Ready When You Are

Lunch with Ugly Alan is always a B-movie horror film experience. I'm seated across the table from a low-budget Frankenstein's monster, who needs several extra bolts of lightning to become fully animate. Any normal person would require ten hours of heavy green make-up application and a prosthetic nose to look as hideous as he does. Just look at him as he throttles an entire bottle of vinegar onto his plate with gorilla-sized hands. Ugly Alan's body is an awkward assemblage of cut-price parts: graveyard eyes, discount legs, second-hand feet, torso found in the back of a junk shop. And his huge, misshapen head appears glued onto a broken neck, precariously balanced on his shoulders, about to fall off at any moment and roll across the restaurant's linoleum floor in the final, spine-chilling scene. Then the credits would roll as a busboy brings more napkins to mop up the mess and the waitress arrives with my check. Fortunately, Ugly Alan's head somehow manages to remain in place. Practice makes perfect, no doubt. He's been well-rehearsed. 

I am no oil painting myself, of course, not even a creepy oil painting whose eyes follow you around the room in a haunted house. I'm more of a slightly overweight werewolf with male pattern baldness. But at least the other diners don't need to worry about me until the next full moon. It's only waning gibbous right now, so they'll be fine if they want to order coffee and dessert. Sitting here with Frankenstein's ketchup-stained monster, however, I'm concerned those other diners are already gathering their flaming torches and preparing to surround our table. How are they supposed to enjoy their meals when the Devil's incubus dwells amongst them, devouring fried chicken by the bucketful.

They are all much younger than Ugly Alan and I, and most of them seem to be starring in ersatz remakes of popular Rom-Coms, except those two guys by the window doing their buddy-cop comedy bits, and that sullen kid in the corner acting out his own coming-of-age-drama. To think I was once the leading man in such blockbuster scenarios; a regular on the red carpet and a stalwart of every opening night. But now I'm too old and unfashionable, reduced to supporting roles in straight-to-video genre flicks featuring Ugly Alan. Soon I'll be just a voice-over in TV commercials for eldercare and back pain pills. I suppose I could try getting typecast as an inscrutable Cherokee chief in a modern Western, dispensing ancient wisdom to troubled pale faces between puffs on his peace pipe. But I'm sure all these younger diners consider that blackface and I'll be cancelled and my chef's salad sent back to the kitchen in disgrace.

Maybe I should just retire from the silver screen altogether. I'm obviously well past my prime. It's been my plan to move to a quiet place on the coast anyway; the kind of perpetually off-season beach town that doesn't even have a cinema. Just a rickety old amateur dramatics stage in a church hall, where I can play Captain Cat every night in the Seaside Theater Company's production of Under Milkwood, until the moth-eaten curtain finally closes on my career. I'll even ask Ugly Alan to guest star as Evans The Death if he's available

The Pound Keys of Heaven

Imagine your prayer is answered, but only by 'the first available angel,' and you are put on hold. 

The hold music: an angelic choir accompanied by plucked harps interrupted by an ethereal voice, "We are currently experiencing higher than usual call volume. Please stay on the line. Your prayer is important to us." 

How long will you wait? Perhaps your connection to the divine can be made hands-free, so you can go about other business while you wait, instead of kneeling beside your bed for an interminable amount of time, listening to the angelic choir, harps and ethereal voice on loop.

But what if it can't, and you lose your place in the celestial queue, or worse, you hear the dreaded dial tone from a cloud as the line goes dead? What then?

And what if Heaven has outsourced its prayer-call-center to Purgatory, so even when your call is eventually picked-up, your prayer is answered by a soul-in-Limbo who can only speak incomprehensible, heavily accented English. 

"This prayer call may be monitored for quality assurance," the ethereal voice announces. Then the soul-in-Limbo voice, distant and echoing, comes onto the line: "Xthaneflo." it mumbles. "Hephutsalve thou hum?"

Xthaneflo? What is the soul trying to say? It's all Coptic Greek to you.

Whatever. As the long as the soul understands you, that's all that matters. So you reverently repeat your prayer, hoping for the best.

"Pattush colombo xan wheppet, wheppet nonce ex-sollox benpho. Amen." 

Is that a yes or a no or a maybe? I guess you'll find out one way or the other one of these days. Just keep the faith, believing unseen wheels have been put in motion. What else can you do?

Then you complete the QC survey at the end of the call, rise from your prostrate position, and return to the world of Earthly quotidian thoughts.

Such are the trials and tribulations of petitioning the Lord during regular office hours.

The Ranter In November

Despite the wailing of soapbox Chicken Littles, we do not live in a "post-truth society." We've never been told any truth in any era. Politicians have always been bald-faced liars and promoters of historical fiction. Where we actually live is a post-literate society: a world of sound-bytes, out-of-context quotation, and the gamification of government. We can no longer read between the lines, which is admittedly difficult to do when the lines all converge into a meaningless scribble of platitudes and empty promises, but we don't try anymore. 

After so many centuries of bitter disappointment and profound frustration, we've finally given up hoping for integrity and honesty in our public figures and settled for simply taking sides, no matter how odious are the teams we choose. 'We won that round' is all that matters, even if it's the most Pyrrhic of Pyrrhic victories; even if the hustings and polling stations are reduced to a wasteland of fear and paranoia.

I've always believed politics to be a type of mental illness; an incurable disease that becomes a pandemic every four years or so, a disease that infects everything it touches. The little birdhouse-style borrowing library around the corner from my house, usually crammed with kids books and popular novels, is currently stuffed with the jingoistic election literature of our local mayoral candidates. Apparently, these shameless professional legislators even think it's necessary to stain Green Eggs And Ham with their red or blue bile. I imagine Draco the Lawgiver would be turning in his grave; that is, if he ever existed.