UltimateGaryB

Maybe I’m Jesus

The true story that follows is of a family friend, someone I’ve known since I was 17….

Margaret had to get out of the house. The yelling, the screaming, the arguing were too much to take, even when she was an active participant.

Margaret is 8th in line out of 11 children, most of them boys. It’s San Antonio, 1957- large families are more the norm than the exception.

“Why doesn’t Jose ever have to mop the floor?!” Margaret screams at her mother. Her younger brother Jose doesn’t hear this because he’s already left to go play with his friends. Jose is just one year older than Margaret’s 14 years. The unfairness is grating upon her insides. It’s been this way for as long as she can remember.

Each of her mother’s long black strands of hair are partnered with two competitors in gray. She is never without a scarf on her head and has a face that looks weathered at home, but softens in mixed company. When she speaks to Margaret, it’s always an order. When she speaks to Jose, or any of Margaret’s brothers, the tone changes for all to witness.

Margaret’s younger sister Prieta had another seizure today. Margaret even got yelled at for it. At 2 ½ years old, while at a family gathering, Prieta took an awkward fall and struck her head on concrete. Details of the incident are intentionally not discussed anymore, but the result is that Prieta has not developed normally, and someone will have to take care of her the rest of her life. The future will bring medicines that can control the seizures but someone will have to see that she takes them.

On this hot summer San Antonio day, Margaret disobeys her mother and pushes away the mop handle. The side door slams loudly when she leaves with the screen door bouncing three times for emphasis.

Margaret walks her anger down the hot sidewalk, past her neighbors’ houses, humble and hardworking, all of them…and nearly identical to her own small, overcrowded, family home. Three blocks over and one block up, Margaret comes to a Catholic church. It’s not the same church her family usually attends. This one is two times larger and three times nicer. Margaret enters. It’s cool inside.

Two nuns softly approach Margaret with warm, welcoming smiles. They are young, too. Not teenagers like Margaret, but young women, wearing the full habit and simple black smock. The nuns are beautiful, charming, understanding. They listen to this young girl and validate her feelings. They give Margaret comfort, safety, friendship, and most of all, an escape from the harsh, unjust home she will have to return to that evening to help prepare dinner for her father and brothers…and her sister Prieta.

Margaret walks back to that same church again and again in the days, years, and decades that follow. It’s where her heart can sing, where she feels protected, where she has found a second family.

Whenever I find myself in a discussion about whether or not God is real, you will soon know what I believe. I am fully aware, however, that what I know to be true, that God does not exist, is totally dependent on context. When I think about Margaret and what is true for her, God exists again.

When Margaret turned 18 she told her family she wanted to become a nun. Her mother would have gone along, but her father said no. Today, Margaret Assisi is 74 years old and goes to church everyday: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I list each day alone so you can fully appreciate the seriousness and consistency of her commitment. Often it’s twice a day. God, Jesus, Mary, Holy crosses, Saints, the Rosary, these are all elements of Margaret’s daily life, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Margaret still lives in San Antonio, in the exact same house she grew up in. She argued with her mother up until that tough little lady with the thinning long gray hair and scarf passed away 7 years ago. Margaret still takes care of her younger sister, Prieta, and sees that she gets her medication every day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

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There is a good chance what I’m about to tell you is the most foundational moment of my life. This is the big one. This is the scene that locked me into a trajectory I’ve been stubbornly slow to veer from ever since. First, you’ll need a bit of background before I get to the clincher.

I have early childhood memories of being made to dress up in my “Sunday best” and attend services at St. Luke’s Methodist Church with my parents. We are talking about late sixties Houston, Texas, and a cookie-cutter society that hadn’t yet been breached by the hippie-led counter-culture. Churches back then had much higher attendance than today and were more intertwined with communities, even in larger cities like Houston.

Being so young at the time (ages 1 – 6), I had no sense that my dad wasn’t too into being a church-goer. I only learned about it years later from my mom who pegged his lack of enthusiasm towards the church on an incident from much earlier in his life. Seems his car was stolen from a Catholic church parking lot one fine Sunday right there during mass. Yes, apparently my dad was raised Catholic, though by the time I came around overt signs of those influences were long gone…perhaps left in the trunk of his stolen car. One remnant of my family’s catholic history endured through my dad’s sister Helen (my aunt), who, much like Margaret in the story above, was a highly motivated Catholic her entire life.

Once old enough, being at my parents’ side in the main church was replaced by me getting herded into the annex hall where donuts were served and Sunday school was taught. My present-day self knows very little about the differences between being a Methodist, Catholic Baptist, Presbyterian, or any other flavor of Christian. But one thing was for sure, at St. Luke’s Methodist church the life of Jesus was something my little mind had plenty of exposure to. The big takeaways for little Gary were just three things. Heaven is an awesome place where good people go. Hell is a terrible place where bad people go. And Jesus is great. Really, he’s amazing! That story of him walking on water…? How cool is that?!

And when you’re 3, 4 and 5 years old, nobody is taking the time to explain biblical events as stories, fables, or metaphors for life. It’s all presented in a very convincing fashion. By the time I am 5, thoughts of Jesus are occupying an ever-increasing portion of my little kid brain. But here’s the thing, all my life up until literally now, I would have said that I did NOT grow up in a very religious household. We only went to church on Sundays because that’s what people did in those days. It’s not like our home was adorned with religious symbols, it wasn’t. We didn’t say a blessing before each meal, only the big ones like Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We didn’t scramble to find a church if we were out of town on a Sunday, thank God. However…I did say a prayer at the side of my bed each night before crawling into it. If this was your experience too, then you and I were both going to bed with God.

I believe my parents were convinced, as are billions of other parents around the world, that raising your kids with religion will make them better people. It’s like getting a little help from Santa Claus… so your kids stay on the nice list.

Heaven, Hell, Jesus, these were all big influences on my impressionable little mind. And there’s no question about it, I wanted to be a good kid because of them.

Here’s the Clincher!

One night when I was 5 years old, my mom was tucking me into bed. The bedtime story I got that night was a kids book about Jesus. The church library was always happy to lend parents religious books for their kids. Part of their 25 year business model, I suppose. I remember the book having big illustrated pages, always with Jesus leading the scene, and only one or two short sentences at the bottom. This particular book had a drawing of Jesus as a little boy, like maybe around 9 or 10 years old. This caught my attention. Perhaps I’d never thought about Jesus being a little boy. At Church, I’d only seen Jesus as a baby in the manger, or as an adult with a beard and hippie-long brown hair.

There was something else in my 5 year old mind, too. The idea that Jesus would one day return to Earth and save us. This was one of the “teachings” I’d already been exposed to.

Five year old me is putting this all together in my head. Here’s how I think it through:

So, if Jesus was once a little boy….like me. And…. he’s going to return to Earth. I guess he has to start out being born and growing up first. I wonder how old Jesus was when he learned he was Jesus, the Son of God. He probably didn’t know at first, he was just a really good kid, like… he was really smart and knew how to behave and did stuff right. Well, I’m a good kid like that.

My little wheels are turning fast. All of this information is pointing in one direction:

Maybe I’M Jesus!

Yes…Literally

It’s funny now. But it’s not like it didn’t make sense at the time, right? The next day after what may have been my first (and worst) “epiphany,” I woke up feeling mindful that being the next Jesus was a distinct possibility. Again and Yes, that I am literally the next coming of Jesus Christ, son of God, our Lord and Savior. I carried this thought around with me for at least two days. By day three, after giving it additional consideration, I had come around to the more rational conclusion that I was probably not right about that whole being Jesus thing.

Here’s the consequence. Even though this episode came and went in a matter of days when I was a child of 5, its effects are still echoing in my head today. It was foundational in that it set me up to want to always stay on the extreme “good” side of everything.

An example from my childhood would be, If it’s not good to say bad words, I won’t say them. To this day, my instinct is to not cuss. You will see this throughout my blog, too. I have zero moral objection to people who tend to incorporate a lot of curse words into their communication. And, I will use curse words sometimes when speaking or writing, too, but it will always be in a very deliberate context. The most glaring example from my adulthood is my decade’s long abstention from drugs and alcohol.

There’s plenty of religious people in the world today who would hear my story and say, “Mission accomplished!” I see it quite differently. It’s a burden. I have mental prohibitions other people don’t have to think about. There’s an energetic pop song from the 80’s called Goody Two Shoes, sung by Adam Ant. Part of the chorus says, You don’t drink, don’t smoke. What do you do? Subtle innuendos follow. Must be something inside. That’s me. I was Goody Two Shoes with no subtle innuendos to balance me out. It was something inside….

Damn you, Jesus!!!

The crushing truth is that my natural tendency to not cuss or drink or smoke is not natural at all. And it is not a direct legacy of any single moment from so long ago. My arrival to that Maybe I’m Jesus moment at 5 years old and the further conditioning I received in the subsequent years….up until I was old enough to start thinking on my own. It’s something I should rightly be pissed off about. I was misled, conditioned, and indoctrinated by religion, and by the parents that fed me to those lions. I know their intentions were only good, but my parents, as well as any parent that raises their children in the church, were and are playing with fire. Jesus was a Saint, a peacemaker, a savior of the world, or so the story goes. I was a little boy growing up in a dysfunctional household. My chances of growing up “normal” were less than zero.

I fully left Christianty for good around 15 or 16 years old, but the damage had been done. And now, all these years later, I am still working to uncover who I really am.

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Next up, cannabis gets explained to an alien.

Smoke ‘em If You Want to Live

That’s strange. Where’s my garden hose? I wondered to myself. The disturbing answer to my question came much later in the day.

I only noticed it was missing because I wasn’t able to water the flower beds that morning before going to work. It was Austin, late in the summer of 2016, and my flowerbeds couldn’t go too many consecutive days without water.

Around 2:30 pm that same day, I am camped in my cubicle at work. My cell phone vibrates on the desktop next to my computer. It’s a call from a number I don’t recognize. I answer…because I’m like that.

“Hi this is Treasure, M’s girlfriend. I’m really worried about him. Do you know where he is?” There is urgency and stress in her voice. Immediately, I am feeling just as worried. I know M’s been in a bad place lately. I tell Treasure I will do my best to find him.

Seconds later I call M on his cell phone. He’s always hard to get ahold of, even on his good days. Today, I’m preparing myself to double, triple, and quadruple-call him.

But he answers right away with a flat, hello. I could tell through the phone he’s somewhere outdoors.

“Hey, what’s going on? You okay?” Really, I’m shocked that he’s answered.

“Not really. I don’t know.” He is speaking from a sunken place. “It’s just hard. I’m trying.” I can hear what sounds like a police radio in the background. This is America. M’s six-foot-seven and black by birth.

“Where are you, man? Tell me where you are and I’ll be right there.”

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A recurring theme of this blog is paradigm-smashing; how old ideas can get up-ended by ah-ha moments. Since smashing paradigms is considerable work, let’s take a “smoke break.”

For most of my life, I harbored a preternatural personal disdain for smoking. Of course, there is no shortage of people who dislike smoking, but not like I did. All for reasons I will attempt to explain. I will also build a new case for why smoking cigarettes should not be looked upon with such negative judgement, but is instead deserving of broad and empathetic understanding.

Several years ago I was listening to a Freakonomics Radio episode about cigarette smoking. [If you don’t already know this show/podcast, it’s one of the best.] Two things from that podcast stuck with me in particular. The first was when one of their guests, a medical researcher, described nicotine as, “Good drug. Bad delivery method.” The researcher went on to explain nicotine’s “health benefits,” such as increased levels of beta-endorphins that reduce anxiety, to name just one.

The other amazing fact they reported was that the most commonly shared characteristic among cigarette smokers is “mental illness.” [Screech!] Stop right there!! I wish to be super clear this is what they reported and substantially different from the better and more nuanced personal conclusions I’ve made on the subject. Stay with me while I attempt to connect a few dots.

Can I Get A Light?

I have never been a smoker. Well, not voluntarily. From as early as I can remember, and even before I can remember, smoke was in the air. My mom was a smoker and didn’t even think to slow down her habit while being pregnant with me. My dad didn’t light up as frequently, but he smoked on occasion, too. It was the 60’s. Practically everyone smoked. Even my first words were, “Can I get a light?”

When you are the child of a smoker, you are in a tough spot. You cannot simply make different lifestyle-choices and avoid being constantly surrounded by cigarette smoke. I disliked it VERY much. And once information started coming out in the media about how smoking was bad for your health, I despised it even more. I loved my mother, duh!. Watching her smoke pack after pack of cigarettes was the worst. Then, the final straw… I was maybe 14 or so when I became aware that some people thought I smoked cigarettes because my clothes, laundered by my mom, smelled like it.

My kid-logic brain created a monster-strong aversion to cigarettes, cigarette smokers, and pretty much anything smoking related. Smoking = bad. End of story.

Now that I’ve accrued a decent amount of life experience I am able to understand the phenomenon of smoking in a far more robust and nuanced way. There are people in my life today that smoke and, while I don’t care to sit downwind from them at a table, I still appreciate them without negative judgement.

A Tether Back to Earth

Several years ago a very close friend of mine- let’s just call him M -was going through a life-threatening personal crisis. He was distraught and suicidal like I’d never seen him. I was letting M stay in the spare bedroom of my house at the time; though he was out so much I rarely saw him.

On the day he planned to take his own life, M unscrewed the garden hose from its bib on the front of my house and carried the green coiled up mass towards his vehicle. In the dark hours before another unbearable day began, M parked his beat-up SUV behind a nondescript retail shopping center, right next to a dumpster. His plan was to stick one end of the hose up the exhaust pipe and leave the other end inside the car, windows up.

—–

My friend M is a smoker. When I found him that day in a suburban neighborhood alley, in the midst of four police officers and two squad cars, he was smoking like a fiend. Finish one, light another. Repeat. On that day, in that city, those cops were (thankfully) the good guys. They helped M find a clinic where he could get some legit help. The whole story is compelling and maybe someday the time will be right for me to tell it in full. For now, we need to stay at his side.

While three of the police officers were occupied by standing around, one was making arrangements so that M would have a safe place to go. For a few hollowed out moments, my friend and I were able to talk. Like I said, his cigarette smoking at that moment was in high gear. Out of pure curiosity, I thought to ask him, “What is happening when you smoke like that?”

I found his response both revealing and fascinating. In the middle of this high-stress, intense, existential reckoning, he gave my question a moment’s thought and uttered, “It’s like…Okay, I’m alive.” This stripped down, raw, visceral response cut through so much mystery for me. Nicotine and/or the other compounds in cigarettes were somehow providing a tether back to Earth at a moment when stress levels threatened to hurl my friend into the darkness of space.

Resolving the Rubik

On another front, I’ve been exposed to several different discussions of late about chronic stress that have me thinking about its connection to smoking in a new light. Each discussion had a completely different context, but I am seeing them all as different colored squares on the same Rubik’s cube. There was a story a couple years ago on NPR about the psychological effects of living in the US while being undocumented. More recently I heard about studies that show how simply being poor can put a person into a state of chronic stress, which makes total sense. An entirely different source, and at a later time, discussed how being black in America induces chronic stress, too. And one more- Recent deep dives into my own personal history have taught me how chronic stress can be the body’s innate response to even relatively mild forms of trauma during childhood.

The last cube to turn… About 2 months ago, someone suggested I listen to Joe Rogan’s interview with an engaging Brit named Johann Hari. Ostensibly, the discussion was about depression, but that’s only where it started. Addiction. Medication. Self-determination. Civilization, and much more. It’s ALL connected. The podcast is 3+ hours long and totally worth a listen. The giant takeaway from the interview is that depression results from a much larger list of societal ills than most of us ever imagined. By the way, that someone who suggested I listen…was M.

Now I’m ready to resolve the Rubik and put all of these seemingly disparate data points on the same side. It’s not mental illness that is the most commonly shared trait among smokers, it is anxiety. Survivors of trauma whether acute or constant, and victims of chronic stress, have to battle anxiety with each breath. The chemistry of cigarettes gives those that smoke a brief but desperately needed respite from anxiety. Finally, I can look upon my mother’s smoking addiction with fresh, sympathetic clarity. The mother I knew as a child was steeped in worry. She was trying to survive her trauma, both past and present. She was stressed the fuck out!

Her husband, my dad, suffered from his own issues and was honestly impossible to live with. Their constant arguing over everything from the thermostat to the “right” way to slice a stick of butter, created a home environment for her that was a petri dish for anxiety and stress. It’s long been my conclusion that when it comes to relationships, emotionally healthy people are drawn to each other and, unfortunately, the opposite holds true for the damaged.

My mom would never have ended up with my dad were it not for her own trauma-filled past. At 13 years old, my mom left for school one morning… without a clue she would never see her own mother again. When she came home that afternoon, strangers were going in and out of her house. She was told her amazing mother, the closest, dearest, most loving person ever in my mom’s young life, had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. The strangers helped my mom gather up a few belongings before sending her to live with an aunt. This was only temporary, as were the series of foster homes she would be placed in while finishing out her teenage years. These were also the same years she takes up smoking.

Cured By The Flu

There you have it, full circle. My mother’s addiction to cigarettes makes disturbingly perfect sense within the context of her own personal hardships.

It should be noted, by the way, that my mother eventually did quit smoking. She got sick with the flu one season and was seriously knocked off her feet for several days. While coping with a fever, sore throat, chest congestion, sinus pain, and all that comes with the flu, smoking a cigarette was the furthest thing from her mind. After getting better, her motivation for that next cigarette mercifully never returned. Her addiction to cigarettes was miraculously “cured” by the flu!

Though, I have another theory. The last 20 or so years of my mom’s life were perhaps her happiest. She had a part-time job she mostly liked, a quiet, peaceful living situation, several wonderful new friends, and at one point, three quirky cats she more than adored. The stresses and drama of her prior lives were now absent. Smoking was no longer needed.

My mom lived to be 84. The final year of her life may have been her best, and I hope to tell you about it in a future post. She passed away 9 years ago…

…from lung cancer.

Closing caveat: Most certainly there are many good people who smoke for reasons having nothing to do with trauma, stress, or anxiety. Can they not just enjoy it? Yes they can. You know, it’s not my jam, but different people like different things for all sorts of reasons. We should all be careful not to develop preconceptions about every smoker before getting to know them.

The next post is….well…I’m really not sure what to say about. It’ll be interesting.

The Puzzle of a Thousand Pieces

I cannot remember my brother’s face. I was six the very last time I saw it, and blood was everywhere.

The garage was always creepy to me anyway. Too many times we’d walked into the garage of my family home and seen a rat or two running for cover. My dad tried to rid them with poison and traps, but they always came back. Any time I entered the garage alone, I did it slowly.

“Tommy?” my little voice called. I couldn’t see him right away, my line of sight was protected by the pool table, but I heard his breathing. It was rough, gurgling. For a split second it sounded like snoring, like they do in the cartoons, loud, exaggerated, and with the line of Z’s vibrating above. I relaxed a bit. I’d found Tommy and he was sleeping in the garage.

But he wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t snoring. These were my brother’s last breaths.

Because I was only as tall as the pool table then, I couldn’t see around it’s corner…until taking one additional step. That’s when I saw my brother Tommy lying face up on the thin green layer of AstroTurf that covered our garage floor. The visual memory of what I witnessed is barely inside my head today. I saw Tommy. I saw the red blood all about his head and how brightly it contrasted against the green of the AstroTurf. I never saw the gun.

Instantly, I turned and ran for help. I have no memory of why my mom wasn’t home at that moment, but she wasn’t. There was no need calling for her. I raced to a neighbor’s house in tears, distressed and sobbing to the point it was difficult for adults to make out what I was saying. To the first neighbor that answered their door, I pleaded, “Something happened. Something happened to Tommy… I think he got bit by a rat.” That’s how my little mind put two and two together. I had no concept of suicide, no understanding of what it was like to be 19 years old and hopeless. I was six. I knew rats were scary and had big teeth.

Tommy left behind a note for my mother. It said, “I owe Stewart $10. Please pay him back for me.”

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I’d already done a lot of contemplating about where I wanted to live and work. Yet, there was another, even bigger, puzzle I needed to solve. This would turn out to be the biggest puzzle of them all.

I have 25 years to live. What am I going to do?

It’s now July of 2020 as I begin telling you the story of how this grand puzzle gets solved. As if it were a physical jigsaw puzzle to be dumped from its box onto a table, I’m giving this puzzle the name: 1 More World. Look on the side of the box, this puzzle has 1,000 interlocking pieces. As I share this particular story with you, bear in mind, it will not be completed in one post, just as any puzzle of a 1,000 pieces would not be finished in one evening. I will tackle different sections of the puzzle individually until enough of it is finished for you to see the same picture that was revealed to me. Even though parts of it remain unfinished today, I know what the 1 More World puzzle is showing me.

I expect all of the pieces to be found and dropped into place over the course of the next 6 to 12 months. For now, I will take you back to the end of last year when I was finally ready to be selfish…. in the best possible way.

Re-thinking Selfish

Ah, your immediate reaction is probably to question whether selfishness could ever be a good thing. I assure you it can. The word “selfish” most certainly gets a bad rap. If we’re talking about people who struggle with the concept of sharing, then I’m totally on board. But if it is a person taking time to reflect on what they want out of life, I will be the first to come to their defense. Call me selfish and I will thank you for the compliment.

Unfortunately, most people never have the opportunity to truly be selfish. Or, they weren’t selfish enough when the opportunity was there. Once one enters adulthood, life’s immediate challenges of money, job, relationships, family, house, holidays, etc., always seem to take precedence and the best of selfishness gets no attention.

After a year of me living in Denver… life was, for the most part, pretty good. I’d made a few good friends. My job was tough, but I felt good about it. The biggest frustration I had at home was my struggle getting a consistent water temperature out of the shower. The house I lived in was 120 years old and its original claw-footed tub and shower faucet couldn’t hold a steady temp, even with the rubber bands we tried to strategically stretch around the handles.

Joy and happiness have always been elusive concepts to me, And my new life in Denver hadn’t changed that. However, stability and certainty were at their highest levels ever in my life. I had no fires to put out, and no fish to fry (being a vegetarian and all). And finally, I was sitting on more life experiences than at any other point.

My table top was cleared. Let’s work this puzzle.

Debbie Downer Rocks My World

One of the best media outlets I’ve found is an online news show called, The Young Turks (a.k.a. TYT) – the largest and longest-running news show on the Internet. If you have never heard of them before, they are totally worth checking out. I think most people learn about them through their YouTube channel, but their show is also televised on Roku, Pluto and many other platforms. Their news is founded on journalistic integrity and facts, but it’s the outspoken commentary of the hosts that really makes the show unique and often fun even when the news depresses. The core of The Young Turks is a daily 2 hour long “main show,” but they also offer additional content for $10/mo subscribers (like me). One of those “extra content” shows is the Friday Post Game. The show’s three co-hosts talked about starting up a book club. Their first chosen book was, Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan. Not wanting to be left out of the club, I read it.

Holy Mother of Thor! Talk about pulling back the curtain on everything! Civilized to Death is a point-by-point takedown of the universally accepted idea that we are far better off now as a species than at any other time in our human history. In some narrow ways, mostly related to specific advances in medicine, we are surely better off. But there are many measures by which we fall short.

The book’s core message is that humans evolved over millions of years to live one way and that the advent of civilization swept us off in a direction we’re not really suited for. If you want the details, take my recommendation and read Civilized to Death.

That Sounds Awesome!

As I was reading the book, I would tell my friend Vanessa about all the ways the book says ‘we suck.’ Well, Vanessa….being the stay positive person she is, didn’t really enjoy hearing me recount the fall of mankind; so, pretty soon she starts referring to the book as ‘The Debbie Downer Book.’ I can’t say she’s wrong, either.

Like any good book, The Debbie Downer Book makes you think. And when I did my thinking, I wondered how I could live my life more in-line with my true evolved nature. [As you can tell, I bought the book’s premise.] Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. The book makes a compelling case that prior to “civilization” people used to “work” an average of 3 – 4 hours a day. So I’m thinking, Man, that sounds awesome! And I have “work” in quotes because prior to civilization, the concept of “a job” as we experience it, did not exist..

I read the book and just took this information in. Nothing in my life abruptly changed as a result. However, in terms of my puzzle analogy, that book did a great job of helping me to connect a whole lot of pieces together. It wasn’t nearly enough for me to know what 1 More World was showing me, but the puzzle was one step closer to being solved.

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Regarding stories from my past, like the one I share with you at the top of this post, these too will fill in significant sections of my puzzle. These are the broken pieces… and the ones that appear to have gone missing altogether. I am finding them now. I am making a few repairs. All of the pieces of my life will have their place.

Next up, I will introduce you to Jesus. And it will all make sense.