Lost

Anyway, that guy never did come back to claim his self-help book from the other day. I'm guessing he's beyond help now, self or otherwise. Which is a real shame because one of our bartenders invented this cocktail this morning that'll cure what ails ya in ten seconds flat, whether it be syphilis or claustrophobia. It does give you hallucinations, exploding head syndrome, and spasming sphincter disorder, but hey, nobody ever said a panacea wouldn't have side effects. And SSD is a hoot at parties.

We had a priest sit in on the salon last night. He didn't wear his collar but we all knew; some priests keep an invisible collar you can see from across the room. "Anybody here ever read 'Paradise Lost'?" he asked around midnight, which had the effect of breaking up a fistfight Ron and Cal were having over 'Synthetic Men of Mars.'

"'Paradise Lost'?" pants Ron. "I'll kill any man here ever read that hoity-toity down-from-Oxford fancy-pantsy swanky-pinky-cocked university shit."

There was a general silence while I was sweeping up the broken glasses and doing a running total in my head for the damage. Now me, I've read 'Paradise Lost.' And enjoyed the hell out of it, thanks, and spent fifty pages of Books VII and IIX in a cold sweat of inevitability with a bullet casing clenched between my back teeth so's I could deal with the tension.

Ron's one of those guys who'd probably appreciate Milton's little ditty if it wasn't for the language, let's face it. He's got an 'I (heart) Satan' t-shirt for Christ's sake. What he needs is a fresh and untainted view, free from the old stones of ancient learning. Lucky for him I got all this free time.

PARADISE LOST

THE L.S.A. VERSION

Book I:
John Milton: There was a war in Heaven, and it was ugly, and the losers got thrown into a pit deeper than Rockefeller's pockets.
Beelzebub: Are you all right?
Satan: I do believe I have broken everything except my pride. Let us fuck up our enemy.
Beelzebub: Fuck yeah.
(They look around. Pandaemonium is like the aftermath of a frat party, except on a lake of liquid fire instead of somebody's basement.)
Satan: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
(He goes to wake everybody up. Everybody wakes up and complains about their backs. A bigger bunch of lowlives you have never met, including lewd spirits and sea-monsters.)
Satan: OK. So we lost. But there's always time for one more war. Somebody get me a chair and put on a fucking light. We need to talk.

See? Twenty pages of tightly-scrolled bug-up-his-ass iambic boils down, once you take out all the flowery stuff, to a couple of lines tense with broken dreams and damaged honour. What's not to like? Maybe I'll bring it up next time. If Ron pays for the broken glasses, that is: can't get something for nothing these days, and the Strip ain't a charity.