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

I’m Gone For Just Two Millenia…

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

Caligula’s Dreamlog #5: The Nightmare

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

 

The Gay Aughties

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

Relatively Speaking

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

 

 

Ruffled Feathers

Terrible news for Hillary Rodham Clinton today. That’s right: Big Bird has now tainted her candidacy in a way even Reverend Wright must be impressed with.

Just when we were moving past the offensive phrase “flipping the bird”

Tabloid readers will be familiar with this shot of the far-left fringe educationalist saluting the paparazzi after running over a boy crossing the street on foot because he donated his bike-fund money to HRC’s campaign. And my fans will remember me blowing the lid off of the fraternization between this piss-colored monster and Hillary herself back at the height of her cookie-baking powers.

It just keeps getting worse. I mean, Bert and Ernie’s gay marriage in Los Angeles this past week was a beautiful thing, and a long time coming. But no sooner had that holy ceremony taken place than a certain disgrace to the whole avian community was throwing a lavish, key-swapping swingers party on the beach to directly undermine the idea of homosexual monogamy itself.

And if the classical Greek-style nude statues that urinated Stoli vodka are any indication, this party was paid for by money embezzled from PBS. It’s safe to say that if Hillary doesn’t address the Big Bird connection soon, she’ll never clinch this nomination.

—Nero

Caligula’s Dreamlog #4: Ein Dieb Von Art Und Weise

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.  

 

Seeing Red

I have a Pinkerton tattoo under my left wing. I lost my virginity to “El Scorcho.” I wish I looked like Buddy Holly, even tried wearing non-prescription glasses. Rivers Cuomo is a friend of mine.

None of this saves their comeback—the so-called “Red Album”—from being a little disappointing. But how fuckin’ DARE Pitchforkmedia give it a 4.7?!! SHOW A LITTLE RESPECT YOU OVERLITERATE LES SAVY FAV-FELLATING COPYWRITER SCUM

Don’t kick someone when they’re already mustachioed

4.7. Seriously. 4.7: less than exactly mediocre. 4.7: the equivalent of Pedro the Lion’s “Achilles Heel”. 4.7: One-tenth of a point below Two Ton Boa’s self-titled EP. I have no idea who these bands are, but they’re no company for the chugging 90s power-pop that soundtracked flight academy for me. They should have broken the 9.0 ceiling on nostalgia alone. But I guess some critics are hankering for the end of culture and civilization. You hipsters go have fun handjobbing each other to Vampire Weekend—I’ll be rocking out “In The Garage.”

—Nero

Zero Life

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

The Decline and Collapse of Manhattan

Taking a stroll from Broadway to Central Park West yesterday afternoon, I was struck by something out of a clear spring sky. I mean that quite literally: a heavy green chunk of something landed on and promptly broke my collarbone. I wondered, in that stumbling, shambling state of shock, whether the policemen shouting to me from the street had indeed been trying to warn me off this obviously treacherous path rather than ridiculing my gold toga, as is their custom. More greenish stone rained down, sending the cops scrambling for cover—why, I can’t imagine. It was just the cornice of an apartment building falling off. I would think New Yorkers had gotten used to such a routine inconvenience!

Local firefighters argue over whose turn it is to be brave

I suppose when one has lived among the crumbling infrastructure of ancient Rome as I have, these crane accidents and bridge collapses barely excite the senses anymore. Still, you people have no excuse for such rampant fear-mongering: do you really think your shoddy engineering standards are what’s bringing these structures down? As anyone who’s read Gibbon’s masterly “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” knows, a disintegrating infrastructure is but one symptom of the loss of the “civic virtue” (a.k.a. “manliness”) that keeps imperial regimes airborne. Amend your effeminate lifestyles, and maybe your tenement will stand the test of time.

Also, what are you, too good for paganism?

—Caligula