Paying your own way through college sucks, btw. Laws yes, it sucketh hard. I should have gone to UT and taken loans. Ahh, regrets, I've had a few...
ANYWAY, back to the present. Since I still drive down streets to get to work, I encounter intersections with stoplights. At one of the intersections, a self-appointed preacher man with a bullhorn is intent on making sure we hear the message of the Lord! He's an older black man well-dressed and adorned with what looks like a mini-sandwich board on his shoulders. There's a bucket by his feet, which I assume is for donations.
I've seen him there a number of times, yet somehow every time I see him, I get through the stoplight without having to stop. I just hear the indistinct blare of amplified voice as I drive by. And yet, I always feel a little sorry for him standing there in 80F weather with 99% humidity in a suit at 7:20AM. He's earnestly waiting for a heathen like me to convert with his bullhorn urgings, and I just drive by in air conditioned comfort applying face powder to make my forehead less shiny.
Speaking of overly-zealous religious folk, in an old neighborhood I used to live in there was a dude who played Christ. Let me explain here. This dude would dress up in Biblical type robes and drag a huge cross behind him around the neighborhood. No crown of thorns, but the cross looked about the size you'd expect such morbid thing to be. Before you get too awe-filled, the cross had wheels at the base. So yeah, it'd be heavy but not impossible to drag around. I can't remember if he had a sign around his neck, but he didn't stop to try to convert people. He'd just drag the cross around for a few hours every day.
Going with this men of God theme, I think of Pat Robertson urging our government to assasinate Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela and his earlier urging of his flock to pray for "vacancies" in the Supreme Court. And I'm glad to be agnostic. I know many good people of faith that I respect, but at the same time, I much prefer being outside of the trappings of religion.