Greetings.
Me again. I guess I have some explaining to do. Sorry, guys, but I've been through a terrible ordeal. And it's a long story.
Last week, during my vacation to the Holy Land, God tried to kill me. In fact, He DID kill me.
On Friday I was sitting at my laptop writing an e-letter to my dear friend, Homunculus, on the RELIGION threads at Amazon.com, just minding our own business, when a dove flew through the open window of my second-floor flat in the Ramat Shlomo district of north Jerusalem (They have no insect-screens on those damn'd rentals, in Israel.) And so I stopped typing immediately, and I stood up.
Can you believe it, Homunculus? That angry bird tried to *attack* me, right inside the house, like in one of those old-fashioned Alfred Hitchcock movies! Only this was not your typical, fakey-looking cinematic crow--it was a very real fat white pigeon.
(Well, of course YOU can believe it, Hom! -- you're an evangelical Christian, you can believe anything -- but this actually did happen.)
I gave chase, but the bird was too quick for me. The pigeon darted all around the living room, and the kitchen, and the dining area, and up and down and back and forth and over and through, while I pursued it with a broom.
I took a swipe or two, but missed, and I knocked over an open bottle of wine and I smacked a ceramic lamp, which broke--and that lamp will cost me, my landlord is Jewish--before I finally chased the pigeon back out the window. Phew!
Having just experienced a close encounter of the third (i.e., pneumatological) kind, I sat down to catch my breath--and that's when I noticed that the bird had dropped something onto my brand new mousepad--and I'm not even going to tell you what it was, but it looked like a great splatter of white paint.
Usually, I remain calm when harassed by God. But I was already on edge that night--Homunculus had me all tied up in knots because of his crazy religious blather on the Amazon RELIGION thread--so when I saw my favourite mousepad-- ruined by the Lord! Well, I just lost it.
I had bought that mousepad in the Old City market, for a souvenir, from a very nice Arab merchant, for 50 shekels. (In fact, I think the man must've been a Christian, and not a Muslim extremist, because he was also selling hand-carved crucifixes, and olivewood rosary beads, and bootlegged Mel Gibson movies.) But this mousepad that I'm telling you about was something special: a one-of-a-kind miniature oriental rug (really cute!) … until that bird nuked it.
I was pretty angry. Somewhat impetuously, I poked my head out the window, and I shouted out, into the night sky, an unsolicited (though not inaccurate) assessment of the Lord's anatomy.
I probably should have counted to ten, before I said that.
Moments later (about as quick as it takes a thought to be transmitted to Heaven and back), the silence was broken by a booming, reverberating, deeply resonant Voice, which said, in Hebrew: "Behold, His 'fanny' is NOT a 'big fat one'."
I was not deceived: I recognized the voice, almost immediately: it was Yahveh, speaking of Himself in the third Person, as usual.
Even so, I did not put my head back out the window and look up, and here's why: because whenever God, or Jesus, or the holy prophets, or the TV evangelists, command you to "BEHOLD, this or that," they usually want you to take those words quite literally, and to LOOK. But I was in no mood, that night, to look at what the Lord evidently wanted me to see.
"Lord," I said (not wishing to be punished), "I believe! I do! You're right: it's not."
Then I heard another voice, also calling down from the sky, more gentle than the first, slightly feminine but still pretty loud, that said: "BEHOLD: MINE, NEITHER, thou serpent!"
And that was SUCH an unfair thing to say! BECAUSE I NEVER EVEN SAID THAT "JESUS HAS A FAT BUTTOCKS." What I actually said was that "Jesus, when seen from behind, looks like his mother" (meaning: Jesus has long brown hair, and a nicely laundered toga).
By this time, I was feeling pretty picked on, by those Three. But the nice thing about Jesus is that you can reason with him even when he's angry--which is something you can never do with His irascible Father, who is angry most of the time, and who likes to make people suffer, and die, and suffer, and suffer-some-more, in that precise order. But Jesus is someone who will listen to a rational argument.
"Dear Jesus," I cried. "When have I EVER said that your mother has a fat buttocks?"
Silence.
"Okay, then," I said.
(Score one for Lucifer!)
Having won the argument, I should not have pressed the advantage. But I did: I leaned out the window and hollered across the rooftops of Jerusalem: "JESUS' MOTHER, THE VIRGIN MARY, HAS A BIG, FAT, BUTTOCKS!"
And that was a big mistake, strategically speaking, because Jesus killed me.
And my troubles were just beginning. Some Jewish neighbor--who had heard all of the hollering from Upstairs and down--called in a complaint to the Jerusalem Police--who entered my flat and found my otherwise immortal body, dead on the floor.
Next, they read what was on my computer screen--these long rambling fantasies of divine revenge on unbelievers, published by someone calling himself "Homunculus"--and they said to themselves, "We don't know who the dead guy is, but he's been corresponding with an irrational, dangerous, lunatic."
(They were mistaken: Homunculus is not "dangerous," just goofy.)
Frankly, I don't know what happened after that. Somewhere along the line, the secret police were called in. Israel's Lohamah Psichologit department (the LAP) took custody of my corpse.
Well, let me tell you a secret: those agents in Israel's LAP have studied the New Testament up one side and down the other--and it has not been good for them. Those fellas have developed as many crazy ideas as Homunculus, about the End Times.
Some knucklehead in the LAP recollected Revelation 13:3: "And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast"--which was complete nonsense. The "whole world"? I don't think so! We're talking a half-dozen polemicists on the Amazon religion thread, two of whom are crazy evangelicals. But the LAP decided I was #666, the Beast whom everyone in Jesusland has been waiting for, all these years. Not willing to take any chances, they sealed me up in a stone sarcophagus, where they expected me to rot until Doomsday. (Like that worked with JESUS, when HE died? What a bunch of knuckleheads!)
Next thing I know, my Day-Glo Timex watch says that it's half-past six on Sunday morning. I have just awakened, quite literally, from the dead. But I'm awaking inside a sealed concrete sarcophagus. I've got a migraine headache. AND I'M STUCK IN THERE, AND I CAN'T GET OUT! All I can say about my escape is that it was quite the miracle, and I thank God for it!
--L
