THE MERRY MAYPOLE

Okay, so... Let's say that religion is a disease that infects people and makes them act in aberrant manners, and kills millions.

Which leads me to often joke about ways to destroy the religions, in ways that I hope will infect some people who will one day go on to be influential... I have given up on thinking I will ever be, but maybe some kid who reads me will write a great American atheistic constitution for the new personality/technobeing of the future? There is no way to tell, so I am assuming this is true... And will be putting it on my Resume.'


With all this talk about killing off christ, it is important to remember the revenge aspect of all this Jabber. My snide sneer is footnoted by Nietzsche, who said we execute prisoners because of a deep rooted need to take revenge. My cab driver mentor, Mike Paite -- alias Mike Masters, told me that if someone 'stung me', then I should always sting back -- to maintain good mental health. I was an assholes worst nightmare -- a crazy, revenge seeker who knew they had been pissing on service people all their lives, but would soon learn to think twice about that social sin... I have so many stories of the sting that they might be a book one day, certainly a short story? Tales of the Sting.. Maybe I will base it on this story I'm writing about?

So, here is an entry about Puritans killing some free spirits.


This here old, old story is by the master, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His grandfather was one of the preachers who instigated witch hunts in early, puritan america.

Nat. saw through the superstition, was a modern man in his time, knew Henry James, Herman Melville, and other writers who are called, in the lexicon of English Majors and Exams, THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS. They lived in a time when the idea that there was simply nothing but rotting flesh left of us after we died was too intense for them... But, they did reject conventional religion, which was almost impossible for the generations that came before them.

This led them to seek other ways to fill their hunger for answers to the big questions. They tried to talk to the dead, etc... In the end, they believed only that man could 'transcend' his daily life and see some kind of truth behind the curtain of the day to day that we see.
What that truth was, they all had different ideas.

I am bringing him up because of the Merry Maypole, a story that I have been threatening to rewrite since college. The story is about a bunch of hedonists who give up the every day life to have drunken orgies and play on their Maypole (which is a pole with a lot ropish things coming off, enough that all the players hold one as they walk or skip or dance around in circles... which only a very drunken person would love as much as they do).
The hedonists are hated by the religious puritans in a nearby village. And when one of their children decides to chuck the very, very conformist and superstitious lifestyle of her parents and join her lover in the drinking games of the Maypole crowd... the christos lose it!!! Kill them all, including the 'infected' daughter.

nowadays, people walking around a Maypole and drinking is way too tame for us. They would hardly be sentenced to death for this (except in the backward, ass-breath cultures). Considering the kind of trouble drunks get in, maybe we should start having these Maypoles all over the city? We could get them all started with a good advertising campaign run by spuds Mackenzie and other famous advocates of liver damage and drunk driving and silly fucks with people we don't know...

People often accuse me of being an asshole because I slam religion. Well, I have a lot of anger at religions exactly because they hurt me so bad... they gave me this big lie that I believed to the point that I only fucking based my life on the damned teachings. Then I learned they were all lying and that was not fun.... Duh.

People do hate me for this, and I used to get lots of letters from them, until they realized how easily I could slam them into next week with my witty ways.... I mean, I have no life other than sitting here all day thinking up mean shit to say, and they have to work and all that shit, so they are obviously at a disadvantage. I am always shocked by how alone I feel out here, how unexpected my voice is to some people.. I am not exactly parroting anything that unknown (except to people too young or ignorant to be at my level of educational factoid, time accumulated knowledge). One of my Jobs, as I see it, is to make sure this little voice of reason still speaks somewhere, even if I am way, way on the margins of the literary community. ... and never amount to much more than a trail of small clouds of illegal smoke.

Today a comment from a reader told me that she felt like she was the only one who was clear eyed enough to consider religion the disease. .... or more that she often feels that way, I guess.

It's not easy being a closet atheist. That is exactly where I was once, when I was a teenager. I felt like a cursed freak because the books I had read showed me how to see through the illusions so easily accepted by uncritical minds. If not for reading other people who felt the same as me, like Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Herbert, Jerzy Kosinski, Gabrial Garcia Marquez and a lot of others.... I might have given in to the ennui of feeling all weirdo and alone and damaged and simply ceased to exist.