On Dinosaurs, God, Michael Keaton and being Twenty Nine:

 When I was a kid, I would curse God a lot. Well, I would curse at God, you know, when things didn't go my way. To me God was that blank plaster ceiling with a few discerning cracks in my room. I think that ceiling was the most tangible and present God I ever experienced. I mean I realized that God wasn't actually the ceiling, I wasn't retarded or anything. I knew that he was supposed to be up there somewhere, in the sky I guess.

Or you know, on toast. Righteous.

At five or six years old it was too strange an idea to really push past the ceiling and explore. I believed in a lot of crazy shit, mind you, but more realistic stuff to a kid; like Freddy Krueger and mutagen. 

Yo Freddaaaay, whadduuup? I like your scowl...You wanna go like... kill some kids or something, I'm totally into that too.

I don't think I ever thought about the old man God with the grey beard and toga bathrobe combo thingy. That would lead to questions centered in minutia, like, was he sitting down and listening intently when I was blurting out words like "I hate you" and “big stupid idiot” (extremely visceral stuff for a five year old)? Or was he standing there lording over the world and just shaking his huge malformed galactic head at my young, misguided ranting? 

 Hey wait... I thought you hated gays? What? Oh so just like... The over 18 crowd then. Okay.

Did he even have to sit? Did he float? Where did he poop, just like, on the clouds? Does he poop? How does he make angels? Are the two things related? And so on...

"I POOP ANGEL BABIIIEEESSS!" - God

I never thought about that part, he was just a ceiling, really. So when I carefully muttered “ass”, “crap” or “frig” at God in my room so mom couldn't hear me, it was wonderfully vengeful and taboo. Swearing at God was a thing for me. Like meth before Lindsay Lohan made meth not okay. 

Just look what it did to Adele.

Granted I was an odd little geek pretty much from birth, and as an adult I’m still a complete train wreck of awkward neurosis, but swearing at God, man... That got me in the zone. 

THE ZONE

It was the worst thing I could think of. I was secretly doing something that my parents would never know about. Those glorious, dirty words were between me and God. What was he going to do, tell mom? So when I didn't get an action figure at the depressing Woolworths one block from my house

Where your primary school reputation goes to die.

I couldn't wait to get home, run up to my room, glare at the ceiling and tell God to “frig off and eat crap”. Anyway I swore at God a lot when I was a kid, that’s my point. Then I got a bit older and my life sucked, because like any ten year old if you don’t have all the things...

 then you’re obviously the Jew mouse from that depressing cartoon. The one with the boat and the parents are fat and there's a storm... Fievel.

"You want an animated film for kids? How about a poor, tortured, mildly learning disabled Russian jew-mouse who's separated from his parents and left lonely and terrified in the streets of America? Wakka wakka wakka!"

An American Tail, I mean, not the shitty western one. The first one that was really sad, like the song at the end of that dinosaur movie. The one with the brontosaurus that watches his mother get fucking murdered by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. 

"Say what one more time Mother fucker!!! I dare you!"

Land before Time. That was the movie, Land before Time with the Brontosaurus version of Bruce Wayne if Martha was a single mother… and they were dinosaurs. 

"Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit!!!"

It had the saddest song in the known universe: “If we hold on together”, performed by Diana Ross. Seriously listen to that song right now and try not to cry. Try to masturbate too actually, you can’t do it. I promise. It can’t be done. You can’t masturbate to “If we hold on together”.

 Diana Ross If we hold on together - YouTube

Later in life, at age twenty nine, I come to find out that Brontosaurus’ don’t exist. It was made up during the “Bone Wars” which sounds like the title of a kickass movie starring Liam Neeson 

"To collect the stolen bones, one man must face 1,000 space dinosaurs, by punching them in their erections... to death... blindfolded...In space... BONE WARS!!!" 

but actually it’s just two old paleontologists farting around over some fossils and one of them told a fib. 

Notice the lack of Liam Nesson and space dinosaur hard-ons.

It’s actually an Apatosaurus. Because, old people science. So a world with too few twenty nine year olds who remember Brontosaurus’ being a real thing collectively offered a sigh devoid of fucks given.

That's right honest girl who makes this Blogpost ethnically diverse.

Okay so anyway, being ten, suddenly you’re a Jewish rat commie Apatosaurus because you don’t own everything you can think of on a minute to minute basis. So I think to myself; am I suffering because I swore at God? Did he make my parents poor and unable to purchase me the things I care about for a while? Oh no.

"Okay you foul-mouthed little shit let's see how you like the celestial poverty hammer!" 

I started to get anxiety about it, I swore at God in secret in my room, like, a lot. Was that why my life sucked? Was God subtly screwing with me? I could never be sure! Was that why I didn't get Mario Paint?!? Did I make an enemy of an angry giant floating geriatric space ghost? 

*Incompatible with divine wrath.

Kid logic dictates if he was pissed, he should have just smote me, which for me at the time was literally lightning coming down to strike me in the balls and neck. That didn't happen. So I figured if I toned it down I’d be okay. Or keep fucking with him in the hopes of becoming Powder.

The story of a boy who did so much cocaine he could control lightning and his pubes fell off.

God forgave and stuff right? That was like, his thing. I didn't swear at God much after that, but I also spent a lot less time in my room pretending my bed was ground zero for a battle royal between the blonde G.I. Joe missing a leg and my crazy accurate Michael Keaton special edition Batman with removable mask. 

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na BATMAN!!

I eventually lost the mask and it was basically just Michael Keaton. Keaton and I had been on some wacky adventures, man. I came to prefer the naked honesty of Michael’s chiseled, plastic face to the cape and cowl of his Dark Knight alter-ego.

Bat-shaped menstrual blood stain included?

The Michael Keaton over Batman figurine preference is important. It’s important because I always wanted my fantasies sprinkled with an understanding that there was an anchor in reality behind it all no matter how weird things like Space, or Tim Burton were. 

Tim Burton: "And this is how I like getting head."

People: "God damn it. You're so fucking weird, Timothy."

If I didn't keep things somewhat "real",  I would feel strangely disassociated all day. It’s like that first time you get high and have to do the dishes while your parents watch you. They look like aliens or something because you've never taken the time to actually process your dad clipping his toenails on the couch next to mom, and she just pretends it’s not happening. 

Or they catch you doing drugs and hire an Asian man to hit you with a belt. We've all been there, right, am I right? Man, I miss those supplies beatings. 

That’s the feeling. I had that feeling a lot when I started imagining what I guess I now understand as metaphysical concepts that, in theory were impacting real life. Theories like an omnipotent God personally messing with a kid’s possessions because he was rude, or karma giving me Lou Gehrig’s disease if I didn't stop pissing on ant hills.

Concept art. 

It was terrifying, so I wanted certainties, stuff that I could KNOW, not guess or muse on or any of that shit. The bad part is; uncertainty and randomness are everywhere in the life of a ten year old. Sometimes, some bald old shriveled up nut sack from NBC would suddenly switch the line up of Saturday morning cartoons. You’d expect the X-Men, but you'd get Gem and your whole morning feels truly outrageous as your expectations get clumsily raped by one of those wind up monkeys with the cymbals.

Where is your God now?

I've spoken to my closest friends about this and we all agree, there was a chaotic lack of rhyme or reason to Saturday morning cartoon line ups. How does a kid not swear through a stucco ceiling at an absent God when he can’t even count on the concatenation of Saturday morning cartoons? That kind of thing bothered me, and evidently still does. A lot of things are nonsensical when you’re ten. Your dads mustache, old people, music from the 80’s, bugs flying into your mouth and anything political. Oddly though, God, in any incarnation, doesn't feel nonsensical for a ten year old. He‘s just scary and somehow plausible.

Well, not this God obviously, this doesn't look plausible at all... Four armed elephant transsexual or whatever. Ha! Go bomb volcanoes with Xenu, poseur. Giant-invisible-old-man-in-the-sky-with-bird-people-soldiers or GTFO.

  

My parents weren't very religious, I mean, mom was kind of, but she was Protestant so who cares. Either way I believed in some form of ever present deity, and that seemed more normal to me than say, salamanders, which is fascinating to me now.

Go home evolution, you're drunk. 

Don’t get me wrong, those amphibious bastards are weird, but on a scale of weird, I now feel they fall somewhere between Ben Stiller and socks with little toes in them, not the existence of an omnipotent being, weird.

Just.... fucking.... WHY?!?!

So I get nervous when I consider I thought God was normal, even though I wasn't taken to church much and my parents weren't very religious. I’m pretty sure I only learned about the almighty big guy from my French catholic school (we still had a few straggling nuns that paraded around like real honest to goodness teachers, you could tell them apart by their Nazi death grip and a general aura of guilt bestowing superiority) and I only understood half of what anyone said there anyway. My parents felt the best way to teach me the language was for me to get kicked in the ribs by people I didn't understand at recess.

That's me in the middle 

My point is God was familiar without being present. It’s almost like the whole thing was designed to be easily absorbed by a child’s moist, incompetent grey matter. Now, pushing thirty, I get that, it’s easy to wrap your deformed little skull around the virgin mother making a prophet baby sans man-parts digging up her trench when you’re barely one fifty-seventh of a human being. You're basically deeply mentally handicapped.

Hi, I'm a shark sandwich, get into my giant toothbrush we're going to Narnia.

But then I remember the dipshits that wrote the bible lived in huts made of sticks, dirt and feces. I feel like these guys weren't effortlessly grasping such Machiavellian concepts in the hours between various goat milkings. 

Ladies and gentlemen, the homes of the people who wrote the infallible, timeless word of God.

So did they really go out there with the intent of creating a manipulation device that would span thousands of years? I don’t know that. I do know that hundreds of years later Romans were obsessed with urine and began taxing it. Is that relevant? I don’t know, but the Romans were infinitely more advanced than the apostles and they taxed pee-pee. I can’t even tell if that’s somehow an ingenious thing to do it’s so far along the spectrum of fucking weird.

 Pecunia Non Olet, Baby!

Recently a friend of mine sent me a picture of a giant three dimensional vagina that was tampered with to kind of look like the Virgin Mary was hidden in its big pink roast beef folds of fecundity. It damn near turned me gay and really concerned me. All blown up, extrapolated and made symbolic, vagina's are disgusting. Like a dude tonguing a straw. In your peripheral vision it’s quasi-normal but if you really watch him work that thin pinkish cylinder it get’s really strange really quickly.

"'Sup?"

How disgusted I could be by something I truly loved because of context was baffling to me. How many other things did I love more than life itself that, that if blown up and made into three dimensional virgin birth idolatry, would I find gross and offensive. Starbursts? The Beastie Boys? TOP GUN!?!?

Yep. Top Gun.

It’s all about perception. Every day I get a little older and my eyes warp and get floaters in them (those little shadows that float around and everyone thinks its eye ball cancer the first time they show up) and everything changes. My mind changes too. 

The world doesn't change; my brain just slowly warps and goes rotten. It’s like Jean-Baptiste Alphonse “Frou-Frou le French” said. "Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose." 

"Something, Something, oui oui le fromage tabarnacle." - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Fifteen years ago the picture of a giant gaping virgin vulva would have been the kind of thing I would brave a post Hurricane Katrina landscapes full of angry African-American jazz musicians just to get in spitting distance of (you always have to spit, bro). 

 

Me too, King, fuck white people...I'm just here for the giant vulva. So we cool right?

Now I’m still showering the gay off me because of that disgusting picture of the holiest of holes, but giant vagina art didn't change, my appreciation of giant vagina art did. That’s what being twenty nine is. Living in a world that constantly reminds you that you only liked things because when you were young, you were stupid and those things were equally stupid. Then you grow up. You stop believing in things, even if they were good for you, like an outlet for frustrations that could have turned into mutilating cats or something.

"Bro, what the fuck." 

Now when I wake up and stare at the ceiling, cursing Mondays, back pain and those old paleontologists that made me believe in Brontosaurus’, No deity is offended, there’s no rush of mischief. Regardless of my belief system, Michael Keaton, or giant virgin mother vagina. There is no man behind the curtain. I’m just a grown up swearing at a ceiling.

Or am I?