Religion in the U District

Working at the Neptune during the Rocky Horror Picture Show I met plenty of people who's philosophy of life could be summed up as "whoopie!" While some of them may have considered themselves religious, they were mostly hedonists and not too concerned about morality.

Sitting out in the little glass box office on the sidewalk I'd watch the Hare Krishna's (that's what I called them, after the repetitive chant that they'd continue for an hour or more) on some Fridays and occasional weekdays up the street near the intersection of 45th and the Ave. I can still hear the drums in my memory - bump-a-bum, bump-a-bum, as the voices chanted. It got oddly hypnotic and strangely comforting, although I had no idea what exactly it was all about at the time. Some religious thing from India, apparently.

My favorite religious activity involved the Scientologists, though. I like to discuss and argue, and one time as I walked down the Ave a clean cut young couple approached me and started asking questions. "If you knew a way to improve everyones lives, a way to overcome mental and physical issues, wouldn't you want to share it?" and so on.

I was happy to engage them and discuss things, but they pretty quickly figured out that I was a complete waste of their time. Their arguments were not convincing in general, and once they tried to get specific they just got ridiculous. They gave up after 5 minutes without any sign of traction with me. I was disappointed that they gave up so easily, I enjoyed the argument. Oh well, I had to head to work shortly anyway.

I noticed that they worked the Ave all of the time, and I started watching for them and horning in on the discussion when they had a live one on. (Sorry for the fishing metaphor, it's a family thing). I'm sure they hated that, I'd demolish their arguments and get them sidetracked, often allowing the victim to sneak away while they were distracted. For some reason I find hard to explain I enjoyed messing with them.

Pretty quickly they learned to take their lunch break as soon as they saw me coming. Sigh, all my fun came to an end.

The U District has some great progressive churches that do many good things and run food banks and other charitable operations but I pretty much ignored them. Not enough controversy or interest for me there - I was a pretty shallow dude as a teenager. Faith wasn't a large portion of my life at the time.