A lot of people (who shall remain nameless) think God is a stick in the
mud for creating the universe and not taking responsibility for it.  They
say trite stupid shit like, “I can’t believe in God, because how can I
believe in an all-powerful being that could make such a messed up world.”

101 philosophy may wow her over wine, but I’m not her, nor would I employ
that method of attack to get in her pants.  Instead I’d tell her, “God is
a stoned teenager, who steals his parent’s car so he can hotrod around
town all the while never knowing the true root of his delinquency.  He’s
the greatest artist of all time, full of self loathing and directionless
angst.  I heard he was the 4th member of Nirvana.  Now show me your
breasts – I love you.”

It is like last night, when I was in the mall Christmas shopping.  At some
non-specific point I wound up in Footlocker staring into the void of a
black pair of Timbos when from out of the in store speakers a pop-punk
song burbled out yearning for a new-Aquarian-age of 1985 ushered in by
Madonna and Springsteen.  I’m not sure how Madonna and Springsteen were to
bring about this new age, but I suspect by none other than winged chariot.
As a member of Church of Springsteen (and not God’s stoner church) I
would have cheered such a chariot, even if it was dragging Madonna like
Judah Ben Hur behind it.  I guess that means that my old age has allowed
me the objectivity to appreciate Madonna on an academic level.  My old age
however prevented me from enjoying the song, which reeked of so much
corporate slime, that perhaps the only person who was truly po-mo enough
to fathom its reflexive emo-lyrics was the anesthetized suit who dreamed
it up and was accordingly rolling his sweating naked ass in the stink of
the millions it reaped.  As of now, I haven’t the faintest who the song
was by; nor do I feel compelled to play Private Dick Google and figure out
who it was.  I will forever let this remain out my realm, and in God’s
punk postered room.

For I remember when I was a teenager in the 90’s.  Then we all dreamed of
living in the 70’s rather than the 80’s.  NY and the Beastie Boys had been
the major prognosticators of this, leaving bumbling suburban nerds and
honkeys to blindly spread the word of John Travolta and Dolomite.

Though I did pray daily I’d wake up to discover I was in fact a black man,
on the Travolta front – I’d never even actually seen Saturday Night Fever.

I still haven’t.

Either way, I never spread the word that far of life in the ivory tower of
the 70s, always discovering that at ages 16 through 18 girls still went
for quarterbacks.  This of course left me to spend my girl-less evenings
dreaming up mutton chops on my face so large that I could see the grease
dripping off them in the reflected clouds of my silver aviator glasses.

My aviator glasses now sit up somewhere in my room along with my distant
dreams of the 70s; but I do now own Olivia Newton John records.  Ironically
however, her country ones are my favorites.  There is a similar irony in
it now being 1985, even though the date of this post will say otherwise.

For a related set of reasons, I decided there was no point in staying at
the mall any longer and having this all rammed down my throat.  When I
did, I passed a group of young soldiers.  They didn’t look like the
soldiers that I’d seen before.  None of them were lean or cut.  Rather it
was as if they’d fallen off a random page from a high school yearbook and
into desert fatigues that didn’t quite fit right; but they looked happy,
as people in the background invariably always do, taking one another’s
pictures and falling on and off children’s’ choo-choo train rides.  Soon
they’d be in Iraq, fighting in some war that was hard to understand,
dying and having their lives torn to shreds.

When they were behind me I could still hear the soldiers still laughing,
so I shifted my attention to two girls on a bench.  I leered at the more
attractive of the girls who smiled warningly back.