Things are still in a 'holding pattern' w/r/t my (possible) freelance job conducting interviews with people who claim to have seen godlike beings, but 'Mark' -- the guy who initially contacted me -- has continued to send me transcripts of past interviews conducted by his 'organization.' (The name of which I still haven't learned.) As you might expect, some of these interviews are not exactly 'illuminating' (lol), but some of them are pretty interesting (to me, anyway). Mark told me that I'm welcome to share excerpts here, given that the transcripts contain no names or other identifying information, or 'not too much' as he put it. (For more background on this 'project,' feel free to search #gods on this blog.) Below please find excerpts from one interview I thought was relevant to my interests, accompanied by pictures I took on a run this morning in Fort Tryon Park, which if you haven't been there recently, now is seriously a good time to go. (The pictures -- except for the last one -- are mine; the words are not.) 
"I grew up in the United States, somewhere in the middle in what I call 'Suburbia circa 1970s' because I don't think it was very different than most other suburbs at the time, or maybe even now, although I don't live in a suburb anymore so it's kind of hard to say." 
"In some ways, Suburbia circa 1970s was a pretty strange place. Just to be clear, I was still in elementary school in the 70s, like I was ten years old in 1978. I have to say, I hated school for the most part because I thought my teachers were all complete numbskulls. I went to this elementary school where a lot of men were teachers, which in theory could have been a good thing because it kind of 'deconstructed the stereotype' of the Prim Lady elementary school teacher, but it didn't change the fact that these men were all a bunch of macho assholes who were constantly making comments about what certain girls looked like and what boys should be thinking about doing with or to these girls and other stuff along these lines that I'm sure (or hope) would get them into hot water pretty quickly these days. Not all of the teachers were men; my second grade teacher looked EXACTLY like Farah Fawcett and her name was Miss Winsect, pronounced and spelled just like a bug but with a 'w.' She only lasted a year, because I know that she got a lot of shit from her colleagues. Looking back, it was sort of like a disco version of 'Mad Men' set in an elementary school, which based on that description alone is a show I would totally watch." 
"Elementary school wasn't all bad. I guess I learned a few things, but on the whole my sense is that it was mostly just an exercise in babysitting, which is exactly why the men hated us. I remember my third grade teacher -- get this: his name was 'Mr. Pencil' -- yelling at us and saying 'what do you think I am some kind of babysitter?' and he was probably more right than he wanted to admit. I once read a statistic that says that you forget 99 percent of everything you ever learn in school, and when I think back to elementary school, I don't have a hard time believing that at all. Not that it got any better in junior high, high school, or college. I don't think I really learned anything until I started 'working,' at which point I realized I had been 'coasting' for like thirty years and it was maybe time to pick up a book and learn something. It's one of my big regrets about life, because it's not like you get those years back or anything." 
"I don't want to sound completely negative about my childhood, though. In a lot of ways it was very unstructured in the best of ways, which I think is something that has been lost in our society. I recently heard about this study conducted in the 70s where they put trackers on kids -- I think they were in Suburbia, Vermont or some other state -- and followed them around. They recorded where these kids went after school and on the weekends, where they had secret caves and hideouts and all of the other places that you could probably imagine a ten-year old kid in 1978 going. Or at least I could imagine it, because I remembered how -- like pretty much every other kid I knew -- I went wherever I wanted once school was out. We didn't have cell phones or feel compelled to check in with our parents every five seconds. Our parents were busy doing whatever parents did back then. So we went to the fields, we went to the lake, we went to the woods, we went to the grocery store and stole candy, we just goofed off, I guess, the way kids have probably always done, assuming they didn't have to work, which is maybe a big assumption, but I'm sure you get what I'm saying. I was middle class during a relatively prosperous era of our country's history. It was boring but fun. Or more fun than school, which was just boring. Adults weren't a big part of our lives in the 1970s. I don't know exactly what they were doing, but based on movies I've seen it was probably having a lot of sex, doing drugs, taking disco lessons, and generally making up for lost time. It's a fact that there was a lot of pent-up curiosity after the 1950s and 1960s, because it took until the 70s for beat/hippie counterculture to go mainstream. For older kids -- which I know because my brother and sister were teenagers -- this meant a lot of 'Dazed and Confused' getting wasted and going to huge parties around town, but I was too young for that kind of thing, so I just sat in the fields and watched the sun glitter through the tall grass. It was pretty peaceful, actually. I'll always appreciate the freedom I had, and 'freedom' isn't a word I use lightly anymore because it's been ruined by politicians." 
"But anyway, I was talking about that study where they tracked the kids. In the original study, they determined that your average kid in the 70s had a 'radius' of like five miles around his or her house where they were likely to be at any given moment. But then they went back and redid the study last year or something and discovered that kids the same age now had an average radius of like fifty feet, meaning they rarely strayed beyond their backyard, if they even made it out of the house. Which is pretty sad if you think about it, because they're still living in Suburbia, Vermont (or wherever else) and there's no evidence that crime has increased at all, and parents have basically implemented a 'police state' on their kids. What was most incredible-slash-depressing of all was that they interviewed one of these five-mile radius kids from the 70s who now has a ten year old daughter and he was like 'oh, I absolutely need to know where she is at every second of the day.' It was no different for the parents with boys, either. All of these parents live in a state of constant fear." 
"I'm not blaming them or anything, or at least not completely. If I had kids, I'd probably be the same way, but I do think it's really tragic that we've reached this point, where the fear of something that literally has no basis in reality is dictating our behavior. That's pretty much the definition of paranoia and here we are." 
"A lot of this fear probably seeps down from the 'terrorism vibes' that have obviously been a big part of the 'national consciousness' since 9/11 or whatever, but even if a fear of terrorism is rooted in reality, it's still kind of horrible and ridiculous, and I'm not sure it should be a reason to make some of the choices we're making. It's almost like everyone is petrified to go swimming in the ocean because we're so afraid of sharks, notwithstanding the fact that sharks killed like three people last year, which is like seriously nothing compared to the number of people who were killed by their own relatives with handguns. I remember reading an article in The Onion about how some library in Nebraska or something had just been outfitted with a counter-terrorism unit and as with so many things in The Onion, it made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, because you know it's basically true. Like our police departments have become hyper-militarized in ways that, again, have no basis in the kind of policing that 99 percent of the country actually needs." 
"I'm sorry, I know I'm getting a little distracted. What I really wanted to say is that, besides the kind of freedom I just described having as a kid, another good thing about growing up in the 70s was that there was a real skepticism for groups and organizations. Nobody wanted to be constrained back then." 
"I don't know why exactly. Maybe it was another ripple effect of hippie counterculture, or maybe it was an effect of Watergate, maybe it was 'Free To Be You and Me' which was actually a big deal and not just in the cute, nostalgic was it's depicted now, or maybe it was 'some combination of the above,' but whatever the case, kids I knew were not 'joiners'." 
"I didn't know anyone who went to 'church' because we all understood that it was run by a bunch of old, hypocritical windbags who liked to force them to give up your Sunday morning so you could listen to them drone on, when you could just as easily be sitting in a field or in the woods, or even watching something good on television. Although Sunday morning television didn't have much to offer for kids in the 1970s." 
"I didn't even really know what the word 'Christian' even meant, beyond a requirement to go to church on Sunday and then 'Sunday School,' which I never had to do, so I wasn't sure what I was. I knew I wasn't Jewish, either, because one of my best friends was Jewish, and he had to go to 'Hebrew School' like two or three times a week after regular school, which seemed like the worst thing anyone could imagine. He really hated it, especially when the rest of us were going to the woods to play 'Monster in the Deep' or 'Kick the Can'' or any of those other great games we used to play. The 70s were really a Golden Era of Religious Ambivalence. I've read some articles about how 'millennials are turning away from religion' these days, which makes me hopeful that they can relegate organized religion to the footnotes of history, where it obviously belongs." 
"This ambivalence for structure wasn't limited to religion, either. I remember being in fourth grade when this kid showed up to school wearing a Boy Scout uniform and we were all just like so confused, not understanding at all why anyone would want to be a Boy Scout. We were seriously like 'what are you wearing and why'. Most kids I knew would have rather died than wear a shirt with a collar -- all we wore were t-shirts and sweatshirts -- and here was this kid in his blue shirt with a little yellow necktie. Vaguely militaristic. I'm embarrassed to say it now, because I'm homosexual, but we definitely thought that kid's outfit was 'gay' and we told him so, repeatedly." 
"Let me just say that for the record I now think it would be awesome for a kid or anyone else to wear whatever they want, but I still hate 'uniforms' of any kind. I mean, I'll wear a collar and a button-down shirt to my 'business casual' job, but I don't think I've worn a tie or a suit for at least ten years. I'm not against them or anything, so long as it's a choice and not a requirement." 
"So now you know a little bit more about me and my background, which might or might not make you more skeptical about what I'm going to tell you." 
"As for this whole 'interview' or my belief in gods or whatever the hell you think I saw, I personally don't know what to think, because there's a big part of me that doesn't want to believe in anything that might be considered 'paranormal' or 'unprovable' or whatever else. Because a lot of people who believe in that shit are clearly lunatics just looking for another group to join. There are so many different kinds of orthodoxies, it's almost inevitable that you're going to fall into one of them. That's why hippies and their Park Slope yoga-mom descendants are so insufferable: on the surface they act like they're very open to experience, but the second you stop playing by their rules, it's going to be a very tense situation. I'll spare you the details, but if you've ever played Ultimate Frisbee you might know what I'm talking about." 
"And science is an orthodoxy, too. I mean, look, it was only forty years ago that 'science' considered me a deviant with a mental illness because I like having sex with men, so how much faith can I put in science? That's a question I can answer by saying 'probably about as much faith as I put in mainstream religions'. Or the Boy Scouts." 
"Okay, so that's my admittedly idiosyncratic and probably verging on antisocial if not quite insane philosophy, which I shared because you asked. Now for the facts, by which I mean the details of what I saw on the day in question, which you seem to want to believe is some sort of quasi-immortal being." 
"Or not. Well, you can decide after you hear the full story. Anyway, it was five years ago and I was driving to the beach, which I decided to do in the middle of the night to beat the traffic. And moreover I was taking the back roads -- the ones that cut through the Pine Barrens -- because I've always found them more interesting. And I was going along at a pretty good clip, probably around seventy miles per hour, when I saw something on the side of the road. And I don't know why I slowed down, beyond the fact that it was like nothing I had ever seen before, and I stopped maybe 100 yards past whatever it was. And I looked in the mirror and it was there. What did it look like? Well, I guess it looked like a person, except -- what can I tell you? -- I've never seen a person glowing like that..."
