Roll away the stone

I don’t know about you, but I think Easter has it all over Christmas when it comes to Christian holidays with pagan roots. The candy is pretty much the same, but the story is way better. After all, anybody can be born, but to come back to life after you’ve been nailed to a cross? Come on! That is freakin’ superhero material! And then to push aside this humungous stone that’s blocking the way out of your crypt as if it were just a plain-old door? Truly mind-blowing stuff.

The weather is also a little better this time of year than it is at the end of December.

 

No more Mr. Nice Guy

In my lifetime, I have seen Jesus Christ go from being a blue-eyed, blond-haired, somewhat wimpy, hippie-ish Son of God to, on the one hand, a brown-eyed, Palestinian jew with curly or wavy hair (or possibly a black man), and, on the other hand, an ass-kicking, gay-hating marine with a Southern drawl (he only speaks English, dammit) and a Hummer. Of the two possibilities, I have to say I am more comfortable with him as an Arab or black man than I am with him as basically an anti-Christ who’s going to come back one day and open up a can of whupass on all us heathens, and then settle down in South Carolina, or possibly Kansas.

However, the idea of Jesus as this violent, intolerant right-winger does fire my imagination in ways the more ethnically and historically correct but still basically kind, thoughtful Messiah doesn’t. Picturing Christ as some kind of tight-butted, snuff-spitting special-ops guy is just more fun. So, while I may in a future post attempt to trace the evolution of popular concepts of Christ, for now I am going to attempt to catalog all the ways that Christ the Carolina shitkicker knows to kill a man. Herewith is that list:

• Jesus can rip your heart out of your chest and keep you alive long enough to watch Him eat it
• Jesus can manipulate air currents in such a way as to produce an ultra-low-pressure system that will make your lungs explode, or cause your skeleton to pop out of your skin
• Jesus can reach in and pull your spine out
• Jesus can pull your skin up over your face, so that you suffocate on your own skin
• Jesus can end you with a paper clip
• Jesus can end you with a well-thrown CD
• Jesus can end you with a manila folder
• Jesus can end you with anything from Staples, up to and including the Easy Button
• Muhammad, Buddha, Joseph Smith and Rasta Fari know how to take you out, too
• Jesus carries a dozen throwing stars on his person at all times
• Jesus can cancel you by pinching you at one of about a dozen locations on your body
• Jesus is like fucking MacGyver, man
• Jesus don’t take no mess
• Jesus can drop you just by holding a certain note
• Jesus can put a cap in yo’ ass
• Jesus can lock you in a room and suck all the air out with a straw
• If Jesus punches you in the solar plexus, or under your arms, you out, G.