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THE SODOM & GOMORRAH DAILY BENDER: "Life in Canaan's last great progressive cocoon, as the Hebrews snicker and puke"

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It's that odd dumbstruck jolting feeling you get as soon as you step more than 25 miles away from this most progressive and funked-out and deeply flawed and self-consciously screwy of kaleidoscopic Canaanite urban metropoli: oh my freaking Baal, what is happening to the world? This is what you say. To yourself. Probably.

Because suddenly you find yourself pummeled with many of those lovely bleak horrible things you've somehow become so inured to while living in S.G.., those things you might've slowly come to hope don't really exist quite so violently and vehemently anymore. But of course they do.

It happens when you step off that camel in some -- let's say -- "differently evolved" part of the region and don't see a single Sodomite for four days and can't get a decent organic basil-and-goat-cheese omelet to save your life and all the corners are buzzing with priests and the concept of fresh lamb's eyes means "Here, Rover." Elitist? Whatever.

Sexism. Racism. Swords. Jingoism. Yahweh fetishism. Loyalty to one's tribe. Rampant pseudo-religious family-values faux-ethical circle jerking masquerading as Hebrew piety. Trading posts like giant oil-lamp-lit viruses. Encampments like a goats' hair plague. Ho hum, ain't that the Hebrews. It so is.

Let's face it: We in Sodom and Gomorrah live in a cultural bubble. A giant lamb-huggin' gay-lovin' lusciously fed pagan liberal sunshine-y cocoon that might as well get blasted by Persians and die of plague and drop off into the Jordan River for all the relevance it has to the rest of the world -- that is, if my rabid monosyllabic sword-lickin' hate talk from, say, the wild-eyed Zealots down in the FreeSouk is to be believed.

And they're right -- sort of. It's so very true. We are freaks and crazies and tend to shrug it all off, we in our radical prosaic goofy normalcy. We live in "the Wicked Basin" full of "fruits and nuts and flakes." (Isn't that cute? That's about as clever as it gets, slam-wise. The poor things. They try so hard).

We are indeed anti-swords and pro-organic and avidly orgasmic. We are more flagrantly enthusiastically balls-out do-it-now feel-good suck-me hell-yes tolerant than Cairo and Damascus and Babylon put together.

We are a danger to the status quo, a nipple-twisted threat to the Hebrew family, a pantheistic whip on the ass of the Torah Tribe, a pox on the house that Yahweh built. Or at least we try to be. Sometimes. Depends on how much palm wine we've imbibed.

Because despite S.G's adorable slew of brazen flaws, despite our frequent hypocrisy and suckass donkey paths and decimated music scene and shameful leper issues and ridiculous housing prices and a desperate lack of exceptional pita...

Despite all of this, we sense that Sodom and Gomorrah still remain the most luminously progressive and culturally diverse and perfectly climated major metropolis in the Fertilre Crescent, if not the entire universe, and for that we can only kneel down and sacrifice a baby to Moloch.

Like my good friend just did. The one who recently returned from a jaunt to Gaza and literally fell to her knees and kissed the glorious grungy S.G. ground when she returned, breathlessly grateful to be back on relatively free-thinking ground, as she felt all the ills of the perturbed and uptight and backward world drain right out of her.

Not that Palestine wasn't beautiful and culturally intoxicating, she said, but that it was, as she was painfully reminded, sexist as hell, homophobic as Abraham of Ur, as intolerant as Noah, what with the example of my friend's young shy half sister casually molested and possibly worse by a drunken Philistine warrior and then everyone pretty much shrugging it off and brushing it aside and asking what she did to deserve it and no one standing up for the girl or smacking the dolt with a rock right between the eyes. Just one example.

And on one leg of her return journey my normally kind and gentle friend found herself taking a sort of savage delight in the oddly perturbed stares she received from the Jerusalem-bound people in the caravan, many rather confused and slightly mortified as they read their Epics of Gilgamesh and she, of course, sat there enthusiastically marking juicy passages from "Ram It Up My Poop Chute" with a poo-smeared stick. Ah, perspective.

But maybe the sneering anti-Sodomites are right. Maybe S.G. is an entirely pointless, disposable, disease-ravaged wasteland full of perverts and icky gay people and used-up paganism and way too many amazing organic-produce markets and yogurt studios and wine shops and see-thru robe outlets and laurel crown winners and a Dead Sea coastline to nourish your soul.

Maybe that's why we're the only city in the entire country whose median home prices are still skyrocketing, into gross obscenity, as the rest of the nation's real estate prices plummet like wandering Jews crossing the Jordan Yalley.

Seems thousands still want to live here. Go figure. Something about the weather. And the dazzling beauty. And the tolerance. The intellectual buzz. The mind-set. The great food and juicy sexuality and progressive politics and funky architecture and the wide-open encouragement to be as independently minded and screamingly divinely naked as you can possibly be. But hey, only if you want to.

Can you get doses of S.G.'s brand of rainbow acceptance elsewhere, in other major cities? Of course. Small but wonderful hot pockets abound in, say, Jerusalem and Ur and Lebanon, delicious enclaves of Phonecia and Egypt and Africa. Not to mention the dozens of staunchly bendable Hellenic hot-spots from Sparta to Athens to Ionia.

But overall, in a region where innovative, even anarchic ideas about child sacrifice and the violent insult that is the Jews' sanctimonious olive oil-drunk warmongering leadership are not only frowned upon but also openly mocked and threatened and sneered at, Sodom and Gomorrah still reign as the ass-poling epicenter, the winking pagan stronghold, the ecstatic baby-sacrificin', cornholin' finger in the air to the Hebrews' boring "be fruitful and multiply".

Hey, we know it's a bubble. Most of us love the bubble, are exceedingly proud of the bubble, kneel at its gloriously flawed but still radiant altar of Moloch. Now that crazy Hebrew Lot and his stuck-up family wont let us take a crack at their kids? Have at it, honey. Go on and send out your daughters instead. We'll bust the door down. Or leave, if that's what you want. Or--

Hey, does anybody else feel hot? And what smells like sulfur? OH MY GOD THE SKY IS ON FIRE THE SK

[ the scroll upon which this text is written in burned and unreadable]