by Corey Taylor
Then again, I am sure some people will feel the same way when they listen to me go on and on about paranormal activity. But here is the difference: I am not saying you have to believe in what I believe. Modern religions damn you if you do not while also damning you if you do, depending on your taste for deities. I guess that would be where my all-purpose “Go Fuck Yourself” gesture comes in handy. It is pretty simple: give the middle finger, making sure to flick your wrist upward as you do, and blow your raspberries (for the uninitiated, that means stick your tongue out and “SHPPPPPPPPP”). I know I have intimated that the God folk may be more prone to jumping on my spooky bandwagon than most others, but at the same time there is a fanatical, conspiracy-theorist glint in the eyes of the righteous that I can do without. In dodge ball you do not pick the weakest links; you pick the ones who can handle the job load.
Just between you and yours, I know and believe the difference comes down to knowing and believing, if you can allow the words to play. I know the things I have seen are real. I recall the events with a historian’s clarity. I can close my eyes and remember the room I was in, the clothes I was wearing (or had just taken off), the look on my face, and the cool tingle that ran up my spine. Fear can be a strong bookmark when it comes to recall. But that is just it: knowing and believing are so different that they might as well be magnetic opposites. A person who knows can draw on the experience to use the framework of explanation in sculpting a stronger foundation of acceptance; a person who just believes may eventually find him or herself living in a house that never existed or stuck in a position of seeing their cellophane walls dissolve under the warm rain of truth and fact.
Religious zealots believe what they do with no proof or understanding. Worse yet, they treat others by the Book, a tome that is older than most accepted behavior in this day and age. I am not just jumping on the Christians, although my experiences have dealt mostly with their ilk. Devout Muslims treat women like second-class citizens at best and used tissue at worst. In fact, most religions have almost all been severely matricidal, spiritually speaking. Women are denigrated and limited to backup rolls so the “men” in charge can carry all the glory and take all the credit. In the world’s most sectionalized cultures women are punished and often murdered for doing something as unthinkable as voicing their opinion. If this is what religion can accomplish, then I would rather throw my own little faithless tea party, thank you very much.
Once again, this book is meant to start a conversation. My last book dealt with sin; this one, among other things, deals with death and what might come next. I had a talk once with a very good friend who is an odd mix of comic-book geek and devoted Catholic. We were having some afternoon java and comparing notes on things like the paranormal. He tried to explain to me that, although he truly believed in ghosts and had seen his share of strange occurrences, he was convinced that most spirits were people who had sinned in life, had paid no religious attrition, and were doomed to walk the Earth until their sins were forgiven. I frowned a bit because that raised several questions, but I started with a few precursors first: “So you are saying Earth is a sort of prison for the unrepentant?”
“Correct,” my friend, who we will call Carl, answered.
“Well, being Catholic, doesn’t that rub with the whole ‘Purgatory’ setup?”
He paused for a minute, then said, “Not really, when you consider that perhaps the glimpses we get of these spirits are simply Purgatory’s thin spots. And Purgatory is essentially temporary Hell—those souls will eventually go to Heaven. The spirits on Earth might just be the ones who cannot recognize they are dead. Once they do, they will go to Hell.” He smiled and drank his coffee.
I just stared at him.
He blinked and said, “What?”
It took me a second to finally blurt out, “That cannot be what you believe. Are you shitting me?”
“What is wrong with that explanation?”
“Where the fuck do I start? What about the ghosts of children? What about the souls of the truly decent? How can they all be sinners, just waiting to get clued in to the fact that they are dead so they can go to Hell?”
“Why does that bother you?”
“When do you suppose a six-year-old found the time to do something worthy of being damned for eternity?”
Carl then did something I had never seen him do before: he took on the air of someone who had a certain knowledge and truly felt sorry for the ignorant, giving me a knowing smile that almost made me punch the shit out of him. “People commit sin, no matter what the age.”
You have got to be . . . “You know damn well I do not believe in Hell.”
“C. T., just because you do not believe, that does not mean it is not true.”
“Oh, and where do you suppose Hell lies—just below the topsoil or just above the Earth’s magma?”
“That is not funny.”
“It was not a joke! And let’s not forget the fact that you contradicted yourself. How can these supposed ‘oblivious dead’ be forgiven their sins but still go to Hell? Is that not part of the whole Heaven gift basket?”
Carl left.
Subsequently, we did not talk for a while.
Thankfully I have other friends who have no legs in Christ’s shackles. But the funny thing is that I do not mind many of the things that Jesus supposedly preached (oh yeah, I am also one of those weirdoes who is not completely convinced that Jesus ever really existed). I like the idea of turn the other cheek. I adore that the meek shall inherit the earth. I enjoy the miracle section—the loaves and the fishes, the water into wine. The water-into-wine story gives me enough pause, however, to draw some connections here and there. I call it the “Miracle Hypothesis”: there is the walk-on-water story and then there is the water into wine story. There is a tidy little parallel, because when you think about it, people in the old days—even to this day—use their feet to stomp grapes to make wine, right? Well, we all know that no one can actually walk on water unless there is a very long dock submerged just under the surface in the shallow end. Sooooo . . . maybe Jesus was making wine at a party for some people who had never seen how wine was made before. Different people told the story enough that it really became two different stories: walking on water (or grape juice really—it would have never had time to ferment) and turning water into wine (because these confused ignorant people might have assumed the liquid was water before the truth came out). Is it a stretch? Of course it is a stretch, most assuredly so. But that is what religion and the Bible are all about—stretching stories into scripture and, hundreds of years later in America, the Official Land of the Gullible, turning scripture into “fact.” Just to recap: it is possible that a person named Jesus stomped fruit for wine, people saw this being done, and through an ancient version of the game Telephone, a tale of one man making beverages for a soiree becomes two miracles that have the feel that they were mutually exclusive.
Before you ask: yes, this is what I do with my time when there is nothing on TV and I have had too much coffee. I debunk outlandishly dumb religious tales in an even more outlandish way. To quote the Christian Sasquatch: judge not lest ye be judged yourself.
Between the Council of Nicea and the nineteenth-century advent of Dispensationism, it really is a wonder that more Christians do not sit up, put their newspaper and coffee down, and say, “Wait a minute . . . what the fuck?” It all appears to be based on faulty math. Where does this leave us then? I will tell you: it leaves us in a climate in which everyone has a different interpretation of that book, and it is not specifically relegated to Christianity. Muslims fight Christians openly because they are convinced Christians are wanton agents of the Antichrist. Both team up on the Jewish culture for no real reason other than they feel better when they both have a common enemy. I have not seen a collaboration this juvenile since the fourth graders teamed up with the third graders to beat the fifth graders at kickball.
Maybe it is because religion is not sexy enough for me—or for other athe
ists while we are on the subject. Mind you, it is not like ghost stories get teenagers running for the bathrooms, embarrassed by the sudden tightness of their pants. But the God Chronicles have never inspired heavy petting either. That could be the issue, and I believe I have a solution for that. It is an idea I had years ago while writing my columns for Rock Sound in the UK. You see, even though I am not a fan of the cloth, I am a fan of certain bits of its mystery, like the whole God vs. Satan storyline. I really dig “good versus evil” because I like it when things feel right while other things are clearly wrong. In my first book I pointed out that it is only when the waters get muddied with the gray areas that we have problems as knuckle-dragging human meat. However, it is a bit tired. We get it—the theological throw-down will tear us to shreds with all the might of a million Hiroshimas and whatnot. So it is a foregone conclusion. But when we think of these opposing deities, they are always male. You think of Morgan Freeman from Bruce Almighty as God and Robert De Niro from Angel Heart as the Devil, and you send them spinning toward each other for cosmic battle. My suggestion is: What if they were female?
Imagine Elizabeth Hurley from Bedazzled as the Devil—mmmmmmm! Then conjure up Alanis Morrisette as God from Dogma—ooh! Now, drape them each in their own leather bikinis: Hurley in flat black and Morrisette in shiny white. Now, we are fucking getting somewhere! Okay, now that we have our outfits, where and what would the battleground be? I would like to assume that we would all agree some place tropical—the Caribbean, for example. That just leaves us trying to sort out what the arena would comprise. Some would immediately run for mud wrestling, but I disagree. Mud tends to obscure the, ahem, obviously interesting mishaps that come with moist wrestling. Interestingly, I have several other alternative solutions (yes, the pun is incredibly intended). What if our lovely Lord-like ladies tore at each other in honey? I know, right? I like that because it brings to mind Ann Margaret in Tommy. The viscosity is great, and it is not too opaque that we cannot readily see where the heat is coming from. Another delicious idea is Jell-O! Ah, I recall the grand days when gelatin wrestling was a risqué melodrama, and I do so with a faint and knowing smile in my heart. Pudding would follow that train of thought, but we run into the same problems we had with mud (just not as edible, admittedly). Alas, I feel I must bring this conundrum to a screeching halt with the obvious answer, an answer that will give our competitors the desired (snicker) and wonderful immersion that an epic conflagration such as this truly deserves. Friends and enemies, the only real answer is oil. Yes, corn or veggie, motor or olive, I do not know about you, but my God and Devil will fight for the lives of saints and sinners clad only in biker bikinis, completely saturated in warm oil. It may not be where the Bible was heading with the Armageddon thing, but as Mary Poppins belted out as she brainwashed the children: “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” If that is where religion is heading—two beautiful mythical forces going at it dressed in cow hide, drenched in melted oleo—I just might sign up for the Jesus bed and breakfast myself.
Then again, to quote George Clooney, “I may be a bastard, but I’m not a fucking bastard.”
Whenever something unbelievable happens, I always hear some fucking sportscaster or news anchor (read: talking head) say, “the world’s best fiction writers could not have come up with something as outlandish as this!” Um, I hope no one minds, but I strenuously object to that. You see, a good fiction writer could come up with stuff like that, whatever “that” actually happens to be. It does not take much in this day and age to create something completely and unabashedly false and fantastic. It is real life that is constantly throwing us for a loop, with chaos and entropy and all the crap that comes with it. Real life cannot be controlled—it can only be lived and adapted to, equally. It is when people start meddling and proceed to build myths out of molehills that shit gets complicated. You see, people wrote the Bible. People created God. The problem erupts when you try to sell it the other way around. So “the world’s best fiction writers” could come up with a concept like God and all the trimmings, and we suffer aeons later when the fiction is treated as fact and we allow the witless to determine what we should do to evolve.
There it is: control. The faithful cannot handle when others try to do something without invoking God’s name, so they try to control the outcome or its completion. It is my belief that man (or woman—I want to be inclusive) will go nowhere as long as the Holy Monkey is on our back. We will never make it to the next level of existence with flawed thinking. There is a reason that anyone with any reason resists the so-called intelligent design theory, and that is because it is not a theory. The faithful say that in order to be fair, this theory should be taught in school right alongside the theory of evolution. Well, you holy yocals, here is the rub: the theory of evolution is a scientific theory because it is verifiable. That is the whole reason it is a scientific theory. Intelligent design is not science—it is mythology that is not based on factual data that can be observed and tested. You are so busy trying to be right and so set in your ways that you never bothered to learn the actual definition of the term “scientific theory,” and I am so disgusted with your ignorant behavior that I will not provide it for you herein. Let me just say that the definition does not involve the words hope, guess, myth, unverifiable, or bullshit. So keep your hopeless guess-ridden unscientific myth out of my school system, and I will do my best not to throw shit at you just after your gorgeous buffets on Easter Sunday.
My friends, I do not want to be an asshole. I do not want to sound like a dick-faced hypocrite. But I am also not going to sugarcoat a bunch of fucked up delusions just so they taste better when I try to swallow them. If faith works for you, please understand that I will not judge you for that—in fact, I envy you. I wish I could suspend my reality that far over the precipice, like that dream I have in the mountain that I will never comprehend. But I am saddled with that prick of a burden named cynicism. Does that make me a hypocrite when it comes to my adherence to the paranormal? Maybe—actually, more like yes, absolutely. And yet who knows? Like I said, I know what I saw and experienced. We will get to all of that—and I do mean all of it—soon enough.
Sometimes I wonder why I am trying so hard to get to that cave in the mountain. I wonder about who that voice belongs to, the voice that is so concerned about me wiping my feet in a dirty-ass cave. I wonder why those zombies were protecting him or even if they were protecting him. What lies beyond that doorway? What is that man’s name? Who would have ever thought I would have the balls to base-jump? Sure, I am in a mountain, but that does not mean it is not equally terrifying. But where does this fantasy come from, anyway? Maybe I will never know, and quite frankly I am alright with that.
In the end we all need that rope to keep us tethered to our lives, leading us through our own strange caverns and pitfalls until we eventually find that faceless man in the mountain to give us the clues we think we deserve. Maybe my dream is some kind of accepted version of St. Peter, guarding the pearly gates with his ledger and his questions. That could mean there is a bit of my sodden brain that desperately wants to have that kind of faith. I do not know why—maybe to belong, maybe to have some semblance of order and dictation. Maybe I am just getting to that age when it feels easier to stop fighting the waves and let the current sweep me out into the deeper pieces, so to speak. But my fucking mind will never relent to that: I know me way too well. I have been finding ways to break rules and bend popular thought my whole life, armed only with uncommonly common sense. Hell, I even have a hard time giving a red shit about wearing underwear with jeans, for fuck’s sake. You think I could ever give in and buy the thought of a spiritual overseer up in the cumulus keeping score on all the monkeys on his blue-green marble? Not only keeping score, but ready at any minute to file us in the “ETERNAL BURN” folder for something as irrelevant as eating the wrong meat on the wrong day while also working on another verboten day? Maybe I myself could not make this up, but somebody else did. I know this in my
shitty little heart, and I will never submit.
Ever.
I am no Einstein. Hell, I am no actual Albert Einstein. But I do know this: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.” That, my friends, is a quote from the actual Albert Einstein. What I have tried to say in a chapter he says with one complex sentence. If I could be allowed to act as a posthumous Einstein hype man for a brief but glorious second or two, I rest my fucking case. We will have a little more from our friend with the crazy hair later on in the book, but for now I am content in my happiness that, at least on paper (more pun intended), he and I appear to be on the same page (that was the end of said pun).
Oh, by the way—my computer just suggested that Einstein’s quote was grammatically unsound. Cheeky fucker.
Lately people have been asking me a lot of questions about death, most likely because I have lost a lot of people extremely close to me in the last four years. However, they never ask me if we come back as a spirit. It always comes down to heaven and the dead stampede into the great corral. I keep my answers succinct and solid: I have no idea what happens when you die. I could not care less, really. You say maybe this is just because of all the misery and shit I went through when I was younger, but my attention is squarely on the present, on life, and less on death and whatnot. Maybe when I get older I will cast a better eye toward that end of the gym. But right now I do not and will not give an opinion on the more cloudy section of the heavens. I will say, however, that I believe there is a better shot of walking the Earth after you are gone than ascending toward some unseen dimension between one of the spheres in the wide sky.
There will be a day when I die, and the only thing I want is to be cremated. I want some of my ashes made into Life Gems for my wife and family. Some more of the ashes I want sprinkled into various ashtrays outside of grocery stores in Des Moines, in salute to the days when I was homeless—people always light a smoke when they get out of their car, take two drags, and put it out in those ashtrays. When you are broke and homeless, those are the best places to get free cigarettes. Depending on what my wife wants, the rest of my ashes can be buried next to her or commingled with her own ashes. Thus ends what I think about for after I die. Let’s put it this way: if I wake up in Heaven, I will shit myself. Then I will quietly head for the exit—I know when and where I am not wanted.
