Showing posts with label october stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label october stories. Show all posts
REAL LIFE: SHOTGUN HEAVEN
Dad had been a lot of things in his life– a not-quite-criminal street kid in 1940s Queens, a college student, a soldier in Vietnam, a civil servant in the Federal government, even a part-time carpenter and NGO worker.
Due to some very strange circumstances that don’t need mentioning here, he’d fallen on considerably harder times than expected.
Due to some very strange circumstances that don’t need mentioning here, he’d fallen on considerably harder times than expected.
At forty-plus years old he had been forced to take a job as a bike messenger in order to keep the ends, if not meeting, at least close together.
If you don’t know, messengering that way involves a lot of dodging of cars, dirty tricks between competing employees and not a few injuries when your bike gets into an argument with an oncoming taxi. It was a rough life. Now that I’m looking down the barrel of forty myself, I finally understand exactly how rough.
If you don’t know, messengering that way involves a lot of dodging of cars, dirty tricks between competing employees and not a few injuries when your bike gets into an argument with an oncoming taxi. It was a rough life. Now that I’m looking down the barrel of forty myself, I finally understand exactly how rough.
Shotgun heaven was two stories of plywood and plaster with enough paint slapped on to hide the caulk and the mold. My brothers and I scored a room on the second floor with Dad and Wife #2 sharing the big one at the end of the hall. The walls were thin and we all got an earful of some of the aspects of adult life that we probably shouldn’t have for at least a few more years.
I’m sure they tried to be quiet but, if I could hear my little brother humming in the living room without even putting my ear to the floor, catching snippets of the two of them arguing every night was guaranteed.
I didn’t know what the fight was about and, frankly, I wasn’t interested. In my family argument was like O2. We did it like breathing. Politics. Religion. Which actor was better than another. Whether it was cheaper to buy bread from a market or bake it ourselves. I wasn’t interested but I could hear it.
Eventually the arguing led Wife #2 to pack her kit and her kid and vacate. I wasn’t sorry to see her go. Not because of any specific antipathy we might have had between us; she was all right, in her way. More than.
It was just that she had committed the one sin that my tweenaged mind couldn’t forgive: she had made my father’s life, already difficult, more so.
Their nocturnal grumblings had exploded into full blown daily screaming matches, complete with slammed doors, broken dishes and encyclopedic streams of profanity. Yeah. I can’t say I was bothered to see the back of her. Nobody misses a hurricane.
It was just that she had committed the one sin that my tweenaged mind couldn’t forgive: she had made my father’s life, already difficult, more so.
Their nocturnal grumblings had exploded into full blown daily screaming matches, complete with slammed doors, broken dishes and encyclopedic streams of profanity. Yeah. I can’t say I was bothered to see the back of her. Nobody misses a hurricane.
Nobody but Dad. He was a grown-up, a man and, as such, was constantly under pressures of which I couldn’t conceive at that time.
Wife #2 had been in his bed, in his life, for several years by then and, while from my POV their relationship had been mostly acrimonious, I see now that it couldn’t have been. There’s fighting and there’s fighting. There’s love and there’s lovemaking. There’s a universe of grown-up life that is impenetrable to the minds of thirteen year olds.
Wife #2 had been in his bed, in his life, for several years by then and, while from my POV their relationship had been mostly acrimonious, I see now that it couldn’t have been. There’s fighting and there’s fighting. There’s love and there’s lovemaking. There’s a universe of grown-up life that is impenetrable to the minds of thirteen year olds.
Dad had become adept at showing a brave face over the months we’d been in Shotgun Heaven. He went to work. He watched the Star Trek reruns and listened to the Pryor albums. He made breakfasts and hustled us off to school.
But at night, when dinner was cleared and homework was done, Dad went away. I don’t mean he left us alone in the house. He sat with us, even talked to us about the day’s minutia, but it was as if he was watching us from a distance, like his mind was on other, more important things.
I was the oldest so, with no other adult in the house, I had to take up some slack. I helped with meals, clearing up, getting things set for the following day’s adventures. I also ended most evenings alone with Dad, or, at that time, with his shell.
I learned in the first few days after Wife #2 left that pressing him, trying to see what was wrong, was futile. He wouldn’t talk, not about that and certainly not to some kid who hadn’t even lost his virginity yet.
On those nights I left him in the living room, sitting quiet in his overstuffed leather chair, listening to Havens or Davis and, as often as not, nursing a beer.
I woke up once in the middle of one of those nights, wondering just for second where I was. The sound of my brother almost snoring from the other side of the room anchored me.
Whatever dream had occupied me a second previous, I was now in my own bed on the second floor of Shotgun Heaven. The clock said 3:20 am.
Whatever dream had occupied me a second previous, I was now in my own bed on the second floor of Shotgun Heaven. The clock said 3:20 am.
I realized I was hungry. I was a kid which meant I was pretty much always hungry. There was a half a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in the kitchen, both with my name on them.
I slid out of bed, considered and rejected the idea of giving my brother a quick Wet Willy and crept out into the hall. It’s fun moving around when the world is sleeping. I still like to do it. It’s like being allowed backstage at an amusement park or into a museum after hours. It’s not ghosts that come out at the witching hour but the shades of everybody’s secrets.
Mine was the peanut butter and honey sandwich I’d be eating in about five minutes.
As I moved, I winced with every creak of the floor as might weight settled in. The last thing I wanted was to wake anyone up. It’s no fun having a secret, after all, if it’s not yours. These late-night snacks had been mine for more than a year and I meant to keep it that way.
At the current pace it would take more than the five minutes just to make it downstairs but the vision of the sandwich steeled me. One step, two and I was halfway to the bend in the hallway that led to the stairs. Three, four, five and I was just about to make the turn.
Dad’s room faced the streetlight out front so I could see the silhouette of his bamboo curtains framed in the faintly orange glow. As I oriented on his digital clock- 3:44 am- I was suddenly aware of something moving nearby, very fast and horribly quiet. A black shape rose up in front of me, blocking the view. Before I could even squeak out my shock, something hard and about the size of a softball slammed into my chest, forcing me back into the wall. I was pinned there, gasping for breath, struggling against the pressure on my sternum. The black shape, now sporting a bit of a halo from the streetlight’s glow, had resolved itself into something familiar.
“Dad?” I croaked more than said, still barely able to take a breath
It was him. He hissed something at me in a language I didn’t know and pressed harder against my chest, forcing out more wind
“Dad,” I said, trying to pull the hand away. “Dad, you’re hurting me.
He said something then in that other language and I felt his body tense, repositioning itself for another blow.
“Dad!” I said, managing a weak cry. “Dad, it’s ME! It’s GEOFF! DAD!”
His fist came at me anyway and I knew that I was about to feel a pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Maybe even one of those “killing blows” they talked about in my comic books.
There was a crack, a loud angry sound of bone against- something and the feeling of wind beside my face.
“Agh!, Dammit!” said my father, releasing me as he stepped away. A light came on and I saw him, his right hand bloody from where it had impacted the wall. The wall was bloody too and there was a hole in it roughly the shape of his fist
“What the hell are you doing creeping around like that?” my father said
“I wanted,” I was still having difficulty catching my breath. “I just wanted a sandwich.
He told me to go back to bed and I was way ahead of him. I sat there in the dark until sun up wondering what the hell had just happened
He didn’t mention the incident the following day nor on the next several. Eventually he told me it was a flashback to his time in Vietnam, a sort of sleepwalking event brought on by stress. He was sorry, very sorry, for frightening me and he was getting into therapy. He didn’t ever want a repeat performance.
I lied, telling him I understood. Of course I didn’t. I was just a kid.
But he never ever hit me again.
And I never did get that sandwich.
copyright © 2011 geoffrey thorne. all rights reserved.
REAL LIFE: Addio, Maestro
 |
| DWAYNE MCDUFFIE |
I picked up my normal stack of stuff, the Xs, the Legions, the Avengers and the Knights in the Dark.
This was in the time when new companies were popping up all the time and, though smaller than the so-called Big Two, were offering some pretty competitive work. Elementals. Grendel. Mage. Elfquest. Hellboy A Distant Soil. Nexus.
Too many to mention, really, to anyone who doesn't already know.
The world of comics was undergoing a sea change at that time, decentralizing, giving more and more power to the creators rather than to their editors (a dubious blessing in some cases) and, in some few instances, actually challenging long held notions of what might make a go in the marketplace.
So my stack included a good many of these because, though I was much younger than I am, I was already old then in the multiverse of comic books and reaching that edge where they just would no longer easily satisfy. Some people might call that edge the end of adolescence but I call it pattern recognition.
For many years by then I'd become increasingly dissatisfied with the way people who look like me- brown skin, predominantly African descent- were treated in the medium I loved. As a child I had loved the damned things without regard to their social meaning and influence. I followed the Bat and the S, the 4 and most of those who came after, never realizing that, despite the wide variety of color and experience in the real world, a world in which I lived, the world of comic books was a Klansman's wet dream– Four colors of white.
It was the work of industry Great Will Eisner, his Spirit in particular, that pulled me up short and hard.
This was a character I loved created by an artist I loved, to whom I was exposed via a large-sized, hardcover book called THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES.
I loved the characters in that book so so much I wanted to find all their adventures wherever I could. This was during a time when comics weren't valued so much so, early on, it was relatively easy to put hands on certain ancient comics if one was ready to dig a bit.
So I dug. So I found and so I read. So I met Ebony.
I won't bore you with how he was depicted, how he spoke, what an hideous portrayal of people like me he was, though not as bad as his replacement, a lovely yellow fellow called Blubber.
Ebony was the first but by no means the last of this sort of version of black people which was only slightly worse than the general absence of decent black people in comics. Or really, non-whites of any sort.
It was pretty ugly and it hit me in the face like a freight train. My heroes were part of the same ugliness that was, at the time increasingly becoming part of my real life.
The older I got, the more real that ugliness became, more pervasive and more subtle. This created in me (and thousands of others) a sort of cognitive dissonance as I (and they) attempted to resolve the vicious contradiction of love for the various heroes and rage and hatred for their chroniclers who seemed intent on spitting on me who had only ever wanted to bask in the glow of their adventures.
Love won out but it was not without a cost. There was always this simmering undercurrent, a sort of gnawing expectation that oscillated between hope and dread as I waited for the next depiction, knowing it would likely be ugly but never knowing the degree.
Once in a great long while a reasonably decent character might appear (mostly in Marvel comics, nearly never in DC) they were nearly always in the background of the Important Whites, weaker, not as smart, never the point of the story and nearly never the hero.
But love won, as I said, and I sucked up this constant insult, pretending mostly not to notice unless the offense was so pointed it could not be ignored.
"That's what comics are," I told myself. "But, as long as they don't actually mention non-whites, they're not truly being offensive."
I made myself content with invisibility as the better of two evils. I was a child and didn't know that one was the same as the other. But I was content enough.
Until I met ICON.
"Finally," I thought as I poured over the pages. "Finally someone got it right."
I don't need to describe the actual books to you. They're out there and I recommend finding them. The point is every story was written and drawn by people who either were relatively well-known at the time or weren't but went on to greatness after the company let them show their stuff.
It was also the first comic book I ever felt compelled to write a so-called fan letter.
It was then that I met Dwayne McDuffie for the first time.
As I said, comics were (and largely remain) a wasteland when it comes to non-whites and here was an entire line of comics for the rest of us and for whites as well. It was, as Dwayne himself proved to be, an entirely benign response to a fairly ugly situation- building something new instead of railing against the injustice of the existing paradigm.
Sadly, this was met with hostility by the so-called "industry media" of the day, painting the books as diatribes against the wrongly characterized "mainstream" industry (they were not) created by poor artists and writers (again, not so).
McDuffie, one of the two or three black writers that had ever managed to score work at either of the Big Two, persevered, telling the truth of his work to anyone who would listen and moving forward as if simply telling the truth and showing the work would be enough to win. He was, like me, naive about the public he hoped to serve, gifting them with a cleanliness of spirit they did not and perhaps do not possess.
The fledgling stories were, ultimately, rejected by the larger audience and the industry at large, left to fade back into what they could only have thought was rightful obscurity.
I envision a lot of smiles from some men who should consider themselves lucky we will never meet. I get angry, you see. I have an extremely low tolerance for cowards and an even lower for racists. These men were both. And likely still are, those that are still alive, as there has been nothing to change their minds. Indeed, DC comics has gone into clear retrograde over the last couple years, literally killing off the few minority characters that had managed to squeak through.
I would have been incensed by these men, mostly lesser talents, having this sort of control over an industry and using that control to squash something benign and beautiful.
Dwayne was not that way. He was better than that. He simply moved forward, thinking so far outside the box that the thing itself could scarcely be defined as such. He moved on without rancor, without too much anger (though I'm betting there was some. None of us are immune.). Began the climb in another, more broad arena, that of animation. To say he excelled there, where money rather than feelings is the bottom line, is to understate things in the extreme.
He wrote for many series, created others winning award after award until he had carved out a bright career for himself as well as a legion of friends and followers both backstage and in his now more massive audience. I don't know that I could have done this. Maybe I could. But not without some shouting and fist swinging. I'm not made for the path he took however much i see it and recognize it as the better one.
My correspondence with Dwayne grew over the years from that initial few lines, to the sort of web-based friendship that most now take for granted but which, at the time, was rather rare, until finally we met face-to-face and became actual friends, rather than virtual.
And, more than that, Dwayne was a great teacher, never shy to share anything he knew about writing or any of the other endeavors in which we were both immersed. It's not an exaggeration to say, without his input, I would not have garnered the successes I've had. He's one a very select few in that regard but at the top of that list without doubt.
I wish I could have learned the trick that allowed him to take the slings and bullets of his "peers" with such grace, but, as I said, I lack that gene. I hold grudges. I get angry.
Even though he was repeatedly treated poorly by the industry he so loved, he never ceased to believe that simply making something beautiful was the best way to clear out something ugly.
And he was, as always, right.
That first note led to a friendship that started small and grew into something I loved and which continues to this moment despite his current silence and great distance. He's dead now. Taken in a useless random way just as he was reaching the apex of his powers as a writer. We will never never see what amazing things he was to create.
I know for sure he had plans to amaze and was lucky enough to be asked to participate in them but, like the rest of you, I will never know what those things were. he is gone now. For good.
Over the next few weeks people will lionize him and rightly so, but much of that praise will be from the very people who did their best to thwart him when he simply tried to say, with everything he produced, that we are ALL valuable, we are ALL here and we are ALL in this together.
It was true then. It's true now. It always will be true.
Good-Night, Maestro. You will be missed.
copyright © 2011 geoffrey thorne, all rights reserved
REAL LIFE: On Things Lost: Crashing the Memory House
There's stuff everywhere, some organized and clearly labeled, some in the wrong box, in the wrong shape and, very often, randomly stuck to something from another time and place. Piles on stacks on mountains.
Messy. It's a wonder any thoughts manage to navigate the place, much less the odd story or script.
Still, once begun is better done as the saying I just made up goes. I was in already. It seemed stupid to leave without some version of the trophy. I wiped the dust from my Victorian era giggles, pull the thick leather work gloves up to my wrists, tied them off and started sifting. I wish I'd remembered to wear the dust filter but what can you do?
The first thing I found that was significant loss, you know: something other than a bag of marbles left on a park bench or a jacket at a theatre, was a crate marked "Formula One."
Now, in my mind, in my memory, this thing is the size of a real car. You can get in, you can drive it (if you can clear enough space which you can't because of the mess but, y'know, in principle.). In truth it was a toy. Sometime just before or just after my parents' divorce (these things get murky when the decades stack up) I was presented with an authentic replica of a Formula One race car.
This was no matchbox.
This thing had every gear, every piston, every decal every strip of actual leather that the original possessed. The only thing truly "fake" about it was the engine which, of course, wouldn't burn petrol or anything else.
This was no matchbox.
This thing had every gear, every piston, every decal every strip of actual leather that the original possessed. The only thing truly "fake" about it was the engine which, of course, wouldn't burn petrol or anything else.
I loved that thing the way only a six or seven year old can, playing with it constantly, picturing myself behind the wheel, screaming past Speed Racer and some unnamed Frenchman on raceways of infinite impossible complexity. Always winning.
Always after insane obstacles had been narrowly overcome.
I left it, I think, at the home of one of my playmates who, subsequently somehow was unable to locate it. Ever.
Neat. I hadn't thought of the thing in years and yet, in the Memory House it still sits, ready for my key and my inclination to drive. File that away for the next boring Sunday.
The next thing I found was a box of comic books, mostly from the late 1960s and into the 70s, a bequest from my father who, during one of his many travel-related adventures, managed to lose not only the box but the letters I got back from NASA explaining why there were no black astronauts at the time and another from John Romita Sr. telling me to keep up the good work and to practice, practice, practice, if I meant to become a comic book illustrator.
The letters are around here somewhere but I don't need to dig them out. They aren't really lost once you read them. And most of the comics have been restocked since then so we can score that a wash. No hard feelings, Pop. Life goes on.
I rifled through a bunch of stuff, some of it glittery and strange, some of it quite mundane.
My first wedding ring is in here. I'm crap with jewelry. I left it on a restaurant table and, as it was raw silver and carved with intricate celtic symbols (something my wife and I both love). When i scrambled back at lawbreaking speed to retrieve the thing it was, of course, gone into some lucky person's pocket.
There's also the first "really good" short story I ever wrote, left on a Washington DC Metrobus as I transferred between my morning school (one side of the city) and the post-lunch classes (the other side). It was a story about a sparrow and an otter at the city Zoo in winter typed and stuffed into a manilla envelope for easy carrying and, apparently, easy loss. It stings me to this day that I was stupid enough to let that thing disappear. I'd kill to have it back.
I'm not kidding.
I had to take a moment after that one. I sat down on my Plan for a Personal Flying Harness and took it.
The rest of the morning was heavy lifting, shifting of old OMNI magazine articles, a copy of the RIVERSIDE SHAKESPEARE I'd won from the Folger Theatre for doing scenes from Hamlet in competition, some old-school GI JOES and then I was pretty near the center of the place.
I was stuck in that workman's crouch; you know the one: hands on knees, head a bit bowed, short huffy breaths as you consider your next move. Sweaty, suffering from acute melancholy and nostalgia (both fatal if left untreated) and scanning around absently for something that would make the trip worthwhile.
It was then I saw it. Well. Not so much "it" as "her."
There was a young girl standing almost dead center of the place
She was no older than sixteen, long dark hair spilling in waves over her shoulders, skin the color of dark amber. She wore a very modest school uniform- grey and white and green- not one of your anime fetish things so get your mind out of the gutter.
Priscilla.
Okay. I know what you're thinking. You think she was my first, right? Well, yes and no. When I met her I was living in Africa with my father and my idiot brother. I attended a English style "prep" school (again, not what you think. It was just a school where we had to wear uniforms and lessons were taught from the British POV rather than the more acceptable American one (that's a joke, son)). She was three years older than me and she was completely, absolutely, impossibly perfect in every single way.
Her mother taught french at the school. Her boyfriend was some scottish superhero named Ian who played soccer and rugby and was mostly elsewhere doing that. I hated him the way a mongoose hates a king cobra. In my genes.
She hit me like a thousand kilograms of bricks. She inspired poems. She inspired stupid classroom antics so i'd get sent out of mine and get to walk by hers on my way to a punishment that was ABSOLUTELY worth it. She inspired me to take ballet after school so I could be in it with her (leading, paradoxically, to my father meeting his second wife but that's another story). We became the sort of friends that an older girl can be with a boy who is so obviously smitten.
She tolerated me. I made her laugh. I mocked her idiot boyfriend for not being there when he wasn't and for being a jerk when he was. Eventually he did the thing all idiot boyfriends do with awesome perfect girls: he broke up with her.
And i was there. We became what I'd always wanted us to be. When i'm talking to guys she was my first real kiss. My first "second base." Guys, for the most part, are idiots. When I'm talking to women, I tell it straight.
She was my first. The first person other than my parents who completely owned my heart. You remember what that's like. I don't have to spell it out. Words make it maudlin. You know.
But the nature of expats working in foreign lands means, eventually, they have to return home and so we did. Her to the Seychelles and me to DC. We wrote. Lockets and bracelets were exchanged. It was all very earnest and heartbreaking. Lots of teary promises.
Then I did the other thing that idiot boyfriends do with awesome perfect girlfriends. I misunderstood her.
In the last letter I got from her she finished with a sad paragraph about how awful it was that we would not see each other again for at least a couple years ( I had to get out of high school first, right?) but she began with "Anyway, forget about these stupid letters..."
I never got past that line. The whole preceding meat of the letter was so sad and defeated and filled with what I now know is teenaged angst but which, at the time, felt like tragedy, that that one sentence destroyed me. I couldn't read more. She was, I thought, saying good-bye.
It broke me. Right through. A crack as big as this. I was a wreck for a good year before I really got over it. Then I did get on with life. I had other firsts.
And then, years later, I was going through some old boxes and I came across the letter. I won't lie and say there wasn't a twinge. There was. How could there not be?
I read it, straight to the end this time and I realized that, had I gone on before, had I NOT been such and angsty,hyper dramatic teenaged IDIOT, I would have realized that the last few sentences of that letter where an apology for being so bleak and a reaffirmation of our deep perfect connection.
I wouldn't have tossed that letter into a bin. I would have written back.
Sure it was impossible. Sure we would have grown apart and found young men and women to pair off with that were closer to home. That's what happened anyway. It was always what would have happened. It's what happens.
But I would have written back. Instead all she got was silence. I know how that hurt her because I felt the same even though it was my own stupid fault. I would have written back.
If you can replace something, you didn't really lose it. That's my feeling anyway. If you can't, it's really and truly lost.
So that was and remains the biggest. A whole human being. An entire place and time. You can't get things like that back. You can't refill your childhood. Once it's spent, it's gone.
I've got my own awesome perfect girl now. married. locked in. she definitely owns my heart.
But Priscilla will always be there, right near the center of my Memory House, smiling her Da Vinci smile.
copyright © 2011 geoffrey thorne, all rights reserved
REAL LIFE: For Ms. NTF, wherever I may find her
When I was in high school I was called before the guidance councillor, Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten.
She was a skinny mahogany pole of a woman who smelled of something musty. She took a dim view of me and my activities which, while not truly delinquent, were certainly outside her frame of personal reference.
After a fairly stellar academic career and a stack of extra curricular activities, our difference of personality led this lovely woman to tell me that the career I should prepare myself for was one at the end of a mop.
Now, there's nothing wrong with being a janitor. There's nothing wrong with ANY job that you do well and in which you take a certain pride. My folks raised me to respect every person who warrants respect and job description has never been the determiner.
Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten's intent is what is important here, you see. She found me, for whatever reason, the wrong sort of student. Too mouthy maybe or not as perfectly respectful of adult authority as she deemed appropriate or maybe she just didn't like me. Whatever.
She sat me down in her office and, under color of her authority, proceeded to map out the rest of my life as she saw it. She wanted, in short, to hurt me. A child.
Now I'm no angel and I wasn't then. But I never did anything wrong enough to merit even a reprimand from a teacher much less get suspended or even detention. And, it must be said, I didn't much care for Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten either.
Still I had the good manners to steer clear of her whenever possible. Why tempt fate, right?
But she had it, as some might say, in for me and she made no secret of it. She tried, at the end of my senior year, to take this one last crippling shot at me. Needless to say, it didn't work.
I've never been one to let somebody saying mean things to me slow me down. But it did piss me off. A grown-up trying to hurt me for no reason? Trying to wreck my life, my sense of self, just because she could? No. That was wrong.
I can only imagine she did it to others both before and after I came along. I can just picture those other kids, who, for whatever reason, fell outside Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten's idea of the norm.
Maybe they weren't all stiff-necked bastards like me. Maybe some of them actually took those edicts of hers to heart. Not everyone has the kind of parents I have or the sort of ego that gets angry at attacks rather than folding up shop.
I can imagine some of those kids, if not folding, at least being hampered by the ghost of that ugly little woman and her ugly little mind. I can imagine it well.
I've met plenty of adults in my adult life who are complete bastards to children just because they can be. Viewed through adult eyes they're nothing more than pathetic cowards but to a child they can be like the voice of doom. And they know it.
They move through life being Absolutely Right about Absolutely Everything and punishing anyone who falls Outside. Well. Anyone they can.
I have to say that I actually hate people like them. Life's plenty hard enough without them mucking it up for the rest of us. I wish they would all go away. But they don't. They stay and muck and cripple.
So, it's up to us, when we can, however we can, to let them and each other know that they aren't right. Not about us and not about the world.
It's hard, sure, even brutal on occasion, but it's not evil. And being Outside one sect only means you're In another, maybe a larger, maybe a better one.
They're not right.
Spread the word.
And, if anyone reads this and knows this woman (presuming she's still with us), maybe pass this next little tidbit on with a kiss from me.
You were wrong.
About all of us.
text is copyright © 2008 geoffrey thorne, all rights reserved
the videos, obviously, do not belong to me.
Binary - by Geoffrey Thorne
Posted by Geoff Thorne
on
24.10.07
, under
october stories
|
comments (0)
"Uh, Armageddon, pearly gates, lake of fire. Where have you been?"
"Well, um, dead, mostly."
"It's Judgement Day, dude. Get it in gear."
"OMG! That's REAL?"
"Seems that way."
"So that's what all these folks are lined up for?"
"Pretty much. See that little speck way down there by the gates?"
"Barely. There must be like a million people in this line."
"More, I bet. Anyway. That's Jesus down there."
"No shit."
"Straight up. JC."
"What's he doing?"
"Talking, catching up. Checking tickets."
"Tickets?"
"You know: to get in. To see the Big Guy. Heaven, man."
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"Looks like that's gonna take some time."
"Yeah."
"So, uh, where's the Buddhist line?"
"There isn't one. Christians only."
"Excuse me, what?"
"Christians only. One gate. One ticket taker. Jesus."
"What about Zoroasterans?"
"Nope."
"Shinto? Animist? Muslim?"
"Nope, nope, nope."
"'Christians only.'"
"Pretty much. I heard the Jews might have cut a separate
deal but don't quote me."
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"Nice for the Christians."
"Yeah. It is."
"Kinda sucks for everybody else."
"Yeah. It does, I guess. But what are ya gonna do. We don't make the rules, right?"
"Somebody should complain."
"To who?"
"Well, I mean, God I guess. Or JC."
"Yeah, I don't know how much traction that will get, to be honest with you. It's kind of too late for all that. Capital T, capital L."
"Because of the whole Armageddon thing."
"Pretty much."
"Bummer."
"For some, yeah."
"So what, they all burn in the lake?"
"Yeah. That's what the other line's for."
"What other line?"
"See that over there, it looks like a mountain range? By the horizon."
"Yeah."
"That's the line for the lake."
"Holy CRAP!"
"Yeah."
"It's huge!"
"I heard like 20 billion or something. Could be a rumor."
"That's- that's like everybody in the world, EVER."
"Everybody ELSE, yeah."
"No. No, that's. That's effed up, man. Come on."
"You think so?"
"Are you kidding? You're kidding, right?"
"Not at all."
"But, come ON, that's insane over there. All those people, they're gonna burn for eternity in a big lava pit?"
"Pretty much."
"DUDE!"
"Hey, it's not like they didn't have ample warning. It was in all the papers for like, you know, EVER."
"Yeah, but I mean, Buddhism. Who hates Buddhists?"
"Nobody I know."
"There's a lot to be said for Buddhism, right?"
"Sure. No question. Great people. Great ideas."
"My Dad was a Buddhist."
"Hey, great. That must have been cool for him."
"But he's probably in that other line then, huh?"
"Did he convert before he died?"
"Nope."
"Probably, yeah."
"Mom was an Episcopalian."
"HEY! Great! Awesome for her."
"Looks like it."
"What about you? You a Buddhist or what?"
"Or What, I guess. I could never put my feet down on the whole Universe Run By Magic Santa Claus thing."
"Irreverent."
"What can I say."
"Bet you regret that now."
"I'm starting to."
"Where are you going?"
"Other line, right? Might as well get to it."
"Wow. You're taking this REALLY well."
"Hey, you dance with who brung ya, right?"
"I suppose so."
"Besides. I think I see Mark Twain and George Carlin over there."
"I wouldn't doubt it. 'specially Carlin. That guy had a real Jones near the end."
"Funny though."
"Yeah. Funny."
"Twain too. And I think that might be Oscar Wilde next to them."
"Plus you get to see your Dad again. For a while anyway."
"A long while. Look at that line."
"Okay, then."
"Yeah."
"So, uh, "good luck?""
"What with the burning for all eternity? Thanks. I bet I get the hang of it pretty quick."
"Yeah. Doesn't look complex."
"And y'know, have fun in heaven."
"Oh, I plan to. There's a rock candy mountain with my name on it. Special order."
"They let you do that?"
"Oh, yeah. But you had to sweat for it in Life, y'know. It's that whole delayed gratification thing."
"Never was much good at that either."
"..... Well."
"So, seeya."
" I guess."
"But, I mean, not really."
"No. Not really."
copyright ©2007 geoffrey thorne, all rights reserved
