Let's do it

Let’s all get jobs at the same factory, so that we can chat with each other while laboring — that’ll make work more bearable. It is nice to toil alongside friends. 

Now let’s quit our jobs, all at once. Then, when the owner sends his armed goons out to shoot at us, and they yell “Get back to work!” we will just walk straight at them and let them kill however many of us that they can. — They can’t kill us all. There’s only so many hours in a day.

So a happy few of us make it out of the factory-lifestyle alive. A sad few of us are dead, but we’re all still comrades. We can still travel together like pack animals.

“I like the way that the new media formats are going,” I say. “I’m glad that cinema died. It was time to make room for worse ideas.”

“I agree,” sez a member of our group. I guess we’re sitting before a campfire or something — it’s hard to tell. “The new miniseries shows that are available to stream online are more relaxing because you can talk over them and not lose your place in the plot.”

“What plot!?” a dead member of our ex-factory veterans stands up and yells in indignation.

None of us dares answer this dead comrade. Out of respect for him, we spend a moment of silence thinking about potential lovers. Then our thoughts move toward different types of dessert.

“If you sculpt a statue of Eve, the first woman ever invented,” I change the subject, as we all rise and begin walking into the forest, “you’ve gotta decide whether or not to drape her with a robe.”

“Yeah,” sez Bob, another dead comrade, “cuz it’s chivalrous to offer her a covering, lest she grow cold while waiting to be made real; but it’s harder to sculpt all the intricate folds of the garment — it would be easier to just mimic the smooth curves of nude flesh. You could even paint it, to make it more believable. Then again, the robe is maybe the safer choice; for it’s more polite to shield society from the temptation of your evilest intentions, even though it’s sorta also contrary to the original story, since Eve was fashioned unclothed on the day that Jove molded her.”

“Bob has spoken,” I say to our group of pilgrims. “Does anyone disagree with him? I’d like to get an argument started, if we can.”

“I disagree,” sez our living ex-coworker Vera.

So I play matchmaker and lure Bob and Vera to produce two children together. Then I wait until the kids are at their cutest (they are born only a year apart, so it’s not impossible to find a brief span of time when they’re both still on the pleasant side of repulsive), and I ask the couple:

“Do you persist in disagreeing on this issue of hand-sculpting human beings?”

“Yes,” they say as one. “We strongly disagree.”

“Well you should try to compromise and reconcile your views, for the sake of your kids,” I argue. “For you are young parents now, happily married; and it would be a shame for you to split up — just look how adorable your children are. (Look fast.)”

Bob and Vera stare blankly at their darlings who are playing with toy firearms.

“C’mon!” I say, while placing my arms around each spouse and squeezing their shoulders.

Then the children grow up a little and enter adolescence. They are hideously ugly now. 

“We’re splitting up,” say Bob and Vera. 

“Understood,” I reply. Then we spend the rest of the afternoon filling out paperwork. It is agreed that although Vera was a billionaire before Bob wooed her away from Jeff, Bob gets to keep 75% of the couple’s wealth, while Vera walks away with only 250 mill.

Vera turns to prostitution, so as to afford her apartment in Manhattan.

§

Then, after two more years, our group of ex-factory workers makes it to the other side of the forest. We emerge from the thick vegetation and halt just beyond the forest’s edge and look down: 

We all collectively grow dizzy, as we realize that we’re standing before a chasm. It is an abyss — no soul can see the bottom.

“I bet you’d die if you dropped down there,” sez Ken, one of the dead workers.

“I bet you wouldn’t,” sez Bob, who learned to be a Master Contrarian from observing his ex-wife Vera.

“Look,” I address the group because I’m the king, “there’s a vine hanging directly in the center of this chasm. If anyone can think of a way to get the vine over to our side, I’ll give that person five caesars,” and I hold up a bill.

“I’ll do it,” sez Jeff, a living ex-coworker.

Jeff dives out toward the vine and looks like he’s gonna miss it. He’s falling fast, and there’s only a short amount of time and space for him to reach out and grasp the vine before this opportunity passes; but he manages to clutch it by its frayed end — the whole thing stretches taut and makes noises like it’s going to snap and break, and we all secretly conclude that Jeff shall be sent falling eternally into the abyss. But the vine holds, after all; and Jeff swings back and lands on the edge; then he passes the vine to me.

“Here you go,” he sez. 

So I teach all the ex-factory workers how to swing from the forest’s side to the far side of the chasm, and we almost all make it safely across.

The only two group members now remaining on the forest’s side are the children of Bob and Vera. We stand there, on the far side, holding the rope-vine and debating about whether we should send it back over to them.

Bob and Vera each now use the money from their respective portions of their divorce settlement to purchase sniper rifles from a Mom-&-Pop Gun Shop (this was a popular franchise, back in our future eon). Then they both worm down on the ground and aim with their scopes, and their mission gets accomplished.

We send Hayes and Hamilton, two of the dead ex-coworkers from our factory days, over to the other side; and they retrieve the bodies of the slain.

We cook and eat our kill. 

“This is very good,” sez Bob.

“I agree,” sez Vera.

“See?” I say. “Now don’t you wish that you two had remained married, if only for the sake of the children?”

Then someone from our tribe (I forgot who) invents a device that can scan meat and tell what its person’s life would have been like if the stuff had remained animate. So it turns out that Clyde — the firstborn child of Bob and Vera — would have been a mathematician, if he’d have been allowed to reach adulthood without anyone sniping him; and Brad — the couple’s secondborn — would’ve starred in a soap opera and proved a fine hunk.

“Oh well,” Vera quips; “better red than dead.”

Bob looks cross as he takes another bite of the subject: “But Brad IS dead…  AND red. (For I requested ‘medium rare’ but this is on the bloody side of rare.)”

Vera blushes, “Oh, I just meant: Better to be a hunk of red meat than the hunk who stars in some annoying TV series.”

So Bob and Vera fall in love again and produce two children identical to the first ones; except, this time, they learn to keep their kids below the age of two years. They do this by injecting them with a magic serum periodically. And they live with the burden that if they ever miss an injection, the children will grow up rapidly. So this is a tense sub-plot that shall enrich the present Passion Play considerably. You’ll never know what’ll happen next. You might even be surprised about some of the stuff that you expected to happen. For instance, you know that someone shall eventually undergo crucifixion, since that’s what you paid the price of admission to gawk at, but when you see how the scene is directed, you’ll exclaim: “Turn it off!” — But that’s the rub: You can’t turn it off, cuz it’s a live play, with real ammo!

So now we decide to paint a room. I get the rollers out, and Ken reveals where he hid the brushes, and Vera unveils her collection of the properly sized sprayer nozzles; then Jack drives the golf cart over to the Mom-&-Pop Gun Shop to buy the proper toxicity of industrial-strength whitewash.

Then we watch the paint dry.

Then we watch the second coat try to dry. But it can’t — it’s too thick: it’ll remain liquid forever.

So then we go on a pony ride.

And then we go on a cat ride.

Then we go on a hippo ride.

Next we go on a gator ride.

Then another hippo ride.

Then an airplane trip to Maine.

Now we’re stuck in the middle of the desert of Maine, with twenty-three camels and only seventeen people.

“Who the fuck is going to ride the remaining camels, Einstein?” (I’m very angry that too many camels were rented.)

“I ordered extra, so that we could barbecue them,” he cries.

“But that is immoral,” I say. “They’re camels!! They’re PRIVATE PROPERTY.”

“Oh,” sez Einstein.

So I slap the mind out of Einstein, and then we go return the unwanted camels to Camel Abusers Inc., and we fill out a few bundles of paperwork and pay some fines and service fees. — At long last, we leave, feeling great about having performed a well-born act.