I wasn’t the only one who fell asleep. Anyone, in those days, who found themselves listening to Paul rag on and on with his lawyerly court room metaphors about how somebody had to be excruciatingly tortured, just to make up for the fact that we’re all made with some defects. Really!. Who wouldn’t fall asleep. I mean if you had to listen to more than twenty minutes of this fundamentalistic angry ranting about a Punitive Deity Who had to be violently appeased as part of the design of creation. And then having his followers call him SAINT Paul.

What really frosts my ass is that I was sitting in a window on the third floor, thinking about this chick I had just met, and how I was going to ask her to come see my new invention – an ox cart turned into a Jerusalem passenger carrier. I was the one who invented the metro bus but people forgot that too. In fact, people forgot a lot of things. Like the fact that when I fell asleep during this long dirge of Paul’s about how the first human was created with some sort of innate defect. Shit, why didn’t the Deity just scrap Adam and begin again with the improved Eve model?.

“Get a life!� I was thinking of saying back to the Saint, right before I nodded off. Because it’s not like THE Saint had even a miraculous chance of getting a date himself that night. And I had a pretty good chance on talking this brown haired honey into seeing my new bus, . . . “camelbus� I was going to call it.

But down I went. I even saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I was the first one in history to see it but nobody remembered that either. When I cam to, Paul looked as surprised as was when I woke up and saw him hovering over me as I opened my eyes.

He never missed a beat. He lifted me up, a little, off the ground, as if he knew exactly when I’d fully open my eyes. He proudly announced to the crowd around us, “Of course he’s all right. He’s alive!� raising his hands up above him within perfect rhythm of an unheard melody only he could hear.

The crowd around us roared in awe. Everyone else left me behind and followed THE Saint back out to the side yard to hear the rest of his twenty point theologically studded lecture on the universality of how fucked up the Creator had made people. Like maybe we are that clueless to believe to believe in such a capricious Being Who would absolutely demand the agonizing death of Someone – just to appease a rule that allegedly stated that if anyone does anything wrong, someone’s got to be tortured to death to make it right. “Propitiation� THE Saint said as he coined another word that came to be the rallying cry for Republicans for the next two thousand years. “It’s cruel to be kind in just the right measure� someone else put it once in a song. I can just picture Mary Mag and the other Marry skipping down the dusty Damascus road singing, “My boy friend’s back and there’s gonna’ be trouble.�

Meanwhile, nobody wrote anything about how I came back from the dead. Never a mention of my vision of the light at the end of the tunnel either.

For several centuries, I worked the side shows with the carneys. Small traveling circuses, mostly. I’d climb to the top of a tree or poll and fall splat on the ground. Resurrect myself and please the crowds. When the circus owners aged or died of syphilis, I’d move on to some other show, living at the periphery of life. I usually outlived everyone around me. Death sucks big time, especially if everyone you fall in love with ends up turning into a dried up sack of skin and bones and croaks. You end up getting very Buddhist. You turn Vegan, for a few centuries, but eventually give it up for endless hot-fudge sundaes and pork rinds because it doesn’t really matter if you can’t die. So through time, I invented the fourteen diets and went on and off them, selling diet books under different author’s names.

My bus idea eventually sold and I made enough money so I d
id
n’t have to work the carnivals. Someone who found out about me made a movie, inventing a family of people like me and calling it Tuck Everlasting. But they never stopped to ask why old Dr. Luke never wrote more than Acts 20:9 and 10 about me falling asleep and becoming alive again. Two fucking verses. What made Lazarus’ story more remarkable? Was it because he didn’t fall asleep during some boring religious talk?

Well here I’m blogging, two thousand years later. Don’t fall asleep. Only a few of us can come back again.

. . . Eutychus