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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| Transit in the Winter. |
Winter in Winnipeg is cold.
The colder it gets, the more likely a person is to bundle up. I think of that as a law of supply and demand. God supplies mind-numbing cold, and our bodies demand that if we venture out into that cold, we provide at least ten inches of layered thinsolate between our flesh and the sort of cold that literally damages exposed skin cells in under 60 seconds.
In Winnipeg, when it is really cold, we put on multiple layers, so many in fact that we can no longer bend our arms or legs, and must be lowered into the final layer or two by crane - but that is another story. Typically, it is during the last few layers, that we begin to pre-perspire. This isn't the mother load of perspiration, it is just the sort of stuff a nurse might mop off the face of a surgeon - enough to get in your eyes and cloud your vision, but not enough to cause organs to shut down or whatnot.
By the time I am halfway to the bus stop I am usually in a "full" sweat, and although discretion demands that I spare you a description of that, I can say that it is only a passing phase, as the radical -10% humidity quickly sucks any moisture out of my apparel and into the air where it quickly freezes to the surface of whatever I am wearing. This adds the wonderful effect of making me glisten in the morning twilight - which is helpful for crossing the street.
By the time I get to the bus stop the possibility of passing out from heat stroke has been replaced by the possibility of slipping into a hypothermia induced coma. Thankfully that sharp, arctic bite of angry cold that hits you wherever it finds a chink in your thinsolate armor, like a knife in the kidneys, keeps you from passing out - at least for the first couple of minutes. Eventually you do pass out, but not before losing a toe or two to the cold, and to be sure, usually you die of exposure before you pass out.
It is on days such as I have just described that I have looked into the face of pure evil and seen in darkest majesty (if there is such a thing) the full effects that "the fall" had on mankind.
For on such days, otherwise civilly minded socially conscious bus drivers are conscientious and considerate people, but for some reason, the cold acts like a drug on them - unleashing their darkest depravities - which invariably plays itself out in their sadistic (and might I suggest criminal?) mishandling of the bus' heating system.
On days where 90% of bus patrons are dressed in every article of clothing they own, and some 60% of these have learned that they can increase their odds of keeping all their toes by close to 20% by merely wearing two pairs of boots (one six sizes bigger than the other, and worn over top of the other) - and that even if the extra boot doesn't save one from losing a toe or two - it does stave it off for a few minutes longer - on these days the younger, cooler, hipper bus drivers like to crank the heat on the bus from "too hot", past "inferno" - and all the way up to "writhing in the torments of hell" such that although men are stumbling onto the bus fresh from the challenge of waiting in an open field for a bus that is 25 minutes late - stumbling I say, unknowingly into this tropical hell on wheels - only to experience what a radical shift of 120 degrees in under ten seconds can do to the human body.
For those of us who wear glasses, our first clue that we are on a sadists bus is not the bus driver himself, it is the fact that our glasses ice up before we even pull out our bus pass. You can actually hear the ice snap and crackle as the moisture in the air (read: evaporating sweat of the other patrons) condenses on your cold glasses, and begins to rapidly knit a white crystal powder over the whole of your glasses. Were a person not encumbered at this point under layer after layer of cold-be-gone type clothing, surely they would be able to remove their glasses before any permanent damage (to their corneas) was done. But even though a man knows he is defeated before he begins, nevertheless he frantically [1] wriggles out of a few dozen pairs of mittens, [2] braces one arm against a nearby pipe or even another frozen (read: yet to be thawed) passenger and [3] heaves the full weight of his body against the pipe or whatever, in the vain hope of starting a collective "bend" in every one of their collective layers of clothing, in order that [4] they might be able to bring that newly bent arm up (in time) to remove their glasses before the crackling ice formation actually reaches their corneas.
Not that kaleidoscopes aren't fun and all...
The bus, is always late during cold days because every ounce of "extra" power is being diverted to the furnace, er, heaters - making the actual top speed something like nine miles per hour, but in order to keep the heaters from becoming stressed they keep it under six or seven mph.
Not that we can actually see the bus driver for the first ten minutes of the ride anyway! It is only after the external layer of condensed ice melts that we get our first glimpse - and what do we see? There he is, in all his rancid splendor - wearing a pair of shorts and a short sleeved shirt. How is that for a sick, ...sick ...sense of humor?
Okay, I admit, I have exaggerated a bit about, ... about the mittens - you know, half a dozen pairs is closer to the truth - but I kid you not about this sadist wearing shorts! - I mean, he looks like he just came in from playing a game of beach volleyball.
As I melt into my seat I feel sort of odd. The outside clothes are starting to thaw, and I am gaining some flexibility (the middle layers are still stiff and cold but the inner layers are already drenched in my sweat as my body tries to cool itself down by making my entire wardrobe (which I have on) a walking body-diaper.
As I take my seat I find myself sitting in what can only be described as "discomfort" if one is charitable to the point of being grossly misleading and is perhaps less charitably described (though far more precisely) as becoming at peace with the rapid erosion of my sanity and looking forward to the extreme dementia of heat stroke that I know will eventually begins to work its mind-numbing magic. Sure, there is screaming for the first little while, and maybe it is coming from me - but it is hardly noticed in the chaotic cacaphony of the bedlam bus - once the numbness kicks in, I know I will be just fine.
Don't get me wrong, I love the bus, the odors, the shrieking - did I mention the odors? This is the very spice of life (not unlike pepper spray in your eyes) - and I even like the sadist bus driver whose desire to live in a perpetual sauna is being lived out creatively at my expense. I am not complaining. I am just saying that there is a moment on rides such as that, when time seems to slow down, and everything gets quiet, and the bus driver glances at your suffering in his over-sized rear view mirror - when you see him smile, and you know you are looking into the face of pure evil. |
posted by Daniel @
2:45 PM
 
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| 8 Comments: |
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You slay me! I didn't know there were any funny Canadians left since John Candy died.
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John Candy died???? AAAAHHHHH!!!!
This isn't the way I wanted to find out...
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I'm wearing shorts right now...
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Very well written and hilarious. I can understand your misery in the bitter cold. We had a cold front come through yesterday. It's only gonna be low 70's(f) today. I might hafta roll the sleeves down on my T-shirt.
Hatfield,
I knew you were a sadist.
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You'd love Rochester and the "lake effect" snow - those times when cold air from the north flies over a warm Lake Ontario, collecting all that moisture, and then dumps it on Western New York.
Too bad my snow blower no longer works.
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About ten years or so ago I took some photos of snow. I haven't seen any since. Please don't tell Al Gore as he may want to interview me.
W.H.
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very funny! And about the glasses...so true.
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You slay me! I didn't know there were any funny Canadians left since John Candy died.