Meanwhile… #22 – What A Year!

It was Saturday 28 December 2025. What an interesting day! Got up early to cut back the hedge under the tree in the driveway and got greeted by numerous friendly passersby. It’s nice when people can give each other a passing nod or wave or smile or even a brief chin-wag in passing. It’s downright neighborly and reminds me of what “civilization” is supposedly all about. 😏Of course I haven’t been very well this year, with several things that came up, and yes, being physically inactive behind a PC keyboard for much of this past year while working towards my PhD hasn’t helped my fitness any! Yes, I admit it, I also don’t like exercise much anymore, I’m starting to feel my age – which means doing squats and mind-numbingly boring physical movements seems like way too much faffery! ;)So therefore, this gardening job was a huge task I had to force myself to get into – snipping branches, which was the easy part… the sweeping and picking up the million or so cuttings and all the trash that had accumulated under the hedge over the past year, and bundling it all into eight large black trash bags was much more of a strain! Trust me, my back is going to be feeling this for days!The highlight of the day though, was getting into an hour-long argument with some asshole who had nothing better to do with his time, and decided I was going to be his mark today – and since we were in the street in front of my house, technically a public place – I couldn’t legally chase him off.It started off innocently enough. “Hi there, my name is David.” He greeted. I wondered what he wanted and what it was going to cost me while he sidled up to me like a salesman looking for an opening to deliver his pitch. “Do you mind my asking if you have any health problems?”Boy, do I ever! Of course I wasn’t going to list them all off to some stranger – WHY did he want to know and what did it have to do with him anyway? And why the sudden random interest? I was pointedly vague – just a few general things that might apply to anyone in their 50s. I watched as his eyes took on a hungry gleam and he launched into a swan-dive over Lake Opportunity.

“Would you like to talk about Jesus? Could I pray for you?” He asked eagerly, like I was the last soul on the planet that hadn’t been “saved” and he was a few brownie points short on his Golden Ticket to Heaven. And there it was, the pitch.

I told him “Hell no! I’m definitely not interested in that shit!” – which basically was one of the two predetermined responses that – either way – would set him off on his tangent of proselytization. He would either pray with me, or prey on me – and since physically bludgeoning someone with a piece of wood or a broom handle is illegal last time I checked, I opted to use words instead… 😉 You can see where this is going, right?

He was deserving of the tongue lashing. I mean, who wakes up on a Saturday morning and decides to walk around picking arguments with random innocent people they meet on the street while trying to convince them that a) they need Jesus, b) they are on the right path, you aren’t, and they are only trying to help you (even if you don’t need or want their “help”) and c) this is for your own good? So shut up and let me save you already! How unbelievably arrogant! How presumptuous! How fucking bloody insulting and offensive!

I was incensed, but I kept that shit squared firmly behind a wall of composure and self-control I’ve refined over the thirty-four years I’ve spent working under often difficult and inane circumstances I can’t talk about on social media.

To think that all I ventured out for this morning was to tackle a chore I didn’t want to do in the first place – I just needed to get the job done, and if possible, enjoy the early morning serenity of my neighborhood street in peace and quiet. Sadly, this feller made that impossible.

The cheek of it. This guy clearly has no life of his own, and face it, it must be pretty damn lonely being an incel living in his parent’s basement. That is, if his parents even still put up with him.

Guy said he had a pocket bible in the right pocket of his short pant, that he kept referring to as the ultimate resource of facts and truth, but never once got to the point where he could actually pull it out and refer to it, because I kept challenging him with questions that made him blink awkwardly and retreat to the bible quotes and references section of his programming. Oh yes, the hungry gleam faded to something of a worried glassy stare.

Just as a ‘for example’, he kept waffling about ‘God’ protecting his followers from evil – I asked him “who created evil in the first place?” I told him – your ‘God’ did – it’s in your bible in your pocket. The bible itself quotes ‘God” as saying he created evil, I forget the exact verse right now, but he denied it – which means he’s hardly read the bible he claims is all-true and all-knowing.

He skipped over that like an old fashioned record-player skipping over a crack in the track, so I asked him where is his “God” when children get bone cancer? Where’s his ‘God’ when Israel murders children in Palestine? His response was that it was the fault of the children being murdered by Israel themselves for not being Christians (yes, he actually said that)!

Oh yes, it was entirely predictable considering whom it was coming from, but it still set me off. The hedge took the brunt of my ire of course, and although it looks neat and tidy now, it reminds me of a freshly shorn army recruit, standing rigidly to attention just in case I see anything else that needs snipping off. Yeah – I gave it a crew cut.

Needless to say, the spirited exchange lasted about an hour, while I continued to snip away at the hedge growing around the tree at an accelerated rate, while the guy never seemed to get the message that he was deliberately annoying someone who’d had combat training in their ill-tempered youth and was working with a number of sharp implements. 😝 Yeap, I pride myself in my self-control. With good reason. If I had a hose out front, and was watering the garden or something of that nature while he was accosting me, I might’ve succumbed to that temptation though.

That said, I’m actually quite proud of how my debating skills and patience have improved over the past year or so since I’ve been practicing… after all it won’t do if I were to tell someone simply to “fuck off” just because I run out of patience or get bent out of shape at a religious debate at a varsity or presentation because a critic or opponent is a brainwashed dimwit producing pre-programmed, circular responses and who has half the IQ of a crayon.

Once he realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere with me, he finally shuffled off – I’m sure with a bit of food for thought and a couple of things to look up in his little book he kept in his pocket the whole time, and hopefully he will think twice before pulling the same stunt and harassing people on the public street in the near future.

The thing that lingered in my memory for a while afterwards was his expression. If you’ve ever watched the movie “Kingdom of Heaven” and remember the bit in the early part of the flick where the main character meets a priest recruiting men to fight in a Crusade in Palestine saying “to kill an infidel is not murder!”, then you know the sort of look on the face of the individual I met today. Glassy. Impermeable. It was nauseating. It was like being confronted by an AI given flesh. An automaton lacking humanity, compassion, intelligence, actual reasoning ability… a zombie even.

It strikes me that that is exactly the sort of mindset we’re dealing with when it comes to these people isn’t it? They idolize (in the original sense of the word) their flawed scriptures, haven’t read the entire thing anyway, and only memorize the bits that support their attacks on other people, elevate themselves above the rest of humanity (or “creation” as they call it), or lionize the bits that support their arguments in justifying their hatred or their actions that undermine others around them… and when you point out the contradictions, even if you manage to remember the verses and references, you’re either “making it up” or just “taking it out of context”.

My parting shot as he ambled away, amounted to “I’d rather spend eternity in a hell I don’t believe in, than spend it in a place with people like you.” I don’t think he liked that very much.

There really needs to be a law made in this country against people proselytizing their religion at people in public spaces – especially when it’s made perfectly clear that their doing so is unwelcome and amounts to harassment. For the public space to be safe for everyone in this country, it needs to be secularized. If you want to ramble on about how terrific your religion is, you’re welcome to do it at home – or in your church, temple, mosque, or synagogue.

At the end of the day though, all that aggravation gave me just the adrenalin and head of steam I needed to finish the annual job that usually takes me all day – in just over 3 hours! So perhaps he’s also earned a begrudging thanks. 😛

Stay safe out there, and have a nice day – er, in spite of the world being littered with people like this guy. 🙂