September 24th, 2007.

Us North-Easterners are comfortable with churches pushing the concept of heaven and an eternal reward. Indeed, we’re exposed to plenty of placards letting you know that you’ll sleep better counting your blessings than counting your sheep and that to know God is to know Love. In extreme cases there’s the hint that no matter how hot the summer’s been, it’s going to get a whole lot hotter if you haven’t sat your soul down on a pew for a while. Head North enough and perhaps the summer months never peg the temperatures enough to inspire visions of eternal damnation and you cease to even see billboards for air conditioner repair – though maybe their regional obsession with ice cream stands shows some resignation to their lack of spiritual safeguarding.

Down south the billboards push the presence of Pedro and vasectomy reversal and strip clubs and in the west you can’t even make out what they’re pushing past the palm tree fronds and neon, but here in the gentle beginnings of the corn fields and flats of the Midwest there’s a firm belief in Hell. They want to let us know because they care and they are especially firm on the concepts of burning sinners for evermore. In this seemingly never-ending summer, perhaps the idea of Satan shoving our unwilling asses out on infinite fields of monotone labour seems all too real.

Hell is other people? No, I Love people – I’m amazed by their grace. Hell is cubicle-shaped, grey, made too hot by the servers and too cold in rooms designed more for the survival of their electronic occupants than their mere human servitors. People are what you do it all for – your family, your Lover, the person you meet on the road and sit in wonder of for an hour or a day… listening and speaking and sharing.

One of the crystallizing moments that sent me on the Trip happened out in California while I was working for Glovia International. I’d been sent to Los Angeles for some unknown purpose – I’m sure it’s something that could’ve been accomplished with a phone call or probably even an email, but corporations like to see faces in unfamiliar time zones struggling with jet lag and unknown geographies. They like to see the recipients of their checks almost more than they like to see the end results of all those dollars spent… and so I found myself spending a week in the artificial oasis of Irvine, CA – an overgrown industrial complex with offices and warehouses and overpriced hotels within earshot of LAX. Close enough for the noise but not attractive enough to have the zip code of Los Angeles proper.

After an afternoon of motivational speaking and finger-foods I’d learned little and observed a lot and nearly been knocked over numerous times by a friendly, energetic woman a couple of inches shorter than me. She was in motion most of the time, rushing from place to place in a frenzied blur – in her rush from point A to point C, point B (a man who’s elbow she’d jogged AGAIN) stopped her and asked why she was ALWAYS rushing… she told us that she HAD to walk fast because her husband was really tall, had abnormally long legs and that she had to walk with a swiftness to keep up with him. I didn’t think twice about her explanation but the man who’d stopped her pointed out something so coldly logical and something so horrific about our world that I knew I needed to leave my job before I became trapped and twisted like these people before me…

He told her something along these lines. “You spend 8-10 hours at work five to six days a week. You spend another 2 hours a day getting to work and getting home from work. On most days you can only spend 4 hours or so with your husband and I bet most of that’s spent in front of the television. You should be walking at OUR speed.” He said it without judgment, without the disgust that I associate with the idea that this woman was more married to her job than to the man she’d married. He said it like a man who’d come to terms with the fact that his Life bent more around his profession than around who he professed to Love.

And so maybe we don’t see a lot of West Coast churches pushing the tantalizing everlasting rewards of heaven because the corporations we’re prostrating ourselves to are already doing it. It’s not poorly lettered signs and pearly gates perhaps, but the fonts in our contracts have become attractive if rather generic and our 401ks are fully transferable, which is a far cry superior to the loyalty demanded by your standard deity.

Everyone needs to find their own bliss and on the bad nights I need to be reminded that I think I’ve found mine. A friend sent me a Jimi Hendrix quote a couple of nights ago – something to the effect of Living as hard as you can is the only way to Live and that we choose what to sacrifice based on how much we Live that Love. (or Love how we Live?) I’m not sure how much I admire him as a man – a man after all who died of a drug overdose after declaring music the only REAL high, but I find him inspirational as an artist and if that’s the thinking that was going on behind his burning (ha!) guitar solos then maybe it’s not a bad thing to listen to. I think that after a certain point we choose our cliffs and leap off them. Those of you who stay up there on solid ground must think those of us dopplering away beneath their feet are crazy, but we see your receding forms as simple static.