Tao of Pauly

Some of My Favorite Things

I calmly sat across from my second favorite actress and slowly finished up the fluffy slice of cheese cake that I had my mind on for several days. I tasted it in my sleep each night. My aloof eyes wandered around the crowded diner on a random weekday afternoon. A couple of small Yuppie children, or Yuppie 2.0 as my cyber-geek-hipster-friends comically and pathetically referred to them as, yes, the spoiled children childishly argued about some sponge named Bob. An elderly man decked out in a winter coat and scarf on a warm and refreshing Spring afternoon silently sipped his pea soup. A surly Russian lady right next to us sniffed the cream before she poured it into her coffee.

On our walk to the park she smoked two cigarettes and made three phone calls on her worn out cell phone. I saw a group of tourists with I LOVE NY t-shirts taking pictures at random historic landmarks with their disposable cameras. Inside the park, the vast park in the middle of the energetic city, I almost got trampled by several anxious bikers, who thought they were racing in the Tour de France, not on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I sat down on a rock underneath a tree near Strawberry Fields and she lit up a cigarette. The warmth of the afternoon resembled the temperature on her forehead as I cupped her chin in my left hand and smiled when she smiled back and like a playful poodle, she bit my index finger. My feral mind looked up at the wide sky and I wondered why didn’t everyone else think religion was a sham. Was I not the only one who serious doubted and believed in God. Or Buddha. Or Allah. Or whoever you call him, or as I am told by a militant-dyke, "God is a She. And She hates your penis. Breeder!"

So I don’t bode well in that circle, but I could care less. But my point is and always has been clear. There is no one God. There is no right entity that we refer to that allows the atrocities that have been undertaken in his name and for his glory for centuries. Would the God that the Western cultures refer to condone the hordes of teenaged bandits in Sierra Leone who rape, murder, pillage and destroy? The manic posse of drugged up youngsters rushed out of the jungle armed with sharp objects and machetes, and rounded up all the inhabitants of a real place called Kissy Mental. The leaders picked out children at random and handed them rusty machetes and other axes with the caked up and dried up blood of a hundred severed hands. Those angry mobs of rebel children, no longer children, but soldiers on a mission, and they ran rampant throughout their countryside in dozens of other villages and pointed out other children, lined them up and forced one confused child to cut off the other children’s hands in a swift fashion. If they cried they were forced to get in line and another child was forced to take their place and perform the amputations. The ones who resisted had both cut off. For miles and miles, hands of small children cluttered the roadside.

Generations of children and teenagers currently live within a bubble of insanity, they sleep underneath the same stars, they look up at the same sky and wonder how they woke up one day unable to function without one or both hands, as if it was God’s will or a decisive piece of his Master Plan. This isn’t something that I’m making up. It’s true. And it’s not just happening in Sierra Leone. In places we never knew existed people are being randomly executed for reasons unknown to any of us. And it’s matter of time before the angry hordes of disaffected youths hit or streets and it’s not going to like the 60s all over again, man... peace, love, and Hippie bullshit protesting the Government and asking for a voice. No way, the next revolution will be with sticks and broken bottles, and more axes and handguns and those pissed off, jobless, sexual depraved youngsters will un plug their MTV and rush out of our suburbs and round up all the housewives and make them chose one of their children, much like Sophie’s Choice, one gets to keep his or her hands… only if they cut off one hand of each of their siblings. Grotesque and horrible, the mental rape and torturing of young souls. The somber kids walking around with a missing hands hold the tragic memory of how it violently happened inisde of each of them. While the kids with both hands live with the guilt knowing that they have both hands only because it was a reward for their devestating act of chopping off the hands of their brothers and sisters, espeically because sometimes the blades weren't sharp and you had to cut more than once to get the job done right.

And you tell me that I'm crazy for not believing in God. These people live by the word of God and kill in his name. And you tell me, with a straight face, how if there is a God, how he could blindly turn his eye to the severed hands, the bloody stumps, the rusty machetes that drip the sorrowful blood of thousands of innocent children whose their only fault in life, was being born at the wrong place, at the wrong time?