no wonder there are so many christians.

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26 february 1997

3:52 p.m.

Dear diary, Sometimes even the most insignificant of absurdities can keep a good smirk on your face all day. There was a Jesus freak on campus yesterday. He set up shop right in front of Campus Center, hoping, I guess, to enchant the lunchtime crowd amassed on the steps. He was a large lumbering lump of a man, flexing his arms and doing what could only be described as a fair approximation of the "rapper strut" (bobbing head and obscure thrusting hand gestures included). His delivery wavered on the line between "highly animated" and "verbal assault." Fortunately for me, I missed most of his warmup spiel. I went in to the cafeteria to fetch a plate of fatty chicken katsu, only afterward joining a classmate outside where we watched a portion of Mr. Freak's presentation. The crowd that was watching had thinned considerably from the time I went in to eat, and as the show continued, small patches of students would up and leave at random points throughout his sermon. The size of the pack of folks that meandered away, though, seemed directly proportional to the ratio of yelling to speaking. As most of the stuff spewed by such characters are naturally filtered out by my subconscious, I can't give you a very good transcript of it all. The general gist, though, was that Jesus was groovy and made him strong. With an excess of Marine-esque drama, he then proceeded to: Tear an O`ahu telephone book in half. Duct-tape his wrists together, then rip them apart. Snap a baseball bat in half. Panting and wheezing unconvincingly, he smiled up at everyone in gratitude for two or three accidental claps from the sunburnt gallery. I guess we were to infer that these acts of amazing strength came through the gracious empowerment of Mr. J. Christ. Then he really went off. "Now I need twenty people!" he bellowed. "Okay! Come on down!" A massive wave of apathy came crashing down. But he wasn't discouraged. Unfortunately. "C'mon!" he yelled, rattling his Playskool amplifier. "Anyone! Come down, grab my arms, tear me limb from limb!" He paced and strutted and spat with every grunt. He looked up at us, disgusted. Five of the perhaps twenty people remaining on the center steps quietly picked up their bags and disappeared. "Hey! I've done this at a hundred schools all over the country! At UCLA, they were great! They had all these big football guys pile on me and pulled my arms from their sockets!" He smiled a scary smile. "It was awesome!" Absolute silence. By then, another six people had strolled away. "Come on! You can't tell me no one here has the guts to humiliate me!" Slowly, just about everyone in the area who was self-ambulatory headed home or returned their attention to counting cracks in the steps. "Hey!" he yelped. I imagined his voice cracking. "Don't you want to humiliate me?" It was a truly beautiful moment. I guess I'm still, as one might say, unclear on the concept. Even if there is an allmighty toga-wearing Overseer of All, I'm not sure why she (or he) would let nations starve and let the Spice Girls survive, and instead endorse the gratuitious annihilation of phone books. I'm so proud. Derek's going in on Friday to sign his first lease. His property manager seems just as cranky as mine, but she's at least open to the possibility of his having a cat... after he's lived there a while. Despite what he may say, Derek wants a cat. He just doesn't know it yet. I'm still trying to figure out what this Big Step for him means for us. He's figured we'll at least see eachother more often... I guess in that spontaneous rendezvous (rendezvouses?) at clubs and coffeehouses won't mean a twenty-minute drive for one of us. In addition to planning the "surprise" housewarming, I'm going to help with decorating. I doubt he'll be getting a Visa gold card from his mom or anything, but still... I won't refuse to at least participate in a shopping project that involves someone else's money. I wonder if they still make those "Star Wars" bathroom curtains?