Oh these are some corkers!
Okay time to add another story of this guy.
All right, it's been a while, but we're going to relay another tale of this strange, sad fellow, a matter of faith in fact.
I hesitated to share this one, but I think after lurking here a while this forum is mature enough for it.
I hate mentioning anyone's religion on the internet because there's like this patrol on the internet who is set to try to change any mention of the subject into a flame war.
So up front:
1. This guy is a nutter butter who doesn't represent the group he claims to belong to. At all. Not even close.
2. I have to define a new human emotion to tell this story, the emotion of smooplarf. It's a unique state I've never seen before or sense that defies all existing terms, so I had to name it. So now there's anger, happiness, envy, sadness, smooplarf, etc.
So one day, Terrible Boss calls in myself and "Billy" (not his real name) for one of his famous cauterwhaling diatribes.
And boy oh boy did we get a good one, today's subject was religion and everything we don't know about God that we ought to, per the gospel of Terrible Boss.
Now for the record, I am a person who believes in God, so I'm not inherently opposed to the concept here if he really has something he thinks he needs to share with us (not that you'd have to believe in God to be open to it but I digress), but I don't think this was necessarily the best topic to discuss in this setting, considering his relative expertise and the stated goals of our operations at this business.
But this was at the time I had decided I needed to leave this job, but I needed to save some money up first, so I sat there and just regarded this as being paid to listen to an hour long monologue.
Again, it is hard to do this man's performances justices in text. You see dear reader, it is a modern affectation to insist all nonsense is equal, that there's no difference between something that's not supported in the manner in which you'd prefer and outright, spur of the moment fabricated non sequitars.
This is simply not the case, I tell you my friends there is nonsense and there is Nonsense, and this was the latter. He was in rare form on this occasion.
He had a hypnotic way of being Nonsensical, ranting, screaming at some points, standing up and slapping his belly, smoking a cigarette (three consumed during the whole thing) and making gestures with it for emphasis of key points.
I can't recreate it, I could barely keep up with it at the time as he moved seamlessly from one unrelated idea to the next; he may have been a terrible person but his segues were second to none.
I can only attempt to bullet point the recurring themes:
1. The argument predicated on the existence of an all powerful God, but he was smarter and wiser than said God because God created women (note that this rant happened about the time he'd been arguing a lot with his ex wife).
2. God would let him do anything he wanted to, but specifically he had a supernatural ability to manipulate his own luck.
3. He somehow accomplished all of this through the power of strict Catholicism.
As to the first point, ignoring the implied misogyny and frustration with his ex wife he was projecting onto all women (as he so often did), I'd rather wonder, given how the human species is structured, how he would expect it to endure without the existence of the female specimens, so I'd rather think God did rather well providing us with the whole set there. Granted such indiscriminate inclusion in existence makes certain things problematic, but I'm still going to chalk that one up as a win.
As to the second point, I attempted to address that in conversation.
As to the last point, I'm not a Catholic or an expert on Catholicism, my only street cred is I used to have lunch every week with one Father Jamie, and I've talked to some number of nuns, monks, and normal run of the mill Catholic people in the course of every day business and volunteerism in the past, and all I can comfortably state about them as a group is they are a wide and diverse set of people with different interpretations and ideas about their shared religion, often to the point the religion is the only point of commonality.
Despite my humble pedigree and such a wide and vague assessment of what it means to be Catholic, I still feel completely safe saying this individual's strange behavior, ideas and thoughts are not in any way actually Catholic, nor is his overall lifestyle, bearing and disposition similar to any other self professed Catholic person I've ever met.
Indeed if he was a "strict" Catholic, then the word "strict" must be remarkably elastic. To put it succintly, if he was a strict Catholic then I'm the King of England.
You see my difficulty, where does one even begin to take such a proposal apart? I wouldn't have a problem with this per se if he hadn't said this was Catholicism, I mean it could be some new religion of his, but he called it Catholicism, which bears no resemblance to this... I was so confused.
But in conversation, I decided to triage, limiting myself to the second point. I simply said "Well, I don't think that's how God works sir."
I thought that was a good way to put it, I wasn't attacking him or the idea, I was just pointing out there was an alternative interpretation of the... uh... facts? Were there ever any actual facts discussed in that hour... I'm not sure.
Regardless I really shouldn't have said that.
He didn't get mad or anything like that, in fact I don't think I understood his reaction at all, until I finally realized he was smooplarfed.
He became very very smooplarf indeed, red in the face, animated, agitated, excited, speaking in a high pitched voice, his hands shaking and constantly passing a crushed cigarette between them while grinning with his brow corrugated. All the classic signs of smooplarf were there.
And his reasoned response to the statement I just made was "I can't go to hell, I'd dig it up." He then gestured, pointing with the fingertips of both hands, violently, forward and back, up to down, for emphasis.
Never in my life have I been so succinctly and utterly defeated in rhetorical or theological debate by such elegance and brevity.
I literally had no idea what to say at that point. I was utterly defeated by his counterpoint, I must say.
As crazy as this experience was, I'm oddly bemused now that at one point in my life, someone was paying me to listen to rants. I wonder if that's a career I could explore more in the future sometimes.
There were other incidents. My other favorites were all the times he'd tell us about something we had no business knowing about, and then say it never happened because he confessed it to a priest.
First of all that's so wrong it's beyond ludicrous, but that's beside the point, it turns out.
I later learned the "priest" was code for a bartender who claimed to be a minister, which he may have been (I doubt it personally), but the last time I checked no Catholic priest would be tending a pub for any number of reasons, so even if it is true, it makes no sense!
And with that I'm done, I can't stomach any more hypocrisy from him in one write up.
I wish he'd go to an actual priest, be it a Catholic priest or some other faith's because talking to any other human being who wouldn't feel obligated to indulge him could only help; there's no downside potential to the idea, and Father Jamie in particular would straighten this guy out real good... but he'd probably become smooplarfed and get drunk rather than listen to a priest however.
