Pope on a rope

Have you ever heard people go on & on about Satanists & devil worship & how cultists killed their cats & kidnapped a baby & drank it's blood last Halloween? Have you ever seen daytime TV talk shows blither on & on about Satanic cults & how they turn teenagers into evil robots, how Satanic heavy-metal lyrics inspired two dumbshit dropouts to kill themselves?

I've never seen anything like that, & I've investigated the subject more thoroughly than 1,000 Geraldos. But I'm not going to bore you all with my personal philosophy. Let's just compare, for the sake of argument, the Catholic Church with the Church of Satan (neither of which, I'm proud to say, I'm a member of)...

There are no, repeat NO cases of bona fide "Satanists" harming animals or people during their "Black Masses". The Church of Satan's rituals are a bit over the top, but only in the sense that they're heavy on the theater. Conversely, there are several rape/child-abuse cases still pending against Catholic priests.

The Catholic Church openly condemns abortion, homosexuality, birth-control & euthansia...& no exceptions, people! The Church of Satan openly condems organizations that enforce strict dogma.

The new pope, God's earthly representative, was in the Hitler Youth. Anton LaVey left home to play the organ at a carnival.

I could go on & on but I've learned, though bitter experience, that no one wants to hear this. If you've read this far, you've heard more about it than anyone I've tried to explain it to. Does it really sound that crazy?

To me, an elderly resident of a Church-State who lives his life literally protected from the world by palace guards, & who weilds influence over millions of poverty-stricken families with arcane rituals conducted in gargantuan cathedrals literally made of gold, & who is literally believed to be fucking infallible!!! If he says up is down, up is down, baby!.....THAT sounds crazy to me.

Some guys up in the Bay area want to wear black & fuck with people's minds by lighting incense in front of a drawing of a goat's head, & they're the lunatics? Well call me crazy, people.

Take this master cylinder & shove it

Well, as just about anyone can tell you, having automotive problems can be one of the most frustrating feelings. My Ford truck had a VERY old set of brakes when I bought it, & I've been having various components repaired as money & time allow. Most of the work has been done at the Midas on Sunset just off the Hollywood freeway. But the days of me forking over my dough on to those dunderheads' plates are long gone. Turns out the only thing those wahoos specialize in is pissing off your humble narrator. Can you believe I went there three, that's right THREE times trying to get my brakes fixed? My ABS light & the emergency brake light were both turning on intermittently, along with an ominous tightening of the brake pedal. So those blithering idiots string me along to the tune of a few hundred dollars doing various odd jobs that do absolutely nothing towards solving the problem. When I take the truck back they say everything is fine, it's just an old ABS sensor & it's not a safety issue. When I take it back again with both lights flashing & the brakes siezing up, they tell me (after a 3 hour wait) that they're missing the adaptor that can check the computer for ABS errors. Take it to the dealer, they say, then bring it back when they know what the problem is & they'll fix it for me (the dealer charges $120 just to turn the diagnostic machine on). Well folks, you would be proud of the restraint I showed that day. A few blunt statements & a brief squealing of tires where there was once the stream of obscenities & the randomly hurled object. Let me tell you, there'll be some outfielders hating their jobs this season (if you read my previous post that'll make more sense). The next week my daily commute is cut short by a terrible sound & a stream of acrid smoke shooting out of my rear wheels, causing a bit of a stir on the eastern stretch of Santa Monica Blvd. Turns out the rear cylinders were sticking, and subsequently burning up the shoes. But I catch a break, my parent's signed me up for AAA for xmas...turns out to be a better present thanthe Jabba the Hut playset, which I didn't think was possible. A local mechanic, recommended by the towing company that picks me up, fixes the problem & I'm on my way. Well naturally the same symptoms promptly set in. I bring it back to the local guy and here's what he tells me, in so many words: the truck's computer, which turns on when the truck is started, is not unlike the computer you use at work or school. After you boot up, it takes awhile for various programs to open up. There was a problem, or "virus", if you will, in rear anti-lock brake circuit, so when the ABS program activated, it was causing the rear brakes to lock up. Solution? The guy reaches under the truck & unplugs the ABS unit, & sends me on my way. Well, first he explained to me that one day, like the new Mercedes E-class, mankind will be controlled by small, sophisticated computers...then he sent me on my way.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, in the thralls of another rambling internal monologue...now let's see...Midas, if I recall correctly, was a king whose lust for gold ended up destroying his life in an ironic twist. Yeah, you never hear about his kids who were transmogrified into golden statuettes eternally frozen in silent screams of agony & terror. Reminds me of when Han Solo was encased in carbonite. That's right folks, I was able pull out not one but TWO Star Wars references out from this mess.

Still got it.

I see you boys of Summer, pretending not to hear my drunken taunts

Ah, the euphoric descent into full-blown psychosis. When reality taunts me with obstacles that verge on the comedic, why do people look at me like I'm crazy when I laugh out loud? Why do I feel my blood pressure start to rise when I see typos in the inter-office e-mail? Why does it infuriate me to no end when people don't mind their goddamn manners? Luckily I have several coping mechanisms that allow me to channel the terrible feelings into productive means. For instance, I like to heckle outfielders at baseball games, and feed goldfish to my pet fishes, & now that I think about it, I guess it's not that productive after all. Ah, back to the arcane meditation excercise that is heckling outfielders. I'm sorry, in a strange way, that Barry Bonds will be missing the Dodgers home opener, & possibly the entire season. What will I do with the taunts I fine-tuned during the off-season? Will mankind never know the beauty & power of my beer-fueled oratory delivered fom the loge section? Is this how Van Gogh felt when he died peniless, the world oblivious to the gift he was leaving them? The answer, of course, is yes...yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

So this brings us to the issue of the day: steroids! Why in God's name would a baseball player need performance-enhancing drugs? They spend %95 of each game literally standing around. Now, please don't get me wrong, I love baseball. I may not be able to tell you how many RBIs Willie Mays had in his rookie year, or who won the All-Star game in 1982, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the game immensely. Well, watching the game. And I've been watching it long enough to tell you that baseball players don't need steroids. Rarely do they run for more than 5 seconds continuously. Double-plays & occasional stolen bases are spread out through 9+ innings. Hitting the ball requires strength, yes, but without the reflexes, strength will only get you a pop-fly to shallow right. Do you need to take steroids just to spit sunflower seeds onto the dugout floor? Seems like they would be more apt to get high to pass the time after they strike out & have to wait for the entire rotation until they're up again. Granted, the guys who were on the juice were the guys who were routinely breaking the home-run record, but there's a solution to the problem that's a thousand times simpler than government hearings & official investigations. It's called walking the batter, you bozos. Any pitcher who actually tries to strike out a hulking left-fielder with 50 home runs is either way ahead in the count with a 3-run lead & no one on 2nd, or has been taking bong hits in the bullpen. So maybe there IS a drug problem in the Major Leagues.