Bumper sticker of the week:
I found Jesus!
He’s in my trunk.

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L. is with us, having conquered her phobia and flown across the country to spend a week in Florida. She braved one of her worst fears just to be with me. What else can I say?

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Last week, the Mormons came into my office to try to convert me.

(Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Rant ahead…read at your own risk. You have been warned…)

There they stood, two Elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, blinking and sweating under the flourescent light in my office. “We’ve come to talk to you about our Church, because you invited us to…”

I am 36 years old. I have spent six years in the graves of a liberal-arts school. You know what that means? That means when some asshole backs a dump truck full of top-quality, high-grade bullshit and dumps the whole load on me, I can recognize it for what it is.

I would no more invite a bunch of whacko, Apocalyptic doomsday cultists to my office during my business hours to try to preach at me than I would stick hot needles in my eyes.

“You didn’t invite us? Then it was someone in your office.”

No, it wasn’t. You see, I am my company. I’m it–head cook and bottle-washer. I’m the company president and the company mailboy. Most assuredly, I did not invite them over.

But, like many business owners, I have friends who are also business owners. And they all have strangely similar stories to tell–in the past few weeks, a group of Mormons have appeared on their doorstep and said “You invited us to talk about the church with you.”

These bastards, you see, have a new strategy. They monitor occupational license registrations and renewals, which are a matter of public record. They get the business owner’s name and address from the occupational license registrations, and turn up on the business owner’s doorstep a few days later, spouting some lie about being “invited” like the hopeless perennial loser at the singles bar spouts tired, cliched pickup lines in the desperate hoe that someone, anyone, will fuck him.

So they stood there, blinking nervously, trying to see if their worn-out pickup line worked–Is he buying it? Will he fall for it? Is he going to give us money?

Now, I can’t speak for other people, and I have no idea how often this line actually works. But for myself: If you want to start a relationship–personal, sexual, business, religious, or other–with me, and the very first words out of your mouth are a lie, fuck you. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.

If you want me to believe that you possess the Universal Cosmic Truth(tm), and the first words out of your mouth are a lie, then fuck you. You’re a phony and a fraud, and I will not give you my money, my faith, my allegiance, or my trust. Go stand in line with the psychics and the “bigger penis now!” losers and the hawkers of herbal medicines and the other charlatans; you suck.

I did not tell them any of this, of course. I’m not going to give them, even indirectly, better tools to go hump their tired, dishonest ideology. I simply explained to this crooked pack of mules that I was far too busy to speak theology with them, and wished them begone and Godspeed. There’s a chiropractor in the office three doors down from mine; i wonder if he “invited” them over too.