the streak

Nobody fucks in the old chapel anymore. No one keeps track, so nobody knows about the streak, but people have had sex in there at least once a year since the building was completed. 

This year that streak is in grave jeopardy. It’s already August, and the laypeople haven’t even held impure thoughts in the pews this year, much less gone all the way. 

Some people see the tendency to retroactively construct simple causal narratives from the vagaries of life as a flaw in human reasoning. But in this instance, I refuse to believe it’s a random coincidence that, as decades and decades passed, one could count on a steady stream of scamps to come in and defile this sacred place, as reliably as any other ritual, only for it to suddenly dry up all at once. It might not be the most important thing in the world, but it must be the symptom of some as-yet undetected malady, an effect of an unknown cause, it just has to mean something. I won’t let a streak like this mean nothing, because even if the underlying problem is addressed, effects of the year without sex in the chapel will reverberate through years to come. 

For example, once during The Streak, this couple got caught in the act by a priest. They obviously could never look that priest in the eyes again. Since they couldn’t go back to their regular church, they converted to Episcopalian. The couple quickly became a pillar of the local Episcopalian church, going on to serve as church treasurer and choir director, respectively. So I ask, what will become of the local Episcopalian community in this brave new Post-Streak world? 

That very same priest ended up losing the faith, in no small part thanks to a seed of doubt planted by walking in on the young future Episcopalian lovers in the throes of passion. They screamed “oh, God! oh my fucking God!” and the priest thought he heard Him say something back. God never said anything back to him. A few years later he accidentally died from autoerotic asphyxiation. His close friends and relatives, in his honor, started a charitable foundation for homeless and abandoned youth. Years on, will there be a child in need because of the end of The Streak?

In attempting to win you over regarding the importance of The Streak, I saved my simplest, yet most convincing evidence for last. The Streak created human life. Sex in that building has been responsible for 14 conceptions, two of which were aborted, and one of which perhaps should have been. 

Now, I’m sorry, but before you accost me for being so rude as to say a child should have been aborted, or try to paint me as some kind of anti-natalist, neo-Malthusian, here I’m only repeating her own words. 

Her mother hadn’t been ready for a child. Not for any particular reason, just because she wouldn’t and couldn’t ever be ready. She didn’t have it in her. Some people ought to stick to themselves, live a humdrum life and never bother anyone or anything, never disrupt the world’s precarious balance from the moment they’re brought into it till the moment they leave, simply because they haven’t the foresight, nor solemn sense of responsibility, that ought to govern someone who dares disturb the universe. 

“Hey, Alex, you there? Earth to Alex?” 

“Yeah, I’m here,” Alex responded. “Sorry.” 

The 1999 Nissan Quest carrying all their earthly belongings was rolling west at 57 miles per hour. The road was flat with a long, slow, rightward bend. She couldn’t tell what kind of crops surrounded the road, but the fields stretched out to the horizon. The field hands were bent over, methodically making their way down the rows. 

“Hey,” Alex said with a quizzical inflection.  

“Yeah?”

“Do you figure there’s really that much of a difference between starting a new life and killing yourself?” 

“Well yeah, we’re not dead.” 

“No shit sherlock. I just mean, it’s two sides of the same coin, right? Trying to start a new life is, like, the flipside of trying to end my old life?”

“I guess there’s something to that,” he replied, stroking his chin. “But if we’re just gonna kill ourselves, we wouldn’t need to find a motel, right?” 

“Yeah, that seems like a pretty big difference.”

They passed the chapel two hours ago and haven’t mentioned it since. It’s going to take a miracle to keep the streak alive.