Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

So there I am riding the T to my internship, holding a copy of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, a book for my Psychopathology class that is just as uplifting as it sounds. I sit down next to a perfectly ordinary woman. She glances at the title and says, “There’s not one word of truth in that thing.”

“Kinda pushy of her,” I think to myself.

She then notices a quote on the cover from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. “I’m pretty sure she’s a Christian,” she says. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the landmark On Death and Dying and who passed away in 2004, was in fact unable to follow her own advice and died a bitter New Ager. These facts, however, would not be visited in the conversation.

“Humm…” I think to myself.

Then she kept talking. She wasn’t totally coherent, but I gathered that she was raised Jewish and converted to Christianity when she had a vision of Jesus in her late twenties. I also gathered that she was Slightly Crazy, and so I did what I do whenever I encounter someone who is Slightly Crazy: I nod politely and hope they’ll get distracted by someone else. No such luck on this one though. I prepared to suffer until the T hit Arlington station, six long stops away. Then she said something about eating pages from the Bible.

“What?” I said.

Apparently, in order to stave off negative emotions, bad luck, and of course, Satan, this Slightly Crazy lady habitually ingests pages of the Good Book. Sure enough, in her left hand was a crumpled printing of the New Testament, most of it clearly ripped out and presumably eaten. She claims that the power she receives from this practice works better than any antidepressant she’s ever been on.

“Just go to the Barnes and Noble in Kenmore, get yourself a little mini Bible (the only kind good for eating, it seems), and have some mixed with water or in a sandwhich,” she says enthusiastically,” it’ll change your life.”