In the summer of 1989 I took a two-week trip to Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York City with a group of about 20 theater students. At fifteen, I was the oldest kid in the group but still not nearly old enough to realize that I was a complete idiot.

Being too cool to hang with the younger kids I took the opportunity when I could to do a few things on my own. One afternoon, I stood in line at the TKTS booth on Times Square and bought last minute tickets to a matinee of Les Miserables.

After the show, being the drama fag I was, I waited by the stage door to meet the players. I stood there, program and pen in hand, greeting each actor as they stepped onto 53rd street into the afternoon sun. Everyone was very nice. Nicer than they had to be.

I submitted my formal resignation from the LDS church almost one year ago. Upon me telling her that I had done so, Donna replied in a way that I still don't fully understand.

"I'm not surprised and really, I've been wanting you to do it for some time now." This she said through a stream of tears. She was clearly upset. She wanted me to do it, but she was upset that I had. I was confused. I wasn't confused by her experiencing several seemingly at-odds emotions at once. What I was confused about was that she actually had wanted me to shed my Mormonism in an official way.

The question has run through my head thousands of times since that day last October, Why would Donna want me to reject that which she has tried so hard to get me to embrace? I have a few ideas. None of them very good.

"Warren Jeffs has been taken into custody by Las Vegas police. Details coming up...", said the voice on the radio.

"Holy crap!", said the voice in my head. I immediately called Donna to relay the news. I knew should would not have heard yet as this is the time of day she is busy getting little bodies out the door for school.

Her response was surprisingly tepid, "Oh."

My brother-in-law Christopher finally managed to knock his wife up. Thank God too since they've been trying to shoot one past the goalie for almost six months and she's pushing twenty-three and they've been married for 2 years already. This more-public-than-is-comfortable process even got so desperate that one woman in their ward suggested that it might not be too long before they should look into adopting.

All this fuss of course implies that her womanhood can only be validated by having children early and often. Otherwise she's nothing more than a priesthood-less vagina relegated to a life of sex not for procreation but -gasp- pleasure alone. The kind of woman destined to inspire the return of polygamy so her righteous husband can have a woman worthy of bearing his children. So... yeah, thank God for small miracles.

Now that she's a few weeks along she's begun craving strange and exotic foods. Christopher, being the good husband, runs to the store at all hours to fulfill the sudden and unusual cravings. I'm no stranger to this myself having made the half-awake excursion to 7-11 in my pajamas for Slurpees and beef jerky more than a few times.

A few nights ago I noticed while flipping through the on-screen cable guide that The History Channel was to air a 2-hour show, The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It was to air that night at ten o'clock. I was giddy.

I am not particularly interested in Egyptian antiquities specifically, though all aspects of history are of interest to me. In this case I hoped that by innocently tuning in and watching that Donna would happen to recognize a few of the more-than-coincidental similarities between the Book of the Dead papyrus and the published-as-Mormon-scripture, Book of Abraham Facsimiles. And while I hold no false illusion that exposure to this information would cause her to once and for all shed her Pioneer Birth Control^tm I did hope that a dose of objectivity might prep her mind for the truth of the matter at a later date.

The truth of course being that the papyrus Joseph Smith claimed had been written by Abraham, even "by his own hand, upon papyrus", was nothing more than the most common burial document in all of ancient Egypt. A document that since the time of Joseph Smith has been correctly translated and which has nothing whatsoever to do with Abraham, Christianity, Mormonism, the pre-mortal existence, or any of that other nonsense.

In my family there is a famous story, "The Miracle of the Blessing". It is more of an anecdote, really. The whos, wheres, and whens have long since been lost but it re-surfaces once in a while despite it's total lack of subtance and credibility. Let's assume for a moment that the events really happened for a moment while I regail you with the story.

It is told that a family member, sometime in late 1800's Utah, received a Patriarchal Blessing from a local Patriarch. She was less than pleased with the blessing and felt some sort of error must have been made on the part of the Patriarch. She fasted and prayed and, some weeks later, received her answer. She was to return to the offending Patriarch and demand a new blessing.

This she did. The Patriarch reluctantly agreed and arrangments were made. Boy, golly, was my ancestor taught a lesson when the Patriarch, through divine inspiration, delivered an identical blessing to the original. "I guess this is the blessing the Lord needed her to have", says my mother when recounting the events.

One Sunday, not long ago, my seven-year-old daughter came home from church complaining that her foot hurt. I asked her what she thought the cause of the problem was.

"Last week, my Primary teacher had us put a pebble in our shoe for the whole class."

"What?!? Why?"

The vacation this past weekend included a day trip to Fossil Butte National Monument. Fossil Butte is a 50-million year old lake bed. The Visitors' Center has hundreds of fossils on display. It also has an impressive exhibit showing the timeline of the Earth.

The Earth is 4500 million years old, according to their information. Life began 700 million years ago. The fossil record within this one National Monument shows advanced life on this planet 50 million years old.

We are able to know the age of these fossils with unprecedented accuracy in this location because of a wide array of age-indicators. Carbon dating is of course used. But there are also volcanic markers in the now-exposed layers of the Earth's crust. These markers allow a given layer of fossil evidence to be dated in comparison to known volcanic activity in the area.

I'm on vacation this weekend. I use the word vacation strictly in the technical sense. I won't be at home or at work, I'll get paid for my time off and I'll come home more tired than when I left. In no other way is this a vacation. You see, I'll be at the lake house with the in-laws. That's sure to make for good material for next week.

See, my in-laws are a non-stop wrecking crew. They are the dominant force everywhere they go. There are just so damn many of them. A virtual self-contained, mobile, Mormon ward of their own. They are all loud and opinionated and act like they own the place wherever they are. It is like being a Jew at a ward dinner.

This includes my family's lake house. Somehow they always seem to act like I'm the visitor since there are more of them than me. That means they dominate what is on television, they dominate what games are played, and THEY set the Sunday rules.

I post a lot of my frustrations here because this is generally my only outlet to do so. I say shit here I can't say anywhere else. Well, that's not exactly accurate. I can, and do, say them in therapy. What I mean is that this is a place where, by sharing these thing publicly, I can feel validated by making certain thoughts and feelings real.

I just want to be loved, ok?

Don't mistake my writing as representative of the whole me. Just because I bitch on here doesn't mean all I ever do anywhere is bitch. I am a happy person with lots of moments I count as victories. My days are generally filled with positive experiences and most of my life is how I have long hoped it could be.

Sally Field is hot. She always has been. Gidget, The Flying Nun (What is it about nuns that is SO hot?), Smokey and the Bandit, the braless Norma Rae, Sybil ("I want to be YOUR little girl!"). Hot, hot, hot. Who cares if she's older than my mother? She's hot.

Now, I find myself once again predictably aroused by her in an ad for an osteoporosis medicine. She keeps talking about how she told her girlfriend how hard it makes your bones. It then cuts to a shot of her eating a piece of fruit with her eyes closed in slow motion.

And then, as if I weren't aroused enough, she says the name of the product, "Boniva". Gawd, could it get any better than this? "Boniva", she says again matronly. This is some great advertising.

I finally did it. Today, after a couple of years of regular coffee drinking, I finally asked someone at work to show me how to use the coffee maker.

I have appreciated the kindness of a few people in the office who regularly make the coffee. Occasionally however the morning coffee is gone by the time I get around to wanting a cup or, more rarely, I want a second cup and the pot is spent.

I have, on these occasions, feigned attempts to brew a pot by getting the bag of beans out of the fridge and glancing at the packaging. I'll take the grinder and filter basket out of the maker and look at them for a while. Then, I'll put it all back and give up. They never taught us how to do this at Mormon-sponsored scout camp.

I never suffered from allergies as a kid. I remember hearing the term "hay fever" in movies and on TV. I had friends who complained about seasonal allergies but always felt it was something of a literary convention, something the folks at Warner Brothers made up so Jerry could make Tom sneeze himself to death on a dash of pepper. That is until a few years ago.

I was with the family at Lagoon Amusement Park one Saturday when it happened. I was on the skyride with my oldest daughter when the intense spinning and vertigo hit. I panicked. I felt my throat swell and itch. My nose filled. I went straight to the doctor's office. I thought I was having a panic attack. Once the doctor saw the redness and fluid in my ears he recognized my symptoms as seasonal allergies.

He prescribed an antihistamine and the symptoms subsided. Since that day though. I have suffered every summer. My nose clogs, my ears stop up, and my throat itches so badly I am tempted to remedy it with a Dremel tool and 80 grid sandpaper.

Donna is still an active, practicing Mormon. She is a Cub Scout Den Leader in her ward. At a dutch oven dinner she held for the scouts and their parents at our house I was approached by one of the dads.

"So, Pete I've been asked to ask you if you'll help with the ward road show this year"

"No."

Donna called me today to apologize about the phone call on Saturday. There's been a lot of tension between us since then and I was good to hear her be honest in her apology. During the conversation she talked about her work in therapy to find her "authentic self". I was glad to hear they were working on that as it was that path through recovery that led me fully out of Mormonism for good.

Once I had observed myself objectively and allowed myself to question who I was and what I felt, I recognized that my faith was founded on nothing more than tradition. I observed that I didn't believe in Mormonism. That observation made my exit pretty swift.

About an hour after we talked I sent her a text message:

Most nights are like last night. I lay in bed, perfectly still, as near the edge as I can. The clock says 2:21. I'm not sleeping despite having lied perfectly still and silent for 4 hours. My brain is shouting but my mouth is silent.

"I can't be intimate with a woman who doesn't love me! I can't be intimate with a woman who doesn't trust me! I can't be intimate with a woman who doesn't care for me!"

My therapist describes Donna as a "highly sexual woman burdened by guilt by her family of origin and religious upbringing". This guilt has crippled her. The problem is, she doesn't know it. She doesn't believe it.

As I looked west down Young Street I saw the familiar blue Lincoln Continental turn the corner and approach the Temple Lot. I looked nervously across the street at the restored, nineteenth century two-story duplex where Elder Black, the senior missionary who had been assigned as my companion that day, had gone home for lunch. It was raining that day and we hadn't had any visitors to the site so leaving me there alone for a while was no big deal.

Well, not for him. I felt as though Satan would pull me into a chasm in the Earth for being without my companion. The senior missionaries were a little more relaxed about the whole deal.

Besides, he was only going to be a few minutes because we were expecting important company. Elder Richard G. Scott of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was in Nauvoo for the day and the mission president, President Burgess, would be bringing Elder Scott to the Temple Lot any minute now. The last thing I wanted was to be caught alone, without my companion.

Yesterday morning I arose at 8. A little early for a Saturday but I wanted to be awake and warmed up for the call back audition at 10. I felt prepared for the most part. I was also a little nervous.

I told Donna I would try to be back in time to leave with her to the family reunion we had planned for noon. I wasn't sure how long the audition would take though.

I got to the theater early, around 9:20, so I could sit in the parking lot and rehearse with the backup CD I had made the night before from the vocal sides the theater had provided. My voice was cold and hoarse. A little early for some of these notes.

I first went to the temple on my first wedding anniversary. June 22, 1994. I was nervous and excited. I had promised Donna a year earlier that I would take her to the temple as soon as we could.

We would have been married there in the first place were it not for the church's strict ban on mutual masturbation and rabbit-like fucking. Instead, we were married in a church gym.

That day I also remember the overwhelming feeling of faintness and hunger from the 24 hour fast my Bishop had proposed to prepare my soul for the day's events.

Saturday, November 10, 2001 was the last day I wore the LDS church-approved, church-issued, regulation, knee length, temple garments.

I had not given Donna any indication that I was having a crisis of faith. But I was. It came clear to me the previous Sunday sitting in church that I didn't agree, in my heart, with almost everything that was being taught that day.

I didn't believe God was interested in regulating what I ate, what I wore, and how I spent my money. I didn't believe that Adam and Eve were the original parents of all of mankind a mere 6000 years before. I didn't believe that all of life on Earth, save one family and two of every animal, were destroyed in a global flood.

A few weeks ago, when I heard the theater where I used to perform regularly was going to produce Little Shop of Horrors, I immediately emailed Steve Goldman. Steve is the Artistic Director at the theater and a good pal.

I wrote:

...read the rest...