Christmas with Pentecostal Fried Chicken
Their heads are bowed; eyes closed tight. Our heads are up; eyes wiiiiiiide open
as grandma weaves her annual christmas 10-minute prayer,
which is, essentially, just a paraphrased version
of a year's worth of Pat Robertson's 700 Club televangecasts
with a few of her own imaginative flourishes televangelized in.
Things like: the world is filled with sinful, evil people and ideas
because christ's picture is, apparently, on white milk cartons across the country?,
but no one seems to be working at the call center
to answer the goddamn missing person's hotline.
And oh, thank the lord, for our family has found christ,
and, is, I guess, not going to get a job at the call center?,
but is instead just hoarding christ for ourselves,
so we are thusly blessed with the bounty of his body,
which has appeared to us in the form of day-old Kentucky Fried Chicken,
original recipe.
Oh, and bless our dear gramps, who is in heaven with his father, jesus,
the two of them providing these blessed gifts for us,
which are, of course, just boxes filled with money from gramps',
and I guess jesus's?,
retirement from the City of Portland's Wastewater Treatment Plant.
And oh, thank you lord for our faith in you, for through our faith,
we will all join you in your paradise, amen.
And I wonder, if, as my uncle, aunt, and pasty ass cousins say amen,
if they could feel that for the last 10 minutes,
my wife's humanism has been breaking the bones in my hand;
my sister-in-law has been holding my niece against her legs,
as if to say, I told you this was going to be a long night, just hold it together;
my niece has been making sense of the dynamic in her 7-year-old ways;
and I have been engaged in a glaring contest with my mom.
She is communicating to me to remember the deal,
and I am communicating to her that I remember the deal,
but I don't. fucking. like. the deal.
Because the deal is, we have to let grandma go to her grave
believing that we believe
in the taste of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
That once grandma joins gramps and jesus
in the City of Portland's Wastewater Treatment Plant in the sky,
then,
and only then,
can we finally say things to the others like,
"This chicken sucks—
AND jesus isn't white."
Or,
"This chicken sucks—
AND so does your GoFundMe page asking for blessings and prayers and $2,500 to get your naughty dog the training he desperately needs."
Or,
"This chicken sucks—
AND you're raising your boys to be racist, misogynist, pasty weirdo creeps who will believe they grew up disadvantaged because immigrants and women are taking jobs and scholarships and not because of the reality that their dad went to a pentecostal echo chamber college and then decided to become an independent contractor,
like jesus,
but couldn't make any money because only other pentecostals want other pentecostals building their houses and the world is filled with more diversity than that so when dad's business collapsed he had no other skills to save him."
But nooooooooooo!
The fucking deal is:
we gotta stuff this Pentecostal Fried Chicken down our gullets
and let it burn through our intestines and explode out our rectums
so we can flush it up to the City of Portland's Wastewater Treatment Plant in the sky
where gramps and jesus can recycle that shit into next year's christmas dinner.
And so, as they say amen, I wonder if, over the years, they've caught on to the deal,
the deal where we must give up our tastes at the expense of theirs.
And then, a christmas fucking miracle happens. One of the future racist,
misogynist, pasty weirdo creeps runs up to his mom, points to my niece,
and says,
"Mommy, mommy,
McKenna says her family doesn't like
Kentucky Fried Chicken."
