A lot has been written about the afterlife. It’s been the subject of countless books, poems, movies, television shows, songs, tattoos, and fortune cookie inserts. Entire religions are built around the concept of not fucking up too badly here so as to risk a free split level home on a huge cumulus cloud with a fabulous view of the Great Beyond.
On the whole it sounds like a pretty groovy gig doesn’t it? Just imagine a place where you can eat twenty to thirty pounds of chocolate a day and not get either diabetes or terminally constipated; wouldn’t you want to go there? How about being able to just think of where you want to be and Poof, you’re there! Who needs planes or Priceline.com?
In fact, just by imagining it, you’d be able to instantly speak Chinese or one of those African clicking languages...or combine the two and invent a Chinese clicking dialect. The combinations are endless! You’d be slim, beautiful, and have your pick of whichever partner d’amore you want; no diseases, no need for birth control (hear that Rush?), and no reason to have to drop out of pastry chef school because somebody got pregnant (Yeah Rush...see what you did?).
And money? Forget about it! No more bills either! In fact every time Verizon robo -called you 15 times a day as soon as you were 20 minutes past the due date for your bill, instead of looking at the caller ID and feeling that knot in your stomach get a little tighter, you can now gleefully pick up the phone and shout at the top of your lungs, “Hey Verizon! Go fuck yourself! I ain’t payin!!!” And you can do that for all eternity...which, by the way, is about how long it takes to speak with an actual person at Verizon.
Yeah, the afterlife sounds like it is a bitchin place alright. It makes you wonder why everyone is so afraid of it.
I think it might be because the very thought of an eternity similar to this world we live in is so horrific that, if it were true, we’d all be spending our earthly vacations driving the family Ford Focus off the ledge and into the nearest canyon we could find. So, we make up this fantasy world, call it heaven, and voila; something to focus on that takes our mind off of the omnipresent, pernicious and toxic cloud that we know as life.
Now you might say, “Well gee Julia, are you alright? You don’t sound very happy. It’s not all bad is it?” To which I would say, if you are asking that question, then it probably isn’t all bad. In fact, it’s probably pretty damned good. Either that or it’s time to fire up another Thai stick.
But to answer the imaginary reader’s question, yes, I’m alright. And most of the time I am pretty happy, actually. I don’t hate life per say, I just hate the system, you know? It’s all so random, so arbitrary. It’s kind of like those ducks that you pick out of a tub of water at a carnival and when you turn it over, you get to find out what you won. Sometimes it’s a Cadillac Escalade, and sometimes it’s a mother of a case of shingles. It’s the friggin system.
Now, it has occurred to me numerous times over my earthly existence that if there is such a thing as an afterlife, then it follows that there must also exist a pre-life. Logically, it would seem that the pre-life would be just as cool as the after-life, but it isn’t. In fact, if I were doing a performance review of the pre-life, I could only conclude that it is woefully mismanaged.
Let’s think this through, shall we? If we are souls just inhabiting our bodies, and our souls are eternal, then it stands to reason that we must have been someplace before we got here, right? I mean, there isn’t some assembly line in the heaven version of Detroit
The answer to all of the above questions of course, is that the friggin system is way screwed up; at least in the pre-life.
Here’s my take on what’s going on up there, down there, out there, or wherever there is. Either the pre-life houses all of it’s souls in a cosmic bar where the Ruler of It All gets them so plastered that they don’t care which life they pick, or the second, more logical assumption is, it’s a heavenly Selective Service System; that’s right, a draft.
It has to be! Can you imagine anyone choosing to be born in a place where a night out on the town consists of a romp in a de-lousing tent? Or where the local 5 star restaurant serves fifty different kinds of gruel? Or where the most popular game show is Let’s Not Get Diphtheria? No, you can’t. Only a draft could justify sending anyone down here to that kind of life.
So, let’s review, shall we?
We now know that if you believe that you’re going someplace really good after all of this is finished, they you must have come from someplace before you got here. You didn’t have a choice where you were getting sent, but anything was better than the pre-life housing and job situation, where if you believe the Renaissance artists, you spent your pre-life as a nude baby floating aimlessly throughout space.
We’ve also gleaned that if you intend to have enough to enjoy your eternal retirement in the afterlife, you must have a good earthly credit score and plenty of stars in your confidential file; otherwise, it’s straight to hell for you. And as we all know, hell is not unlike spending eternity listening to Snooki’s philosophies on life and Guidos.
If you really, REALLY screw things up, you may have to come back here and do the whole thing over again, and you might not be so lucky in the draft the next time around. You could wind up living as an indentured servant, or worse, a Greek bondholder!
In conclusion, let me say that life is the ultimate reality show. It is the Great Race and Survival all mixed into one. And when the day comes when The Ruler of It All decides to vote you off the island, just hope it doesn’t happen when you are in the middle of surfing porn on the Internet or God forbid, nodding your head in agreement with Rush Limbaugh or Rick Santorum. Because sure as shootin’, if you don’t make the most of your time here, you’re bound to have to do this all over again- as a closeted transgendered, illegal alien, birth control pill popping, oversexed, Republican. Born again, of course!
That’s it. I’m done bitching. Everybody hug. Everybody eat. Abbondanza!
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