Have you ever achieved an instant of sheer perfection?  Known that one true moment of bliss that stands out like a beacon against the backdrop of your weary, humdrum life.  Last week, I experienced such a moment for the first time in…forever. Admittedly I’d had a couple glasses of wine.  I probably shouldn’t have been driving but what can you do?  It was 10:30, I’d spent the evening with old friends, relived old tales and reminded myself of who I really was.  I actually felt better than I had in ages.

The valet brought the Prius around. Fond memories of an old convertible surfaced as I drove home on the 70-degree October night in my sensible car.  I rolled the windows down. Remember what the wind used to feel like blowing through your hair?  Nice. So, what’s the song for tonight, I wondered? I scrolled through Artists on the iTouch and landed on MFSB. It was a corny song, “Love is the Message,” but I have the 11 minute 34 second, original 12” version from 1973.  This long version starts to break at about 6 minutes and 23 seconds, suddenly transforming itself from a corny AM pop song into the greatest jam of all time.

The saxes blared and the bass kept my head bobbing in time…it took me to another place.  In my head, I was suddenly back in my 1976 British Racing Green Triumph Spitfire.  Equipped with a state-of-the-art cassette player, that car took me through many nights in the early 90s, just driving along Mulholland, wind whipping through my hair, “LA Woman” blasting.

But that night last week, it was the sound of Philadelphia that got me in the zone.  I threaded my way up the 405, zipping through traffic like the smoothest of racecar drivers.  My head bounced and my left hand tapped the outside of the driver’s side door as I changed lanes, flying around all the cars in my way.  A heavy silver ring on my middle finger kept time on the metal, matching the snares, beat for beat.   I looked left, I looked right, but no one else was feeling the groove.  It didn’t bother me, I didn’t need anyone else.

As I transitioned off the 405 into the valley, I started to play chicken with a big shiny tour bus.  I first caught a glimpse as it pulled ahead, all silver-sleek, windows tinted black and chilly.  Then I pulled ahead, grooving in my seat, barely acknowledging the game we were involved in.  Traffic suddenly slowed to a crawl.

I caught sight of the bus pulling up beside me.  I glanced at the iTouch…the song was at 8:55…I didn’t want it to fade into its inevitable goodbye.  I was having too much fun singing and clapping my hands.  The bus pulled up next to me as we slowed to a near stop.  The back window creaked open.

“Hey,” a raspy voice called out. I looked up, nodding in time to the beat. “What are you listening to?” I shook my head. I can’t hear you. I cranked the song up higher and pulled ahead.  Traffic inched forward.  The bus pulled forward.  “What is that?” he yelled from the back window.  I couldn’t see anyone, just heard the voice.  “MFSB? Love is the Message?”  I yelled into the air.  I inched ahead, then a few minutes later, the bus pulled up next to me again. “12 inch version?” the voice inquired.

Just then, the traffic in front of me narrowed down to one lane.  The bus was forced behind me as we crept forward slowly.  The song was reaching its peak somewhere around 10:42, and I wondered who this person could possibly be on the bus.  No one likes this shit.  I’m pretty much the only person on this planet, short of a 60-year-old Motown backup singer, who actually knows, or cares about MFSB anymore.  Weird.

The traffic pulled forward and I soon saw the reason for the delay. A black Jeep Cherokee sat squarely in the middle of the fast lane.  A guy stood next to the median, yelling frantically into a cell phone.  Then I saw a white Range Rover, spun around and flipped on its back.  Two young girls clung to each other behind it, as another guy tried to console them.  This has just happened, it is pretty clear…no cops have come and the drivers are trying to make sense of the whole scenario.

Traffic cleared just past the accident.  I stayed right, heading into the valley via the 101 and the bus passed me.  A hand pushed its way out of the window, gave me a thumbs up and then a wave.  I laughed and waved back as the bus continued straight.

The song ended, and my shuffle made a very good choice – Joe Bataan’s version of “The Bottle.” Way better than Gil Scott Heron’s, or even Paul Weller’s, the salsa standard picked up the beat and piloted me along to my exit.  Visions of myself dancing on some long-ago dance floor kept me going past Coldwater, then past Laurel Canyon.

The warm wind in my hair, accompanied by the song I’ve listened to a thousand times, made me keep going past my exit.  I didn’t want to return to my world of deadlines, mortgages and responsibility. I wanted to go back, back to the days of getting lost in a song…listening to music for hours…memorizing lyrics and dancing till I dropped.   I kept driving till I realized if I kept going, I’d end up downtown.  Not where I wanted to be late on a Thursday night.  I got off in Hollywood and turned around.

Who was the voice that spoke to me from the bus?  Did he really exist?  Or did I just manufacture him? For some reason, he was just what I needed at that moment in time.  A connection.  An impossibility come true.  My iTouch moved on to a Genesis song, not at all what I wanted to hear.  The mood was suddenly broken and the feeling was gone.  But it happened, and it was a perfect musical moment on a perfect California night (even if I was in a Prius). That was enough for me…

I grew up in a house with an absence of God.  Wait, that is not entirely true. I once, late at night, stood outside my mother’s bedroom door and heard her call out to him. “Oh god, oh god,” she said.  My dad often cursed “Jesus H. Christ” when he was pissed about something, so in a way god was around, but as a family we did not follow him.  I did ask my mother once why we didn’t go to church or worship god, and she told me the journey was mine, I needed to discover on my own what to believe.  So, here is the story of my journey.

When I was six, my very best friend was a Jewish girl named Rachel.  I spent most of my playtime at her house, and because her mother made way better snacks than my mother, naturally I was attracted to her home over mine. Rachel was the first person to tell me about God.  She told me that God made the world and people, and that he lived in the sky on a cloud somewhere and watched over us, and when we died we got to go up to that cloud and be with him and watch everyone down here on Earth.  I thought this was pretty cool…I couldn’t wait to die and get to that cloud.  She also told me that Jews don’t believe in Jesus.  That was fine by me, I didn’t know much about who Jesus was, so what did I care if Jews didn’t believe in him?

But then Rachel told me that Jews don’t believe in Santa Clause.  That statement made me stand up in protest.  What kind of crazy religion was this?  No Santa? No white-bearded man riding on a sleigh bringing me presents?  It was then that I rejected Judaism and, sadly, I also rejected Rachel too.  I just couldn’t be friends with a non-Santa believer.  Later, much to my horror and sadness, I found out that Rachel was right, there was no Santa.  It was not the last time I was duped, but finding out I had been lied to about Santa, did make me wary of future stories that I would hear.  I would never take anything at face value again and I would always make sure I dug a little deeper.

My next encounter with religion was in the sixth grade. We began studying Greek mythology in social studies and I loved it.  All those glamorous Gods with petty human emotions in charge of their own piece of the universe.  Gods mingling with humans, creating part-human, part-god offspring, having fights with other gods over trivial stuff and getting into all sorts of trouble…it was intoxicating.  My favorite was of course the big guy, Zeus, the head honcho of all the other Gods.  He had that cool thunderbolt that he hurled at liars, and even though he was married he had numerous affairs.  Hypocrite?  Hurling his thunderbolt at liars and than cheating on his wife, well yes, but I later learned I learned that hypocrisy ran rampant in most religions, and most Gods are hypocrites.  At least Zeus was a sexy Greek god.

At the end of the unit on Greek mythology, after I was completely hooked on these Greek Gods, I asked my teacher where they went?  How come we don’t follow these Gods anymore?  He told me that it was only mythology; stories made up for people to explain the Universe.  They were not real Gods.  People stopped believing when they realized it was ridiculous and replaced them with the real God.  I thought, bummer that these Gods weren’t the real ones – they were so cool.

God did not come up e again until college.  My next-door neighbor was a fun-loving gal named Mary.  She was a big girl, who had a big laugh, a big heart, was a big drinker and was way big on god.   (She eventually quit school to become a nun.)   After drinking one night it came out that I didn’t care much about God, and Mary freaked.  From then on she spent many evenings listening to Amy Grant crying and praying for my soul.  I was touched that this new friend would worry so much about me, so I thought perhaps I should look into this God thing and pick out a religion that would best suit my sinful lifestyle.

The following semester I signed up for “World Religions” and assured a much-relieved Mary that I was going to find me some God.  There was a problem.  There are 19 major religions in the world, which are divided into 240 large religious groups, and there are 34,000 different Christian religious groups alone.  How was a girl to choose?  And more important, what if a girl chose wrong?  I mean what if I spent a lifetime following a Christian life, and turned out God was really a Hindu?  I would have wasted my religious life, and pissed God off to boot.  But I had promised Mary I’d find my way to heaven so I figured I should look into some of them a bit deeper.

I started with the most popular one (I always like to be with the popular crowd anyway) – Christianity.  Because there are so many different Christian religions, and all of them seem to be at odds with each other, I thought I’d better just read the Bible and from that I would find out which one was the right one.  After all, the Bible is the “word” of God so he ought to know which one is right.    I am honest enough to say that what I actually read was the Cliff notes, that bible book is big!  Fortunately it does have Cliff’s notes!

I got into a few of the chapters of the bible and found out that God is jealous, petty and just plain mean.  He brutally orders the murder and rape of thousands of people, and even sends his son (who is himself) on a death mission to save a bunch of people who might not want or need to be saved.   I’m sorry, I need a religion with a nice God who wants people to love and take care of each other, not one that orders death to anyone who doesn’t worship only him.

Judaism was out, partly due to the whole Santa thing, and partly due to the whole mean God thing that the Christians worship.  That also wiped out Mormon, Lutheran, Episcopalian and all the other various Christian sects for me.  All of them ultimately worshiped the mean God.   I also read parts of the Koran, and unfortunately that God, who is also somehow the same God as the Christian God, well he is mean too.  Sorry no mean Gods for me.

I like science and a religion based on scientific principals sounded good to me so I looked into Scientology.  Unfortunately the only science in Scientology is the trillion of nuked aliens that were boxed up and then placed into living humans and the only way to for a person to be healthy is to take a personality test and then spend thousands of dollars to get the aliens out.  At the time I didn’t have the thousands to spend, and well it was just too crazy to believe.

I also looked a bit into Hinduism and Buddhists.  They seem to be more flexible religions and you can worship as many or as little gods as you want in the Hindu religion and Buddhists don’t believe in God at all.  Here is the problem for me.  Reincarnation.  Frankly the idea of coming back and relieving life over and over again, (although maybe next time in a skinny body), until I got it right was not very appealing and frankly sounded exhausting.    Also, what if I got demoted and came back as a chicken?  The truth is I have no consciousness of the millions of years before I was alive, I don’t need consciousness of the millions of years after I am dead.

All of these religions seemed so crazy and illogical and frankly none of them provided any proof that any of these Gods actually existed.  I got duped with Santa; I needed real proof of God.  So, the day came when I had to break it to Mary that there was no God.   Needless to say she didn’t believe me.  “You can’t think too hard about all the ins and outs of religion you have to just trust, you have to have faith,” she told me.

Here is the problem, as I see it, with “blind faith.” If someone came to me and said I must buy a house, I must live in this house for my whole life, but I can’t look it over too hard, and I can’t fix anything that is wrong with it, I just have to have “faith” that it is a sound house, that I can live with the things that are wrong with it – I would say “no way.” I’m going to have this thing inspected, I’m going to look in the basement, check out the roof, and if there are things wrong with it, I’m going to fix it.  I would never buy a house on blind faith; I would expect proof that it was a good deal.  Yet I am expected to give over my life and soul to some god based on faith, with no proof that he was really there.  Sorry, no way.

Mary was sad that she had failed my soul and she continued to pray for me (which was nice) and I was sad that I disappointed her.  But truthfully I was sad that she also disappointed me.  That she would not look into this God thing, but continued to rely on nothing but faith.

People are horrified when I tell them I don’t believe in God.  How do you have morals? How do you live without knowing the meaning of life?  How do you cope with no promise of a glorious afterlife?  How can you deal with all the questions left unanswered by science?  Here is how.  I stand at the side of the Grand Canyon and I am awed by its beauty and the millions of years it took for it to get that way.  I can become wonderfully overwhelmed with the knowledge that the Universe is a delicate unpredictable thing and am amazed that it all works, well sort of.    That I, as insignificant as I am in this universe get to spend this brief amount of time conscious of it and I get to share it with the others who are here with me during the same time as me.    I find joy in the fact that the atoms that make up me are the same as the atoms that make up the flowers, the trees, the stars and all the other things that occupy this universe with me.  I love the fact that millions of years ago my precious dog, Dottie, and I shared some common animal beginning before evolution sent our species on our separate paths.

This is it, this is my life. I am only given one chance to enjoy it, to do something with it, it should not ever be squandered because it was such a fluke that I came into being.  I will have an afterlife, in the lives of my children and future grandchildren and in the lives of the other people that I have touched and who have touched me.

And no, the many scientists whose books I’ve read and whose lectures I’ve attended do not have all the answers, and would never try to provide them without the needed proof, and they are not arrogant enough to say that they do.   They would never throw down their test tubes and say, “ Shit, I don’t know how this particular thing works, so it must be this way because of magic.”

I am honest enough to say that there are times when I wonder, what if I’m wrong about the whole no God thing?  I could find myself dead, following that white light in the sky with my deceased loved ones cheering me on, and when I get to the end I could say, “I’m sorry I was wrong, I should have known you’d be real, sitting on your cloud with a thunderbolt in your hand, Zeus, could you find it in your heart to forgive me?” And I think he would.