Church Camp: Part I

church camp while shopping with their mother on “good friday” the kid got caught shoplifting & after being dragged into the secret room with the plain-clothed cop & after totaling up what had been stolen & after the whole pretending-to-cry-buckets episode failed to succeed in gaining any kind of leniency on behalf of the embarrassed & fuming mad christian mother, the two left the store with a new order arising--- the child in question was to be grounded, was to be swatted like a fly who’d taken too long to run off with that itty bitty piece of fruit, was to have their hair cut & was to be twisted & shaped in a last attempt to make them a good christian soldier--- so off to church camp they went that summer on the tail end of the grounding stint which on top of accomplishing nothing only drove that wonderful nail of disbelief deep into the face of that fictional character who didn’t die for anyone’s “sins” who didn’t get “resurrected” & who didn’t fly on up to “heaven” so that he could “come back to judge the living & the dead”--- no, this child’s punishment did the exact opposite of what was supposed to be accomplished, for church camp (an isolated cult compound buried out in the middle of the ****ing woods) was full of kids who’d been sentenced by their parents for lack of any better attempt at discipline & once the parents were gone, kids were kids, just as they had been before, regardless of the few truly brainwashed zombies who stumbled around all day with their “holy book” in hand, pretending that their hormones weren’t driving them insane, while the others who had smuggled in some pot, condoms & liquor, did their best to keep those comforts of home life relevant amidst the insanity of what spun round their heads for a week like a gnat just asking to be obliterated against a wall with the palm of a hand growing ever more angry as time went by.