Easter Sundry.

For as long as I can remember Easter was my least favorite holiday. I’d much preferred every other Sunday of the year where I was free to roam the streets honing my unique awkwardness. I was never big on cheap, mass produced candy. I’d always try to prolong and savor the only thing I really loved, the peanut butter melt-a-way egg, by only eating a sliver or two a day but it would always magically disappear while I slept at night. My mom told me that was why it was called a melt-a-way egg; because if you didn’t eat it fast it would melt-a-way until in was ‘all gone’ but I always suspected she was using my fucking Easter chocolate as a coping mechanism. Probably for the guilt she felt at eating my Easter chocolate. Or maybe it had to do with her sex life. I try not to think too much about the whys. 

I feel the same sort of ambivalence.

 

It didn’t help that this was also the only time of the year that we had to go to church, a place that I never felt comfortable. I felt that at any moment, the pries,t or a gaggle of alter boys, or perhaps the statues themselves, were going to suddenly glare at me and point with shaking fingers, saying, “You!” as if they saw me steal that packet of gum or maybe saw what I made my GI JOE do to Princess Leia. They wouldn’t even blame her for being such a royal slut. Had I had any inclination of the maelstrom of future lawsuits coming against the RCC I would have confessed it all to the first priest I saw with a slight lisp and dressed as a pool boy. Would I shatter my youthful innocence and pimp out my own young ass for tens of millions? In retrospect, yes. Even without the retrospect, yes. I’ll do it right now if someone has 13 million for a 38 year old anal virgin. Seriously.

 

Even when I was young and naive and still held a modicum of respect for religion, I found the Easter story to be horrific, sad and completely incongruous. I could always get into Christmas, what with the eggnog and Rudolph and Frosty and lights and toys to open and the winter solstice to sacrifice a goat to and Christmas cards to check for money, but as far back as I remember I was freaked out by the eclectic mix of contradiction and weirdness that was thrown at me on the third Sunday in April.

 

At least I would understand the case for a chocolate Buddha.

 

 

Looking back I can see why; because this was the way that my young mind interpreted the Easter Story…..

 

The human race (they were all brown) was stuck in a rut and God was really sad that he kept having to send almost everybody who’d ever lived to be burnt up and tortured for eternity so he hatched a plan. He’d shoot his seed (I thought it was a watermelon seed) into a virgin’s stomach without defiling her. (Which I thought meant he didn’t get poop on her.) This also fulfilled ancient prophesy by allowing Jesus to have direct lineage to David without actually being related to David(wait what?) since Joseph didn’t get to put a watermelon seed in Mary’s belly. 

 

Jesus did amazing things and helped all the people and shone his little light on me and everybody. He wrestled with Satan (managed by Bobby Heenan) in the desert and kicked his butt. Then Judas (also managed by Heenan) double crossed him by turning gay and trying to kiss his mouth. There was a big kerfuffle and when Bobby Heenan’s ear got cut off, Jesus felt bad so he agreed to go be tortured and murdered because he knew he was God so the prosecution wouldn’t be able to ‘make it stick.’

 

Bobby Heenan showing off his ear transplant. He's a proud man.

 

He was bullied and beaten (I’d imagined with a wooden spoon) for a long time and it was mean and horrible. Then the bad far-a-sees hung him up on my Uncle’s jewelry medallion thingy but it wasn’t gold it was wooden. Because nobody’s that rich. Then he hung there and died and everybody was really sad and crying. His friends took his body and put it in a cave with a bear. (I think I thought there was a bear in every cave?) Everybody went to look three days later but the body was all gone. (I remember that this made me want to steal a corpse, strangely.)

 

Jesus came back to life three days later but nobody believed him even though he still looked like Jesus. Then one of his friends stuck his finger in Jesus’ rib-hole, like some kinda sicko, and then everybody knew that it was really Jesus. Because if you can finger it, it’s supernaturally alive. (I still believe this.)  Then everybody was like, “Holy crap!” And Jesus was like, “I freaking told you guys!” then he took off into the air like Superman but he never came back and everybody was all like, “Is he coming back again?… … … Jesus?” Then everybody cried some more and wrote really long letters and stuff.

 

So God split himself in two and made half of himself be tortured and killed as a sacrifice to himself so that the other half of himself could stop the other half of himself from burning and torturing human beings just as long as they said ‘sorry’ and ‘thanks’ and had magic water dropped on their head when they were a baby. And God knew that he’d be ok because he knew that it would only be two really bad days in an otherwise awesome life and after the really bad two days he’d get an awesome eternity which was made even awesomer now that God had himself to talk to. Then, the two one-Gods made a third one-God of themselves and called it the Holy Spirit and its job was to kill archeologists who found the Ark of the Covenant and to possess a giant bunny rabbit named after a pagan goddess and take a bunch of crappy candy and one delicious melt-a-way egg and hide them all over my apartment on the spring equinox.

If Frank doesn't remind you of fertility then you're just not human.

 

Now that I’m grown and *totally understand* Easter, I still don’t like it. All the bars and restaurants are closed, the city is dead, and nothing’s even on TV. The only thing I still enjoy are small slivers of my melt-a-way egg, before it all magically disappears on the nights that my wife stays up later than me. Maybe they really do melt-a-way.