What Would Jesus Do … if he ran out of beer?
For the last couple of nights I have fought that train of thought, that unconscious writing that just comes from the daydreams and unexpected sources. I would have to get up and jot a few items down and then try to go back to bed.
Last night I’d had it. I thought, “Screw it, I’ll just write ’til it’s gone.”
I hopped out of bed and threw on the first shirt I came to in the dark and fumbled around trying to find my shoes.
I had to ride down the street to get some beer first if this plan was to be successful. I grabbed my backpack and mounted my road bike.
I still had the images of Lance and the Tour de France in my mind so I got there pretty quick. Texaco’s parking lot was empty and quiet, except for the one car and country music playing on the outside speakers.
The store was bright with its white gleaming floor and the humming lights.
I reached in the big cooler and grabbed a 12-pack. Not my usual choice, but the bright silver box reminded me that the alcohol content is somewhat low, good for writing – don’t want to get too drunk too quick.
When I stood, I turned around to find some dork bumping into me.
He didn’t say “sorry,” he just looked at me and I could tell he was thinking something like, “you sinner.”
I glared at him with equal contempt because I saw his WWJD shirt and knew that the car out in the parking lot with the personalized plate that said ‘JESUS’ had to be his.
He looked at his watch and goes, “Kinda late for that, isn’t it?” So, you pose one question.
How about I pose one for you – Would Jesus really want his name on your new gas-guzzling SUV or am I to believe that you really are Jesus himself and have come back to save us all from Armageddon, but stopped to pick up a root beer and a pack of ho-ho’s?
‘What would Jesus do?’
I tell you what Jesus would do. He’d pull his hand back and back hand your stupid arse for cheapening his name by wearing some stupid slogan, thought up by some far-from-clever idiot who giggles at his own crazy Christian wit on a shirt that you bought on a hanger that sits on a rack in between a ‘coed naked fishing’ and a ‘Big Johnson’ shirt in the mall at “The TeeShirt Hut” while talking on your cell phone about something that didn’t matter and never will.
Jesus has got to be thinking, “Man. What is you people’s major malfunction?”
He knows that there are no Malaysian kids carrying around a “What would Buddha do?” lunch box and nobody in Beijing has a “What would Confucius say?” bumper sticker and the Home Shopping Network doesn’t sell any memorabilia with sayings like “Reincarnation Rules!” “Yippee for YOU if you’re YIDDISH” or “If you don’t eat pork, then come to Mecca with me” on it.
Sometimes I get a bit frustrated with the old Bible Belt. Last summer, I got to hear a story about this preacher in Morristown.
He claims, in his incoherent ramblings, that environmentalists are doing the bidding of the anti-Christ, that God obviously means for the world to be the way it is, and fighting it with environmentalism is blatantly crossing God’s will.
He called a ‘Save the Planet’ bumper sticker blasphemous and said, “Instead of saving the planet, we need to be saving our souls.” What?????
Oh, but at the end of every one of his sermons he leads a prayer to bless the tobacco crops.
Somebody please call St. Paul to take up this serpent and his rhetoric. This is the kind of idiot that I look forward to sitting on a deck somewhere, open a good cold beer and getting the chance to watch walk himself into oncoming traffic.
Anyways, I was buying my beer and as I dug in my pockets to find my I.D., my antagonist in the Texaco sighed.
The sinner in front of him was delaying his getting to wherever he had to be. He probably was trying to figure out what Jesus would do.
I wanted to respond to his little impatient foot taps and head shaking sighs. I wanted to explain my love for the appetites of the flesh, my love of the black pleasure of sin.
Explain what I like to do and what he’s missing.
Explain that I want to drink beer and make out with Anna Kournikova ’til dawn and have him walk in on us just so I could look up with a coy smile and say unto thee, “Yeeaaaah … you know it.”
Explain that I want to be a knower of secrets, like a cluttered, ethical ashtray lying beside a dirty mattress.
Explain how fun it would be to walk to the beach and stand on the shore.
The waves pounding on the shore might sound like the pounding of a drunken lover’s heart.
Raising my voice, I would talk back to the rising tide and crashing surf with insubordinate and idle gibberish, all the while holding a Mason jar of ancient gladiator sweat. As my rants turned verbose, I would start walking back and I would pound the jar’s contents like a first shot of the night, the thick amber liquid flowing past my epiglottis in gratifying gulps.
Licking my lips, I would be trying to decide which dangerous person I should invite to tea. I’d then crush the jar in my hands and, while chewing the broken glass into swallowable bits, randomly pick up large boulders and throw them with virile fury, running with scissors to each watering hole along the way using my free hand to shovel water to my palate to quench my thirst.
As I make it back to town I’m sure he could find me admiring the shapely calf muscles on the tan lubricious stilts of young women and thinking unholy thoughts.
Who knows, maybe when I got back to town I could go to Texaco and pick up a six-pack?
Would Jesus have done that? I’m not Jesus and I don’t know.
Is it blasphemous? I don’t even know what that means.
Is WWJD a cheesy, cleverless slogan that makes my ears bleed blood as dark as communion wine? Yep.
I didn’t get to say any of that though. The liquid courage was in the silver box and the gladiator sweat was somewhere to be found.
So, I just silently recited, “A wise man need not prove himself wise.”
Let him go back to his box and look down on whomever he wants and let him rise the next morning and do the same thing again. It won’t matter ’cause he’s a good Christian man going to heaven just because he sits in a pew.
When I got home I opened a beer and placed it on top of its backup beside my keyboard. I got out the French onion dip, but put it back cause I didn’t have any chips.
I clicked the Word icon and I wrote and wrote and drank and drank. And when I got done, I wrote this.

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