the Virgin Mary into a single Cool Ranch Dorito bound for Oklahoma. Hey, he can't be everywhere at once.