Dear diary,
While walking along, I say to my travelmate Lucy: “I think I’d like to become a shoe salesman.”
Lucy stops and stares. Then she sez: “I believe you can do it.”
So I set up a shop, using the materials that I find at the roadside. It turns out that many creatures who live in this district love purchasing new shoes, because I get many visitors. And this is doubly surprising; because I only advertised locally, but most of these shoppers come from out-of-town. The other revelation for us is that there are more Jesuses in existence than just Jehovah’s Jesus and Lucifer’s Jesus. It turns out that Zeus has a Jesus, and so does Indra and the old World-War-2 Japanese Emperor (I forgot his name) — they all have their own personal Jesus; and these Jesuses love shoes.
But I must turn all the masculine shoppers away, because right now I only can find enough materials at the roadside to makeshift stylish women’s footwear. Fortunately, all the male Jesuses are compassionate: they simply say “I understand,” and they purchase a pair of kitten heels in their wife’s size. Then they shuffle out of my shop wearing their worn-out dusty sandals.
But one night I burn down my own shop, by lighting a match. The reason that I do this is that I realize I can gain more cash by collecting the insurance money than if I operated my shoe business for an entire fiscal quarter. And I could really use that cash to purchase readers. So Lucy and I continue our journeys.
The next character we meet on the Road to Perdition is a stuffed scorpion. “Hi there,” he sez.
“Hi,” say we, in unison.
“Will you let me ride on your backs while you swim across the lake of fire and then take a dip in the River Styx?” asks the cute little scorpion; then he adds: “I promise to refrain from stinging you to death along the way.”
I look at Lucy, and she looks back at me, and we both shake our heads and say: “No. We don’t trust you.”
Then the little stuffed scorpion whines and sez: “What! Why not? I can just tie you together with hempen rope, so that you humans become like two planks on a fleshy, self-propelling raft; and then I promise not to sting you; but, even if I did sting you, you would only become paralyzed from my poison — I don’t think you’d actually drown. There’s no statistics to suggest such an outcome, that I am aware of.”
At this point, Lucy pulls me aside and sez: “Look, this creep is trying to fool us. So, here’s what I suggest. Let us mock up two hot-sexy robots using the plastic debris that riddles this side of Eden, and then build a remote-control unit so that our droids can approach the stuffed scorpion and speak to him with our own voices — yours and mine — by way of a small speaker that we will have installed just behind the bots’ pursed lips.”
“Great idea!” I say.
So we do what Lucy imagined, and the plan works out: Our alluring robo-humanoids approach the scorpion stiffly, and he sez: “Oh, I see you’ve changed your minds and you would like to ferry me across, from page last to page next inside the Book of the Dead.”
“Yes, master.” (We use our walkie-talkie system to cause our manikins to say this.)
So then the stuffed scorpion ties up these robots that resemble the unclad First Couple (Adam and Lilith) and whips them to speed. He makes it across the fire lake, but the flames of the lake continue secretly burning the hempen ropes while the scorpion pushes the raft over into the Styx River. So, straightaway the ropes burn off during this second half of the mission, thus causing our mechanical swimmers to drift away from each other while they’re floating thru the Styx. In panicked confusion, the scorpion continues to sting them and sting them, yelling out curse words at his raft made of nude robots and saying “Bad humans! You have sinned against your Lord!” but inevitably these battery-powered ferry-folk that comprise poor Scorpio’s bot-raft get too far away from each other, and the scorpion’s legs cannot straddle the expanse; so he falls into the river and forgets this ever happened.
“Got him!” sez Lucy.
“Serves him right,” I pump my fist to the sky like a champion.
Then we keep walking and eventually come to the strip of Eden where all the harlots line up along each side of the road and try to entice passersby to allow them to gestate future Seeds of Promise. Lucy and I look at each other and say: “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” And then we both smile and giggle because we never tire of this joke. Then we go and engage with every harlot; and we end up with more messiahs than there are stars in the sky or granules of sand on the beach. This is a really good outcome, because it guarantees the survival of people who look and think and act like Lucy and me. We also go in unto the handmaids of the harlots, and these “bonus seeds” turn out even better than our original efforts.
So, all in all, today was a good day. We got a lot of platitudes accomplished, and we expanded our carbon footprint in the universe.
§
Oh, and I should also mention that we saw a stuffed crow on the heavenly horizon: We chased him for a bit, and he fled all around Eden, which resulted in us beholding many marvels of our homeland that we never knew existed. So this was fun, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment