Everyone has a cross to bear. Especially Brother Stickthrough.

It was a dark, windy April morning when we caught up with Vlad Stickthrough, a monk at the Abbey of Our Tortured Lord some twenty miles southwest of the holy city of Jerusalem. Brother Stickthrough stood over a patch of crabgrass creeping out between the cracks in the dusty ground. Back arched, shoulders hunched, teeth clenched, splintery shaft of wood protruding from his back and chest, he mercilessly drenched the weed with a five dollar bottle of Roundup. “Fucking grow on my ground when I got a chunk of wood stuck through me. I’ll show you who deserves to breath my fucking air,” he rambled crazily.

Brother Stickthrough wasn’t always so bitter and psychotic, nor was he always devoted to the Lord. Let me tell you about the tale of Stickthrough versus Hitler.

The year was 1947, and Vlad Stickthrough was young American adventurer traveling across the Sahara. He visited the great sultans and governors and demonstrated his amazing air conditioning systems to the leaders of the great desert region. Eventually his travels brought him east to the Holy Land. Seeking to sell his wares to European archaeologists, Stickthrough checked out all the major digs. Arriving at one site to an echoing shriek of triumph, Stickthrough descended into a long-buried stone building to find out what all the commotion was about.

“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be dead?” asked a surprised Stickthrough to a deranged Adolph Hitler.

To Stickthrough’s horror, Hitler had unearthed a piece of the True Cross, the ancient relic that would render him invincible. Leaping into action, he attempted to wrest the splintery shaft from Hitler’s grasp. Stickthrough, weary from his desert travel, was no match for a deranged Hitler, and the not-so-dead Fuhrer stabbed him through the chest with the mighty artifact.

It was then that Stickthrough felt the power of the True Cross enter him, and he became invincible.

“I fucking killed Hitler with my bare hands that day,” Brother Stickthrough remembers. “Poured gasoline on his little mustache. Nose went up like a marshmallow.”

Stickthrough immediately retired from the air conditioner business and joined a monastery. “I should have cursed God, really. Son of a bitch has me impaled. Bad enough I was named Vlad fucking Stickthrough already without being stuck through. And it still hurts like a motherfucker. But then I thought, what the hell, I’m invincible. Though apparently invincible doesn’t extend to Scrabble. Doesn’t even work for arm wrestling. Damn lot of good that does me.”

Brother Stickthrough has big plans for the future. “I figure I could be some kind of reverse suicide bomber. You know, find out where them crazy ones live, join their group, then blow myself up in their midst, only, you know, I’m invincible, so I wouldn’t blow up. Then I’ll just sit around getting older and older until somebody finds the Spear of Longinus and kills me with that.”