Positive Integer

Thanks to Greg for editing.

Pastor Tyler was stuck in transit. Stuck somewhere in the forgettable New Jersey night in a place he’d have to consciously think about remembering only to remember more original thoughts. It was the abnormality of forcing typically-subconscious commitments. And he’d have to personally key into his sub-history the sidereal mutant orange from the New York his crumpled ticket promised, data-log the sense of public trappedness. This was the apathetic community he shared with fellow budgeted passengers, the cell-phone talker in the back, a slurry of slang-crusted Spanish, the girl seeming nice right next to him, how courteous with their shared dome-lamp she’d been, the noxious clouds billowing chaotically, birth-defected, in contrast with the cruel symmetry of the wrought-iron estuaries that spawned them, the Ionic lattice works with Clinton-era bunting, pithy revelations: we make refrigerators here, this is where Teflon comes from, sand production, glue gun ammo. It was all illuminated in some fake way by the unblinking sodium bulbs refracting in the glassy quiet of the inbound winter. But then again if the mind only deposited what was essential then what the fuck had he been doing all these years?

At least they’re paying.

He took what was always his own advice and prayed. Prayed for his family, his neighbors, his steadily swelling readership, industry friends who came through when they told him they “knew people,” who told him they’d get him noticed, you’ve got the look, the message, you’re what the people, the people you want to be reaching, are always looking to find. He prayed until he cracked that smirk, the one that shone only with reflection on his mission's greatness, on his aptitude as an instrument, His instrument, a sense of self/creator-satisfaction known only to the premier fraternity of prophets.

I’ll bet Falwell isn’t carted around on busses.

He drifted out the window into the fleeting immobillia to catch some industrial chimney’s vigilante flame jet disturb the late December cold: such dependability, and the permanence. He passed between these worlds, the frazzle-wired metaphysics of the beleaguered self and the observable external world, the subordinate exogenous one of plural egos, ecosystems, of seemingly random variety in the hidden creator's dominion, all serving as proof of some disparate genius.

Book deal...lecture tour...eventually national radio syndication. My message can travel beyond busses. It can travel without them. That’ll be alright.

He saw the other cars. He eyed them suspiciously and wondered what their drivers read. Maybe they had headed into town to see him to see him, or catch a matinee of some tawdry spectacle entering the sixth year of its run. Bring the wife, kids, and then head over to the talk. Come to hear him, get his books signed, one per person, it's included in the ticket, shake his hands, smear tears and makeup into some brackish ecstasy .

He thought of the branched nature of experience, the entanglement of narrative possibilities for those beings imbued with the radical capacity for free-will, existing in a society of others. Willers, id-abusers, megalomaniacal super-egoists, atheists…

He liked the line and wrote it down for his lecture. Audiences love personal experiences. You introduce a thought as “On the way up here I was thinking…” and it has gauranteed success. By demonstrating personal incompleteness the introduction provides authority. It provokes an endearment in the listener, a disarmament strategy. Really, it is grounding. Really, anyone could write this stuff. It'd been around for two thousand years. Everyone was paraphrasing from their forebearers. It wasn't the content so much, but delivery, showmanship, the verbal magic-tricks, the rehearsed idiosyncrasies, the self-caricaturisation necessary to become digestible through personal fiction.

The bus crash could happen so suddenly. Exit 8, I would die right now thinking about Exit 8. The Parkway of the Garden State.

He thought about his best friend in sixth grade, Andrew Mason, Andy, who lived on the small, Connecticut street, whose mother died of breast cancer, her ashes scattered in the family’s backyard garden. He thought about the way Andy cradled his head in his hands for a week after the wake, how he couldn’t attend the service, how, after returning to school a week later, Andy was greeted by being absorbed into the popular kid’s group, sitting at their lunch table and smoking cigarettes and learning about pornography and all those weird sex moves that you only ever hear about in seventh grade on the bus ride home and how Andy eventually abandoned his once best friend to join the elite caste even though they lived on the same street, even though he’d been the only other person in their grade who really actually knew his mother really as a person rather than some harrowing event, and how she drove the two of them to the bus-stop in the winter even until the last days, listening to NPR, Morning Edition, with the heat was on high, wasting away under her body’s betrayal and the chemotherapy, and how they even went sledding together on the day of her passing, down the hill in the woods behind the house, where the property lines ended, and back under the rope swing, where talking seemed redundant. How he was the only one who didn’t talk to Andy about it and how this was the major mistake in seventh grade. The green sweater on the day of the funeral. The snow-laden evergreens. How there were teachers in attendance: Mr. Lossey, Homeroom and Math. How after the service in the wood-paneled basement the two of them played soccer on Super Nintendo and how Andy was much better because it was his game and he knew how to do a bicycle kick and he wouldn’t tell anyone how to do it: “Figure it out,” he said, “like I did.”

Tyler’s message is simply about positive thinking. Sure, someone is always going to be telling us how horrible things are. People like the horrible, they need the horrible. But these wants and needs are all the evidence required to understand that this revulsion to ourselves is itself a vice. We understand there is a Perfect. We are part of that Perfect. We march toward that Perfect under our cross, under the word, under the Lord. With this message Tyler has inspired thousands. You can change your life today!

How easily this bus could crash. How quick it could happen. How at the second the driver loses control, you’re at the mercy of some foreign, depressed machinists' engineering of a more productive decade. Notice the integral force of whatever you’re colliding with. Notice there are no seatbelts, unlike a Greyhound. These fuckers won’t even pay for a seatbelt. Do they salivate while pondering post-mortem sales?

Out the window again, into the world of arterial soullessness, inter-state transience, the windowed world who’s lifespan corresponds with the width of cool plexiglass framing peripheral limbo. The closest we could get to understanding Earth’s rotation. This is what they call the empirical world. It was labeled thus by the maniacs busy smashing atoms together, dropping pennies off observation decks. Yet we only observe everything you’ve already heard, everything that’s already obvious, everything that coheres.

We pen mental forecasts to ourselves in the now and call it experience--half the sum-total of human philosophical endeavors--or wisdom, that taste of the unobtainable omniscience men like himself, like his followers, those with eyes open, slouch towards, like in that poem, toward the tragic asymptotic truth.

He wrote this down too, for his audience, his flock. They’d have to love him now. Yes, now.