This recent post on Religion Clause describes the victorious struggle of a Texas Pastafarian for the right to wear the sacred pasta strainer in his driver’s license photograph.

It caught my attention because I had just finished editing an article by Joe “Vampires” Leycock, “wandering anthropologist of the occult,”  for the Bulletin for the Study of Religion: “Laughing Matters: “Parody Religions” and the Command to Compare.”

In it he mentions the similar struggle of an Austrian man, Nico Alm, for the same end. Laycock argues that Alm, like Pastafarianism’s founders, “wanted to demonstrate that religion is a category fundamentally preoccupied with the absurd and to question why Western democracies afford special privileges to religion.”

But then a memory of years ago trickled up.

Since this photo predates the founding of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I think that that afternoon my friend and I were merely “preoccupied with the absurd.” Little did I know that I was an unheralded prophet of Pastafarianism.

The bare-chested fellow in the Greek fisherman’s cap is, in fact, Greek — my housemate Yioryos Chouliaras. He seemed to live on Turkish coffee (that’s what he called it) and strong cigarettes and wrote surrealist poetry by the yard. The last I heard, he was the cultural attache at the Greek embassy in Ottawa. Sounds like tough duty, but I am sure that Yioryos could handle it.