BANG OUT

Leo’s recent blog posts:

9:04 am

Blogging deadline: 1000 words on the Jennifer Love Hewitt sexting scandal, by 5pm. Me: calling sex therapists and even other journalists (even that jerk Jayden at People, I was that desperate for a quote).

Noise from Dominic’s cubicle next to me. His loud-assed headphones? Music: louder and trumpety sounding (weird because he only listens to mashups). His stupid balding head rising above the cubicle wall. I covered my phone’s mouthpiece and yelled, “Gophering: Bad etiquette, man!” His fuzzy beard and bowtie and torso rose above the cubicle wall. Me: really pissed, because he must have been standing on a chair to make some announcement, when Jayden’s blabbing on the line about the “psychology of sexting”. But Dominic kept rising, his legs and his feet went above the cubicle wall, and he was hovering above me. Then: a really loud noise: the entire roof of our building was tearing off, and Dominic went flying into the sky. Laser beams were shooting down at us, but then I realized it was these huge golden sun beams.

It was the friggin rapture, on a Monday, of course.

Makes no sense. Dominic is a pussy agnostic, so he can’t even admit there is no God!

A couple other people in our office went floating up, like totally unreligious Casper: dickhead in tech support who smells like old socks, who only worships that stupid alien-street-fighting video game.

That old priest in Oakland was right about the rapture, goddammit. He just got the date wrong.

Mary from HR: in the conference room eating donuts. Weird. She’s been on a diet forever, but then I wondered why she hadn’t levitated too.  She was always inviting me to her punch-and-cheese bible-study groups.

Her face was blank.

OK. I’m a professional blogger. I don’t use clichés like “a blank stare”, but that chick’s face was blank, not blank like a crisp sheet of paper ready for you to fill up with your awesome ideas, but blank like all erased and smudged. She was crumpled and crinkly and had nothing now.

One time I interviewed this math-professor-guy who told me that zero is not “nothing”; it’s not a blank. It’s a placeholder. But for what?

11:02 am

Half the people on Facebook changed their status to “See ya at the gates!” or “Waiting for my turn :-) LOL.”

I’ve got these nasty red sores all over me. Everyone does.

So Jesus showed up: Man, that guy is a prick. He gave a speech from on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, sitting on this cloud, and he was wearing those red Prada shoes that the Pope wears, but everything else looked legit, all robey and flowey. “We warned you,” he said, and then he told us you need a beard to get into heaven (which explains Casper’s levitating — dude had a beard full of Dorito particles), and that only the women who cover their faces can go.

Poor Mary. All those bake sales and bible study groups and sitting on metal chairs.

So somebody asks, “What about the rest of us?”

Jesus says, “I am sick of your shit. You’ve got seven years to prove yourselves. Read the Bible for once. Take it literally.”

I can eat kosher, but I can’t grow a beard. It’s pretty patchy compared to Jesus’.

One thought calmed me: That old motherfucker in Oakland doesn’t have a beard!

1:12 pm

Been watching Left Behind movies on YouTube non-stop to try and figure it out. Kirk Cameron looks really weird: all tendon-ey and too tan.

I also keep thinking about something Casper from tech support used to always say: When you’re playing a video game, and you get to the fifteenth hour or so, you reach this point where you have to decide: is it GAME OVER or GAME ON? Are you gonna drink another Red Bull and round up an army of zombie cage-fighters? Or are you gonna cry about your carpal tunnel, like a little bitch, and go to sleep just like everyone else?

I’m typing this, but I can’t print out to proofread because the locusts flew into the office and ate all the paper.

Anyway, The Son of the Son of God showed up. Jesus’ kid. He’s awesome. He wore pinstriped pants and a Cure t-shirt, and he’s starting a revolution against Jesus. Beyond badass.

If I’m going to hell, at least there will be some real street-fighting to watch along the way. Or maybe earth is now hell? Has it always been?

2:11 pm

Dammit. I think The Son of the Son of God is actually with the devil. Maybe.

“You didn’t think of that?” said Mary in HR. She had a whole chocolate cake on a plate and was eating it with a fork. The black crumbs were stuck in her lip gloss like flies. She barely swallowed the last bite, and then she frenched me and walked away. I wiped my mouth, but the cheap chocolate taste was still there.

3:10 pm

Fox News, Rapture Special Report, said the locusts ate all the plants on earth, and now they are eating all the telecom wires.

Jesus had a press conference and admitted The Son of the Son is his son. Plus, The Son of the Son can’t be the devil because I wikipediaed it, and the devil was originally one of God’s angels, so he was never really a person like Jesus. Yes!

“In your face, Mary!” I said, as she passed out slices of peach cobbler.

“Eat up,” said Mary. “I looted it from the bakery down the street. What the hell.” Her breath smelled like peach syrup. Then she tried to drag me into the storage closet, and everyone was laughing, but I ran ahead of her and locked myself in. I sat on some boxes of old printer cartridges and thought about it: Either I was stuck down here with people like her losing their minds, or I’d try to grow a beard and get raptured in seven years. Is earth purgatory now? A placeholder?

Who do you believe when people are flying all over the place?

4:09 pm

The locusts are almost done eating through the routers and the whole stupid Internet, so this will be my last blog post.

Mary killed herself.

Her blank look had been gone for a few hours. She was scaring me, but I thought she’d crossed over to GAME ON.

But then Mary disappeared, so we thought she just went home, until we found the suicide note.

Why did that dickhead Casper from tech support get to go up instead of Mary? One time I caught him stealing cases of staplers, so he definitely wasn’t taking the bible literally. It’s random, like God is just going by the facial-hair-head-covering thing.

Well, Jesus. Well, Son of the Son. You wanna mess with people like Mary? Then I’m gonna mess with you. I’m wearing a choir robe I stole from the church down the street. I got stubble. I’ll go stealth, get raptured and take you motherfuckers down god dammit. Wait. I damn it, not you, God. And I’ll play the Son of the Son too. I’ll play everybody. GAME ON Jesus and God, GAME ON.