Saturday, April 15, 2006

Allow me to dump on your Easter Parade


Today is Easter. And one thing I can surely say about Easter is that throughout my life, from the time I was a little kid up to and including my current state of crabby-assed middle-agedness, it remains the lamest fucking holiday of all.

I am kind of sorry if this offends you, seeing as that it is the "holiest" holiday on the Christian calendar. I don't mean to diss Christ, who truly was a great man for what he did in his short 33 years. It's just that I have seen lots of dead people, both in caskets at wakes and in the course of my job, and I will be goddamned if any of them looked as if they had the slightest interest in getting up and being alive again. And if anyone on Earth would have gotten up from the dead it would have been my grandfather Lonnie, the half-Indian joker who enjoyed putting live rats in people's lunchboxes while they were working high construction so that they would be startled as hell and risk falling about 500 feet to their deaths when the fucking rat would jump out of the lunchbox. Now THAT'S entertainment.

Anyway, Grandpa Lonnie was a great guy, and he died young at 67, and while he was alive he could really put the booze away. I almost never saw him without a bottle of Seagram's or something within close reach. So seeing as that he loved both life and liquor so goddamned much, if anyone since Creation would be able to rise from the dead I think it would have been Grandpa Lonnie, because it is impossible for me to imagine him going the 33 years he has now been dead without a glass of good old Seagrams whiskey.

So Lonnie never got back up, and he has been pushing up daisies in a dismal New Jersey boneyard for decades now. Even though Jesus was in tight with God, why would he have gotten a free pass on this? It just doesn't compute with me, folks. I read a book called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" in which the authors claim to have evidence that Christ faked the resurrection for a good cause and then went off to father a bunch of kids with Mary Magdalene. This is probably horseshit like everything else, but it is kind of more believable than what you will hear out of the Vatican on the matter.

But religion aside, let's get back to why Easter is a shitty holiday. I remember having mixed feelings about it even as a kid. My parents were hugely into the whole Easter basket thing, and even though their intentions were good I can remember all that fucking Easter candy and how sick it made me, and those goddamned stupid-assed marshmallow Peeps that tasted horrible and got hard within two minutes after you opened your basket (I should be so lucky at my age, but that's another matter), and the chocolate footballs that you could never quite get all the tinfoil off of and thus you would enjoy simultaneously the taste of rich milk chocolate and the taste of thin aluminum foil.

. And then there was my kid brother, who was wired to begin with, and once he chowed down on the seven pounds of chocolate in his basket he would become a whirling fucking dervish and create all sorts of havoc, doing things like once trying to rip the testicles off my sister's cat and breaking plates over my head (see entry "I'm With Stupid").

Ah -- the Easter ham. I hated ham as a kid. I always thought that despite my mother's commendable kitchen wizardry, ham looked and tasted like a pig's ass, and I guess I was not too bloody wrong on that one, was I?

The insult of Easter as a shitty holiday continued into adulthood. At least as a kid you got a few days off from school around Easter, presumably so your GI tract could return to normal after the massive sugar infusion. Once you are grown, that's it. There is no Easter holiday. I work every Easter, and I work it for straight fucking time, for God's sake.

So what does Easter mean to me? Well, let's see. It means the endless repeating of the most dubious story in the entire fable-filled realm of Christianity. It means memories of stomach aches and prolonged diarrhea due to chocolate overdose, which is probably the main reason I have had little use for sweets as an adult. It means just another day of work, and at straight time yet.

So, frankly, whoever came up with this idea can take their Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it and shove it clean up their ass. And let me tell you this: if resurrection is possible, someday I will come back from the dead and tell everyone that Easter is a good thing. If that doesn't happen, people, just assume Easter is a load of crap like every fucking thing else in this world.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Easter should be a celebration of Spring, when the Earth wakes up after the cold, bleak winter, and plants start growing again. Eostre was the Teutonic Goddess of Spring, the Dawn Mother of Fertility. Eggs and rabbits are sacred to her as symbols of fertility and fecundity. The proper way to celebrate Easter is to take joy in the flowering plants and baby animals and the pagan symbols that represent rebirth and renewal as the Earth renews itself once again. The pagan custom of Maypole dancing on May 1st is a related spring custom wherein the May pole is a phallic symbol and the pretty young maidens dancing around it in a Rite of Spring represent fecundity. The more wanton versions of this dance might cause the peeps of some to harden before they get out of the basket!
In any case, these are far more pleasant customs than dwelling on the gruesome details of one man's death by torture. Spring is here. It is time to plant your own garden and decorate your own soul. Enjoy the sunshine and cheer up!

9:43 AM  
Blogger Fiddler said...

You said it, Anon.

9:55 AM  

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