Welcome, Fellow Automatons, to the Winter 1997 Issue of The Satyrist: the magazine that uncovers the fascinating fiction behind the thin veneer of reality. If you are like me, then you are only using approximately 3 % of your brain cells on your job. Oh sure, you use a few neurons here and there maintaining impulse control, and a few more feigning interest in the lives of others. And occasionally the entire reptilian brainstem may be required to suppress some bothersome gas symptoms but what may I ask do you intend to do with the REST OF YOU BRAIN? It's not like you need it for that tedious commute to work or to smile at What's-His-Name in Accounts Receivable. Fact is, your entire work week is probably nothing more than one long spinal reflex. You could probably be decapitated by a Road Raged Real American on the way to work, show up with literally nothing attached above your shoulders without anyone noticing or caring. In fact, your de-brained docility would probably make you a real "team player" and get you promoted to the coveted position of Under-Assistant-Deputy-Dilrod In Charge of Something Profoundly Insignificant. Or maybe you would bleed to death-----What's the difference?
So the question remains: what do humans, the crowning achievement of three billion years of evolution, do with the 97% of our brains that we don't really need? I see only two possibilities. The first is so horrifying to contemplate that I don't even know why I keep bringing it up. Perhaps I am still getting over that embarassing incident at the Senior Prom. However, the other path in this contrived dichotomy is much more productive: read this web page. Welcome to The Satyrist: The Magazine for the Rest of Your Brain
This issue's features include:
Like most of our readers you are fascinated with the lives of the personalities we profile and worshipful of the gifted savants who create this sagely page. Obviously you desire, you crave, you simply must have more, more, more information about your favorite Satyrist celebrities. To satisfy this gluttonous craving for artificial factoid events, we have created Tales from The Lip a new column not available in any store!!!! Our compiler is the Guru of Gossip, the Druid of Disinformation---the venerable Lippy O' Toole. Lippy is a veteran bottom feeder in the Aquarium of Life, a tireless shoveler of celebrity dirt, a greedy plankton in the vast pool of pond scum. What follows is Lippy's latest missive: That Gothic Geek Ennui has unleashed his Apathetic Ambience on yet another area of expression. The gonadly-challenged neo-gothic guitar poet has written a treatise, "A Brief History of Pain," which painstakingly analyzes human history, compiles all examples of pain, torture, and suffering, and rates them on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the Andy Williams Christmas Special). This "brief" work is 1713 pages of dense, overwritten, self-pitying prose and will be sold door to door by little kids trying to stay off drugs and out of gangs...........After a 500 year absence our favorite vampire, Vlad the Inhaler is back and according to a groupie who should know "he still sucks!" Actually, Vlad has given up directly sucking blood and is busy promoting "Blood Bud:" a new product by Ann Howzyerbush that contains the plasma of chronic marijuana smokers.......... Former Satyrist editor and current bar slut Molly Wacker-Stifley is finally showing some entrepreneurial flair. Her cash cow is reportedly a line of pregnant-teenager figurines. Also generating big bucks for the Wackster is a holiday wreath made of laminated macaroni and cheese. The Impressive One also recently received an honorary GED from the Duluth College of Soft Knockers...........After his perspirational, universally-maimed performance in "Cretin of the Black Lagoon," The Anabolic Air head Mike Mozzarella has inseminated himself into yet another bit of future celluloid trivia: he will take the title role in "King Leer," a wee bit of neo-Shakesperian tripe which will prominently feature Mikey's own wee bits. He plays a perverted school crossing guard who works hard and has little to show for it. The King of Gratuitous Sax, Kenny ZZZZZZZZZZ recently suffered a Near-Life Experience, featuring a measureable pulse. The terror was short-lived, however, as the King of Castrado quickly lapsed back to a tranquil holiday coma. The ZZZZZZZZZZZZmeister is the latest in the long series of Artists Well Past Their Prime With High Overhead, who discover some marginal revenue with an "Unplugged" album. The tentative title is Kenny ZZZZZZZZ: Unconscious at the Fillmore East
Has the relentless, cliche-driven Christmas season mitigated your normal high level of perkiness? Is your Seasonal Affective Disorder becoming a year-round event? Are you suffering from Permanent Menstrual Syndrome? Did the Kathy Gifford Christmas Special make any sense to you? Do find long series of rhetorical questions annoying? Are you unable to muster even one short burst of False Gaiety to mollify your fossilized family members during the annual Holiday Horror?And yet you persist. Indeed your dream, your fantasy, your hallucination is this: that somewhere in this vast Sullen Solstice there exists a kindred hominid, who will create album of Christmas music that speaks to you, wounds you, and disses you in front of your so-called friends.
Fellow wimpoids your search, much like your sex life, is over, Apathy records is proud to announce the rerelease of the Ennui classic Gothic Christmas. Previously available only on Navajo pictographs, this classic ditty has been reissued on the new STD mini-disc. Providing that your standards are sufficiently low, Gothic Xmas has something for everybody. For terminal bleaknes, try Darkness on the Edge of Darkness, Ennui's tribute to industrial soot. Want something depressing? How about Thorazine, which is about a psychotropic medication that the composer really should be taking. If you prefer the macabre, try Ennui's banjo duet with his pet virus Muertos on Last Rites of Spring. And finally, if your are Inspired by the Inane, try Soap on the Water, composed after a 24 hour catatonic gaze into clothes washer.
Resolved: That society must take steps to limit the suffering of seriously ill citizens. Be it Further Resolved that we live in a society blessed with a macho cowboy mentality that enables any illiterate wacko with an attitude to possess lethal handguns. It is Even Further Resolved that this wonderful surplus of violent, phallus-shaped weaponry must somehow be put to socially productive use. Therefore it is Really, Really, Finally Resolved that with forty million Americans currently lacking health care coverage, the only reasonable solution is the medical use of handguns .
Hi there, Authentic Americans, this is Sidney "El Sid" Masculino Real Man, Elite Weapons Merchant, karmic descendant of John Wayne, and all-round Rare Turdis. I'm here today to announce that your favorite Renaissance Rifleman has added yet another notch to his ever widening Belt of Glory----political activist. I, along with a convicted felon whose name escapes me, have authored Initiative 3006 (which it was your distinct pleasure to read), intended to legalize, compel, mandate, and sanctify the medical use of handguns.
With one sweeping gesture the citizens of this fine nation can solve two of our most vexing social problems. First and foremost, we must provide good ole' Joe Six-Shooter with more opportunities to exercise his/its cultural heritage. It is pointless to have 192 million long, hard, glistening weapons and nobody to shoot! And don't waste my time with shooting ranges and gun clubs. If they provided any real satisfaction then, by the same logic, I would divorce my wife and marry a "Victoria's Secret" catalog! And why should common criminals have a monopoly on manslaughter?
Another pressing problem solved by this initiative is America's health care crisis. With the ranks of the uninsured at the 40 million mark and still climbing we need to take swift, brutal and constitutional action. And, sadly, the United States is a very poor nation, unable to afford the universal health care offered to the citizens of Canada, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, ad infinitum. Thankfully, Divine Intervention in the form of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, provides us with the solution.
In a burst of insight unique to savants such as myself, I have authored an initiative to solve these problems simultaneously. Initiative 3006 mandates the elimination of all individuals lacking health insurance using handguns fired by any idiot who owns one. (Special note to knife owners and explosive experts: you'll have to write your own damn initiative!). Any gun owner, upon encountering an uninsured person is compelled to immediately terminate the entity's physical existence. This allows for a steady decrease in the number of uninsured and provide some good clean fun for gun junkies. Our homicide rate, currently the laughing stock of the civilized world, will also be reduced, since actions previously classified as murder will now be considered "health care." Prepare yourself for a most epic paradigm shift: for now, the crazed psycho postal worker will no longer be a murderer---he will merely be effecting a career change.
To maintain logical consistency, all gun owners are now considered medical doctors. Since gunnies and doctors are legally identical, all licensing and education requirements for the latter are eliminated.
After all, if it is immoral to license a lethal weapon such as a gun, why should anything or anyone be subjected to burdensome licensing conditions?
One final thought: Gun worship is a very emotional issue, striking at the very heart of our stunted emotional development and rugged individualist fantasies. So don't bother actually reading the initiative----it might make you angry. You might hurt someone.
Keep on Firin' The Sidster
After months of arduous preparation, your humble reviewer was finally ready to perform Rusty Cage's magnificent "Sonata of Silence" in public. I was engaged in short moment of anticipatory reverie when the inevitable tranquility-shattering telephone message arrived from my editor at The Satyrist. After a brief, ritualized critique of my (insufficient) masculinity he attempted to make a point. It seems that I, rather than perform the Sonata that night before a rapped audience of noble inner-city savages, was instead to depart immediately for Elma, Washington, site of the notorious Butt Dipping Festival. Though I am firmly attached to the non-pecuniary rewards of the critic's profession, it nonetheless required the threat of unemployment to propel this reviewer down the long, ignorant road to Elma. Allow me, gentle reader, to express my profound distaste for my editor. Hadn't I spent countless solitary evenings in pursuit of the Sonata, struggling to master its atonal, amelodic, arythmic, amotivational grandeur? And now, on the afternoon of the evening where I was destined to exhibit this mastery, my hard-earned glory was ripped from my loins by a pile of mucus masquerading as an editor. Indeed, I would rather be bitten repeatedly by a lingerie-clad toupe-topped transvestite than endure what I have. In fact, I would much rather be bitten by a....... But I digress.
The computer navigation system in my trusty Volvo was malfunctioning, so I was forced to used a more traditional means of transportation. I pulled our my titanium Fairy Rod and bellowed my command:
And presently, I alighted at the opening ceremony of the 1997 Elma Butt-Dipping Festival. Without a field-guide to help me find my way I cast about in a random, aimless fashion, much like a Jehovah Witness in search of another victim. But for this reviewer, Hell resembled not at all the comic book mythology of the Jehovah. No indeed, for Hell Incarnate was directly in front of me on the Podium of the main stage------a corpulent, jiggling, 300 pound mound of homespun stupidity-----our Master of Ceremonies.
His name was apparently "Vern" though I suspect his parents actually called him "Mistake." He reminded everyone that he was the town's chief entrepreneur and benefactor, owner of the Tavern/Hardware/Drug Store operation next to the dump. Vern had apparently sampled extensively from the inventory from at least two of the three operations, and was soon groveling on the floor, begging the audience to "rip them damn crawlie things offa me." If you survived the 1960's, as did your loyal reviewer, you may ask yourself "why waste a perfectly good hallucination on body lice?" Though the rest of the crowd seemed quite comfortable with Vern's cootie obsession, I grew impatient. As I departed, Vern was attempting to orchestrate a mass "simul-fart" among the faithful.
I then strode purposefully to the Entertainment Stage, where a pathetic concoction known as the Below Average White Band was busy spewing out countrified versions of 70's disco classics. You haven't lived until you have witnessed a triple-chinned cowboy vocalist doing The Hustle during the prolonged steel guitar solo in "YMCA." When the group stumbled into a stillborn version of "Funky Town," it was time for this reviewer's boothills to be wanderin'.
Since the musical fare seemed rather simian, your intrepid scribe headed swiftly to the Arts and Crafts area. The longest lines were at Elmo's Tattoos: here our namesake would tattoo any design on a person as long as it was a barnyard animal or a pregnant woman. Distinguishing the two categories was not always easy. Next, I stopped at the Belly Painting exhibit---a popular and, given the girth of the populace, a time-consuming activity. A local was having a version of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" painted onto her Abdominal Vastness, with the cast of "Roseanne" replacing the Apostles and a pre-facelift, crotch-grabbing Roseanne inevitably hogging center stage. I retched, took a swig of Pepto-Absymal and strode on.
Desperate for escape from this Pork Belly Pastiche, I proceeded to the Main Odditorium where the ritualized Dipping of the Butt was about to begin.
As a traditional hunting/gathering/puking society, the citizens of Elma tend to associate large body mass with power and prestige. Indeed, comparative ethnology might postulate a link between the Elmans and ancient Polynesian culture. Well guess again. The natives of Elma crack open skulls and kegs, not coconuts. What's more, the butt of the ugliest Hawaiian is more appealing than than the face of the most impressive Elmite.
The actual Butt-Dipping involves an arithmetic progression of ever-mounting gluteal mass. On the main stage, I spied a series of seven vats, increasing in size from left to right on your computer monitor. As the Elma Kazoo Infantry held a prolonged B-flat, a series of bare butts were ceremoniously dipped into the vats, beginning with small butts and vats and continuing up to the truly prodigious. After dipping into the mysterious brown bubbling substance, the dipees were hoisted to a nearby stockade, where their amply coated love pads were nibbled upon by a ravenous collection of barnyard animals. After the sixth and pentultimate dip, I was beset with a wave of nausea, but I remained determined to experience the full extent of this bizarre tribal ritual.
As the Kazoo Infantry reached a dizzying crescendo, the final, the ultimate, Dip of Destiny began. This year's winner was Peg, a 312 pound secretary from Seattle, who had split open her moo moo in honor of this hallowed occasion. According to the ghost of Andy Gibb, who emceed the proceedings, the annual Dip of the Year is determined by sheer buttocks mass, with cellulite and acne used as tie breakers.
Several attendees were temporarily blinded by the sun's rays as reflected off Peg's prodigous side. As the towering construction hoist lowered Peg into the enormous vat, she turned her Jello-Pudding of a countenance towards the adoring throngs and giggled. At the moment of the dip, she could not resist scooping some the the brown matter and sucking it down her gullet like she was an eight pound Orik XL.
Suddenly the spectacle began to drip with irony, much as the substance dripped from Peg's chin. The hoist was unable to support Peg's tonnage and she was inadvertently dropped into a nearby pig stye, whereupon she proceeded to chomp, snort and frolic like a true native.
And how, refined readers, are we to make sense of this bizarre ritual? The cultural diffusion hypothesis states that cultures become more advanced as they contact with other groups, sharing skills and technology. Perhaps the recent introduction of television to the Elma area will enable this motley collection of Cellulite Heroes to achieve some semblance of humanity.
After seeing much more than enough I hopped on my fairy, waved my wand, and transported myself back to leaner, gentler America.
Nobody has ever visited this page before. How does it feel to be the first? Was it as good for you as it was for me? Did I take too long? Someday, when the world acknowledges my genius then ,000,000,000,013 people will visit it every day.
But until then, you are my only friend.
© 1997, Mike, Charlotte, and Dennis Hayes