It’s Always Darkest Before It Gets Darker: Part Two
POPEYE
Popeye was the union of a scurvy sea dog and an opium-smoking slattern in the Asian pirate-hole of Madriporno in the Golden Triangle. As a boy he was beaten so severely by his father - an embittered alcoholic with a leather belt he called “Mr.Wimpy” - that Popeye lost the use of one of his eyes and developed a life-long stutter (“Didst-didst-didst-donsts-beat me any more, pappy!”).
When his mother turned down a threesome with two manta rays, as proposed by the bored local warlord, Bluto, she was hacked to death in front of Popeye with a series of increasingly rusty flensing knives. Bluto’s band of swarthy pirates gang-raped little Popeye in every orifice, leaving him for dead in the hold of a freighter.
Popeye, near-death, dragged himself over a tangle of lobster pots and netting before collapsing into a large supply of spinach. For three long nights the flowering plant sustained the boy - he ate what he could to build up his strength, using the rest of what he couldn’t keep down as a soothing poultice on his violated little man place. In that time, he learned to hate for the first time.
Exactly one year later he moved like a hairy-forearmed wraith through the ranks of Bluto’s men, beating them to death with their own femurs (whilst using their tibias as a tripod so he could record and post their death throes on his Facebook page). Bluto escaped to America.
Now a man, Popeye haunts the crusty seaports of the eastern seaboard looking for his adversary. On his path he meets many evildoers, whom he is happy to dispatch as karmic collateral of his long walk to vengeance and justice. When they beg him for their lives, pleading that they aren’t the warlord who destroyed him, Popeye bends down, glowering through his one good eye, and asks his own scarred asshole - which he has nicknamed “liddle Swee’pea” - whether he should let them live. Whereupon his butt, like a ventriloquist’s doll, replies: “Youse-youske-youske-are-allsk-the-Bluto.”
Next: strike three for Charlie Brown’s team.
The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:
The cosmic unfairness of the Internet proceeds apace. Once, even fat fucks used to have to waddle down to their sports bar to see unfortunates die and/or wipe out in rear-projected montages of rally car crashes, dirt bike catastrophes and bus-jumping follies, while U2 blared in the background. Now, thanks to youtube, you can log on to footage of people who have devoted their lives - athletes goddamnit! - to being anything BUT a couch potato… to training in the wee small hours even as we sleep… to pushing every brain cell and sinew to the breaking point in a quixotic search for excellence… so that when their world goes to shit in a naonosecond due to the incredible targets they set themselves, we can all luxuriate in them screwing it up without even getting up from our Aeron chair with lumbar support.
I’d say it’s tough but fair… except it’s not either of these things. It isn’t.