Funny things happen when you're forced to spend vast chunks of your childhood in church. People react to it in different ways. I couldn't stand it. The polished grain of the pews, the endless ritual of sitting and standing at different parts of mass, the holding hands during the Our Father, the way my parents would flick me in the head whenever I got too restless -- it all adds up to a visceral memory-haze thing. It was this black hole at the center of the weekend -- this fugue state I'd go into for an hour or so every Sunday morning, mentally picking apart movie plots or Danzig riffs while my body did the robotic worship-performance stuff that the ritual demanded. I still go into a state of anxiety whenever I get near a church. The way people interact there -- even if it's an entirely genuine expression of real community -- feels, on some level, like a forced ordeal. And yet all that time in those houses of worship trained my brain, on some reptile level, to contemplate the infinite, to fixate on morality and devotion and transcendence. It's in me. It'll always be in me.