I don’t know what it is about me that seems to attract Jesus freaks; the best theory I’ve been able to dredge up is that my posture on a micro-subtle level somehow emits a constant “lapsed Catholic, ripe for retry!” signal in a sort of dog-whistle range that only evangelicals can sense. Well, someone sensed it Friday night as I walked out of the Sunflower grocery store on Trop and Pecos.

The scene: Across the parking lot, Christians from ministry Something Or Other had laid an elaborate trap for passersby consisting of free car washes and teenage girls rapping about Christ on a makeshift stage. Fanning out from that were the ground troops, collaring strip-mall pedestrians into The God Talk. Not surprisingly, some of the churchbots had trickled across the lot to the front of the grocery store, where they were stuffing yellow fliers into people’s hands and boathooking exiting customers into all manner of Christy gab. Great, I thought. Great. The thing I sort of strangely admire about religious freaks is how they have few qualms about dispensing with notions such as personal space and people’s little force-fields of public privacy; they’re ballsy that way; they just roll right up, eyes eerily agleam, and start laying down His Word all over your uncomfortable uninterest.

Between that and my status as a missionary-magnet, though, I knew I was seriously in for it, and no sooner did I think this than a Christ-man and a Christ-woman locked onto me and began the beeline. In fact - and here’s the weird thing — in the microsecond it took for them to reach me, I had already done so much groanful anticipating that I had already mentally rummaged through the typical well-mannered responses that just don’t work with these people - the smiling “I’ll pass, thanks,” the curt “Sorry!,” the unsmiling forward lockstep that works on, say, Strip smutters but never these folks - and summarily dismissed them as ineffective.

So - wrought with so much bizarre pre-emptive frustration that I almost felt bad saying this - I disgorged from my chest a primitive, unthinking response that, for once, managed to stop them dead in their tracks.

Screwing up my face with a expression of aggrieved surfeit - like a person waddling out of a buffet who’s immediately offered a chocolate cake - I blurted out as though from the depths of gustatory overload, “Oh god, please. No more Christ. Please! ENOUGH CHRIST ALREADY!”

Amen. They were stunned just long enough for me to load my groceries and start my car.