So Here’s The Thing

Episode 4: Easter

So here’s the thing—send me money. (Preferably nothing smaller than tens.)

Okay, fine, I’ll explain if I have to. (Everyone’s so suspicious these days.)

It all started—my new life, I mean, my new life because of which you should send me money—my new life started when I went to this theme park called Jesusland for their Easter celebration. I don’t normally do religion, you understand, but just this once, I thought it might be fun to try something new, save my immortal soul, become one with God. You know—fun.

They put on this big show with laser lights and a theologically correct, clean-cut rock band, and people clapped (mostly) in time with the music and smiled a lot and prayed, and I think there was even some speaking in tongues and spontaneous appearances of the stigmata, but no snake-handling, which was nice.

And when they asked for volunteers for their Easter re-enactment pageant, I’ll admit that the spirit seized me, so I raised my hand to play Jesus.

The only thing was, I really didn’t expect them to use real fucking nails.

Now you have to understand that when I went to Sovietland and volunteered to play Trotsky, they used a rubber ice-axe to assassinate me; and when I went to Mahatmaland to play Gandhi, they used rubber bullets; and when I went to Naziland and volunteered to play Hitler, (well, actually about a thousand guys and even some women had already signed up on a waiting list ahead of me for Hitler, so I got stuck playing Gauleiter Hans Frank), but even they used a rubber noose.

So when half-a-dozen big truckers and off-duty Sheriff’s deputies dressed like Roman soldiers grabbed me and ripped off my clothes and pounded me bloody and dragged me naked across a parking lot filled with broken glass and shot me with tasers, I figured that maybe they just took their Bible stories very seriously. (To be honest, I didn’t remember any broken glass, parking lots or tasers in the Bible, but I suppose sometimes the Word of God has to be interpreted symbolically, and sometimes literally.)

It was only when they started pounding nails as thick as thumbs through my palms that I thought they were maybe taking their religious devotion a little too seriously. So I tried to talk some sense into them as they hoisted my cross upright on a little hill.

“Get me the fuck down from here, you fucking cocksuckers, or I’ll sue your fucking asses to hell and back, you filthy shit-eating bastard fuck-humping motherfuckers.”

(I cleaned up my language a bit, but you get the idea.)

Well, my words didn’t have the effect I’d hoped for. They all strolled down the hill, singing songs and shouting Hallelujah a lot, and I guess you could say that they left me hanging. (I can laugh about it now, but I was pretty angry at the time, what with the excruciating, ball-skinning, hydrofluoric-enema agony frying every cell in my body.)

So.

There I was. In the middle of Kansas. Sometime after midnight. Bleeding. Nailed to a cross.

The guy crucified to my left had passed out a while back, which was just as well, since he kept talking about how the only reason he was there in the first place was that his wife had wanted to come, and then she’d volunteered him for the role of Crucified Thief #1 behind his back, and all the time they were fixing him to his cross, he screamed how sorry he was for cheating on her, but she wasn’t buying any of it. But at least he shut up after he passed out.

The other fucking guy keeps fucking repenting, and fucking confessing, and fucking asking me if he’s going to be saved and go to fucking heaven. Jesus Christ, like I fucking know. Stupid asshole.

I had my own problems, bleeding like a hog with a slit throat and hung up to drain, and the only reason my nailed feet didn’t hurt was because they had gone numb an hour ago, and anyways my hands hurt even more. I had struggled at first, and the nails had kind of sawed their way up my palms, and now I couldn’t move my fingers any more except when they twitched every once in awhile on their own, and my hands felt like they’d been split in two all the way down to my wrists with a dull hacksaw, and I couldn’t breathe very well either, and I kept horking up a sticky paste of blood and snot all down my chin, and my chest burned like I still had the taser spikes frying my nipples, and my lungs felt like every breath I inhaled was a thick slurry of glowing molten slag, and then I exhaled fire; but hey, like I said, on the bright side, at least my feet had stopped hurting.

Then things started to get a little hazy. Pain. Blood loss. Shock. I think that’s about when the hallucinations started. I saw a bright light, like a brilliant white tunnel cork-screwing up into the sky, but that could’ve been the sunrise. It seemed like a very nice white light though. Friendly. Welcoming. I remember thinking—maybe it’s Dad coming for me. That made me laugh, which was a mistake, since laughing felt like I was snapping my own ribs in two and jabbing my internal organs with the jagged tips. And then I felt myself being lifted up, and a choir of heavenly voices started to sing around me, but in a flat Midwestern twang, which I thought was kind of odd for angels. I still couldn’t move, although I felt my body floating along in a fog, until I finally came to rest in a dark, quiet place.

I figured I was dead.

Fuck.

I’d always wanted to die while having sex.

And then the bright light came back, only brighter, and the next thing I knew—BOOM!—I opened my eyes, and I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, but someplace else, someplace better, someplace filled with warm, golden light, which I immediately realized must be Heaven.

Except it wasn’t.

It turned out I was in a spaceship.

Well, not a spaceship exactly, not like people normally think of spaceships. The place was really more like a temporal suspension bridge spanning the quantum interface between existence and non-existence. And the golden light was Time being simultaneously created and annihilated.

Except not exactly.

It’s hard to grasp unless your mind has been expanded, like mine. I didn’t quite get it at first either. (I’m trying to paraphrase a translation from the insubstantial to the subjective here, so cut me some slack.)

So then I heard a voice which called Itself Heffileffilnarhararar, or something like that. (Again, paraphrasing the ineffable here.) And the Voice told me lots of stuff about inter-dimensional, time-traveling, alien-human-divine cross-breeding and ensoulments with quasi-physical incarnations of the spirit—you know, heaven and hell, what’s been and what will be, the kinds of food I should and shouldn’t eat (the Voice came down really hard on pork for some reason), the unacceptability under any circumstances of masturbation, all the ultimate truths.

And then the Voice told me to go back whence I had come, and that’s the kind of thing that really tipped me off that I was talking to the Divine, using words like ‘whence’. And I felt the Voice’s final words ripping through me like lightning, jerking my body like earthquakes and tornadoes were tear-assing around inside my flesh, and then I woke up in my apartment in Chicago, and all my wounds were miraculously healed.

So.

Long story short. I’m the new Jesus. I know more. I’m taller. I’m better looking. Kind of like Jesus Version 2.0 with upgraded revelations. (You should look for my smiling face spontaneously appearing in the nearest piece of toast, or in the grain of your rec room’s paneling, or an oil-stain, or the reflection of sunlight in a window, or anywhere you can see something like a face if you just stare at it hard enough and from the right angle and really, really believe.)

So anyway, I’ve got this hybrid Christian-Muslim-Jewish-Hindu-Animist-New Age-UFOlogist- Interdimensional-SCIFIentology-hallucinatory-vision quest revelation of the One and Only Truth (may all disbelievers rot in hell) bouncing around in my head. The short version is this—the entire universe, everything, past present and future, from the smallest particle to the largest cluster of galaxies, is specifically designed to make YOU happy.

“How?” you ask.

Well, I’d be happy to provide spiritual guidance and illumination concerning life, the afterlife, truth, justice, transcendence, meaning, what club to use from the rough, and pretty much anything else you want to know.

But only if you send me money. (Preferably nothing smaller than twenties, now that I think about it.)

And before you assume I’m just a con-man looking to make an easy buck, and before you dismiss me as a crank or a schizophrenic revving up some voices and delusions, and before you bet your eternal damnation in Hell on the vanishingly miniscule likelihood of my completely unsubstantiated story being true, remember this: I’ve got just as much proof for my claims as any other religion.

So let’s make that nothing smaller than fifties.

Hallelujah. Shalom. Om shanti shanti shanti. Abracadabra. Wango tango. Whoopdeedo. Amen.