Why I am Christian again

Puncturing the vault of heaven to rediscover earth.

In college, while my friends were getting slammed at house parties, I was working as a bouncer at a hipster bar called Red Star. Lots of IPAs and a jukebox playing Bob Dylan.

I took the job specifically because hipster bars were less rowdy than other bars, so I could sit on a stool outside and read. That was where I first read “The Selfish Gene.” Richard Dawkins wrote that book directly to me. It was a stairway from the swampy superstition of Louisiana, up to clean reason. All human behavior could be explained, genetically. Mmm, fresh water.

From my stool, I watched the bar goers’ drunken mating rituals. I was having less fun, but I knew something they didn’t. I was smarter — safer.

I got off of work at about 2am, hurled the last sour-beer-smelling trash bag into the dumpster and ambled the 5-minutes to the bank of the Mississippi river.

In reverence to the sodium lamp lights glimmering in the water, I dreamed of hanging out with people like Dawkins: smart people at the firmament of reality. My moonshot ticket into those circles? I wanted to be a famous writer. My book was science fiction and a theory of consciousness… yeah, like most novels, it’s still sitting on my hard drive, unpublished.