Insect Overlords

I, for one, welcome our insect overlords!

There’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.

On Wisconsin: Fight Songs

There are two kinds of battle anthems: those in the Sousa idiom and the good kind.

“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. 

Yard Sale!

Handmade sign and adorable toddler: the only promotional devices God intended. And by “God”, I mean my beautiful wife. Who else?

Say what you will about the suburbs (no wait, allow me: they are pretend nowhere towns filled with soulless, greedy honkeys who like to pay a lot for coffee at space/time intervals approximating every third city block), the burbs really can’t be beat for rolling out bang-up quality yard sales.  This is owed to the simple fact that these greedy honkeys have a knack for acquiring a lot of shit they have absolutely no use for nor any appreciation of the value of said shit.  The suburban yard sale is sort of like a modernization of  American Indian potlach in which the wealthiest chiefs demonstrate both their power and benevolence by just giving  lot of valuable shit away, only add a cup of Starbucks and minus the underlying mission statement.