The Bureacracy of Heaven

            Between birth and death… between one fix or another… I no longer wonder what it is that I am doing here. It is a dreamscape I occupy for a spell… a spell cast by an illusionist… the master illusionist… you call it God? Mickey calls it the great Whazoo. How many theologians can we count dancing on the head of a pin? But in the dreamscape something else is going on.

 Picture heaven… the throne room of God… full of grace and light but, as we shield our eyes, we see lower levels of celestial bureaucracy. Highest rank among the non-warrior angels is the more meticulous Guardians: protector angels with tasks involving individual treatment and care for bumbling fools among us on the earthly plain. These angels, having seats in cosmic cubicles, are deputized with duties to not only protect and guard us individually but also have the onerous responsibility to call us home if we are otherwise obtuse in hearing the bells, whistles and claxons… warning sirens of impending doom. There are times too, when some have done nothing wrong at all or have been especially prescient and have foreseen their own demise. It is simply a matter of calling them heavenward when they have accomplished all that needs be done on earth. In other words, there is a time when the Gautama has done all he can do and the angel passes some bad pork his way… or when Jeshua Ben Joseph has finished thing up and a bug is put in Judas Iscariot’s ear to cash in on the carpenter.  While these events come off as tragic or puzzling at best angel sees them from another perspective… after all, the chap has been up to this a long… long time. So many… many, times there have been mass extinctions… whole populations wiped out by tsunami and only a few could be saved. Angel knows that it all works out eventually and that our worst tragedies here have no more meaning or impact on the heavenly scale than that of a bug splattering out its brief existence on the windshield  of a station-wagon on its way to a family picnic.

Our Angel in charge of Adriane is busy at his desk watching Adriane shoot-up a muscle-pop of tar in her butt on the big screen when he is visited by Imp from the Satanic Entourage. Imp pulls up a seat next to him smacking his lips, “Oh, yes, she is on her way now.”

“Yes, you might say so. We almost had her clear of it…” Angel pulls open a drawer and takes out a pint of Nectar, passing it to Imp.

“What’s a few pints between friends, eh?” Imp wonders why Angel is so damned optimistic. After all, since they made their bet, Adriane had been revived by paddles in the ICU and, even after getting clean while in France… within a few weeks of returning to California she was right back where she left off…, good and fucked up.

Angel always delighted in the game… the give and take of it… and he suspected that Imp was in it for more than a few pints also. “So, my friend, you think you are ready to close this deal?”

She is nude and now standing in front of the easel, picking up a paint brush, strokes a broad crimson swath across the canvas. Standing back from it she takes a cloth soaked in turpentine and smears the red into a green patch that showed a half-face peering out…

“Angel, don’t you wish you could see the eroticism of this picture?” Imp leered.

“Hey, I’m an angel but I can still see and feel everything in creation…”

“Yeah, but look at her… a fine form, eh?”