Short story – “Change for the Better?”

“Change for the Better?”

“Let me get this straight, you want to preach the word of God to …”

The young man interrupted with, “Yes, it’s my purpose in life.”

“Right.  You don’t run a megachurch, do you?”

“No.”

“Have a cable show?”

“No.”

“Radio show?”

“No.”

“Website?”

“No.”

“How did you plan to reach people with your message?”

The young man smiled.  “I will walk among them.”

“Listen, I understand.  What you want to do is noble and all, but if you want to be part of the big leagues, you’ll have to put aside such rank amateur ideas.”

The young man frowned.  After a few moments he nodded.  “I understand.”

“Great.  Let’s start you off with something simple, an Instagram page.  Now, what was your name again?”

“Jesus.”

***

I first wrote this story back in 2009 and posted it on a website that is still up but the formatting is messed up.  So I figured I should repost it.  The point of the story is simple: if Jesus came back today, would he open a megachurch or would he slip on a pair of sandals and go among the people?

Random Story – Trying to explode my VCR

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Twenty-fiveish years ago, one of my guilty pleasures was reading the Weekly World News.  I didn’t believe any of the stories, and just laughed at the idea that there were people out there that probably did believe all that shit.  But I felt safe knowing those people would only be on the fringe of society and they’d never … I don’t know … be elected to Congress. 

Anyway, sometime in 1998 or 1999, there was an article about Y2K.  Now the normal fear was that going from 19-- years to 20-- years would cause computers to crash.  But this article claimed that things would be far worse and that any electronic device would explode at midnight. 

I don’t know if shortly before or after I read this article we had a power outage and I had to reset the time on my VCR.  So I performed an experiment.  I set the time on my VCR to 11:59 PM on December 31, 1999.  I then backed away and waited.  A minute later the display switched over to 12:00.  There was no smoke, or buzzing, or anything.  And when I checked the date, it was January 1, 2000.  I guess I had a “modern” VCR that replaced the explosive parts with the memory to have a four digit date. 

I was only slightly bummed.