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You’d think about the songs. They can make you feel nauseous. They — the other Santa-kind, and those wretched elves — are sickened sometimes, too. They try to block the tunes out. Still, the songs would be ringing in their ears loud and true, like an echo chamber full of echo chambers.
Such is the nature of Christmas cheer and all those corny carols and jingles. In the context of Santa slavery, it’s far more primeval. It oozes back into your primordial subconsciousness. You don’t really know how the mind works (even with your new and improved mental faculties), but you know it always works against you. It’s like the clock on the wall — tick tick ticking away, and tock tock talking to stay. It’s not going anywhere, and your mind has you locked into your sacred duties.
Still, you feel in rebellion with your senses. The fiber of your being wishes to cast them off, set them down and stumble upon a new path. Those senseless senses! It’s in your nature, in your blood. Many an elf pass by you now, and each one looks like a caveman past its prime. Not a single one is anatomically female, either. Women are not allowed in your life. Also, even if you were gay, you wouldn’t lower yourself to fraternize genitally with these warthog-looking things. You are nearly asexual, by intent of their design.
The elves chime in and hesitatingly sing the Christmas carols, echoing what’s on the loudspeakers. They don’t really want to, but they do it anyway. Their voices reverberate in their own ears, causing strange feelings of puzzled semi-joy and angst. It is almost always like this, too — the alternations between silence and nauseating joy. How else could these poor creatures cope with their collective lot in life? Suicide? They can’t do it. They just can’t. That’s how many of them got here in the first place — the semi-dead, the helplessly alive.
Some of the elves are former war criminals or soldiers gone bad. Some are just crazy “true believer” types, still willing to kill or die for some earthly cause. In fact, when foul relationships between countries make headlines, it’s sometimes because one of these little bastards escaped. They can still be ideologues, or just plain sadists. They’ll break off and possess the living, make good people commit senseless acts of terrorism against unsuspecting crowds, then get collected back to do work by God and the Devil. It’s crazy but it’s true.
Some of these elves are self-proclaimed foreign policy experts. One of them, named Luigi, is very much animal rights conscious. He once showed you what he called “tiger maps,” showing just how far humans are going to reduce living space for tiger populations. Luigi is a relatively decent elf, but he did murder his wife for insurance money. Also, his face reminds you of a squid for some reason.
You were really spacing out, thinking about this stuff. You’ve snapped back into reality now. You realize you haven’t done jack shit with the “Nice and Naughty” list. You wipe your brow, knowing you’d best get back to work. You look at little Jimmy Weather’s profile. You’ve monitored him for quite some time now. Like most people, he’s said and done some naughty things. How do you stack all comments on Life together and make sense of them, though? You don’t know the context to everything taking place. Still, you can’t doubt your abilities and duties too much. You have to follow through, or god only knows what might happen to you.
Jimmy Weather called his sister a retard two days ago. By logical extension, he’s saying she’s mentally inadequate, and implying that mentally challenged people are “lesser.” The hacker of children’s minds, or the eternal jolly spy, you know Jimmy deserves a moderate punishment for things like this. For better or worse, you get up-to-the-minute updates on kids like Jimmy, if you want them. You look at these updates often, but you never know if the punishments fit.
For obvious reasons, it’s not just kids that you have on record. You are supposed to look at everyone’s misdeeds. Certainly no Santa can catch everything, but you all do an excellent job nonetheless. For example: Not all motorists break for the birds on the road, so you note that. Another example: Others want to lose more than pounds when they go the gym. They’ll lose their self respect by staring way too much at other people’s butts. Yes, people are too prurient for their own good. It is not up to you to punish these people, really. You just make recommendations for the big guy upstairs, and only do light field work (usually just minor sabotage).
Also — quite unbelievably –, you work for Jerry Falwell. That’s right, the Jerry Falwell. He is not god, but one of God’s chosen representatives. Much as expected, Jerry Falwell keeps his own sinful pages private. It’s doubtful people would want to look at them anyway.
Still, Jerry is no stranger to the topic of sin. While alive, sin was a big topic for him. Now he’s arguably even worse. For some reason, Jerry is very obsessed with the long term effects of Trevor Richard’s masturbation to internet porn. Who is Trevor Richards? What’s the significance? Trevor is not famous, really, though he could be. He is currently one of the world’s biggest porn addicts, spending nearly every moment possible wanking it, when not directly at work or doing mundane chores. Either that or he’s thinking about doing it. Trevor’s prick makes Falwell perk.
Jerry made a note for you, regarding the options for retribution against Trevor: “Nothing hardcore in my recommended punishments. I suggest a slashed tire, or maybe a tree branch falling on his car one day. Subjecting him to worse than that seems uncalled for, especially when Trevor already demonstrates feelings of shame.”
However, Jerry seems to be going in a whole new direction lately. More and more often he’s trying to be on the front lines, directing Santas to be more self-righteous and effective against their designated targets; “Creative solutions” masked as morality. While Falwell (apparently) doesn’t directly harm or kill anybody, he has increased his requests for property damage, or to break into people’s homes and plant evidence of wrongdoing, such as clothing that doesn’t belong to one’s spouse. As weird as it is, you’re strangely used to the idea (so long as you don’t think much).
Then there are blackmail letters for money — with the prospective earnings going to a charity, of course. Once, you objected to Falwell’s request to leave a cum rag out in the open at some pervert’s office (the guy got thrills from secretly beating off at work). Jerry’s reply was stern yet calmly delivered: “Do it or I’ll make you eat it.” More generally, Jerry would say, “It’s a dirty job, but God’s somebody has to do it.”
This is what you do as “God’s somebody.” You don’t just make a list and check it twice. You’re basically checking it all the time. You’re trying to avoid such assignments, but Falwell is very good at what he does. He is a living observing machine, full of weird, nonstandard functions. You’re in his program, and you’re in it for the long haul.
(To Be Continued…)
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