Originally published by drfaustroll under Invective, Pataphysics, Phynality, Sedition February 14, 2009

It’s great being an imaginary Catholic. You get to pal around with all the saints, many of whom were considered terrorists by Rome at one point or another, and you get to sneak into confessional booths and inflict horrible pain upon innocent priests, all without risking further damnation. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

I wasn’t born Catholic. In fact, I was nearly not born at all because my insane mother made me very content living in the womb. I was supposed to be born on September 11, 1946, but I hung onto mom’s uterine wall for another three months practicing my late-term anti-abortion protest moves, until eventually she started bleeding out, and she never forgave me for that, but that’s another blog post for another less important day.

I suspect I entered the world believing in nothing. My memories of the first couple of days are hazy, but I’m quite certain I wasn’t introduced to any major religious horse exhaust until somebody snipped off the end of penis and included it in a batch of pepperoni for reasons that have never been clear to me, but that too is another blog post.

For a year or two after birth I was a bastard because my father was a lapsed Catholic and my mother was a deranged Southern Baptist, and they were married in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, by a justice of the peace who turned out to be an uppity nigra. How does that zippy-de-do-dah ring in your ears, motherfuckers?

My pecker was shortened somewhere between the time my parents were married by the uppity nigra in Hopkinsville and their two subsequent marriages, which were apparently intended to keep me from remaining a bastard to his parents and hers, although many on my mother’s side of the family were goddamn motherfucking American Indians, but that’s yet another future blog post muddying the waters on St. Ballantine’s Day, 2009.

Not many Catholics remember the story of St. Ballantine. I know I don’t. Every time I tell the story, I start from scratch. That’s the way St. Ballantine would have wanted it, or if not, well fuck him. He’s already a goddamn saint, and I’m writing this post. If St. Ballantine has a problem with that, he can get his own blog and write his own fucking posts.

What I do remember is... after my pecker healed, that is... is going to Vacation Bible School at the Dutch Reform Church across the street from my house because me parents couldn’t afford the time to take me all the way to St. Francis of Assisi on 48th Street, and the Dutch weren’t that bad. They did good things with apples. And there was a Boy Scout troop there. How could they have known that the scout master liked to suck tiny dicks?

At some point it became important to someone that I receive my first communion, which involved not chewing on a thin wafer which was apparently made from the freeze-dried foreskin of Jesus Christ, so you didn’t want to get it caught in your teeth, so I had to go to catechism class a couple of days a week between my public school brainwashing and the odd jobs I could pick up before I got my working papers.

All I remember from catechism was a couple of nuns who whipped me with their pointers whenever I mentioned going to the Museum of Natural History to look at the dinosaurs. They wanted me to confess that the dinosaurs didn’t exist. I wanted to shove dinosaur bones up their habits.

As I continued my inexorable march through NOMF™ inanity toward my wonderful teenage years, I began to suspect that adults were pretty fucking stupid and tended to believe stuff that was not very helpful. But I kept pretending to go to church on Sundays just to have some time away from the family. Those people were really fucked up. They raised me, for Christ’s sake. You probably had a family pretty much like them. Unless you were living outside the NOMF.

Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time was that my mother and father were scared shitless about what was going on with Joe McCarthy and his evil minions. It was all imaginary torture, of course, except for people like Dalton Trumbo, who was the real Spartacus, and the longer it went on, the more I doubted anything any adult told me. Let me tell you how bad this all is. I am 62 years old, and I still don’t believe anything adults tell me, and adults to me? Anyone over 21.

So when it came time for my glorious confirmation, I had already proven there was no God, no justice, no honor, no hope, no glory, and no help coming during this lifetime, so I chose that sorry experience to conduct another of my periodic empirical studies to demonstrate how silly it was to try to become a saint.

The great thing about confirmation is that it is the ultimate opportunity for the heretic to present himself before the church and demand absolution, cleansing, and eradication. I had chosen Lawrence for my confirmation name because he had been grilled to death for heresy and later elevated to sainthood. To understand this perversion, you only have to remember recent efforts to say that Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan were anything other that perforated scumbags in the war on unsafe sex.

Back in that silly adolescent mind of mine, I was willing to endure the same death as my chosen saint to prove my commitment to receive confirmation with a mortal sin upon my imaginary soul. I am still willing to die for nothing, just not your nothing.

Years later I agreed to allow my imaginary soul to be transplanted into a homeless baboon, but I am once again getting off topic.

Confirmation the way I remember it works well as a PowerPoint slide with a build structure that goes like this:

Go to confession
Receive communion
Get confirmed
Get laid

Let’s be serious, people. Every PowerPoint slide using a build structure ends with something that implies getting laid. Keep that in mind during your next business unit meeting.

My plan to prove that God was not the boss of me was simple. I wouldn’t go to confession. I’d think evil thoughts and break as many of the commandments as I had the means to, mostly lusting in my heart, bearing false witness, and masturbating. I’d go to communion and chew the eucharist like pepperoni, getting some of Jesus Christ stuck in my teeth and letting some of Him slip into the irredeemable digestive juices where Satan could have at Him so that when I finally received the smack on the cheek from Father Groeper, I could smirk at at that creepy old man, like George W. Bush often did at the equally powerless American people and their liberal media representatives, and nothing would happen.

Guess what?

Nothing happened.

Pippa continues to pass wind, wherever the fuck God is on St. Ballantine’s Day, which is also associated with numerous other losers like Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and St. Lawrence, whose name I carry with me to this day without consequence, without purpose, without malice, and with only a great admiration for those who have died for no purpose to save no one from nothing.