Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 8:00 A.M. EST} My Homecoming

Gentle Tweeter,

If you asked my mom she’d tell you: “Religions exist because people would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.” Meaning: My parents didn’t believe in God. Meaning: My family didn’t celebrate Christmas.

If my parents ever imagined God it was as a towering, mountain-size Harvey Milk healing the ozone hole with winged dolphins in place of cherubim. And rainbows, lots of rainbows.

Instead of Christmas, we celebrated Earth Day. Sitting zazen, we celebrated Swami Nikhilananda’s birthday. Maybe we’d Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost I’d be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise and carbon neutral—Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn—was paying attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you’re dead and you discover that the snake-handling, strychnine-guzzling Bible thumpers were right.

Like it or not, the road to Hell is paved with sustainable bamboo flooring.

Trust me, Gentle Tweeter, I know whereof I speak. While my living-alive mom and dad have burned soy-based candles and prayed to John Reed for the better part of a year, I’ve been dead and learning the real truth about everything.