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Religions exist because people would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.”
Instead of Christmas, we celebrated Earth Day. Sitting zazen, we celebrated Swami Nikhilananda’s birthday. Maybe we’d Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture.
And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you’re dead and you discover that the snake-handling, strychnine-guzzling Bible thumpers were right.
My nana’s gaze bounces from me to the skirt of her dress, from me to the sequins and velvet that fall away to reveal her aged legs, and the woman says, “For crying out loud … would you just look at the whore’s costume your mama buried me in?”
Paris Hilton is going to Heaven? This I can’t Ctrl+Alt+Fathom.
The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.
How to rebel against parents who celebrated rebellion? If I did drugs and pulled a train of outlaw bikers and venereal-warted gangbangers, nothing could make my parents happier.
My former-pothead, former-junkie, former–speed freak parents, they’d accidentally overdosed my fish by presenting him to me in a glass full of GHB. Meaning: liquid Ecstasy. Meaning: gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. Unfazed, my dad kept drinking even as my pet’s tiny golden corpse bumped and bobbed against his lips. He pinched it out with two fingers and passed the tiny victim to the Somali maid. “To the commode,” he intoned solemnly, “and henceforth to return to the great circle of life.”
Yes, Gentle Tweeter, we may have polio vaccines and microwave popcorn, but secular humanism really only covers the good times. Nobody in a foxhole ever said a prayer to Ted Kennedy.
Gentle Tweeter, please understand that effective communication is paramount to me. My parents are so rich because people have outsourced the skills with which they once conveyed their emotions. The public has contracted out their own self-expression. All love must be mediated through greeting cards, assembly-line diamond jewelry, or professionally arranged, factory-farmed bouquets of roses.
