Rules and Regulations.

I always thought Heaven would be a free-for-all, the major downside I was confronted with upon arriving was Heaven's rules. My only guess as to why there are rules in Heaven at all is to keep the “Utopia” regulated. Granted, most of the rules are ones that seem obvious to even the most chaotic neutral of a person.

Obviously, you are not allowed to attempt to “kill” (I use the word “kill” lightly being that we are all already dead) any of your peers. Believe it or not, you can date in Heaven, but you are not allowed to bed someone else’s partner. You also can’t slut about in Heaven. Dating one person at a time is fine even if you manage to fuck your way through all of Heaven. But if you fuck a bunch of people at once, you’re done for.

No stealing, no accusatory statements against your neighbor. This ultimately does not matter regardless, because God is consistently monitoring the whole joint. Respect your God and do not worship false gods, which again is impossible. When entering Heaven, you have a meeting with God to answer any question you may have and to get assigned your brand-new position in the land where God, Angels, and Jesus Christ exist. With that being the case, realistically who else would you worship? Joe from the Happiness department? Unlikely.

The more basic rules, to my understanding, is to follow the ten commandments. Now, when I was presented with these rules, I assumed God would send you straight to hell if these rules were broken. I’ve come to find out that when these rules are broken, depending on your ranking, you merely get demoted.

You heard me right Heaven has a ranking system, apparently, there are people who have lived their lives devoid of sin. Those people are at the top of this ranking system. The ranking system’s purpose is solely to assign you to your position.

I assume people who have lived without sin probably do something fun like make rainbows, or maybe they get to create miracles for the humans still alive on Earth. Honestly, I am not sure.

But don’t worry, most people do not live their human lives without sin. So, those who have stayed here long enough (a few millennia or so) and without any issues (i.e. breaking the rules) do eventually get promoted.

These general rules are easy to follow, but there are two more serious rules that I find hard to not break. And of course, they are the most important. Firstly, there are angels in Heaven. I would consider them like the military or some sort of weird police force. They seem to serve God without doubt, unlike some of the people who I have met in Heaven, I would consider Angel’s true believers. They rarely ever speak to anyone other than other angels, but it can be off-putting when they do speak. And unlike the military or even the police, it’s generally frowned upon to speak to an Angel. They enforce God’s rules here in Heaven, and they seem to serve no other purpose.

If you’re unlucky enough for one to speak with you, for your safety here in the ranks you better listen to what the Angel has to say. The second rule, oddly enough, is we are not allowed to discuss what our version of God or Heaven looks like to our peers. Which crushes my everlasting curiosity as to what other Heavens I’m missing out on. Simply because my Mother told me Heaven was clouds and pearly gates! I am desperate to know if someone thought of Heaven as Brooklyn. Or maybe some creative person thought up an elaborate video game as their form of Heaven.

You might find yourself asking, okay so what happens if you break the more serious rules? I know, I asked the same thing. I assumed that these were the rules that if broken… straight to hell with you! The short answer I was given, by God himself is, “There are worse things than the Human perception of hell.”

Average.

My mother was your average strong Italian American woman who instilled into me her Catholic beliefs. As I said we were average, we went to church every Sunday, we would confess our sins when we felt the guilt suddenly strike our guts. We drove a minivan and my father left my mother for his assistant.

My mother then had a slew of boyfriends that she proceeded to parade through my childhood home. When my mother was drowning in men and collecting bricks of resentment toward my father is when we stopped going to Church. See, as I said, just your average American family with normal problems.

When I reached the age where I was moving away from childhood trauma and graduating into adulthood traumas, I moved out and attended a decent four-year University. Afterward, I got a regular job as an insurance agent. A job that I was, at best, mediocre in my performance. A job that also had nothing to do with my college degree. A problem most college graduates have after they make their way across that stage to collect their degree.

I am still convinced that dreams die when you sign that dotted line and agree to an interest rate of 15% on a student loan that just covers one measly semester. And you will say yes and sign again and again every single semester, thinking it will better your life. But in truth, you are giving your life away on the simple promise of spending now and possibly excelling later…after your expensive degree.

My job consisted mostly of sales. And when you have a job selling something. Working almost solely on commission and you are also below average at the selling part. It turns out, you tend to make a mediocre wage. I was not vexed or even remotely perplexed by my average-sized salary.

I lived an ordinary semi-crap life, so I was at peace with my almost middle-of-the-road wage. But when I eventually got married to my long-time girlfriend, that is when my contentment regarding my wage came to a halt. We were trying to live the “American dream,” or at least Melissa wanted the inflated American dream.

The dream that most Americans have, a dream that consists of producing children and moving out of our run-of-the-mill condo and into a home that was far better than ordinary. A home that is also suitable for our future above-average children. My wage, unfortunately, seemed to be a factor that was preventing my wife’s American dream from coming to fruition.

In turn, my wife also started to collect bricks of resentment for me, just as my mother did to my father when I was young.

My “mommy issues” started to bubble to the surface during this time. I proceeded to follow in my father’s footsteps. I took on a lover, of sorts. I, however, was not advanced enough in my career to have an assistant. I settled on our company's young 20-something secretary. As all stories of adultery go, my wife did find the texts between Janet and me. Of course, she left me. Took her invisible house of resentment with her.

Like my mom, who was too resentful to ever forgive my father. My wife, subsequently, never forgave me, and she married a yoga instructor, of all things. But Frank, her new husband, owned many businesses. Thus, his wage was far better than the standard.

Before I died, from what I saw on InnerSociety, they have a house and three very athletic children (two of the children are from Frank’s previous marriage, from what I gather but still.). Which I suppose was for the best. After all, given my exes’ vanity and my protruding waistline and receding hairline, we would have had, at best, cute chubby children who had the pleasure of anticipating hair loss in their mid-twenties. Which, I’m sure, would have been something that Melissa could have used to fuel her unyielding indifference toward me.

Going back to my mother, I grew up moderately religious. After my father left, that was during the same time when it seemed to be going out of style to go to church every Sunday. Attending Sunday Mass was a trend that was dying in our community. My Mother’s friends never questioned why we were not attending Mass anymore because their children were growing older as well. There was no time for Church, we can all praise the Lord before bed every night in the comfort of our own homes. Or at least those are the things we told my mom’s friends, and what my mom’s friends regurgitated back to us.

When we did regularly attend church, we never participated in any anti-gay-rights dogma or any preachings that were remotely bigotry. My mother and her friends, along with all their children attending church was almost like a trend from the 80s that needed to run its course into the 90s. Attending Sunday mass was something our grandparents did with our parents, thus tradition followed me into my childhood. Until, like most trends and traditions, this one died out as well. Sure, we said we were religious. And my mom still posted status updates on InnerSociety about God, but we never attended church regularly again.

Perhaps we were not true believers, I never had the bible drilled into me. I did not, and I still don’t know all the bible stories unless it’s something in the vein of Noah’s Ark. If there was a book that was called the classics of the bible, that is essentially the only holy stories I was taught.

I was a child when we still attended Sunday mass regularly, but it was when my grandfather died that my mom explained to me exactly who God was to her. And of course, what Heaven was, what she believed it to look like, and why Grandpa had to go there after his heart stopped beating.

In my eyes, God was just a friend who kept my grandpa safe in Heaven, who I could speak to only in the form of prayer. I was encouraged to pray every night, but like most, I tended to only pray to God when I was in peril and felt like I was in dire need of divine assistance.

God or Heaven was never something I questioned per se. I blindly believed my mom when she said Heaven was a utopia consisting mostly of clouds, famous dead people, my grandpa, and God. And God was like an old friend whose sole fashion sense consisted of draping white togas, accessorized with a gold belt.

It was only when I started to get a little older, I realized my mom probably took me to church for a few reasons. One: because her mother brought her to church. Two: Her friends went to church and brought their children as well. And Three: so, I can attend religion classes to eventually be able to do the whole confirmation thing. This had two benefits, I would not go to hell. And she could see me get married in my childhood church in front of God, my dead grandpa, and my other dead relatives. Regardless, as an adult, I never questioned my mother’s beliefs and so I thought Heaven was truly a wonderful Utopia of clouds, rainbows, and happiness. I would not say my mother was wrong, but my time here has shown me that, at the very most, Heaven is a nonsensical fever dream. And, at the very least, there are downsides to Heaven.

Prologue, Heaven.

In the most literal sense, Heaven is everything you ever imagined it to be.

If you imagined Heaven as Brooklyn rather than big, pearly white gates and houses made of clouds you’ll get a 400-square-foot studio apartment surrounded by skyscrapers covered in graffiti instead. In fact, you probably crossed a semi-normal-looking bridge to get here. Instead of the big white one made with the most fluffy and prestigious clouds sprinkled with that gold sparkly shit. With shiny, white round pearls on the tops of the cylinder columns that hold the thing together.

Unfortunately, I did imagine Heaven as a place with a big fluffy bridge, big pearly white gates, and more clouds than I ever needed to see in a millennium. So many God damned clouds. You’d be surprised by how nauseating all-white everything gets after days upon days of being blinded by all the sterile gleam.

Regarding the notion of the afterlife being literally exactly how you imagined it. This applies to God as well. Growing up, my mother told me God and Jesus were white men with long beards, dressed in togas. When I got here and met the man himself, that’s what he looked like. Except for Jesus, yes to me he did resemble a white man with a beard who sometimes wore a toga to formal events, but mostly he just looked like a straight-up hipster.

If I wanted to get into specifics. I’d say Jesus is a hipster who spends too much of his time drinking New England India Pale Ale as he pretends to come off as enlightened. The word Jesus described himself as is “woke.” However, I would like to call him a drunk sociopath with daddy issues and far too much free time on his hands. Hell, he even seemed to glorify New York as a romantic idea just like many of the hipsters who seemed to flock to the gentrified Williamsburg as if the place itself would turn them into some sort of new-aged James Dean type.

I would imagine that if you’re someone who envisioned Heaven as Brooklyn perhaps God would also appear as some sort of hipster or some other kind of New York stereotype. The types of folk who fill the coffee houses that have unfinished brick and jazz music lightly bouncing from wall to wall.

However, when it comes to my man Jesus, I honestly think a hipster who consumes too much IPA and falsifies enlightenment is who he really is at his core. He would exist as that no matter how you imagined Heaven to be. Except for me, he is all of that dressed occasionally in a toga for formal events. Usually neglecting to wear underwear.

As I said previously, for me, almost every god-damn thing is a cloud. The ground, my home, and parts of the building where I go to work every day. Parts of God’s mansion and even parts of Jesus’s mansion. As well as a few of the bars on Main Street. Every single thing. The bright side is, we are encouraged to look on the bright side, I can walk everywhere with absolutely no shoes on and I would say that is more comfortable than wearing the silly sandals they distribute. So, I would imagine that if you are someone who imagined Heaven as Brooklyn you probably would not be so comfortable going shoeless, would you? But you probably would be going to an office that might resemble something other than a cloud-like Pantheon. And not everything would be a blindingly pearly white, at least you have that going for you.