At last a gig!! Tropical!!

If you remember our last entry, we are in this tropical island, living in a cabin near our host Melissa’s house. We often have long chats with Melissa, listening  to stories about her life and family and about the comings and goings on the island (according to her, coke smuggling is a glam career choice around here and makes for great narratives of desire, greed, lust and haplessness, ‘get rich or die tryin’ style). We also enjoy playing with the 3 young kids, they have a good sense of humour and we sometimes spend hours together. Well, so much so that the other day Melissa came to the cabin and, sheepishly, confessed that the children would very much like us to watch them sing – their religious hymns!!! Would we take part in the ‘Sabado’ religious festivity the Adventists perform every Friday evening? Confusion ensued... the scene was not really ours (see the ‘S&M and other Christian perversions’ entry for details) – but a gig is a gig! We said yes and keenly joined the family in their house, where we were seated in circle, us enthroned on two mass-produced belle époque bourgeois dining chairs.

A book of psalms and songs was produced and the gig started. The first song went a bit so-so: we didn’t understand we were supposed to sing along, so we just nodded approvingly, smiling encouragingly and tapping our feet while the family was belting it out. But things smoothed out afterwards – the pater familiae informed us we are supposed to ‘help’; I asked them if they knew that we think god is dead (OK, I didn’t quite phrase it this way, I just said I don’t believe); they were a bit stunned but assured me god doesn’t mind that I think he’s dead (he’s either unconscious or doesn’t yet know he’s dead, the poor fellow, as the great stand-up comedian Jacques Lacan might’ve said). From now on, the crowd was ours!! The melodies had the complexity of nursery songs, so we had no trouble mastering the compositional intricacies. They were all written by Anglos, as limp and soggy as a wholemeal biscuit long lost at the bottom of a cup of soup, but the spirits were high, so it didn’t matter!  The lyrics were the usual Goth stuff: damnation, sulphur, doom for the sinner; eternal love and happiness for the devotees.

If I may digress for a second, I often feel that the conduct demanded from the Christian, especially in the newer sects and subcultures, resembles that demanded from a good dog: Semper Fi. Eternal, blank devotion: adore, obey and serve your master, no matter what he demands, no matter his character, no matter you have no idea why you’re asked to do these things or what they mean and that you don’t understand a iota of his desires.  Just obey, love, wait for the reward. But disobey, and the punishment will be fearsome: whipping, canning, your nose will be dragged in your own piss and feces, castration, the kennel, the shot. These Adventist songs were all of the type:

“My master gives me love and food, and bathes me now and then/

And I get treats and flea repellents and, hey, even a toy/

I get a name, a rug, a bone, a neutering and a den/

And if I sit and fetch and roll, he’ll shower me with joy/

Chorus: Oh my master there is nothing, nothing more than serving thee/

To lick your hands, sleep at your feet and be put on leash to pee”.

So we went crazy, belting them out too, nodding knowingly when psalms were read, screaming ‘’amen!’’ like Black Sabbath saying their goodbyes to a loving stadium crowd. It was a blast, the crowd was amazing and we basked in the afterglow for a while. The post-gig party was also an intimate affair, the two of us getting tanked in the cabin. We Have Cracked The Tropics!!! We Are Golden Gods!!! Rock and Fucking Roll! Thank You and God Bless, AMEN!