Having spent the entire month of February abstaining from all vices except chocolate, I now find myself at home on Saturday night reading the Bible. But Exodus was like a movie I'd seen one too many times (and that movie is called The Ten Commandments), and I soon abandoned the Old Testament for the internet, where I located the sacred texts of several major religions and started reading. This reminded me pleasantly of the time when I was a kid and invented my own religion to fill the void my atheist parents created by telling me, "There is no God, Emily, and don't let anyone tell you differently." I got stumped, however, by trying to define the word "pray" in a way that didn't involve a deity. I was so anti-institution even then that my congregation of one disbanded itself.

I am thinking of taking another stab at it, after I've read the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Middle Length Sayings of Buddha and the Quaran. Mine will be a "found religion," based solely on flotsam that has migrated into my life and has inexplicable meaning to me. I think I may begin with the fortune cookie fortunes I've saved. Buddhism has the Eightfold path; my religion will have the Seven Fortunes:

1. Don't wait for others to open the right doors for you.
2. It's time you asked that special someone out on a date.
3. Someone will invite you to a karaoke party.
4. Sell your ideas--they are totally acceptable.
5. Look up an old friend if you're feeling down.
6. Treasure your good memories and you need not worry about ending a banquet.
7. Because of your melodic nature, the moonlight never misses and appointment.

I will then cull my holy texts from the user manuals of my home appliances.

Going to suburbia, especially if one escaped suburbia, especially if one felt stifled in suburbia, if one drove aimlessly from one end of town to the other in the middle of the night trying to work up the nerve to drive out of the town, off the long island where it was located, and far, far away in the reliable station wagon or midsized sedan (after the station wagon was wrecked in an accident that only highlighted the fragility of life and therefore the abject horror of wasting any of it in suburbia) a safe, well-maintained car that could certainly travel miles and miles to what one would one day much later discover would probably be another part of America where suburbia had sprawled and crept, if one lay melodramatically on one's parents' organically tended lawn in the middle of the night, praying for escape from suburbia, if one saw Heathers and thought that the idea of the high school blowing up (empty of all life forms, including not-yet dissected, chloroform-anesthetized frogs, as frogs were dissected with still-beating hearts) was very appealing, if one actually prayed each day as one approached the school that it had in fact mysteriously blown up, if one was misunderstood by one's peers, if one dreaded the prom, if one hated the teachers in their arbitrary wielding of authority and occasional sexual harassment, if one did not derive much satisfaction from doing well in school or playing on the well-maintained ball fields of the town or producing the oft-censored school newspaper, if one knew even then that one was lucky to grow up in such a safe, quiet place and felt guilty about hating it so much and yet could not shake the feeling that flight, immediate, permanent flight from such a place was the only chance one had to save one's soul, if well into one's twenties one still had nightmares about being forced to return to high school, if the smell of the hot, grassy air on one's graduation day were stamped in one's memory as vividly as if it were the day one were sprung from prison, if years later, when one is broke or brokenhearted or bankrupt of dreams one is always heartened by the fact that one no longer lives in suburbia, if, though one lives in the antithesis of suburbia, the perhaps least suburbanized city in the world, a city that ensnares all cars that dare enter in hours of traffic, a city with no freestanding individual houses in its major borough, a city in which split-level houses and "dens" and driveways and other such trappings of suburbia are impossible in its tiny, overpriced apartments, one still somehow feels the proximity to suburbia, and therefore sometimes considers moving to a West Coast city that harbors very little suburbia and dissolves completely into wilderness within five highway exits of city limits, if each descent into suburbia, beginning with the descent into Penn Station that leads to two of the three suburbias that form a kind of Bermuda Triangle of the teenaged and middle-aged soul, trapping the teenagers in their houses and their middle-aged parents in the mortgages for these houses and the jobs that pay for them, if each trip out on the railroads that lead out of this subterranean gateway, through dwindling urbanity, through widening spaces between first blocks of garden apartments and finally houses, from rail yards and junkyards to golf courses and strip malls, weeding out, as the train makes its stops, different kinds of people until at the end of the line, nearly everyone is white, if going to suburbia were fraught with all this, each time, and one was currently, due to the fact that there was money to be made in one's freelance line of work, life-funding, rent-paying, show-seeing, beer-buying, appetizer-and-entrée-at-dinner-permitting, on-time bill-paying, late-night cab-taking money to be procured, by going to suburbia on a weekly basis, one might be surprised to find a certain singularly suburban pleasure lurking on its well-maintained roads.

In the midsized sedan, one's mother might leave a Steve Windwood CD. And one might speed along the very straightaways where drunken teenagers raced and crashed and died at a rate of about one every four years, as the setting sun, its beauty multiplied by the glass windows of the office buildings clustered by these arteries clogged with SUVs, singing along with "Back in the High Life," and liking it.

My favorite holiday of this weekend is already over. That would be Friday the 13th. On Friday the 13th, the unlucky day, you can feel lucky if nothing goes wrong. I got up, I made a sandiwch, I dressed, i did some work-related errands, I had a hot chocolate, I went to an art opening, I didn't die. Now that, folks, is a holiday. The rest of the so-called "holidays" are simply carefully orchestrated consumer orgies enacted on dates that used to be reserved for the sacrificing of virgins.

Now it is time to celebrate love and dead presidents. Instead, I chose to celebrate solitude and the still-living Unelected Government Officials who proudly carry on the tradition of the Original Tax Cut, a.k.a., the American "Revolution." For the rest of the weekend, I will bring you fatalistic musings on love and lonliness, and as many disturbing facts and rantings regarding the George W.'s as I can muster.

I look forward to the holidays of the approaching spring. Passover, when My People will celebrate how our deliverance from bondage necessitated the death of children, and Easter, when we commemorate the senseless execution of a preace-preaching radical.