Anyone else ever get these random flashes of long-buried inconsequential memory?

For a good portion of my childhood, me and my family lived with my grandparents (if not technically, then practically) in the Alapattah neighborhood of downtown Miami. Here's a Google Map of the area. Take a trip through my old hood with street view. It was even more depressing in 1989. Hell, looking at the place I spent part of my childhood in makes me sad; road and sidewalk's all paved now, but there were two huge, beautiful trees in the front yard that grew there for decades, with an Audi parked underneath that my gramps was convinced would run again. It never did.

Anyway...

My little trip down memory lane doesn't have much to do with the house. Whenever my dad (or whomever) would pick me up from school, it would involve a short sojourn along the Dolphin Expressway, past the Orange Bowl (which I'm told is no longer there), and then off the exit for 12th Ave. For years, there were always two things I would see without fail. The first is the Columbia Cedars building, whose since-replaced snakelike logo used to bug me the fuck out. The other were 8 x 10 photocopied flyers of a bearded man wearing a turban posted on all the large palm trees that used to line the once smaller street. After years of seeing this, an eight year old version of myself finally asked my dad who the hell this guy was:


"That's Yahweh Ben Yahweh, man," he said, "he's the leader of some cult." Implicit in his laughter was the message that this dude was batshit insane.

We eventually moved to the suburbs in 1991 (back then it was at the edge of civilization) and my grandparents followed suit a few months later, so I only ever returned maybe three more times after that. Mr. YBY was snuffed out of memory.

Until tonight. I can't even explain why. First, the name entered into my brain (Yahweh Ben Yahweh? What?). Then, the doubt (Did my parents make that shit up? Did I?). Finally, there was the realization that we live in the future; a place where I can look up station bumpers and commercials for the syndicated run of A Different World from a 1994 pre-UPN Channel 33 in less than three seconds. (This bumper from 1988 for their Creature Feature is fun, too. Anyone else miss independent TV like I do?).

Anyway...

This Yahweh Ben Yahweh guy was, in fact, real. He had his own cult based in Miami. He was of the mind that whitey and the Jews (aka the fake Jews) were evil oppressors. And, oh yeah, like most cults worth their salt, the central belief was that this guy was Jesus. He's also got a freaky-deaky website that looks like it was designed by a nine year old with a busted caps lock button and access to Ritalin and Photoshop.

The best part is that shortly after I got the hell out of Dodge, he was arrested via the RICO law for fourteen murders and went to prison for eleven years. His website refers to this as "THE CRUCIFIXION". The denied appeal is under the heading "EROSION OF THE CONSTITUTION". Then on May 2007, Mr. YBY completed his first journey on Earth an ascended to heaven. Or—more accurately—he got prostate cancer and then ate it.

I'm way past the point of no return on the whole god/religion thing, but somewhere in the pit of my rotten aged-27-years-in-an-oak-Catholic-barrel soul this shit still freaks me out. Perhaps it has more to do with the late hour and anticipation of strange nightmares that will never actually come to fruition.

Speaking of which, it's 3:40. I need to get my ass to bed.

Henry

PS: Here are some aliens.