mark monday's Reviews > Farewell Waltz

Last night, when talking to God again, I posed a question atypical for its lack of fawning, begging, or pleading: "Why do You make such a joke of us?" The ceiling throbbed dimly above me, all shadows and cobwebs and barely seen whiteness, only slightly illuminated by the yellow of the streetlights staring blearily through the dusty windows, the tableau of small little shapes embedded in the ceiling could hardly be seen let alone differentiated, these misshapen pimples of paint frozen like a depressed and lackadaisical swarm of sleepy insects covered in cream, or cloud, or whatever color the paint was once named, the little bumps of stucco like small, barely sentient beings whose movements were so slow they didn't appear to move at all. A fitting vision, or at least it felt that way in the moment. Sensing a reply would not soon be forthcoming - so like Him, I thought, resigned - I continued on: "You sprayed Yourself upon this fertile egg Earth and so we were born from this heavenly shower, if that's not too salty a metaphor for You, we motile things moving hither and thither, created by the divine yet living our lives of mundanity, betraying each other, projecting our needs onto each other, hating each other while calling that hate love, hating each other while calling that hate change, hating each other while calling that hate law or freedom or safety, injecting ourselves into each other like You did to this poor Earth who never asked for such parasites infesting her body, infecting each other with ourselves, replicating more of us as is our imperative, or perhaps Your imperative, an imperative to always keep breeding and hating and breeding some more... You created us, but why didn't You just leave us after that? Why stay to laugh, to mock, to create a long-winded joke for which the punch line is not just a shaggy dog, it is a hairy ape, the ape that is man that will never get that it is not just the butt of the joke, it is the head and heart and genitals of the joke as well. Why Lord why? Why not just hit it and quit it, why stay to laugh at what You wrought?" After finishing my appeal, I realized that God had fallen fast asleep while I had rambled on. As He is often prone to do during my more lachrymose musings, sigh. God knows I can sometimes be a bore.

I turned to the typically attractive faun asleep at my side and roused him with an urgent shake. At least he would hear me if He would not. As he was fairly used to this behavior, he woke slowly but with a minimum of grumblings. "What now?" he asked with only faint surliness and the beginnings of an erection. "I have an important question to pose," I said self-importantly. "And put that away please. The question is this: Our existence is depressingly ephemeral as is, must it be made a joke of? Our souls are fragile as is, must they be so aggressively manhandled by the State, by the Media, by the Community, by Old Men, most of all by our oh so humorous Creator and His private little jokes at our expense?" My companion smiled sleepily, his surliness but not his erection now gone, and said: "Oh, so you think we have souls? That's adorable." This was neither the reaction I expected nor the path I wanted to walk on, and certainly not at this late an hour. The fact of our soul's existence must be sacrosanct, sacred, or at least an ironic given, otherwise these jokes of God lack even humor to recommend them. And so I responded: "Of course! Don't you think we have souls? Are you such a godless pagan that your lack of faith has rendered you unable to acknowledge the intangible soul within this all-too tangible bag of skin, bones, hair, muscles, blood, semen, and brain matter?" He replied, horned and horny,

"Ano, máme duši. Ale skládá se z mnoha malých robotů."

And so I experienced another upsetting joke. If you like such jokes, you should read The Farewell Waltz. It is full of them! Eight characters in a comic roundelay, among them a doctor injecting his sperm into hapless women, a little God himself, creating a whole world of people who look like him and think like him, a whole world like him and the seven other characters who live in this angry joke of a novel, a whole world of characters fucking each other and fucking each other over, sometimes dying, sometimes loving, sometimes fooling each other, always fooling themselves, a whole world of insects except of course insects don't do such things.