Free Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie

man?
• Do you think you will see angels before you die? Do you think angels will come to escort you to Heaven? As the angels are carrying you to Heaven, how many times will you ask, “Are we there yet?”
• Your son distinctly remembers stopping once or twice a month at that grocery store in Freeman, Washington, where you would buy him a red-white-and-blue Rocket Popsicle and purchase for yourself a pickled pig foot. Your son distinctly remembers the feet still had their toenails and little tufts of pig fur. Could this be true? Did you actually eat such horrendous food?
• Your son has often made the joke that you were the only Indian of your generation who went to Catholic school on purpose. This is, of course, a tasteless joke that makes light of the forced incarceration and subsequent physical, spiritual, cultural, and sexual abuse of tens of thousands of Native American children in Catholic and Protestant boarding schools. In consideration of your son’s questionable judgment in telling jokes, do you think there should be any moral limits placed on comedy?
• Your oldest son and your two daughters, all over thirty-six years of age, still live in your house. Do you think this is a lovely expression of tribal culture? Or is it a symptom of extreme familial codependence? Or is it both things at the same time?
• F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the sign of a superior mind “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.” Do you believe this is true? And is it also true that you once said, “The only time white people tell the truth is when they keep their mouths shut”?
• A poet once wrote, “Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.” Can you tell us, in twenty-five words or less, exactly how much we all hate mathematical blackmail?
• Your son, in defining you, wrote this poem to explain one of the most significant nights in his life:
    Mutually Assured Destruction
When I was nine, my father sliced his knee
With a chain saw. But he let himself bleed
And finished cutting down one more tree
Before his boss drove him to EMERGENCY.
Late that night, stoned on morphine and beer,
My father needed my help to steer
His pickup into the woods. “Watch for deer,”
My father said. “Those things just appear
Like magic.” It was an Indian summer
And we drove through warm rain and thunder,
Until we found that chain saw, lying under
The fallen pine. Then I watched, with wonder,
As my father, shotgun-rich and impulse-poor,
Blasted that chain saw dead. “What was that for?”
I asked. “Son,” my father said, “here’s the score.
Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”
• Well, first of all, as you know, you did cut your knee with a chain saw, but in direct contradiction to your son’s poem:
A) You immediately went to the emergency room after injuring yourself.
B) Your boss called your wife, who drove you to the emergency room.
C) You were given morphine but even you were not alcoholically stupid enough to drink alcohol while on serious narcotics.
D) You and your son did not get into the pickup that night.
E) And even if you had driven the pickup, you were not injured seriously enough to need your son’s help with the pedals and/or steering wheel.
F) You never in your life used the word, appear, and certainly never used the phrase, like magic .
G) You also think that Indian summer is a fairly questionable seasonal reference for an Indian poet to use.
H) What the fuck is “warm rain and thunder”? Well, everybody knows what warm rain is, but what the fuck is warm thunder?
I) You never went looking for that chain saw because it belonged to the Spokane tribe of Indians and what kind of freak would want to reclaim the chain saw that had just cut the shit out of his knee?
J) You also think that the entire third stanza of this poem sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song and not necessarily one of the great ones.
K) And yet, “shotgun-rich and impulse-poor” is one of the greatest