Soulless Bastard

Entry for my writing group. The topic is "ghosts".

Souls are stupid. So is Hell. Heaven’s even stupider. Though I don’t often feel that life itself is all that sacred, I’ll go ahead and give you that life could be perceived as being pretty goddam amazing. But souls? Gimme a fuckin break! We’re not that fuckin special. We don’t have souls, we’re just narcissistic, organic robots. One of nature’s mistakes. And if human beings have souls, then everything else gets one, too. Don’t tell me that I have a soul but that the cat that I telepathically communicated with while I was on Robitussin doesn’t have a soul. Not to mention that the Dalai Lama’s also gonna tell you to get fucked. He thinks everything has a soul, too. But who cares what the Dalai Lama thinks? Buddhists, that’s who.

For the sake of argument, I’ll say that humans have souls. But I’m not giving up on everything else having a soul. If I’m going to Heaven (which I most assuredly am not) then I better get to hang out with all my old dogs. And I’m really not gonna have that great of a time sipping on gin and tonics in Heaven knowing that plenty of halfway decent folks are getting anally raped by demons with razor wire penises while they’re being boiled alive and eaten by spiders for the rest of eternity. That happens, according to the Bible. Maybe it doesn’t say that. Who knows? It says a bunch of other insane nonsense so it might as well throw in the razor-dicked demon thing while it’s at it.

So maybe you go to heaven, maybe you go to hell. Maybe you come back as a hamster who belongs to a malicious 10 year-old. Perhaps you become poison ivy. You just never know. Somehow though, in all of this there’s a possibility that you won’t go anywhere, that you’ll be trapped in this world without a body or a voice. How long you’ll be sentenced to this is unclear, as is the whole goddam idea that that would ever happen in the first place. It’s kinda fun to think that it might. It’s also kinda fun to think that this isn’t the life you get and that when it’s over, it’s fucking over. We all want one more chance. Another shot. Some of us want vengeance, some of us want true love. Personally, I could totally go for some chili cheese fries.

But that is neither here nor there. I’m talking about ghosts.

I’ve gotten the heebie jeebies before, don’t get me wrong. And I’ve entertained the idea that there might be ghosts because it’s fun to do it. I’ve also talked into a banana and pretended that it was a phone cos it was fun to do. I didn’t believe that the banana was a phone any more than I believe that there are bodiless souls hanging around intent on bugging the shit outta everybody. Still, it was fun and I’m glad I did it. I won’t go to my permanent grave regretting not having talked to a ghost on a banana. Take that one off the bucket list.

So, okay. In the movies, there’s always an Indian burial ground or some schmuck who got killed cos he or she knew who the real killer was or whatever. And in real life there are folks who claim to have seen or been accosted by ghosts. I don’t have the stats on this, but do you have any fuckin idea how many people have died since homo erectus has existed? I would think that everywhere would be fuckin haunted by now. Christ… You’re just minding your own business, waiting for the bus, and all of a sudden you’re tapped on the shoulder by some putz who got clubbed in the head with a rock by some asshole 5,000 years ago. He tries to explain why he’s haunting the bus stop but you don’t understand his forgotten language. He makes you spill your coffee. You get on the bus and don’t even think about it.

How old is humankind? Who knows? A quick google search said 400,000 years. Holy shit! That’s a lot of ghosts! I’m assuming that right before that there were a lot of pre-humans. Neanderthals and what have you. That’s a lot of neanderthal ghosts! Where the fuck are they? And getting back to the idea that every animal has a soul, are the parks haunted by squirrel ghosts? When I get an inexplicable itch on my arm, am I being tormented by the ghost of a fly that was swatted by a wooly mammoth right in this very spot 20,000 years ago? For that matter, why are we not hearing the thuderous footsteps of that wooly mammoth who died and whose soul still stalks the earth? Are the oceans seething with the ghosts of jellyfish and tuna and seahorses and whatever the hell lives inside seashells? Wow! We’re fucked! Are the ghosts of bacteria that I killed with antibiotics still coursing through my system? Christ. Do you have any idea how many brain cells I’ve killed? Maybe I’m possessed by them.

Yep. I’m haunted by the ghosts of all the brain cells I’ve slaughtered. That would certainly explain all this gibberish that I’ve been going on about for way too long…..