Rush Street, CA

In Culver City in a bar called Rush Street watching Bulls give up the Gentleman's Sweep while an older gentleman insists he determines the outcome of the game because he himself is the Holy Spirit. I tell him I'd never meet the Holy Spirit if I were actually on Rush Street. He says I am. I say, no - I mean for real. I am for real from Chicago.

He, the Holy Spirit, is also Father, & the Son Jesus Christ. And America, Time, Space, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Darkness, and Light. Cold and Heat? Yes! (which I point out perhaps necessitates the Miami win. As does James being a book in the bible, he explains). And he is all these things again and again, and so much more. I am surely forgetting some great claims of his. Maybe surely. I asked : so you are Yahweh, you are Jehovah, you are Allah? He said no. That is just one demigod of seven. I am the true God. I am the Creator God, he says. I am the light that came into the black hole. I am the Lord of Lords; I am the Lord of Hosts. The fallen Angel Satan too. And all the angels. Yin and yang? Yes. And the Wizard of Oz, he adds. I asked: are you my ex-girlfriend too? He said, I am! And she is a bitch! First i exclaimed - Shit! Trying to laugh it off and hoping this whole thing, hoping for a second this whole thing has been a put on. Wizard of Oz, even. Exposing the man behind the curtain in all this. But then he gets full into it and i see the laughing, drunk with divine power smug hate in his face. He says - a nasty bitch! I said - Hey..! (All the while the bartender keeping an eye from a distance to see if I'm able to manage this uninvited conversation with such a boisterous insistently delusional customer.) He said:  many of them* are nasty controlling bitches because they want what God has, and only he, this older fellow sitting next to me, is God. (* "them" - no longer including himself as one; that claim seemingly an insincere transition to this tirade.) Like Eve, he bellows, they want God's knowledge but he is the only true God. This sudden switch to cliche sexist theology, though remarkably self-centered and maniacal still, now left me bored, and insulted. Insulted for the woman mentioned, and for all the women implied, and for wasting my time with this god I had wished was a little less harmful than he turned out to be.

I've long thought the Holy Spirit was the sublimated feminine aspect of the Christian Trinity. There's no third to Father and Son that ain't Mother. I decided not to throw that at him. For then he may or may not realize what a bitch he is. He said, after all, he said finally: "I am Everything!" And the situation may or may not have remained under control, with an increasingly agitated Everything embracing his inner bitch that wants what only he, God has. Or rejecting that as Everything he is also Eve. The Eve in Eve rything. Either way I was done. I wasn't up for telling him, subtly or otherwise: You're a bitch god. There were other patrons, and his wrath, to consider. I was done. Standing up from the bar I said : this must not have much meaning or value to You, being All You are, but I wish you a pleasant rest of the evening. Then I left Rush Street and went back outside to California, where I had been all along.