and things not so hard to leave behind in Quincy...

MAKING A JOYFUL RACKET UNTO YOUR OWN PARTICULAR LORD

While sneaking in the back way from San Jose to Tama’s new Santa Cruz digs on a winding, narrow country road we passed through the middle of a massing of Seventh Day Adventists who were attending an annual gathering replete with a giant revival tent and acres upon acres of RV’s, trailers and dome tents all filled with happy Christian souls patiently awaiting the rapture. Not quite the body mass of High Sierra but close. Seeing all those bodies stacked cheek by jowl brought on a 4^th of July flashback and gave me more fodder for my moving pros & cons debate.

The joys of High Sierra aside, if you live by the county fair grounds you get a little of everything else coming your way… the fair (obviously…) Saturday night stock car races and on Labor Day weekend… it’s JesusFest! Well, okay, it’s actually called JoshuaFest but its three very long days of Christian Rock music.

We have elderly neighbors living between our home and the fairgrounds. Sid & Maggie are retirees from Quincy and Miss’ippi and Sid likes to fritter away the hours in a barcalounger, watching TV by the open window. When the festival began, with a thundering crash at 2:30 that first Friday afternoon, I thought that perhaps Sid had suffered a cardiac episode and, in its throes, had clutched tightly at the remote, thereby simultaneously raising the sound and shifting to an MTV special on Thrash bands.

For me there can be nothing less gratifying than the mind-numbing banality of a high volume baptism under the self-righteous waters of church based rock & roll. For three days we had Rappin’ Jesus and Heavy Metal Jesus and Rock Ballad Jesus and Punk Jesus (no doubt replete with a pink mohawk like his disciples raiding the shelves in Safeway for Wonderbread and tuna fish…)

Now, I got nothing against Rock & Roll and I’m not so old that I don’t like it loud, but when you can’t hear your radio inside your house when all the windows are closed it might be time for these ardent believers to practice a little of the old “love thy neighbor” and perhaps refine the biblical admonition to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord” to include something about both volume and content quality. Mix this near cacophony with bouts of amplified testimonials from lead guitarists various and sundry and you have a syrupy concoction that goes down more like ipecac than honey.

Having received what I considered to be a full dose from the comfort of my own living room I must confess that I didn’t actually wander onto the grounds for in depth exposure. The whole affair is billed as a family event and in truth the grounds are packed cheek by jowl with expensive looking RV’s and Airstreams. But either this event draws a primarily youthful audience or these families have teenagers still willing to run the family errands & fetch up some more wieners and diet sodas. It is a longish but easy walk around to Quincy Junction Road and into town to the shopping center and, like army ants on the move, both shoulders of the road were filled with happy campers; a veritable stream of modern day Visigoths sacking the local food supply and carrying off the last of the ice and Doritos.

Safeway becomes a madhouse and all the checkout lines are filled with tattooed and punky teens smugly acknowledging each other’s plastic wristband “tickets”, confident that they not only have a place in heaven but that it is down in front where they can hear the word of God despite the damage to their hearing.

If, truly, Jesus saves, could he please save me from this?