Who is the Antichrist? Part 2

He’s not a member of your family. He’s not your Uncle Louie. The way it works is, if he were your Uncle Louie, you’d be begging him for it. It’s sick, I know, but that’s how the Antichrist rolls.

“The Messiah will come as a thief in the night,” it is written. In the same way, the Antichrist will come as someone who gets mugged in broad daylight. Some say that the congresswoman who got shot in Tucson could be the Antichrist, if she turns out to be a man, but I doubt it. The Antichrist won’t be a politician. Way too obvious.

What do the polls say? 75% would rather date the Antichrist than the Messiah. 80% feel that the Antichrist’s mother is to blame for his behavior; she could control him if she wanted to. She’s permissive. She lets him get away with murder. Always did. She”s in denial. As long as he gets good grades, visits her on Sundays, and promises not to marry that Shiksha he’s been hanging around with, he can do no wrong. 85% believe that the Messiah is secretly jealous of the Antichrist. I mean, the Antichrist is the Antichrist. The Messiah can’t wear dark glasses, get his hair done by Zariff, and share Clooney’s tailor. You won’t find Christ in 230 Fifth in Manhattan, sharing his cocktail with some babe.

90% are waiting for the movie to form an opinion. A guy named Frank thinks that this has something to do with the Red Sox.

95% believe that the Antichrist is a politician. See what I mean?

99% of those polled have opinions so shaky and ill-formed that I’d be a fool to even mention them. It is written that when the Antichrist comes to fully understand what a bunch of morons he will gain dominion over, he’ll hand the whole package back to the Messiah and  concentrate on finding the best forget-me-now, liquid incense, and marching powder in the U.S.

Whoever he turns out to be, I can assure you of one thing. As far as you’re concerned, he’ll be like Brad Pitt or Justin Bieber. For you, no access.

Child Labor

One of the two urinals in my workplace is attached low on the wall, situated close to the floor, as if for a child. A coworker laughingly suggested that it was in fact installed to accommodate child labor. Ha ha. But his comment did remind me of the various times that I have hired kids to work for my company.

Sadly, in difficult economic times like these, the little ones are the first to get canned. Why is this so? They work for peanuts. You can boss them around and abuse them. Yet somehow, they’re the first out the door. Maybe it’s because it’s so easy to get rid of the little buggers. You look at the charts on your office wall, all trending down, and you go out and give the first kid you see a boot in the ass and a snarl, and the next thing you know, they’re all streaming out the back door, heading back to their grammar schools.

Except for the gypsy kids that I had working for me. Skinny little monkeys. Fearless. Of course, they’ll steal you blind. Fortunately, I speak fluent Romany. I’d tell the little bastards that if they stole from me, I’d cut off their fingers. Think that stopped them? Not at all, at least till they’d lost a couple of  digits.

I find that if you can enlist enough kids, they’re sort of like ants. They can’t lift anything heavy, but they can scamper back and forth, making multiple trips, so that stuff moves from the truck trailers and boxcars into the warehouse as if by magic. I just put out a big bag of cheap candy and it keeps them going for hours, the candy and my German Shepherd Rex.

First sign that the economy is improving: hooky stats at school on the rise.

My Book: The Meaning of Life

Today, I reached page 1,000 of the book I’m writing about the meaning of life. I stopped for a moment to celebrate with a glass of grape juice, but as I gazed down at the stack of papers that the manuscript comprises, I realized that no one would ever read it, and even if they did, they wouldn’t agree with it or understand it or like it or it would cause them to track me down like a dog, or whatever, dude. Everybody has their own idea about the meaning of life and nothing that I’ve written so far will disabuse them of that idea.

But what if my meaning of life is right and yours is wrong? Are you gonna be pig-headed and refuse to change? Will you read 1,000 pages of convincing argument and then still cling to your own stupid idea? Sure you will, and that’s just plain ignorant. Don’t talk to me about the meaning of life; 300 pages of that meaning are about putting up with morons.

No, I’ve got to explain the meaning of life in a post no longer than this one. More words just get in the way. George Bush kept it down to a sentence or two. Limbaugh talks a lot, but that’s just a hippo tap-dancing. Perry… well, he’s still trying to deal with George grabbing his shoulder.

Excuse me a minute.

There, I dropped my 1,000 pages down the building’s trash chute. 54 floors to the bottom. The pages are probably still fluttering down.

Now to condense those pages into an epigram… But you’ve got to do a little work to get it… So here it is. The meaning of life, encrypted in the most  simple fashion:

You $&#*^$!!! I’m going to *(@*# &@#(* #@# your *#@&!!! @#$@# you!!!

Who is the Antichrist? Part 1

What can you say about this guy?

He’s a guy, of course, not a girl. Hell hath spewed up plenty of female candidates for Consort to Lucifer. In fact, I’ve married a couple of them. But some guy secured the Antichrist role way back when they were writing the Bible and he’s still hanging onto it.

Anyway, the Antichrist will take care of your needs but, in the end, deny you salvation. That’s his well-known plan. It’s like the housing bubble, or any other Ponzi scheme. You want to get onboard early, reap all possible benefits from your association with the Arch-fiend, and then bail before Christ shows up.

He’s the abomination of desolation, the Antichrist, but that means he’s going to have a neat posse, like that boxer who bit off the other boxer’s ear. It’s like with a frisky pit bull. Poke it. Have some laughs, but don’t get too close to the teeth.

The Antichrist could be an Arab, keep that in mind. The Muslims have their own “deceiving Messiah.” They don’t get off the hook just because they like Muhammad better than Jesus. In fact, the Antichrist could well be Chinese. The idea that he’ll fulfill your worldly wishes with respect to furniture, toys, and electronics would fit with all that manufacturing going on across the Pacific. There is something sort of devilish about it, especially when you put it together with that family of weirdos who inherited the WalMart guy’s empire when he croaked.

Is Obama the Antichrist? Please. If he were, then Gog and Magog would have to be Perry and Romney. Perry might have some dirt in his past, but I challenge you to demonstrate to me a Romney/Bimbo pairing that’s credible. Tiger Woods could qualify, but the Antichrist is not going to blow out his knee hitting a golf ball.

I’ve found that my studies of the Antichrist have helped me in my Sunday betting on NFL games. If you would be interested in my “system,” I’m giving a talk aboutit at Tuesday night’s AA meeting in the basement of the Methodist Church at the corner of Elm and Theosophy.

Are you Walking in Balance on Mother Earth?

My Wife was Bedevilling me this morning and in a moment of self-reflection, I asked myself whether I, too, was Bedevilling others in my Life more than I was Beangelling them, as I like to put it. The consequences of a world where Bedevilling outweighs Beangelling are sobering to contemplate, namely, that Earth in its Spiritual Form is sinking inexorably into the Pit of Hell, by virtue of the combined weight of our Blackened Spirits.

And how come Bedevilling is bad, but Bewitching is good?

For example, I hired an Amigo from the crowd of men who hang out down on the corner looking for work when the INS van isn’t hassling them, to clean out my gutters for a couple of bucks an hour and a sandwhich at noon. The pitch of the roof, with its gables and everything, is quite steep, but yet I do not have rope with which my new Amigo might fashion a safety harness. Nevertheless, when he went over the edge and only saved his Life by hanging off the gutter while it slowly unstapled itself and dropped him into the lilacs, I became angry. I “lost it.” The gutters were not new, but they were freshly painted by another Amigo, who did not fall off the roof in spite of a couple of scary slips. I Bedevilled my new Amigo, and I held back his sandwhich for at least thirty minutes after he was well enough to eat it. BUT, then of a sudden, I saw the Error of my Ways and rather than run him off my property, I sent him back up onto my roof again. He wept, I assume with Relief that I had Forgiven him. He sobbed the whole time he was reattaching the gutter, calling out to God in his native tongue, and he didn’t fall off again.

As he came back down the ladder, shoulders shaking uncontrollably, I sensed that the World, rather than Sinking, in that moment was Rising Up, at least an inch or two.

Worst Sex Crimes

I was asked today by a seventeen-year-old gay delivery boy whether or not I considered myself to be a “bandit of love.” This caused me to slip into a self-reflective mood wherein I asked myself if I was in fact guilty of sexual crimes, of whatever stripe.

This is not about acts of violence, such as rape, which pertain to power rather than sex, or about pathologies resulting in psychic wounding or even homicide. No, this is about getting the word “sex” into a blog post title without writing something depressing or downright creepy in the process.

What’s the difference between a sex crime and a damned shame? A damned shame is when you’re convicted by a jury of love.

Sex crimes can be divided into the following categories: crimes against the self and the self’s innocent-bystander private parts; crimes against another person or persons that affect his, her, or their sexual hormone levels and/or their erogenous bits; crimes against nature; and crimes against God and all that is holy.

Crimes against the self: Well, obviously you want to prevent chafing, or doing anything that will require a visit to the emergency room. Avoid vacuum cleaners, action figures, cacti and other spiny fruits and vegetables, and impure thoughts.

Crimes against others: The fundamental, immutable rule about sex is that, in the end, you won’t get it right. You will f**k it up. This is because, inexplicably, your brain gets involved. Original sin? Unzipping your jeans for the first time.

Crimes against nature: Nature is all about wanting you to go out and get it done. The only crime against nature is staying home, reading a book, and going to bed early.

Crimes against God and all that is holy: This is about doing it in a church, synagogue, temple, mosque, sacred grove, hearse, coffin, huge crematory urn, monkery, monastery, or Jesus camp.

Don’t put cheese in the toaster.

You’ve probably heard that the U.S. is slipping into third-world status in some respects. Here’s a portent: someone has posted a sign at work, DON’T PUT CHEESE IN THE TOASTER.

What does this sign indicate? It indicates that one of our many workers from a foreign country is used to high-tech toasters that can accommodate cheese. Whereas our U.S. toasters can be dialed up to handle a bagel, but that’s about it. Our toasters don’t even pop up the toast like they used to. Back in the day, you could count on a toaster in a movie popping toast into the air, to be snatched on the fly by Dagwood or Lassie.

Once you have a toaster that can handle cheese, you’re standing on the threshold of some great good-eatin experiences. Have you ever toasted ice cream, so that it gets a crust? Mmm-mmm.

I guess that if you went over to a kitchen in Denmark or Finland or, like, Switzerland, you’d encounter all sorts of devices on the counter, of whose uses you could have no clue. What can you do with water in an American kitchen? Freeze it or boil it. That’s about it. In Finland, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve heard that they’ve got thirty words for water over there, and a thing that you plug in to turn water into goo, or coffee, depending on the setting.

We had an au pair from Finland. She was good with the baby but in the kitchen? A total loss. She’d walk out there and look around, confused. Where’s the fernod? she’d ask. Where’s the grandisk? How do you rassel the potatoes?

Me, I’m glad. Walk, don’t ride. In the old days, nobody ever got more than ten miles from home. Or cave. Let’s go back to dirt floors. Do you hate to mop the floor? I do. No mopping a dirt floor. Let’s go back to hunting and gathering. I like to gather. As soon as I stand up from this, I’m going to go out and gather something. I’ve been arrested three times for gathering but I’ve never been sentenced, only committed.

Wrong on so many levels

A lot of stuff lately is said to be wrong on so many levels.

How many levels, exactly? What’s the average number of levels?

Suppose you’re having sex with your grandma.That’s wrong on so many levels, right? One, she’s your grandma. But what’s level two? Suppose you’re not bespoke? No infidelity is involved. The disparity in ages? Let’s be accepting of Spring/Winter coupling. Same sex, in case you’re a woman? That’s officially no longer wrong; just ask the Marines. I’m still looking for level two here.

Suppose you’ve having sex with your grandma’s dog. Now we’ve got a second level, assuming that your grandma would be upset if she knew. And if she wouldn’t be upset, that’s still a level of wrong, on her.

If you had an STD and knew it but didn’t tell your grandma, that would add a level of wrongness vis a vis your grandma, but not vis a vis her dog. Either way, we’re stuck at two levels, grandma/disease and grandma/dog.

Perhaps you could wear your grandma’s wig during the act. That in itself might be wrong on so many levels: mussing the wig hat, making a mockery of style, so forth.

Note: if you’re just diddlling your grandma to see how many levels you can be wrong on, that would be wrong on so many levels right there on the face of it. The levels are just stacking up here. Does your grandma put up preserves every year from the fruit in her orchard? Open a jar and smear it around during the act of love, but also on toast. That’s wrong on various hygienic and alimentary levels. Does your grandma knit? If you’re a guy, have her knit a suit for your member. I feel like we’re really exploring the realm of levels here. Get your grandpa involved. Hire a clown. Have the Garden Elementary School fourth-grade class come over for a lecture. Enter a float in the 4th of July parade.

In conclusion, all things considered, the average number of levels that stuff can be wrong on is 6.