(WWJWMTTHTL) Where Would Jesus Want Me to Take Him to Lunch?

I have a new phone which is also my new day-planner, because hey, I'm no Luddite. But I am a bit slow on the uptake. In my first week with the new phone I very nearly broke my Bluetooth (the yellow ones are just fine, thanks) and apparently did break the Internet. Sorry about that.

I'm all up and running now, but I'm still getting used to one of the phone's features: when you type something (anything, really), it offers to complete the word for you. Microsoft Word has a similar function, but we who work in the publishing industry usually disable such options because we so regularly spell such arcane and high-falutin' words. I've chosen to keep the feature on my PDA phone. but like I say, I'm still getting used to it.

Anyway, today I made an appointment to have lunch with my friend and coworker Jeff. I started keying my appointment into my PDA phone, somewhat disinterstedly I will freely admit, and then realized that my lunch with Jeff had become "lunch with Jesus." Well that can't be right.

I mean, no disrespect, Jeff, but I think it would be a different lunch entirely. I don't know where I would take him; the default restaurant of choice at my office is a barbecue pork joint (Uncle Bub's--no trip to Westmont, Illinois, is complete without a visit), but Jesus was Jewish, so pork seems inappropriate.

And then I remembered an ad campaign from a few years back when Christian environmentalists asked the question "What would Jesus Drive?" They were cashing in (a little late, I'm afraid) on the cultural renaissance of the nineteenth-century pious question "What would Jesus do?" made famous in the novel In His Steps and soon surely to make an appearance on VH1's undoubtedly planned "I Love the 90s." But it's a legitimate question: what would Jesus drive? And if it's not a Hyundai Elantra GT tracking an admittedly unsatisfactory number of miles per gallon, how could I comfortably buckle Jesus into the passenger seat to get us to lunch?

Of course there are restaurants within walking distance of my office, but most of them are national chains, and I get the impression from some of my friends who are concerned with economic justice that taking Jesus to a chain restaurant would be tantamount to cooking him up a pork sandwich on the grill of a Hummer H3. And then of course we'd have to walk right past the homeless guy with the bicycle camped out in the parking lot of the grocery store, and I can just picture Jesus talking about Samaritans and kids feeding five thousand people with a little bread and a few fish.

So I erased Jesus and keyed in the word "Jeff." And we're going to the pork place. Pray for me.

Unsafe at Any Speed

Well, it happened again. For the third time in seven months I've been cited for a moving violation. You may recall from my earlier post that (a) none of my tickets has been for speeding or driving under the influence or shooting at other drivers, and (b) I disputed and defeated the charge the most recent charge. Ever since then I've been hypervigilant as I drive, dropping well beneath the speed limit and virtually shifting into park at every stop sign or stop light. But the man keeps trying to bring me down. I found out this week that my passenger-side headlight is out; that little insight from a Village of Roselle police officer is costing me thirty-five bucks.

The officer had one hand on his holster and one hand on the extra-bright flashlight as he approached my car. I told him good evening and handed him my license and insurance card; he asked me if there was anything he should know about my license. I still don't know what he meant by that (feel free to speculate), because based on my reply and his reaction he wasn't asking if I'm still at the same address or if I've recently gained some weight. My best guess is that, in the minds of the village leadership in Roselle, there's some terrorist message encoded when someone willfully acts to, in the words of the Wallflowers, "drive it home with one headlight."

I really am getting tired of getting pulled over, and as I mentioned in my earlier post, my attempt to defend my driving honor and voice my prophetic diatribe against traffic justice in the United States was interrupted by a forgetful bureaucracy, so once again this time I sat in my car waiting for my ticket and grumbling internally about the unfairness of my situation. I made myself a bet that a third to a half of all the cars that passed by as the Roselle officer wrote my ticket would have at least one headlight out of service, then I started counting. To my shock, only one driver along this busy thoroughfare was a scofflaw like me; apparently Roselle's zero-tolerance policy has effectively rooted out pediddle-driving banditry from its village limits.

After a while, the officer returned to me my license, proof of insurance and ticket. He told me that the ticket won't go on my driving record--that it's a village ordinance I've violated, not a rule of the road. This was free money for Roselle; I know that much for certain, as much because I have such a sophsticated sense of logic and such open eyes about the injustice of the traffic-law system as because of the address to which I was to send my ticket:

Village of Roselle
Finance Department