losing Jehovah was like losing a girlfriend that you loved. you barely had time to flinch when you found out that she had been sleeping with all your friends and stealing your records to pawn off. that you had just been another sucker on the vine.
when jehovah dumps you, you start looking at yourself longer and harder, and wondering what it was about him that you found in yourself, until all you see there in the reflection is just yourself, dancing with an imaginary hand and waistline.
when jehovah was gone, and the war was over, i realized that all the things that had made me "good", and "moral", and "hate what was bad", didn't mean anything to me anymore. i believed in them when i was young and naive. before i was drafted off to his war. i remember being in the shit. sometimes i'd be laying against the ground in the jungle, shells exploding all around, and i'd open my wallet and look at the picture i had of my girl, jehovah. those are some of the only moments from the war i remember, fixating on the holy image of perfection.
when i got back, the demon that i found inside my wine cellar wasn't concerned in the least with being a saint. which doesn't matter anyways because all the good i had in myself was never a purchase, but a rental. the demon showed me, with ease, that you can always return a lease on paradise to heaven, even if you have to pay for the extra mileage. that there's no use, apart from a practical one, in being a bright and shiny person, if there is no jehovah to be bright and shiny with.
jehovah was a dopamine love affair that i'll never forget. there are a lot of girls like him strutting around the world. but she'll always be the first. it was magic. she looked like rita hayworth, with a saxaphone and a bouquet of flowers. but she was just an invitation to the blues once the drugs ran out.
the affair is over. jehovah's gone now, but the saga continues on as ever. falling in and out of love with the different gods that i keep finding inside myself, waiving to me like eager school children from my well-lit past. they're all positive they have the answers to the questions i have been asking. but the one who wins, always, is the demon in the cellar. the one who doesn't pretend to have any answers. he makes a lot of noise, and likes to laugh too much, and he's not very sentimental. he makes no appologies for being a demon, and doesn't beat himself up for not being like jehovah. he'll blow you kisses that are filled with smoke, but they're still the only real kisses you've ever had. he plays all his songs on an old cracked piano, in a key that makes all the dogs in the neighborhood howl. mothers and children cross to the other side of the street when they see him coming, and school girls laugh at him floating along, sockless and hatless and sun burnt. his shirt is stained with with whisky and blood and semen, and he swings by the primate cage at the zoo when he needs a pedicure. and he trails a little water everywhere he goes, dripping from the corner of his coat pocket.
we went out the other night, and i blew all my cash at the blackjack table behind the fake wall at the speakeasy, while the girls danced around the brass polls like epitaphs to the only jehovah i ever knew. and they threw us out at dawn with big smiles on our faces.
he's a real buddy, for once, this demon. and he asked me what i had been thinking bearing around jehovah's cross. but the song that was on explained it better than i ever could have. i wasn't thinking. i was in love, with god, and he broke my heart, but i shouldn't be surprised.
and ya, i had to admit, that jehovah and I were quite a pair:
Well I got a bad liver and broken heart,
I drunk me a river since you tore me apart
And I don't have a drinking problem, 'cept when I can't get a drink
And I wish you'd a-known her, we were quite a pair,
She was sharp as a razor and soft as a prayer
TS