How It Must Have Happened

The Reverend Roy Herberger, pastor of St. Columbia-Brigid Roman Catholic Church in Buffalo, New York, wanted to put up a funny sign. "Everybody likes funny church signs," he thought, so he went to Google where he found a lot:

DO YOU KNOW WHAT HELL IS?
COME MEET OUR PREACHER

GOD SHOWS NO FAVORITISM
BUT OUR SIGN GUY DOES
GO CUBS!

IPOD? IPAD?
TRY IPRAY
GOD IS LISTENING

One sign in particular, though, struck close to home. He prided himself on keeping tabs on his congregation, and he knew it included a lot of remarried parents. Weren't some of those kids struggling with stepparents? he wondered. Shouldn't he show some support? "I sure as heck will!" he declared, and he went outside and put up this sign:

Within seconds the church's phone was ringing off the hook. Catholics don't support gay marriage! the callers screamed. This is blasphemy! Are you crazy? Are you saying it's okay for gay couples to raise kids?

Naturally Rev. Herberger was shocked. He didn't mean anything like that! He was just providing encouragement to the children in his congregation who had, say, a regular dad along with a new stepdad.

Embarrassed, he raced outside and added a clarifying line:

JESUS HAD 2 DADS
AND HE TURNED OUT JUST FINE
BUT THEY WEREN'T MARRIED TO EACH OTHER

Still, the phone didn't stop ringing. "Are you saying God and Joseph were dating?" Old Lady Blandings screamed. "I'm trying to come up with a reason why you think Jesus' two dads should have gotten married," yelled Willie Grimshaw, a local plumber. "But all I can come up with is YOU'RE A MORON."

Rev. Herberger quickly jogged outside, and he changed the message to this:

JESUS HAD 2 DADS
WHO DIDN'T HAVE SEX WITH EACH OTHER
AND HE TURNED OUT JUST FINE

"I'm a little confused," said "Tiny" Mike Gastrudo. "Are you saying the two dads never had sex with each other, or stopped having sex with each other?" "So everything's cool if the two dads don't have sex with each other?" asked a furtive, anonymous voice. "Can they still, like, come on each other's chests?

This time Rev. Herberger sprinted outside, and he rewrote the message to say this:

JESUS WAS CO-PARENTED BY OUR HOLY FATHER
AND SOME RANDOM GUY WHO HUNG AROUND MARY
AND HE TURNED OUT JUST FINE

The first phone call he answered was supportive. "Thank you so much for the comforting message, Reverend," said parishioner Ida Rae Thompson. "I thought the church would frown on it if they knew I left my Cremona for weeks at a time with a guy I met at Skunky Junk's." The fifty-odd calls that followed, though, used words like "heretic" and "burned at the stake."

Rev. Herberger was at his wits' end. "I'M LOST!" he yelled to God. "I'M CONFUSED! PLEASE, GOD, HELP ME! GIVE ME A MESSAGE! SEND ME A SIGN!"

A parishioner walking by heard the plea and decided to get back at the Reverend. In his most booming voice he shouted, "I can't! I'm too busy having sex with some random guy who used to hang around with Mary!"

Rev. Herberger freaked out. Was that really God? he asked himself. Or had the flap driven him nuts? Had he gone stark, raving mad? It didn't matter. He was finished. He'd been broken in two, flattened, humbled. The previous Rev. Herberger didn't exist any more. But then it hit him like a bolt of lightning: wasn't that what religion was all about? Letting go of one's ego so Our Lord can take charge? He took down the message and replaced it with this:

The Reverend admired his handiwork and put the spare letters away. Just as he was locking up the church for the evening, the phone started to ring, and he thought, "Wait."

How It Must Have Happened

Dear President of Domino's,

I work at a Domino's in Brooklyn and I think it's really fun. The food is tasty, the employees are nice, and I get to drive around delivering shit. One day, though, I noticed nobody's eating the new oven-baked subs, and I decided to find out why.

I asked one of our regulars why she never tried the subs. She had a bunch of reasons. "Dude, have you seen them?" she said. "They're disgusting. Nobody in their right mind would eat one of those. I mean, look at that picture. If eight million dollars in advertising dollars can't budge your sandwich offa sickening I'll stick to the Meat Lover's pizza, thanks.

"Meanwhile," she said, "look at that ingredient list. 'Thinly sliced steak.' What's up with that? Have you ever been to a steakhouse? Were there lots of dudes telling the waiter, 'Now make sure that top sirloin is sliced like a sixteenth of an inch thick.'

"And 'hardwood smoked flavored bacon'? You guys actually decided it was too difficult to set the bacon in a little room where shit was on fire? That kind of makes it difficult for me to accept all this 'premium' shit. 'Premium' parmesan, 'premium' provolone, you even got 'premium' American. You know it's just oil, right? Are you saying it's high-quality oil, like unleaded?

"When dudes are too lazy to actually smoke their bacon, I'm pretty sure 'premium' just means all the shit that ain't fall on the ground."

I had to admit she had a point, though at our store we use the word "special." "Tell you what," I said. "If you eat one of our toasty new baked subs, I'll do something really disgusting too."

"Oh no," she said. "You work around this shit all the time. You're like inoculated against disgusting food."

"You nuts," I said. "You eat our fuckin' pizzas like every damn day. You know this shit better than anyone."

She didn't answer so I knew I got her. "You're just a coward," I said. "Bitch be too scared to eat a fresh and hearty oven-baked sub."

"No I ain't," she said. "I could jam one down like Kobayashi. I just wanna make sure we're making a fair bet. If I'm gonna eat one of them things then you've gotta do something really sickening."

"Okay," I said. "You name it. Anything."

She thought for a minute. "You know those thrill rides at the church carnival? You gotta go on the Fling N' Puke."

"You're fuckin' kidding me," I said. "That's plain nuts. That piece of shit been put together by drunks."

She pretended to think. "So that's different from your pert and shareable subs exactly how?"

I thought for a couple minutes but I couldn't come up with anything.

"So who's chicken now?" she said. "The dude who doesn't want to depend on rubber bands to yank him back from certain death, or the one who's gonna be eating thinly sliced steak and premium cheese?"

Well, long story short, we agreed. She'd eat a hot and toasty Domino's sub, and I'd go on a thrill ride assembled by alcoholics at Our Lady of the Singing Hedgehog.

Despite all the puking we both learned something: that sometimes shit isn't as bad as you think it's gonna be. We got to thinking that maybe this would make a good slogan in a TV commercial, though maybe you could class up the words a little first. As for that customer, she's a convert. "I totally got egg on my face," she said. We laughed and I held her hair back and I said I was pretty sure it was cheese.

Your faithful employee, RomanHans