I’m not trying to be all Christ on the Cross or anything, but sometimes, I’ll tell you, it’s hell being a guardian angel.
This one client of mine, Eric Poole (who’s kind of a piece of work, not that I’m judging or anything, but let’s face it, I see everything he does) whose blog appears on this website, is busy trying to finish his second book. As an enormously evolved and, if I say so myself, quite attractive spirit who is charged with the care and protection of a number of lesser-evolved souls (don’t get me started on how much lesser or we’ll be here all millennium), I could see how stressed he was. After all, his last book was published two years ago and he’s only 75% finished with the second one. He’s not exactly setting any land speed records.
“What is taking so freaking long?” I said when I appeared to him in physical form around 2:00 a.m. one night.
“I have a gun,” Eric said, bolting upright in bed.
“No, you don’t,” I replied. Not that it would matter – kinda hard to shoot a spirit. (I know, I should appear in the middle of the day at his office or something, but it’s so entertaining watching humans freak out – it’s really one of the perks of the job.)
“Who are you?” he said, his voice trembling.
“I’m Otis, your guardian angel,” I said wearily, “and you’re not writing War and Peace, here. What’s the holdup?”
“I work kind of long hours at my job,” Eric said, fishing for a baseball bat that he did have under the bed.
“Join the club,” I replied.
“And I write a blog,” he added. ” There are only so many hours in the day. Don’t you know all that?”
“You write like one blog entry every two weeks. And it’s not like you have kids. What do you do when you get home at night?”
“Again,” he said, “isnt that something you would know?
Such attitude for a Level 3.
“You think I’m just sitting up here watching The Eric Show?” I replied. “I got a lot of channels to flip through. I’m not watching you go pee.”
“Well, that’s…good.”
“Alright, look,” I said with a sigh, “it’s my job to get you out of scrapes. And boy, have I. You really need to stop reading your email while you drive.”
“I only do it at stoplights!”
“Uh-huh. How’s about I step out of the other-dimensional shadows and write the blog for a while? Would that help you get that book finished before 2014, for Lloyd’s sake?”
“Lloyd’s sake?” Eric said, still fishing wildly under the bed as though I couldn’t tell what he was doing. “Who’s Lloyd?”
“Oh, that’s God’s nickname.”
“Doesn’t a nickname normally refer to an attribute, like Spaz or Fat Ass or Wombat?”
“Are you calling the Almighty a fat ass?”
“No, I just mean –“
“He nicknamed himself. He just thought Lloyd sounded more fun, you know, more accessible. God’s kind of a loaded word.”
“Well, then why doesn’t he just go by Lloyd?”
“Oh, it’s the whole branding thing,” I explained. “There’s so much material where he’s referred to as God. It’d be like Kleenex trying to change their name to Snot Rags.”
Eric finally stopped flailing around under the bed. “So you’re saying you’ll write my blog? How exactly does that work?”
“I’ll just make the entries magically appear on your website. What, I can stop a semi from running into you but I can’t operate WordPress?”
“You know,” he said, “I always believed there are spirits around us. I once saw the ghost that inhabits this house I used to live in. The house was built by Carl Laemmle for his son, and the son -“
“Yeah, I was there, listen, you’re not my only customer, can we wrap this up?”
“I just never thought I’d see another spirit, much less a guardian angel.”
“Well,” I replied with another well-earned sigh, “ta-dah.”
So, for a while at least, until Eric finishes that second memoir, I’ll be enlightening you with my own angelic brand of wit and wisdom. A lot of you have expressed interest in knowing the meaning of life and why good things happen to bad people and whether angels have lady parts. So here I am to explain it all for you.
You’re welcome.