the sort which Bob never watched, featuring a panel of intellectuals
who were debating something. Bob knew they were intellectuals
because they were all very ugly, and ugly people weren’t allowed on
television unless they were intellectuals.
Their discussions were broken up with videotape snippets of the
previous public appearances of the six prophets. There was the
interview with Koppel, the concert with the Stones, the David
Letterman fiasco, and even segments of their Pasadena New Year’s
Day appearance. They also showed part of a commercial Gautama
appeared in for a herbal fruit juice concoction called “Nirvanade.”
The intellectuals were all speaking very gravely and shaking their
heads a lot, but Bob wasn’t too clear what it was they were talking
about. An anemic-looking old man ranted smugly, “Until now,
eschatology has only been the province of extremists and radicals.
But now that it’s gone mainstream…”
He was interrupted by a fat man with a foreign accent and bad
teeth: “Yes, but, my friend, what does
scatology
have anything to do
with this?”
The anemic man laughed. “Not scatology,” he said, “That’s the
study of excrement.
Eschatology
is about the end of the world.”
“Ha!” The foreigner laughed along noisily, “But they are the
same! At the end of the world all of everything goes down the toilet!”
They all laughed. Bob didn’t get the joke. He changed the
channel.
He would have called the gods directly and asked them what this
was all about, but their number had been changed. Mr.
Schlechtmann could fill him in, but every time Bob called, he was in
a meeting. The way Bob saw it, if he was so busy having meetings all
the time he should just have big parties every day and then everybody
could meet him at the same time, and it would be fun too. Bob felt
that if there was one thing that there wasn’t enough of, it was parties.
If there were more parties, everyone would be friends and then there
would be no more fighting in the world. But everyone said they were
too busy. His biological parents put him up for adoption because he
was too much of a burden. His foster parents didn’t have time for him
either. Bob couldn’t figure out what it was they were so busy doing
that they couldn’t do at a party.
Bob flipped through the channels until he found another
program about his buddies. Now this was a program he could follow.
There were was loud music and lots of wild graphics in the
H O L Y S H I T !
150
 |
 |
 |
 |