OK: Roland the Roadie, a man whose soul had been pressure-washed by the sonic assault of a hundred death metal concerts, found himself back in the beige stillness of Kansas. Because, of course. For months, his universe had been a rolling thunder-dome of Marshall stacks, sweat-soaked leather, and the high-pitched whine of a tour bus generator. But now, in the quiet, his brain kept replaying the scene from Bethel, New York. Bethel! A name that was supposed to conjure images of peace and love and naked people in the mud. Instead, it conjured for him a single, vibrating image: one deeply patchouli-soaked hippie, a walking potpourri of BO and self-righteousness, lecturing him on vibrational energies.
The whole psychic episode had left Roland feeling untethered. He decided, in a moment of profound spiritual desperation, to reconnect with the simple carpenter from Nazareth he’d learned about in Sunday School. A tune-up for the soul. The first step, apparently, was having a beer in Kanorado with an old classmate, Buster was his name, but might have been Biff or Buddy or something equally percussive.
Buster was now full-on MAGies. That’s what he called it… Make America Great In Every State! He said it with the kind of thermonuclear conviction usually reserved for multi-level marketing pitches. He was a walking, talking embodiment of the movement… a cyclone of star-spangled certainty in a Cabela’s cap. Roland, who hadn’t been inside a church since Y2K, admired the dedication. He truly did. But a few things didn’t quite add up.
“So, help me out here,” Roland began, watching the condensation snake down his bottle of suds. “Jesus was all about welcoming the stranger, the whole ‘Good Samaritan’ bit. Now, how does that square with, you know, the screaming on TV about immigrants being an invading army of… well, Bad Hombres?”
Buster took a mighty pull from his beer, his eyes gleaming with the reflected light of a flatscreen broadcasting the gospel of NewsMax. “Roly, Roly,” he said, shaking his head with a sad, paternal chuckle. “It’s an invasion. The enemy within! You gotta protect your house before you can invite people over. It’s just common sense!” Roland wondered if the biblical Good Samaritan had checked for Roman citizenship papers first.
On they went. Roland brought up humility. The washing of the feet. The first being last and the last being first. A beautiful, revolutionary kind of logic.
Buster countered with a sermon on the Prosperity Gospel. Yessir! It was a whole new, New Testament, one seemingly ghostwritten by a real estate developer from Queens. Buster spoke of the President, a man so obviously blessed that his success… the towers, the gold, the winning… was a sign of divine favor.
“It’s a blessing!” Buster roared, a bit too loudly for a Tuesday. “You model the behavior of the blessed to get blessed yourself (Because God, you see, is a big fan of winners)! Damn the torpedoes!” He finished with a belly laugh that shook the barstool.
The conversation, naturally, turned to money. Out on the prairie, a lone steer bellowed for its evening feed, a primal scream from the feedlot heartland. “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” Roland quoted, “than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Buster’s face soured. “That’s communist talk, Roly. Wealth redistribution. That’s theft. And there’s a commandment about that one, an old one. A good one.”
And so on.
Roland pivoted to peace. “Love your enemies,” he murmured. “Be peacemakers.”
“You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet,” Buster said with a shrug, finishing his beer. “It’s a simple recipe.” Roland felt a sudden, powerful urge to test the idea on Buster’s nose, but he resisted. He had, after all, sworn off violence after the “damn hippie” pepper-spray incident.
The final frontier was Truth itself. Roland lamented a world gone funhouse-mirror mad, an upside-down where experts were fools and feelings were “alternative facts“. Buster then launched into a magnificent, thirty-minute jazz solo of pure, uncut conspiracy, a verbal firehose of YouTube links and podcast prophets about how the only way to find truth was to “do your own research.” Roland performed a quiet face-palm, a gesture of complete and utter exasperation.
“Jesus challenged worldly power,” Roland said, one last gasp. “He taught that leadership was about service, not control.”
Buster saw his opening. “Exactly! He was against the Deep State, just like us!”
Roland drained his beer. It was over. He and Buster were standing on opposite sides of a canyon, shouting into the void. They lived in two different sectors of the multiverse, occupying the same space. An irreconcilable parallax view. He realized there was no argument to be won here, only a friendship to be cautiously maintained across an ideological event horizon.
He clapped Buster on the shoulder, managed one last drop from his beer, and walked out into the vast, starry Kansas night. Roland the Roadie resolved then and there to just keep living by the simple, baffling example of the Nazarene, hoping his friend might one day meet him somewhere on the spiral of spiritual originalism.
Onward through the fog…
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