Jesus Take the Wheel

Okay, so I forgot in my anger and rage to explain the Jesus hamster story. It's not really a good story, but it is kind of funny.

So we adopted a hamster. He's really cute, doesn't bite, and formerly lived in one of those kiddie plastic bright neon blue large wheel/tube habitrail deals. He didn't really get the whole concept of the large wheel thing, either because he's got the brain casing of a pea, and/or because he's way too geriatric to do anything more than forage for food and take long, long naps. I'm all for a geriatric hamster lifestyle, by the way.

Any way, we got him from this totally nice chic down in Inwood, which is one of those weird places people who can't afford to live in Brooklyn or Manhattan live, or something. Hey, I don't live in New York, I don't understand the cultural enclaves, okay? I"m a suburban Minnesotan. You either lived by the lake (good) or on the hill (not so good) or on the west side (definetely not good). We had white supremacy in a totally middle America way---The Germans all thought the Scandanavians were a bunch of drunken dumbasses, everybody thought the Polish were inbred peasants (I like Polish people, and frankly, Swedes who cure and bottle nasty gefilte fish in their basement for Lutheran church potlucks have no reason to feel superior to poor second generation disenfranchsized European block people who never really had a country of their own for centuries). Plus Polish people rock. Ever heard of Chopin, you stupid fuckheads? Also, people make fun of Swedes, too, if you haven't noticed.

Black people were like, a complete anomaly, and no one knew quite what to make of them. Instead, we persecuted random Vietnamese folks (how the hell tropical Asian people ended up in God's version of Scandanavian Part II Electric Bugaloo is totally beyond me. Maybe some mean New York social worker fuck thought it would be funny to tell non-English-speaking fresh-off-the-boat poor immigrants that Minnesota is subtropical paradise with lots of Vietamese culture and support, or something.)

Our version of "black people" were Native Americans, who everbody called "Indians" because we weren' t the most political correct enclave of inbred Scandanavians, and well, up north, you were either Lutheran and Scandanavian, or Catholic and Irish (and therefore second class demon spawn who clearly ground new born babie bones into communion wafers and drank the blood of Jehovah Witnesses during communion service on Sundays). Oh wait, I'm mixing metaphors now--it was the Jews they used to accuse of grinding up babies 'bones to use in their matzah back in the unenlightened days of Martin Luther.) I'll have to research the whole Jack and The Beanstalk thing, incidentally, maybe there's some udnerlying Anti-semitism in the whole "I'll grind your bones" line. I cant explain the whole 'Fe fi fo fum" line, though, maybe the authort just wanted something that rhymed.

Any way, up north, you weren't just Indian, you were a drunken Indian. White people have this habit of decimating entire populations of indigenous groups of people, driving them off their land, fucking up their land with stupid factories and shit, corralling said people onto "reservations" which are just really human sized rat traps, and then self righteously calling these people a scourge on those same self absorbed white people who fucked them over in the first place because now the persecuted poor bastards somehow have poverty and alcoholism problems.

Uh, NEWSFLASH: white people have massive problems with drugs, too. White people with jobs, access to health care, education, and heat and running water in nice suburban homes and no excuse for poverty and being fucked over. I mean, I don't see any Eskimos coming down from their homes and start kicking white people's asses and crowding them all into some hellhole like North Dakota and claiming to be all benevolent because see, we only decimated half of your population with smallpox, now you can all kill yourselves in your despair and misery with firewater and new fangled weapons we've traded for your BMWs and PDAs, and it won't be our fault, it's your piss-poor moral constitution for succumbing to poverty and suicidal depression.

Stupid fucking white people and their stupid fucking prediliction for barbaric imperialism and destruction of naturally occuring non-renewable energy sources.

Any way, I was one of TWO asian people in my junior high. And there was ONE black girl. Her name was Angela. She was really nice, but that's all I remember about her. I also was friends with the two Jewish girls in my class, and had Shabbat dinner with their families and listened to them complain about Hebrew lessons. I remember having Shabbat dinner once with my friend Cathy, and she had a little sister and and an older brother Nathan and every fucking dinner her father (who was a doctor) would lecture Nathan about how important it was to get good grades, get into an Ivy League school and Do Something With His LIfe, like go to medical school. Then he'd turn on me and asking if I had planned out my career goals yet. And I was thinking, 'I don't know? Pass seventh grade phy ed and not get stuffed into my locker by the hockey team?"

And then Cathy's mother intervene with the nice version of, "Stop scaring the shiska, honey, she's a really nice goy and besides, she's our guest. I went to my first symphony with my friend Cathy, and I learned briefly to knit from my friend Laurie, whose mother scared the shit out of me but knitted really cute sweaters. Her father (a dentist) drove a Saab, and I thought he was very handsome, and if I were like, forty years old then, I would have wanted to marry him, because I thought he was really, really nice. And cute. Plus I thought his Saab was the coolest car ever, because who the hell drove Saabs in Duluth, Minnesota?

Okay, so my pressured speech, free-association ranting hasn't gotten us any where near the Jesus story.

So we adopted this hamster, whose life basically is sleep, piss, shit, sleep, eat, piss, shit, and sleep. He's great, and probably has about two more months of his current regimen before he goes to Hamster Heaven, where he will probably continue his daily routine of sleep, shit, piss, sleep, eat, piss, shit and sleep.

So Jesus The Hamster had a dad named God, and like good solitary Syrian hamsters, they fought. A lot.

From a theological standpoint, this is hilarious, even though it does take a bit of stretching, because well, they could have just as easily been named King Kong and Godzilla, or something.

But they weren't, and this is why I think it's funny, because I wonder if Jesus and God do fight a lot. I mean, first of all, they are like, way way, way fucked over with an identity crisis. Like, is God Jesus? Is Jesus God? And what's that Holy Spirit doing floating around? Theologians over the centuries haven't been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation that doesn't take a life's work of basically incoprehensible volumes (Tillich, for example), so why not just make up some simple shit and make fun of the whole thing? That's my theory, after having gone through a mind-boggling stint as a graduate level theology student.

I can just see an argument between the two of them:

GOD:
Jesus, go take out of the trash.

JESUS:
Take out the trash yourself, I'm also God, remember that whole trinity thing, not to mention the Word-Made-Flesh thing, in addition to the God made Man thing? Tht was all your fucking brilliant idea, if you don't remember.

GOD:
You're my only begotten son, you asshole, don't you remember? Plus you're forgetting the ten commandments, as per Cecille B. DeMille and Heston playing Moses: Thou shalt honor thy mother and father.

JESUS:
Yeah right, and Mary was so not a virgin, and also probably not my real mother. You know she was banging a Roman centurion on the side, and I'm really a bastard, and all that Word-Made-Flesh thing was a big philosophical/religious cover up designed to eventually make millions for fuckers like Billy Graham and Benny HIll. Like I said, take out the fucking trash yourself.

GOD:
You know, I should have just left you on that cross to die, and not resurrected your goddamn ungrateful, petulant ass.

JESUS:
Yeah, but then we wouldn't have had the entertainment of wack jobs like Jerry Falwell and the whole James Baker scandal. You know how much I enjoy watching those Save The Children campaigns and laughing my ass off, because it's all a crock of shit.

GOD:
You're right, and being praised on a daily basis is kind of cool, being called King of the Universe and Savior of the World and all that.

JESUS:
I hate the lamb of God imagery, though. I mean, we all know what unfortunate events occur to ewes when horny shepards are left with the flock unsupervised.

GOD:
You're grandstanding, again, and I told you, that whole temper tantrum in the temple with the money changers made a good Francis Ford Coppola scene, but honestly, that shit pissed me off. You know how much temple revenue we lost that day because of your pigheaded self righteousness? I'm telling you for the last time, take out the fucking garbage, Son.

JESUS:
Yeah, well, you were still Yaweh then, not Christian Three-in-One God. I changed all that, remember? And you know what, you never make the Holy Spirit do shit around here. When's the last time he did anything other than get written up about being a loving, unifying force by Hegel and Mary Johnson and Thomas Merton? I get to fast in the desert for forty days, be followed around by a bunch of cruddy lepers, resurrect smelly ass rotting corpses, comfort stupid disciples who don't know their as from their elbow, get betrayed by my best homeboy, and then crucified and tortured, and meanwhile, Mr. Pansy Ass Holy Spirit gets to be the good guy everybody loves. Let him do the dirty work for a change, I'm sick of being the corporeal embodiment of God. Plus, I got crucified, and my stimatas are still painful. I demand worker's comp, and I'm still not emptying the trash.

Any way, I'll I'm saying is having Jesus as a hamster is pretty funny, if you think about it like an ex-divinity student who is quickly losing her fucking mind and on the verge of a psychotic break.

Think about it, if you find it offensive or not funny, fuck you, you right-wing commie fucktard.