An Egregious Insult To Good Taste

An excerpt from the rough draft of my Barack Obama bio-pic. I've tried to be as true-to-life as possible, so if you notice any factual errors, please let me know. I'm going to be the next Oliver Stone, with hopefully less of a downward spiral in my later years.

Scene: Lincoln Memorial. Barack Obama has just been inaugurated as President of the United States of America

Dick Cheney and George Bush are watching.

BUSH (forlorn): We had a good run, didn't we Dick?

CHENEY (glowering)

BUSH: Tell me about the rabbits again, Dick. I get to tend the rabbits now, don't I?

CHENEY (still glowering, face distorting, eyes brimming over with hellfire): GRAAAGH! NOOOOOO!

BUSH (perplexed): Dick?

Cheney undergoes a transformation - His demonic visage stretches and expands, his ogreish frame bursts through his suit with new, black-veined muscle. Tusks split his lips wide as he howls his defiance.

The transformation ends; Cheney is a hulking, monstrous troll. People begin to frantically scatter from the crowd. The podium is empty. Cheney begins to pluck up citizens and drop them into one of his jagged, gaping maws. George Bush is crushed under his foot.

OBAMA: That is NOT the change I campaigned on, Cheney.

BARACK OBAMA enters the scene, wearing golden armor and Lincoln's stovepipe hat, the sword Excalibur pointed at Dick Cheney. Queen's "I Want to Break Free" begins to play.

CHENEY (cackling): MORTAL! I FED ON CARRION AND DRANK HOT BLOOD BEFORE THE DAWN OF THIS WORLD! I AM THE LORD OF THE CHARNEL HOUSE AND PRINCE OF THE FIELDS OF BONE AND CARRION! I AM THE FONT OF ALL WOE! WHAT USE ARE THOSE TALISMANS AGAINST ME?

Cheney leaps forwards, backhanding Obama across the chest, sending him flying backwards. Obama leaps to his feet and rushes forward, sword clanging against claws. The two seem evenly matched for a time, until Cheney flaps his black wings and the wind knocks Obama to his knees. Cheney delivers a hideous punch, and Obama flies backwards, to crash down at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial.

Cheney gives a mocking laugh.

Obama looks up - and sees the statue of Abraham Lincoln. He gives it a solemn nod, then rises to his feet, rushing back towards Cheney.

OBAMA: I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

Obama grins, coldly.

OBAMA: All flesh but yours, Cheney.

Obama returns to fight with newfound passion, battering back Cheney. Pouring rain begins, and the fight is lit up occasionally with flashes of lightning. Cheney roars into the thunder as he is beaten back.

Finally, Obama lands a mortal blow, slamming Excalibur into the chest of his foe. Cheney stares down at the pommel of the sword, confused.

CHENEY (sputtering, blood flecking his maw): Y-you can-can't!

OBAMA (grimly, as he pulls the sword out, and delivers a spinning decapitation): Yes. We. Can.

The scene fades, leaving the viewer with some pertinent lines from the Battle Hymn
of the Republic:

"He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on."

-Fin-

Last year, my town's incumbent mayor, a goofy little man who'd held the job for as long as I can recall, was trounced in the local elections by some other guy, whose name I can't think of either. But the majority of the twelve or so people with lives pathetic enough to actually give a shit about local politics clearly felt that What's-his-name had overstayed his welcome and Who's-his-face would be better at whatever the hell it is town mayors do. Riding on the first float in the Christmas parade.

I cared as much as I care about any other absolute non-events (Secretaries' Day, Paris Hilton's birthday) and until recently, hadn't given the new mayor a moment's thought. But I now suspect that he is, in fact, an agent of chaos. A malevolent beast that crawled out into the light from a Stygian pit, intent on being the catalyst of the apocalypse and bringing about the end of man.

First, he's Quebecois, the perfect disguise for an Old One. The Quebecois and the Old Ones are both groups of evil malcontents, and they have similar goals – both want to separate Quebec from Canada. The Quebecois wants to make it a sovereign nation; the dark god wants to rend the two apart in his foetid, cavernous maw.

Second, since his coming, we've been caught under the heel of a record-shattering winter. The snow and ice keep raining down. If you were to look out my back door right now, you would not be able to tell that I have an above-ground swimming pool. It's a week until April, but this winter may go on forever.

My uncle moved back to town last week – before two days had passed, he'd managed to shatter his ankle badly enough that it had to be surgically repaired. I spent an hour walking through town the other day and saw one minor collision and two near-wrecks. The ice is everywhere.

And since the mayor is probably in charge of municipal works (he's got to be in charge of something, right?), it would explain why the snow and removal crews, who were more than efficient every other year, have suddenly done such a piss-poor job that the roads are a gauntlet of death and carnage - black ice six inches thick, snow banks piled so high a driver can only guess if there's another car trying around the corner of any intersection, said banks protruding so far that there's not a street in town where two cars can pass each other safely without coming an inch and a half away from tearing one another's rear-view mirrors off. It's ineptitude so blatant it could only be intentional. Murder by proxy.

Helicopters are crashing into the lake (okay, one helicopter), the streets are drenched in blood. Death stalks the unwary.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

Had I known Who's-his-face had represented the pro-death and mayhem party, I might have voted for him. Now that I'm aware, I fully support my monstrous mayor and his Iced Earth Pogrom. I pray the culling is a wild success.

And whenever the hell the next election is, I fully intend to vote for His Dark Lord, Spawn of the Pit. Unless there's something more important to do, or something on television, or I have a load of laundry that needs to be put in the dryer. But, if I'm bored out of my skull and don't feel too put out walking the four blocks to the Municipal Center, I fully intend to do my civic duty and re-elect whatever-the-hell-his-name-is.

This may be my finest work of heresy:

One of the most fantastic pieces of theological bullshitting is a neat dodge invented by Christians. The reason it came about is because anyone who even peeks into a book of mythology notices a few too many parallels to parts of the New Testament to be brushed off as coincidence. With a little more reading, it really starts to look like a couple philosophy nuts took a bunch of stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, Tammuz, and etc, and just cut away all the naughty parts and invented their very own messiah.

See, the problem is that the Old Testament has pedigree, but the New Testament is a cobbled-together mess of anonymous origins, written by dozens of people. And that was before dozens of Popes started editing it for fun, like Presidents would the Constitution if they could get away with it. The Old Testament is mostly solid, and it never really wavers from its message, which seems to be that god is a dick, and if you have a problem with that, he will fuck your shit up. The New Testament, on the other hand, is full of dubious, contradictory stuff, like Jesus going around telling everyone that you don't need temples and rigid doctrine to have a personal relationship with god, and then telling Paul to build the fucking Catholic church and wear a humongous hat.

But if the whole thing were a hoax, and Jesus was just a white-washed sacrificial fertility deity, that might explain why the New Testament doesn't make any sense at all. Christian scholars, for obvious reasons, weren't keen on being labeled a plagiarist imaginary religion, and someone with a quick mind and gigantic brass balls came up with this: Christ, being the hot shit that he is, made such an impression on humanity that people were actually dreaming of him thousands of years before he was born. Since the dreamers were primitives and heathens, though, they got some of the details wrong.

Stunning, isn't it? Unfortunately, this raises a disturbing (or hilarious) possibility. You see, many of those precursor myths have a common element. They're about these rebellious, young gods, flying in the face of tradition and doctrine. And eventually, they're punished. Sacrificed. And then, after time in the underworld, they're reborn. Life-death-rebirth.

Except often, enough to seem decidedly non-coincidental, the chain of events actually goes like this: Life-cock chopped off-death-rebirth. Attis and Adonis were castrated. So was one of the south american deities, and these are just myths I can remember off-hand. So, like the other recurring motifs that parallel the Jesus story (the wandering in the desert, the cross, the sacrificial death followed by a return from the underworld), doesn't it sound like the reason castration comes up again and again in mythology is actually because Jesus, the only real walked-the-earth deity was castrated as he hung on the cross?

Of course, you can't tell that part in church, right? So you make a tiny little edit in the "completely true, we promise" New Testament, a gaping hole where the Dick of God used to be can be called a wounded side, right? Doesn't it seem out of place to make a big fucking deal about a stab in the side when the poor bastard is already nailed to a goddamn cross and left hanging in the air to die? It's the kind of excess you can only appreciate if you're Mel Gibson... or if it's the polite way to work around saying a Roman soldier castrated Jesus.

Wait, there's more! Jesus, as anyone whose ever suffered through a boring Easter mass knows, rose again, wounds unhealed. And after hanging around with his disciples for a time, he ascended bodily into heaven. As in, his soul did not depart his body. The whole thing, soul and meat-wrapping, went up to heaven to sit at his father's table in his many mansions, blah blah blah. Catholics, after all, believe in the resurrection of the body, which is why you're supposed to boxed and buried instead of cremated.

So what about his cock? It's not any more unreasonable to come to the conclusion that Jesus is spending a cockless eternity in Heaven than it is to reach the conclusion that other deities of myth are just reflections of Christ. It might, however, make the next smugger-than-fuck religion panderer shit his or her fucking pants, so you're free to repeat all this to the next Jehovah's Witness that drags you out of bed to spout dogma at you. Or interrupt mass on Sunday demanding the truth about the pork-sword of the lord.

And if you happen to know someone with a high enough standing in the church to get me excommunicated, please show them this and make my fondest dream come true.

In my heart of hearts, I've always suspected that were I ever in Serious Fucking Trouble with the law, hard time in prison trouble, I'd do my damnedest not to be taken alive, because I've lost almost every fistfight I've ever wound up in, and I'm not exactly intimidating. If you're not catching what I'm pitching, I'd be expected to catch a lot of pitches.

No, I'm not in danger of being fresh meat at the big house, and I'm not seconds from running out into the streets screaming that they'll never take me alive, but I fought the law, and you know how the song goes.

Ages ago, I did a little (okay a lot) of drinking in public, because it was summer and a case of beer is cheaper than getting falling-down wasted in a bar, and because the only two drinking establishments outside of train distance are a karaoke bar and a really dismal pub. French people butchering the same dozen rock songs over and over or drinking with a bunch of people who went to school with your dad isn't a choice, it's a punishment, so we basically drank everywhere but the drinking establishments.

So one night a couple of us got caught, and to be fair, the cops gave us a warning, but when they found the exact same group drinking in public three days later, they gave us all tickets. Mine was thrown in a drawer and promptly forgotten about.

Fast-forward to now, after presumably having several warnings that never quite made it to me, I received a letter informing me that I should present myself in court soon and be prepared to pay about $360 dollars, or perform 36 hours of community service.

Community. Service. I can barely tolerate providing a service to the community (being employed) when I'm being recompensed with money, and now I'm expected to do so gratis because me and a few friends decided to sit at the local dam and split a 12-case?

Yes, it's my own damn fault for getting the ticket, and doubly so for ignoring the ticket, and triply so for not having the money to pay the ticket when it finally surfaced. And yet, I can provide one perfectly valid reason why I should be completely absolved: Because the other three people I was drinking with that night? They paid them off with their fucking welfare checks. And I could do the same right now, if I was a constant drain on the system.

In a perfect world, or at least a less stupid one, I'd be able to walk into that court and say "give me a month of welfare. Or some of that unemployment I sink my money into every fucking two weeks when I have a job that's yet to pay me a fucking cent. Or pull 500 bucks from my worthless fucking "retirement savings" paid to a program that'll be bankrupt decades before I can retire. Pay the ticket, keep the rest of the five hundred, and fuck off."

So now, my already frantic search for a job (I had one since the last time I mentioned work here, but it didn't last, and obviously neither did the money) gets doubly frantic, since I now have to choose between two clearly unthinkable alternatives: welfare, or helping my community. If they can take me alive.

There comes a moment in every man's life when he longs to abandon the life he has built or broken and take to the rails, to sleep in box-cars and drink rotgut brewed in tin cans. For some, this mad notion comes several times a day. Those proud few may eventually give in to their urge, and wear the mantle of abject poverty and foul scents in pride (or desperation). This path will be forever closed to me.

Why? Because I cannot grow a beard. I can grow a scraggly mockery of one at best, but I will never rock a Rasputinesque monster-beard, the sort lesser beards simultaneously fear, love, and envy. In a perfect world, this wouldn't be an issue - a man would be judged by the content of his character (or his ability to fake some character), and not the density and lushness of his facial hair - but in the man-eat-dog world of riding the rails, I would be marked as different, an outsider.

I can see it all so clearly. Initially, I would be welcomed with open arms. The veteran hobos would share their wisdom with me over a hot can of best-left-unidentified stew and brackish wine strengthened with paint thinner. Yet a few weeks in, they would congregate in secret, whispering in the dark, denouncing the young man who can spend weeks living rough without acquiring the look of a man on the edge of apotheosis or madness that can only be expressed through a combination of a thousand-yard stare and, most importantly, a wild, tangled, unruly beast of a beard. "Is he shaving?" They'd ask one another in unabashed disgust. "No," one of the wiser hobos would note. "He's got some wispy facial hair. I think he just can't grow a beard."

Soon after that is when it would all go to hell. Having recognized me as a mere pretender, they'd tear me to pieces and devour me, scattering my bones in rail yards up and down the continent as a warning to other prospective derelicts. For years to come, I'd be a legend across Hobo-dom. The tale of my grisly fate would be heard under every bridge and around every trash-can fire in the land. "I heard tell he was a hot meal for three men, and they smoked the rest of him and made him inta jerky. Got a friend says he met a man with a piece of the Beardless One, and that fella said every bite tasted like failure." And to apprentice-hobos they'd tell a grisly epilogue: "Keep to the hobo-code, or else one night as you sleep, his half-eaten corpse will crawl inta yer box-car, with barber's shears and a straight razor in hand. He wears dead men's beards, he does. And whenever you hear a train whistling in the night, it's said that means the Beardless One just found another victim."

Monstrous, isn't it? I fully expect that I'll one day be nothing more than a cautionary tale, but I'd rather my shocking end to be the result of a series of rash, ill-advised decisions, not the result of a disappointing genetic fluke. But clearly, my dream of a long life on the rails (living to the ripe old age of 32, before dying of something messy, preferably tuberculosis) has to be relegated to the list of things my inability to grow a beard has taken from me, along with captaining a pirate ship, leading a cult, and standing on a street corner and loudly and maniacally proclaiming that the end of days is nigh.

With all those dreams dead, what's left for me?

Unemployed again. My former employer, a bipolar harpy, orally tore me a new asshole at a decibel range that'd set your ears to bleeding. In front of roughly half my coworkers. Normally, between indifference and self-preservation I'd find a little nook of this-too-shall-pass and shrug the whole thing off, but I don't take kindly to personal insults (even when I set the whole thing in motion by personally insulting someone else), and before I knew it I found myself quitting.

To be frank, I'm better off without the job, which is a position I'll maintain for another week or two until the money in my account dries up. So far, the worst part of it was feeling like a bit of an idiot, carrying the umbrella that had been sitting in my work locker for months all the way home on an unseasonably hot day where there wasn't a single cloud in sight.

Well, that and the fact that I'd bought the non-refundable monthly public transit pass on the first of October and quit on the third.

This has been sitting forlorn in my documents folder. Please disregard the use of "we" instead of "I" - I have not recently uncovered a secret royal heritage, I was just writing it as a sort of pre-pitch to show that I can string sentences together and try to be funny.

21st Century Digital Baby

Getting knocked up happens to the best of us. We won't say it's unavoidable, because you could have easily dodged this bullet if you hadn't been so hot to trot, but this isn't the time for judgment, no matter how much we think this is a truly terrible idea. This is a time for getting prepared, because this isn't a dog eat dog world anymore, it's a wolf eat dog, dog eat shit world, and if that little accident growing in your womb isn't prepared to be King or Queen of the hill, he or she won't be able to support you once you're all feeble and your brain goes pudding-y. Here's what to do to make sure you don't look back on your life wishing you'd taken the morning-after pill.

Loud is the new Loud:
Overpopulation is one of the biggest problems we're facing, and not only does that mean there aren't going be enough resources for everyone, it means if your kid can't speak the fuck up, it's just going to be drowned out by the over medicated crowd of little monsters it spends time with. And if he or she isn't a leader right from the start, then some other kid's parents are going to be in the state-of-the-art retirement center, with every amenity at their disposal, while you shamble onto a bus that smells like a latrine full of dead bodies to stagger around the mall in your pajamas with your hearing aid off so you can't hear death breathing down your neck. To learn to be heard, a child needs inspiration, and since you push paper for a living, that's clearly not you. An hour after the little wonder pops out of the womb, give him an iPod full of Iggy Pop, death metal, and every tragically dead rock-star that people still hold vigils for. Except John Lennon - that hippy shit might have flown back in the day, but your kid needs ambition, daring, and a great big set of balls. Metaphorical ones, if you're stuck with a baby girl.

Don't Spare the Rod:
We know it's easier to just pump the kid full of Ritalin, but you're trying to raise a tiger, not a kitten. Make sure you're firm with the child, but also explain yourself. "If you don't get good grades, you'll be stuck in community college. Then, you'll get a miserable job filing papers for a pittance of a wage and you'll never amount to anything. If that happens, Mommy and Daddy won't love you anymore. Is that what you want?" Of course, sometimes you have to explain that the child isn't doing anything wrong, they're just not being ambitious enough. "Don't steal in school, honey. Petty crime leads to getting shanked in prison. Wait until you're a CEO and you can grab a hundred million dollars and retire to the Caymans, like the proper sort of thief."

Birds and Bees:
Make sure you give your child the benefit of your experience, before he or she is stuck abandoning all their hopes and dreams to raise ungrateful, pain in the ass offspring, just like you were. Plus, if your kid does make it big, he or she will put their offspring down as beneficiary, which means if your son or daughter dies at a tragically young age, you'll get completely screwed. If you're very lucky, your child's spouse will pass on with them, which means you'll at least have an opportunity to funnel money out of your grandchild's trust fund, but it's better safe than sorry. Instill distrust in others early - hire incompetent babysitters and only let him/her play with the spastic, arbitrarily violent damaged goods children. The idea is to make sure that no matter how badly your child thinks of you, he thinks you're much better than anyone else. That's love.

The Best and Brightest:
If your child isn't the best, then he or she will never amount to anything, and you'll have wasted years of love and sacrifice on a dud kid. Find something - anything - that the child is good at, and push mercilessly until he's better than anyone else. If you've got a big kid, get him or her working weights and on a strict protein diet fast, and drill the little bastard until it collapses, often. If it's a smart kid, have it studying until all hours of the night, and lay the stress on thicker and thicker until he or she is about to break down. Stress tolerance can probably be built up like tolerance of anything else, and you don't want the mental breakdown happening at MIT. It'll be better if it's taken care of early and often, so the kid is ready for any challenge the world throws at him/her - anything will be easier than staying home. And if you have a cute kid, make sure you emphasize that looks are all that will ever matter. You struck gold here, and you don't want the kid thinking it's good for anything but sex appeal. God forbid he or she starts thinking they don't need to rely on their physical beauty to get ahead in life. That's like winning a lottery and tossing away the ticket on the off chance that the next one might have a bigger pay-off.

If All Else Fails:
By the time you know for certain that your child is inferior, it's probably way too late to put it up for adoption, and far, far too late to abort it. But there's hope for everyone, even losers. That hope is called marrying up, and you should encourage it. Make sure your child is at least attractive - extensive plastic surgery may be required. Then spend most of the time emphasizing on how important money and possessions are, and how attractive old people can be. Rent everything Sean Connery has ever been in, and exhaustively point out what an impressive, suave, dignified, and filthy stinking rich guy he is. And this path isn't restricted to women anymore, since gay marriage is in, and old gay men are probably just as attracted to the young and buff. Your little boy might be able to bag his very own Elton. And if your child marries up, and you play your cards right, the new spouse might be just guilty enough for bumping and grinding someone old enough to be their grandchild to make sure that you're very well taken care of.

If all of this isn't enough for you to raise a perfect, and more importantly, wealthy son or daughter, then you're clearly not fit to be a parent. There are adoption agencies all over the world, and you should start looking into them now. You might not end up wealthy, but there's still the hope that a more competent set of parents can give your child the encouragement, constant pressure, scrutiny, and relentless haranguing it needs to be make it in this cold, hard world. Then, maybe someday, your child will start to search for his real parents. Start working on your "We wanted to keep you so badly, but times were so tough" speech now, so that it's properly rehearsed if opportunity comes knocking.

Good luck, and congratulations on forgetting to wear protection!

This journal is now devoted solely to posting hilarious pictures of cats with trainwreck broken english captions. Oh, and spewing political rhetoric cribbed from Jon Stewart and half-understood sound bites I overheard walking by a television broadcasting CNN.

Or not. I did give this journal a good scouring - every old post has been deleted. I haven't decided if I should use this opportunity to work on my bad habit of squeezing a fuck or a motherfucker into every other post, or if I should fuck this motherfucker like it's never been fucked. Leaning towards the latter, though.

See, this is why I have so much trouble with real writing - the more time passes, the more displeased I become with my own words. I'm already giving the first paragraph of this entry a predatory glare. Archives and I are never meant to co-exist - I won't go so far as to say that it kept me up at nights, but the idea that every dumb thing I ever puked out onto the internet is still kicking around is unsettling. I have a short story I wrote in the eleventh grade up somewhere (I'll never say where), and I can't even look at the thing without groaning.

But countering that is the fact that puking things up onto the internet is enjoyable, so after these deleting sprees, I always come crawling back.

Now I just need to find someone to read a little of it (and more importantly, someone else's wordpuke to read, since my friends page has grown a tad fucking sparse, and most of the people who haven't deleted their accounts have still stopped updating.