"You're home! You know, I could've robbed this place a dozen times!"
That's what the greying, portly gentleman said when I opened the door. As an opening statement, I didn't think it was the strongest.
It was about 11am on a Wednesday and I was working nights, so until the knock at the door I had spent an energetic morning watching Star Trek Voyager in my bedraggled pyjamas.
Past experience suggested this man was here to sell me either pay TV or a new-fangled God. Given the awkward opener, I guessed God.
"Excuse me?" I replied as I blinked the sun out of my eyes, truly at a loss as to how to respond.
"Oh, I just mean I've visited your home three times in the last few weeks and there's never anyone here!"
"OK, cool. Don't rob my house," I said with a snark that only exists in Gen X cult movies and people who are being bothered the morning after night shift.
I clarified that I didn't really belong to any major religion but that I comfortably had my own thing going on and was not currently shopping around.
He assured me he would not attempt any sales and said "Hey look, can I ask you a question?"
I've never developed the ability to just flat out tell uninvited visitors to get lost. I always engage on some level, and regrettably my approach is usually to let all of my sarcastic, caustic, immature bullshit off the leash in the hopes of being too unpleasant to interact with. No matter the result, it always takes time.
I said he could, bid him to wait and went inside to grab a cigarette before re-emerging to light it and sit on the ground in a spot where I could still see Voyager playing in the background. I must have looked like the worst person in the whole world.
"Go for it".
"Do you see that house over there?" I did. "Do you know who built it?" I did not. "Well even though you don't know who built it, it is there. for all you know, God may have built it, and even though you didn't see him do it, you can see evidence of his work. Do you think maybe the world could be like that?"
I thought it was a pretty good approach, really - a made-up story to illustrate a broader point; you know, like the Bible.
I exhaled and considered.
"Dude, I work at the local newspaper. I think that if God built the house down the road, I would have heard about it by now."
He laughed. I laughed. He reiterated that the absence of evidence does not disprove the existence of a supreme being and that a rational mind would be open to such a thing.
I replied that, to my mind, it was more likely that humanity was the result of tachyon particles reacting with a neutrino field in an asynchronies orbit with a distant star which inverted their polarity and fired warp plasma into the primordial soup. I had been watching Star Trek a lot.
The man put out in his hand as a way of saying goodbye.
As I shook his right hand and apologised, his left produced a bundle of pamphlet-sized magazines. He asked if I'd like to take them and I said I would, hoping to expedite the whole process.
I reached for them and he recoiled sharply as if shocked. I stood there, once again befuddled, my hand outstretched like a cat's claw.
"Um, I … uh … you only usually get one," he said.
"Oh …. um …. sure, whatever."
"Oh no, I, uh, I suppose you could have, um, two?"
"That's fine."
"Oh look, I'm sure it's OK, I could probably stretch to giving you three?"
"It's really fine. Whatever you prefer." I had no idea how we'd become locked in this awkward battle of wills, but it was clearly too late to admit I would prefer to give the magazines a miss entirely.
He gave me two and left.
As I went inside, Captain Janeway was on the television, teaching Seven of Nine what it really meant to be human. I was immediately enthralled.
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