Conversations With an Alien

One year. A short time or an eternity depending on how one looks at it.  It has been a year since I first met him.  As I recall, it was one of those dreary wet days when even the sky looked tired.  I was on R & R from the thick atmosphere at home.  As I remember, I was in an uneasy mood and my wife much the same.  We had been locked into one of those battles of unsaid words, stark silence and distance crammed into nine hundred square feet of stifling familiarity. I think we both just needed some space.  Having married later in life, we were both paying for our individuality on the installment plan.  It had rained all week, and cabin fever was setting in.  My leave was covered by a weak reference to going to the store for something or other.  I just wanted out. I had felt strange for days and couldn’t seem to break out of it.  With four walls closing in and without much thought, I grabbed something to read on the way out.  I doubt if my mate even heard my rather lame excuse for running away, perhaps it was just as well. By that time, my ego needed a fix.

It was one of those drizzly types of rain that had none of the excitement and flare of a thundershower.  Texas is famous for its thundershowers. Here rain can dance lightly across the landscape or relentlessly pound in violent fits of retribution.  I once heard somewhere that Indians often describe the big hard raindrops as tears of anger from the Great Spirit.  They say that the Great Spirit started crying the day the white man entered Texas. Even such tears couldn’t drive him away. The Great Spirit was no match for Bubba on the make.

Pulling out of the drive, I noticed that even the rain annoyed me.  It wasn’t raining enough to use either the slow or fast setting on the wipers, so I used one of those I’m-not-sure settings that didn’t quite do the trick.  Driving through the muggy oppressively humid Houston air, I decided to stop at local bourgeois coffee shop for some overly priced coffee from some exotic underdeveloped land.  You know the place, full of slumming yuppies or children of the upper–class college types mixed in with middle-age proto-hipsters and down and out anarchists.   Around the corner from the apartment there is a sufficiently bohemian coffee shop with an avant-garde name. It was just a place where I could play pseudo-intellectual and get away with it.  I could sip coffee and read the words of others as indignant as I about the degenerate state of human society.  Or I could read about past deeds of pious heroes and reflect on just how small I really was.  If I was lucky I might run into another one of the regulars or someone I knew to engage in some stimulating conversation.  Once there, I ordered a Sumatran from the kid with the nose ring and tattoos.  I took the lay of the land and grabbed a seat at a back corner table facing the action and opened the book. It was then and there that we met.

Funny, but thinking back I noticed him from the start.  He looked too normal for such a place.  In fact, he would have been more at home in a golf country club.  He wore light green dockers with a tan polo pull over and deck shoes. He looked to be about thirty-fiveish and oh so normal.  Normal, I hate normal, it smacks of surrender and appeasement.

It took me some time to digest what had been said and some of it still fogged me a bit.  I could see where he was coming from in the sense that it seemed that everyone out there just knows what God likes and doesn’t like.  The current understanding in these parts is that God hates gays, beggars, and socialists.  He likes stained glass, vaulted ceilings, and robed choirs.  God is Republican and helps those who seem to be doing well financially or use lots of hair spray. God favors prayer in school, at football games, and before standardized examinations.  In the Middle East, God favors martyrdom on some level and wants women kept on a short leash.  Maybe God was as scared of women as the next guy, hmm, must be a dude then. He, or it was given to the occasional miracle but I never get to see them.  Then again I think the mocking bird that starts singing at 4:00 a.m. and is still singing when I go to work at 7:30 is a miracle, but I’m a cheap date. 

So I turned the debate around and asked Max to explain to me what was God’s mistake about mankind’s intention.  Max enjoyed that question.  He said quite flippantly that our anthropomorphic God, complete with all man’s passions and desires, probably thinks people really want his guidance and presence in their lives.  This intrigued me, I mean given what he just said about the rulebook and all it just seemed natural that people yearn for God in their lives and if the relationship is reciprocal it must be true the other way around. I jumped all over that answer.  I protested that Max was dead wrong on that one. Max retorted that we want God to think we care but we don’t want him to get in the way of all the usual fun like, self-indulgence, self-righteousness, wealth accumulation, war, politics, exploitation of the environment and the like.  We like to keep our God caged in Churches, Temples and Mosques where they are safe from us and we are safe from them.  After a week of indifference, intolerance, pomposity and, self-righteousness we arrogantly stride into his cage and, with heads bowed sufficiently to feign deference, demand absolution for the dark side of our nature, knowing full well we have absolutely no intention of changing a thing.  “Poor God,” he said adding,” he probably thin