St Petersburg Loses Sainthood

Downtown St. Petersburg – Pinellas County – Monday, 4.8.2019

Following a strongly worded email that was sent to local government officials by the Vatican, St. Petersburg has officially had its Sainthood revoked.

Citing issues of “excessive drug use, but like in an openly obnoxious way not even trying to be discreet,” and a surprisingly long list of other behaviors including, “too many murals,” and “What’s with the port area?” St. Pete will now just be referred to as “Petersburg” and those who continue to use say “Saint” before that are liable to punishment by a potential new law which will be voted on next week.

The new law is expected to pass unanimously, as the Vatican lobby has millions of dollars involved in the Petersburg government.

Local Petersburg resident Billy Gordana claimed he doesn’t really care about the change and stated that, “As long as I can pretty much do whatever I want, whenever I want, I don’t care what we call it.” He huffed some peppermint essential oils and continued, “This is an art town. I do art.” He said while pointing his thumb to his chest like a big boy. “We’re free spirits, and who cares if the Volkswagen says we can’t be saints anymore, this shirt cost $3 and it’s from 1975, but my pants and shoes cost $600!”

Leslie Brenner had a different take on the situation. “I’m offended.” She says while parting her short hair covering a Harry Potter lightning bolt forehead tattoo. “I may not be a Saint, but are they? Those guys are RAPING” she shouted, “CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD!”

She looked around, trying to gather crowd attention, but nobody seems to want to back her up, and continued walking past her.

“THOSE ‘SAINTS’” She over-ironically air-quotes to the point that it’s more offensive than sarcastic, “ARE BAD PEOPLE! I’m a good person!” She caught her breath and recomposed herself. “I’m sorry, you don’t know how many micro-aggressions I deal with on a daily basis. Toxic masculinity in the work place has ruined my life.” She spit on me and kicked me in the shin before running away.

The Petersburg government has no plan on fighting the decision because they’re “scared,” and really have no reason to try and go against the most powerful organization on earth. Local official Brent Greblen, a whistleblower on the inside who’s fed Tampa News Force information years under condition of anonymity, texted us to say the local government “might as well just take this loss.”

Brent goes on in the text to say, “Yea, we’re all pretty comfortable with our bureaucratic lives, and basic day-to-day paper-pusher world where we get paid a handsome wage to be decent people and be happy at public events and pretend to really listen to everything citizens say without them realizing we don’t care and they could easily overthrow us if they wanted with physical violence, and even though they’d suffer substantial casualties, the final result would be worth the effort.”

I delete Mr. Greblen’s number and block it, because the things he said scared me. I realized I had been at the bar for over six hours now and only talked to a few people, read a text message from our insider government-leaker, and then realized I should do more interviews or put in more effort to get any information on the story of St. Petersburg losing their Sainthood, and what that even means in the first place.

A man sitting next to me at the bar looked at me intently. I heard his voice in my head. “I heard you say ‘Saint Petersburg’ in your head when you wrote down ‘St. Petersburg’ a few sentences ago in your article, and putting ‘Saint’ before ‘Petersburg’ is now illegal.”

I thought back at him. “No it’s not, it’s in the process of being proposed in local congress.”

“No” he said in my head.“You’re wrong, you’ve got bad information, it seems like instead of doing any actual research on the topic, you’ve just made up what you think to be real.”

“How are you talking to me in my head?” I thought.

“It’s like that thing in the new Star Wars movie between Adam Driver and the chick.” His voice echoes in my head.

“That’s not really considered a ‘new’ Star Wars movie.” He telepathically hears in his head as I saw him make a frustrated eye-roll upset-face.

“It’s the newest of the numbered ones” he yells across the bar. “Anyways,” he continued. “I’m with the Vatican, I’m actually the guy who decided to take Sainthood away from Petersburg, it was my choice.”

I didn’t understand.

“I’ve lived here undercover as a spiritual spy for the church, and I recently had my heart broken by an art chick, and it made me really sad. I decided if I can’t be happy here, the least I can do is try to make some overblown grand gesture, to try and inconvenience some people’s lives to bring others down to my level, because I was upset. I wanted others to be upset too… But you have the gift, I’m able to speak to you through telepathy, and you’re only the second person in Petersburg I’ve ever met whom I could communicate this way. You, and my ex-girlfriend. The one who broke my heart…”

I get tired and stop writing the article.