JESUS IS COMING

Well blow me up like a balloon and pop me with a toothpick, happy Black Friday to ya you consumerist glutton!

I wonder how the progression of holiday season unfolded over time. You know, like when did the celebration of Jesus Christ being born turn into putting up a tree and buying a Lego set for your nephew in early November? How did it get like this? Where was the turning point? I’m sure there’s some history of Christmas book I could read if I actually cared enough.

It’s definitely weird how much the holiday season has permeated our culture. It’s like a collective coping mechanism to get through the winter. So, I guess that’s a good thing. I’d rather have people be excited about Christmas and depressed about the weather instead of just depressed about the weather.

The whole consumer culture around the holidays is a bit much, though. There’s all this pressure to buy people gifts. Kids should get gifts because their life is still a fairy tale, but adults shouldn’t get gifts. I think that should be a new rule. If you’re an adult and I’m an adult, there should be no expectation for gifts.

Gifts are fun, though. I think Christmas is more of a feeling than anything, at least for me. I’m not religious so Christmas really has nothing to do with Jesus from my perspective. I wonder what the percentage of people is who are primarily excited about celebrating Jesus for Christmas. Imagine a child who is so religious they wake up and run straight past all the gifts under the tree in order to pray at the cross.

I can just picture some snobby little six year-old opening a gift and crying “I DON’T WANT A PLAYSTATION, I WANT JESUS TO COME BACK!” That would be a funny skit to shoot. Just some completely religiously possessed child who gets increasingly mad that none of his gifts are Jesus, resurrected.

I think it would be funny if Jesus did come back, but it was just at like… a Blink 182 concert. He just stays for one song and then leaves. You tell your friends. “Yo, did you guys see Jesus at the concert? It was wild. It wasn’t a guy who looked like Jesus, it was literally Jesus. He just showed up. He had a halo and everything. He only stayed for one song and then he just left. It wasn’t even one of their good songs, I don’t get it…”

I wonder what Jesus would be into if he did come back today. You think he’d be a big anime guy? Could you imagine, Jesus just ends up sitting on the couch all day watching anime and eating Doritos. He’s like “alright I get it. I see why you guys haven’t gotten anything done in a while. This is awesome.”

He just turns water into boxed wine and parties with a bunch of crazy white women. He’s screaming “CHUG CHUG CHUG!” Jesus joins a fraternity. He gets hazed by a bunch of 18 year-olds calling him a pussy. He gets accused of sexual assault but it doesn’t go to trial because nobody really remembers what happened.

He stops going to class. He parties harder and harder because he never addressed his childhood trauma before going off to college. His dad never had time to play baseball with him because he was just so busy spying on everyone all the time. Jesus develops an addiction to both amphetamines and opiates. He barely passes his classes but he gets his hands on enough Adderall to get it done.

Sophomore year comes around and he realizes he can’t continue at this pace. He finds a nice woman who provides him with a sense of grounding and stability but he also thinks he might be a little gay. He gets addicted to hard core homoerotic pornography and he knows his dad is judging him for it but he still can’t stop watching. He can’t get excited for his girlfriend anymore and she leaves him in the dead of night on a cool November morning.

He’s shattered, but he’s also curious. He tries hooking up with dudes but he realizes he’s just attracted to anything he can’t have and he’s not actually gay. He goes to therapy but his therapist doesn’t really do anything besides sit there and listen to him talk, which was helpful at first but not for a rate of $80 an hour.

He decides he’ll take things into his own hands. He meets a hyper-motivated classmate who gets him to join a multi-level marketing scheme, and this provides Jesus with some much needed hope. He goes to lectures and motivational speeches, but he’s too jumble-brained to actually sell anything. He quits after a few months and loses a few hundred dollars and a lot of friends.

He leaves with a little motivation still in his pocket, however. One day he’s browsing reddit and stumbles across a Jordan Peterson video, and things begin to click for him. “What if I could be a responsible man?” he thinks. He watches the entire Maps of Meaning series of lectures and sees himself in a lot of the lessons. The parallels between his own life and that of Pinocchio are startling to say the least.

Jesus begins to stand up straight and take on as much responsibility as he can bare. He starts the “Christians for a better Campus” club where he merges the tenants of religious doctrine with the youthful exuberance of the progressive movement to provide a cleaner and safer college campus for all. He runs for class president but gets beat out by a kid with a disability and he decides that’s probably fair.

He’s a bit undecided as to what he wants to do when he graduates college, but he knows he now has the tools to be successful no matter what field he ends up going into. He gets hit by a bus while crossing the street just a few days before graduation. His vitals are intact but he’s in rough shape. He has to watch the ceremony from the hospital and this fills him with an intense feeling of sadness.

Thankfully, he makes a miraculously quick recovery but is now addicted to opiates for a second time. He knows he can get back to his old self but OxyContin just feels really good right now. He allows himself two months to be a vegetable and then decides he’s going to get his life back together. Luckily, two months turn into one when he stumbles across a David Goggins video where he calls Jesus a little bitch 35 times in a span of six minutes.

Jesus starts to train. HARD. He gets into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and eventually gets so good that he makes an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. He gains almost 60,000 Instagram followers in a span of 24 hours. He starts making motivational videos and even gets a like from Tony Robbins on one of them before realizing it was just a bot account.

Undeterred, he powers on making high quality social media content with a questionable marketing strategy. He gains followers, but not as quickly as he’d like to. His life is good, but something is missing. He decides to take a solo excursion through the Andes Mountains in an attempt to find himself but realizes he’s pretty useless when it comes to simply surviving in the wild.

Motivated by the Netflix documentary “The Alpinist,” Jesus tries to free climb the face of a cliff but falls 300 feet to his death as he screams “I’LL BE BACK!” the entire way down. Nobody has seen him since but they know he’s coming, and they’ll be ready.

• Amazon
• Instagram
• Facebook