The Seven Deadly Sins Read online

  Maybe people will figure it out. Then again, maybe not. As much as it is in our nature to fight, it is also in our nature to follow the person in front of us. Honestly, that is not an admonishment. That is just us. We the people are we the willing, but there is just enough piss and vinegar in our souls to shuffle off the baggage of this mortal coil and get to enlightenment. And the seven deadly sins should be among the first to go.

  So open up your minds and read on. Keep in mind the state of life and go forward. If I am prepared for the repercussions, then you should be prepared for my tiny little reprimands. It is your life, not theirs. Forget the buzzwords and the bullshit issues and think for your fucking selves. When the books open up, we should be throwing wrenches in the plot for better days and better ways. When that happens, we will be students again, ready to pass our tests with flying colors. My credo is treat everyone like it is their birthday, but handle them as if they could throw up on the cake at any moment. In the end, this is not an era for sitting on a fence. This is an era to tear that fucking fence down. Make your mark and find yourself; just do not forget to leave those cinder blocks called sins behind.

  The great thing about believing is that the door goes both ways. You can do what you want. I just want you to want what has always been yours to have. The way is never shut if the light you seek is bright enough. If you are feeling a little dark, you can always change the bulb. Never let the limits of your understanding dictate how far you can go. We can be better.

  We can just be. Trust me—it is as simple as that.

  chapter 2

  Wrath of the Con

  Okay, before we go any further, let’s just get something straight right now. I know I am opening myself up for bitter crossexamination here, but frankly I have had it. It is a simple fact. I know it and you know it. Deep down, in the same weird waiting room of your soul where we all agree Roseanne Barr was never funny, you know this to be true. Because nobody is willing to come out and say it, I will be the motherfucker and make it official.

  Movie theater nachos are not real nachos.

  They are not. Movie theater nachos are nothing more than chips and dip. First of all, you do not put your own nachos together, and you certainly do not put them together in a giant dark room with no table. Second, real nachos are more than just shitty tortilla triangles with a sealed Dixie cup full of spicy, runny Velveeta, and I don’t care how long you microwave that tripe.

  Real nachos are an event, a glorious commingling of meats, cheeses, peppers, chipotle, sour cream, guacamole, and crispy maize saucers for two or more people bent on abdominal destruction. Nachos should be a mountainous conflagration, a majestic Tex-Mex experience in which every bite is delicious yet no two bites taste the same.

  Movie theater nachos are a fucking lie. They are a public travesty to all things edible, a moral distraction brought on in an attempt to reshuffle a stagnant menu produced by an industry pigeonholed by their own narrow views of “snack time.” It is not our fault their most popular items are the same three we have had for years—popcorn, soda pop, and candy. But they did it to themselves. If they had started out with a wider array of foodstuffs, we would not even be having this damn conversation. But I will not let my beloved nachos fall victim to this. I will fight with every breath to keep my nachos pure and disgustingly elaborate. Every breath, motherfuckers!

  Good, now I am pissed, so it is the perfect time to talk about wrath.

  You know the feeling. Darkness boxes your line of sight on either side. Your vision itself gets blurry; you can almost see demons in the trails your eyes trace across the room. There is bile that seems more like venom than saliva in the back of your mouth. Your fists clench and unclench until the palms of your hands tear open, and blood starts a sad journey to the ends of your fingers, mapping out the events that led to this debilitating state of mind. Psychologically, you can shift several ways. You can become loud and abrasive, abusing friends and family, cursing, regressing intellectually. You can also slip into a deadly silence, the calm before the storm, suffocating the world with the quiet known only before all hell breaks loose. One thing will always remain the same: As passion goes, wrath—or rage—is nearly indistinguishable from love in its intensity, the two epic ends of the maelstrom that makes us human.

  Sure, it looks fancy. It is easy to wax poetic about this simple emotional mechanism. We all know the feeling too well. Some people cry; most scream their throats bloody. But it is truly the one “sin” on our list that unites us. Most of us can cope or subdue our lusts, our appetites, our lack of drive, our selfish sides, our tendencies to covet, and so on.

  But we all get mad.

  Admit it.

  Just fucking admit it.

  We all get mad.

  Personally I do not see anything wrong with it.

  To rage is to feel, just like love and hate. But those things are not a part of our so-called “Deadly Seven.”

  Am I right, folks?

  There is a fine reason why rage is not a sin. When used for venting purposes, it can be so cathartic. It feels good to get shit off of your chest, even if it is someone else’s turd stuck in the hairs. We gripe, yell, complain, vent, rant, rave, retort, and expunge because it feels really good to do so, and there is not a damn thing bad about it. It is a way for us to let out a breath, clear the air, and get back to what this species should be doing in the first place: dancing in the streets, happy to be alive.

  However, wrath is also the one “sin” on the list whose darkness is immediately recognizable because it is a feeling that can be reciprocated instantly. In other words, rage is very contagious. All it takes is that little push, that little extra bit of selfish violation. It can pierce the very time in which you are witnessing and bring on a sadness that can linger for a lifetime. Fortunately, a strong mind would blame the person, not the rage.

  Unfortunately, I have seen the damage firsthand.

  I was eleven when these experiences became a part of my life, and after this, innocence became very hard to come by. I had to grow up quick, and I did not do a very good job. It is amazing and sad what we have to do to survive sometimes. Every source of protection came crashing down when I saw the ugly side of humanity.

  My sister and I were staying at the house of a “friend” of my mother’s after a barbecue one night. We were only a few miles away from home. I believe everyone stayed because everyone we came there with was loaded and did not want to drive drunk to get home or so they could get high in the morning and catch a free one before having to crawl back to the “responsibilities” of real life. What a crock. There was no shielding me and my sister. For years we were exposed to every source of hate and anger possible. What happens to you when everything happens to you?

  We were staying in the living room. I had one couch and my sister had the other. The house where we were staying was rented by some people I will refer to as Tom and Christine, mainly because I have worked very hard to forget their names. They were what I would call “professional adolescents” because they were in their thirties but still acted like they were sixteen. Watching delinquents play house is a lot like watching monkeys play poker: Just when it seems like they know what they’re doing, they shit on other people.

  Tom was out of work, but for all intents and purposes he was the most together of the two. He would actually hang out with the kids, make lunch, and take care of us. Christine was just a plain fucking drunken drug addict. She was a hole for men to fill up because she thought it meant they cared about her. She had three kids from three different guys, all of whom Tom took care of—kudos for that. She was a second-hand woman in third-hand clothing—obnoxious, loud, and ignorant. She did not give a shit about anything, and it certainly showed. How Tom could live with her I will never understand. But he did not live with her for long.

  That night after the barbecue, Christine had bailed to go to another party. She did not even talk to anyone about it—just up and left her kids to go find more alcohol and bullshi
t. I believe my mom went with her because I do not remember where she slept that night. What I do remember is watching Tom get angrier and angrier as the hours went by and Christine still was not home. He put her kids to bed. She was still a no-show. He sat down to watch TV with me and my sister. Nothing. Sometime after that, we fell asleep on the couches. Tom passed out in the easy chair. Nobody had come home yet.

  I woke up to the sound of someone pounding on the door, screaming loudly. Just as I curiously raised my head, it became very obvious that the pounding was in fact kicking. Someone was kicking the door in because the deadbolt was engaged.

  It all happened in slow motion: Tom was jumping out of the recliner, the door was crashing open, and Christine was standing on the front steps with a forty-ounce Bud in her hand.

  Then Tom punched her in the face.

  Christine flew backward into the yard, too drunk to defend herself. She was yelling for help and calling Tom every name in the book at the same time. Tom heard nothing but the silence that had filled up the many hours she had been gone, leaving him with a house full of children who were not his own so these broken people could go fill their personal voids with the parties that should have ended in high school. All he could feel was his feet kicking her in the back. Then he was on top of her choking her. In the distance I heard an unfamiliar voice warning the two bloody lovers that they had called the cops, but Tom did not care—all he could feel was the pain of neglect, of being taken advantage of, of being a disposable afterthought in comparison to his wants and needs. All he could do was give in to the rage that was welling up and venting from him like a renegade steam engine, ready to blow if someone had not hit the pressure valve in time. He was a bomb with two fists, Vesuvius with a pulse. He wanted to destroy.

  I watched it all, including the inevitable aftermath: Christine running away and Tom chasing after her, leaving all the kids by themselves. I sat up and waited with the younger ones. The cops showed up, hands on their guns. My sister started screaming, which set off the other kids. I told the police they had fled into the night and a few of them ran in the approximate direction. Sometime later, Tom was led back in handcuffs. Christine was screaming from the cop car. An officer was asking me for my phone number.

  My mom’s roommate’s boyfriend came and picked us up and took us home. The sun was coming up. My sister was quiet for several days. We never saw those people again.

  Rage is not a sin, but it can be the trigger that makes us commit sins. The real problem comes when we bottle up emotion and ignore the fact that we need to let ourselves be angry. Bad things happen when good people pretend nothing is wrong. I am sure Tom was a fairly decent person, just as I am certain that Christine cared about her kids. My judgments are based on the vague memories from an eleven-year-old’s point of view. I remember the emotion more than the circumstances. But these things stuck with me because shit like that happened all the time. My sister and I were not protected from raw hate and powerful anger. It showed me that, with the right push, and the right pressure, anyone could be hurt at any time. That in turn made me angry, made me hate the world, made me distrust everyone. It was not fair; I should not have had to grow up like that. I turned it into music. Most people turn it into crime.

  But then again, I still maintain that rage is not a sin. When properly expressed, anger can be beneficial. Some of the best art in the world is angry, jolting, and abrasive. Moderation—always practice moderation. You cannot place blame on the sin for one simple reason: If you blame one, you must blame all. If that is the case, then we are all guilty. The people who watched and did nothing are guilty. The ones who laughed and thought it was funny are guilty. The ones who suffered instead of saying something are guilty. Imagine a family tree of nothing more than the names of the people involved and you will get the idea.

  The flip side to this rusty coin is that rage can make us do funny things. Have you ever been so mad you could not say anything? Have you ever been so mad that you just blurt out the most ludicrous shit known to man? It is a base idiocy that can be as infectious as the very anger itself. Try talking to someone when you are pissed off—words escape you and everything just gets louder and louder, to the point when you are using monosyllabic words and belting at the top of your lungs. You sound like an auctioneer with Tourette’s syndrome.

  To an outside observer, the telltale signs of someone getting angry can be hilarious as well. Their face might get red, then purple. They might start smiling or laughing while they shake their heads. Their lips might purse and their eyes will get all squinty like they are channeling Clint Eastwood or Steven Seagal. Watch their hands—they could either start squeezing or sweating, depending on their mentality. Teeth might actually grind if their mouths don’t go slack from incredulous shock. All of these things are incredibly fucking funny to me, and I find myself giggling when people are incensed. That, in turn, exacerbates the situation. I cannot help it. It is awesome. Then again, it drives me nuts when people do it to me, and I become uncontrollable. I have to walk away to keep from firing off.

  Sins are the unwashed marks on your spiritual record. So how is it something we all feel almost every day is counted against you? I get it—rage can send someone down a disturbing path that can contribute to actions of questionable purity. But getting pissed shouldn’t mean getting burned. To be mad is to react to a moment beyond your control. Reacting to something you cannot control is life in a nutshell. How the fuck is that a sin?

  Let me clue you in on a real sin; actually it is more like a shame, or a sad fact. Around the 1990s, it became all the rage to start screaming in heavy metal music. Nothing wrong there: I was one of the progenitors of that whole movement, and I screamed my dark little heart out every night. But then, something truly fucked happened. People started mistaking screaming for genuine emotion, rage became synonymous with all feelings, like all you had to do to appear passionate was scream in a metal band. “Oh he is so emotional. . .” Judas fucking Priest, are you kidding me? Jazz singers get on stage and bear their souls every night, and nobody gives a shit. Fuckbucket, the lead singer for the band Land Fill (with a logo that is completely illegible, illogical, and hackneyed, just like the music) barks the vocal equivalent of vomit into an SM57 with healthy doses of “fuck” and “dad” and people call him the next Jim Morrison.

  It is not the emotion you are experiencing but the experience you are engaging. You cannot be defined by the feeling if no one knows what you are feeling, so it is the reaction that is the quote-unquote “sin.” Why is the Church so scared of people feeling anything? I have a theory. I think it is because organized religion makes such an effort to control what people do that it makes sense to control how people feel, rage in particular because it is a natural reaction to anyone or anything controlling their lives. So how do you get people to stop getting mad when you tell them what to do and how to think? Tell them it’s a sin. That is what’s called a self-realizing philosophy. It is also virtually impenetrable the further you get away from the actual inception. In Martin Luther’s day, you might have been able to reverse something so manipulative. Today, with hundreds of years of dogma and successful brainwashing under their belt, you can pound your fist against the walls of blind acceptance all you want. All you will end up with are bloody knuckles and modern frustration.

  Yeah, if you could not tell, I have a big problem with religions. Organized religion has been the blueprint for more missteps than anything I have ever seen in my life. The thing I realized early on is that for an organization that preaches the benefits of love and calls anger a sin, they certainly breed a very opinionated and angry group of people, don’t they? As I have said, hypocrisy is one of the biggest sins in the world. The effect of hypocrisy is that people are told to be one way, while the righteous can do what they please.

  These people can sincerely go fuck themselves.

  Much like lust, the only other “sin” that can be misconstrued as an emotion, there’s a stigma attached to rage that has been
dog piled by years of misrepresentation and fear. When a person gets mad, people are conditioned to think that person is immediately going to do something terrible. Some of this can be attributed to what they call “the caveman gene,” but a lot of it comes down to propaganda. If I get angry, a majority of the people will automatically think I am going to kill someone or beat my kids or rape a horse or something else equally insipid. What is the bigger sin: the anger or the mudslinging about the anger?

  Anger is a sin when parents beat their kids. The real sinner is the murderer who mangles a victim so badly she is left unrecognizable or the teacher who ignores the fact that he is supposed to actually teach because he allows his own negative feelings about children to get in the way or the wife who cheats on her husband because he did not buy her a big enough diamond for her birthday. The wheels on the bus may go ’round and ’round, but that bus might run you over if the driver gets fired.

  There are so many levels to anger and so many ways to use it in noble ways. But rage carries the scars of centuries filled with unchecked degradation. Anger is a powerful weapon in the fight for humanity. Some would rather leave humanity alone, which begs the question: Which is the bigger sin, rage or fear? The adage goes “evil triumphs when good men doing nothing.” Why would a good man do nothing to help the world? Is it a better thing to fear the unknown or to use righteous fire to fight it?

  Here is an odd posit: What is bravery, really, but the potent combination of rage and fear? What is valor but being so angry and scared you do the unthinkable? You see, anger permeates society; when the niceties give way, we are all just one fight-orflight away from eating each other. Can we get along with angry people? Of course we can—we do it every day. Can we get along without being angry? Absolutely not. It is not in our DNA to coexist peaceably. We can “play” nice, but we will never be fully cooled off enough. So how can we keep this in the “deadly sin” pile? Forget what the idealists and the hippies say; rage is here to stay.