The other day, I was thinking about this duty to evangelize that a lot of Christians have got going….and this default assumption that their evangelical Christian behavior is welcome anywhere that they are.
And it got me to thinking about my own religious beliefs and how I am sometimes reluctant to ‘come out of the closet’ as it were, because I personally live in a community dominated by Christians – namely Baptists and Jehovah Witnesses.
I’ve always chalked it up to the fact that I am living in that state in the South which is not the South but still has a lot of Southern conservative Christian attitudes, namely Florida.
(But even so, I will admit that even before I was publicly identifying myself as Norse non-reconstructionist polytheist, or as a Celtic-flavored Pagan, I still grew up surrounded by people who often made the assumption that I must believe in a God and of course, that God had to be the Abrahamic God that they and their parents believed in — despite the fact that my parents styled themselves as agnostics — because I grew up celebrating Christmas and Easter.)
So, in that sense, I hardly think that I am the first person to point out that when you tell many people that you’re spiritual, they assume by default that you must be some form of Christian.
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But aside of all that, I’m getting pretty cranky about some of the people in my neighborhood.
Mostly because there is a woman in my neighborhood who keeps tacking these little cardboard signs everywhere:
…and I mean everywhere.
Walking my dog the day before yesterday, I found at least a half dozen of them during the first 1/2 mile of my walk. Two of them were taped above the walk signal button. Three were tacked and/or stapled into tree trunks that were at least 100 yards from the road-edge. And one – the above one – had been affixed to an electrical pole that held a public cable line repeater.
Walking today, there were at least eight more tacked, taped or stapled unto various things, often at eye-level.
One little sign had been twist-tied into the branches of a decorative hedge.
And it got me to thinking that someone was going quite out of their way to spread these blurbs of God.
I suspect that this is why small towns often put up those ‘Post No Bills‘ signs in downtown areas.
But no one seems to care — except for maybe me – because I watched several workers for the home association (whose job seems to be come out every other Thursday or so to clean up the litter along the sidewalks, and remove other things that don’t belong like the handmade cardboard signs of past garage sales and whatnot) – and I watched each of them stop as if to read these little signs, and then each walked away without removing it.
So, since the homeowner’s association seems to approve of these little signs – I mean, their job is to remove things like that all under the auspices of removing ‘litter’ and I distinctly witnessed each of them leaving these signs alone- I decided that I would turn each of these signs over and write my only little spiritual blurbs on them.
So far, I’ve re-purposed two with stanzas from the Hávamál, one with a short passage from the Vedas, two with verses from Thelema doctrine that came through the Ape of Thoth randomizer, and one with a portion of the Homeric hymn 26 to Dionysus.
I was in the car the other day, listening to music on an alternative rock station.
Then, the station cut to a little promotional blurb wherein Ben Gibbard, guitarist and vocalist for Death Cab for Cutie, gave the station ID for the top of the hour. These blurbs are often created to do the double duty of promoting the station and the band, as well as to make a convenient segue into the next song, which I presumed meant that it should be a Death Cab for Cutie song.
But I was feeling rather depressed, and since I have never been a fan of that band specifically due to the fact that their sound strikes me as rather depressing, I was poised to change the station.
But then this song came on:
I’d never heard this song before, but I was immediately delighted with it.
It didn’t sound to me like your typical Death Cab for Cutie song, and in that, I was pleasantly surprised.
Hm.
Not only was this a sweet moment of pandoramancy – since I had recently been feeling morbid over the recent news concerning the impending death of a beloved relative – it was perhaps a subtle reminder to keep an open mind and an open heart.
Two years or so ago, I was in a Facebook group named The Lokean League of Very Bad People.
The group is unfortunately gone now, but I remember that -towards the end – some of the more active members of LLoVBP engaged in many verbal sparring matches with that particularly vocal folkish Heathen group, The Odinic Right.*
Here is a ‘letter’ that was forwarded by a former member of LLoVBP some time ago:
“Credit for this one goes to Mikki Fraser and Lagaria Farmer.
If you like it copy, paste, and pass it on!
Dear Odinic Rite, It is imperative that I get this message to you as quickly as possible. There may be no more time left for me, but you and all the others still have a chance! Recently, I was fortuitous enough to capture a member of the Lokean League of Very Bad People, and after hours of gruesome torture, was able to extract a confession. However, just before the scoundrel bit into their cyanide cap, they sprayed me with a neurotoxin. It smelled like peaches, and I’m not sure what it does yet, but I’m sure I must only have minutes left before it takes effect. Not only is the LLVBP planning a dastardly scheme that involves teapots (the ravings of this lunatic were hard to make out) it turns out that the Dark Lord Loki HIMSELF has been behind nearly every global catastrophe that has plagued mankind.
This is what I was able to learn:
Loki is the father of the Jewish race
Loki was the man on the grassy knoll
Loki is the leader of Al Qaeda
Loki hid dinosaur bones all over the world to make people doubt the Eddas
Loki was the hunter who shot Bambi’s mother
Loki and Sauron may actually be the same individual, AND he can simply walk into Mordor
Loki is the head of the Illuminati
Loki turns baby Dalmatians into coats
Loki was Joseph Stalin’s mentor
Rasputin was Loki’s avatar
Loki gave birth to Napoleon’s horse
Loki invented condoms to exterminate the white race
Loki is responsible for the “mud” races, and may also be Obama himself
Loki side-swiped Princess Diana’s car
Loki ejected Amelia Earhart out of her plane
Loki kidnapped the Lindbergh baby
Loki blew up the Hindenburg
Loki was the captain of the Titanic AND the Exxon Valdez
Loki broke up the Beatles
Loki stole the Ark of the Covenant
Loki whipped up Hurricane Katrina
Loki is the puppet master behind the Democratic party
Loki created all deadly spiders, and hides them in people’s showers
Loki reverts cured gays
Loki started Occupy Wall street
Loki programmed the Y2K virus
Loki was Mary Queen of Scott’s lesbian lover
This rabbit hole goes so much deeper than we thought, and you have to warn the others before it’s too late! And don’t forget that…. That… cough… cough… what’s happening to me? I have the sudden… urge to… have sex with a man! No! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
~~~
*I am not going to link to the Odinic Rite group, but a quick search of Google would school you on their folkish (read: overwhelmingly racist) belief system.
Well, I know what that means; if you’re going to have a drink, then so shall I.
-Peanut, renowned gadfly/theatre critic
~~~
If you have been following this blog for any length of time, you may have noticed that I am prone to social anxiety. It is not something that I am proud of, but it is something that often affects my daily life. As a result, I’ve developed many coping strategies and behaviors over the years. Some of them are outward physically noticeable coping mechanisms that serve to help me function better when I find myself in anxiety-inducing situations, while others are inward psychological behaviors and patterns of thought-processing that help me through difficult mentally stressful situations.
However, I try as much as I can to function as normally as possible, but on a bad day, I am likely to avoid social interaction altogether.
Sometimes this desire to avoid social interaction will carry on for several days.
At times like that, I would almost welcome the chance to avoid.
But lately, more and more, I’ve been thrust into situations that make me anxious, but I am left to find a way through somehow anyway. These situations present themselves, and I am caught having to deal with exactly the sort of social situation that I’d more than likely rather avoid.
Today was just such a day. I was informed this morning that two acquaintances of mine (whom I do not know very well at all) were planning on stopping by my home later in the afternoon. Of course, I stressed about this, and was on edge all morning. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I had been practically avoiding them socially for over a month, but things converged last night somehow, and it became obvious to me this morning that I didn’t have a good excuse to avoid them for very much longer.*
Besides, they were only planning to stop by for an hour or two.
I started to think that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
So I buried myself in the activity of tidying up the house. I doubled up my dose on my anxiety meds (something I do with the OK of my physician, of course), and then I meditated and I exercised.
In short, I used every one of my physical coping strategies to prepare myself for that two hour window.
While I was out walking, I had an interesting moment of obvious pandoramancy, as this song came up twice in the music feed on my device:
Gods bless you, Frank Turner.
You seem to know exactly how I feel at times.
~~~
But then, you know what?
The situation with those visitors?
They never even showed up.
Perhaps tomorrow, they will…but I am ready to face them.
With a clean house and a clear, calm mind.
~~~
Hail Loki…for understanding the way I tend to be ❤
~~~
* There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus, “Leave me the fuck alone” comes out as “Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point. – David Sedaris, A Friend in the Ghetto; from Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls
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