And look what happens to my precious Rome!

Oh sure, to you it’s some neat touristy diversion, minor ruins, a chill place to sit around and get high with the Australians from your hostel.  But that was my temple!  In 40 A.D., man, the blood ran down those steps and people recognized me for the various gods I undoubtedly am.  And today when I peeked in the archway the Danish teenagers fucking inside wouldn’t even let me take a Polaroid.  When did I lose my touch?  When did my palaces of torture crumble into desrepair?

The rest of the city was likewise depressing; I was run over by two taxis and a ten-year-old on a vespa.  Yet I did catch a glimpse of an opulently dressed man on a balcony—from what the locals say, he seems to have taken up my mantle of narcissism and  eccentricity.  Sealed away in an untouchable private country (imagine the hidden/forbidden pleasures!) and essentially equating himself with the Creator, his word is law; he commands unconditional worship.  It’s good to know Rome is still under the sway of a man so made in my mold:

—Caligula

Um: hello?  It’s chilling enough that goose-torturers as infamous as the French could take a break from force-feeding their future pâté de foie gras to slap an image of their victims on a brand of vodka that only became popular because it’s overpriced.  But that’s neither here nor there.  Now, do you see anything wrong with this picture?  Hint: it’s fucking obvious.

It could have to do with their use of the respected color “grey” (elitist slang for “gray”)—a color that all we Canadian geese wear with pride—in conjunction with illustrations of no geese of color.  I mean, this is as bad as casting Tom Cruise as Genghis Kahn! Out of the six geese portrayed here, five are the classic WASP-white shitheads, I suppose to match that eyesore bimbotini glass, and the sixth is an improbably large transparent monster.

I’m on to you, France.  If you ask me, Remy from Ratatouille looked suspiciously like a mouse in ratface…  

—Nero

Facebook community, Caligula is so sorry.  Sorry I coded an application so special, so visionary, so geared to your fickle yet stunningly limited 18 to 25-year-old imaginations.  An application you should have loved, god damn it.  But now I’ve heard your whiny voices, and I’ve gone and pulled the plug on HotLists.  Just too ahead of its time, I guess.  No, you shut up.  You Generation Y-ers turned out to be nothing but Generation Why-ers.  No, worse than that: Generation Liars.  Um….Generation Criers.  Generation Pli—whatever, you get the idea.  You were not the high-concept hedonists the mainstream media led me to expect.  You must be in denial: deep down, you don’t even care about branding, do you?  Disgusting.

If you’ve got a better idea, you probably stole it    

Someday soon you’ll understand what I was trying to accomplish, but by then it will be too late.  ”How can we identify ourselves without invoking Jessica Alba and Starbucks?”  Here’s a hint: you can’t.  Good luck getting through life without telling people you’re all about Family Guy…Generation Die-ers.  

Get it?  because…I’ll kill you?…ah, fuck it. 

—Caligula

Dear Crazy, Infection-Ridden, Dog-Infatuated, Probably Homeless Lady Who Roams Central Park West:

Whoever you are under that low-quality wig of dreadlocks, thank you.

You’d think New Yorkers would be used to anything, and not glance twice when they see an emotionally warped man of my chiseled looks walk out of his luxury condo in a toga and laurels.  I guess we never live in a society as progressive as we’d like—I’ve certainly tried to put pressure on what constitutes “normal” in my lifetime, but maybe I’d given up trying to push it there, defiantly eschewing the need to fit in, even to my own detriment.

But then along you came, wearing those plastic vampire teeth that I can only assume are your cheap replacements for the genuine article, showing off that bed bug-infested inside-out fur coat, and suddenly exploding from inaudible mutters into an incoherent scream of “Time was to get busy, PLEASE!!”  Which never fails to speed up the gait of passersby.  

Also, your tendency to act as though you’re about to kidnap people’s shi tzus makes them visibly panicked.

I’m like 80% sure our neighborhood’s crazy dog lady

isn’t the ghost of Leona Helmsley

I’m not a man prone to hyperbole, but you are quite literally America’s greatest hero, nay, doused in godliness.  Because of your wrestling matches with park benches, nobody even seems to notice a harmless eccentric like yours truly these days.  It seems that after an estimable tenure, I’ve passed the torch on to another challenger of the status quo.  Oh, sure, you can’t take the twisted decadence out of me—I’m the same soulless void I always was. But a new generation is ready to follow in my footsteps, helming the ship en route to an oblivion of the cruelly absurd and absurd cruelty.

Dog-licking: why didn’t I think of that!

With rapturous admiration,

Caligula

Ever have one of those moments on the subway—after what turned out to be a bitch of a girlfriend dumped you for some seagull that never stops bragging about his trash pile on Coney Island—where you look up from the soggy lip of the crumpled brown bag concealing your bottle of triple sec  and see the most beautiful, supple-necked goose you’ve ever seen, with sparkling obsidian eyes and chest plumage so triumphantly gray that it promises the thunderstorms of the next thousand years, and for some unfathomable reason she is staring not at the lime-flavored drool escaping your beak, not at the bald patch in your left wing that can’t be combed over anymore these days, not at where your ballooning gut touches your cracked foot-webbing, but looks into your very soul for a full soft radiant world of time before the train stops at West 4th street and she hops off, leaving you forever with that untarnished aura of love and longing that melts into the vague memory of what it means to be happy?

“Well fuck that,” I said.  ”I’m putting a Missed Connection ad on Craigslist.”

So far this guy is the only response I’ve gotten.

Just to be clear, the soulmate I was reaching out to is not

A) Human

B) A Mexican Wrestler

I might have more luck staying on the C train for the next six months.

—Nero

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

The emptiness of this city.  You feel it with every issue of the New Yorker—that piece of fiction about a family trip to the beach in 1973 simply too boring to finish, the glossily eroticized spreads of Swiss watches that are unfashionable by the time you’ve caught a glimpse.  In every Sotheby’s auction where they theorize that Rembrandt himself probably painted only the nose on this particular portrait, apprentices responsible for the rest.  At the seal show in the Central Park Zoo, these pathetic creatures squirming about for the amusement of mentally stifling families with no grasp of contraception—

Wait a minute.

Those seals are kissing!!  

That is SO FUCKING CUTE!!  

I LOVE SEALS! I LOVE ALL GOD’S CREATURES WE ARE MEANT TO LIVE IN HARMONY AND ONLY AT THIS MOMENT HAVE I REALIZED ALL THIS PERVADING MELANCHOLY WAS A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND THAT I NEED NOT

Hold on.

What the hell is that?  Did that thing get all its face skin torn off somehow?  UG. LEE.  And it’s eating a twig it just pulled off its own butt.  

What?  How dare you!  I didn’t evolve from this piece of shit!  He’s crass! He’s a slave to his appetites! He—oh, well, that temper tantrum is something I might—and using a rock to masturbate…OK, fine!  I’m no different from this brute.  Are you happy?  

Because I could not be more depressed.  Again.

—Caligula 

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.  

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

I confess to having LOLcat fever, despite my mixed feelings on the phenomenon. On the one hand, these pictures usually play up a cat’s alleged cuteness, and as a member of the avian community (often exploited for “hunting practice” by sociopathic felines), I can’t condone any sympathetic portrayal of said monsters. Stand together, flying V!

At the same time, I love the intimation that cats can’t spell correctly and can only string the most retarded of sentences together. I guess that’s what keeps me looking for new pics pretty much any chance I get at my temp job—this perpetually sweaty guy on the other side of the office is the only one with a computer, and when he gets up, for any reason, everyone starts bickering over whose turn it is for Internet. Usually a lot of honking and biting on my part is enough to put the rest of the underpaid white-collar mob in their place.

Well today I snagged a 3-minute block when Sweats (we don’t know his real name) was in the can. And I saw something on MySpace I never would have expected.

Too soon.

I guess the honeymoon is over … doesn’t feel too good when the shoe is on the other foot. Or drumstick. Thanks, world wide web users, for the LOLgoose. One more pointless diversion I can no longer enjoy.

You just had to take it too far.