"You ever walk into a war zone?"
What?
"Yeah, yeah, I know that's a bit of a weird question, coming from me. I'm a namby-pamby coddled kid from some anonymous place in the northern united states, who's never had to deal with shortage or hunger or fighting or even something as simple as life-threatening illness. Bear with me for a moment. You ever walk into a war zone?"
Uh, not really. I mean, I'm… how'd you put it… a namby-pamby coddled kid from some anonymous place in the northern united states &c &c.
"That's not true, and you know it."
Like feck it's not. What are you talking about?
*Smack!* "Tonight. May 10 2013. Fish fry kitchen. Any bells?"
That wasn't a war zone.
"Like feck it wasn't. Okay, maybe not a conventional war zone. On the pure atoms-photons-and-eyeballs level it was just a dozen or so people standing around with their eyes closed. But you know. You know. You saw. That was as much a war zone as anything your most miscalibrated imagination can come up with."
So yeah, I walked into a war zone tonight. Tail end of fish fry, a whole bunch of adults (well, older adults I should say holy crap I'm twenty) gathered in the kitchen. From what I overheard, 'he' (whoever he was) had bleeding nose and ears, broken ribs, ruptured spleen, and was being airlifted. Bad s***.
I'm standing just outside the door to the kitchen. Maybe I'm in the doorway; at any rate I moved just inside the kitchen and then back to just out over the next 30-60 seconds. Anyway, I'm standing in the entryway to the kitchen, and all these adults just start praying. Now, there's nothing particularly weird about this. We were at a church event, prayer happens, especially when it looks like things have gone south1. But this is a little different. This time, almost in overlay, I can see this battlefield going on, as they're praying. I wish I had better terms to describe what I actually saw, I only saw it for a very brief flash. That was just enough for part of me (much the same part that goes in for surface flash/'coolness', the part that self-inserts into, say, Star Wars to hijack the plot by Saving The World with Really Cool Stuff) to want to jump into the fray, complete with Cool Ninja Moves and stab this and save that; luckily, the rest of me was like "dude?" It's about this point that my angle showed up.
Now, at this point, I have to pause to say that I don't want you thinking I'm one of those angle kooks. Granted, this pause probably doesn't appear to help my case. My point is that I'm not sure whether I actaully believe in angles, much the same way I'm not sure whether I actually believe in God. According to a fair number of people around me they do, most notably including one lady who, assuming there's truth such matters, is absolutely right about these things. Sort of the Albert Einstein or Eliezer Yudkowsky of this area.2
Anyways, my angle shows up. I'm not in the kitchen anymore, I'm just outside the door by now, so he's leaning in to get a better view. And he's all antsy, he's got this – not look, exactly, that's normally what it's called, it's more like feel – he's got this feel about him like "uhg, man, I really should be in there". Because he's an angle, and this is spirit warfare, and this is, like, why he exists, it's what (well, the other thing; still assuming that all this is true) he's good at, it's what he's for. So he looks at me like "dude." And I'm like "Dude, don't let me stop you. This is your thing. Go do what you gotta do." He didn't, of course, I guess I shoulda been explicitly sending him by joining in. I don't really know why. So I told him "You gotta go, go," and he's there antsing, and at this point I turn and go around the kitchen ('cause I'm not going through the kitchen when it's full like that) and back outside. And that's the sixty seconds or thereabouts.
Right, so my angle. He's left. You know the whole shoulder angle/shoulder demon deal3? My shoulder angle sits left. Which isn't a very accurate word picture, since it makes me think they're, y'know, little guys, six or nine or eighteen inches roughly. They're not. But I could literally feel him leaning in on my left shoulder. Yes, I mean literally.
Anyways. That's my story.
Footnotes:
1 That's a really crappy turn-of-phrase, come to think of it. Why is 'going south' a bad thing? We went to Florida earlier this year, and that was great – well, the two days or thereabouts we actually spent in Florida, rather than in the car. (A road trip is quite a different proposition.)
2 She says my angle's name is Erasmus (I really hope I got that spelled correctly). Apparently he's got one of those mortarboard-style professor hats. I wonder if he sports it like just kind of chill?
3 Which, apparently, in the original version wasn't angles and demons, but angles of [good|light] and angles of [evil|darkness].
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