I decided, apropos of nothing, to stop off in Lancaster County to see the Amish.

I’ve kinda wanted to do this for a while. I have somewhat of a personal connection with Amish / Mennonite groups. If you don’t know what those are, watch this 3 1/2 minute documentary and then come back.

As you may or may not know, I was homeschooled growing up. In my experience, and according to the data, most people homeschool their kids because they want to indoctrinate their children with religion, and to keep their kids away from learning those awful, evil ‘facts’ that are taught in school – like that the earth isn’t 6,000 years old, or that evolution by natural selection exists, or the origins of the universe – really anything that doesn’t align with their interpretation of the Bible.

Because of this, there’s a lot of demand for ‘educational’ materials that weave together standard childhood education with religious bullshit. Abeka is probably the most well-known for this, but Rod and Staff is another, which also has a lot of fiction aimed at these Amish / Mennonite groups that make up a large percentage of their audience. As some of you are likely aware, we didn’t own a television when I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to watch movies or TV, or listen to any music that wasn’t Christian, and our parents regularly forbade us from hanging out with our friends once they learned that our friends occasionally used bad words, despite the fact that my father swore prolifically (basically every time he was angry, and he was angry six or seven days per week) and every goddamn motherfucking ass bitch tits hell cocksucker cunting curse word I ever learned I learned directly from him – so we weren’t even able to have friends, since they didn’t arise to the exacting standards my parents demanded.

That left my siblings and I to books, and we were all voracious readers. However, my parents were also BIG into censorship, and would regularly ban any book that they felt didn’t teach good, strong, Christian morals. We weren’t allowed to read stuff like:

• the Garfield comic strip, because Garfield is a glutton, and that’s a Sin.
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond because it had the word ‘witch’ in the title. Also ‘The Witches‘ by Roald Dahl for the same reason.
• The Berenstain Bears because Papa Bear is generally portrayed as an idiot, and it’s inappropriate to read books that don’t show the proper respect for parents. I shit. You not.
• I remember my mother explaining why we weren’t allowed to read one horse series – it was because one of the characters in it had divorced parents, and divorce is not okay, per the Bible, so we couldn’t read that story. This example became particularly hilarious when, a few years later, my parents got divorced

I’m probably forgetting at least a dozen or so examples, but point being, we needed books, and so our house bookshelves quickly loaded up with several dozen titles written by the Amish and the Mennonites starring the A & Ms and I quickly began learning more about that weird, weird slice of life. For example, the Amish believe it’s wrong to depict human beings in images (they don’t like it when you take their picture) so in the illustrations for their books, they don’t put in human beings. So in a story where the characters have a tea party with their dolls, there aren’t any humans there – it’s just the table and chairs and doll and tea. Also, they don’t put faces on their dolls, so it’s this terrifying abomination, but anyway.

Then, when I was maybe eight or nine, my family started attending the Old German Baptist Church in Pasco, WA. While neither Amish nor Mennonite, there were a lot of similarities. The Old German Baptists (GBs) had electricity and drove cars, but they didn’t believe in television or radios or music or riding bicycles (really) or really in anything related to having fun. All of their car dashboards had a giant gaping hole where they had torn out the radio / CD player after buying it. Their hardwood church pews are gender-segregated (women on the left, men on the right). The women all have to dress like this:

And the men have to dress like this:

So basically like the Amish. Enough so that it takes both hands to count the number of times I’ve been asked, “Hey, is your family Amish?” and I had to explain that no, we just attended a weird, culty church.

Anyway, the point of that lengthy, bitter preamble / trip down memory lane is that I’ve read maybe 75 books about these groups, and experienced it (to a certain degree) firsthand. The Amish, of course, are at 98 on the Crazy Cult. Mennonites are at maybe 90, the German Baptists are around 85. The Amish are as hardcore as it gets where you can actually experience it. (Levels 99 are the end of the world cults, and level 100 is Jonestown.) But I’ve never been there. So I went!

The only downside of the trip is that it was absolutely pissing down rain the entire time, making visibility a bitch. Still, I visited an Amish farmhouse, saw a number of them driving around in their horse and buggies, and went on a couple tours.

The house tour was fun, because the tour guide sucked, plus it was a tour group of one (me) and he kept trying to crack jokes that were clearly intended for a group of tourists and I didn’t find them funny. I also (probably) kept throwing off his rhythm because I’d ask questions about something that I knew and wanted further clarification on and he’d be all “Oh that’s actually later in my tour” or “wow that’s a really good question” and I’d be like “I know, I told you I know a decent amount about this cult” and so on.

The driving tour was a bit better, even though it had this weird, voyeuristic vibe to it. It almost felt like the times in American history where we’d exhibit nonwhite people in zoos as attractions. You’re quite literally sitting on a tour bus as the guide is describing the Amish way of life and how it differs from our own, and how the Amish teenagers court each other, and it’s not too unlike listening to David Attenborough describe a mating ritual on BBC Planet Earth. Like, I like learning about different cultures and how people live and the things that are important to them. But it also rarely involves actual people who didn’t consent to be a part of it. To be clear, the tour itself was very respectful, and hosted by a guy who grew up with the Amish and knew a lot of them, and the Amish shop we stopped at was run by a guy who is in with this tour company and super fucking happy to have a steady supply of tourists stopping by to buy his jams and jellies, but the rest of the places we stopped by were just regular Amish people and not affiliated with it, and who probably (I surmise) if they glanced out the window, thought, “There’s that fucking Amish tour bus again” that they see go by their house, four times a day, every single day of their miserable itchy lives.

*Itchy because their clothing is hella itchy

*Miserable because like any culty Christian group, they have a massive, MASSIVE problem with rape and incest.

Anyway. Pittsburgh.

My god this city is dope. Easily one of the most photogenic cities in the world.

Once I arrived, I needed to order a later dinner to my hotel room, and there’s nothing surpassing Primanti Brothers.

I explored the city a bit, and stopped in at the Carnegie Museum, which (IMHO) is one of the best museums in the world.

Obviously not just because of the rather ridiculous number of exposed boobs, but it was make me want to write a scientific paper analyzing exposed boobs in classical art and seeing which is the most frequent (and potentially why). Based on nothing at all, I would assume left boob always wins, but we really need some data on this.

I also got my first COVID test today, which was fun. The place offered rapid testing online but once I arrived they were like “yeah, we don’t offer that shit”. I had to wait for an hour out in my car, which was initially annoying until I remembered I have a copy of Tenet on my phone and so I watched the first hour of Tenet. The nurse took my vitals over the phone, then, when I walked in

Nurse: Wait, you’re actually XYZ weight?

Me: Um….yeah.

Nurse: Wow. Well, you carry it well. Would not have thought that.

I….guess…that’s flattering? Hey, you’re fat, but I would not have guessed you are THAT fat by looking at you, because you hide your fatness well? Or something?