A couple of Mondays ago was the nicest day yet of 2011. It was sunny and it was warm, and the warm bordered on hot. One of April’s many weathers, apparently. But even in the city, I wouldn’t turn away the heat because it’s been a terribly long and cold winter, and as much as I love snowfall in season, once baseball starts I want the mild temperatures to get here quickly and stay here until, hopefully, they’re nudged aside by equally seasonal heat in June, July and August. For the beach and for grilling and for sitting in the shade to mean something.

On this particular gorgeous afternoon I took my first chance to sit out by the Hudson River not too far a walk from my apartment. Usually, though not at all frequently, I’m walking or at best jogging past this stretch of benches by the ferry. But that Monday was a sittin’ afternoon, refamiliarizing myself with UV rays after a six-month hibernation when, refrigerator light coolly aside, television was the only warming glow around, though from what I can tell it’s not a terrific stimulant of vitamin D. I sat out in shorts, my legs palely loitering, the rest of me barely fitting under a hat whose claim of one size fitting all had been put to every test.

I also sat with a book, speaking of the unfamiliar. It’d been too long a time since I’d sat down and read, no excuses covering it. My television and movie watching have had the nearly laughable justification of a career move, my wanting to write them and/or write about them. Books, on the other hand, seemed too “frivolous” “on which to” “fritter away time.” These are the words of an English degreeholder in dire straits. But the past is the past, and the winter is gone and thankfully gone, and if the rest of me is waking up then maybe the proactive part of my brain might do the same.

Cracked open that paperback with a vengeance.

I read a couple of pages.

Put it down. Didn’t want to wear myself out.

So the rest of the time I sat, tanning, listening to music. And ten minutes later, I felt a tap on my right shoulder. I took my earbud out. I heard a lady say, “I saw your book.” Spaced totally out, I figured I had been transplanted to some wonderful future, or failing that a parallel universe, where I’d published a book which this lady saw in a bookstore before seeing me sitting by the river on her way home from work, and not wanting to pass up the chance to meet a recognizable writer, she said “I saw your book.” In real time, she saw the confusion on my face as I worked these scenarios out, and continued: “He does not.”

My book laid as I left it, face down, spine facing leftward. There were the words with which this lady had taken issue: GOD HATES US ALL.

It’s a book put out by the folks who do Californication. The novel is the real-world counterpart to David Duchovny’s character’s successful third novel. Having recently rewarched the series on a loop – four viewings making me as much more charming as I had sunk deeper into my self-loathing rut – I wanted to three-dimensionalize the viewing experience and bought the damn book. It had yet offered me only the seeds of a pseudo-argument with a pseudo-missionary.

It took me a further few seconds to process my next step, but as I realized her assumption – that it was a book on some theistic branch of nihilism, or pessimism, or something, and that my soul was hers to save – I unfortunately nearly laughed in her face. I said, “Oh, that, that’s from a television show.” Her face reflected my earlier confusion. “It’s meant to be ironic.” She skittered away, probably feeling that either she was a fool, or that I was an asshole, but probably both.

I had no time to tell her that I think often of these matters, of religion and of God. Maybe too often. That my faith in the unseen is so questioned that rather than becoming stronger, it likely has little integrity left at all. And that maybe that’s a good thing, in its way.

I forgot to mention earlier in this story that the lady was black. Maybe an irrelevant detail. But I was embarrassed at how it must have looked for a dumbass white guy to be reading a book about unequivocal divine hatred, and how justified a woman of a race different than mine would be to point out how other folks out there in America might possibly have had it tougher over these last few hundred years or so, and still do, than dumbass white males with nothing more important to do in that moment than sitting in the sun like the metaphorical fatcats he so despises.

Nonetheless, victory was mine that day. Evangelism: Deflected.