God Gets Even

The streets of Saint Francis are warmer than those back East, but it's still rainy and blustery on Powell Street. Between the St. Francis Hotel and the cable car turnaround homeless people abound. One old guy looks dazed, holding a Street Sheet upside down alongside his empty styrofoam cup, another is in a wheel chair wearing a Santa Claus jacket, the next hurls his arm forward to stick his DONATIONS cup in anyone's face who passes, the next is nicely dressed but drooling. Nobody is making any money this morning. Even the Powell-Mason cable car clanks up the hill half-empty. It's too cold for tourist generosity.

In Dr. U-Flossem's office the Christmas music is unbearably loud. All the dentists in this office are Israelis but the receptionists are Latinas. Latinas and Christmas trump Israelis. It's December 17 and I must announce I officially hate all Christmas music except for a few of my own tunes, none of which I have heard even once on Muzac this season, but on the other hand I have also managed to keep out of stores where they play Muzac.


The Connecticut massacre has fucked up Christmas 2012. This skinny Lanza kid with the bad Beatle haircut is an unlikely Osama Bin Laden. But he has scared the bedtime story out of every parent. We count our stockings, hanging on the chimney, then we count them again.

This one is surreally bad. Ministers, priests and rabbis in that little town offer up homilies of faith and understanding. But their hearts aren't in it.

Why does no one just say "We don't get it! God must have had his back turned!"

Because if we say that, then we have to answer: "If we can't trust this blind and deaf old fart anymore, who can we trust?"


The answer is we trust who we always trust: our own better natures. We stop at red lights. We pay the Muni driver when we get on. We respect our teachers and we trust our schools. We work. We come home. We might not be ecstatically happy, because there is only so much happy to go around, but  99.9999999% of us buy into the system that sustains multiple humans in crowded environments.

More and more, we recognize that the statistically too-small-to-count contingent of lonely, alienated and angry suburban boys are nonetheless well armed these days. Their rights to kill us all are protected by another, larger bunch of fat old suburban men terrified their penises are too small. Weaponry makes them feel like paleolithic providers of fresh meat for the village. They go deer hunting in huge SUVs with halogen lights to blind the deer so they can run over them.

If God wants to make up for his monumental fuck-up in Connecticut, He could arm the deer.

Or, He could dust off one of his old plagues and visit it upon the NRA. We wouldn't call it even, but at least He could feel useful for one more Chistmas, and let us get on with our lives armed with a sense of delayed gratification, or even justice.

While He was at it, He could drop a few bills in these poor homeless guys' styrofoam cups. But, of course, I could do that too.