Paul Jay Comma Comic

nedhep:

Brand management.

Is this a euphemism for “installing a Breathalyzer on your Tumblr app”?

Every time I’m on my way to a comedy show, I know one of two things will happen: I will run into the current Most Awkward Person I Know, or I will meet someone who sets the new record. I swim so deeply in social cluelessness that a lot of the time I’m not even aware of it. But once in a while I wonder what it would be like to belong to a community of people who all know how close is too close to stand to someone, how loud is too loud to laugh, when a conversation is over, or just generally “where to look”. Like the lost civilization of Atlantis, such a community probably doesn’t exist, but it’s worth aspiring to.

The “This American Mistake” show at Meltdown tonight truly could not have gone better. Thanks so much to all the talented nutbags who helped make it such a fun night. Now, to drink the extra Tecates from the open bar. Good night, New England.

I am consistently surprised whenever I find out that friends of mine identify themselves as Christian. Never fails to jolt me a bit.

This is because I’ve been conditioned by the mass media to expect all Christians to be judgmental, bigoted, antiscientific, closed-minded asswipes who would like nothing more than to see me and all my friends put in camps where our homopositive brown-people-loving Satanistic thought-poison will not infect good honest right-thinking God-fearing master-racers. This is certainly the type of Christian who gets the most ink and airtime in our country.

I also butt up against the Asshole Christians way more than the nice normal ones, because I’m an atheist, and the only people who argue with me about that are Asshole Christians. I don’t have a single problem with Christians whose religion is, as it should be, their own business. 

But then I’ll find out, in casual conversation or a social-network profile or whatever, that someone I know and like is a Christian, and although it’s not an end to the friendship or anything like that - far from it - it does make me look at them in a different way. Shouldn’t it? It shouldn’t! They’re still my friends and they’ve never shoved their religion in my face. Nothing has changed. Except now I know, or think that I know, something new about the way they interpret the world around them. 

I don’t know any such thing, of course. I try never to get into this conversation with my friends, the “so do you believe in angels watching over you?” or “do you do the right thing just because you’re afraid to go to Hell?” or “do you seriously go to church, like, every week?” conversation, because it is none of my business. So I’m left to wonder all those things, along with, incidentally, wondering what they think of me for being an atheist, and a rather loudmouthed one at that, as you can probably tell from my Twitter. Is my lack of belief no business of theirs? Have I been the rude one all this time? Probably not, since they’re my friends and they would have told me so before now.

It’s a weird situation. I have a lot of Asshole-ready arguments against religion in general, and the main organized religions specifically, not to mention “spirituality”, whatever the fuck that is, locked and loaded and ready to fire into any conversation where it looks like someone needs to get blasted. But what happens when my friends step into the crosshairs?