Manic Street Preachers

Every morning before I go out, if I’m going on the MRT, I pick a book out before I leave the house. I was about to reach for “the Girl in the Picture” when I changed my mind and took “A History of the End of the World” instead. That book was a book about the book of Revelations in the Bible, apparently the nuttiest part of the Bible and the one that says that the end is at hand.

When I entered the train, almost immediately the angmoh standing next to me said, “hey, that’s a pretty interesting book you got right there.”

Oh shit, I was standing right next to a preacher in a necktie!

Angmormon: Hey, you a Christian?

#9: No.

Angmormon: You aren’t a Christian, why are you reading this?

#9: I’m just curious.

Angmormon: What is your religion?

#9: I’m a Buddhist.

Angmormon: You believe that the world is coming to an end?

#9: No.

Angmormon: Yeh what do you think is going to happen?

#9: Well things go on as they always used to.

Angmormon: Yeh but we all know the sun’s going to turn into a red giant one day don’t we?

I thought yeh but I dun worry about that because the human race will be gone by then.

Then he passed me a booklet where he talked about his church, the church of the latter day Saints, and talked about his hero, the prophet Joseph Smith. That rang alarm bells in my mind. Joseph Smith was from New York, he said. Yeh. I thought, but he got cast out to Utah because they wanted that cracko as far from civilisation as possible.

He claimed to be a Maths major just like me, and I asked him what he does when he’s not evangelising. He said, nothing. He evangelises from 7 in the morning to 11 at night, and I detected an undertone of resentment as he told me that. That is cracko. I mentioned about having gone to Utah earlier this year to see the arches. He said wow that’s great. How did you know Mormons are from Utah? I said, I was curious. Actually I met a Mormon in Europe once, but I didn’t say that.

It’s unusual for people to be chatting in the MRT. Our MRT is very quiet compared to subways in angmoh countries when everybody is talking away. He left the station at City Hall.

Well thanks for the booklet. It will feed my intellectual curiosity but I’m just not interested in being a Christian, much less a Mormon. If anybody is interested in contacting him, his name is Elder Tuckfield and you can get him at 6455 6425.

There was a third book I considered bringing along before I left the house. It was a biography of a band called the Manic Street Preachers.