Bart has sex with marge

Teresa said on the latest episode that before long and during filming, she could speak about what Marge has supposedly been doing and we would all be shocked, but she said she couldn’t say anything yet as it was all being handled by lawyers, which is only an issue if there are legal proceedings. But if that’s the case, filming is long since over and so we should know what it is now if anything has actually been filed or acted on legally, but I haven’t heard anything. Does anyone know what she’s on about?
Edit: Okay so after checking online what I found out:

1. The ‘case’ Vanessa lost was re a restraining order against Luis, that happened in October last year.
   
2. In February of this year, lawyers acting on behalf of Vanessa re harassment & abuse claims are taking Luis, Bo Deitl and their lawyers to court claiming wiretap and fraud in relation to this. Luis et al have since counter sued and this is all in progress, i.e. not settled.
   
3. It is being reported that Luis claims Vanessa passed on info to the cast to use against him, including Marge, and he admitted to getting investigators to pose as clients to try to get info re this. (This would be no bombshell at all if true, don’t we already know this? Also it’s very understandable).
   
4. Also, lastly, in an earlier case Vanessa and Luis settled out of court re her claims against him re abusive treatment when she would not engage in sex. At least one other ex partner has come out with the same allegations against Luis. (So, again, Vanessa warning the cast would make sense).
   

So yeah, I’m not sure Teresa has what she thinks she does…

We know none of the Belcher kids like sports much and really neither do Bob or Linda for that matter. But Louise loves fighting, violence and kicking ass. I think hockey would be great for her. Especially since too, hockey comes up every known and then in the background of Bob's Burgers. Mostly through Teddy.
In this episode Teddy needs Bob to stand in as the replacement cook at the hockey rink during a weekend hockey tournament. It's a tournament that features both youth and adult divisions.
Louise witnesses the girls hockey and sees them checking, and hitting and taking bad penalties and wants to try it.
Tina meets an older hockey boy and of course keeps trying to sneak into the boys locker room. Zeke plays on said boy's hockey team and brings Jimmy Jr with him for support. Tina still like Jimmy Jr. but is conflicted with this hockey boy (who of course has no idea Tina exists).
Gene discovers the organ player and the organ and wants to play. The organist is a cranky old guy and the organ is over a hundred years old. The organist won't let Gene touch it but of course he is determined just to play one song.
Also we see Teddy and the Mighty Schmucks play. Teddy turns out to actually be good at hockey much to everyone's surprise. Also the rest of the Might Schmucks are aware Teddy isn't Jewish but keep him on the team because he is good. Teddy has no idea they know.
Of course Bob and Linda are overwhelmed by the food orders. Linda leaves Bob to fend for himself while she chats with the hockey moms (who to add further confusion about where Bob's Burgers takes place all have Minnesotan accents "Don't cha Know").
Finally before anyone says "Hockey is an expensive sport and the Belchers are poor, no way Louise can afford to play." This is a cartoon and if Homer and Marge can have both Bart and Lisa playing hockey, than Bob and Linda can pay for Louise to play.

This story was originally written July 2023.
You might have heard of me. I was a social media influencer for two years.
I know kids have “influencer” as one of their top professions these days, but for me it was all an accident, really. I uploaded a few YouTube videos back in 2019, in the summer I finished school. All I did was rant about movies. I had a few notes, not a full script, and just spouted off to my laptop camera about inaccurate science, bad casting choices, real nitpicky stuff. In about six months I’d got 200 subscribers.
I was at university then, and I mentioned my videos to some of my uni friends. They subbed and told their friends, and I got up to 1,000 sub by January 2020. My videos were only about ten minutes long, and I had nowhere near the views to monetise. I was making one a week, but not on any sort of schedule. It was just something I did when I was bored.
Then the pandemic hit. A lot of students here in England basically got locked into their halls of residence (that’s dorms for any Americans reading), but I was lucky enough to get back to my parents’ before then. So I was doing what my uni laughably called “remote learning”, which basically meant a couple of video lectures a week, some worksheets, and lots and lots of my own research. I won’t bore you with the topic of my course; it’s not relevant.
I’m not exactly stereotypically pretty. I’ve come to accept that. My hair is stringy, my nose is too big, my face is profoundly asymmetrical, my complexion is strange and acned, my teeth are crooked … You get the idea. You can only do so much with makeup and hair that covers your face. I probably have fewer friends than I would if I looked like other people, and it actually took a lot of courage to make that first video - and even more courage to upload it.
I can only assume that’s the reason I went viral. It certainly wasn’t the high production values, or the tightly-written scripts, or the quality of my research. On the 9th of April I had 1,322 subscribers. On the 10th it was over 8,000. By the end of April it was up to 300,000, and I had actually monetised my channel.
The comments were … well, they were varied. Lots of hate because of my looks, but lots of love from people who just appreciated what I put out there, calling out others for their negative comments. I know many social media stars struggle with unkind comments, but I’d got used to it. Let’s be honest, they weren’t nice, but neither were they untrue. And comments under your video are easier to ignore than comments in the street. I was making decent money after all. If you were one of those commenters, you know which side you were on, and I love you either way. Thanks for the engagement - it’s not easy to gain financially from your unusual appearance!
The trouble with going viral is that it doesn’t last. Competing in the fast-paced world of internet stardom takes a lot of effort. I started experimenting with other things - YouTube shorts, TikTok, Instagram, pretty much anything going. The format that turned out to work best was actually TikTok. I’d bought some skimpy outfits and did ridiculous little dances. I quickly reached over a thousand views per video, and while I wasn’t up to their creator tier, it still worked. A well-known cosmetics company asked to sponsor my videos.
Cosmetics! Me! I guess they were going for woke points or something. I didn’t care, they offered me more money than I knew what to do with, as long as my views stayed high. So I started making 2-minute videos. A dance without make-up, then I applied the make-up - being sure to show the brand name clear and up-close - and then the same dance with make-up. If this is ringing any bells with you, then yes - that was me. And no, stupid - that’s not my real name.
I’d got used to undesired attention of course. Along with the unpleasant comments, I got my fair share of unwelcome male approaches. For a few hours after any upload, about half of my DMs were from men, and some women (or men with female account names), asking to see more of me. I wasn’t a camgirl, though I suppose I wasn’t a million miles away from one; but I could have been. I did seriously consider it a few times, but never actually followed through.
And half of the rest of my DMs, and a good portion of the public comments, were from angry women. What made me think I had the right to show off like that? How could I bring their favourite cosmetics brand into disrepute? But I’ve got pretty thick skin (hey, I can make that joke, you can’t), and mostly laughed the comments off and ignored them.
That was, in hindsight, a mistake.
By September my uni was reopening for in-person teaching. I was working six or seven hours a day just to keep up with everything, and had a couple more brands sponsoring me. Being an influencer isn’t just about filming for ten minutes a day and watching the money come in!
So I was going to tutorials an hour a day, watching video lectures at 2x speed, and ignoring my assignments in favour of making videos and replying to messages. It’s not like my pointless degree was helping with my real job.
Okay fine. It was geology. Rocks and stuff. You happy now? I bet you can’t tell the difference between sylvite and carnallite just by licking it, can you?
Anyway, the point is I came close to being chucked out. Actually I had to repeat the second year. At least I could afford it.
So anyway, I somehow got through to the end of my second year, the end of my second year again, and part way through my third year. I was passing my exams - just - and through several reinventions I had managed to maintain my social influencer role. Last Autumn I was getting some good views, and cash, back on YouTube. I was getting pretty good at make-up (I had an exclusive deal with one company on TikTok, and another deal with a different cosmetics company on YouTube). The videos that did well then were me with experimental hairstyles and not much in the way of clothes, putting on makeup for a few minutes, then reading out-of-copyright fiction in my patented “YouTube voice”. If you can imagine a cross between Shania Twain and Marge Simpson then… well, then you’re weird, but you’ve pretty much got it.
Then, last December, a week or so before the Christmas holidays, I went out with my friends. I had made a decent number, both girls and guys, by then. I could never quite tell whether it was my personality (which I assure you is fantastic), my influencer status, or the cash I was liberal with (it always seemed to be my round, and I didn’t mind). There were even a couple of boys who were keen on me, though I hadn’t done anything about it yet. Eight of us went out together to celebrate a birthday. It wasn’t actually anybody’s birthday that day, but Shireen had a Christmas Day birthday, and she wanted a proper party.
Now I look quite different in real life than I do online. I think the technical term is “frumpy” - jeans, trainers, fluffy jumper and a hat, or maybe a hoodie. The birthday girl had somehow convinced me to put a bit more effort in, and had helped me pick out some heels and a knee-length silver dress. Make-up was easy for me of course, and so I got dressed up and off we went to the Black Swan.
The Black Swan has several great qualities about it. One: it’s cheap. Two: it does good food. Three: it’s a couple of hundred metres from The Bar. We had a decent meal, a few drinks, and around 9 we walked to The Bar.
To be more precise, they walked. I wobbled. If you’ve watched my videos you might have seen me in heels, but did you ever see me walk in them? Didn’t think so.
The Bar is open til 3 in the morning. It looks respectable enough from the outside, especially in the afternoon; but after about 11, when most pubs close, it fills up with students drinking expensive-looking drinks. And almost every night, somebody jumps up onto a table, and then everybody’s up there dancing. In The Bar, either you hold your drink tightly, or you lose it.
I’d done this before, and I can handle my alcohol. I’ve stayed at The Bar till chuckout more than a few times, and I’ve been wobbly on the way home, but I’ve never thrown up or passed out. And so I was surprised when I woke up. The last thing I remembered was Stu saying he was tired, and Shireen replying that it wasn’t even midnight yet. Now I was lying on the hard wooden floor of my living room.
My head pounded. Daylight streamed through the window, and I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes. My hands were wet and sticky.
I looked at them. They were covered in blood.
I looked down. My heels were across the room, but I was still wearing my dress. It, also, was covered in blood, a huge stain across the chest.
Panic set in. What happened to me last night? I checked myself out and could find no injuries. Where did the blood come from?
Standing up, I realised it was worse than that. Red pools stained the wooden floor. I don’t know much medicine, but if somebody had lost this much blood, I couldn’t see how they could have survived.
I stood up, unsure whether my shaking was from the shock or the alcohol. This was when I saw a shirt on the floor behind me. White, with a subtle pattern. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it wasn’t my shirt. I lived alone, and rarely invited people back to my flat. I looked around some more. A pair of men’s black leather shoes by the door. And then I saw it.
I suppose, rather, I should say him. He was naked except for a pair of dark blue jeans, slumped in the open doorway to the kitchen, covered in blood, and very, very, dead.
I panicked then. I’m calmer now, so let’s take a moment to describe my conclusions that morning. I had got very drunk. I had met a guy. We’d come back to my flat. We’d been getting naked (the shoes and shirt weren’t bloodied). Then, for some reason, we’d had an argument or a fight. The body had stab wounds in the chest, and a pool of blood had congealed onto the wooden floor of the living room and the linoleum of the kitchen where the man collapsed. How did those stab wounds get there? I didn’t know for sure, but a quick glance at my kitchen counter showed that my sharp carving knife was missing. It was all coming together. I didn’t know if he had picked up the knife, or if I had; I didn’t know why either of us would do that. I didn’t even know his name, and later when I checked his pockets, I couldn’t find any ID.
There was a lot I didn’t know. But I’m smart. So once I was done crying on the floor (I think it was about two hours), I came up with a plan. This man was dead, and I couldn’t do anything about that. But what would the consequences be? There’s no need for my life to be ruined as well. I decided not to call the police. People go missing mysteriously all the time, he can just be another statistic and I’ll get on with my life.
The blood on Dave was mostly dry by now. (Sure, I didn’t know his name, but every bloke’s called Dave, right?) So I put a badly-fitting vest on him to soak up the remaining blood, and his shirt over the top, along with his shoes. His jeans were bloody, but they were dark, so hopefully it wouldn’t show up in low light. I couldn’t find his coat, which was odd given how cold it was, but this would have to do. I put my dress and heels in a plastic bag, and grabbed a spade that I never used. Had I missed anything?
The knife. The fucking knife. I searched all over for it, but by the time it got dark I still hadn’t found it. I knew I couldn’t delay for long, so I figured it was best to deal with Dave now, and find the knife later.
Eight o’clock in the evening came. I’m lucky I have parking right outside my house, no street cameras, and a ground-floor flat. I put the bag in the boot of my car and came back for the body.
Have you ever tried to move a dead person? It’s not easy, and I’m not exactly strong. I put my arm around his waist and eventually managed to heave him almost upright. “Come on Dave, that’s it. We’re gonna get you home. Maybe calm down on the tequila next time right? Try to keep it in, and don’t you dare vomit in my car, you sexy bastard.”
Oh come on, what do you want from me? I’m an influencer, not a stand-up comedian. And anyway, I don’t think anybody saw me during the several minutes it took to drag Dave to the passenger seat. I really wish I’d got round to buying a bigger car than the Fiat Punto I’d had since I was 18, but it was too late for that now.
There’s a place about an hour’s drive from me called Epping Forest. The Heritage Trust reckon it’s most famous for its huge tracts of unspoiled wildlife, thousands of trees, and Iron Age settlements. But around here it’s best known as the place where murderers and gang members bury bodies. So off I trundled in my 1.2 litre pensioner-mobile. I arrived around 9:30, checked Google Maps, and drove offroad into the woods.
Do you know how long it takes to dig a grave? The answer is: a long time! By dawn I’d only managed a hole about two feet. Oh, and it was my third try, because the first two times I found too much rock. Well, it would have to do. In went Dave, and I shovelled the ground back over him. I thought I could put my clothes in with him, but it was a shallow grave, and when the inevitable dog-walker finds it I didn’t want them linked back to me. I mean, there’s my DNA in there for sure, but let’s not make it too easy for them, right? So I chucked the spade in a river, and the clothes went back home with me, including the vest I’d lent him.
Now in England we have a thing called ANPR everywhere. The police can just type in a car registration and see exactly where it’s been from traffic cameras. I needed an alibi. Why had I gone to Epping Forest? For a hike of course! So I walked around for a few hours, got breakfast at a pub, and told the staff about all the wacky adventures I’d had that night. And while I was there, for the first time in a good long time, I checked my phone.
Hundreds of messages, of course. But only one sent a shiver down my spine.
Jolly_Gal_56234
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID
My heart thumped. My ears started ringing. I felt dizzy, nearly passed out. How could anybody know?
Of course nobody knew. I actually got messages like this fairly often. Just some idiot trying to wind people up. They’d probably sent a dozen messages just like it, to random people, and I just blocked her. Still it rattled me. I finished my breakfast, paid up, walked back to my car, and drove home.
My flat was just as I left it. Dave was gone, but his blood was still there. I scrubbed the floor for hours, and it helped a bit, but you could still see the stains. Exhausted, I showered and went to bed.
The next morning I woke up. I hadn’t posted anything for a day and a half, so I needed to do something about that. Scrolling through my messages, one stood out like a police light.
Jolly_Gal_28473
YOU’VE BEEN A BAD GIRL 🔪
Shit. SHIT! What the fuck is going on? I stared at my phone, paralysed with indecision. When I finally snapped out of it I made sure the door was locked, and tried to come up with a plan.
I had no idea who was sending these. Maybe they didn’t really know anything. You send stupid messages like that to hundreds of people, you’re gonna come across one who’s actually done something bad, right? I poured myself a big glass of gin, decided that nobody could know anything, and made a video.
Remember that one where I didn’t speak at all, just danced for three minutes dressed like 90s Britney to 70s disco music, titled “HANGOVER DANCE”? Yeah, that’s the one. I didn’t trust myself to speak without breaking, but I could dance about as well as I ever could.
The rest of the day I answered messages, emailed my sponsors, and considered getting an agent. It’s still just me doing everything, and that Sunday afternoon, I really didn’t want to. I also spent a few hours scrubbing the wooden floor with baking soda and vinegar, and looking for the knife.
I kept getting messages from Jolly_Gal. It didn’t matter how much I blocked her, she just popped up again the next day with different numbers at the end of her username. Always all-caps, just a single sentence.
YOU DON’T DESERVE IT
YOU’LL GET WHAT’S COMING TO YOU
OWN UP
DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT
Exactly one message a day, but always at different times. I decided it was a bot, and it was just coincidence that it started when it did. Until Christmas Day.
I’d been back at my parents’ for a few days, and endured the usual conversations about what I was going to do for a “proper job” after uni. They’re great, and really supportive. They’ve just never understood what an “influencer” really is, and that “playing on my phone” for six hours a day counts as work. My brother Rich gets it, but the rest of my family is honestly baffled.
Anyway, Christmas morning comes. All four of us were in the house together (my brother’s 17 so he still lives there), and we gathered together in the living room opening presents. It was a couple of weeks since the incident, and I still had nightmares every night, and those sudden panic attacks - you know, when you’re sure you’re going to be found out - but I was getting used to it. It had happened, I couldn’t change it, and I’d have to keep it secret for the rest of my life; but it was becoming a sort of background hum. I don’t know if that’s too quick, but I suppose I’ve learned to handle difficulty in my life.
Until we finished opening presents and I checked my phone.
Jolly_Gal_814385
HAPPY CHRISTMAS
And underneath, a photo of my kitchen knife, stained with blood.
I ran out of the house in tears.
Rich found me, sitting on the wooden bridge down the road from the house, my legs dangling over the river. I came here a lot when I was a teenager, so it was the first place he looked. I’d left my phone on the living room floor, and the three of them had seen the message, so he knew what triggered me. He just didn’t know the full story.
Well, I told him. I mean, not everything, obviously. But I told him how this person had been harassing me for weeks. He listened sympathetically, like he’s always done, and asked if there was anything he could do to help. I didn’t say anything; I just turned around, hugged him, and cried into his Christmas sweater.
After about half an hour we went back to the house. Rich explained things to my parents, thank goodness. I don’t think I could have handled it.
The rest of the holiday was … okay, I guess. More messages from Jolly_Gal, but only text. I made videos most days, and met all two of my old schoolfriends for drinks, movies and shopping. They’re big fans of my channels. I even took Rich out for drinks one evening, though it took us four pubs to find somewhere that wouldn’t ID him. He’s a bit of a babyface.
I did all I could not to think about Dave. I put him to the back of my mind, letting him live in the shed at the bottom of the garden of my psyche where he couldn’t disturb me. I guess that’s why it came as a shock to me, when I packed my stuff into the boot of my car to head back to uni.
There was one suitcase I’d packed but hadn’t got round to taking into the house. And peeking around the edge was that plastic bag. I’d forgotten to get rid of it!
Dad was helping me load the car, so I couldn’t do anything about it. I tucked it out of sight, finished loading up, said goodbye, and drove back to uni. It was dark when I got back, so I unpacked everything else, triple-bagged my bloody clothes, left my phone at home (no tracking me!), and walked two miles to drop them into somebody else’s wheelie bin.
The next morning I checked my messages.
Jolly_Gal_12592
WELCOME HOME
And a photo of me dumping the bag the night before.
You know what? This didn’t bother me. I mean, it did bother me, but not as much as I guess Jolly_Gal hoped. I’ve been bullied and harassed most of my life, and I’ve got pretty good at ignoring it. Sure, it was an escalation - she was actually following me - but it was just one of almost thirty messages. Jolly_Gal was hoping to destroy me. Instead, she hardened my resolve.
Clearly she had enough evidence to go to the police, but she hadn’t. And obviously she lived nearby. Now I’m no hacker, but you don’t do a job like mine without learning your way around technology. So I started sleuthing. I hadn’t bothered blocking her after the third or fourth message, so I made a list of all the messages, including timecodes. I’ve got a geology degree (almost), and we have techniques to analyse rock strata. Finally I had a genuine use for all that studying I sort of did!
Jolly_Gal was not as clever as she thought. She’d got sloppy. About half of her messages were sent at strange hours, on the hour. These were presumably posted by her bot. But the other messages were all sent between 7 and 8 am, or between 6 and 10 pm. So I guessed that she has a normal 9-5 day job, or maybe she’s a student.
Next I searched all the social media sites I could think of for Jolly_Gal or JollyGal usernames. There are a few, so please don’t go harassing people with that username! I don’t want innocent people to get hurt. After a few hours I had profiles of all Jolly_Gals. Pictures, locations, partial travel history, even birthdays for some of them. I discounted those who clearly weren’t in England, but I still had too many to narrow it down. The photos had no EXIF data so I couldn’t tell the type of phone or camera they used.
So my days became something like this: Five hours doing uni stuff, five hours working on my socials, and an hour or two learning digital sleuthing. I still went out with my friends sometimes, but made sure not to drink too much. I know how to have a good time without being drunk!
The breakthrough came by total chance. I rarely read the local papers, and just got lucky one afternoon in March. I was waiting for a friend in the pub after lectures, and there was a copy of the Post somebody had left on a table. So I flicked through it. The local council was rubbish at doing traffic. Some group of OAPS was organising a May Day celebration. And a woman had been convicted of body-snatching.
I recognised her! There was a photo of a woman in her early twenties. She’d been arrested when a corpse went missing back in December, and they’d seen her take it on the morgue’s CCTV. She’d been released on bail. “Prevention of the lawful and decent burial of a dead body” is a rare crime these days, so she hadn’t been sentenced yet; instead she was released until her sentencing, expected to be in August. Her name was Jenny Smith, which is so common as to be almost useless - that is, if you don’t have a profile of her on your laptop at home!
The report also gave her address. So I started hatching a plan. I texted my friend that I wouldn’t make it, and went home.
Jolly_Gal, or rather, Jenny, lived near me, and actually went to the same university. She had accounts on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and a few others. Of course you can’t get Jolly_Gal by itself these days, but my profile gave all her precise usernames. I spent my evening watching her videos and reading her tweets. And then I found the smoking gun.
Jenny had posted a video on TikTok last June bitching about me. She’s way prettier than me, and yet I’d got all the subs and follows. She deserved all those sponsorship deals. It wasn’t fair that I had hundreds of thousands of subs and she only had a few thousand. She even said I was ugly and deserved to die.
Well, she got one out of two right, I guess. You can decide which one.
It all started to slot into place. Jenny was absurdly jealous of me, so she’d hatched a plan to destroy me. She must have roofied me in The Bar, got me and Dave back to my place, stabbed him, poured blood everywhere, and taken the knife home. I mean, I don’t know anything about forensic science, and I was drugged and panicked when I woke up that morning. I’d have no way of knowing that Dave had died days before he ended up in my flat!
I’d never managed to get all the blood out of the wooden flooring, and ended up putting a really misplaced rug over it. I chiselled off a sample and gave it to one of my friends who was doing a PhD in biology. It took a bit of persuading, but he ran an analysis on it.
It was pig’s blood.
Fuck Jenny. She’s not Jenny, or Jolly_Gal, she’s fucking Carrie!
She planned to destroy me. She ruined my mental health, she framed me for murder. All because I was more popular on TikTok than she was. Well, two can play at that game. I didn’t deserve what Jenny did to me. She did.
I thought about this all night, coming up with plan after plan, weighing them in my head. I wanted two things: to destroy Jenny, and to feel good about it for myself. Finally I had a course of action I’m actually rather proud of.
I decided to start slow. I did something anybody could have done - I mocked up a poster. At the top was “Jenny Smith - body snatcher!”. Underneath were two pictures, her Insta profile pic and the courthouse photo from the paper, and between them: “From This … To This!” And all her various social media handles to top it off. I printed hundreds of these, and pinned them all around the university and her street.
I’ve never thought of myself as an unkind person - God knows I’ve suffered enough myself to be sympathetic to others. But I’m willing to admit I felt a lot of satisfaction seeing her comments fill up with accusations and links to the online article. Jenny carried on making videos, but I could tell she was suffering. Good!
That was stage one. I had to up the ante for stage two. Jenny had covered me and my flat with pig’s blood, so I think we all know what’s coming next.
I pondered for a long time whether I should do it in the day or the night. But you know what they say - go big or go home. I scoped out her house for a while, and found out that she leaves her kitchen window, at the back of the house, open. Now I’m not the most athletic girl in the world, but I can be pretty determined when I want to be. So one night around 2 am I walked to her house - it’s only about half a mile - and climbed through the window.
I almost gave myself a heart attack when I knocked a glass over on the kitchen sink! Luckily it didn’t smash. I hid in a corner and waited for a full half hour before I decided Jenny hadn’t heard me. Then I snuck upstairs, slow as anything, and crept into her room.
Actually, the first room wasn’t hers. She shared with a couple of other students. Thank fuck I checked first! The second room was the right one. She was asleep, alone, in a double bed. I was so quiet that the only thing I could hear was my heart pounding in my chest as I opened my canvas bag, gently deposited its contents onto the pillow next to her, and took a photo. It didn’t come out that well - I couldn’t use the flash - but hey, I have a souvenir!
I really wish I’d seen her face when she woke up the next morning, staring at a pig’s head. She didn’t post on her socials for a week after that, and for two days she even forgot to send me a threatening message.
I’m sorry? You think I’m done? Oh, my sweet summer child. I’ve barely begun.
Jenny had a boyfriend, Abdul. I made sure he wasn’t around when I broke in, but stage three involved him in a big way.
Abdul was also at our university, a year younger than me, a year older than Jenny. He wasn’t very active on social media, but he did tend to broadcast his activity on Twitter. And what do you know? He’s also a fan of The Bar. So I spent the next month planning my move. I bought a new clubbing dress and heels - hey, I kinda missed that outfit! - and asked around for the other thing I needed. Some things you can’t just buy in Next, or a local butcher’s, but eventually I managed it.
I got my chance one Friday in May. Abdul had loudly announced on Twitter that he was excited for his boys’ night out in The Bar, and Jenny had been gushing about a girls’ night on the whole other side of town. Perfect. I spent hours on my makeup, and got to The Bar around ten. Abdul and his mates were having a drinking contest, and leching up at the girls dancing on the tables.
I figured I had a good long while before he would be ready, so I had a couple of drinks - not too much, but like I said I can handle myself, and I knew Jenny wasn’t around - and got up on the tables myself for a bit. Then about midnight Abdul’s friend got another round in, while Abdul was in the loo. This was my chance. I walked up to their table - which had no dancing feet on it, but a heck of a lot of spilled beer - and started talking to them, saying I thought their friend was hot.
“Uh, what the fuck?” “Not a chance in hell.” “Get lost, freak!”
Lovely chaps. But they were too far gone to notice me dropping something into Abdul’s double-whiskey-and-coke. For all I know, it’s the exact same thing Jenny used on me all those months ago.
Abdul came back and downed his whiskey in one gulp. I was worried he was going to vomit it up, but he held it in and blamed his difficulty on the coke fizz. Yeah mate, sure, sure.
Not too long after, he started to fade. His friends were really taking the piss out of him for being such a lightweight. Well, when I came over, the pisstaking just got worse. I introduced myself (with a fake name, duh) and told him he was hot. Believe it or not, it was only about twenty seconds before he put his tongue down my throat. Wow, I’m not sure I even needed to bother with the roofie!
His friends, who had been so intent on being mean to me, now turned their attention to him. I suggested we ditch them and go back to his place (I’d checked, it was only five minutes’ walk sober) - and off we went.
That was the first time I had sex. I’m sure I don’t need to go into details, but we did a lot of stuff, and I enjoyed it. I’m not sure if that’s because it was good, or because he was good, or because I knew what it was all for. I was impressed that he managed to keep going as long as he did in his state, but I do feel a bit sorry for him; from his Twitter he seems like a decent guy.
When he finally fell asleep I left. I’d got what I came for - pictures. And the next day I made a new account and sent a DM to Jenny.
At first I blurred my face, or chose shots that didn’t include it. A bit of editing and I could have been anybody. I watched their messy breakup on Twitter, Jenny hurling accusations, Abdul protesting his innocence. I know this is the age of social media, but I never understood why people play these things out in public.
And then, after posting a picture a day for a few weeks (I’d taken a lot of pictures), I sent one that showed my face clearly.
Jenny had managed to restrain herself from replying before, but now she knew who I was. She was furious! The very idea that her boyfriend had cheated on her with ME, of all people, was unbelievable. And this was exactly the outcome I’d been going for.
Jolly_Gal was broken. She’d ruined her reputation. She’d lost her boyfriend. She had nightmares about pigs (okay, so I don’t know that for certain, but in my imagination she woke up screaming every night). She was possibly going to prison. And now she knew that not only was I more successful than her as an influencer, but I was the one to steal her lover. She still sent messages, at first angry, but they soon degenerated into pleading. “Please stop.” “I’m sorry.” “We can work this out.” Jolly_Gal without CAPS LOCK, it was glorious to see.
In fact it was almost perfect. Three stages of my plan were complete, and only one remained. Jenny’s sentencing was in three weeks, so I had to move quickly.
She had two flatmates, so I needed to work around them. They weren’t particularly active on Twitter, but Jenny was. I knew from her tweets that while her flatmates had gone home, she was staying on a couple of weeks after the end of term. She didn’t say why publicly, but it was for her trial. No flatmates, no boyfriend. Now was the time.
And that brings us up to date. I’ve typed this up over the last few days, and saved as a draft. The final chapter, hopefully, comes tonight.
*******
I’m at Jenny’s house, and I’ve just called the police.
I turned up at Jenny’s door just after seven. Luck was with me - she’d tweeted that she was expecting a Deliveroo takeout. And I got there first.
The idiot actually kept the knife. I’d seen it when I was in her room. When she answered the doorbell, expecting food, and saw me - ah, the look on her face was priceless.
“I’m so sorry! Please, let’s just talk. I didn’t mean it to get this -”
I stalked towards her, anger in my face. Jenny fled upstairs. Perfect! She went into her room and shut the door, but I was like the furies of Greek legend. I smashed the door in, and looked on as Jenny cowered on her bed.
In full daylight, I saw the knife took pride of place in what looked like a shrine. She had photos of me printed out, and she’d written on them “BITCH”, “WHORE”, “FREAK” and all sorts of other hateful words.
Jenny had tried to make me into a murderer, so I gave her what she wanted. I grabbed the knife and stood over her. The coward shrank into the bed, begging for forgiveness, pleading for her life. Unfortunately for her I was not inclined to oblige. I plunged the knife into her chest, just as she had done to Dave all those many months ago. Jenny whimpered like a whipped dog, and after the ninth stab (yes, I counted), she stopped.
The police are on their way. I’m definitely going to jail after this. But Jenny got what was coming to her. We could both have lived happily, but Jenny chose otherwise.
And me? I passed my degree. I have friends. And jail or not, I have a life.
Burn in hell, Jolly_Gal.

11
The New Age: California Orphism
California, for most of this century, has been our new Burned-over District, replacing the western reserve of New York State, which was the religious hothouse of the nineteenth century. Though the New Age cults have no more than about thirty thousand members, their fellow travelers are an untold multitude. Virtually all our bookstores feature a New Age section, ranging from Shirley MacLaine recalling her previous incarnations to the memoirs of prehistoric warriors, Schwarzkopfs of 35,000 years ago. Networking in our America, these days, takes place either among the politically correct academics of the high camp of Resentment, or among the dank cranks of the belated Aquarian Conspiracy, trying to float our planet off into cosmic consciousness.
Religious criticism cannot be applied to Scientology, or to the Moonie Unification Church, any more than literary criticism can find its texts-for-discussion in Alice Walker or in Danielle Steel. The New Age is a borderline case, like Allen Ginsberg or John Updike. The warlocks and the mediums of California Orphism aren’t exactly Emanuel Swedenborg or even Madame Helena.
Petrovna Blavatsky, of whom W.B. Yeats sublimely remarked: “Of course she gets up spurious miracles, but what is a woman of genius to do in the nineteenth century!” The spurious miracles of the New Age are the comic outreaches of the American Religion, and might yield a few amiable insights to a properly disinterested religious criticism. The way not to criticize the New Age is simply to denounce it, which is the practice of Christian apologists such as Kerry D. McRoberts in his New Age or Old Lie (1989), an Evangelical ferocity of a treatise:

• Concerns by some Christian writers that an ominous system, like the New Age, could usher in the reign of the Antichrist are valid, yet they are easily sensationalized. The biblical record clearly illustrates that we live in a theistic universe, not one left to the conscious, random reordering on a world-wide scale by diabolical co-conspirators independent of God’s foreordained “plan.”

Easily sensationalized? Hardly, since New Age fantasies are beyond further sensationalizing. Their ultimate American ancestor is Emerson, who would have had grand entertainment from them, and yet Emerson hardly would have rejoiced in this varied progeny. To have given us Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens is one kind of achievement; to have helped foster Norman Vincent Peale and the wild apostles of Harmonial religion is quite another. Sydney Ahlstrom’s definition of Harmonial religion is now classic:

• Harmonial religion encompasses those forms of piety and belief in which spiritual composure, physical health, and even economic wellbeing are understood to flow from a person’s rapport with the cosmos. Human beatitude and immortality are believed to depend to a great degree on one’s being “in tune with the infinite.”

The last phrase is the title of Ralph Waldo Trine’s book of 1897, which preached a universal religion in which God and man were seen as differing only in degree, not in essence. Hailing his namesake Emerson as prophet of the New Harmonial era, Trine set the pattern for a long procession of similar diffusers of the sage of Concord. The late President Bart Giamatti of Yale (later baseball commissioner) accurately remarked to me once that the actual Emerson was “as sweet as barbed wire,” a truth lost upon the Harmonials.
Health and Harmony worthies, after Trine, memorably included Emmet Fox, Norman Vincent Peale, Ann Morrow Lindbergh, Thomas Merton, and all of our current New Age prophets, seers, and shamans. These are legion, yet are varied ancestors of Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky, and the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The American 1960s doubtless originated the ferment out of which the New Age emanated, but the movement essentially was revived in the California of the later 1970s and may have achieved its greatest prominence throughout the 1980s. Its most enthusiastic (and uncritical) chronicler remains Marilyn Ferguson, who celebrated its promise in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980). Her catalog of gurus began with Teilhard de Chardin, Jung, Aldous Huxley, and J. Krishnamurti, and then went on to include a remarkable mingling (among others) of Tillich, Buber, Gregory Bateson, assorted Swamis, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and even Werner Erhard. California, she declared, was the “Laboratory for Transformation,” and the inevitable location for sparking a return to “the God within.” We are well within the belated repetition of what I have called American Orphism when we contemplate California Orphism.
Having read his way through Mrs. Eddy, Mrs. White, and the Book of Mormon, the religious critic encounters his inevitable defeat in the pages of Matthew Fox, David Spangler, David Toolan, Chogyam Trungpa, and the other major New Age authors. One reads the same passages over again, worried that one has missed the point, only to discover that points belong to the wrong mindset. Here, absolutely at random, is Trungpa:

• Sometimes if your clothes fit you well, you feel that they are too tight. If you dress up, you may feel constricted by wearing a necktie or a suit or a tight fitting skirt or dress. The idea of invoking internal drala is not to give in to the allure of casualness. The occasional irritation coming from your neck, the crotch of your pants, or your waist is usually a good sign. It means that your clothes fit you well, but your neurosis doesn’t fit your clothes. (Shambhala, the Sacred Path of the Warrior [1984]. p. 85)

We are told (p. 79) that drala is “the living magic of reality,” but the definition does not aid me in the difficult act of interpreting whether or not looser garments will bring me nearer to such living magic. New Age prose is its own genre, and the wonder of the New Age, at its advent, will be how the newagers will manage to read their own edifying discourse. Rather than pursue the pith of their doctrine in particular authorities, I will summarize the burden of what my doughty efforts have contrived to dredge up, so far. Somewhat in the background of the New Age is the lucid and beautiful anthology edited by Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Huxley’s spiritual authorities were the great seers and mystics of the ages, among them William Law, Thomas Traherne, the Bhagavad Gita, Meister Eckhart, and Saint Augustine. In the contemplative brilliance of Huxley’s own prose as frame, the profundities of Law and Eckhart acquired fresh reverberation. By recourse to Huxley, you can sometimes construe a New Age passage and hazard some guess as to more or less what some California sage hoped she or he might mean. Otherwise, the student of the New Age must be resigned to that proverbial picnic, to which the authors bring the words (or some of them, anyway) and the readers bring the meanings.
Elevated consciousness would appear to be the common goal of all New Age Enthusiasts, including Ms. Shirley MacLaine, certainly the handsomest of the movement’s public figures. Monistic ecologists of the spirit, they proclaim that now is the acceptable time for a great leap forward in paradigms, despite one’s gloomy sense that the era belongs to Reagan, Bush, and similar anchors of the Old Age. If one must have apocalyptics, far better that they should be of the California Orphic variety than our multitude of Fundamentalist literalizers of the Revelation of St. John the Divine and the book of Daniel. California apocalypses are by no means all benign: any reader of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust can recall the fury that descends there on Los Angeles, and can wonder how ominous a prophecy it may prove to be. But New Age apocalypse is humane, indeed even sentimental. Our planet is not about to float off into a cosmic greenpeace, but at least it is heartening that the New Age Orphics dream of so amiable a conclusion.

God, for the New Age, is rather too purged of the anthropomorphic for my taste, and I assume that the Theosophical legacy is responsible for no otherwise uncharacteristic a Californian dehumanization of God. A God immanent both in outward nature and in consciousness evades the intervening space of incarnation. Christianity therefore is mostly irrelevant to the New Age, except insofar as Christianity already has been modified into the American Religion, of which the New Age is sometimes a charming parody.
One might say that the New Age is to the American Religion what Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is to Shakespearean drama: a great shadow’s last embellishment. The Mormon aspiration of mounting to godhood or the Southern Baptist experience of an uncreated self within one, is replaced by the entertainment of the notion that one’s own consciousness is God. And the Mormon ambition of populating a planet only with one’s own family, or the Southern Baptist passion for being alone with Jesus, is taken to the lunatic apotheosis that one’s very own spirit guide is built into the ecology of one’s own mind. American Gnosticism and American Enthusiasm are splendidly parodied by California Orphism, by a metamorphic glamour that dissolves the last empiric constraints which the universe of death exercises against our drive for spirituality.
Aldous Huxley, in his introduction to The Perennial Philosophy, gave a warning that New Age Enthusiasts, like everyone else, will receive nothing for nothing:

• The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.

California Orphism, skipping over Huxley’s monitory remark, apprehends Reality directly and immediately, at no inner expense whatsoever. Marilyn Ferguson, in the accents of a benign consumerism, excitedly assured her Aquarian conspirators that even death had surrendered to their aspirations:

• A number of those filling out the Aquarian Conspiracy questionnaire commented that their experiences had forced them to give up their previous assumption that bodily death ends consciousness. Despite their disaffiliation with formal religion, 53 percent expressed strong belief in such survival and another 23 percent said they were “moderately sure,” a total of 75 percent. Only 5 percent were skeptical and 3 percent disbelieving. (pp. 383-84)

What the God of California shares with the God of the American Religion, and indeed of Christianity, is that he is the Reality you set against the Freudian reality principle, the necessity of dying, of really dying, once and for all. The Californian God differs in that he is a kind of public orange grove, where you can pick as and when you want, particularly since he is an orange grove within. His perpetual and universal immanence makes it difficult for a newager to distinguish between God and any experience whatsoever, but then why should such a distinction occur to a Californian Orphic? Matthew Fox, ostensibly a Catholic priest, has formulated a curious doctrine of “panentheism” to avoid this collapse into pantheism, but Fox is one of my defeats. Several attempts on my part to read through The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (1988) have failed, as no prose I have ever encountered can match Fox’s in blissful vacuity, where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.
The absolute immanence of the New Age God is, I suppose, the inescapable poem of California’s climate, the cosmos as one grand orange, consciousness as its juice. “The sacramental consciousness of panentheism develops into a transparent and diaphanous consciousness wherein we can see events and beings as divine.” If one substituted “oranges” for “divine” as the final word in that Foxian sentence, after substituting “juice” for the two appearances of “consciousness,” then mere understanding might be advanced:

• The sacramental juice of panentheism develops into a transparent and diaphanous juice wherein we can see events and beings as oranges.

To render justice unto Fox and most followers of the New Age, he and they hedged the obsessive immanence of God with a touch of transcendence. There is thus a heavenly or archetypal orange somewhere, as well as the enveloping cosmic orange. But this difference makes so little difference, on a daily basis, as not to survive the pragmatic test. Fox has a nostalgia for the Church’s sacraments but he, like all newagers, doesn’t really need them.
The perfect concentrate of consciousness is the Grail for which the New Age quests, a Grail it rather surprisingly identifies with near-death experiences, which now constitute a considerable American growth industry. Here again I must mutter my defeat, since I cannot understand how any near-death experience whatsoever can give evidence of the survival of consciousness after death. Carol Zaleski’s very useful Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (1987) notes the rise of IANDS (International Association of Near-Death Studies). IANDS has become a marvelous amalgam of near-death research with New Age ideology, complete with “maroon T-shirts, and a logo that combines the tunnel image with the Taoist yin-yang symbol,” as well as a quarterly newsletter hopefully entitled Vital Signs. As Zaleski shows, this is nothing new, but was inaugurated as early as 1903 by the British psychic research F.W.H Myers, himself a crucial influence upon my favorite modern literary critic, the late G. Wilson Knight. Still, the modern phase of near-death jamboree begins only with Raymond Moody’s relatively careful Life after Life (1975), a threshold work that does not cross over into New Age exuberance. That achievement belongs to Kenneth Ring, a Moody disciple who made the great leap and oranged himself:

• Near-death experiences collectively represent an evolutionary thrust toward higher consciousness for humanity as a whole.... People who have had near-death experiences, as well as many other people whose lives have been transformed by one or more deep spiritual experiences, all these people as a totality represent in effect a more highly advanced human being…. To my thinking, the emergence of this new strain of human being…on the planet now, signals a possibility that the dawning of the New Age is indeed upon us. (quoted in Zaleski, pp. 107-8)

Zaleski’s own restrained conclusions are altogether different:

• At this stage I see no justification for treating contemporary near-death testimony as the foundation for a new eschatology or religious movement. Near-death literature is at its best when it is modest and anecdotal; pressed into service as philosophy or prophecy, it sounds insipid. (p. 204)

But the apostles of the New Age ignore such a warning, and rely not only upon Moody and Ring but also upon Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, author of On Death and Dying (1969, 1975) and its companion works. Kubler-Ross, by whatever means, has comforted both the dying and their survivors, while assuring all of us that there is no such thing as death, and also that dying is in itself rather a good thing. It is hardly a limitation of the New Age that so much of its appeal is founded upon thanatology. Christianity, after all, stakes everything upon the Resurrection; if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, in defiance of nature, then all of Christianity is simply an imposture. The American Religion, as I have argued throughout, is ultrasupernaturalistic, and its varieties demand even more violent miracles than are afforded by institutional and historical Christianity. Extravagant as the New Age is, it is only the most garish of all the American originals that have expressed our national spiritual exuberance.

 It's Friday, April 19th in New York City. Donald Trump is on trial for one of the many crimes he is accused of. Around 1:39 that afternoon, a man walks up to police barricades and the crowd of onlookers and media. He throws pamphlets on the ground before taking out a bottle of liquid and pouring it over his head and body. At 1:39 PM, the man lit himself on fire collapsing onto a police barricade. Police and bystanders attempted to extinguish the flames but their efforts failed to save the life of Max Azzarello.