Tonight, it’s the first of the first month, or of the seventh, depends on how you keep up, if and to what end. As this season features the fast of the firstborns, in memory of the dead kinder of Mitzraim, which was Egypt, and so of its Pharaoh and his sun, one day and its night in memoriam, tenthplagued, the FBs — young and old as if they still have a survival to prove; stepspooked, careful around the mirrored corners, migrained desperate, weak already, emptied — they fast almost the entire month, though not alone: in flagrantly mundane disregard of the law prohibiting excessive fasting, which archaic rabbinic ruling holds that such action serves only to lessen the holy, a new law is proposed, a ruling terrestrially lesser voted upon and approved with astonishing haste, which in its unanimity and the rarity of its passing speed seems as if made with the tacit approval of the Divine in us all; every day this month — which is known by the name of Nisan, meaning First Fruits in a language lost — is designated as a national fast day, as optional as life, as proclaimed by President Shade in an address from the Capitol to a joint session of Congress, which is now per an earlier ruling to be referred to as the Sanhedrin, exclusively and with all due respect: Der at one flank, the Doctors Tweiss become the Soygens General behind; this in support of UN (United Nudniks, it’s witzed) Resolution number doesn’t matter, appreciatively drafted then proposed by one Mohammed Arbas, the new delegate from the reformed State of Palestein, and cousin to its ruling class, the usurping Abulafias; a fast to be observed as per tradition inherited, in deference to religious precedent, from sundown to sunset, with those underage, pregnant, and/or suffering from medical conditions too agonizingly tedious to address personally, those abstaining acting on the advice of their personal physicians on the dole, and those who just don’t want to go hungry the whole month exempted, of course, forbidden from the option of indulging in the restrictive holy. Supermarkets are swept, mopped, then shuttered, themerestaurants shut, their burners cooled, fryers shushed; lonesome servicestations and truckstops since last moon their windows festooned with grabs of plastic grapes infused with Xmas lights aglow, darkened; everything’s unplugged, the water turned off or frozen in the pipes to explode; many take the opportunity to go out of business, invoke for themselves the broke of hope Chapter numbered Eleventh, go boardedup, condemned, especially if not kosher — the price for appropriate certification, a hechsher, being prohibitive due to current lack of a rabbinic council or other administrative body, that and the bribery involved; most everyone wanting to keep up with their friends the Joneses now the Jabotinskys, to look good for the neighbors, setting an example for the Development and their kind, they stay indoors, lock their cabinets, nail up their crannies and nooks, knot up their fridges, chain and bolt ovens and stoves, to feast on this fasting that — as we’re reminded in an address by President Shade, as scripted by Der and Doctor Abuya with the Nachmachen consulting — directs us away from the wants of the body, all those functions corporeal, to focus instead on the needs of the soul; though the knifesharp, teethsharp pangs the President feels later this first day, around 1700, wedgewoodtime, fineboned chinatime, serve only to remind him how famished he truly is, and, too, of the surplus stock hidden amid the basement cubs of his mansion: the store in its recesses, overwebbed like the manifested back of a bill outdated — enough foods, flashfrozen at outlandish taxpayer expense, to last any Shade and his First Family consecutive terms bounteously in excess of the old legal limit.
