Brick, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, described the level of peace he found after a certain number of drinks as a click that happened in his head. I hadn’t been drinking when it happened to me the other day. While dodging snowflakes on my drive home I suddenly found myself calm and collected. Tonight I still find myself at peace. Despite the beginning of the new month, or perhaps because of it.

Tony is trying to convince me it is all because of our new religion, the Pleiades. “Religion,” he explains, “very often gives one a feeling of peace that stems from knowing that your soul is no longer your own.” It is true that I have immersed myself in our new religious cult, but I have not had any of the revelations I remember from my childhood. What revelations? Well, let me tell you…

First time came at Bible camp, a week long sleep-a-way camp where I was supposed to get saved. Mostly I developed a crush on my cabin-mate and worried about wetting the bed, but at the end of the week I did indeed walk down the aisle to accept Jesus into my heart. I made myself cry and walked around all dizzy-like to try and get some attention from folks. I got a few hugs from my cabin mates (which of course got me all excited) and proud looks from my parents. And I even made myself pray constantly over the next few days as I returned home. The problem came, though, when my prayers basically turned into mini dialogues about internal cursing and wondering if God cared if I thought certain words as long as I didn’t say them aloud. This lead me to just think the words over and over again and pretty soon my prayers diminished and my appetite for bad words increased. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work at all.

The second time I made the trip down the aisle I was at the end of my church’s Revival week where guest preachers come to explain how bad hell is and how we should all be saved. I was bored so figured I might as well get some attention and went and knelt down and met the guy’s challenge. The following month I was baptized and my only real memory of that is of my preacher’s naked body as he changed in the room next to me. Go figure.

But getting back to my current peace: I realize that it has a lot more to do with my lessoning anxiety of the future. I have arrived at a place where I feel some control over my actions and plans and for once seem to really be following through on my goals. For some reason this makes my days stretch out a bit and time seem less like my enemy.