Well, this is it for me. I’m leaving the board, and am compelled to announce it. But there are a few things I want to say first -- some recollections that (perhaps incongruously) seem germane to my leave-taking of JW.com
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1) My first post was also my first thread, written in the summer of 2000 (on H2O, actually). The rhetoric of the organization was becoming feverish after what had seemed to me several years of docility. Suddenly Jesus was out, Yahweh in, with much foaming at the mouth about Zechariah’s prophecy, the cobblestones of the streets to be as sponges soaked in the blood of the wicked. So, one dank New England evening – hazy and languid, treetops feigning a breeze we couldn’t feel below -- I typed with nervous fingers a synopsis of the district convention I’d attended the previous weekend. I wrote about a precocious child with dark bangs flapping at the blubber of her father’s face, coaxing from him a chuckle, a guffaw, and finally genuine laughter; meanwhile, the district overseer broke the monotonous tone of manuscript to describe, frenziedly, the peculiar sensation one might feel standing erect, like a recalcitrant tree, as rivers of blood burst through the capillaries of suburban sidestreets and inner city cul-de-sacs and flooded the sprawling metropolis of the world. The ten plagues of Egypt globally revisited – Yahweh couldn’t bring them fast enough. And I knew, after that strange juxtaposition of innocence and religious violence, that I was no more for the Witnesses, gone over the cliff on a sanguine waterfall with nearly the rest of God’s creation.
The thread was well received, I suppose. Someone told me he wasn’t surprised; it sounded like the same old stuff to him. To me this was a revelation – or, rather, expressing it was a revelation, since I’d always been apprehensive about the orgiastic enthusiasm of Witnesses for the apocalypse.
2) In late February of 2003, after my 28th birthday, I drove my letter of disassociation over to the presiding overseer's house. I had not been to a meeting in over two years. For reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere on the board, it was necessary to formally sever my by-then tenuous connections with the religion.
So. Oxbow, Massachusetts. A typical Oxbow winter, gritty, foul, monochromatic. The dirty, exhaust-soaked detritus of ice and snow was packed, refrozen, and latticed by the rolling crunch of tires; the dreary ranch houses slouched behind sidewalks, dressed in the dull hues of aluminum siding. My VW Jetta was in its death throes after I’d driven it, repeatedly and angrily, into a phalanx of snow banks the previous week, so driving it now was a challenge – the tires, bald where I’d revved them through layers of ice to scrape cold asphalt, slipped in the gaps of packed snow on the road; the steering wheel glared cock-eyed back at me, grimacing with misalignment; the ventilators mocked me with cool air. But the radio worked, and I had thumping through the speakers Coldplay’s “Clocks,” and I felt ... powerful, my purpose syncopated to the urgency of a pop song, epic. Important. This was the climax of a journey, often an ordeal, that began when I was two years old. The ride home and the rest of my life would be the denouement.
Confusion never stops
Closing walls and ticking clocks…
The presiding overseer’s wife answered the door. Joyce: her first name the last of my literary hero, creator of my deliberately misspelled handle on this board. She looked old; three years in the life of a sextigenarian had registered profoundly on her face. But her blinking eyes and familiar stammer brought me back twenty years, when a family emergency deposited me in her care for the better half of a week. While my mother had convalesced in the hospital, Joyce and I built spaceships out of Lego blocks and flew them down to the study, where her husband, bespectacled and wrapped in a cardigan she’d knitted, abandoned his Greek Septuagint to admire our work, our play. Standing now in the cold, I realized, as she invited me in, that I did not hate these people, and that I wanted to leave them forever.
(And what did she think of me? I’d spent the last two years at Boston, on scholarship, lucubrating away at graduate school, and rumors had it, almost correctly, that I was blasphemous and concupiscent and generally to be avoided, an eloquent but vociferous rogue. Or I like to think those were the rumors, anyway.)
Despite the cold I politely declined her invitation, and she assured me her husband was merely cloistered away in his study, and would be happy to see me, and I underemphasized the urgency of my visit, and we moved stolidly through the script until I gave her the envelope and said goodbye, twice, without meaning to -- the stammering redundancy of improvisation.
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So it goes. An old professor of mine, a friend and something of a father figure to me, wrote in his memoir: “True stories have no end, but a storyteller must find boundaries, or else from three small sentences in a diary he could be drawn to the beginning of the world.” Here I am, then, bookmarking my life for the discussion board. It begins with the dark bangs of a girl, and ends with the tousled gray perm of an old woman.
I’ve spent a lot of time, too much time perhaps, on this discussion board. And the only way to successfully make my egress is to declare it first; otherwise, I’d be back in a week. So here goes: I won’t be posting on this forum anymore, won’t even be lurking, not because I am exasperated by any recent squabble, or bear any teeth-gnashing grudge, but because I have other things to do now, and I’m ready to do them. But as an ex-Witness, slowly aging and stagnating in the denouement of my experience, I can only fail.
All of this to say, time to be getting on.
I’ll check in now and then as this thread drops off the board, and then I’ll be gone. My e-mail address is available to anyone who wants it.
Goodbye, goodbye,
Dedalus