Jesus--The hobo--Lesbians

It is not very often that I experience a feeling of thematic unity in daily life, but that happened today, and I feel compelled to write about it. It's a bit of a stretch to say this experience is unified, but there is a definite moment of "aha!", as my twelfth-grade english teacher would have said. Bear with me.

I was in Taco Bell gorging myself on what I realized, half-way through the sordid ritual, was too much food. I was also reading my psychology textbook in a vague attempt to minimize the guilt of not working through the day. All of a sudden, the paragraph I was reading was occluded from view by a callused hand, which appeared to have not been washed in a long time. My eyes traced the path up that hand, up the arm, up the neck and to the face of the person to whom this hand belonged. He was ruddy-faced, bearded and one of his eyes was so bloodshot that there was no white showing. He began mumbling inaudibly. I just sat there for a few seconds, unsure what course of action to take. Finally, I just shrugged and he went on his way, but not before he shouted "Canada!" in an inappropriately loud voice. The three guys at the table next to me snickered. He sat down next to someone else at a four-seat table across the restaurant.

I finished the required reading as well as the platter of greasy meat and spicy cheese and was preparing to leave when I saw the cashier lady approach the presumably homeless man. He was smoking and she asked him to put out the cigarette. He did not respond. She stood there for a few moments, and then turned back and told her co-worker to call the police. I left before the police arrived; I wanted to get back to work.

Instead of getting back to work, I ended up in a coffee shop, sipping on a too-expensive coffee while reading the Deaths, Memorials and Births section with a metaphysical focus. Apparently, on the date of one man's death, God himself was in Sunnybrook Hospital. Moreover, God was in the room when he died. I'd have liked to see that (with all due respect to the deceased).

At this point I looked around, and saw that the table next to me was occupied by two women who were lening in and having a regular time-passing conversation about work, how tired they were, how school/work was etc. Something ineffable in the substance of that conversation told me they must have been a couple. But this was very much like the conclusions drawn from the average psychology study: you know deep down that the same data could explain a thousand different scenarios, but you push your point of view to get exposure and prestige.

A few minutes passed in quiet contemplation of how much work I had to do after I got back, and how I was just putting this off with feeble excuses that ran "caffeine will get my stregth back up, so I'll be more efficent...". That was interrupted by a shout at the back of the restaurant. We all turned to look. I heard a tenor voice yelling, but it was a very one-sided shouting match. I went back to my coffee when the shouting resumed. I saw two figures emerging from the back, and one of them was, of course, the homeless guy from the Taco Bell being nudged out of the establishment by a chunky yet well-groomed fellow. I turnd back to my coffee, which was near done. As I finished, I turned putting on my jacket and saw that my suspected lesbians were definitely lesbians: they were making out across the tiny table. Not shocking. What was shocking was the backpack under the tiny table. It was painted in the image of Jesus. He just stood there, staring at me benignly (and more power to Him). I had seen this backpack as I was leaving the library to go to lunch on someone else, and had thought to myself "wow, I've never seen one of those before"; it brought a smile to my face, and that rush of endorphins motivated me to get to Taco Bell. That was my moment of "aha!", a mini- or pseudo- or quasi-apotheosis. It was as if the entire last hour and a half had folded into itself and could be explained entirely in terms of the three images in the title.

Consider: "the job interview process teaches bad people mildly bad skills, and teaches good people mildly bad skills. Those skills are embellishment, sucking up, rampant insincerity, shamelessness (not the good kind) and a complete disregard for the here-and-now."