J. God doesn’t exist. We are products of evolution and we shall continue to evolve. In ten thousand years, who we are now will be as strange and distant as Neanderthal man seems to us today. We may yet go on to develop impervious metal skin, sprout downy angel wings, or consolidate into giant heads floating in vats of saline solution, whichever natural selection sees fit.
K. God absolutely exists. He is us. We are god. All things that breathe or think or even move, like wind or water, are integral parts of the celestial being that we are collectively. At some point we will learn to worship ourselves.
L. We do not exist. Our nonexistent selves dreamed up our nonexistent god to make our lack of existence more palatable.
M. Alien gods showed up in 1952 in a pie-shaped landing craft to explain the pyramids, but the government killed them.
N. Alien gods showed up in 1952 in a pie-shaped landing craft, looked around for a while, and then left in disgust.
O. Alien gods showed up in 1952 in a pie-shaped landing craft, looked around for a while, bought a house in Orange County, and started working on their tans.
P. Art Tatum’s left hand is the hand of god. Pele’s right foot is the foot of god. Selma Hayak’s booty is the booty of god. Stephen Hawking’s brain is the brain of god. Natalie Portman’s ankles are the ankles of god. H. L. Mencken’s vocabulary is the vocabulary of god. Billie Holiday’s voice is the voice of god. Miles Davis’s cool is the cool of god. Your mom’s heart is the heart of god.
Q. The Greeks were right. The stars are gods. The constellations are meaning. Everything spiritual and true was lost when the Romans started building bridges and aqueducts. Hail, Minerva.
R. God exists, and in all his heavenly mercy is about to step in and help me here since I have eight more letters to go and ran out of funny stuff somewhere between E and F.
S. God exists. The Devil exists. Our souls hang in the balance. In the meantime, shut your yap, Deal or No Deal is about to start.
T. Someone invented the tuba. People spend years in their rooms trying to learn to play it. Some of them do, putting together notes in pleasing sequences. We all generally understand and respond to the same arbitrary construction of rhythm and melody regardless of culture or geography. Tuba exists. Mozart exists. There is god in that randomness alone.
U. A child’s skinned knee. A fresh lime. Ice on a hot day. Boots that fit perfectly. A book you can’t wait to finish. Lying on the rug while your parents talk about their jobs. Your grandmother palming you a twenty. The smell of coffee. A movie you really want to see that turns out to be worth seeing. Washing grease off your hands after figuring out how to fix something yourself. Your girlfriend’s neck. Your boyfriend’s stomach. Waking up and having an hour more to sleep.
V. God backward spells dog. Devil backward sounds like a word for being really mad. Vatican backward sort of sounds like that metal band Savatage. Muslim backward sounds like a brand of baby food. Confucianism backward sounds about the same as Confucianism forward. Pray backward sounds like an old-timey cowboy answering in the affirmative. Words are meaningless. Divisions are meaningless. Labels are meaningless. If god is truly god, we are truly one.
W. hy am I writing this?
X. In some religions the letter X is holy. Everyone prays to Gox.
Y. Turns out god is about treating other people with respect and kindness. If you never once prayed, never were baptized, never were circumcised, never faced Mecca, never recited the Vedas, never achieved Zen, and never took communion, but spent your entire life simply being kind to those around you, whoever is waiting will almost certainly approve no matter what rituals you chose to observe.
Z. Ultimately, there will soon be ten billion people on this planet, most of whom have contradictory views of faith, worship, and afterlife. God exists for those who need him to, in whatever incarnation. God exists for those who don’t need him, mostly as a source of nervous conjecture about whether they’re making a huge mistake by spurning him. Tens of millions of people have lived and died before us, and when they died found out if their beliefs were right or wrong. Or, they found nothing at all. Either way, we still wake up every morning. Until we don’t.
SALT RIVER HIGH CLIQUE INDEX
THE BALLS: Comprised of Salt River’s football team, except the punter and some freshman scrubs. Wearers of no-irony crew cuts, shoulder pads without shirts, and cleats for kicking the fallen and cleatless. They play only one sport at Salt River, and it’s not field hockey. Mortal enemies of Pinker Casket. LEADER: Jeff Chuff, QB RIGHT-HAND MAN TO JEFF CHUFF: Chance Chugg, WR QUOTE: “Chuff to Chugg… touchdown!” RACKET: Girlie mags, by-the-sip water fountain, game tickets, autographs, pay-for-play bathroom use. GROUPIES: SIS BOOM BAHS: Milk-fed, long-legged leaders of cheer. Big hair. Aggressively dim. Can’t spell pom or pom. Make up sixty percent of the Booze ’n’ Fondle dating pool. SUB-CLIQUES: COULDABEEN CONTENDERS: Good enough to compete, damaged enough to avoid competing, e.g., the girl who was smarter than everyone else but now fails all her classes; the super-arty kid who gave up drawing and now mostly picks his nose; the seven-foot guy who quit basketball to write sploetry. SCAM WOWS: Ferret-faced huckster clan. Members wear matching Bluetooth headsets and tight polo shirts. They’ll buy or sell your mother. Seriously, is she available for purchase? Most are also sploets. Writers of sports poetry. Poetry about sports. What? Chuff does it. So what? No way, it’s cool. It’s about sports. Shut up. It is not. No, I mean it. I swear, you better shut your cakehole before I come over there.
PINKER CASKET: The rockingest, thrashingest band on campus. Loud and dark and droning. Plays all pep rallies, proms, and school events, although probably most appropriate for funerals or virgin sacrifices. The yearly battle of the bands isn’t a battle, it’s a slaughter. Most popular songs are “There’s a Shocker in My Locker,” “Sex Nuke,” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia, No, Not That Georgia, the One That Was Part of the Former Soviet Union Whose Capital Is Now Tbilisi.” Mortal enemies of the Balls. LEADER: Kurt Tarot RIGHT-HAND MAN TO KURT TAROT: Mick Freeley QUOTE: “If you can’t play an instrument, why even have a name?” RACKET: Knockoff iPods, bootlegged MP3s, ripped DVDs, suspect electronics, and not-punch-you fees. GROUPIES: DES BARRES: Spandex toe to neck and willing to de-spandex as required. Tend to be in love with the sensitive drummer, who’s actually more half asleep than he is sensitive. Most secret inner desire is to get a Marshall Stack tattoo. SUB-CLIQUES: KOKROCK CITY: Guys who spend the majority of their time claiming to have heard of the latest trendy band way before you did. Anyone who sells more than ten albums is a sellout. Anyone whose second album sounds even slightly different from the first is a sellout. Includes indie, glam, metal, punk, rude boys, go-go, hardcore, and thrash. AIRPLANE GLUZE: Frequent wearers of a perm-mullet hybrid. Lots of PARTY HEARTY bumper stickers. Lots of CERTIFIED SEX INSPECTOR T-shirts. Congenital utterance of “huh?” Includes Garage Rockers, Jam Banders, Zep Heads, Random Noodlers, Stinky Phishers, and Feedback Queens.
YEARBOOK COMMITTEE: Controls all social events. Controls all captions and candid shots. Kingmakers for all student government and student council slots. LEADER: Lu Lu Footer QUOTE “You want a quote, buy a yearbook.” RACKET The status inherent in being in print, and the favors delivered accordingly. SUB-CLIQUES MOST LIKELY TO HAVE NICEST TEETH: If you keep smiling, eventually someone will take your picture.
SMOKE: Enjoys muscle cars, smoking, and leaning against brick walls enigmatically. Prefers nonfilters. LEADER AND ONLY MEMBER: Ronnie Newport QUOTE: “Hey, you got a light?” RACKET: Transportation, yearbook photography, being the man behind the lens. GROUPIES: GINNY SLIMS: Ronnie Newport’s inexplicably dim backseat posse. Big on laughing too loud, headbands, ripped jeans, glossy lips, and stiletto boots.
FOXXES: Hot Chix and Whiskey Licks. All Foxxes can more than hold their own, and frequently do. Wearing the best vines and dressed to the nines. LEADER: Cassiopeia Jones QUOTE: “Go ahead and mess with me. Please.” RACKET: Unknown but highly lucrative. GROUPIES None.
Unless you count every guy at school. SUB-CLIQUES: CATWALK NINJA: The Foxxes’ highly mysterious bodyguard triplets, with lightning moves to match their racy leatherette. Thighs to die for. Sometimes referred to as “Jenny,” but rarely to their faces.
CAPE SILVERSPOON: Rich girls who are, amazingly, also popular. Not as smoking hot as Foxxes but with spending power to work around it. Too much of a cliché to have a leader, too boring to even describe. Yeah, blond; yeah, perfect; yeah, big house and sculpted calves and two-grand pumps. Not big fans of Proust. QUOTE: “Whatever, lesser. Go get me a diet Rush.” RACKET Dad’s wallet. GROUPIES: You gotta be born into it. SUB-CLIQUES: FACE BOI: Groomed, attractive, naturally muscled, and unencumbered with the baggage of excess personality. They enjoy driving Silverspoon to the mall or a movie like the expensively sweatered gentlemen they are. Formerly Lax Brahs with flow, but since they cut the lacrosse budget, it’s all about abs and three-stage acne solutions. GIRLZ WITH TWO FIRST NAMES: Tiffany Michele. Amber Jennifer. Sadie Lynn. Cari Natalie. Hannah Bella. Exotic nomenclature allows them to be a subset of Cape Silverspoon without having sufficient access to Mom’s credit card to otherwise qualify. BULL LEMIA: One purged meal and a designer handbag away from graduating to Silverspoon. Oh so in love with that Face Boi who would probably notice them if they could only stop eating Cool Ranch Bloritos. Time to do another thousand leg lifts.
LEE HARVIES: Self-appointed regulators of who is or isn’t strapped at Salt River. Shadowy group with no known leader, cause, racket, or purpose, except firing at random. Sniper skills are without parallel, as there has yet to be a Lee Harvies–related fatality. Are either disrupting the herd, or herding the herd. When rare Lee Harvies sightings are made, they’re usually running from the scene, wearing a Jason-style hockey mask with silver anarchy symbols painted over the eyes. They always leave behind a single playing card, the jack of spades, where the jack’s face has been replaced by a portrait of Leon Czolgosz. LEADER: None. QUOTE: “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold, grassy knoll.” RACKET None. They can’t be bribed. Or bargained with. Or even identified.
FRESHMAN GIRLS: Sigh. RACKET Causing sighs.
ROTTEN IN DENMARK: The theater department. Constantly quoting Brecht. Prone to porkpie hats and Kansas prairie dresses. Members know all the songs from Cats and two-thirds of the songs from Rent. Since third grade have been beat up at least one-fourth of the time because of it. LEADER: Whoever’s got the most lines that day. QUOTE “Give me a minute to get into character.” RACKET Improv tips. GROUPIES The occasional soon-to-be-arrested visiting playwright who has graciously volunteered his scraggly-bearded time for one-on-one instruction. SUB-CLIQUES FOOTLIGHTS: Kids who really, really want to be in a play but never make it through an audition without crying and saying, “Okay, sorry… sorry… okay, let me start again… I just… I just… sorry. I have it. I can totally do it. Let’s just start over. Can we start over? From the top?” They tend to hang around dejectedly backstage before eventually agreeing to spend the weekend painting backdrops. GIRLS WITH UNNECESSARY Y’S: Aspiring dancers like Cyndi, Jyll, Alyce, Chrys, and Lysa. Women who refer to themselves as womyn. Aspiring spokesmodels like Susyn, Lynda, Jordyn, Bryn, and Cameryn. Aspiring trophy wives like Kyra, Mylissa, Tyne, and Skyler.
CROWDAROUNDS: Pretty much everyone at school is a charter member. If there’s action, they crowd around. They gawk and laugh while basking in utter relief that they’re not the one being picked on. Everyone talks derisively about Crowdarounds, which is ironic, since pretty much everyone is one. LEADER: None, or they wouldn’t be Crowdarounds. QUOTE “Be quiet and watch.” RACKET Vicarious immersion. SUB-CLIQUES TEXT MOB LOL: OMG! D U just C wht hppnd? Tht wuz Cr8zy! LOL! Did U C Skyler’s hair???? Gross! R U cming 2 School 2day? Im txting in my homework since mom got doc’s note sez my thumbs r inflamed. LOL.
EUCLIDIANS: Sure, nerd is a cliché, but nerds are a reality and revenge is inevitable. As Moses or someone once said: “The nerds will inherit the meek.” Mostly fingertip-sniffers, Fack Cult daughters, corduroy wearers, and that kid who plays with his Robot Lion Fist™ action figures while making a preer preer sound through his nose during lunch. LEADER: Possibly Stephen Hawking. QUOTE “Some people like to study, okay? Get over it, mouth-breather.” RACKET Test scores, term papers, video game unlockables, tutoring, high-grade Wite-Out, and Finish Your Sudoku for You? GROUPIES Occasionally a wayward Plath with a few wine coolers under her belt, but not really, no. SUB-CLIQUES None, except for the natural loose affiliation with various New Skids.
NEW SKIDS ON THE LOOM: More a poorly dressed amoeba than a true clique, New Skids is a nebulous catchall for the socially stranded. Encompasses most species of geeks, kingdoms of nerds, and phyla of dorks, including but not limited to: debating geeks, activities geeks, code-writing nerds, geeks with dice, nerds with long stringy hair, and Elvis Costello glasses–wearing dorks, as well as all other variants of sit-alones, snorty laughers, movie dialogue reciters, the helplessly flatulent, the NASA obsessed, pretty-horse drawers, the willfully unpleasant, virtual-girl fantasizers, those with yellow breath, the cat-hair-covered, Nerf herders, the daily velour-swathed, and those having fully retreated into elf realms. SUB-CLIQUES PLATHS: Girls who write aching poetry in their algebra book margins about razors, virgins, and the eternal love of Germanic vampire overlords. Are known to rock the occasional beret, along with the occasional stained sweatpants. COAL TRAIN: Marching band wieners. Tuba lards. Flautists. Triangle dingers. Auto-harp toters. Sniffers of fuzzy-tipped drumsticks, owners of spit-caked clarinets, and donners of fringy polyester uniforms. Tend to spend countless hours on the bus trying to interest people in their quadraphonic recordings of Bitches Brew. BAREFOOTS: Random shouting vegans and the petition-wielding patchouli-soaked. Peace yellers. Justice demanders. Tofu garglers. The mud-flecked. STEEL-TOE DYSTOPIA: Wearing distressed leather and fingerless gloves, they spend many hours on the couch envisioning themselves with architectural stomach musculature, an indefatigable sword arm, and a high-tensile mullet. They lust for the Take-Charge Apocalypse Female, who tends to prefer to do her fighting in something tight and low-cut and will soon come to lead them to the promised land, which in this case is the remnants of a heavily irradiated Las Vegas.
THE FACK CULT T: The faculty and administration: young, idealistic math teachers; old, broken, sweater-vested history teachers; gym teachers driven insane by the parade of hopeless delinquency; secretaries; various staff; substitutes, lackeys, librarians; cafeteria workers; and the dude who drives the Roach Coach. LEADER: Principal Inference CO-LEADER Miss Honey Bucket, school registrar QUOTE “Do you have a hall pass? No? Well, then, do you have ten dollars?” RACKET Power corrupts. Absolute power equals absolute cash.
THE BODY: Don’t think about Wesley. Don’t talk about Wesley. Shhh. Who? What body? I have no idea what you’re talking about, and even if I did, do you think I’d talk to you about it?
THE GLOSSARY
Asshat |azz het|
noun
One of those insults that really has no meaning but for some reason just sorta feels right. Either that, or you’re wearing Stetson pants.
Assy Assbourne |azzy azbourne|
person
Big-haired and hopelessly addled metal singer who used to front Black Sabbath but now spends most of his time as the intermittently coherent punch line of a truly depressing reality show. Rumored to have once bitten the head off a bat, a rumor that held no truth whatsoever but resulted in the sale of about nine million more albums than just wearing tight pants and makeup would have.
Barnaby Smollet |‘burn u be smo let|
person
A notorious and long-standing member of London’s Hellfire Club, Smollet is also the author of the marginally successful and many-volumed Lexington Cole detective series. Called an “infidel” and a “rake” by his literary nemesis, Percy Eaton-Hogg, Smollet seemed oblivious to both reviews and critique, happily churning out one Cole novel per year until the end of his life. The series, rev
iewed variously in the Times of London as “puerile slop,” “books for people who hate to read,” “the franchise that put no more in moribund,” and “thoroughly distasteful brain static,” still managed to find a reasonable, if hard to identify, readership.
Bebe Rebozo |‘bee bee ra bozo|
person
Aside from Spiro Agnew, the most damningly and alliteratively named of the Watergate conspirators and their ilk. Rebozo was a financier up to his cleft in all things seamy during the long reign of Richard Nixon. They apparently went sailing together a lot. The name Spiro Agnew can be rearranged to spell Grow a Penis. The name Bebe Rebozo can be rearranged to spell Zoo Beer Ebb.
Bertolt Brecht |bert olt brekt|
person
The world’s most boring and strident playwright, usually beloved by the world’s most annoying and humorless theater professors.
Bitches Brew |beet chez broo|
noun
The seminal Miles Davis recording of 1970 that is now, in retrospect, almost universally agreed to have been the gravitational and theoretical nexus wherein jazz, funk, and rock met in a throbbing hell-broth of grooving wail and spanky dissonance. Essentially the recording that ruined the music industry for just about everyone else, since in comparison they suddenly seemed relentlessly mediocre, if not outright inert. Akin to guzzling shellac just before being aurally trepanned. Of course, like anything truly original or challenging, it was widely hated at the time of its release.
Bite Me Totally Neckless |boit meh tot lee nik lus|
You Killed Wesley Payne Page 26