* * *
Number Eight: Thou shalt not steal.
Another no-brainer. That shit doesn’t belong to you. Leave it alone. There’s really no explaining to be done here, no loopholes. Murdering a serial killer is one thing, but stealing your neighbor’s newspaper is something else. Plus, what were you thinking? You can read it on the Internet for free!
* * *
Number Nine: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Don’t lie about him or her. Don’t make up crap to get them in trouble. Yeah, they only mow their giant lawn about once a month. And their dog is constantly escaping just long enough to leave a major dump on your lawn. They call the cops every time you have a party, not because of the noise, but because they’re pissed you didn’t invite them. All those dead cars parked on the lawn they never mow are bringing down the value of your home. And you know they’re the ones who fill up your recycling bins with their old newspapers.
Irrelevant. For whatever reason, that’s your home. You have to take the good (the ice cream truck always starts on your block!) with the bad (the ice cream truck runs late because it has to avoid hitting the neighbor’s dog). Suck it up, buttercup.
* * *
Number Ten: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.
C’mon, this isn’t the seventies and you’re not throwing a key party. Don’t be coveting: not his/her spouse, ox, or butt. Sometimes it’s hard not to be jealous, especially when your neighbors have the bad taste to flaunt their good fortune: “Gosh, don’t you think everyone should be driving electric cars? If people really cared about the environment, they’d find the money somehow.” Yeah, yeah, go plug yourself, you smug jerk.
Just . . . try to cut them a little slack. Remember, fifty thousand years ago if you didn’t play nicely with your neighbors, death came a lot quicker. These days it’s not death you have to worry about so much as intense annoyance. But you never know when you’ll need them. So be nice. Or at least don’t be terrible.
* * *
Addendum:
“And on the eighth day the Lord said, ‘Ye have done well in mine eyes; go ye forth to all the malls of the land and shoe you well with the shoes of designers. And avoid ye knockoffs, for if ye adorn thyself with such thou shalt know naught but blisters.’”
Yeah, I know: uproar. Can’t blame a gal for trying.
CHAPTER
FIVE
“Okay . . . that’s not . . . completely terrible.” Whoa. From the Ant, that was high praise. “Except for the shoe addendum. That’s just stupid.”
“It is not! Okay, it’s a little dumb. But give me a break, it took me hours to come up with all that.” Well. An hour. Except it was more like thirty minutes. I had time to kill while waiting for Sinclair to get ready to go another round. For a dead guy, his refractory period was pretty impressive. But not, y’know, instant. Besides, he was getting steadily more sulky about being left at the mansion every time I went to Hell. But that was an argument for another day. Another year, hopefully. “But it’s like Father Markus said: the basics are pretty much always the same. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t be a dick. The big diff is, it’s not a hard-and-fast set of rules for Christians. Don’t kill and don’t steal apply across religions, or lack of religion.”
“I can’t decide if that’s brilliant or deepest blasphemy. I’ll pray on it and get back to you.” He would, too. He was always tracking me down to let me know he’d prayed on something, and how the power of prayer revealed to him my general incompetence. Blech. “It’s true, you’ve covered the basics,” Markus admitted. “Though I’m not one hundred percent behind the ‘murder is okay in wartime’ clause.”
“When else would murder be okay?”
“Meet the new boss,” Tina murmured, “same as the old boss.” At the stares, she replied, “Why are you looking at me like that? I enjoy the Who as much as the next woman.”
“Except that’d be me,” Cathie pointed out, “and I hate that shit. The Simpsons described the sixties perfectly: ‘What a shrill, pointless decade.’ In fact, as more and more boomers end up in Hell, I’d like to move we forbid all bands who were in the top one hundred between 1960 and 1979. For their own safety.”
“I’m not the same as the old boss,” I said, stung. “I’m giving Hell a much-needed and long-overdue makeover, for free, I might add, which is something the old boss either never thought of or never cared about.”