My overdose

Starting in two weeks, this column will have a new name and identity.

Allow me to explain.

Some of you may have noticed that “Sordid Tales” was missing from the March 18 issue of CityBeat. That was because I had a bit of an accident. Well, maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was an on-purpose, which is to say, I freaking overdosed! On what, I don’t know, since I had ingested so many liquids, powders and pills that night, there’s no way of telling what it was that stopped my heart in the same manner that a brick wall stops a speeding egg.

One minute I was recoiling from having unintentionally observed the top of Dan Frost’s inflamed ass crack as he lined up a pool shot, and the next I awoke with a rubber tube down my throat and a small gathering of whitecoats flailing above me trying to save my life.

The procedure is called a gastric lavage (commonly known as the stomach pump), and it feels as though your gullet is being gang-raped by horde of carnivorous alien zombies.

It was there, in the hospital, a few hours after that violent intubation—lying broken and twisted among the rocks and glass at the bottom of my bottomed-out existence—where I encountered Jesus Christ.

Imagine my surprise. All my life I had dismissed religion. All my life I pooh-poohed anyone’s attempt to show me The Light and The Way. All my life I’ve been told by the deeply spiritual that one day Jesus would appear to me, and all my life I snickered at them.

Not snickering anymore.

Of course, Jesus did not come to me in the flesh. I’m not crazy, you know. It was more like a warmth enveloping me, a general feeling of aplomb that was instantly identifiable as The Lord wrapping his enormous, goose-down arms around me. Then He spoke. Not out loud, of course. I’m not crazy. Rather, He spoke as a voice in my head. He told me there was a hole inside of me, a hole excavated by Satan. He told me it was not my fault, but that it was now time to accept Him into my life. So I did, and, instantly, the giant hole inside of me—the hole that Satan dug, the hole that I never knew existed—was filled with the groovy golden cement mix that is the Gospel of Christ, our Savior.

After returning home from the hospital, I started implementing the appropriate spiritual changes in my life. You know, ditching the drugs and booze, getting rid of my Black Sabbath and AC/DC box sets, freeing the sex slaves from my dungeon—that sort of stuff. The next thing that needed changing was the title of this column. Obviously, with my newfound spirituality, “Sordid Tales” will no longer be acceptable, so I’ve changed it to “My Sacred Muse.”

Next, I had to scrub Edwindecker.com of all the blasphemous prose I had scribed over the years. All the religion-bashing and debauchery-promoting that was the signature of my writing simply had to go. And by-Jiminy was there a lot! I felt like a killer trying to scour every speck of blood from a homicidal home invasion. Whether in giant pools or tiny drops, the blood and guts of my blasphemy was everywhere! On the floors, walls, ceiling, couch and lampshades of my website. It took no less than four score and 14 Red Bulls to clean it all, and it was quite a depressing task. Not so much because of how much sacrilege was there, but how little usable content was left behind. The whole process left me asking some serious questions: How did I not know that Satan was using me to publish his carnal worldview? How did I not know that Christ was always there, by my side, waiting to be noticed? How could I have been so blind?

Anyway, there’s your back story. In two weeks I begin writing my new beginning: “My Sacred Muse.” Instead of being a column about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, “My Sacred Muse” will preach abstinence, restraint and the glory of singer-songwriter music. Instead of writing about drunken, barroom encounters, I will write about all my kooky escapades at midnight mass. I will write about the joys of procreation, the wonder of faith healing and the mortal danger of excessive penis-washing—which I used to do several times a day, even though the penis is, as Jesus informed me in the hospital room that woeful night, “A self-cleaning organ.”

I was also thinking, as part of a monthly routine, I would use “My Sacred Muse” to identify the more notorious sinners of San Diego, as a call to my fellow Christian crusaders to do whatever it takes to convert their souls—black and slimy as the underside of a rotten Portobello—to The Gospel of Christ: sinners like Steve Poltz, whose songs about fornication and tomfoolery disguised as nursery rhymes irrevocably damage the psyche of unsuspecting children; sinners like Tim Pyles, who thinks “being saved” means successfully sneaking out of some godawful broad’s apartment the morning after a particularly beastly one-night stand; sinners like Anders Wright, who writes all the CityBeat movie reviews with a secret gay code embedded to further his homosexual agenda. (If you highlight every 15th word, it reads, “I lick balls and like it,” over and over again.)

Oh, gay Anders, don’t you know you must repent?

I know, I know, in my pre-Christian days, I supported homosexual rights. But all that has changed. As Jesus told Paul when they were lamenting about Judas’ unnerving habit of patting the other apostles on the butt, “If I wanted homosexuality to be in the mainstream,” said Christ, “I wouldn’t have made all the queer bars so dark inside.”    

This story was part of our April Fool's Day issue of 2009. Don't believe it.