I had yesterday a terrible row with God
My dear Frienda,*(kind of abstract)
The post I am tentatively, even hesitantly, sending you today is a hybrid, fathered and mothered** by a combination of old and new occurrences. Some time ago, I published a partial version of it under the same name. Recently, I felt an imperious urge to add new verbal configurations to the original discourse, only to find myself, in the end, 
riding a mule—the classic hybrid par excellence. Let me assure you, there is nothing wrong with a mule. About ten years ago, I rode one to climb from the bottom of the Colca Canyon (one of the deepest in the world) up a narrow, abrupt, and viciously winding path to Cabanaconde in the Peruvian Andes—an ascent of more than two thousand meters.https://on-death-row.com/peru-monogatari-the-colca-canyon-octava-maleta-part-one/ Rarely have I felt more secure than I did then, far more so than in today’s nervous green-light crossings at pedestrian lanes anywhere except Pyongyang.
As some of you who have had the endurance to swim through my stream of stories may have noticed, God—whom I often call the Principal—frequently appears. Despite my repeated declarations of atheism, one might conclude that I hold God*** accountable for much of the world’s evil. And indeed, you would be right. Alas, I am aware of the inconsistency, even incoherence, of assigning blame to an entity I do not believe exists. Feel free to point an accusatory finger elsewhere…
So long,
The Wanderer
*In pursuit of precision, I proposed Frienda as a term for a female friend. I believe I’ve made a valid case in this post, but please check and share your valuable opinion.
**Interestingly, “fathered” and “mothered” are not entirely equivalent (setting aside sexual connotations). While “fathered” typically implies the act of giving life, “mothered” is more commonly associated with care and protection. We might attribute this disparity to the unjustified dominance of violent males in most societies in human history. Fact. The contribution of mothers to life-giving is undoubtedly second to none! We are living in a surrogate time everything. But even if the test tube, God forbid, will replace the womb, somebody should provide the EGG. Don’t let Columbus’ story fool you!
***Lest I be accused of blasphemy, I only suggest that perhaps it’s time for a glamorous goddess—armed with 
superb feminine attributes, among which tenderness and seduction are not the least— to take charge. From 60,000 to 4,000 B.C.E. and beyond, this was the rule. Unfortunately, for some curious reason, the goddess in question was often depicted with extra-fat hips, buttocks, and breasts—traits that are now considered obsolete, even offensive, in our gym-obsessed culture. Nothing is known about the body’s hair treatment. Either shaved thoroughly or let to grow free, mane-like!
Virtual letter to a frienda (aka woman friend)
It was around midnight after a grueling day, including a five-hour flight from St. Petersburg and a major letdown of discovering no trains from the airport to my backwaters’ abode. I finally arrived home, dead tired and hungry. Despite my
fatigue, I managed to prepare a bowl of rice with some Indian relish—pickled lime, I believe—took care of my ritual hygiene, and went to bed with my Apple tablet. Suddenly, the house and my bed started to tremble. I knew the house was old and shaky, but my bed, made of railroad beams, as heavy and firm as the one Ulysses made for his beloved Penelope*, was not supposed to be moving. It was an EARTHQUAKE!
I jumped on my SMART, took refuge under the symbolic door frame, and called God. I will remember the talk with the Principal till the last day of my life which can come at any moment, particularly now. I was indeed out of my wits and pretty hysterical but it seems that for a while, memory is still with me. Speaking of memory, I recently learned that Claude Lanzmann passed away. Though I admired him, don’t expect me to write his eulogy. His MEMORY stunt helped good-thinking people worldwide become appalled by the past HOLOCAUST while more and less overtly contributing to a NEW ONE. But let’s focus on the present, which is far more important and not less amusing!
–Lord, Lord hello, hello….
-What do you want? the voice wasn’t gruff but not too friendly either.
-Lord, there was an earthquake at my place.
-I know, I believe it’s stopped.
–BUT IT could COME BACK!
-So what do you want me to do? I cannot interfere, it is a natural phenomenon.
-But Lord, please, NOT NOW, I am dead tired, I returned from Russia where I was hunted like a beast by Putin, the Oligarchs, and the Soccer Fandom! https://on-death-row.com/some-amazing-disclosures-of-a-new-russian-conspiracy/
-Delusional as ever and a bit of a compulsive liar aren’t you? Nobody paid the SLIGHTEST attention to you! And by the way, how come an ATHEIST like you call on me?
-That is elementary Lord, believers, or whatever devout bigots are under your protectively spread cloud, cloak, or clout by barely merited DEFAULT, while I…
-Sorry, I cannot butt into planetary tectonic affairs. Also, this is such a trivial issue, he haughtily cut me in to follow, I would like YOU to tell me what is the colorful mix I see in your post.
-It is a Romanian salad Lord, tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, radishes, pimentos, green onions, caviar eggplants, three herbs dill, parsley, coriander, salt, pepper, pressed lemon, and olive oil. Nothing more…
-It sounds great, appealing even….with food like that, you could live forever—or at least stick to what you already are, a DIE-HARD
-Lord, that is intolerable. I feel your PUN is like a PUNCH in the nose!
-Listen, man, are you lecturing me? Is joke-cracking, now forbidden? Today they censor speech, tomorrow they will codify sexual approaches and modes. After tomorrow they’ll monitor the mind, enforce total control, and delete any liberal economic thinking! Have you become a POLITICALLY CORRECT buff in your old miserable days?
Now he was adding insult to injury. I could not stand, on my dead body, being called POLITICALLY CORRECT. Call me a kike if you want and I won’t mind it. After all, it is true. I am what I am. I have no more regard for Fidel than for Papa Doc. Fair elections are my idea of true democracy. Anything beyond that stinks of the will of power and of the perennial desire to perfunctory control others. Let’s the primate be. I mistrust mass demonstrations, bourgeois leftists, charitable billionaires, positive discrimination, corrupt NGOs gangs, drug 
lords, perverse protectors of the misers like the infamous Abbé Pierre**, rights activists, the New York Times moralist toads, the BBC pinky justice seekers, the compulsive vagabondage of drifting crowds, and the Hollywood UN ambassadors. With so many props, so strong support and so highly placed good-doers on his behalf the MIGHTY POOR (of any color) will completely forget to fend for himself. He may indulge, by despair, in carnal extravaganzas that should exponentially augment the POOR MASS. A demographic MESS looms. I see the casual XY progressively degenerating, sliding into the caricatural state of the Lilliputian male angelfish parasitizing the plump body of his female partner. Meanwhile,
brave and 
mighty women advance to becoming army chiefs, dental and brain surgeons, and rewriting the prejudiced Shakespeare stuff. What is wrong with me? Is this a rotten daydream or I’m plagued by a pure, and terminal nightmare?
His muffled voice, I am coming back to Lord, had an alien cruel tone (let’s face it, LORD IS AN ALIEN) he fancies when in a looser mood He became unremittingly deaf to my complaints or pleas, like in Chris de Burgh’s Spanish Train.
But, by then I began to lose patience. The EARTHQUAKE didn’t seem to reiterate, and I felt the time was ripe to show some manhood. A TANTRUM was on the way. Mine!
-If this is so ALMIGHTY, I roared, kind of DEUS OTIOSUS***(let’s give him some hell), who left clueless mankind in stich to commit horrible crimes for good causes is your loaded question implies that I am either an IDIOT or a HYPOCRITE?
-Right you are, he sneered genially, I will say BOTH, you cannot escape to your ZEITGEIST (your stupid Zeitgeist….ha-ha!), and he hung up!!!!
Now, my dear and charitable friend, I was going to ask something when it occurred to me that we don’t have a feminine term for friend or buddy in English like amie, חברה, prietenâ, amica, 友達, подруга, amiga, Freudenin, etc. in other decent languages! Do you think that FRIENDA would work? The French are quite happy with “cheffe” for “chef”! So, my dear frienda. with tears in my eyes and a hemlock concoction in my heart, I am finally asking you if it is acceptable for an ex-major deity to make fun of a fragile old man.
If I were younger, I might convert to ISLAM. It is an avatar, I know, but it came thousands of years after the original Big Bang – the bringing of behavior rules to mankind by Moses. Therefore. Islam’s rise according to sociobiology, is a progressive evolution. I would have to choose between SHI or SUN. That’s easy. I am a conformist by birth and highly respect authority. The PROPHET said ALI, and what was good for the PROPHET is FINE for me. I already have
a splendid djellaba, red royal babouches, an embroidered shirt, a fine series of red (tarbouche) caps, and two baggy (sirwal) trousers of great quality. Islam is a forward-going religion with a steadily growing demographic mass. I would shed off the feeling of being an outcast criminal. In Islam, you feel assured by DEFAULT for any little or big venture in your life. MALES, I am one, have some tangible advantages, you know what I mean, and nobody, absolutely nobody can stick on you a POLITICALLY CORRECT epithet….You see?****Unfortunately, it seems too late; it feels like a daydream. A little glass of WHISKEY or a couple of them will do me fine! And I should not hide while drinking!
*Ulysses nailed the planks of his wedding bed on the bent-to-earth branches of a mighty olive tree growing in the inner court of his home, without uprooting the centenary trunk. Nobody except himself and his wife knew of the bed being unmovable. Upon his return, still doubting his identity, Penelope asked him to drag the bed aside. Only when he burst into laughing did Penelope become sure that the man standing before her was her husband she hadn’t seen for 20 years.
**See Abbé Pierre: A Century of Devotion (2023) movie if you want! I haven’t seen the film but I assume it doesn’t include scenes of public masturbation, pedophilia, and compulsive rape. We should be cautious about what is shown and what is said! Correct? Now, the chap Pierre, a widely renowned champion for the poor, was recently exposed as a monstrous sexual predator. Let’s consider the case. The poor wretch is already gone. We are not going to exhume him and burn his carrion at stake. That was during the dark times of medieval justice. Today, thanks to the generous tolerant vision of people like Badinter even the cruelest offenders are assured of reaching a golden age. They are getting decent food, shelter, and medical care and can enjoy, in prime, Christmas messages of solidarity from Johnny Cash and Patrick Sebastian. Let’s be grateful and happy, we live in an enlightened age. Also, who will throw the first stone at Pierre? It is widely known that in religious intercourse, some people, like cardinals, exegetes, prophets, or simple officiants are getting enough overexcited to indulge in various carnal extravaganzas. We should consider decriminalizing these emotional outbursts recognizing that the fault lies more with society than the individual and that the deviation is cultural rather than criminal. Have a heart!
***lazy God
****And if somebody has any doubts about my intentions, please consider these photos taken at Tangier, BEFORE the Earthquake!
About Post Author
