AC/DC/E/F/G

I don't like meatloaf. Never will. It makes me uncomfortable the way they shape meat into a loaf like bread. Bread and meat are delicious as separate entities, but when mashed together it is not a peanut butter and chocolate moment to me. It's also because as a youth I was forced to eat it by my stepdad one night. It was an epic meeting of two stubborn motherfuckers at the dinner table. He was new and I was adjusting to him as a patriarch. He was doing the same adjusting to me as a sort of son. We sat at that fuckin' table for three hours while I picked at it and choked it down. That is probably the other reason that I won't eat it. This is a metaphor for life. I don't do well when forced to do something and will often throw a wooden shoe in the gears of the mechanism that is forcing me to do something either in the form of self-destruction which diffuses the whole situation a la pushing the big red button and blowing it all to pieces or leaving something in the results to fuck with the forcer later down the road.

This brings me to last weekend. The goal was to find two priest costumes and a Jesus costume for a mini Cannonball Run that I'm participating in at the end of the month. The idea is to pay homage to Cannonball Run while also committing heresy. I was raised religiously as a child or should I say religion was forced on me as a child and now I will occasionally say things that would be viewed as improper in a church setting. Well, not improper, but not popular in that type of setting.

Jesus was easy. Beard, hessian wig and crown of thorns. To match my Jesus keychain, we picked up a Caesar robe. It seemed kind of ironic that a Caesar robe was the robe that matched the keychain model that we were using.

The priest outfits were not so easy. You figure black pants and that priest shirt with a collar would be pretty basic. It wasn't. At the costume store all they had were priest outfits with ten year old boys sewn to the crotch and inflatable boners. Who's the heretic now? We tried a police uniform store and still nothing. We got a referral to a Christian bookstore and I started getting uncomfortable. Like meatloaf uncomfortable. I didn't want to go in one. It felt really wrong.

So, we called it and they closed at 1:00 PM. It was 2:00 PM. I dodged a bullet, but in the voice message at the place they used the term "Church Goods" and it turns out this is the proper term for finding Jesus gear. A Google search later, we end up heading up to South San Francisco to Western Jesus Supply or something like that.

On the way up El Camino Real, past the largest smattering of dive bars I have ever seen in my life, we established our cover story. We were going to say that we were making a student film about religion and needed the priest shirts for that. We weren't the directors and we were just sent out to get the shirts. It was pretty solid.

We got to South San Francisco after passing the See's candy factory (awesome!) and went into the store. My buddy looks at me and goes "Dude, keep it cool. You can do this." I had a smoke and went into the store after him.

He was outed immediately by the saleswoman as not being a priest and she asked him why he needed the shirt. Thank Go...Thankfully, we had the cover story. I browsed the store and couldn't believe all the Jesus gear. Some of it was super cool. There were 50 different sets of rosary beads and a statue of the patron saint of real estate for help in selling your house. I wish I was lying about that last part.

As my buddy is getting rung up, a car pulls up to the stop light outside the store and I hear music blaring through the open door of the Jesus supply store. I recognize it immediately and under my breath say "Listen, dude. Listen to the music from that car."

My buddy was like, "What, Dude?" and started listening.

Out of the car blares "Won't take no prisoners. Won't spare no lives. Nobody's putting up a fight. I got my bell, I'm gonna take you to hell. I'm gonna get you, satan get you."

I'm losing it, doing that breath through your nose, bite your lip thing to stop from laughing and blowing everything as you can hear the chorus of "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC as the car drives away.

It was totally weird, but we got the gear. We went and visited one of the old drummers from my band that worked down the street for a bit and talked about hooking up later.

We did some early evening drinking in Saturday night shirts when we got home and called the old drummer on a lark. He said he was going to an AC/DC cover band that night and would pick us up and we were like "We're in. We kinda have to go." We had come completely full circle.

I'm not really superstitious, but I do have to admit that something extremely coincidental is going down. I'm kinda on the lookout for things now. If the walls of my apartment start bleeding and locusts swarming, I may have to call it off and admit that I was wrong, but for now, I'm just kinda on heightened alert to my surroundings. I'm not ready to eat crow yet.