We’re having Thanksgiving dinner today, but it’s not Thanksgiving. This is a totally bogus holiday, culminating in the partaking of the jive turkey. Today we celebrate the Totally Bogus in all its many vestiges, from the deviously “counterfeit” to the flat-out “wiggity-wiggity-whack.” Jive Turkey Thanksgiving is so Totally Bogus, it’s the Courtney Love of holidays: a holiday that stands before us in tattered evening wear, confronting us with face smeared out of focus with streaked makeup and multiple plastic surgeries, a holiday that declaims from the top of its rattling lungs: “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.” Jive Turkey Thanksgiving is, in fact, the only real way to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that is in itself notoriously jive-ass from top to bottom.
Archive for the ‘Suburbia’ Category
Jive Turkey Thanksgiving
December 9, 2012Tags:Courtney Love, family, holidays, jive turkey, Joni Mitchell, Room 237, Stanley Kubrick, Thanksgiving, The Shining
Posted in consumerism, family, film, Holidays, humor, panic attacks, pop culture, Race, social commentary, Suburbia | 6 Comments »
Insect Overlords
September 9, 2012There’s a newer, bigger car parked in the driveway beside the battered black Honda 4 door I’ve nicknamed The Dreamweaver. It’s silver and chunky– an awkward ambassador to the suburbs, a representative of some mothership lost so many light years ago. (more…)
Tags:insect overlords, mini vans, suburbs
Posted in humor, Suburbia | 1 Comment »
On Wisconsin: Fight Songs
August 19, 2012“Fight Songs” is the sixth chapter in The Gaytheist Gospel Hour‘s seven part series “On Wisconsin.”
Here in the good ol’ USA, we love our college football fight songs. We like the boastful smack-talk of the lyrics, the militaristic marching band music, the purposeful feeling of “us vs. them” that pumps in our veins when we all sing along. It could be argued that no other state in the union loves their college football fight song more than Wisconsin, which actually adapted theirs into the official state song.* “On, Wisconsin” is such an epitome of the fight song genre, it was once praised by none other than John Phillip Sousa himself, king of the marching band battle anthem. It is a pretty rousing tune, if only for the fact it mentions the word “fight” four times in a single line.
But for my money, there’s no better fight song than the one recorded by Pat Benatar in 1979. “Heartbreaker” dispenses with the jingoistic clap trap of the classic fight song and its attendant arms-forces hoo-hah and focuses directly on the “fuck you” core element of the fight at hand. (more…)
Tags:"Heartbreaker", "On Wisconsin", camp fire songs, Christian, conformity, homophobia, John Phillip Sousa, Pat Benatar, Rockytop, suburbs, Topp Twins, Wisconsin
Posted in Cubicle America, gay, humor, lesbian, Music, panic attacks, pop culture, social commentary, Suburbia, Wisconsin | 3 Comments »
Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part Three
January 11, 2012Toukey’s Big Deluge: The Reckoning Prelude: Paradise Lost Propers
Sundown. Expressway. The sky is a murky post-pink peach. Indigo clouds smear up from the western horizon, appearing very much like the monsters that awaited us at the edge of a world we once considered flat, bringing nighttime in the hems of their gowns. In the darkness below, snaking chains of alternating red and white lights coil around the I-94/134 cloverleaf . They slither this way and that across an unseen landscape. From the lower deck of a preposterous aquatic amusement contraption, a bottom-heavy Eve regards this rush hour serpent and the darkness outside the cathedral-sized water park windows through her water-speckled Buddy Holly glasses. (more…)
Tags:Citizen Kane, death, Eve, fear, gravity, infinity, John Milton, Key Lime Cove, life, Paradise Lost, Rosebud, Satan, Tree of Knowledge, water slide
Posted in dreams, film, humor, In my life, panic attacks, seasonal affective disorder, Suburbia | Leave a Comment »
A Million Little Salt Crystals
May 18, 2014ROME and remorse.
I love my daughter Mabel more than I’d thought I could ever love another person. For her, I’ve incurred cavities of the teeth and mind by way of multiple sugar shock episodes of “My Little Pony.” I glory in the light in her eyes when we play “school”, despite being cast repeatedly as an illiterate little dullard named Denise Bernice. Mabel is the ambassador of my fondest hopes; she carries my heart in her little purple leopard-skin purse. She is everything to me. Yet I took her to the (shudder) Olive Garden. That’s right: the (shudder) Olive Garden. Like the monster parent of urban legend fame who forced his child to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in one sitting, I did a horrible, valuable thing, and I did it out of love. It’s quite possible she will resent me for it for the rest of our lives, but I have no regrets. (more…)
Tags:A Million Little Pieces, breadsticks, death, Hospitaliano, James Frey, Olive Garden, salad
Posted in class malaise, family, humor, In my life, parenthood, social commentary, Suburbia | 2 Comments »