The Sermon of the Cake
Friend, I know you’re enjoying these secular diversions.
It’s not easy in these troubling times to drag your wretched flesh out of bed and engage the world, in no matter how meager a manner. It’s tough enough just going about the business of emptying out your bodily waste, much less to put on parade for all the world what a sinning lot you and yours really are.
But let me tell you something: I’ve had supper with the naked little ghoul who drives your brain. I’ve listened to his funnytalk, and I understand. And I am just one among many. We are here, for you.
We can help you shear the unwanted hair of burden from your skull. Do you think we painted the Virgin Day-Glo because it’s fun? Do we display the gumdrop and toothpick Stations of the Cross because we’ve got bees in our bonnets? Do we look like we have bees in our bonnets? Believe me, we know bees, we’re acquainted with bees intimately, and these aren’t bees. Not in our bonnets.
We hold no truck with bees.
Back when I was a teeny tiny boy in Satan, Nebraska, I was no bigger than your thumb. But my father, Professor Emeritus at the Continental Auctioneers School on County Highway L, he learned me this one lesson well. His bellowing voice broke the air high above my head, magisterial, louder than any rock-roll singer, his voice broke the sky andno one, not the swans that lived down the lake a ways, not the man who ran all the way from here to hereafter, not the whys and wherefores, not the dese, dems, and dose, NO ONE dared to fix it.
But I’ll come back to that, later, the lesson learned from my father.
Right now, I want to talk about the sky.
The clouds cried out. “Rain!” they said.
Yes, they did.
It was a summer month. A month of Sundays coming down and the flock and I were up at the Shoney’s on Route Nine, just past the Big A Modeling Salon for Photographers and Artists, where the Mister thinks you don’t know he goes, ladies.
We’d gone up there for a little late lunch, just some meatloaf, you know, or eggs, biscuits, and gravy, a ham platter, what have you, and it had come time for dessert.
Did I say dessert? HELL YES, I said dessert! Did we order pie? HELL NO, we didn’t order pie! Not this day, anyway.
We took a look at the pastry carousel, spinning, spinning, much like life itself on this worried world, spinning, and we ordered cake.
Now, our waitress, Melissa I believe she said it was, what her name tag said, Melissa was a young person. And I know the young persons have their problems with their crack and their crank and their cat-in-the-hat, but frankly, all of this is a bad excuse for a job poorly done.
We are all planted and grown here for a reason, and Melissa’s reason to draw breath on this earth, entangled and entwined with the tentacles of life that summer’s day at the Shoney’s, was to bring us cake.
Now, it breaks the very cockles of my heart, it smashes the aorta to tell you this, but Melissa, someone’s daughter Melissa, must’ve been sniffing LSD in the mop closet because the cake she brought us was befouled, it was the lowest of the low, it had no right to take the name of cake.
I tell you this: We looked down upon the plates she put before us and, it shudders me to remember it again, there was evidence of dirt on the cake. Clear, irrefutable specks of dirt on the icing, near the bottom, next to the decorative doily.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking.
Some of you are thinking this loathsome evidence of the beast in man was nothing more than chocolate jimmies. Well, I am here to tell you no! No! One thousand times NO! Do you for one moment think that we here among the flock don’t know chocolate jimmies? We who went to all that trouble last year to build a revolving strobe light Hand O’ God at the very apex of the chapel? We know chocolate jimmies, and we’re not talking chocolate jimmies here.
The Vestibule of Saints umbrella stands we place in our hallways are not for nothing.
This was filth! This was filth, pure and simple! Filth and rot and stink and all the pus filled bags of sin the root of evil squared is heir to. That cake was dirty! I’m telling you, once and for final all the live long day, that cake was DIRTY!
Well, we didn’t hesitate a minute. The flock and I took one look at that cake, and before you can say trammel-lama-ding-dong we’d stood Melissa up on a chair with a paper placemat dunce cap and a cardboard sign we’d hung about her shameful neck with some yarn we’d found, and on that sign we’d written with a Special of the Day marker the words
“I AM A DIRTY CAKE!”
Yes, we did. And we rolled that swivel chair of degradation around and around the Shoney’s for a full and fateful hour. We encouraged the other diners to witness and testify: “Dirty cake! Dirty cake!” they shouted, showering her sinful countenance with wax beans and fruit compote.
Now, some of you might be thinking, might be saying to yourselves, what gives this man and his flock of faithful the right, the right to festoon a healthy, human born girl child with paper products and roll her around on a swivel chair in a 24-hour restaurant like they did back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition?
And I answer you COMMON SENSE! Common, inborn, heffalump sense! Any fool can see that the wages of sin are cheap at half the price, and the sucker born every minute never had a chance to breathe his last, to sigh his last, to last a lasting bond of relationship with those who care dearly dear for the cost of what keeps him. No, sir. No, ma’am.
So here’s one thing you can make bank on, and I tell you this: Melissa will think twice before she ever does those illegal drugs again. Now, we know young people are worried about their grades and the temptations of criminy-hey-now, but that’s no excuse for shooting the boy who carries the water.
Ride the J and pay the pay, that’s what the Devil Man say.
Now, I haven’t forgotten my promise earlier before to tell you the wise words my enormous father told me, way back when in Satan, Nebraska, where the land lies so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days.
That lesson I’d learned before I was but two inches tall, greater than any schooling I’ve ever had. My great big dad, he said to me, and he told me to never forget, he said, “Son, I forgive those who gave us that hated bread, and renewed our bus passes, or used our bus passes against us.”
Or used our bus passes against us!
Think about that. You just…think. It is your right. And it’s your right to come to the right conclusion.
And friend, I thank you.
An Esperanto translation is available HERE for a free will donation.
And now it’s my great pleasure to return you to your secular entertainments.
Enjoy yourselves, you dirty cakes. It’s later than you think.
