"Ole' Goat Head" is our most frequently misunderstood figure of Christian mythology. You have to understand, Lucifer actually started off "as a pretty nice guy". He was "the bringer of light", illuminating the world with his charming wit and offbeat sense of humor. As a boy he laughed with such joy in his eyes and his spirit was unquenchable. In the early days he was a bright, fearless child who held the door open for everybody and was lost in a magical world of books and cartoons. My first words were "No way Josè!", perhaps a portent of what was to come. . . . .

A moment to remember, one of the family's most cherished memories.

But then there was Mee-shee, Satan's cat, who didn't much cotton to having any more attention distracted away from its god-like masters, those who poured out the Friskies "dry" with an appealing rattle and changed the litter box. Her attitude toward me could at best be described as sullen as I toddled down toward the kitchen, this black cat sauntering with its tail high in the air to express that it didn't exactly approve of my presence. Less time for its masters to stroke its fur, scratch its ears, make it feel like it was the number one creature in the house whose shit was picked up after it.

One distraction had been enough. But now Lucifer's temptress took to yowling and pissing on the hardwood floors to show its displeasure, clawing at the furniture in rebellion to demonstrate what it felt about "this little angel without wings". To make a long story short, we had to give Mee-shee away. If not for homely odors, than for the resale value of our house which had smelled like something had died. Perhaps it was Mee-shee's soul. . . . . gone putrid with jealousy. She had mounted "her rebellion" in crusted cat-piss and had been cast into "the cat shelter" of no return. What had happened to her, this chronicle can not say.

(No, you didn't just see that!)

Well, things did not necessarily turn out well for young Lucifer.

And what kind of cruel elf would give you "Popeye" overalls?!

(By the way-- where did you stash "that little helper" I specifically requested?)

(-- They're on back-order, Michael. Play with "He-Man"!)

The notion of "Sugar Candy Mountain" died hard. But nothing suitable came to take its place, so up rose "Sugar Candy Mountain #2" which was perhaps more delusional because there is nothing more ill-equipped to face this world than a fool who is half-educated.

I found myself in an alternative liberal arts school surrounded by a Luciferian ethos of dimmer sparks who could not offer any kind of credible front to the bald-faced lie that they were worth anything. What is fundamentally true about this misunderstood character known as Lucifer, is that fundamentally he is a very weak adversary to the mainstream he is fighting. He is a slave to his instincts, when the strength to deny is great-- how "won't" is shortchanged into "can't" and how, ultimately, "his will" is never actually translated into positive, effective actions. He destroys, rather than builds. He would pull down others to "his level" rather than lift them up on a host of angels. The attitude around those parts ranges from a jaundiced cynicism, to a pained liberal arts sensitivity, to a fundamental flakiness that can't be honest about "this damned human race".

"Sugar Candy Mountain #2" came down in an awful shudder of disillusionment where there was nothing for a while, only a bleak wind mocking his tin-pot 1960's-inspired folly. Scraping together what remained of his pride, feeling used and cheated, up came "Sugar Candy Mountain #3" when he was the 15 year-old equivalent of "Donald Rumsfeld on speed" headed toward "the promised land" of conservatism's bastion-- the 2000 election. But if you wanted to call my life "Rumsfeld's War", what you got to understand is that the answer to the world's problems is not necessarily "force". That if you try to place a hokey, unrealistic, self-abnegating code of values on teenagers, Muslims, or South Americans "they'll never go for it" and eventually your bumbling impotence will become so embarrassing that you'll flee in disgrace after a long period of finger-pointing and denial, if not a huge pile of casualties as you've left a huge path of destruction if your life's wake "trying to be the man" you secretly don't feel yourself to be.

The self-replicating snarl of woe behind why I left was endless, but fundamentally I found myself as a high-school drop-out with no kind of belief in the future, as "Sugar Candy Mountain #3" made a long, slow, sickening descent into nothingness "when staying the course" was no longer worth the anguish. I had lost nearly everything. . . . . I could at least limp out of there with some semblance of self-respect. That tiny "fig-leaf" of pride was the only thing this young Lucifer had left. And frequently, even that would be nearly taken away as adults bullied and insulted and told him "he was doomed" and wouldn't have understood even if he tried to explain. They inappropriately grouped him in with all sorts of labels, imminently satisfied with themselves as grand sachems and closet drunks who did not know about the dark, secret underworld of Asperger's Syndrome and social awkwardness and never would.

I was knocked down to the lowest rank of collegiate material possible. . . . . that of state school commuter. It was a ghost-town of tumble-weed intelligence. . . . . and the devil stewed in the sump. He was bitter, yes. He was cranky, for certain. And he felt like something that had been run over that wanted to crawl back to its lair and die. He may as well have been a veteran in a wheelchair whose pain medication had been stolen as he snarled through the halls like molten agony.

In came "The Clown for Christ".

You could smell his rank fibs and disingenuousness of why he started "a current issues discussion club", but one felt sorry for the middle-aged, baby-faced sucker and his junior partner-in-crime who looked like Roy Cohn at the McCarthy hearings. You had to humor their "pitiful effort to save souls" that was just about as out of place as 1950's Martians in the era of "Britney Spears" and "N' Sync". Perhaps I was bored. . . . . or merely lonely. . . . . or felt just about as out-of-place in post-Reagan America as they did.

But these people did not understand all the levels on which "irony appreciation" worked.

Our "Clown for Jesus" seemed to expect that I, as a bright, half-Jewish 17 year-old from a liberal, upper middle-class background who had been through some of the most horrible, non-lethal games of psychological brinksmanship that you can imagine, would actually descend down to a level so marginal and actually join this doofus's church where he would preside over me as "my higher authority" in all things temporal and spiritual like the Pentecostal Pope praying over a kneeled "Bat Boy" at the altar. You had "The Left Behind" series on-sale at Walmart, a man announces in a rapture of roll-eyed fear, and then you have an image of his rebellious teenaged daughter off in the bushes with a slat-eyed, squinting little sociopath.

The only thing left behind is your ass in the dirt in our "Information Economy". This was the height of the tech bubble, but these characters scraped along the bottom quarter of the economy like picks and shovels working the land, top soil blowing away in the wind like a funnel of 1970's stagflation that dropped them, conveyor-belt like, onto the cold Linoleum floor of the discount bread store like a dollop of artificial strawberry-topping spurted out on a "honey bun". After-all, the stock-market and health insurance was a form of gambling that "The Lord Almighty" answered to with a dark rumble like riders on the storm.

Meet you down at the Tri-City Speedway circa 1975 with a plain blue shirt, a Cromagnon brow, and strong white teeth that were bared around a lot as if waiting for a combination between Eval Kineval and their own version of "Jesus Christ: Superstar", to show up and jump over the 77(7) flaming school buses and reclaim this land from the godless Supreme Court. Not forgetting, vowing that the pussy of "that wicked witch of the East", Gloria Steinnam, should shrivel up and not admit a man's Christian love even if she wanted him to.

Yes, down here with these cretins-- the puke of Christian America-- on the ass-end of St. Louis county a few stoplights off the beaten path of St. Charles Rock Road where the working poor traversed the asphalt-swirled roads in beat-to-shit cars like hope in a nose-dive. The croaking bullfrogs in the congregation, the wretched, the fearful-- fed on "the opium of the Red-State underclass" as they were reassured with tales about "Sugar Candy Mountain" that seemed as elusive as our lives were empty on this side of a dirty, black summer. And he seriously expected some sour old bastard like me (-- 17+ life) to be fooled?

It's not so bad, son-- pull up a fold-out chair! We've been born tricked all of our lives!

This was not empowerment, but enfeebling-- like dodging the call of lionly duty, hunkered down low on a hill and watching soldiers do jumping jacks-- brushing a bead of sweat off your forehead, relieved it isn't you going off to fight-- and then going off and sucking cock in the stinking reeds.

Yes, with all the other traitors and back-sliders and Allan Ginsberg-types who lived without honor, fetid in their nonconformity, self-indulgent in intransigence, ultimately fit for "the firing squad". Or if you wanted to be merciful, loose screws that should be picked up and collected in a bucket of our windowless mental institutions where you can zap them with a car battery in case they got "too grandiose" for these solid, white concrete walls of society's rightful perdition.

But yet he couldn't "follow through" with his A-to-B mission as society expected. For he was like the bullied young fat boy in "Full Metal Jacket" who was tormented by his drill sergeant, then targeted by his fellow soldiers because he was pulling the unit down. At one point they filled up socks with bars of soap, held him down, and beat him. There was what he does not and can not understand with the ticking of the stop-watch, when A-to-B is not an option for him upon rotten, sinking ground, when he's simply not "a standard piece of equipment" that operates like everyone else and needs time to come up with a solution.

And matters are not helped when he's told "there's only one way". That you must submit to the self-delusions of ignorant, marginal men who know not of honor, of war, of shot-to-hell prospects, of reality down here "on the jungle-floor" where the trees have eyes and even the strongest crack under the stress. Where Colonel Kurtz dwelled on the nature of evil and held up a crystal skull as "Lord of the Flies".

(Why, there must have even been a copy of "The Turner Diaries" in there someplace. . . . . along with a stack of old "Conan the Barbarian" comic books from the early '80s about knee-high)

"The Clown for Christ" tried to put a bridle around "ole' goat head" and lead him to the Lord. But "the kid", so to speak, bucked and fought and kicked against this fundamentalist "know-nothing", secretly aware of the fact that deep down the shepherd wasn't "sure of anything" and needed the sanctity of numbers to convince even himself of the absolute infallibility of his creed and the power to transcend death.

If you're so certain, then why can't I ask any questions if what you say is true? You violated my perimeter and tried "to kidnap my king" in a gunny-sack, so why don't I declare open warfare on your castle? Never underestimate Lucifer's wrath, especially when his intelligence and counterfeit impression of self-worth is questioned. He lives in each and every one of us, even in the godly. It's what would cause us to manipulate or lie, cheat, or steal or be fundamentally dishonest about life as you truck in self-defeating illusions that leave the world poorer as "Sugar Candy Mountain" turns into worms and you have a bunch of overgrown, wailing children.

And perhaps even "this Lucifer" had to grow up and become a man of God. . . . . . when the reasons behind why we do things are not completely arbitrary, "because the Lord said so" but because in the context of how we live there are dire consequences when you don't follow a set of rules, time-tested over generations with what we know about the human character and how this stuff tends to work out. Generally, a society that has fallen to its Luciferian instinct tends to rot in cynicism and entropy, when you become so sharp that you believe in nothing-- except, of course, for "the big score" or "the cheap fuck" when your morose emptiness makes such a remote possibility even more unlikely for the likes of you. Don't be a bastard. Invest in heaven today by working on the world we already have and meeting God in your own right.

And I hope that girl I wrote away for arrives soon. . . . . even "damaged merchandise" can be redeemed at this outlet with no proof of purchase.

(No Questions Asked)