jd87: Prayer

by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.

This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.

2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

Prayer FICTION

Oh, god, make it stop. Make it stop. This is so annoying! Please, I’m telling you, I’ll do anything. I’ll spread the word of Abraham and Moses and Isaac and Jacob. I’ll become a good man, a pious man. I know I haven’t been very responsible lately. Leaving the kids by the pool the other day was a horrible idea. But I had to take that business call. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have blessed me with this Mercedes-AMG E63 (a station wagon with a five-hundred and seven horsepower V8!) Good thing you blessed us with our golden retriever, Cliff, who is an ample swimmer and an even better rescuer. And we did not even train him! And the other day, I know, I saw that older blind man struggling to pick up his cell phone, and I just kept walking. I’m pretty sure I was in a rush, because I was on my way to a date with Angela, that shiksa who I met at work. Oh, and I know I haven’t been too… faithful, either. My wife, she’s beautiful, but her voice sounds like Joan Rivers with a sinus infection. And if that’s not bad enough, lord, when I shtoop her, it sounds like an old fax machine. “Eeeh-ahh, eee-ahh,” you know? And she has to be faking those orgasms. Shit, shit, I know I shouldn’t be saying things like this.

I remember the day when things started to click – or de-click – for me. When I started to think that you, lord, did not exist. It was during Rabbi Eliezer’s sermon on Yom Kippur. I was atoning for my sins. Apologizing for punching my little brother so much, for ripping the heads off of my sister’s dolls and then laughing in her face. For not listening to my mother when she told me to stop. For calling out in class without raising my hand. I didn’t understand that other people had interesting things to say, lord. You can understand that, can’t you, with an anxious mind like mine? But back to the sermon. Rabbi Eliezer was telling us how you had a list of all of us, with our sins. And in my mind, I pictured a large scroll, something larger in breadth and size than the Torah itself. And I saw my name, Daniel Benjamin Rosenbaum, and next to it were a series of dots. Like a menu, this list was. Instead of a price at the end of the dots, though, there was a list of all my sins, sorted by degree of severity. And right as that mental picture formed in my mind, right when the dots became crystal clear and I could see the crisp letters forming my name, the rabbi said with stern seriousness that you were probably using computers to sort everything out now. Computers! Are you kidding me! I did not understand why someone as omnipotent and omniscient and omni-everything (omni-omni?) as you wouldn’t have had access to computers before, why the lord would busy himself with quill and ink when he had an IBM with a floppy disk drive!

And yes, I still had a Bar Mitzvah, but I was more concerned about the party than the service. I was worried about who was going to show up, because my Bar Mitzvah was on the same day as Jenny Rappaport’s.

But I know I can count on you, lord. Because I remember when I still believed in you, when miracles did still exist. Remember when my aunt took me to the park when I was seven? She let me play in the sandbox. My world was a lot smaller back then. The only thing that really mattered was whether or not my tunnel would collapse if I made the mound on top larger. That was the first time I had ever seen the moon during the daytime; it was surrounded by a vast blue sky, not a puff of white anywhere. I remembered thinking, this isn’t right. Maybe the moon was feeling playful. Or maybe it felt proud, like the sun wasn’t the only agent of light that should be hanging in the sky. It didn’t make any sense to me back then. It still doesn’t make any sense to me, lord. Though I’m sure there’s a perfectly good scientific explanation for it. But no amount of science, it seems, could explain how my aunt knew that there was a fully-grown cottonmouth in the sandbox with me and how she knew that the damn snake was planning on sinking its teeth into my stubby little leg. I thought back then it was magic, but I realized that it had to be a miracle that you performed. I mean, I’ve never seen Aunt Remi move so quickly. You must have came down and intervened on your own creations. Isn’t that right, lord?

I really just can’t stand this right now. I’ve tried drinking Gatorade to balance out my electrolytes. Those electrolytes are supposed to be good for you. I tried eating some bananas for potassium. I heard that helps with this sort of thing. None of it worked. Please god, do something to get rid of this damn twitch in my eyeball. It’s pulsing, for Christ’s sake!

Oh, that’s funny. I know a lot of Jews that say “for Christ’s sake.” Are we doing it on purpose? Do we have some kind of inferiority complex to the Christians, or do we all secretly wish we were subjects of a triune god? I don’t think so. It’s a way of swearing to a pseudo-diety without violating the rules – the First Commandment. You have to admit it: you gave us that drive to break the rules without really breaking them. To find those loopholes.

I’m looking at my eye in the mirror now. Like a heart it beats. Dum dum, dum dum. I want to rip the damn thing out. I can’t fall asleep. I can’t concentrate on anything. I was trying to do something before, I don’t even remember what it was, but I couldn’t do it.

Please lord, I’ll do anything to get this pulsing to stop. ♦

January 15, 2009

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