Friday, October 28, 2011

Al Roker and the Lexicon of Tomorrow


Although by no means do I consider myself interested in nor acquainted with the culinary arts, my eye happened to stumble upon a copy of Al Roker’s The Big Bad Book of Barbecue while browsing the public library. It was not Mr. Roker’s venture down the avenue of literature that provoked my inquiry, but rather the crudely-contrived title of The Big Bad Book of Barbecue that was of particular interest to me. The context of the word Bad used in the book title represents a growing trend in the modern English lexicon concerning how certain adjectives are used in proportion to their intended definitions. I am sure that Mr. Roker, a popular TV meteorologist turned food connoisseur, does not intend for his readers to believe that his book is terrible or bad in any sense, but rather appeals to this aforementioned trend in order to satisfy the alliteration contained within its title and to perpetuate the reckless and disobedient stereotype associated with the demographic of individuals who eat grilled food.

There are those of us who continue to use the word bad for its intended definition, which denotes something to be of poor quality, inferior, or defective. Then, there are those such as Mr. Roker, who would prefer to use the word in reverse proportion to its intended meaning. Such negligent use of adjectives is part of what contributes to the downfall of the English language. The ocean of language is truly shaped by those individuals who use it, and thus stands to be desecrated or even destroyed at the hands of whoever poisons its precious waters with their illogical nonsense.

The existence of a word which represents both an idea and its own antithesis is a fundamentally illogical notion. The word bad has come to represent in colloquial dialogue, the polar opposite of its dictionary definition (as observed in the title of the aforementioned book, and in the common idioms badass, and bad to the bone), and is thus a contradiction of terms.  Consider if I were to use the word hot in order to refer to a boiling pot of stew. Only a fool would assume that by using the word hot, I actually meant cold and then proceed to eat a large spoonful of said stew, scalding his palette profusely. A differentiation between the words hot and cold is necessary in language simply because both words represent two respective ideas. The use of the word bad, thus representing the antonym ideas of both inferior and desirable is an illogical and poisonous notion in any language.



Therefore, just as Aristotle would scarcely be remembered today if he had published The Big Bad Book of Metaphysics, I would encourage Al Roker to consider naming his next incursion into the literary arts in more accurate proportion to the content found therein. 

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The Denizens of Gethsemane



1.
Thousands of years ago, in the northern regions of present-day Palestine, there was a town called Galilee. In a small, mud brick house on the outskirts of Galilee lived two humans named Mary and Joseph. They were engaged to be married and were fervent religious adherents. Mary and Joseph had few friends, namely their neighbours Elizabeth and Zachariah, with whom they often talked and drank wine. According to some obsolete and archaic tradition, Mary and Joseph, had never fucked each other because their nuptial bonds had yet to be tied. Of course, innocent Virgin Mary didn’t mind her seemingly boring celibate existence, as much of her teenage years had been spent singing with birds and baking pies. However, Joseph lived in perpetual agony. Joseph would lie awake many nights of the week on his tick-infested straw mattress trying not to think of how much longer he needed to wait to fuck her. He was consumed by pulsating sentiments of bestial lust whenever he gazed upon her tits or her ass, knowing that it was only a little while longer before they were his.  There came a day when Joseph reached a breaking point. He told himself when he saw her ass on a really good angle when she genuflected at the temple one morning:
“I’m going to fuck Mary today!”
Joseph knew of an old, homeless cynic who lived on the shores of the River Jordan. He disregarded wealth and status and fulfilled his dietary obligation by feeding upon locusts and honeycombs. He usually wore a cloth of bearskin and from time to time, locals knew him to baptize unsuspecting people in the River Jordan. The whispers that Joseph heard around the marketplaces in Galilee led him to believe that this man  could help him bust his nut into Mary. He came upon him one day bathing nude in the River Jordan.
The cynic didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular but seemed to be captivated by an object that may have been right in front of him. The man grabbed at the air before his face- Joseph knew that he was drunk. Joseph watched him bath naked in the river and yell obscenities at passersby. Locals named him John the Baptist.
John waded to the shore and approached Joseph after a few minutes and knew immediately what it was Joseph sought from him. He retrieved a small burlap sack of psilocybin mushrooms and gave them onto Joseph. John said to him,
“Feed these unto thine beloved and she will succumb to a hypnotic fervour which shall submit her to your every suggestion.”
Later that evening, during the last supper of their celibate lives, Joseph put the fungi into Mary’s meal. To his surprise, she consumed the whole bag of mushrooms without noticing them. She began to betray her submission to the effects of the tryptamines about half an hour later and he began loosening his rags. Through the onset of her trip, Mary’s eyes were trained on her fiancĂ©, with an odd, drug-induced perplexity, empty of all intent.
“Who are you?”
Joseph panicked. Standing nude and erect before her, he rummaged through his psyche trying to satisfy his wife’s peculiar question.
“My name is umm, Gabriel! Do not be afraid, Mary; I intend to do you no harm.”
“Are you really Gabriel? Your wings are awfully small!”
“My wings?”
He remembered that she was most likely hallucinating.
“Yes, I am an angel of God, my name is Gabriel. God sent me here to, uh, examine you.”
                He started undressing her rags. For the past 25 years of his miserable virgin life, Joseph had been waiting for this very moment. Mary seemed so much more sexually enthralling than any of the times he had seen her clothed. They fucked furiously for hours on Joseph’s straw mattress, frightening away all the household pests in doing so. It was moist passion. After he had ejaculated into Mary several times, he contemplated the possibility that he may have inadvertently impregnated her.
“Mary, The Lord Yahweh has instructed me to dowse you with his holy sperm as part of his heavenly insemination program. You may bear the son of God in about 9 months. This is non-negotiable.”
“Oh yes Gabriel! Thank the lord for he is good, for his lovingkindness is everlasting. Let the redeemed of the lord say so, whom he has redeemed from the hand of the adversary!”
“What the fuck are you talking about Mary?
“Did I pass the examination Gabriel?”
“What? Oh yeah, you pass.”
Joseph’s intuition had been correct. Mary eventually came down from the mushroom trip and after about 5 months, her expanding womb began to betray signs of pregnancy. He was frightened at what the gossipy Pharisees at the marketplace should whisper once it had been made general knowledge of his wife’s pre-marital child-bearing. They hid in shame. The rapist made the necessary arrangements for the two of them to flee to the nearby city of Bethlehem once the child was to be born.

2.
When the time had come for Mary to give birth to her rape-conceived bastard child, the couple gathered together what meagre possessions they had and fled their mud house in Galilee on a donkey to Bethlehem. In a bizarre twist of circumstance, Mary’s neighbour Elizabeth had been pregnant at about the same time, and being at the whim of various unpredictable hormone fluctuations, was unable to keep secret the word about Mary’s fertilization, which spread faster than the fire that consumed non-believers. Elizabeth later gave birth to a boy she named John.
It was about the time at which Mary and Joseph reached their destination that word of mouth concerning their bastard baby ascended up to the throne of one Herod the Great, King of Judea. King Herod the Great was a psychopathic, megalomaniacal pedophile and a false king; known by his people as an insane puppet ruler ripe with political corruption. Evidently, he was not warmly taken by the news about the couple whose child had been conceived out of wedlock, so he ordered three of his opium-inebriated assassins to travel to Bethlehem and apprehend the bastard child so that he could fulfill his depraved desires upon him. However, once the three assassins had come down off the opium and had run out of wine, they found themselves lost hopelessly in the desert, having been chasing after stars for two weeks.
Mary and Joseph had come to Bethlehem in the midst of its tourist season, which filled up all the local hotels, inns, hostels, and boarding houses with an unsavoury flavour of Thracians and Armenians. There was not one suitable place in the whole city for the couple to stay, so their son was birthed into a swine’s feeding trough. The baby was not well. Due to a combination of being born into a bacteria-ridden slop puddle, and possessing the extensive medical knowledge common to bronze-age desert serfs as his sole means of thwarting off illness, Jesus of Nazareth, as he would come to be known, developed a plethora of infectious diseases; among them, a prevalence of both syphilis and gonorrhoea. Furthermore, despite being born to Levantine parents, Jesus appeared mysteriously Caucasian. Once he had reached adulthood, Jesus became a carpenter by trade. He had very few friends and spent much of his time in his parent’s basement whittling cedar dildos.
One day, in an attempt for some privacy with Mary, Joseph demanded that his thirty-year-old son leave their home so that he could make his own living. Lonely and rejected, Jesus walked along the shoreline of the River Jordan when he heard an unknown voice calling out his name. He saw a man jumping around gaily in the water, yelling at passersby and making obscene gestures.
“You there! The long-haired, neck-bearded bastard!”
Curious, Jesus walked down to the tide and confronted the crazy old man. The man was covered in thick mud and bearskin and was snacking on a handful of honeycomb. He motioned for Jesus to wade out towards him. Before he was able to introduce himself, the man grabbed Jesus by his long hair and dunked his head beneath the murky water. When he let go, Jesus sprung back up, gasping heavily for air.
“Hahaha! You ought to thank me for baptizing you Jesus! I’ve been preaching to all these good people for years about the day you would finally emerge from your solitude and come see me!”
The man motioned with his hand to the bystanders watching along the shoreline.
“You should know, I was acquainted with your father Joseph. It was I that gave him the drugs which resulted in your conception.”
Jesus was perplexed. He looked deep into the crazy man’s eyes.
“Wait, aren’t you John the Baptist? Son of Elizabeth and Zachariah? How could you possibly have been around before I was born to have met my father?”
John the Baptist let out a deep, bellowing laugh. He took another bite of his honeycomb and rested his right arm around Jesus’ shoulder.
“Jesus, my friend, you are over-analyzing things! You mustn’t interpret what you hear so literally. This is all occurs on a biblical timeline after all-- shit doesn’t need to make sense!”
The both of them shared a hearty, friendly chuckle, and what John had left of his drug stash. Jesus and John made their way back to Jesus’ house, where they laid with one another.  John, who was already in possession of just about any venereal infection known to man, didn’t seem aversive to Jesus’ bloody ejaculations or his grotesquely deformed genitalia.
3.
“Jesus, do you want to go to an awesome party tonight? One of my mushroom dealers is marrying this girl in a town just a few miles over called Cana. From what he’s been telling me, there should be a ton of liquor and supple, young boys there.”
Jesus agreed to go to the wedding.
“You’ll have to meet these guys Jesus, they’re fucking crazy, man!”
“But do they uphold the scriptures?”
“Do they uphold the scriptures? Shit they do! You’ve never seen anybody as Jewish as these guys, but they’re crazy man! They do tons of drugs and fuck tons of girls too. There’s Peter, and Luke, and Bartholomew, and fuck man, I’d be hard-pressed to list them all, but you’ll meet them all at the wedding!.”
Excitedly, Jesus put his rags back on.
 His father then burst into the room, chasing him and John back outside.
“Don’t ever fucking come back here Jesus! You and your sick little boyfriend can go live elsewhere! I and your mother didn’t raise you to be a drug addict!”
Mary was weeping heavily and screaming incoherently at the two men and then to her husband. Joseph took her into his arms and she slammed the hut door behind them.
Jesus and John travelled the tens miles to nearby Cana; which they walked because they weren’t pussies like people living in the 21st century. He met John’s eleven other friends at the wedding reception. They feasted on the lavish cuisine and wine that was offered to the guests until all of it was consumed. The other guests, who were all still sober and hungry, began to clamour for their removal if Jesus and his friends could not compensate for the wine that they stole. He gathered his twelve disciples in the restroom. John had been eating mushrooms during the whole ordeal and was now so disassociated from reality that he was barely able to maintain an upright composure. Matthew, James, and Judas Iscariot had all been quite inebriated from drinking cheap wine and happened to be vomiting on some of the other guests, fomenting a climactic insurrection. Jesus knew exactly what to do.
“My friends, there is no need for us to leave; I’ll have these vases filled with wine in seconds.”
One of the men among them, Thomas spoke thusly,
“I don’t believe you Jesus! You’re bullshiting us! I doubt you! How are you going to get the wine?
“Please, just turn around, all of you for like one minute!”
The men did as Jesus had commanded them. Iscariot collapsed drunk on the restroom floor. Jesus then proceeded to urinate into all three of the wine vases. When the apostles turned around to see that the vases had been filled up, they were much too drunk and high to have questioned that the bloody, gonorrhoea-infected piss could have been anything else but wine.
Jesus and his friends burst monumentally back into the reception hall, carrying the giant clay vases on their heads. The Canaanites, who had grown desperate to consume the smallest bit of alcohol, chugged  the swirling froth of disease and all became intoxicated from the ammonia. John introduced him to all his acquaintances at the party, who praised Jesus for his “water into wine” trick, as they called it.
4.
One of Jesus’ least repugnant disciples, a strapping young lad by the name of Peter Simon had acquainted himself with 2 young female parishioners named Martha and Mary (no relation whatsoever with Jesus’ mother) at the Cana reception, along with 2 of her friends. Having met them in such a hopelessly intoxicated state, managed to arrange for himself, Jesus, Matthew, and Luke to participate in an epic eightsome with the four young ladies (unbeknownst to  the apostles, one of the four, Lazarus,  was merely a very convincing transvestite). John, having been offered to go with them, had declined because he was really, really gay. Jesus was bisexual.
The women with whom they were about to lay lived in a small house in the neighbouring village of Bethany. Bethany was a small, desolate space with few landmarks and inhabitants. “This is perfect”. Said Jesus, ”There’s nobody around for miles. We can make as much ruckus as we want.”
Once they arrived at the home of Mary and Martha-- a small wooden hut at the summit of an olive valley, Mary and Lazarus opened fresh bottles of wine. Peter Simon produced a bag of cannabis he had purchased from a gang of Scythians days prior. A fantastic and bombastic time was had at the orgy by all. The writhing mass of bodies, glistening with perspiration fornicated for what seemed to them like days; each constituent thrashing limb appeared indistinguishable from one another in the fornicating flock of Christ.
Lazarus, who was the brother of Mary, had joined in the sexual escapades against the advice of Bethany’s medicine man, having warned him/her than any aggressive sexual activity could potentially aggravate his/her heart condition. Evidently, this was to be the case, as the misshapen cross-dresser collapsed lifeless upon the ground after a good hour of alcohol-fuelled fellatio. His/her sister was traumatized.
“Please Help Lazarus! He’s not breathing! Matthew, seriously, get that fucking thing out of my ass! My brother is not breathing!”
“Your brother?”
She began frantically pressing down on his chest. Lazarus did not wake. Jesus motioned Mary away and took hold of her brother.
“I believe I know what the problem is.”
He turned Lazarus onto his stomach.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing Jesus? What if you hurt him more than he already is?”
“Positive, Your brother isn’t the first person to choke on one of my cedar dildos!”
Jesus recoiled his fist and then shot it directly into the deviant’s spinal column, dislodging the giant 10-inch dildo that had obstructed his/her breathing. Lazarus coughed up some cum and some phlegm and thanked Jesus for raising him/her from the dead.
“There. Problem solved.”
5.
It was not until several weeks later, did the good news about Jesus’ resuscitation of the filthy freak Lazarus make its way back to the party guests in Cana. Due to the absence of mainstream media in the lonely bronze-age, exaggerations and hyperboles that had been contrived from the tale of Jesus travelling from party guest to party guest went unexamined. Some said that he was divine; others alleged that he healed lepers and the blind. Some said that he was even the son of Yahweh the most high! A modest cult following arose shortly thereafter, proudly upholding the divinity of the one they called Jesus of Nazareth (the plebeian class had little else to do with their lives back then). Idiots and inbred fools congregated like insects at the sermons and meetings of the cult, all eager to profess their own unfounded claims of the alleged miracles witnessed by the rape-conceived bastard of Nazareth. 
The Pharisees had reiterated countless times that Yahweh alone was God and it was blasphemy to propose that there could be any before him. In the eyes of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and of a county preacher in particular named Caiaphas, this Jesus fellow was naught but a divergence of their duly-earned attention. Those of the spiritually enlightened demographic had always regarded Jesus Christ as the false idol he was. Like their hero Moses, who had smashed the golden calf on the summit of Mount Sinai in the harsh, yet enduring tales of the Old Testament, there was no question about what had to be done to rid the earth of such idols. In a petty attempt to wash their hands of the nomadic sodomite of Nazareth, the Pharisees had devised a plan with the compliance of the Roman Government to put an end to this heretic cult for good.
Judas Iscariot had not been on friendly terms with Jesus lately. He had contracted syphilis from him at some point during the past few weeks and was cross about not being invited to his orgy in Bethany. Caiaphas, who was known by his devote congregation as a disgruntled old celibate who hated life, bore a particular disdain for Jesus and saw Judas’ wavering loyalty to work very much in his favour. Judas was offered 30 pieces of silver, an offer he could not possibly refuse considering his immense poverty, to turn his former associate over into the hands of the Roman Government. Iscariot later spent the money on some crack, got high and hung himself on a tree out in the desert because he was smoking extremely potent crack and it gave him paranoia. Caiaphas, having finally captured Jesus, took him before the office of the mighty Pontius Pilate, governor of something.
“Sir, I have brought before you a man who refuses to pay taxes unto Caesar and claims he is King of the Jews!”
Unfortunately for Jesus, Caiaphas and his centurion bodyguard had arrested him in the midst of the autophagous orgy which  he orchestrated with his disciples. He cut pieces of his flesh off with and knife and instructed his followers to eat it. They drank his blood and bowed before his knees, surrendering their wills to him. It was a dirty and disgusting affair that had drained Jesus of enough blood to have impaired his judgement. He would have died had Caiaphas not stopped the bleeding in time.
“Are you King of the Jews as this man claims?”
Jesus fumbled around. He did not answer him.
“I will ask you a final time, are you the King of the Jews? Son of David the most high?”
“It is as they claim.”
Pilate was aghast. There was not a man in all of Bethlehem who would dare not cower in sheer inferiority before the presence of Pontius Pilate. He had men put to death over nothing.
“You Blasphemer! You Heretic! You and all your disgusting friends shall be subject to the most excruciating punishments conceivable! Caiaphas, take this scoundrel away and nail him to a piece of wood for misleading the religious inclinations of my people—such is the punishment for false profits. I only pray that misled fools will forget your name in a thousand years from now, though I’m sure that this Christianity you’ve inspired, being no more than a passing fad, shall be lost to the history books forever. Those plebeians you’ve inspired with your despicable nonsense and unsanitary rituals will die and leave no word or influence upon future generations, so I pray. ”
Jesus, still very much intoxicated from the blood loss, did not fully understand what the governor was saying, and when he was taken away by a guard of Roman centurions and crucified, he was in no state of mind to resist their punishment and fight back.
When Jesus was taken away, Pilate turned to his historian.
“When all this is said and done, make the history books seems as though I was a nice guy in the midst of this whole affair. Write that I tried to give that Jesus character a chance.”
6.
After Jesus’ death upon the cross, Pontius Pilate ensured that all of Jesus’ apostles suffered a similar fate that he did. John was beheaded and two thousand years later, the portrait of his severed head was used as the cover art of Cryptopsy’s None So Vile album (a landmark release in the genre of death metal that is mandatory listening to all who have not had the fortune of doing so already). Peter, also having been crucified, requested that his cross be hung upside down because Peter was a fucking hipster and had decreed that upright crosses were far too mainstream.
Three days after Jesus was buried in a tomb, a necrophiliac by the name of Barabbas dug up his half-decomposed corpse and had his way with it. The Christians however, did not desist in their blind worship of the fornicating carpenter, and proposed that the disappearance of his corpse was proof that their master has raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. Much to the plight of Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, the cult of Christianity did not dissolve, in fact after Christ’s execution; the following grew stronger thanks to the glorious Justinian I. Every Springtime to this very day, they still celebrate the ascension of Jesus into heaven and look forward with meek anticipation to the day when he will return once again to forgive their trespasses and fuck them all in the ass.
Amen.