Dear Mac Brunson…

124 West Ashley St., Jacksonville, FL  32202

Dear Mac,

  You know I’ve always liked you… in a manner of speaking.  Well, if I paid any attention to you at all, I would have considered you the kind of take-charge brand-loyalist who leads the cash-cow around by the nose for the glory of Me and My vacation fund.  If I engraved brand-loyalist names on an ”Earner of the Month” plaque, (and, once again, presuming I’d ever noticed you), you’d be up there multiple times.

  But – and this is why I’m writing – I’d have to think seriously about taking your name off now that I know just how much money you skim off the top before you tithe into My vacation fund.  Actually, it can’t really be called a tithe if you’re not giving Me at least 10% of your $300,000 salary, plus book royalties, etc.

  All that stuff about crushing all criticism doesn’t bother Me, of course.  I’m all for that.  In this case, if you hadn’t had Thomas A. Rich investigated by the local Sheriff, outed and expelled from My Jacksonville, FL cash machine, I wouldn’t know that you’ve been holding back.  So, sort of hoist by your own petard, there.  Yep, it’s a fine line you walk, isn’t it?  Destroy all opposition, obviously.  Obviously do that.  But not so publicly that other people talk about it enough to clue Me in on your actual net worth.

  So, I said all that to say this:  Pay up, boyo.  You will find, attached, an itemized bill drawn up by My accountant in conjunction with My lawyers, Fire, Brimstone & Wrath, LLC.  It goes without saying that I expect all of the back-tithes paid, pronto.  Also, in order to avert My wrath in the form of a substantial legal and medical smiting, I have inserted additional charges for incidentals such as, (but not limited to), creating the world, ($27,854.98 is your share), guiding personalized spermatozoa through… wherever it was that it went through, ($13,963.39), causing 1984 Firebird to crash into family in station wagon instead of you , 14 Nov., 1998, ($111,419.98), and, of course, causing Google to give up name of offending blogger, (Priceless… but I’ll settle for $641,968.27).

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd

Dear Christian Broadcasters…

C/O Christian Broadcasting Network, 977 Centerville Tnpk., Virgina Beach, VA  23463

Dear Telecasting Brand-Loyalists,

  As you know, I don’t much like to meddle in your business.  My motto has always been “if it’s bringing in money for My vacation fund, don’t fix it”.  However, I have another motto which goes, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”, but since Jerry Falwell went to his reward, (24 cubic feet of real estate on the Liberty University campus), publicity has fallen off somewhat.

  So imagine My shock when I learned that Allah, (that hacktastic hack), has been stepping up His publicity game.  One of Allah’s, (hack, hack), brand-loyalist broadcasters went and cut off his wife’s head, presumably with a wickedly-sharpened copy of the Qur’an.  You can’t buy publicity like that!

  Now, I’ve only read far enough into the Qur’an to satisfy Myself that Allah, (who, by the way, is a hack), stole His schtick from Me.  Maybe cutting off wive’s heads is a central tenet of His brand.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that Muzzammil Hassan launched Bridges TV in 2004 in order to portray Allah’s, (or, the Thief of Baghdad’s), brand-loyalists in a positive light.  Then, two days before Valentine’s, he beheaded his wife.

  On the one hand, if he was trying to steal publicity from the Gawdless Hindus defiling one of My brand-holidays; more power to him.  Frankly, with some of the things I’ve seen Hindu deities get up to, it’s just crassly hypocritical to give people a hard time on Valentine’s Day.  Especially since I get a kickback from every heart-shaped box of candy sold.

  On the other hand… where were you?  How come you’re not grabbing headlines?  I know you’re going to try to tell Me that most of you didn’t run those two stories, but that’s not enough.  Suppressing stories with religious overtones is all well and good.  Only running positive stories about My brand-loyalists, or stories that make them look like oppressed minorities, is fine.  But My bank accounts demand more.

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Gawd’s vacation fund.  A half dozen or so of you are going to have to step up.  (Rupert, I’m looking at you.)  My first thought was that one of you could eat a baby on live television.  Uncooked, if possible.  But then I thought it would be more powerful if you re-enacted scenes from My glory days.  Then, if anyone tried to stop you, you could say that the wicked, Gawdless majority was trying to suppress Biblical History.

  So here’s My plan.  Try to space these actions out so that just after publicity peaks for one, you pull the next, and so on.  That way, you get constant airtime throughout.

1.  Release a ravenous bear in a school playground.  It worked like gangbusters for Elisha.  People were talking about that one for years.  Be sure to interview the parents afterwards.

2.  Pre-empt American Idol to sacrifice an only-son on top of the Time-Warner Center.  Close-ups of his trusting face before, during and after are a must.

3.  Sign a business deal with someone, then kill him, his son and everyone in their neighborhood.  Take their women and cattle.

4.  Torture and kill one or more of your employees, making sure they last a day or two.  Show video teasers during prime-time.

5.  Free all the carnivores from a local zoo.  Try to synchronise it with a school field trip if possible.

6.  If anyone complains about My plan, infect them with something gross.  Leprosy works nicely.

  Now get out there and start making headlines, instead of just suppressing them.

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd

Dear Allah…

When you wish upon 72 virgins...

Seventh Heaven, Sitting on Your Arsh

Dear Al,

  I thought We agreed no magic.  I specifically recall having that conversation with You.  We said no healing, no telling the future, no 7-league boots, no Taragon’s Elemental Transformer, no Soulbind and definitely no Magic Mosques!  Yet here You are, barely into the game, and You’re cheating!

  Did You think I wouldn’t notice?  You plopped a $60 million mosque down in the poorest poor country in the history of poor, where people have sex nine months before Ramadan just so they’ll have something to eat on Eid, and You thought I’d overlook it?!  You really boil My Blessed Bunions!  I mean, come on.  Yemen?  Dubai, maybe.  Maybe in Dubai I might have missed it, but Yemen… Poseidon on a pogo stick!  How obtuse do You think I am?

  Okay.  You want to play dirty?  You’ve got to pay the piper.  First off, You skip a turn.  I’m taking two turns and on My first turn I’m resurrecting Jerry Falwell.  For My second turn, I’m airdropping him into Mecca with a bag full of Chick tracts and a t-shirt that says “Muhammad was a Feminist, Homosexual Abortionist”.  How do You like that?  And… AND I get a free wave of snackfood Jesii sightings.

  Speaking of food, You don’t get to magic up any food for the Yemenis.  If they get hungry, let them eat the Gingerbread Mosque.  That’s what happens when You cheat.  Your pawns starve to death.  Which reminds Me, no magical protection for the president of Yemen.  I wasn’t going to say anything, but now I see You think I’m stupid, so I call “Bullshit” on that “election” in 1999.  91.2%?  Really?

  Damn it, I hate playing with You.  Not only are You a cheating, fucking hack – but You suck at it.  I have spotted You… Every.  Single.  Time.  You haven’t changed one bit since school!  You were a cheating hack then and You’re a cheating hack now.  I wish You had been eliminated early, instead of Zeus or Odin.  Hell, I’d rather play with Fucti, God of That Stream That Dried Up One Summer In 4,012 BC than You.

  So I’m through taking Your crap.  The next time I catch You cheating – and I will – I’m telling all Your pawns about the raisins.

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd

Dear Birthday Shoppers…

Armed only with a pointy stick...

Wherever Fine Gifts Are Sold

Dear Consumers,

  As you may know, My boys’ birthday is fast approaching and every year you get off easy.  I’m the one who has to stump up for two presents.  While all of you are busy stuffing your faces and wondering which gift to open first, (which, frankly, boggles My mind – it’s not even your birthday), I’m stuck handing out goodies to the twins without so much as a cracker in return.  Oh, sure, Santa usually stops by with a sack of cookies, but it never fails that He’s eaten the best ones before He shows up.  On top of that, He invariably mooches six or seven glasses of My famous Jameson Egg Nog and bitches about His holiday piles.

  After 2,000-some-odd years it’s very, very hard to find the boys something new in the way of gifts.  It’s gotten to the point where I have to turn My omniscience on just to surprise Them.  Well, this year it paid off in a couple of ways.  First, I’ve found excellent presents.  For Republican Jesus, there’s Playing Gods.  Not only does it look like a hoot, it’s good practice for Him.  Eventually, I’ll retire completely and He’s going to need to know what He’s doing.  besides that, it seems to be popular with “the hip subculture of militant popular atheists“, or My Chosen People.  For Hippie Jesus, I found Blasphemy.  Which Messiah will be The Messiah?  It’s a chance for Him to relive His glory days and maybe, just maybe, get it right this time.  And anyway, I figure that if He sees He can’t win the game without getting crucified, it’ll take some of the sting out of the real thing.  The boy is still edgy around hammers.

  The second thing My omniscience revealed to me, (and this is where you should really listen up), is that the more these games sell, the lower the price will be.  So what I, Lord of Lords, El-Shaddai, Yahweh, Master of the Universe, &tc., am commanding you to do is chip in.  That’s right.  For once in your miserable consumerist existence, help Me do something for The Jesii.  I’m not asking for a whip-round; just do what you always do at this time of year.  Buy stuff.  Buy stuff so I don’t have to dip into the vacation fund this year.  Is that too much to ask command?  Or is Bill O’Reilly right?  Have you declared War On My Boys’ Birthday?

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd

Dear Brand-Loyalists…

Photo: "Dan The Man", Wonkette.com

Currently Impeding Traffic in Bowling Green Park

Dear Base,

  Do you like movies?  I like movies.  All kinds of movies.  Miller’s Crossing, by those Coen boys is a good one.  The Thin Man movies?  I could watch those over and over.  I also like The Ten Commandments, (even though there were really twenty-three), and Pulp Fiction.

  I especially like The Ten Commandments because it was a pretty fair depiction of how things went down; if you take into consideration that Moses never looked as good as Chuck Heston, (more like Peter Lorre), and that he and I were mostly wasted the whole time.  This was before I went cold turkey, you understand?  I couldn’t get DeMille to shoot the bit where Moses made the Israelites grind the Golden Calf to powder and drink it.  He shot some cheap explosion special-effect crap.  DeMille was a wuss of the first water.

  I like Pulp Fiction because Samuel L. Jackson is just a bad-ass motherfucker who don’t take no shit from no motherfuckers.

  I especially have these two in mind right now because it has come to My attention that you have lost your minds… again.  If it weren’t for all the money you pay into the vacation fund every time the collection plate passes, I’d have dropped you like a bad habit years ago.  First, you try to give My Chosen People a bad name, and now I catch you red-Me-Damned-handed worshipping idols!

  Don’t try to bullshit Me, either.  I’ve had 6,000 some-odd years to get to know you.  You’re going to try to tell Me that you were really praying to Me and that Golden Calf thing just happened to be a convenient place to do it at.  Let Me ask you a question.  What do I look like?  Do I look like a bitch?  No?  Then why did you try to fuck Me like a bitch!?  You did.  You tried to fuck Me, and I don’t like to be fucked by anybody, except exceptionally talented call-girls.

  There’s this passage I got memorized.

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides with the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and with furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know that My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.”

  I don’t really know what it means.  I just think it’s some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I smite his ass.

  Normally, all your asses would be deader than fried chicken right now, but you happened to pull this shit while My finances are in a transitional period.  You see, the truth in that passage above is that you’re the weak.  And I’m the tyranny.  And that’s not gonna change, but there’s one thing you can do to save your sorry asses.  You can give ’til it hurts.

  The next time that collection plate passes, you remember how I let you walk this time and you put your kid’s college fund in that plate.  You put that second car the wife wants in there.  You put that diamond necklace for the mistress you think your wife doesn’t know about in there.  And you smile while you’re doing it, because I have had it with these motherfucking idols in this motherfucking country!

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd