Wow! That was all I thought, there he was, hunched over a plastic table outside a Waffle House just off I-40, smoking Marlboros, staring into a coffee mug and wearing a t-shirt that read "Jesus would be alive if he'd had a gun." The kind of thing that makes your brain stutter. My early morning buzz hadn’t even peaked yet and already the universe was unraveling. One numerical string of reality at a time.
He had the look of a man who’d stared too long into a gas station microwave and found some meaning there. A greasy truth. Worn out eyes, cracked lips, a .45 bulge on his hip, this wasn’t a man playing dress-up. This was the real disease, the terminal velocity of American lunacy. God, make us great somehow.
I asked him where he got the shirt. He mumbled about an online store someplace. $20 worth of makeshift theology. “It’s a statement,” he told me, eyes twitching. “A spiritual one.” And then he laughed, all sharp, dry, like gravel in a blender. I didn’t argue. You don’t argue with a man like that in a place like this, not with that shirt and not in this heat. No sir. The line between prophecy and psychosis is thin, and I was in no mood to find out which side he was preaching from.
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