Citate memorabile

[Lia]

The Stupidest Angel

Christopher Moore

Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude, the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: "Look at them, with their fitness and
their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!" Because if you're up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you're shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.

"'Oh, I am a bad, bad dog.' No, wait, the Emergency Backup Food Guy was scratching
his ears. Oh, that felt good. He was fine. Doggie Xanax. Never mind."

"Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!" Molly cried from her seat astraddle the town constable, who was squirming on an uncomfortable bed of plastic roses a few feet above a dead schoolteacher.
"They always think they're the first ones. Ooooo, let's do it in the
graveyard," said Bess Leander, whose husband had served her foxglove tea with her last breakfast.
"I know, there are three used condoms on my grave from this week alone," said Arthur Tannbeau, citrus farmer, deceased five years.
"How can you tell?"
They heard everything, but their vision was limited.
"The smell."

They'd heard it all, the dead: crying children, wailing widows, confessions, condemnations, questions that they could never answer; Halloween dares, raving drunks-invoking the ghosts or just apologizing for drawing breath; would-be witches, chanting at indifferent spirits, tourists rubbing the old tombstones with paper and charcoal like curious dogs scratching at the grave to get in.
Funerals, confirmations, communions, weddings, square dances, heart attacks, junior-high hand jobs, wakes gone awry, vandalism, Handel's Messiah, a birth, a murder, eighty-three Passion plays,
eighty-five Christmas pageants, a dozen brides barking over tombstones like taffeta sea lions as the best man gave it to them dog style, and now and again, couples who needed something dark and
smelling of damp earth to give their sex life a jolt: the dead had heard it.

Author's Warning
If you're buying this book as a gift for your grandma or a kid, you should be aware that it contains cusswords as well as tasteful depictions of cannibalism and people in their forties having sex.
Don't blame me. I told you.

"We just buried my ex-husband," Lena said.
"Sure, sure, but then we delivered Christmas trees to the poor. A little perspective, huh? A lot of people have buried their spouses."
"Not personally. With the shovel they killed him with."
"You may want to keep it down a little." Tuck checked the diners at the nearby tables to see if they were listening, but they all seemed to be discussing the pine tree that had just driven by. "Let's talk about something else. Interests? Hobbies? Movies?"
Lena tossed her head as if she didn't hear him right, then stared as if to say: Are you nuts?

"You're a child," said the blond man.
Josh stopped kicking for a second and looked into the impossibly blue eyes of the stranger, who was now studying him in much the same way a bear might examine a portable television while wondering how to get all those tasty little people out of it.
"Well, duh," said Josh.


"Our Heavenly Father," Josh began. You never used God's first name that was like a commandment or something. "This is Josh Barker, six-seventy-one Worchester Street, Pine Cove, California nine-three-seven, five-four. I saw Santa tonight, which was great, and thank you for that, but then, right after I saw him, he got killed with a shovel, and so, I'm afraid that there's not going to be any Christmas and I've been good, which I'm sure you'll see if you check Santa's list, so if you don't mind could you please make Santa come back to life and make everything okay for Christmas?" No, no, no, that sounded really selfish. Quickly he added: "And a Happy Hanukkah to you and all the Jewish people like Sam and his family. Mazel tov."