In Today's Heaven

One wrong click too soon and they’re all gone, gone, gone. I wonder if you get to see all the pages you accidentally deleted when you go to Heaven. Or, are the pages you’d like to see in Heaven and the bad ones in Hell? You only see what you deserve. Sounds like something God would say. Of course God doesn’t just say anything, he proclaims it and he commands it from the depths of his bellowing soul above the treetops. Even when he whispers, well let’s just say he can’t keep secrets. The man has some serious lungs. He has volume. He could do opera. He never just says things like someone might say, ‘have you seen the remote’ or ‘do you have a value card’. He knows where the remote is. It’s between the cushions. He has a value card. Besides, God doesn’t ask questions. He creates them. Then he divines the answers. He’s the ultimate professor. And we have all heard about his temper. He’d be the last God you’d ever spite. You’d find yourself locked in the truck of a Town Car faster than you could say “it’s the last season of ‘The Sopranos’. The disciple behind the wheel is speeding toward some dead-end dirt in the woods, flicking butts at the dark and telling you to 'Go ahead, scream all you want'.

Many more technological breakthroughs and we’re going to need a brand new, New Testament. I’m pretty sure the old New Testament never mentions e-mail or search engines. It might mention fire walls but that would only be in some purgatorial context. In today’s Heaven you can tell an old soul from a recently deceased one by the piles of deleted documents. The old dead have no documents, deleted or otherwise. No laptops allowed. Remember, ‘you can’t take it with you’. You actually have to read pieces of paper up here. There might be a Cajun restaurant in Hell. But there are no internet cafes in Heaven. Do you have any idea how much that hook up fee would be? These long dead oldsters lived and died before home computers, pathetic. They float around bored out of their fucking minds, eyes rolling back in their heads the way only dead persons can. They gaze blankly through their paper-thin papal skulls, out through their halos up at … up at what? They’re already UP there. They think inappropriate thoughts like, 'Maybe Hell is hell, but I bet it’s not so fucking boring'. They wonder what the people in Hell might be doing today. Whatever it is its hot and colorful and full of excitement. Everybody loves watching a roaring fire. In Hell's Restaurant its, ‘careful, these plates are REALLY hot’. And yes, it is Cajun. I’d like to see you not burn, I mean ‘blacken’ every meal you ever cooked down there.

But up here in ‘Frillyville’ (that’s slang for Heaven) it’s all, ‘Hey, what are you going to do today’? ‘Oh, I don’t know, I might float over to those Maxfield Parrish clouds and not get a bite to eat or drink or sing or dance or pet the dog or fornicate or smoke or lie or cheat or steal or murder or covet thy neighbor’s wife or commit suicide, and you’? They wonder aloud as to why there are never any Maxfield Parrish women reclining in those Maxfield Parrish clouds. Duh, this is Heaven idiot. They wonder to themselves, ‘I thought you only wandered around aimlessly for all eternity if you were dead and stuck on Earth in some old Victorian’. These flaccid white restless souls play harps and make puppy eyes at Peter. They brown nose and kiss ass God, conniving for feathers. Saving for wings, everybody is saving for wings. We call it the ‘Angel Angle’. Word is they keep turning people into angels ‘Down South’. ‘Down South’ is slang for Earth up here. But remember, slang is not allowed, so you’d better whisper unless you really want to find out just how hot and exciting ‘The Deep South’ is. ‘The Deep South’ is slang for Hell up here. Dumb fucks, they don’t even know what being an angel means. I mean Elton John an angel? I can see getting knighted for Mad Man Across the Water, but, an angel? I don’t think so. Don’t ever forget he also did Candle in the Wind. They’re turning so many people into angels down there, well, that the quota is about met. Souls up here are scrambling for the few remaining slots. The raciest rumor booming through our clouds right now is that Bono might be next. I can see that. But, turns out, we’re not talking U2, were talking Sonny. He had a bad voice. He played sidekick to a tall chick. I think Cher’s hair was taller than him. He reemerged years later as a bad mayor and then ended it all by assaulting a Bristlecone Pine with his head while skiing. For that he gets to be an angel? What the fuck is the Pope thinking? How much money did Sonny give to the Vatican? Must have been all of it because I remember he used to sing, ‘They say our love won’t pay the rent, before it earned, our money’s all been spent’.

The new dead could give a shit. They sit off on a cumulus without a single feather to their name, reading. Occasionally they grimace. Often they laugh with self congratulatory smugness, all proud of themselves for something they had forgotten they had written. Some pages they rip to bits and angrily toss off the cloud. They’re cheeks rising to a fine crimson. The shredded pieces fall to earth as paralyzing blizzards on their way to Hell. They snicker to themselves at the old souls drifting about like dust mites. The new dead confide in each other with nods and knowing winks. They are still the newbie gentrifying yuppies that they were in life. They look around and think, ‘Who picked out these hideous pinks and purples’ and ‘I’ve got to paint this place’. In life they bought up brownstones at a pittance from wavering hippies. Ten years earlier the hippies had kicked out the homeless squatters. The yuppies condemned the hippies condemned the homeless, all in equal superior disdain. Of course now the new-rich of exurbia condemn the gentrifying yuppies of yesterday. The hippies fixed them up, a little. They made the stones brown again. They made them livable. Because they wanted to, well, live in them. But, being hippies=artists/homos, they kept much of the funkiness intact. The character of the places, the accidental accents that can only be achieved by time and neglect were preserved with a loving tenderness. Indeed, a corner web of cracked plaster bleeding off-color stains were as much a selling point to them as the potential of these places were to the yuppies to come a decade later.

And another decade after the yuppies arrived, a Volvo went sideways in a paralyzing blizzard on a ski trip to Vermont. With everything taken to its fullest potential, the career, the security, the wife, and the kids all in Cambridge, early retirement coming up quick and what happens? He puts the fucking Volvo in the hardwoods. So now he floats on cirrus reading lost writings. But he can see the potential in these clouds.