This is gonna sound so fake it’s ridiculous, but at least it’s short. This was about a decade ago when I was about to go to college, so that factored into the setting, but the other part? No idea. Basically, I was riding around my college campus on the back of a raptor, saddle and all. I was having a blast, and everybody thought it was so cool that I had a badass dinosaur to ride around on, because obviously nobody else did. That was the whole dream, zero plot, nobody got eaten, just me and my raptor buddy having a grand ol’ time stomping around campus.

For me, it was kind of like taking off a pair of sunglasses you forgot you were wearing. Faith tends to put a tint on everything that after a while just becomes normal until you take off the glasses and see what the world actually looks like and you realize the sky IS blue and the grass IS green.

I was born into a religious family and on the outskirts of any serious involvement with a church…I never really “felt” anything as a kid or ever later despite summer camps and bible school, so it was just this weekly burden and this unnecessary layer of thought to wade through in everything I did, so when I started working my way out of religion it was a massive weight off my shoulders.

I still consciously do good where I can, still give to others in need, etc…I still try to be as kind and empathetic to people as I can regardless of their beliefs, but now with the knowledge that I’m doing it just because it’s what I believe is right to do, not because it’s tied to a rule book.

Hottest? Last summer, driving home, Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex area. The A/C in the car I was driving was busted, it had zero window tint and a plexiglas roof panel so there was no shade whatsoever. The area was getting that extremely dry late-summer heat that area gets during made worse by the heat dome effect over the city. The actual temp was likely 108°-110°F, but the “feels like” was somewhere in the upper 120°s. Add to that the fact that the wind itself was literally hot, and there I was driving down the highway with my windows down cooking in what basically amounted to a convection oven. I ended up finding that I was actually cooler if I rolled the windows up. When I got home my shirt was totally soaked and as a result, it has the shadow of a seatbelt burned into it.

Coldest? Around -20°F in central Utah during winter at about 3AM during an impromptu snowball fight in the apartment complex I lived in. Zero wind and about a foot of snow on the ground. Again, surprisingly dry, so it was legitimately PLEASANT with a ski jacket, long johns and jeans, when compared to a humid, windy winter as warm as 32°F anywhere else in the same gear, but definitely the coldest temperature I’ve seen by the numbers.

Imagine believing in a guy who allegedly told as many people as he could to spread tolerance and acceptance for literally everyone, then going and preaching the exact opposite while saying they’re doing it because he said so. Incredible.