It was the day of the festival (celebrating the city’s goodwill) and Joseph had every plan to debut his first play, if only he could find a suitable place for his stage and coax his fellow ‘players’ out of their crates and lairs. He’d had a long talk with them the night before, seemingly making headway with promises that he’d find them fish guts and other scraps, while not requiring them to do more than block for him, although one or two would probably have to don some sort of costume (Joseph guiltily omitted that when he’d introduced the idea). And, he’d even found two of the C.I. familiaris, a particularly russet gray female with dyed ruby ears whom he called Daisy Mae and a dear blonde terrier mutt who answered blithely to Linus, both being essential to Scene II, in which he needed some complicated spins and an elaborate bow.
He was returning to the alleyway, having only recently discarded his angel gear and managing some terrestrial clothing (after it appeared his ascension was not to be in the near future), when he saw four of them lounging on a delivery stand in the back of a warehouse. Being a courteous neighbor and in a festive mood, he joined them for some small talk:
“Well kitties, it appears as though the day is upon us. We should pray for our soul or most certainly we will be the sole prey of eternity,” Joseph remarked ibn Arabianly as he took a seat, they casually acknowledging his entrance into their pride and furthering their reputation for idleness. “What can you say about a day like this… my, my…”
He patiently waited for any one of their members to insert their own observation, but realized their inclination for direct communication; he quickly amended his languid words and focused on le mot juste. It was a pure egotistical pleonasm how he continued on, never stopping, speaking as though they were listening like schoolchildren afraid their grades would suffer or that they would be given the ole ruler across the knuckles if they veered their attention, like so many of them could remember on cold autumn mornings, as the teacher began his lecture, snapping the yard stick against his palm and continuing on until lunch time and they could escape out onto the playground.
“They say we are not our own to govern, and they are bureaucratic men.”
On his scraps that morning he clearly saw, in his very own handwriting, an order to uncover the root of his purpose (although it was a step in the right direction, he was still suffering from teleophobia). For several nights he’d heard nothing from Flower, not one visit just to say ‘hi’ or sit down for a chat, not a single tickle, no paizogony what so ever (waking with unsoiled trousers), no new information delivered in her very special way (he particularly enjoyed the one in which the message was written all over her body and he had to twist and turn her to read it in its entirety, the conclusion scribbled in her inner thighs), no explanation for her absence, such as a vacation or sabbatical, and so he’d written himself an assignment. If she was going to leave him to do it himself, well then, by god, he’d miss how thersitical she could be and her spanking subtlety (especially when she was procumbent), but he’d carry on.
“Well then, there, now,” he said in character, coaxingly, “methinks you’ve taken a rather quaestuary view of it my friend. You speak only of truth and usury sin, of tossing them moneylenders out of the temple, as it were, but truly, if our monetary worth was the object of our pleasure, would each coin received magnify our inner light, and if so, if so, do we feel this enlightenment on payday, is it an otherworldly experience in which we ascend to a harmonious plain or do we feel sudden quiet, a sudden undulation of the spirit when we hand over those sums and find ourselves free of creditors? Nay, I say, fantasize for a brief moment, that you’ve borrowed some gem from a friend to wear for the festival, it is a sparkling, prideful rock that you wear on your lapel like a tag of prosperity, you strut throughout the crowds, chest puffed, arms back, head high as a hanged man, looking down on the passerbyers to catch their response to your ornamentation. After a few initial acknowledgements, you lose the thrill of it; their observation of it replays over and over again, the same response, until it means so very little to you that it’s plucked off of your collar and placed quietly in your pocket. You then hand it back to your friendly loaner, no more the better for borrowing it, and no better for returning it. Where in there lies pleasure?”
He patiently waits for the effect, languidly sort of acknowledging his voice; one rises slowly, arches her back, stretches lengthily, yawns, turns four times and reseats herself contentedly.
“Imagine, if you will, a proverbial life’s line-up of all the people you’ve ever known, stretching off into the everizon like a chain of sin. With each person, you’re required to give him or her a particular moniker: friend or foe. You walk like a commandant around them, sniff their cologne, stare into their eyes, smell their breath, perhaps, pinch a few butt cheeks, smack a few asses, et cetera, et cetera, and then, you begin to label these phantoms of your memory. This one you say is a ‘friend’, this one you say is a ‘foe’, and so on and so on. How correct do you think you would be? If we were to ask this line of acquaintances, would they concur with your labels or ardently disagree? My money’s on the latter, and here’s why: we are petty fortunetellers, my friends, most of us are not capable of understanding psychology, sociology or any other pertinent ologies that may come into play. One man, whom we assume is not just a friend, but was once actually considered a ‘best’ friend, well he reveals (without guilt or malice of fore-thought), that he had a little tickle, tickle with one of our former girlfriends, or our wife, or he admits that he sabotaged our reputation on several occasions, or that he secretly despised us but was, due to social convention, required to butter up our egos and give us puckered lips rather than his sporked tongue…”
A few heads indolently turn, some snout licking, he thinks the black one might have even winked (Imholtian in its mockery, i.e. teaching a feline that rather than believing people are cats, that the cat is a people), receives a knowing gaze from one, as if to suggest some justice or notion of good to friends and evil to enemies.
“…yes, yes, I see where you are going with this, two negatives make a positive, I believe is the religion, but can we accept this as truth, true truth, versus the other type, the type that appears to be true because we base it upon our own prejudices, our own limitations? I think not, not in ethics, not in morality (for they are different), because an eye for an eye, an offense for an offense, a punch for a punch, a stab for a stab, a hand for a product, money for security, does not equal happiness, or the good. Rather, as we have seen, responding in kind produces the opposite effect, evil plus evil equals double the evil, just as good plus good equals double the good, evil minus evil equals nothing, just as good minus good equals an absence of good, thusly causing there to be no good, and in the absence of good, there lies evil. We are damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
“Now when we use this superstition for government, we speak of justice, i.e. that the ruling body has the right, nay the duty, to eye for an eye criminals, or even, as was the custom in the past, an eye for an organ, fear by superior fire power, what you do to me I do a hundred fold to you, your family, relatives, acquaintances, and co-workers, which is to suggest that they can make things good by inflicting ever more evil, that by forcing evil into even worse conditions it will somehow, perhaps through psychological and social alchemy, suddenly turn towards the good. Well we know, as per experimentation and history, that this is simply not so, rather inflicting evil upon evil only makes more evil.”