Pitiful Appeal Chain Letter

My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can't. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is because I'm so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn't hurt, except when I try to breathe.

The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or insurance.

I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money. Mommy doesn't work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said, "Don't cry, Mommy," and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she's allergic to leaves and the burlap. I make her sneeze and my body chafes her real bad. She can't afford Sudafed and Calamine lotion and that makes me sad.

I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you dn't know, too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and they will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better then. Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball like the normal kids. Right now I can only be the third base.

Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy is so sad, and I want a body. I don't want my leaves to rot and my body turn into mulch before I turn ten. If you can only send it to a few people at least maybe we can get a new bigger burlap bag for me as I get older.

If you don't forward this email, that's okay, I'll understand. But my Mommy says you're a mean and heartless bastard who doesn't care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don't stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of self centered cruel person are you that you can't take five FREAKIN' minutes out of your happy day to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy too?

Please help me. I try to be happy, but it's hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn't scratch and claw and chew on me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much.

Thank You,
Billy "Smiles" Evans

54: A Retraction and Reflection

It has been a year since I changed my identity from pastel yellow to well...pastel yellow, except my daughter commented I looked like a catfish now. That is how I looked a year ago, this is what I'm shooting for.
I can't explain it, but I conciously remember ever since I was a child I wanted to be old. I thought it was cool to look really old. When I was in my thirties and many of my friends were going bald, I was not. I realized I may never be completely bald. I was disappointed. I was actually jealous of my best friend who went bald when he was mid twenties. With all the hair restoration programs out there playing on men's fear of age, and me getting carded for the last time in my life at age 47 in a restaurant with my daughter, I've concluded there is no justice in the universe. But I knew that a long time ago.

So, I'm chronologically another year older and not anywhere near another year wiser. I've concluded God created a set amount of wisdom to go around when He created the world and it has gotten spread thinner and thinner as the human race multiplies. It is hard to not believe that when the last TV I used to watch regularly was Donna Reed, Lunch with Soupy Sales, Ed Sullivan Show and Father Knows Best. In recent years, I've seen a few minutes of programs like CSI, Jackass, ummmm... and one of those psychic crime shows where the stars look like they are zoned out on Thorazine... Anyway, I cannot grasp why these programs are entertaining. Seriously. What happens to the human soul when it is filled with images of grisly death, absolute stupidity and supernatural stories with no clear dogma attached. It is difficult to not take the "world is going to hell in a handbasket" bunker mentality when I percieve that the vast majority of the people in this country actually mindlessly accept this assault on their humanity (its tantamount to inviting a serial rapist to attack your mind and soul), and the media keeps pushing the envelope of brutality and dehumanizing and sells soap, real estate and male performance enhancing drugs every 6 minutes during the assaults.

OK... so that's my "old man" rant. Sorry, just had to get it off my chest.

So, my kids did in fact take ME out for my birthday to celebrate what my oldest daughter called my "slow march to death". Yeah, it is funny, we can say stuff like that in our family and laugh. I seriously have the coolest kids on earth (step kids, god kids and all). No, they aren't all Opie and Beaver Cleaver and they've all had their seasons of flying out of orbit in one way or another, but I'm never ashamed to introduce them to anyone as my kids. It is not until you get old enough to have kids this age that you understand the true parental meaningfulness of the Psalm verse "your children will rise up and call you blessed".

Anyway, no, I'm not moving into the senior trailer park I found in Apache Junction... I'd have to give up my women. Actually I'd have to give up my library to fit into it too, and I'm not sure I can do that either.

All in all, life at 54 is good. Mortality looms larger and larger. The body grows more and more feeble and weary and breaks and creaks more easily. Yes, when you are young it is a slow march to death but it seems that as we get older we somehow break into a sprint. We can only hope to wake up to one more gray hair, one more brown spot, one more wrinkle of flesh and pray we live long enough to at least look as wise as we should be.

Happy Birthday to me....

Actually my birthday was on Wednesday and I got a box of Cinnamon Roll and S'mores Poptarts from some friends. I'm sitting here waiting for my college aged kids to arrive so I can take them all out for dinner for my birthday. (Take note parents....)

It occurred to me that in 362 days I can move into a "Senior Trailer Park" in Apache Junction.


Imagine, living large for 3,000.00. Heck, I could charge my house on a VISA card! .... and I can order from the "Senior Menu" at Denny's. The thing I'm living for is the twenty five cent coffee at McDonalds. Of course those aren't the only benefits of surviving the 60's, EST, and 80's music. I'm trying to remember what they are....

You know what... I'm going to have to think about that, the kids are here and I'm going to have the experience that all parents live for: sharing a pitcher of beer with your kids.

The Last Chapter

The Last Chapter of "Life, Death and Love"

"…and boy gets girl."

"Let us rejoice and be glad and give glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready. Come, and I shall show you the Bride of the Lamb. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, and made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. 'And I heard a loud voice say, 'Behold, the very presence of God is with his people, and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying or pain: the first things have passed away.” The Revelation of John

This is the whole of The Book. It is a story of love, surely, but of a love like all true loves, one that suffers greatly for the sake of finally and eternally possessing the beloved. It is the divine romance, the story of God's passionate pursuit of his beloved through Hell and high water to have her for Himself. And the heart of sorrows is the heart touched by this True Love, it is the heart that longs for the ending of the story.

The Revelation of John is at the end of the story, an epilogue of sorts, told in huge images of such cataclysmic epic proportions that the message cannot be missed if we will stand back from the movie screen instead of standing with our noses to it. It is simply a retelling of The Love Story in ghastly and beautifully awesome images in case we did not understand when it was told in the terrifying human drama in which it actually happened: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl both suffer greatly, insurmountable odds are overcome, boy gets girl in the end and they live happily ever after. This is the plot of every date flick romance ever written and filmed.

And this is the end of the matter for the heart of sorrows, the one bruised and beaten by and for the sake of Love. This thing all lovers know, to this all lovers will say it is so: In the end, in love, nothing, but nothing, matters except the presence of our beloved. If that presence is ours we at once lose everything and possess all creation. This is Truth: When I finally sit in the presence of my beloved, embraced in her unconditional passion and love for me, all the pain and sorrows of the joining of our hearts, the hell of the fear of rejection, all of my longings for her in her absence, all of my doubts about her love, all of the darkness of being abandoned by her because of doubts and fears, all of our unbelief, lack of faith, all of it is consumed, all is swallowed up in our love. None of it matters, none of it is of any consequence, none of it is even remembered, all the first things have passed away, all things are new. There is now only my beloved; no belief or unbelief, no fear, no doubts, no past, no future, no sense of the passing of the present moment, only the two now one in a mystery and the eternal sense that it is now as it was intended from the beginning. For that moment love reigns supreme, the world, the two of us, God himself and all his creation is a seamless tapestry; everything is woven together by the bright threads of romance and passion. This is the final and best mystery, the hope to which all we know about human and divine love, and that to which St. John finally points us.

This is the eternal moment I long for most desperately. To rest in the arms of my True Beloved, to sit in the presence of His divine passion for my heart and soul, to be lost in Him, to be one with Him, finally and completely. It is then that I know all of life with its tears and desperations, hopelessness and fears and sorrows will be swallowed up in His holy and fearless love. It is then I will know that I am, but it is truly more than knowing: I will be, yes I will BE my Beloved's and He will be mine.

"Arise my darling, my beautiful one. For behold the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers have appeared in the land. Who is this that grows like the dawn, as beautiful as the full moon, as pure as the sun? I am my beloved's and his desire is for me. Come my beloved, let us go out into the country. Let us spend the night in the villages. Let us rise early and go to the vineyard, let us see whether the vine has budded and its blossoms have opened, and whether the pomegranates have bloomed. There I will give you my love."

"The Spirit and the Bride say come.”