The devil stared at his calloused hands. Its work on Earth was done. It had accomplished all that it had set out to do. And, in its newfound idleness, it wondered what it should do next. Should it do anything? What more could it do?
It had created horrors and loosed them upon the world: gnarled, apocalyptic-looking opossums that could tear a man in two with a single hand; mindless, garbage-covered, thin-haired zombies; selfish and self-destructive sociopathic greed; Charles Manson, and, perhaps even more diabolically, his followers and worshippers; and, worst of all, fiendishly conceived in the bloody, uterusic hot tub that is its mind: podcasts. (And drugs — holy hell, did it make a lot of drugs; each one more addictive, more deadly, than the last, which, to the devil, was an impressive feat, and one that it thinks it should get more credit for; the devil is the Bob-Fucking-Dylan of drugs — it’s hit after hit after hit after hit, and they gave him a Nobel Prize? Fuck, thinks the devil, that’s nothing. I created meth — where’s my fucking medal?)
Idle hands weren’t exactly new to the devil — he’d seen it before — but only ever on others. Got nothing to do? Don’t worry, the devil’s got you covered. It’ll take your lazy, sluggish hands and put ’em to good use. And by good, I mean bad, I mean sinful, I mean sinister, I mean the internet, I mean its unfiltered contagion, I mean live-streaming, I mean slop and gore and buckets of shit and piss and cum. I mean the lot. The devil knows intimately well what it can do with idle hands.
But now that those idle hands were its own, what then? Another drug? Another PornHub clone? Another monstrous cryptid? Some pustulescent salamander that eats little girls live? Should it re-ignite racial differences? Create a new and demonically accurate slur? No, no, no — it’s done all that before. No use rehashing old biblical favourites.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
