Standard phone-a-friend (a just-so parable)

Dear diary,

Whoever invented the piñata was a genius. Is there anything better? Is there anything more fun or more profound?

Think about it: You look up into the sky and see the Calf of Heaven descending a stairway to earth, at the end of a matching golden leash. This Heavenly Calf now begins to bellow. The thing bellows thrice; and, each time, the voice of the Heavenly Calf shakes the world, causing the ground to cleave asunder:

And the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up ten thousand wealthy landowners and all their capital. These landowners went down alive with all their capital into the pit; and the earth closed up again over upon them: thus they perished from among the people. (Numbers 16:31-33)

Keep in mind that this happened not just once but three full times. (And what I tell you three times is true, as the Bellman proves in The Hunting of the Snark, a just-so parable by my friend Lewis Carroll.) So that’s a total of 30,000 souls. Prior to this, only Dante alone got sent to Hell while still alive.

Now you may be wondering why the Calf of Heaven is acting so darn vengefully. Well, I’ll tell you why. For I happen to know all about the Calf’s reasons and motives. And here is the answer:

The Heavenly Calf’s murderous behavior is on account of the fact that the landowning capitalists mistakenly declined the Goddess of Greed’s invitation to inseminate her womb. Yes, you read that right: they misread her advances, just this once. And such was the result.

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Now, after screening these events, I Bryan Ray of Eagan, Minnesota, decide to become a lifetime pirate, so that I can learn how to use a sword properly — my thot is that thereby I might slay Heaven’s Calf.

So I move to London and get myself kidnapped by a team of some of the finest full-time pirates in the universe*; then I take a number of courses in sword safety. I learn how to aim and hit the target, how to thrust with all my might, and also how to jab, stab, and swing hard. Soon I master the art of using a sword to protect my family, which consists of every thing that lives.

(By the way, I’m basically following the gist of the middle portions of Tablet 6 of Gilgamesh—yes, THAT ancient epic—at least up here at the “rising action” part of this entry. I just love that old story, and God refuses to deliver me from the temptation of re-plagiarizing it.)

Now, before the Calf of Heaven can bellow again and cause more capitalists to get earth-swallowed, I challenge the monster to a fair shootout. So we meet in the midst of the wild-west redness at eveningtime, in the center of town, and stare at each other. I bring my sword to the gunfight. Then we commence to perform our duel. I swing once and miss; but my cape apparently agitates Heaven’s Calf, so he charges at me and pounces upon me and pins me. The Calf is so mad that he’s slobbering as he fights, thus I am drenched in a pool of drool. Plus the Calf was blessed by its creator with a long, flowing tail, which it loves to swish vigorously, especially when it feels like it is victorious; therefore the Calf’s glittery tail keeps brushing my face as we pose like this. Yuck, it smells foul — please, someone, give this Calf a bath.

So I pray for the modern prophetess Emma Goldman to redeem me. I say: “O Emma, give ear! I got myself in a fix, and I need your help!”

So Ms. Goldman steps out of whatever dimension she was occupying and begins to deliver a passionate speech to Heaven’s Calf. Her words are fiery and her points are spot-on. But, partway thru, the Calf grows bored & moseys off to graze in the field.

So I leap up and wring the slobber out of my costume; then I jab my sword into the Calf, exactly the way that a professional butcher would do it. And because of the precision of my sword-stroke, the Calf falls asleep on the instant (this was intentional — I didn’t want the thing to feel any pain: I just wanted it to stop causing the environment to eat up all our capitalists). And now Emma Goldman and I inaugurate a repeatable ceremony where we remove the heart from the Calf and use it to alleviate global hunger:

Now I don’t mean that we cooked and ate the heart, and added seasonings and served it with dipping sauce, and divided it up into bazillions of pieces so that every inhabitant of the globe could have a taste, even southerners. NO: for the Heavenly Calf’s heart is wholly mechanical, like the owl of Perseus. (Here I’m thinking of Bubo, from the 1981 film Clash of the Titans.) Thus we took the heart apart and reverse-engineered it, and we discovered all of its secrets. This yielded countless little contraptions that have the ability to convert grass and plants into cheese and meat, and grapes and potatoes into wine and vodka. The customer simply inserts the aforementioned ingredients into the funnel-end of the mechanism, and, after a spell, those latter refreshments prove available for immediate purchase in its display-case. So the whole world got fed, cuz everyone received one of these MagiCuisine MannaMakers (as we dubbed them) from the settlement of a class-action lawsuit against the LORD of Heaven; and our ad agency dreamt up the slogan: “Cut out the middleman!”

And, nowadays, in commemoration of this Ray-Goldman enterprise, earthlings engage in a dour sacrament whenever a member of one’s family happens to comes down with pregnancy.* They make an object called a golden piñata in the shape of a calf, and they hide this object amid the common folk; then they choose a leader from among their number, and they blind this leader and place a weapon in his or her hands. Then he or she goes on a rampage until the piñata is the last object standing. Once the devastation from the blind leader’s arsenal causes shrapnel haphazardly to lodge between the horns of the piñata, the piñata’s head ejects away violently, and its body gushes a cascade of candy hearts. (It does NOT get better than this — if you claim otherwise, I will sue you.)