Screwing the Penguin Suits
“You see that?” I’m pointing at a group of nuns ambling down the road toward us.
My buddy says, “Yeah, so what?”
We’re
having coffee at this small roadside café. It’s a lazy Sunday
afternoon, the cafe piping in Kalapana, the girl at the next table has
blinding white thighs I’m gawking at. But this “idyll” has just been
destroyed by the sight of the nuns.
“I hate nuns,” I say. “They’re wasting all that sexual equipment. They
make me sing that Black Eyed Peas song, ‘What you gonna do wit all that
breast? All that breast inside that shirt?’”
“Then you should hate priests, too.”
“I
don’t care about priests. They’re boring by default. With nuns, at
least sometimes there’s a saving grace. I once ran into somebody who
looked like Cheska Garcia and she broke my heart with that penguin
suit. Beautiful nuns make you wish you could go back in time and slit
Emperor Constantine’s throat. That is, if you could get past the nasty in hoc signo vinces crowd.”
“Why Constantine?”
“Why not
Constantine?” I say. “If it wasn’t because of him, our “nuns” today would
have been largely pagan, complete with fertility orgies. Wouldn’t it be
nice? Religion and sexual orgies. Who wants to be an atheist if you
have that wonderful alternative? These days, either they bore you out
of your skull with stories that never change and are as dry as dinosaur
bones, or they frighten you to death with varying pictures of hell and
the afterlife.”
“I was having lunch the other day,” I say, “when this neighbor’s dog
began barking. Maybe the dog was hungry. Maybe it just wanted to kick
my balls and destroy my peace right at the very moment I needed it
most. But I was thinking, if you’d strip religious belief down to the
viscera, you’d see the simple fact that we believe in god only because
we’re afraid of the fires of some hell, or we’re hoping to get the meat
scrap of an ‘eternal’ reward.”
“What does it tell you about the
human race? It tells you that humanity, on some fundamental level of our
survival instincts, are no different from dogs. We wait at
tables and tremble in fear when the master’s gonna kick us.”
Arf!
“Religious
fervor is just a matter of swelling the brain’s temporal lobe. Certain
drugs do that. You want to ‘feel’ the presence of god, get high on
hallucinogens. Remember those yanomamos? They sniff hallucinogenic
mushrooms to ’see’ gods and demons. Ancient shamans and priests used to
do that, too. Now, since they’ve replaced the mushrooms with impotent
things like incense and saccharine red wine, it’s no longer fun. The
game these days is to pretend. The game these days is sing ‘jesusified’
rock and roll and lipsync fags like Jamie Rivera.”
“Jamie Rivera is not a fag,” my buddy snaps. “She’s a woman.”
“Okay. What’s your point?”
My buddy stares at me angrily. “I love Jamie Rivera.”
“Uhuh.”
I’m trying to digest this disturbing piece of information. “That’s
okay. Some people like screwing she-goats or playing the dominatrix in
bed, you love Jamie Rivera. That’s fine. That’s normal.”
“I think I’m having a headache.”
“I
have a mushroom at home. The guy who gave it to me said it’s most
probably a genuine hallucinogenic. Maybe you’d want a sniff. It’s safe.
“You can’t just do that. You should have it dried first.”
“Don’t they just munch it straight from the stem?”
He gazes at me. “I think I have to leave. I’m watching a DVD. The movie’s title is ‘Go and Fuck Yourself.’ So see you later.”
“Okay,”
I say. I watch my good friend walk down the seething road. Something
rankles me; there’s something odd about the movie’s title that I just
couldn’t quite put a finger on.
And I’m thinking, I’ll dry the
mushroom. But I’ll sniff it only after I’m sure it’s the right species.
After I’m sure it doesn’t have deadly spores. If it’s hallucinogenic,
that’ll be a blast. I could “tune in” like Timothy Leary. But if it
isn’t…it could be nasty.
Hmmm… A little experiment is in order.
The Shakespearean question is: Should I assume that it’s safe if my
neighbor’s dog survives?
***
For similar posts, see Sacred Cows 2.0.
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