The Pharisees (An Essay)

The Pharisees

by

Varo Borja

In this essay I will attempt, in as brief a manner as possible, to define what a Pharisee was, how they came about, and the impact, or legacy they left from the time of Christ until today.

The word “Pharisee” comes from the Hebrew word, Chasidim or “pious ones”. The Pharisees, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, came into being somewhere in the middle of the 3^rd century B.C., or right around the time of the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epihphanes. Being born in revolt, the Pharisees were no strangers to a type of militaristic doctrine. The Pharisees, as apart from the chief priests, were stringent upholders of the law, written or oral. Many of their “laws” were codified in the Book of Jubilees; an apocryphal book of the Hebrew Bible. During the Seleucid implementation of the pagan rites in the sacred Temple in Jerusalem, the Pharisees were some of the most outspoken opponents to this policy. Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid monarch, had tried to implement a violent process of Hellenization in the region of Judaea. He was supported by the Sadducees (the temple cult that welcomed everything Hellenistic, including philosophy and the building of gymnasia), but resisted bitterly by the Pharisees. Some Pharisees even suffered martyrdom for their convictions. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, some Pharisees were so devout that they let themselves be slaughtered on the Sabbath rather than lift a finger to defend themselves (any type of physical activity was expressly forbidden on the Sabbath).

Christ’s dealings with the Pharisees in the early 1^st century A.D. angered this sect to no end and was one of the direct causes of His death. In a quote from the Gospel of Matthew, Christ said "The scribes and the Pharisees have sitten in the chair of Moses. All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works do ye not; for they say and do not. For they bind heavy and insupportable burdens, and lay them on men's shoulders; but with a finger of their own they will not move them. And all their works they do for to be seen of men. For they make their phylacteries broad, and enlarge their fringes. And they love the first places at feasts, and the first chairs in the synagogues. And salutations in the market place, and to be called by men, Rabbi" (Matt., xxiii, 1-8). Christ made several more scathing rebukes of the Pharisees (as well as the scribes and the Sadducees), calling them a nest of vipers and warning the multitude to “Beware of the leaven of the scribes and the Pharisees”. Extremely conservative as a rule, and haughty in their knowledge of the scriptures and their own “righteousness”, the Pharisees were confounded and deeply embarrassed by the Son of Jesse who called himself the Messiah, and the “Son of David”. Claims like these were reserved for what the Pharisees considered to be the savior of Israel from the Romans. The Pharisees, in their evolutionary process, had become deeply nationalistic and involved intrinsically in the politics of Palestine (Judaea), and sought a temporal solution to the woes of the Jewish nation. They firmly expected the wrath of God to deliver them from the Roman legions and restore the rule of their land to those most worthy to rule it: themselves. However, as opposed to the Zealots (a sect bent on armed rebellion against Rome; Simon Zealotas the disciple of Christ was one of these), the Pharisees had no taste for armed revolt. They much preferred for the hand of God to do it for them. Perhaps this is one reason why Jesus made statements like the quote above, and didn’t add, “beware of the leaven of the Zealots also”.

After the death of Jesus a new trend in the religio-political situation in Palestine came into being, with the Pharisees at the forefront. To quote the Catholic Encyclopedia, “After the conflicts with Rome (A.D. 66-135) Pharisaism became practically synonymous with Judaism. The great Machabean wars had defined Pharisaism: another even more terrible conflict gave it a final ascendancy. The result of both wars was to create from the second century onward, in the bosom of a tenacious race, the type of Judaism known to the western world.” Where the Sadducees had failed, the Pharisees succeeded. The Sadducees had been a totally exclusive class (or caste) of priests, with limited numbers and high (material) standards of entry. The Pharisees had always held the respect of the people for their seeming purity and unquestionable devotion to the law and the prophets, and welcomed any adherents to their doctrine. Also, the Pharisees had been inherently nationalistic in their ideals, and this appealed to the majority of the non-Christian, non-pagan population of Palestine. The Pharisees had always placed the spiritual before the material (in theory), and their belief in a resurrection and the eternal nature of the soul (as contrasted with the Sadducees who believed in neither) appealed strongly to a people who saw themselves in present bondage and gave them something to look forward to in the afterlife.

In conclusion, it would be important to note that some of the most prominent men in the New Testament were Pharisees. Nicodemus (John 3:1), Gamaliel (Acts 5:34), and Paul (Acts 26:5, Phil. 3:5) all were Pharisees, and not in least ashamed of it. Paul stated, according to the Zondervan Bible Pictorial Dictionary, “I am, in the matter of the Law, ‘a Pharisee’ (Phil. 3:5), he did not think of himself as a hypocrite but claims the highest degree of faithfulness to the Law. In similar manner, church leaders might say, ‘We are Pharisees’”. To quote this source again, “Much of modern scholarship, however, has cast the Pharisees in too favorable a light; when one reads our Lord’s heated denunciation of Pharisaism in Matthew, chapter 23, where He specifically lists their sins, one has not only a true but a dark picture of Pharisaism as it was at the time of Christ” (Zondervan Bible Pictorial Dictionary pg. 648). This statement, when compared with the present state of affairs in the modern nation of Israel, is all too true. Almost daily Palestinian men, women, and children are blown to bits or machine gunned down in the name of Jewish nationalism. The seeds for this type of conflict are very old, and the ancient sect of the Pharisees is very near the taproot.

Bibliography

The Zondervan Bible Pictorial Dictionary. Merril C. Tenney, Editor in Chief. Grand Rapids Michigan, 1963.

The Catholic Encyclopedia. Found at: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11789b.htm.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised Version. Edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York, Oxford University Press, 1971.

Brainyquotes.com. Found at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/ariel_sharon.html

The Fool

I am a moderate. Most of the time. When the Right gives a tax cut to the progeny of the Wal Mart dynasty, I cringe. When the left makes it un pc for me to say the word God in my own church, I want to vomit. What is going on? Is it really the end of days? Are the Republicans and the Democrats two heads of the same dragon? Is the media really liberal, or is it just a vehicle for more sales, more fear, and more control? Where is the middle ground? Where is the sanity? Where is my grandfather who got a bayonet in the stomach during WW2 and retired making 5 dollars and fifty cents an hour and all the time smiling like the cheshire cat? Why can't a public school teacher get elected president? I pray for serenity and I'm still white bread house nigger scum in the grand spectacle of the race to get more, more, more for your dollar and scrape enough change together to put Phillip Morris's great grandchildren through cotillion with my brown lung butter and the cancerous sores forming at the corners of my frowning face. I watched C span last night sheerly for the sedating effect of the pedant discoursing on the intelligence community that he's envious of for not putting enough text about subversive elements in Guatemala on the internet and who the fuck really cares anyway? I tell you who cares. The thousands of soldiers hunkered down in Babylon bleeding for us and dying for us and procuring another pint of oil and prestige for the bloated elephantitis head of state that doesn't give two shits about even serving a day in the service of his country in a war zone that has long segued into peace because we decided to leave well enough the hell alone. Peace? Upside down broken cross standing for sodomy, sloth, and the egoistic crusade of a generation of failed marriages, spiritual bankruptcy and the trouncing of every piece of character that this nation retained at one time. Fuck Bill Clinton. Fuck W. Fuck the whole lot of self serving, self interested glory hounds hot on the trail of stock tips and trips to the Caymans where they hide what really matters to the majority. Money. Cash rules everything around me and never forget it, cause if you do you're liable. Lawyers and the reek of ambulance exhaust. Can you tell I'm a gen Xer? Can you tell I don't have a lot of faith in the future? Will my generation really be able to turn the red tide of fate or will we make the same mistakes as our parents? Gimme the Star Spangled Banner anyday over Lil John and Tommy Lee and the rest of the no talent sequels to American Idol prepackaged for the consumption of obese welfare mothers and chronic masturbatory teens bringing up the rear and ready to procreate with the devil for fifteen minutes on the boob tube. My father, My father, why hast thou forsaken us?

--VB

Now I Lay Me Down

Now I Lay Me Down

By

Varo Borja

Baxter clocked out at the furniture factory about 11pm. His shift had lasted for 12 solid hours, and when he got to the Gaslight all he could think of was the bottom of a Dickel on the rocks, straight with a Bud chaser and the long, lovely arms of the bar wrapping around him in the afterdark of his worn down life. The Gaslight was Baxter’s haunt of choice for the evening and had been for just about every night for the past five years. He was a regular, complete with his own barstool and a tab that he paid every Thursday when he got his slim subsistence from Thomason Furniture, Inc.

Exiting his orange ’73 Dodge Roadrunner, Baxter extracted his black plastic comb from the back pocket of his tattered Levi’s and slicked back his overlong, dingy hair until he looked like a used up cross between James Dean and Ronnie Van Zant. He had a two-day old stubble of a beard and his eyes still had the look of the jungle to them. He hid this as best he could through occasional jokes and jabs at his coworkers and codrinkers, but Baxter definitely still had the thousand-yard stare. He had served four tours in Nam as a Navy Seal, and he had the tattoo and the grayish pink bullet wounds to prove it. Baxter was not a big man, but his was a barely concealed fire. A hideous demon just below the dam erected by numerous sessions with the corpsman-therapist at the VA hospital in Johnson City beat against Baxter’s breast and tormented him on a daily, if not hourly basis. Baxter was a man not to be trifled with, and he had found nothing in the world to live for but the backbreaking labor of a tenon machine operator and the occasional jaded touch of a barfly harlot to soothe his latent aggression and disillusionment with life in postwar Americana. Baxter lumbered up to the double doors of the Gaslight and entered with a great sigh of relief and the feeling that an orphan might experience on being returned to kith and kin.

The scent of stale beer and hot women struck Baxter like a fist as he entered the bar, accompanied to the sound of Melissa on the jukebox and the greeting gazes of half a dozen war buddies and a few decked out and perfumed ladies of the night. Baxter stretched for the ceiling, savoring the cigarette smoke and loud music, feeling the good tiredness that only the manual laborer knows and maintaining his rebel without a cause posture. He sidled up to the bar where a glass with twelve-year-old George Dickel waited expectantly nestled up beside a perspiring twelve-day-old Budweiser.

“How’s it goin, Bat?”

“Not bad, Possum. Long day. I’m ready to unwind,” said Baxter to the corpulent bartender who presented him with a half toothless grin while wiping at a spot on the bar with lackluster precision.

“Where’s Owl been the past week? He owes me about 50 bucks on his tab, and I ain’t coverin’ that shit when Top collects this week. Is he fucked up again on that black tar shit them niggers sell down in Blacksburg?”

“Shit man, I don’t know. Owl didn’t show up for work this week, and I be damned if I’m goin down to the lake to drag his ass out again. He may have had it bad at Dak To, but I be a shithouse rat if I cover that fifty for his ass,” retorted Baxter as he polished off the first of what would be many whiskeys. Baxter knew that he would cover the fifty as soon as he got paid next week; he always did. Baxter’s band of battered bastards from the nether regions of Nam was a tight group. They always stuck together, even when one of them wasn’t packing his own gear or pulling his own weight, like Owl. The men who had been in country always had a couple of bucks to spare for a brother down on his luck, and Baxter was no exception.

Baxter reached into the sweat stained and grimy front pocket of his dime store wifebeater and extracted a crumpled pack of Marlboros. Lighting one up and feeling the sultry smoke fill his lungs, he realized for an instant how tired he was and how futile his life had become, but this passed in an instant when the desire for another 8 ounces of the brown stuff crowded his existential awakening to the side like so much dust blown in the wind.

“How bout another one, there Possum old buddy? Hey Brubaker, where does a man get a drink around here anyway?”

Brubaker, one of the resident sots of the establishment was another Nam vet who had served with the 173^rd Airborne. Brubaker was another of the former GI’s who was down and out and drunk all the time. He just couldn’t seem to get it together, and he lived off a small dole from Uncle Sam and spent damn near the whole thing on cheap whiskey and Lucky Strikes. He nodded and peered drunkenly at Baxter and then collapsed face first on the oak veneer bar.

“Hold your horses, Bat, I’m comin’” said Possum as he managed to move his great weight to the bottle of Dickel and give Baxter a generous helping of the fiery poison.

As the record changed on the jukebox, a small, ratlike figure clothed in a tattered Army Jacket and jeans entered through the double doors and scurried up to the bar, fingering in his pocket for a moment and producing a small, round white poker chip with the letters AA emblazoned in cheap gold lettering in the center.

“Well I’ll be damned, if et ain’t Shitbird. Back from the VA, huh?” said Baxter in a mocking tone, gliding along the edge of the buzz produced from his first two drinks.

“Gimme a goddam drink, Possum. That AA shit is for gooks and goners,” said Shitbird with the nervous anticipation of the alcoholic about to be in his cups.

“Well, I guess one won’t hurt ya. I know, I know, the first one’s on the house for a white chip. Jesus, slow down Shit, there’s more where that come from but you ain’t sleepin’ in the back this time. Two o’clock’s lights out for this saloon. Top will have my ass if he catches you drunk in his office again.”

Top was the owner of the Gaslight. He stood about 6’7” and dressed out at about 300. He was a likeable man, but when angered he could commit the most unspeakable atrocities upon all those present. Like Baxter and Shitbird, Top had been in the war, but he had achieved the rank of First Sergeant in ’68 right before the Tet offensive, consigning him forever to the ranks of the Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. For an enlisted man, Top had made good in the Army and now in private life he owned a couple of car lots and the Gaslight. He was not above ostentation— he drove a sparkling white Cadillac and showed his gold-toothed grin to everyone he liked and the back of his hand to everyone he despised. Top showed a mutual respect to the Nam vets who frequented the Gaslight though, and had more than once slipped them a twenty when they were down and out. However, Top was a family man, and his wife didn’t let him out to play with the boys at the bar and talk about the good old days. He was rarely ever present at the Gaslight past 7:30pm, and tonight was no exception.

“Top’s a big softy, Possum. You don’t know him like I do. Top may have made First Sergeant, but he was in the shit back in ’67 with the rest of us. Whaddayou know about that anyhow, Possum? You were 4F in ’67 and workin’ down at Hollister’s then. Gimme another goddam drink and quit your bitchin’ fat boy” said Shitbird, darting his rodent’s eyes around at the fellow topers present as he anxiously awaited another round.

“Yeah, whatever Shit. Just don’t raise no hell. Hey Walter, did you ever see such an ungrateful little drunk?” said Possum as he poured Shitbird another round from the inexpensive brand saved for deadbeets and drifters.

Walter was the oversized doorman; a former Force Recon marine who had done two tours in country and could crush a Campbell’s Tomato soup can, unopened. Walter said very little, but his 27-inch biceps made it so that he didn’t have to be very vocal to transmit his unquestioned hegemony over all present at the Gaslight.

“Don’t gimme that fuckin’ horsepiss, Possum. Gimme a shot of the good stuff. I just got my check and I’m splurgin’.”

“Alright, Shit” said Possum “I forgot it was the first of the month.”

The night rolled on to the sound of Skynyrd, The Allman Bros., Creedence Clearwater, and Cat Stevens as the wounded warriors drank and lied and drank and lied and laughed about the “bad old days” until like Brubaker, Baxter and Shitbird were wasted and sentimental. About 1:30 a couple of fine young things in tight leather and stiletto heels sidled up to the pair of intoxicated anti-heroes and asked them if they cared to partake of a certain white powder that one of the tarts had in her purse. Baxter candidly refused, saying that he would stick with the liquid poison, but Shitbird greedily acquiesced to their query and the trio headed for the ladies bathroom. Baxter peered through his tin stamped, bleary beer goggles at the bar and tried to remember if he had enough gas to get home. He stumbled over to the jukebox, swerving mightily and careening off the table of a pair locked in the amorous clutches of heavy petting. The young brave with his hand down his lover’s pants immediately rose and demanded satisfaction from the drunken S.O.B. that had just disturbed his passionate pursuit. Baxter laughed in his face and then took a big gulp from his lukewarm Budweiser, spitting the contents onto the jacket of the erstwhile-offended Romeo. Then, with a movement that betrayed Baxter’s drunken state, he did a quick downward snap kick, breaking the knee of the unlucky lover and sending him crashing through the Formica table and onto the floor. As Romeo lay on the floor gibbering and cursing at his misfortune and his broken kneecap, Baxter straddled him and began cursing in Vietnamese, slapping the unfortunate man senseless. About this time, Walter seized a Louisville Slugger from behind the bar and swiftly cracked the bat over Baxter’s back. This floored Baxter for only a moment, and he came up from the floor as quickly as he had went down. Walter certainly had the advantage since he was sober and in full control of his wits, but Baxter had a fifth of a gallon of fire water in his gut and he was rapidly becoming dangerous. Possum had not been idle either. He had telephoned the local police because he knew this situation could very quickly become deadly. Both men in question were confirmed killers, and if the fight escalated, which it was bound to do, one or both men could end up six feet under. Possum had been lifelong friends with both men, and didn’t want to see them hurt or dead.

Baxter was Section 8 though. He was in what his corpsman-therapist would call a paranoid delusional state fueled by about a fifth of whiskey and years of pent up aggression. He couldn’t distinguish his friend Walter Pulaski from the phantoms of his past. Baxter had long ago crossed over into what was known as No Man’s land, and it had only taken a hair to break the camel’s back of his sanity.

As soon as Baxter had risen from the floor, he had swiftly extracted his Gerber boot knife from the top of his worn leather motorcycle boots. The two combatants circled the floor: Baxter with knife drawn and in a defensive posture, seeking for the first opportunity to drive the knife between the ribs of what he thought was a VC operative. Walter was being as cautious as possible, seeking for the first opportunity to diffuse the situation and go home alive.

About this time Shitbird emerged from the bathroom with his two coked out companions and seeing Baxter and Walter faced off in their deadly duel, he immediately ran to where the two men were about to converge and began to try and talk down Baxter with soothing words that might have come from his own mother some winter bedtime long ago when nightmarish djinn had hidden under his bed lustily waiting to inflict their tortures upon his hapless and helpless soul. Shitbird soothed and salved Baxter’s rage enough to the point where Baxter started to see through the eyes of a human again instead of a hunted beast. Baxter glanced quickly at both men, searching for the visage of the Vietnamese soldiers he had been surrounded by just a few seconds before, but they were not visible anymore. What he saw was an angry giant of Polish descent in a tank top t-shirt and a small, haggard friend in an Army jacket and worn blue jeans. Immediately, Baxter dropped his guard and fell to the floor, uncontrollable sobs heaving forth from his sawdust and liquor scented body. Where two minutes ago there had been a trained killer on the verge of committing a terrible crime, there was now a frightened child, seeking protection and his mother’s breast.

Shitbird moved close to Baxter, cradling him in his arms for a few minutes until the police arrived. They immediately inquired as to what the disturbance was, but all present were silent. Don Juan with the broken kneecap started to tell the whole affair, but one look from Walter and he was silent. Possum was the first to answer the police officer.

“Just a little accident. I called because I thought two niggers were breaking in the back. It turned out to be nothing. This man here just tripped over his own shoelaces, and the man crying there, well, his mother died today and he’s right upset. You boys want a drink?”

“No thanks. We’re on duty. Well, I better not get any more calls from you this evening, Willard (Possum’s real name), and if I have to come back down here tonight, somebody’s goin’ to jail. You here me?”

“Sure, Jack. You won’t hear a peep. Scout’s honor” said Possum as he tried to look busy wiping the bar and be as cordial as possible at the same time.

The policemen left and Shitbird drove Baxter home to his trailer in the small community of Sawmills. The coke that Shitbird had done in the bathroom enhanced his ability to drive and they made it home safely. Shitbird helped Baxter into bed and lovingly tucked him in, turning on the box fan and the three nightlights in the hall before he crashed out on the couch, passing out before he hit the pillow. Baxter lay in bed, and though still drunk he began to say a prayer from his childhood that he had religiously repeated every night since he was five years old. He had said it in the jungles of Cambodia, he had said it in the whorehouses of Saigon, and he had said it while in the seclusion room in the State Hospital.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”

The sublime state of sleep slowly crept up on Baxter, and he drifted off to a land where children run under a golden sun and lovers lie by crystal clear pools of untroubled water and the dead walk again on an Earth that has never known the horrors of war or the cries of impoverished babes sent to untimely graves in the perfume scented fields of Southeast Asia.

Juggernaut

By

Varo Borja

I lay dying in a pool of translucent fear and my hair feels like straw sat upon a worried brow and I am lying by the porcelain altar of Shiva or Set. I feel the paroxysm of my birthright rising within innards of fiery fulsome fright and it comes and I feel better and then I look at the porcelain tile and see a lone dust mite crawling through paths of urine stained freeways and the internecine ride of the Caledonians on my bathroom’s battlefield and my fingers crush the lone ranger upon this funereal floor where only the strong survive and the involutions of my intestinal hellspawn offerings and oblations to the god of wine no longer bring Bacchus to bear on the heretics running loose in my head and I’ve lost the war but at least the bloodletting has stopped and I can go back to bed.

The bed spins through time and space and I smell the feces from the day before and I reach to the bedside and take a long, liverish drink from the Chevas Regal and lie back on the satin pillowcase and breathe asthmatically and crave a cancer stick. Carol Lynn cries in the kitchen and I crawl back to the bathroom past the window where watchers keep their vigilant gaze glued to my stash of cocaine in the chest of drawers. I take a few toots from my stash only for medicinal purposes and then I crawl past Carol Lynn who is frying tofu and eggs for my children’s consumption to the refrigerator for a bottle of Schlitz and then back to the bathroom for more intensive research on the beneficent properties of cool tile on the forehead of a highly developed drunkard like me.

I’ve done too much coke. I know the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the cedar woods just outside my bedroom window. I must hide here in my sanctuary where the Virgin Mary lets me rest my tired head on her lily-white feet and escape from the barbarian hordes outside who demand my immediate crucifixion. Jesus must have turned the water into wine on a Friday night because on Saturday I’ve always been too drunk to drink from rhytons filled with seraphimic nectar so I just go for the single malt Scotch straight with a beer chaser. I know they’ve tapped my phone and the satellite signals larrup my fevered brain and I must now have a touch more cocaine because I’ve laved my head in the sacramental holy water and reaped the lenity of my Lord and Savior.

I crawl back to the chest of drawers from the bathroom floor and take another toot for my stomach’s sake and then crawl back into bed, being careful to avoid the view from the window. I try to sleep but Carol Lynn’s unreasonable lists, always lists, keep me awake and I am making a mental grocery spread sheet in my mind and I know we need milk, bread, tempeh, Schlitz, cocaine, toiler paper, and a couple of Blow Pops for the girls because they’re such good girls but they keep playing now in the yard with all those nasty government agents and they insist on screaming and giggling much too loudly for my sensitive ears. I simply MUST have another snort of that delightful white powder that is cut so splendidly with powdered sugar which reminds me that I’m supposed to bake a cake for my daughter’s birthday tomorrow but I just can’t seem to motivate myself so yes I must have another toot and crawl back to the bathroom for more inspiration from the Virgin Mary and her celestial Sesame Street companions.

I’m in hell. I’m in hell. The cool, luxuriant tiles are losing their redemptive powers and there’s blood mixed with the bile that I deposit into the crystal blue waters of my wife’s favorite seat in the house. Where is the new wine? Where is the feast they have promised? Where the fuck did I go wrong after graduation from Harvard with my useless degree in Chaos, Comparative Religion, and Thai Stick that forced me to sell my soul to the Goths of the Guatemalan countryside with their wonderful coca leaves and dusky, manscented pagodas of pleasure where the fleshpots of old Sodom would pale in comparison. Enrico will kill me if I turn state’s evidence on the cartel. I’ll be sporting a Columbian necktie to my funeral in some backwater bilgedump in Baha or Cozumel. Fuck. I simply must straighten out my head from all this fretting and fidgeting and find a solution to my existential crises. Cocaine. Yes, I guess that’s the answer. No. I must fight that white devil-in-waiting that lurks in the bottom of the Ethan Allen chest that my mother in law gave as a Christmas present when Carol Lynn and I were young and had the world by the teeth. I had arrived. Now look at me. Fuck. Fuck.

The cocaine enlivens my spirits and I feel I must go for a walk but not now because I must hide and destroy the mental grocery lists of my beleaguered wife here in our red brick Victorian castle nestled ever so secretly in the Maine woods and away from those pesky bastards with badges and warrants and wire taps and satellites but apparently not far enough because now I am besieged with only about an ounce left of my panacea and about half a half a gallon of Chevas Regal; the most wonderfully cheap Scotch that tastes as if the Lord himself had bequeathed it to we mortals instead of the nasty verdict of guilty, guilty, guilty when I go before his sacrosanct white throne and plead for my soul because I am a good boy and always have been I just got caught up with those despicable Central Americans and their wonderful white powder which I simply must have now or I will die.

The smoke from my cigarette curls in the air; wispy fragments descending upon alabaster counters filled with all the necessities of the modern age: makeup from Neiman Marcus, perfume from Nordstrom’s, Q-tips from Communist China. A virtual cornucopia of sanitary solutions for the sensibilities of the modern woman. Too bad there aren’t any get out of jail free cards amongst my wife’s belongings. I am sitting on the toilet now, rehashing my sins of commission and omission. No, I didn’t take over my father’s printing business. Yes, I slept with our Mexican maid Margherita. No, I didn’t take out the trash. Yes, I did wreck the Mercedes into the lake last year, but didn’t Carol Lynn always say that she would much rather have a Volvo? Volvos are designed with safety in mind, are they not? Besides, a Volvo wouldn’t spin out of control at 135 mph and wreck itself, now would it? My scorecard reads zero. I must offer myself to the waiting servants of justice for trial and excommunication from the Republic for which they stand. Yes. I must.

First, I have to get my courage up. I’m going to jail anyway, so I might as well have one last bump of the good stuff. The cocaine feels like fire flowing through my nostrils and into my extremities and I have a solution. If it is battle that the barbarian hordes seek, they shall have it. By god they will. I open the drawer to the nightstand and sift through the unmentionables (K-Y, various and sundry sex toys, and my wife’s diaphragm) until I find the sword of Allah that will reap the harvest of blood and free me from my oppression: my Daisy semi-automatic air pistol. Yes. I shall have my vengeance. I run through the house in my skivvies and fling open the front door where I am literally blinded by the god of the Mithraists, but I will not be daunted. I run headlong at my assailants, firing from the hip. I am the avenging angel from the book of Revelation. When I am sated with bloodlust, I pause to look around at the carnage. Hmm. It seems I have fired my fiery darts at the innocents of the woodland: squirrels, an old growth hemlock, my wife’s Volvo, and the azure shadows produced by the waning day. Feeling foolish and a little tired, I retire to bed with the assurance of a brighter tomorrow. First, I must consult with my wife, for it seems that aliens have taken up residence in the flower garden and turned the dog into a very large sea monster that resembles the Leviathan of the holy scriptures. Yes, and she simply MUST go to Enrico’s and procure me another bag of that delightful white substance.