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.

Why Couldn’t It Be A Sex Tape

Oh, fuck me. This is just my luck. You live your whole life, spend years in flight academy, do the goddamn migrations, eat the moldy bread, preen, kill countless hours drifting on the water, stand around in the rain, flee from cartoonish and badly-camouflaged hunters, molt, go everywhere in a giant V. You do everything expected of a goose.

Maybe then you go through a messy divorce. That’s all too common, man, nobody’s gonna knock you for that. Maybe the rent shot sky high on the one side of the lake you could still afford. Not your fault, buddy. And maybe you finally have no choice but to sleep in someone’s boat for a few nights. Hell, nobody’s used it in months, what’s the big deal?

Then, say you get up in the morning to piss and came back to find some good ol’ boy and his ugly mutt trying to make off with your improvised shelter, the one thing you have left in this world. At a certain point a bird has to spread his wings and say: “Nuh-uh. Not today. Not my crappy makeshift nest.”

Well, what the fuck was he doing with a camera, anyway? “Doggone goose”—wish I’d pecked his bastard amateur filmmaker’s eyes out.

The YouTube comments? “You should have broke its neck.” “I would have ate that goose.” No, you wouldn’t have, you feckin Capri Sun-drinking web-rat virgins. You’d be dead if you tried that. I took these rednecks to school, and that joker would be at the bottom of that lake with his pooch for grabbing me by the neck if I hadn’t been so hungover. Jesus. A guy tries to preserve his dignity and the wired community takes a steaming dump on him. Real classy, Internet.

—Nero

Urban Ennui

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 

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

Weddings Always Make Me Bleed

Bleed the bride, of course, with dagger or leeches: her choice. It’s a little ritual I made up and hope will catch on soon—symbolizing the virginal blood, getting the lady of the hour good and dizzy for the fuckfest to follow that night—my invented spiritual exercises have got it all.

I had just come out of the glass box with the giant glowing apple on 59th street (and who exactly is supposed to have taken a bite of that apple? the customer? would I really be stupid enough to eat a luminous white food, other than, say, Renoir’s weightless onions?). Just one of those days, really. The so-called “Genius Bar” was utterly ignorant of how I might alter my iPhone to periodically emit the scent of a concubine’s tears. And it was in the resulting foul mood that I found myself outside the Metropolitan Club, a lavish wedding reception taking place inside…in dire need of enlivening.

The applause for my penis tricks was tepid at best.

When all is said and arrested on multiple counts of indecency and assault, these people just didn’t want to celebrate. I should have known what I was getting into when the doorman refused to believe my toga was formal wear. I mean, really, if a wedding crasher can’t appoint himself MC and force-feed the kid’s table sperm-coated cake without bringing the full wrath of the authorities down on himself, what hope does that poor couple really have?

—Caligula

With Enemies Like These

Who needs friends?  I can barely keep my enemies list updated, what with all the backstabbing and douchebaggery and constantly revised revenge plots. Here’s who’s currently getting my dander up—and consequently making innocent dander-allergic third parties suffer.  HOW MANY NASAL PASSAGES MUST YOU INFLAME

Nero’s Enemies List

(in order of who I would punch hardest if I had fists)

—————————————————

1. Edith Wharton (lingering English class antipathy)

2. Maxie (does not deserve to live or, barring that, be more popular than me)

3. Willie Randolph (he knows why)

4. Google Inc. (for reporting my gosling pornography searches)

5. Exterminators (bedbugs didn’t ask to be born, buddy!)

6. Richard M. Nixon

7. The Kingdom of Denmark (enough visa rejections will drive you to violence)

Also, how bout you learn to spell in American

8. Hank the Bullying Hawk (“sharpens” his talons on my back)

9. Fortune cookie fortunes (is it me, or have they gotten more threatening?)

10. The Honorable Judge Winston Busby of the Delaware Court of Chancery (whose title is long and boring)

Memorialize This

Memorial Day Weekend is more than just an opportunity for brain-dead and liquored up humans to cover the country with dirty blankets and discarded sporks as they chow down on bloody bovine and the less fortunate members of the avian community: it’s the beginning of three and a half months of said grotesque behavior.

I don’t get it, America—summer seems like prime time to sit in your homes, blast the A/C and look up celebrity sex videos on your new MacBooks.  Instead you’re inviting mosquitos into your ears and sweat into your asscracks.  If were up to me, of course, humans would never be allowed outside in the first place.  But I would think you’d get the hint that nature doesn’t want you running around playing frisbee golf in it. Or did you think knocking a squirrel out of a tree with a hard plastic disc was a fitting tribute to our fallen heroes?       

Celebrate those who gave their lives by          sacrificing the dignity of yours

 

 

 

—Nero

 

This Is Going To Sound Crazy

But hear me out.  It’s all true.  A goose has been following me.

No, you shut up.  I’m not insane.  Well, of course the encyclopedia is going to say that, but look at the facts! What?  I don’t have encephalitis, or schizophrenia.  Epilepsy?  I don’t even know what that is, but you can bet I’m free of it.  Do I look like an invalid to you?  Once in a very, very long while, I’ll have a spell and faint, yes, but that’s just the Falling Sickness, my Uncle Gaius says.  I don’t expect you to understand—it’s part of the regal temperament.

If I were crazy, would I mind being called crazy this much?  Would I protest so much against that characterization, or so strenuously?

Think about this: I don’t live in a psychiatric asylum of any kind.  Show me a schizo who has his own luxury condo on 105th and Central Park West!  Fine, alright, that’s true: the chateau style building I live in was once an insane asylum, but that doesn’t mean anything.  Straitjackets were bound to get left behind in the conversion!  I’m not necessarily forced to wear them whenever I foam at the mouth!

When have you known a mentally unstable person to be holed up in a Gothic castle like this?

 

Please, just listen.  I was walking in Morningside Park, which I can do alone, without assistants, thank you very much, and without raving so loudly to myself that people take pains to get out of my way.  I was blending in just fine, not that I have to make a conscious effort to “blend.”  I was feeding whatever you normally feed the birds (it certainly wasn’t sharp metal can lids or gravel or anything like that), when I noticed a goose bullying the smaller sparrows and ducks around and snapping up every tasty morsel of the very edible stuff I was tossing out.  I shooed it away politely, because only a whacko would use something as drastic as firearm to scare it off.  

AND NOW IT WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE.  All he does is stare.  But it’s horrifying.  He’s at the window right now.  Oh, God, if only the doctors—er, tenant association—would let me have curtains and drawstrings.  It’s not as though I’d use them to hang myself, if you can even do that with curtains and drawstrings, which I never even wonder about.

I fear I’ve made a powerful enemy. 

—Caligula (Sane)