Stealing God back

Bumper stickers augment my ESP. They are ideological beacons on the highway that suck at my eyeballs and force me to increase my speed so that I can accuse the backs of heads of being my enemies or my allies. If I see one of the ubiquitous Bush-Cheney placards, I shoot tendrils out of my brain and ensnare, enshroud the driver and her or his passengers and fill them with globs of curdled poison.

I become hot with clairvoyance, I see them. They have hundreds of angry crabs jammed into their eyes, cheap, wormy rubies packed in salt. Something thin and purple is boiling inside their mouths, not wine. I try to count the fissures in their great vapid noggins but hairspray coils into the cracks and bakes them shut. They shriek blisters into me and their marionette teeth clack in unison; the dental percussion terrifies me. I know they can eat me because they ate God.

Maybe masticated, digested deity boils thin and purple.

My feminist neighbor Betty died three years ago. During the great Atlanta ice storm of 2001, neither I nor she had any heat and we gathered at our neighbors' house in front of the fireplace. We sought warmth and to rot the conservative pit out of the Georgia Peach collectively. Betty was in her seventies when she passed away. She referred to herself proudly as a "yellow-dog democrat." At her funeral, her three liberal children let anyone present eulogize their mother in any way they saw fit. I chose to laud Betty's courage to struggle and fight against oppression. I learned at her ceremony that she had been ardently active in her church and that she had fought to see that underprivileged children of color got medical care and equal educational opportunities back when the white potentate in Atlanta equated lynchings with Christian responsibility. I imagined Betty sitting alone in her little house near the end of her life knitting and listening to the minute hand on her clock clicking through silence with the force of a cannon and I think that solitude is no reward for the life of this incredible woman. I curse myself for all the times I sat in my house across the street browsing for sex on the internet when I could've been shrinking myself, falling into her ball of yarn, letting myself be woven into her history and into microcosmic greatness. She was a woman of compassion and kindness, qualities born of her faith and staunch belief in the equality of all humans. I wonder if God died with her or if the last vestiges of Him/Her were crunched between the teeth of the charismatic zealots who stole God and reappropriated Her/Him for hate at the same time she departed.

A single man in his early thirties bought Betty's house from her three children. He drives an SUV and smokes cigarettes. For a while, I secretly wanted to fuck him. Then he put a Bush-Cheney sign in the front yard.

I saw a bumper sticker last week that said:

JESUS WAS A LIBERAL

I will buy it and place it on my truck. I will lurk at my window until the Betty squatter cranks his Ford Explorer and I will hurtle through my house to my truck. I will beat him to the stop sign and I will freeze myself in place, I will refuse to go and he will read and reread the words on the back of my truck.

His eyes will melt and I will gather them in my right hand. They are my lubricant; now I will fuck him.

Amen

Infernal infirmity, infantry indecencies

So fails my mucosal portcullis. The germs have sullied my innards; I am withering.

Today I peered at the TiVo over the small mountain of tissue paper erupting on my coffee table and watched my sister on CNN. She appeared once in October and again in January (both are still on the TiVo; I cannot bring myself to delete my sibling's fifteen minutes of fame).

Kristen is a natural redhead, a trait that I've always found to be wholly emblematic of her character. She is a firebrand and a fighter. When I'm not mad at her for being insufferably remiss about returning phone calls, I love her fiercely and am immensely devoted to her.

She has appeared on CNN twice because her husband (a very good-looking, personable, funny, doting man) is a West Point graduate and a Captain in the United States Army. Kristen and Jason have been separated for nearly two years now. After Jason's 1.5 year stint in Iraq, he was scheduled to return to the U.S. on 7/1/2004...but 41 days before his greatly anticipated return, Kristen learned (by watching CNN) that he was going to be deployed to Iraq...making his total time away from his family almost three years. Even though U.S. military law forbids the redeployment of troops from one hardship tour of duty to another except when Congress enacts the articles of war, that gawking twit in the White House saw fit to abrogate all regulations to stuff enough personnel in the Middle East to wage his war of vengeance and personal profit...and duly commanded three thousand five hundred soldiers to leave South Korea for a tour of duty in Iraq of undetermined length. So my sister stomped off to Washington and created a stinking, fetid stir. Only John Kerry could have brought relief to these forlorn families...

The election came and we lost. The smarmy faux cowboy's beady eyes will hypnotize the dung-brained populace for another four years.

I am listening to my sister's voice cracking and aching. Small headlines run underneath her stomach; I want to catch them with my horrible, glistening fangs and swallow them and ingest their venom, then spit them in those beady eyes. Two of her friends have lost their husbands; they were blown to pieces by small bombs. They were in their thirties and had small children. I am thinking of the garish opulence that the Republicans in power crave; I loathe them. I am considering how stupid and cowlike the American masses are who voted for the prevaricating skunk. I hate him for demonizing gay people to gain political clout, I hate him for pissing squatter's rights into the goodness of the person that Jesus must've been to trick the herd into licking the conservatives' harp strings, I hate him for obliterating the thinking person's ability to pursue logic and reason and supplanting it with a spellbinding drone of the words "freedom" and "liberty" unleashed as ignoble and hollow clichés.

I hear my sister suppressing her tears, and every protective cell in my body yearns to envelop her and whisk her back to 1973, where I could alleviate her fears and her sadness by dangling a stuffed yellow octopus over her pumpkin-colored ringlets, where the angst of not knowing whether three little fishies who didn't want to be bossed would be reunited with their mama was the most complicated tragedy we could contemplate.

I can invoke neither the spirit nor the vision of H. G. Wells and I crawl on the floor of my office, impotent and emasculated. My ardent and strident voice is muffled by rebel yells and white, white noise. Coins roll into the eye sockets of dead soldiers, blood and oil ooze from the holes, Republicans scurry to lap the juices.

She finishes her interview. Her thoughts are disconnected, insufficiently scurrilous. My papillae throb like supernovas and collapse, crushing my tongue. I cannot rescue her, I am weak. The bacteria in me pummel my lymphatic system and my head and heart muscle contract in pain. I soak my throat in tepid ginger ale and click the "save - do not delete" button once again.