The Ever-Loving Virgin Prince
Saturday, February 12, 2005
All The News That Fits To Print
To all you magnificent mice and men of modern ‘Merica,
Last night I was caught up in the strange swirlings of Dadaist dreamings. Nemo and the Sandman had conspired together to present me nocturnal images the likes of which Dr. Timothy Leary once had to spend hours in the laboratory to produce. In my confused, unconscious state I was greeted with visions of kung fu-fighting soul brothers, exploding horses, and large bands of mariachis engaging in brutal turf-war battles with packs of pink ninjas. My subconscious had even blessed me with a celebrity cameo, by way of Britney Spears, riding bareback on a horse briefly, until she too exploded with it. Brute and Glob had done their job, and the landscape was littered with unidentifiable pink bits of human muck, and two nearly unscathed (and clearly reusable) bags of silicone.
I awoke shortly thereafter to the sounds of Count Dante and the Black Dragon Fighting Society, but not before being granted two nuggets of universal truth, sent to me from the group-mind in the center in the universe. The first was the vision of Amy Acker in lingerie; there is no sweeter sight. Secondly, the knowledge that at the very basis of things there are two types of people: those who dream, and those who only place importance on how much cold hard cash they can hold solidly in their hands at any given time. It’s sad to say this isn’t much of a dreamer’s world. I’m trapped.
Trapped in a world of compromise, of people choosing lesser evils instead of trying to effect great change. Stuck in a world where the nation to the north has a terminal case of national penis envy over its neighbor to the south, choosing instead to gripe, complain, attempt to belittle the other, rather than actually make an effort at doing anything about it. Wedged in a world where the nation in the west flaunts its superior economic and military might as reason enough to joyfully mock and impose its will on its weaker neighbor. So much importance placed on the truly trivial.
Redwood City, Rock City ripped me from my slumber and I was off, jumping up in my bed and running out of my room to the kitchen for a breakfast bowl of hot ramen noodles in peanut sauce. It was time to take off for deep into the uncharted lands of California, to the land where monsters be; where Confederate flags fly and crank is manufactured by the ton. It was time to visit family.
February is the month which celebrates the births of both my niece and my nephew. All of us that could, and would, made the trek to visit. It would be a damnable journey, filled with the horrors of rightwing America, and the inherent crapulence that is all of California that is not the San Francisco bay area.
We stopped briefly in San Francisco to pick up my aunt, visiting briefly from Kansas, or Missouri, or whatever shithole state she currently resides in, somewhere where the white man roams free, clutching tightly to his Bible and fighting bitterly to stave off the effects of change. In my youth, she had always seemed the cool aunt, being considerably younger than the rest, and, I thought, a free-thinker. Our initial first few hours in the car were nice, I, filling the car with laughter courtesy of my dry, British wit. Everything seemed fine until the time of the birthday party.
That was when my aunt and my brother-in-law, and his father (my father-in-law by extension?), started griping about how homosexuality was a choice.
That was when I got angry.
That was when Bobo the Virgin Chimp, ever the civil rights defender, became enraged as well, and began to pelt the offending party with unholy amounts of monkey-dung. The birthday parlor of Auburn’s premier pizza establishment was quickly a mess of flying fur and feces. My aunt dodged an oncoming barrage of ape-guano only to defend the war on Iraq and start ranting about how America is the only moral place on Earth, making a point to state how she could care less about the opinions of Europeans, as Europe is filled with a bunch of heathen sinners that don’t go to church and she’d never want to go there. I quickly pointed out how the Vatican was based in Rome and how Europe itself was the birthplace of Protestantism, but she countered with an excuse about how the religion itself was created there, but God sided with America. She had me there. She was assuming God exists. There’s no way to logically argue with something not proven to exist; faith can’t be debated.
Heh. A nation built on slavery and the ideals of property-ownership. America the most moral place on Earth. I was waiting for her to start making with the “Sieg heil”s.
But as she continued to rant, the different points she made continued to contradict one another. One minute she complained of how the rich shouldn’t be taxed any higher than others, then followed up with a complaint of how we can’t even take care of our own people here in the ‘States. She further complained of the continued loss of jobs and economic downward spiral currently afflicting this country, then refused to pin any blame on the Bush administration, which she admitted was spending unholy amounts of money on the war in Iraq, which she still defended. She started praising Bush’s social security reform plan, while admitting she had no understanding of it, and when we started complaining about the total lack of character of Condoleezza Rice and her continued lack of ability in her job, as well as her frustrating inability to ever admit to any of her failures, errors, and wrongdoing, my aunt countered with,
“See! We’ve got a black person in the cabinet! The Republicans are the friends of the African American people, they’re on our side! You Democrats like to talk, but we’re the good guys!”
It was a weak counter-argument on every level. For one, when I think of Condoleezza Rice, “black person” isn’t the first thing to come to mind (rather, “overly ambitious, morally bankrupt, woefully inept, pathological liar” comes to mind) but we really shouldn’t be looking at people in terms of color, that’s the wrong path. A person should be judged on their ethics and accomplishments; I feel that’s what my fellow liberals have been working towards. She and her party of choice are welcome to continue looking at people in terms of “red fish, blue fish, one fish, two fish”, though I must admit I feel that as long as they continue to, the audiences in attendance at future Republican conventions will continue to be overwhelmingly albino in shade.
The “being gay is a choice” argument came up again, to which I argued passionately, and backed up my points with my knowledge of scientific fact. I was so successful on this battlefront that she actually did slip up and change her stance to say that regardless of how a person is predisposed at birth, people have a choice to obey or disobey (her concept of) God. It was an admission of sorts on her part that quite possibly, yes, people are born gay. I had no time to relish the satisfaction of winning the point however, realizing that what she was essentially saying was that gays should be made to suffer through a life absent of their own choice.
That just strikes me as evil.
Finally, when she tried to blame Clinton and his administration for the sorry state of America as it stands today, I brought up the point that there is now a definitive controlling Republican majority in charge of the Executive branch, the Legislative branch, and sadly, even the Judicial branch (something which our forefathers in writing the Constitution wanted never, never to happen). Not a lot of places left for Democrats to sabotage the American government. Pointing out that the Republicans have had significant control of the nation for more than four years now, I asked her where the evidence of this great change was, the signs of the mending of our wounded nation.
“We’re working on it.” was her only response.
We’re working on it? This is a counter-argument? Four years with no tangible evidence of any benefit for my fellow man and I?
At this comment I too lost my cool, and I joined my faithful ape in the flinging of feces at the avatars of our rightwing oppressors. With a solid “thud” I pelted my Kansas-bred relative with all the force of two decades worth of bitterness towards Reagan, exposing her to my own smelly version of trickle-down theory. As for my brother-in-law, spouting his pro-Mexican-deportation beliefs as he attempted to duck behind a table, he too was soiled by the inescapable version of the manifest destiny I presented. As for his father, I was compassionately conservative in the throwing of my waste at him.
To see such a dashing masked man and his trusty ape boldly throwing nature’s unholy version of the Molotov cocktail at the cowering wicked must have inspired the young ones, for quickly they too had joined in. Babes were chucking diapers and letting fly strained justice and stewed freedom. The toddlers joined in on the battle as well, supplying many of the bombs bursting in air. There was indeed no child left behind as I, my trusty ape, and my brave army of junior deputy Federalists bombarded the opposition. Finally, we had the offenders cornered in, trenched in behind an overturned table, and wedged between the videogame room and the entrance to the birthday parlor. They soon hoisted up a makeshift white flag, snatched from where, I shudder to think.
“Huzzah!” was my battle-cry, “democracy has won this day!”
The cost of the battle had been great. I was lucky my great-granddaddy’s camera had been protected in a leather case at my side. The birthday cake was ruined, with no chance of the candles ever being lit. The pizza was coated in extra toppings the likes of which would make anchovies feel altogether appetizing, nay, welcomed in their place. Another pineapple pizza ruined; somewhere in heaven, Hawaiian Jesus was crying. There wasn’t a Care Bear in the house that wouldn’t need a thorough machine washing with an excess of bleach. But I had no chance to savor my victory.
Quickly I was snatched up by the assistant manager of the establishment, his large arms pinning mine behind my back, and his barely formed, sparse mustache doing little to shield my ears from the angry stream of indignities spewing forth from his lips. With the help of the cute pizza-assembler that had winked at me when I first entered the establishment, I was heartily tossed out the front door, back to the parking lot exterior of the mini-mall. My ape soon followed. Then we were photographed and told never to return to the inside of the hallowed walls of Round Table pizza.
I protested with the tale of how the spirit of the great Alexander Hamilton himself had appeared before me, demanding that I do this deed for the good of America, but it was all for naught. My claims of patriotism fell on deaf ears.
As for my family, it was decided unilaterally amongst them that next year I would have to sit at the kiddy table. That is, IF I was invited to the next birthday party.
You and me against the world, Bobo. You and me against the world.
Be seeing you,
The Virgin Prince
Last night I was caught up in the strange swirlings of Dadaist dreamings. Nemo and the Sandman had conspired together to present me nocturnal images the likes of which Dr. Timothy Leary once had to spend hours in the laboratory to produce. In my confused, unconscious state I was greeted with visions of kung fu-fighting soul brothers, exploding horses, and large bands of mariachis engaging in brutal turf-war battles with packs of pink ninjas. My subconscious had even blessed me with a celebrity cameo, by way of Britney Spears, riding bareback on a horse briefly, until she too exploded with it. Brute and Glob had done their job, and the landscape was littered with unidentifiable pink bits of human muck, and two nearly unscathed (and clearly reusable) bags of silicone.
I awoke shortly thereafter to the sounds of Count Dante and the Black Dragon Fighting Society, but not before being granted two nuggets of universal truth, sent to me from the group-mind in the center in the universe. The first was the vision of Amy Acker in lingerie; there is no sweeter sight. Secondly, the knowledge that at the very basis of things there are two types of people: those who dream, and those who only place importance on how much cold hard cash they can hold solidly in their hands at any given time. It’s sad to say this isn’t much of a dreamer’s world. I’m trapped.
Trapped in a world of compromise, of people choosing lesser evils instead of trying to effect great change. Stuck in a world where the nation to the north has a terminal case of national penis envy over its neighbor to the south, choosing instead to gripe, complain, attempt to belittle the other, rather than actually make an effort at doing anything about it. Wedged in a world where the nation in the west flaunts its superior economic and military might as reason enough to joyfully mock and impose its will on its weaker neighbor. So much importance placed on the truly trivial.
Redwood City, Rock City ripped me from my slumber and I was off, jumping up in my bed and running out of my room to the kitchen for a breakfast bowl of hot ramen noodles in peanut sauce. It was time to take off for deep into the uncharted lands of California, to the land where monsters be; where Confederate flags fly and crank is manufactured by the ton. It was time to visit family.
February is the month which celebrates the births of both my niece and my nephew. All of us that could, and would, made the trek to visit. It would be a damnable journey, filled with the horrors of rightwing America, and the inherent crapulence that is all of California that is not the San Francisco bay area.
We stopped briefly in San Francisco to pick up my aunt, visiting briefly from Kansas, or Missouri, or whatever shithole state she currently resides in, somewhere where the white man roams free, clutching tightly to his Bible and fighting bitterly to stave off the effects of change. In my youth, she had always seemed the cool aunt, being considerably younger than the rest, and, I thought, a free-thinker. Our initial first few hours in the car were nice, I, filling the car with laughter courtesy of my dry, British wit. Everything seemed fine until the time of the birthday party.
That was when my aunt and my brother-in-law, and his father (my father-in-law by extension?), started griping about how homosexuality was a choice.
That was when I got angry.
That was when Bobo the Virgin Chimp, ever the civil rights defender, became enraged as well, and began to pelt the offending party with unholy amounts of monkey-dung. The birthday parlor of Auburn’s premier pizza establishment was quickly a mess of flying fur and feces. My aunt dodged an oncoming barrage of ape-guano only to defend the war on Iraq and start ranting about how America is the only moral place on Earth, making a point to state how she could care less about the opinions of Europeans, as Europe is filled with a bunch of heathen sinners that don’t go to church and she’d never want to go there. I quickly pointed out how the Vatican was based in Rome and how Europe itself was the birthplace of Protestantism, but she countered with an excuse about how the religion itself was created there, but God sided with America. She had me there. She was assuming God exists. There’s no way to logically argue with something not proven to exist; faith can’t be debated.
Heh. A nation built on slavery and the ideals of property-ownership. America the most moral place on Earth. I was waiting for her to start making with the “Sieg heil”s.
But as she continued to rant, the different points she made continued to contradict one another. One minute she complained of how the rich shouldn’t be taxed any higher than others, then followed up with a complaint of how we can’t even take care of our own people here in the ‘States. She further complained of the continued loss of jobs and economic downward spiral currently afflicting this country, then refused to pin any blame on the Bush administration, which she admitted was spending unholy amounts of money on the war in Iraq, which she still defended. She started praising Bush’s social security reform plan, while admitting she had no understanding of it, and when we started complaining about the total lack of character of Condoleezza Rice and her continued lack of ability in her job, as well as her frustrating inability to ever admit to any of her failures, errors, and wrongdoing, my aunt countered with,
“See! We’ve got a black person in the cabinet! The Republicans are the friends of the African American people, they’re on our side! You Democrats like to talk, but we’re the good guys!”
It was a weak counter-argument on every level. For one, when I think of Condoleezza Rice, “black person” isn’t the first thing to come to mind (rather, “overly ambitious, morally bankrupt, woefully inept, pathological liar” comes to mind) but we really shouldn’t be looking at people in terms of color, that’s the wrong path. A person should be judged on their ethics and accomplishments; I feel that’s what my fellow liberals have been working towards. She and her party of choice are welcome to continue looking at people in terms of “red fish, blue fish, one fish, two fish”, though I must admit I feel that as long as they continue to, the audiences in attendance at future Republican conventions will continue to be overwhelmingly albino in shade.
The “being gay is a choice” argument came up again, to which I argued passionately, and backed up my points with my knowledge of scientific fact. I was so successful on this battlefront that she actually did slip up and change her stance to say that regardless of how a person is predisposed at birth, people have a choice to obey or disobey (her concept of) God. It was an admission of sorts on her part that quite possibly, yes, people are born gay. I had no time to relish the satisfaction of winning the point however, realizing that what she was essentially saying was that gays should be made to suffer through a life absent of their own choice.
That just strikes me as evil.
Finally, when she tried to blame Clinton and his administration for the sorry state of America as it stands today, I brought up the point that there is now a definitive controlling Republican majority in charge of the Executive branch, the Legislative branch, and sadly, even the Judicial branch (something which our forefathers in writing the Constitution wanted never, never to happen). Not a lot of places left for Democrats to sabotage the American government. Pointing out that the Republicans have had significant control of the nation for more than four years now, I asked her where the evidence of this great change was, the signs of the mending of our wounded nation.
“We’re working on it.” was her only response.
We’re working on it? This is a counter-argument? Four years with no tangible evidence of any benefit for my fellow man and I?
At this comment I too lost my cool, and I joined my faithful ape in the flinging of feces at the avatars of our rightwing oppressors. With a solid “thud” I pelted my Kansas-bred relative with all the force of two decades worth of bitterness towards Reagan, exposing her to my own smelly version of trickle-down theory. As for my brother-in-law, spouting his pro-Mexican-deportation beliefs as he attempted to duck behind a table, he too was soiled by the inescapable version of the manifest destiny I presented. As for his father, I was compassionately conservative in the throwing of my waste at him.
To see such a dashing masked man and his trusty ape boldly throwing nature’s unholy version of the Molotov cocktail at the cowering wicked must have inspired the young ones, for quickly they too had joined in. Babes were chucking diapers and letting fly strained justice and stewed freedom. The toddlers joined in on the battle as well, supplying many of the bombs bursting in air. There was indeed no child left behind as I, my trusty ape, and my brave army of junior deputy Federalists bombarded the opposition. Finally, we had the offenders cornered in, trenched in behind an overturned table, and wedged between the videogame room and the entrance to the birthday parlor. They soon hoisted up a makeshift white flag, snatched from where, I shudder to think.
“Huzzah!” was my battle-cry, “democracy has won this day!”
The cost of the battle had been great. I was lucky my great-granddaddy’s camera had been protected in a leather case at my side. The birthday cake was ruined, with no chance of the candles ever being lit. The pizza was coated in extra toppings the likes of which would make anchovies feel altogether appetizing, nay, welcomed in their place. Another pineapple pizza ruined; somewhere in heaven, Hawaiian Jesus was crying. There wasn’t a Care Bear in the house that wouldn’t need a thorough machine washing with an excess of bleach. But I had no chance to savor my victory.
Quickly I was snatched up by the assistant manager of the establishment, his large arms pinning mine behind my back, and his barely formed, sparse mustache doing little to shield my ears from the angry stream of indignities spewing forth from his lips. With the help of the cute pizza-assembler that had winked at me when I first entered the establishment, I was heartily tossed out the front door, back to the parking lot exterior of the mini-mall. My ape soon followed. Then we were photographed and told never to return to the inside of the hallowed walls of Round Table pizza.
I protested with the tale of how the spirit of the great Alexander Hamilton himself had appeared before me, demanding that I do this deed for the good of America, but it was all for naught. My claims of patriotism fell on deaf ears.
As for my family, it was decided unilaterally amongst them that next year I would have to sit at the kiddy table. That is, IF I was invited to the next birthday party.
You and me against the world, Bobo. You and me against the world.
The Virgin Prince
