Anaideia part 10

I waited for a cab outside the tawdry gates of Big Dick Cedars. The burly guard approached me with a stack of old and faded nudie cards he found stashed away in the guard shack. “Can you believe my luck?” he asked as he held a picture of a fully bushed woman spread eagle on an eight of spades.

“Pretty neat,” I said.

“I know! I can’t play solitaire without getting a boner!”

But as he thumbed through each card with increasing intensity, the taxi pulled curbside and rolled down the window. My heart sank when I saw the driver. “You son of a bitch!” the cabbie shouted. It was the same racist cabbie I stiffed earlier in the day.

Panicked, I grabbed the guard’s pistol believing it to be a 9mm then I aimed and fired it at the driver. Instead of a bullet, a prong shot out and attached itself to the cabbie. While he convulsed from numerous volts of electricity, I dropped the taser and headed for the bushes. I realized then that there was only one way back to Los Angeles and that was on my own two feet.

21 hours later I was back on the outskirts LA. With my feet rubbed raw and the soles of my shoes hanging by a thread, I crawled into my flat on all fours. I headed straight towards the kitchen and grabbed the last beer in the fridge. It was a Pabst BlueRibbon. “Goddamn piss water,” I said to myself. Vic must have drank the last of my Miller High Life. But I cracked open the PBR and crawled to the couch and tried to enjoy the lukewarm beer.

Right as I was about to doze off, Vic came through the front door carrying machete, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a dead boar. “Evening mate,” he greeted in his Scottish draw.

“I didn’t think there were wild boar in California,” I say.

“There’s not,” he explains as he throws off his gear. “Ay went huntin in the San Gabriel Mountains and was stalked by two prowlin cougars. I killed em both with me machete and used their skins to make me loincloth. Aye, I had a good dee killin’.”

“But how did you get the boar?”

“Tha boar? Oh that’s just roadkill mate.”

Vic strips out of his bloodied shirt and mud-caked pants to expose his cougar-skinned loincloth. Unbridled by clothes and restrictions of modern man, he stood like a Roman god in my living room. The half naked Scot then picked up an acoustic guitar and gently plucked away as he sang hymns from the mother land. I finished my can of piss water and threw the crushed piece of aluminum across the room. Vic stopped his serenading. “Oy mate, where have you been all day?” he asks.

“Norco,” I say.

“Norco? Why would you go to tha shitehole?”

“Someone owed me money. It’s like the goddamn wild west out there.”

“Aye. It’s the wild west everywhere mate.”

I rub my hands across my face as I choked back tears. “How did the world get so crazy?” I ask.

Vic lays down the guitar and leans forward. “The world has always been crazy,” he says. “We’re just feeble beings floating on an insignificant rock through time and space. Some days you’re up but most days you’re down yet the world spins madly round. They say that man is born into sin but his soul can be redeemed. But I say man is rotted to the bone. There is not one pure creature that walks this earth. Nay not one. God was right to look upon his creation and curse it. And if god has cursed us to live this madness then what hope have we? The pursuit of sanity will forever remain an empty one. In fact it’s something worse. It’s vanity.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

pennies for the dead ☠️ (part vi- all the exposition crap)

“So you’ve been in hell for 70 years Joe?” I asked.

“Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

“Did you die first? Or did you go down there for shits and giggles?”

“Unbeknownst to me, my family has been guarding this portal to hell for 200 years. Jezebel was a maid at our estate and I went outside my marriage to be with her. But Jezebel was secretly the devil and she cast me into the portal.”

“So is your body buried in that cemetery or what? If so, how the hell are you standing here with a flesh and blood body?”

“Don’t worry about it. The point is there’s been a rebellion in hell. Spirits are escaping to this earth and if we don’t stop Jezebel, there will be hell on earth!”

“Relax Joe, you’re just describing Toledo,” I said.

“You already made that joke.”

“How can three flesh and blood men stop an army of evil spirits?” Pete asked.

“While in Hell, I learned the ancient dark arts of Mesopotamia,” Joe replied. “I’ve been made a priest in these ancient religions. All I have to do is bless your weapon of choosing, and voila.”

“Can you bless the bullets of my .38?” I asked.

“Sure can.”

“Hell yeah!”

“What about my pocket knife?” Pete asked.

“That’s a pretty lame weapon, Pete.”

“Grab as many weapons as you can carry,” Joe replied.

“What about this machete?” Pete asked.

“What about this IWI Tavor TS12 shotgun?” I asked.

“Yes, yes. I will bless them all. We must hurry though.”

“Thanks Joe!” I said. “By the way, I’ve always wondered: what’s it like having sex with Satan?”

TO BE CONTINUED

pennies for the dead 💀 (part v)

“I don’t know Sheila,” I said, “you’ve faked demonic possessions before.”

“Try me, asswipe!” she replied. Then I pumped a few bullets into her chest.

Nothin

“Alright, so I guess you’re Jezebel,” I said. “Where’s Pete?”

“His soul resides in HELL for all eternity!!!!”

“Good, he’s a Boston sports fan,” I said, “he needs to know how that feels.”

“You will join him soon enough!”

“Sorry sister, I already live in Ohio.”

I pulled the trigger again but I already emptied the revolver. I threw the gun at her and started running down the hallway while screaming for my life.

I hid in the closet under the staircase. Of course, it didn’t take long for her to find me. Using her demonic powers, Jezebel began to eat my soul. I started praying. “God, I regret everything,” I said.

Then God responded. Thunderbolts began raining down on Jezebel from some unseen force and she retreated into the shadows. I was still alive.

I crawled out from the closet. In front of me stood a wizard-like figure dressed in white robes and holding a staff.

“Thank you Jesus,” I said.

“I’m not Jesus,” the figure replied. “I’m Joe Morris.”

I stood up. “Joe Morris? Shouldn’t you be 120 years old?”

“119 to be precise.”

Then Pete ran down the hallway. “Ty! I’m still alive!” he said.

“I thought you went to hell,” I replied.

“I did. It ain’t such a bad place. I got to meet Dave Cowens.”

“He’s still alive dumbass.”

“Are you sure? By the way, did you piss your pants?”

“I did. It’s a side effect of my elavil prescription. Where did Jezebel go?”

“She went back to hell to lick her wounds,” Joe Morris said. “We must go to the cellar, return to hell, and make sure she never returns.”

“Fuck that,” I said. “This ain’t my problem. I’ll just collect the money from Dorthy and be on my merry way.”

Right then, a possessed Dorthy flew down from the ceiling and attacked me. While I fought her off, Joe Morris released more thunderbolts from his staff. Finally, she flew off of me and began writhing on the ground before whatever cursed spirit that possessed her left her body. Dorthy was dead.

“Mother!” Pete screamed.

“She hasn’t been your mother for a long time,” Joe said.

I took a moment to gather myself.

“Alright,” I said, “I need to change my pants before we go to the cellar,”

TO BE CONTINUED…

the problem of good

Part of the reason why William Peter Blatty considered The Ninth Configuration as a true sequel to The Exorcist is because they both attempt to address the “mystery of the good.”

Blatty, from my understanding of course, was a devout Catholic so he understood these terms from a very spiritual perspective. While I find the phenomenon of religion fascinating, I don’t view the universe in that particular way. Nevertheless, I think Blatty was attempting to address a very interesting question, particularly with The Ninth Configuration (the film. I haven’t read the novel)

Much ado is made about “the problem of evil”, but that’s only a problem from a religious perspective. If the the universe is indifferent to our plight, and life is inherently selfish, then there is no mystery. Furthermore, there is no good OR evil…it’s merely a projection of human perception.

Many philosophers have attempted to formulate a model for morality, notably Kant’s Categorical Imperative and utilitarianism, with varying degrees of success. I personally tend to favor something that I heard Bart Ehrman say: I just know it when I see it. However I do find it interesting that nearly every religion has some variant of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.

I don’t think that I have many philosophical convictions, but one thing I am certain of is that I am not a “blank slatist”. If we were born as blank slates, then nothing we do would be possible. Language acquisition itself provides some insight into the a priori nature of our being. What language can tell us precisely about our morality is unknown to me, but I think it warrants further investigation as evidenced by the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule may not be a “philosophically consistent” principle, but I think it’s intuitive enough that there could possibly be something revealing about it. Empathy might be an example. To my understanding, empathy is a phenomenon that’s scientifically falsifiable, but I’m just spitballing here. Maybe “good” and “evil” are a priori categories of human reasoning, I dunno.

Either way, from both a religious and secular perspective, “the problem of good” needs answering.