And I laid around and read. Drank some after I'd had a brunch and listened to a podcast, but I never darkened a door. It wasn't like a Sunday, any Sunday, when I was young and hadn't yet graduated from home.

My Father preached the gospel under the Southern Baptist label, and headed the Religion & Philosophy department at a small college. He groomed likely young folks and shuffled them out to small piney-woods churches to develop their chops. When he needed a car note or a suit, he'd send himself out to a strange room and do his thing, dragging the family along.

Sometimes my Mother would play piano if the church didn't have a pianist, but as the years turned she frankly drug up. Couldn't take it. She'd read science fiction and palmistry books after begging off sick. My Dad would stop by the bus station on the way home and pass me a few dollars. I'd run in and pick up an Astounding or Amazing, or some other 50s-60s bug-eyed-monster pulp sci-fi magazine for her. She was burnt out, but she stuck.

My chief assignment was sneaking around smoking in those days, I would slip out and smoke, take a look at the day and plan the afternoon once all the rituals were done. The only time that was mine was stolen. The moments the input ceased. Smoking was forbidden, and still is. So I still do. Anything so universally condemned must have value.

I listen to someone like Doug Coe doing his act, and I can see he's effective. So, he's fucking dead. Last guy I expected to see now days. I know that when Trump went to church, as a kid, his Pastor was Norman Vincent Peale. How must that have been? Ol' Norm Vin was no passive plant. I wonder about Trump and the God factor he has introduced. I've never listened to but one of Coe's sermons, and it was OK, and made me wish I'd paid more attention. I have heard me some sermons. Mostly, I'd just heard his Cousin David Allen Coe, a known race-healer and poet.

I have always believed in talismans, and that's sort of like belief. An agreement with the general concept that there's more than you see out there, and you might be missing something. A coin or a rabbit's foot. An anchor when you go into other places. When God haters begrudge warriors their talismans on some fly-by-night point, I clench. With such presumption the streets will turn into places not to be slow in.

Holy Wars? I suppose once a war's yours it's holy. Life is getting like a river you don't let those you protect swim in. Lots of biters and grabbers down there, and you pay them to do it. I keep looking for something new, but it's always with the same old.

In a time one time, when things weren't so arranged, people crossed themselves against demons for they had met them. They knew they existed, for they had eaten their grain and stolen their women. Heads up.

CD

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