Editors note: Since I'm not going to finish the entire essay about our visit to the Creationism Museum, and other parts west, anytime soon and I don't want to leave chuckling on-line magazine with no new content, we've decided to publish it as a serial. Below is part 1, which most likely will be some other part in the final essay.
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For a while, things were perfect in the Garden of Eden. As Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful garden (planted especially for them by God). They could eat of any tree in Eden, except one. This first couple had a perfect relationship with their Creator, a perfect marriage and a perfect place to live. The animals, which Adam ruled over, got along perfectly. But something obviously corrupted this “very good” world, turning it int the world we see today, which is full of sickness and death.
Because of Adam's disobedience (sin), all of his descendants (you and I) are born with sin in our nature. Because of Adam;s sin, our bodies will die. Because of Adam's sin, God cursed His precious creation. The world we see today, while reflecting God's original creation, has been corrupted by sin.
My good friend K. died a couple weeks ago. Or was it a month? Either way, I was unable to attend the funeral and it was too late to send flowers by the time I learned about her death. I knew I'd be visiting the old home town in a few weeks anyway, so I put off making a condolence call to her husband until I could do it in person.
So the first thing on my agenda was to see F. and tell him how sorry I was. Everyone told me he was devastated. I brought a joint along, as is the local custom. F. always liked to get high and that hasn't changed. He had his own dope and wouldn't think of smoking the crap I had managed to bum. I knew it would play like that going in, but I like to follow social conventions and he appreciated my efforts. It's pretty much all we've got. K was 51 when she died. Looked like 85.
K's death was horrible. She. suffered mightily for many years. Oh, I know, the end was sudden. She keeled over from a sudden heart attack and was gone before her head hit the steering wheel. That's what the paramedics said and it made everyone feel a little better. No suffering. Here one minute, gone the next. Poof.
But in reality she had been dying for a long time. Her son was killed a few years ago when the road curved and his car went straight into a ditch and flipped end over end across a wheat field. N was thrown through through the window. He broke his spine and cracked his head, killed when he hit the ground. N hadn't been drinking and only pussies wore seat belts back then, so it wasn't his fault. He had a little weed in his system but that wasn't the cause of the accident. People blamed it on lack of sleep from the messy divorce he was going through. That and working two jobs to support the baby. Sounds bad, I know, but that's pretty much everybody's story back there. K suffered every moment from when she got the call that he was dead to when her heart gave out for real in the plastic factory parking lot.
K had been a beautiful woman, but when I saw her a year after N's death she looked like a meth addict. She was beautiful one year. A craggy faced hag the next. I'm glad I didn't see her at the end, when she had actually been smoking meth for awhile. Must have been the ugliest woman alive.
According to F, she had complained of chest pains and numbness for several days before she died. He told me that during that time she had also drank a big box of wine, took over a hundred Xanax, smoked a little meth and smoked weed and cigarettes pretty much constantly. I was very surprised to hear that. The drug use was nothing new of course, but it was the first I'd ever heard of her drinking. That struck me as odd. Very odd.
But it got odder fast. F told me she had been hanging out at the bar, giving blow jobs in the parking lot and fucking old bikers in their oil stained garages. Said he caught her with some guy, told him, that's my wife, buddy. Here's five dollars, go buy her a beer. Don't ask me what the fuck that meant. I didn't ask him.
As an aside, those guys she was reportedly fooling around with must have been some serious losers. A normal man wouldn't let an old meth hag like that get anywhere near his dick. F didn't see it that way though. He was still in love. She was still beautiful. It wasn't her doing those things. It was the alcohol. As soon as she quit drinking, he would forgive her and they could go back to the way they were.
Although K deteriorated rapidly after N's untimely death, she had been unhappy for the fifteen years she had been married to F. Previously, she had been married to a friend of mine, which is how I had gotten to know her so well. Back then M was a crazy adventurous guy. They were always doing exiting things, having a good time. They seemed like such an ideal family, especially after N was born. But as is only natural, M got caught fucking the babysitter and a divorce quickly ensued. F was right there to catch her on the rebound. I think she complained bitterly about her quick remarriage to F every time I saw her after that. She would have been better off staying with M. So what if he couldn't keep his dick in his pants. At least he was alive. It was better than being with boring old F. Or she could have married me and gone off traveling to interesting places (and it's true, she could have). But no. She was stuck and she hated it.
Everyone that knew them sided with F. He was nothing but a nice guy who took good care of her and gave her with everything she asked for except excitement. She should be happy, or if that wasn't possible, get a divorce and move on. But soon he got her pregnant and she stuck it out. She regularly attended a right wing evangelical church and had strong feelings about raising children in a two parent family. She also believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and would have enjoyed the Creation Museum. As the years went by she came to believe the most outrageous right wing conspiracies and regularly expressed her hatred of all "niggers" (except those who were her friends). It was due to that kind of degeneration, especially the racist jeremiads,that I hadn't seen her for for about five years before she died. She managed to cope with her marital unhappiness until her son died by going to church on Sunday, smoking prodigious amounts of weed and taking a lots of pills. There was the occasional sniff or two of crank as well. Then later, when crank became meth, she started smoking it.
I wonder now if there wasn't something more wrong with F than anyone believed. All K ever said against him was that he was boring, but who knows what else might have been going on. I know realize that his was probably a “nice guy” in the Pandagonian sense of the term. He was the friend who was always there, then he swooped in when she was depressed about the breakup of her marriage. He was the anti-M. Now I wonder about the deeper details. Sex must have been horrible for her. That's a given.
I don't know of course but he's sure a mess now. That condolences visit was one of the most uncomfortable situations I've ever been in. It was bad enough listening to him go into way too much detail about her fucking and sucking, then alternately going on about how he loved her so much, how it wasn't her doing those things, and that he would have forgiven her if she quit drinking, but I hadn't smoked any dope for a long time and his was pretty good. I wanted to back off and analyze it all intellectually, but with the dope and all I was just horrified and uncomfortable and all I could think about was getting out of there as fast as possible. I know what you're thinking and it's true. I'm not the good friend you want around in your time of need.
Anyway, as I said above, I wasn't surprised that K deteriorated and died young. That has happened, and is happening, to a lot, if not most of my friends and acquaintances from the old home town. Any sane person either gets out or gets fucked up.
