What brutal sprawls of twisted deathmaze encroach on our precious isle of Manhattan!  What beast-infested nooks and crannies where taxis dare not roam!  What great food-trapping beards that outgristle and outgrease any post-coital Minotaur!  What cheap and chokesome wat’ry beers!  What uninspired zombie throngs that barely conceal contempt for opening bands that aren’t half bad!  What bony, unwashed sternums unearthed by plunging V-neck collars!     

Sign marking the condemned’s entrance to their existential Inferno

To think, that even I, Caligula, could find myself in that phantom world of non-dreams and overshopping at Trader Joe’s, merely by falling asleep on the B train en route to Urban Outfitters, is too hellish an ordeal to dwell on. The human disease, thy name is Brooklyn. I shall have to put the episode behind me if I stand any chance of recovery. But the memories of clove-breath and misappropriations of irony, the gnarled syntax and pizza parlor stabbings, will haunt me for a lifetime, nay, into the afterlife.  

To say nothing of the short stories that hold together about as well as a fistful of diarrhea.  

—Caligula

Ordinarily, waking to the drab world around us is a bothersome chore—how horrible it is when one’s bladder brings about the end of sleep at noon and demands access to one’s carved marble water closet—but this morning I could have kissed even the toilet lid with gratitude.  And I did, because I woke up with my face in it, right as this nightmare reached its happy conclusion:

THE DREAM

It begins, innocently enough, with me using pliers to extract my own teeth while the Supreme Court hands down a delightful decision: no death penalty for child rape.  So far, so good.  Hordes of beautiful trusting children start filing into the murky basement the justices and I have selected for this gleefully macabre affair: time to celebrate the rule of law!  

I dig the pliers into my gums to pull out a bloody tooth and make the children cower in reverent fear, but what’s this?  I pull out a piece of candy instead.  A laughing child snatches it away.  I try again: more candy. Soon the children are clamoring all about me, and individually wrapped candies are pouring out of every orifice I hold dear (all of them).  I try to beat the ragamuffins off, but every would-be blow turns into a hug by accident.  They love it, and smother me with that love.

“Scalia!” I cry out to the bench, which seems to grow ever more distant in the brightening room.  ”Help!  You owe me!”  Scalia also looks concerned with this state of affairs, as the murky basement has finished turning into—gods preserve me—a Whole Foods supermarket, with hippies wearing nothing but hemp vests streaming through the aisles, studying the nutritional information labels on every item they consider.  But even as the other judges fade from sight, Scalia tramples over the children to hand me a beautiful gleaming handgun before falling off the dogpile and turning into a …it gives me an awful warmth to say it…

…a unicorn.

OH, FUCK

Sobbing, I fire the gun repeatedly, but it’s already too late: the once proud weapon is just a rainbow in my fist that emits only sunflowers and Mozart sonatas.  All the pristine civilization man has achieved in spite of my work raises me above the children and hippies, and I soar, riding clouds of of high culture, love, peace, innocence, respect, and compassion, never to find my way back to the nadirs of humanity I had so proudly pioneered.

ANALYSIS

Judge Antonin Scalia is all that stands between us and a nightmare world of pure harmony.

—Caligula

Caligula, for one, could not be happier with how the gay marriage situation is unfolding in California.  Of course in principal I’m against the extension of human rights to any oppressed minority—still hoping someone has the courage and malice aforethought to overturn Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka one of these days—but when such disgraceful civility advances my own sick ends, it’s hardly worth resisting, is it?

Ha!  No, this is not a Caligula-coming-out-of-the-boudoir confession, no matter what my Uncle Gaius says.  Those slave boys are mere sex toys, nothing that could sustain the hellfire of my matrimonal devotion, nor indeed survive it.  Rather, gay marriage, as our prudish GOP friends will remind you, heralds the decent down a long and slippery slope, the base of which must be reached at all costs if I have any say in the matter.

IT BEGINS

First, you see, is the establishment of boring heterosexual marriage.  Then little cracks begin to appear in the institution’s sanctity—polygamy is the next logical step, followed by same-sex couplings, with all attendant tax breaks.  By now quite a few leaks have sprung in marriage’s fortified dykes (ha!), and all manner of minor deviants trickle through.  Soon people can be wed to mundane inanimate objects, chairs, toasters, unicycles.  Then the big one: bestiality sweeps the nation!  It’s not uncommon for a man to take a harem of squirrels at this point.  The bar is raised for object-marriage as well: people wed hydrogen bombs, oil slicks, Ikea, the Sahara desert.  Eventually the door is opened for hostile marriage—yes, you can marry people and things against their will, and it’s all 100% legal!  From there it’s a hop, skip and a jump to blood rites and accidental marriage via fleeting eye contact.  

And just as the fabric of space-time is starting to tear from all this immoral stress, my fantasy achieves fruition: interdimensional marriage.  Yes, if I can’t fuck beings in other universes, I can damn well be symbolically bound to them.  Till death do us part, hive-minded sentient gas-clouds!

It’s a long and twisted road ahead, but even the journey of a thousand perversities begins with a single unholy union.    

—Caligula

Moviegoers!  Caligula begs you to cease your pop-culture assassination of M. Night Shyamalan.  True, he is no Hitchcock, as he is unable to chill the nether-regions of the loins and soul, but being bludgeoned by his stilted messages and cring-inducing cameos provides the sick thrill of blunter abuse, a heady mix of mockery and condescension.  He’s like a boyfriend that beats you until you cry and laugh with gratitude and acknowledge that he has every right to assume he’s the Messiah.  And “The Happening” will be his greatest triumph of audience flagellation yet.  SPOILER ALERT: a description of the film’s ending follows below this delicious custom Mark Wahlberg desktop.

Buzz about “The Happening” would have you believe that the twist is: there IS NO TWIST.  But the false prophets of Hollywood do not have the augury training of your favorite Roman sadomasochist.  I have read the signs (ha! get it?) of sparrows and bluejays in the sky, and I have learned what torture Shyamalan has in store for us.  The twist is that there IS a twist when everyone thought there was NO twist.  That glorious, swarthy bastard!  

The climax unfolds thusly: Just as Mark Wahlberg and his terrified family are about to be devoured by the King of Trees (it will make even less sense when you watch it), all will go black.  Slowly, Marky Mark wakes up out of a fog and finds himself on a couch in a room strewn with gauche costumes and hair products. The New Kids on the Block stand around him, and his brother Donnie leans down to speak: “Marky, buddy, wake up!  You were having some kind of terrible nightmare!  Now let’s go out there and ROCK!”

“Go out there?” Marky asks.  ”But I quit the New Kids.  It’s over.”

“Yeah,” says Donnie.  ”But this is our 2008 Reunion Tour!”

Marky looks at the camera with pure horror in his eyes: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

And his wail crossfades into the sounds of a sold-out arena show by the New Kids on the Block. The last half hour of the movie is basically a low-quality concert DVD, and one of the most brilliant cross-promotional hackjobs you’ll ever see.

The New Kids on the Block need be neither New nor Kids to strike fear into your heart

Yes, Shyamalan could have really outdone himself this time.  Viewers would have found a new nadir for cinema.  The critics’ faces may have melted off when this ending rolls into focus.  

Unfortunately, even they will have vacated the theater in disgust by then.  

—Caligula

Dear “Kristen”—

No, the title of this post is not a reference to one of the many positions you and ex-governor Eliot Spitzer lovelessly copulated in.  Or at least I don’t mean it that way.  

I’m breaking this thing off.

That’s right.  You squandered your gift.  You had all the makings of the Top 40 pop star I’d been waiting for my whole adult life, a diva that could make me molt with nothing but her sultry voice, an oversexed club beat and ugly—gloriously ugly—synthesizer riffs.  And you threw it all away.  Instead of being a record industry whore, you were a regular whore.  Instead of reminding us “What We Want” and to “Move Ya Body,” you chose to be a jizz jar at the VIP club.  Well, you forgot who the real VIPs are: the fans.

How can I think of peace when those fingers have been in a governor’s asshole?

Oh, I defended you when the news first broke and threatened to overshadow your singing career.  I said when the dust settled, you’d be touring with Kanye and the Dixie Chicks and get around to responding to my MySpace messages.  But the weeks went by, and I got knocked off your top friends list.  I couldn’t afford tickets to “Glow In The Dark,” but I know you sure as hell didn’t make a guest appearance.  And I won’t let you hurt me any longer.

You could have been a goddess, girl.  But the world will always remember the day Eliot Spitzer fell as the the day the music died.

—Nero 

I always knew Hitler was a genocidal monster—one that gave raving lunatics and tyrants a bad name, I might add, with none of the amusing anecdotes my reign trailed in its wake—but a copycat?

THE DREAM:

I’ve awoken in some Peruvian farmhouse, on a mattress that is certainly not the tempurpedic I’ve cultivated an addiction to, under blankets.  Some sort of convalescence, it seems, though what illness I’m suffering is unclear, even when I cough up some blah-gray slime.  Then I realize someone is watching over me, in a rocker. Why, it’s Der Fürher himself, a little older after years of paranoia in South America.  Is he presiding over my recuperation?  Strange, but in a way humbling, humanizing.  Almost an honor, to have a mass murderer as your nurse.  Suspiciously, though, he’s still wearing a Nazi uniform—not the most discreet disguise, eh, old chap?  Probably want to lose the trademark mustache too: I’d recognized him almost instantly.  How had he been keeping his cover up?  

Then, what to my eyes should appear peeking out from his unbuttoned olive green army-issue shirt but a out-of-place, gorgeous, familiar blue paisley.  My favorite nightclub shirt!  The very one I pilfered from the bathroom at Rawhide in Chelsea not a year ago—he had stolen it and was wearing it under his fatigues!  I don’t know which bothered me more, the brazen theft (which I was myself guilty of, to be fair), or the horrible fashion choice: It didn’t match his un-Aryan brown eyes at all.

I can appreciate the desire to blow out this limited wardrobe, but still

ANALYSIS: If you find yourself starting to turn a hazily sympathetic eye towards a total abortion of a human being, wait and ask yourself if he might need to be on “E! Fashion Emergency” more.  

To The Caretakers and Groundskeepers of Arlington National Cemetery:

Do you always assume that someone standing around the JFK Eternal Flame with a fire extinguisher is up to something?  Sheesh.  Just trying to lighten the mood—it’s Memorial Day Weekend, not Fat Tourists Pretend To Be Moved Con 2K8!  

You know, I’m glad I was banned from the premises for a year.  Make it life!  I would never have made the trip down to Virginia in the first place if I’d known you’d make American military history so boring—I expected friezes of huge gory battle scenes, maybe a few naked statues representing Fortune and Victory, for eye candy’s sake. Instead I get unimaginative tripe like the “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” and “Visitor Center.”

All I can say is, any self-respecting risen-from-the-dead soldier would take the curators of this blandarama and render them FUBAR for making their final resting place such a bore.  Sleep, you damned curs, and dream that zombie Robert E. Lee is coming to settle your grits.

Mortified,

Caligula

P.S. I want my coffin exhuming equipment back.

You nerds have some explaining to do.  And don’t come at me with all this L337 5p34k, for the love of Jove.  I never even bothered to learn Roman numerals, so what chance do you have?  

Here’s the thing.  When I had Sextus, my head intern/slave boy, describe the conceit behind Second Life, I reeled at the idea of a world without heinous physical bonds, something out of cyberpunk lit that would virtually eliminate the need for these sweating, stinking bodies we lug about from day to day.  Taking into account the proliferation of depravity the Internet invites, I was sure my God-king status would only inflate once my inner space alter-ego was born, and that heresies and cruelty only feverishly imagined till now would follow as naturally as colonization does conquest.

Only to find out that Second Life is duller than an Uncle Gaius story about exporting figs.

My avatar considers another boredom-related suicide.

After accidentally wandering into an online college lecture, haggling with some designer geek for a Louis Vuitton suitcase knock-off, being thrown out of a United Nations meeting for indecency, getting lost in a hedge maze programmed to have no exit and searching in vain for a black market chimpanzee liver, I concluded that Second Life is of no use to anyone and run by a distinctly vision-lacking shadow junta. When I started saying as much, I was banished to an endless corn field of some sort.  Sigh.  I should have known, of course: of all the liberties I tried to exercise, freedom of speech was bound to carry the greatest risk. 

—Caligula

How quaint! I dreamed I was a man of moderately less power and stature, which is to say, some obscenely wealthy and naïve fauxhemian metro with a Gucci axe to grind. It was an odyssey of Homeric—er, maybe Spielbergian—uh, small quirky Sundance film proportions. Who knew how perfectly ridiculous it was to see the world through the reductive psyche of the modern aristocrat wannabe?

The Dream:

Steve Forbes had lodged one too many hasty wagers at the Hampton Classic, and I grew altogether weary of his delinquency in tendering the final—and rightfully beloved—Fabergé egg. This was no slight tiff: my Segway had been sitting sans worthwhile hood ornament in my spare closet since I first finagled a prototype of the awkward thing, waiting patiently in a cocoon for the embellishment that would transform it from gauche scooter into chariot-fit-for-Apollo.

The price of Forbes’ weakness for long-odds horses

Setting out towards Steve’s on that gyroscopic claptrap, my valet Bernard driving, I gripping his pelvis for dear life, I was suddenly struck with a profound craving for vitals, i.e., bourbon, in some unfamiliar ghetto or other. A Xanadu of Oriental delights awaited: We wandered into an establishment staffed by the largest and most muscled women one could care to gaze upon, who, after plying us with saccharine libations and cuisine apparently fused in Asia, went about joshing and lightly embarrassing various patrons in the middle of their meals, occasionally bursting into inspired song. All this was executed with a wit so barbed and bawdy Oscar Wilde’s pallid cheeks would burn. I assumed these mercurial hosts had absorbed rumors that suggested this tastemaker’s penchant for entertainment of the decadent and bacchanalian sort until one turned to Bernard and inquired whether I was his boyfriend, sending my poor manservant into a dreadful stutter, which only served to magnify his discomfiture and mine. The rest of the ride to Steve’s and all the pelvic contact there entailed came bundled with a silent tension I won’t soon forget.

Analysis:

Apparently my nocturnal alter-ego had never been to a drag restaurant. Oh! The innocence of it all! Which reminds me, I haven’t been to Lucky Cheng’s in ages.

Because where else could such an inspired notion be borne out but my naughty dreams? In this case, my somnolent fantasy was not so rich in detail or plot as it was sodomy-heavy. It happens. Anyhoo, something struck me about the encounter: here I was copulating with a skinny man. Normally I am given to the meatier type—as much as pleasure and pain belong together, pointy hips leave me with bruised buttocks and thighs, which can greatly sap my otherwise bull-like endurance. And though the coitus here was prolonged and rough, of the kind designed to draw blood, my body, though delicate from a life of luxury, felt no pain or injury. At first I thought it was a function of the dream’s illogic, but gradually, preceding the dreamgasm, I became aware of a garment this handsome devil was wearing:

The miraculous fuck-padding device (dickhole not pictured)

What to my joy should I discover upon subsequent internet search but the very extreme form-fitting shorts he had on, marketed to the extreme snow sport crowd—they existed after all! Possibly it was a visual mindscrap held over from my last visit to the Alps. In any event, you can bet that I ordered a dozen pairs and will be making the necessary alterations for “easy access.”