The Zen Gun [FICTOID]

Pieter van Unen took another sip of coffee, another hit off his bong, rubbed his hands together gleefully, then typed “EXT. ZEN MONASTERY – DAY”.

Outside his dingy one-room flat tourists floated lazily down the canals in sightseeing boats.

He hated the tourists, he hated the boats, he hated the canals, but most of all he hated Zen Buddhism. 

When asked (“asked”?  “asked”?!?!?  Pieter van Unen would spew forth his opinions on anything at any time to anybody which accounted for his dearth of friends / acquaintances / tolerate IRS -- another thing he hated) he would say, “It's their smug holier than thou serenity, their ability to remain untouched by the vicissitudes of life.  They live without pain or passion and they seem all the better for it.  A pox on them and their ilk!”

If asked (who are we kidding?  Nobody ever asked Pieter van Unen anything because -1- he never stopped talking long enough for anybody to get a question in and -2- nobody cared) why he simply did not adopt Zen practices himself to make his own life better he would sneer and say, “That's the cowards way out -- to rise above the suffering of this world like a dove seeking the sky rather than wallowing the filth and muck and mire of our wretched existence!”

Pieter always felt proud of himself when he daydreamed about delivering stinging retorts to imaginary debaters (he considered himself a master debater and most who encountered him would agree though they would leave out the middle syllable).

Now he pounded away at his nicotine / caffeine / cannabis stained keyboard, gleefully inflicting all sorts of degradations of the Zen monks of his fetid imagination, subjecting them to atrocities beyond enumeration, ravaging flesh, breaking bones, burning sacred texts, and shattering icons.

He loved his work (not that you could call it work, not technically since he never got paid, never sold, never even posted online his numerous screeds, polemics, essays, manifestos, and screenplays). 

By late afternoon he finished his latest magnum opus:  The Zen Gun, a tale about Western capitalist cowboys (whom he hated sight unseen) travelling across the Indian Ocean (Pieter remained a mite shakey on geography) to massacre a monastery full of Zen monks (whom he hated even more).

Filling his bong bowl with another load of Dutch Dynamite, using the old bong water to brew more coffee, he saved his document in his screenplay folder along with earlier efforts such as Hanging All The Priests and Murder The Mormons.

It was a wretched useless life but it kept him off the streets and everybody agreed that was a good idea.

© Buzz Dixon