My idea of Heaven

... contains the ultimate Magic 8 Ball®.

You go into this room where the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball sits on an otherwise bare, unprepossessing table. An equally unprepossessing chair is there for you to sit on; maybe it's one of those clunky steel folding chairs, chocolate brown or battleship gray, like the ones you've seen at all those all-you-can-eat charity spaghetti pigouts you go to.

Anyway, the thing about the UM8B is, you don't have to phrase your questions for a "yes" or "no" type response. You can ask the UM8B literally anything—about literally anything—and it will give you the unadulterated dope right there on the spot. Yup. The pure, unvarnished, pull-no-punches truth. "The whole truth and nothing but" that hardly ever rears its ennobling head in court no matter how much swearing goes on.

And never mind asking ho-hum crappola like "C'mon, who really shot J.F.K.?" or "Did President William Jefferson Clinton—or did he not—have sexual relations with 'that woman'?" or "What is the meaning of 'is'"?

No. What I'm talking about is ...

I go into the room. I sit down before the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball. I nod my head to the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball in the most respectful manner imaginable. I clear my throat and pose my question: "Hey, what was the deal with my mom and dad's break-up, O Ultimate Magic 8 Ball?"*

I then grasp UM8B with both hands. I lift and gently but emphatically, and of course reverentially, shake UM8B two, three, seventy times. I upend UM8B and watch with paralyzing anticipation as the oracular icosahedron bobbing within its encapsulated watery murk slowly rises into bubbly view, and ...

Lo and behold!

There's like a book's worth of luminescent microscopic verbiage on the exposed icosahedral surface. But this being Heaven and the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball, I have as little trouble reading the tiny treatise as I would the first line of an optometrist's wall chart at arm's length.

What, oh what, does it say? you wonder. I'll get back to you when I'm dead.

* See blog entry entitled July 14, 1987.
Magic 8 Ball is a registered trademark of Mattel Inc.

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