Post-Mortem

Caligula the mad emperor and Nero the embittered goose sit on a bench in front of an office building in midtown Manhattan.

CALIGULA: Well, even the Roman empire didn’t last forever.

NERO: That was a lazy and unfunny reference, not to mention completely off-scale for what we’re supposed to be discussing now.

CALIGULA: You calling me out on it isn’t impressing anyone either.

NERO: Well as long as I’m calling everyone on their shit I think we deserve to understand your role on this blog a little more.  I mean, pretty much everything about you made no sense.  Were people supposed to believe you’re an immortal?  That you’d survived the assassination attempt 2000 years ago and had just slummed around ever since?

CALIGULA: I guess I never thought about that.  Didn’t seem important, though.  And how about you?  I never understood why, in your entries, animals seemed to be half-integrated into the human world, almost like Muppets.  You even held down a temp job for a while.

NERO: I’d like to forget that place, if you don’t mind.

CALIGULA: The problem as I see it is that we were misunderstood.  People kept begging me for advice on all sorts of sexual aberrations, but I wanted them to understand that the joy of perversion is all about figuring it out as you go!  There’s no “right” way to be depraved.

NERO: And I learned that no one cares about the plight of certain malign waterfowl.  I was glad I had a chance to expose so much prejudice, but it’s still rampant.  My species is always the odd one out.  Ever played Duck Duck Goose?

CALIGULA: Oh, really, don’t start now, you honking eunuch of a beast.

NERO: I’m going to assume that word I don’t know is an insult.  (Starts pecking Caligula)

CALIGULA: (choking Nero) I hope you ate recently, because I’m having pâté tonight!

Then the window-washer platform falls off the building and lands on the bickering pair, killing them instantly.  Luckily no window washers were on it at the time.

R.I.P.

GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR “CALIGULA” AUGUSTUS GERMANICUS

12 A.D. – 2008 A.D.

 

NERO DOWNFEATHER

1994 A.D. – 2008 A.D.

PS — Watch for the announcement of a new and radically different blog coming soon.  Or go to hell.

Ducktailed

Had the nightmare again the gathering yellow rubber storm they swarmed over me in spite of their legless bodies squeaking smelling of a sterile assembly line and began to bounce and DONT EVEN TRY TO TELL ME YOU HAVENT HAD THE SAME DREAM I mean look at the dammit dead-eyed things holy fuck

Does it get any more terrifying (rhetorical question, obviously not)?

Oh and by the way this blog will have see its last entry tomorrow.  It’s been brutal and anonymous, folks.

—Nero

Dark Bite

Dear Batman,

While I really appreciate all you’re doing for the city in vigilantia, I must take umbrage at the tactics enacted by your person at the orphanage fire last night.  Fine, yes, you got me: I was engaging in acts of nihilistic and bottomless evil.  But when I gained a temporary advantage in the battle—namely, a half-nelson headlock you were sure to lose consciousness during—was it really appropriate to sink your teeth into my exposed forearm?

As such a dubious force for good, should you really be risking a venture into more gray territory?  You and I are less dissimilar than you think—I have some boy slaves of my own (though I haven’t dressed them up in anything nearly so campy, you’ve clearly outsickoed me in that department), and I suspect your alter-ego may have as much money in the bank as this comfortable emperor.  So why the eagerness to get your saliva into my bloodstream?  It’s childish, unsportsmanlike, goes against all sorts of health standards.  I can only hope you meant it as a symbolic gesture, in which case, of course I’ll be your wife, you silly flying rodent.

With confusing quantities of love and spite,

Caligula

Hold On A Sec

Wait … did you just say ‘war’?  War?  What war?  Where?  No, man, that happened already, like—wow, must have been almost seventeen years ago now.  Hm?  No, jeez, yeah, I know it’s confusing in that region, what a fucking hellhole, but trust me, we got out of Iraq like almost two decades ago, so no need to—you really believe what you’re saying, don’t you.  Buddy, there was no reason to go to—okay, so you agree there was no cause to start a war with them, so how would—Huh?  They knew that and they declared war anyway? No, who would be that retarded?  Hah!  Okay, now I know for sure you’re talking about 1991—Bush hasn’t been president for a long time, you know.  Yeah, yeah, Saddam and all that.  I think you’re just a little mixed up, because lately Saddam hasn’t been doing anything, really.  You know that for a fact, do you?  How’s that? Dead?  Hm, first I’ve heard of it.  Ah, those dictators, always dying comfortably on their beds of old age. Hanged?  What the fuck, seriously?  When did that happen?  It’s on fucking YouTube?  That’s not funny, dude.  The troops are in Afghanistan, where the Taliban were based—hello, we’re trying to get the scumbags responsible for 9/11.  America thinks what?  Nobody is that stupid.  Well, maybe some people, but—god, put the pie charts away, I can’t look at those numbers.  You are goddamned sick.  This isn’t possible.  It would have been on the TV news.  President Clinton would have been impeached.  What?  He was??  For WHAT??  And he’s not even president anymore??!  What do you mean we live in a mostly benevolent but deeply fascist state???!! CAN A GOOSE GO OUT DRINKING FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS WITHOUT THE WORLD CRUMBLING DOWN AROUND HIM I MEAN FUCK

—Nero

Chief Scientist

Caligula has a theory: that Internet readership spikes with even an offhanded mention of LOLcat pictures.

Let’s see how pathetically predictable you peasants are, shall we?

Snowflake injects her psychotic brand of conspiracy-mongering into an entry on 9/11

Bandit is so racist he won’t even accept Sacajawea dollar coins

Unfortunately this infamous image is doctored:

it’s just Jackie Chan and Jet Li dog and cat outfits, respectively

—Caligula

Plucked

Well, the should-have-seen-that-coming has happened.  Just got fired for blogging about my crap job.

Again.

But you know what that means!!:

INFINITE-DAY WEEKEND FUCK YEAH     

ok im getting kicked off the computer now i was supposed to leave like 20 minutes ago and anyway theres only one compu

The Labyrinth 2.0

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

Obsessively, Compulsively Wrong

HEY! WAIT A SECOND! You know this hurculean piece of junk that Howard Hughes built back in the day?

The fact that this nightmare of “ingenuity” is even in the air

suggests the use of some old-timey photoshop software

I just realized that the name “Spruce Goose,” which I always thought was a rare instance of goose-flattery, is actually kind of an insult! This airplane is a big fat failure! A joke! And you know what the worst part is? It wasn’t even made of spruce! That’s, right: it was a BIRCH goose. Which means they had already settled on the “goose” stamp as a way to insult the aircraft and needed a rhyming kind of wood for their retarded, fact-trampling, species-insensitive bon mot! Well, fuck Howard Hughes, and fuck the trees that gave their life for him. It should have been called a birch…lurch. Furch. There’s bound to be a bird name that rhymes with “birch,” just fucking look it up yourselves. I hate you all so much.

—Nero

My Own Olympus

Naturally, once Caligula found out Manhattan had an “Olympic Tower,” he simply had to have one of its converted condos on the 51st floor. Even the fact that a filthy Greek like Aristotle (and I was never one for scholastics, either) Onassis was one of the driving forces behind this behemoth’s construction could not stanch my gliterati greed for a perch in the opulent roost. That I could shit out my window onto St. Patrick’s cathedral was too much to pass up: feces-flavored icing on the anti-monotheistic fungus cake!

Worship in my ugly, modernist shadow, Christ-humping Irish scum!

Of course, I did have to suffer a shade of buyer’s remorse. For where in my unit was the vomitorium whereupon we purge between meal courses? Surely no hedonist’s home is complete without it. The landlord calmly explained that no such vomitorium as I described it ever really existed, not even when I was Caesar of Rome—the idea was nothing but pure misconception, he said. I took the opportunity of his open mouth to deliberately regurgitate a half-digested duck confit entree into his face to make a point, and bid him to clean up the resulting mess, for as Seneca writes: Cum ad cenandum discubuimus, alius sputa deterget, alius reliquias temulentorum [toro] subditus colligit — “When we recline at a banquet, one [slave] wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath [the table], collects the leavings of the drunks.”

And though I did not drool, I was supremely hammered at the time, and most of my “leavings” did end up under a Mies van de Rohe glass coffee table. Luckily or not, my landlord happened to be a rare emetophiliac, which meant he found the whole barfing display erotic and arousing.

I can’t say I found the sight of duck goo and bile in his mustache quite as enticing, even after licking some off.

—Caligula

Putt-Butt

Can a motherfuckin goose go to no mini golf place without some drunk dad thinking he’s part of the course? GOD. DAMN. IT.

This is the end of a parlor trick. The beginning was him shoving the ball up his ass.

It’s not like I can practice my short game at Augusta, is it—the specist ne’er-do-well hatemongers there aren’t taking their anti-waterfowl proviso off the books anytime soon, class action suit or no. And really, even if I were a lifelike animatronic bird strutting around the greens and “pretending” to putt, would it be prudent or wise to start poking me with a club? Right when I’m about to sink a hole-in-one on the 18th with the laughing Clown Head and score a free game? So that instead I drive the ball out onto the highway, where it cracks the windshield of a jeep whose driver pulls over and shakes me down for $500?

Even Tiger’s dad never pulled that shit.

—Nero