Confessions of a Strip Mall Santa

“Just getting ready for another fun-filled day with the little tykes!”

I know what you’re thinking. Oh, don’t worry, I know. You’re thinking uh-oh here he goes on his annual Shitmas tirade. Well folks, you are in for a treat. Now maybe last year I didn’t do the best job of showing how much I love the holidays in this less than ‘Yay People!’ post. True, I was letting the stress of the season get to me, and I maybe wasn’t thinking clearly about all of the great things that go along with this festive time of year. What a difference a year makes! Well, several months actually since not too long ago I was eating pizza pops on a shitty futon in my underwear plotting what turned out to be a Joaquin Phoenix-style ill advised foray into attempted rap superstardom. Out of the blue I met someone great that handily met all of my qualifications for a life partner/financial supporter/identity theft crime accomplice: She wanted me to put my clothes back on because I grossed her out in my underwear (I gross me out in my underwear too!), she sits on the shitty futon and lets me have the comfy chair if I get to it first, and she loves pizza pops as long as I buy them and microwave them and promise that one day she’ll never see another fucking pizza pop as long as she lives.

I know, seriously right?! You can’t make this kind of love story up, it’s just too perfect. You know, unless you were responsible for doing a re-draft on a script for a crappy Jennifer Aniston-Jack Black romantic (?) comedy (?). The story better be pretty good to convince the public about that pairing. In real life she wouldn’t even bang him with your punanny.  So anyhow, I was all aglow this holiday season with positivity about my future prospects with this girl, mostly about the identity theft stuff ‘cause she’s really awesome with computers and shit. I was thinking maybe I should spread some of my manic-phase happy-jones around and try and get a job as a mall Santa to bring in a little extra cash when I saw an ad in the local paper seeking applicants for Santa-wannabes like me to take shifts at our very own local den of capitalist pit vipers. I went down and talked to the mall manager about the position, but he informed me I smelled too much like gin to be a high class center concourse mall Santa, and suggested I try the outlet strip mall out by the overpass, as he had heard they were hiring. Needless to say I aced the interview, due in no small part to the fact that the strip mall manager smelled more like gin than me. Looks like I had picked a great day to not smell like vodka! So there I was, sitting in my folding outdoors chair next to a lovely plastic tree with popping and farting seventies-era lights strung on it and an aroma that could only reasonably be described as “burning” just inside the entrance of the Electronics Emporium Shack of Craaaaazzy Deals ©. I found myself listening to one hard luck story after another from the the underprivileged kids perched on my lap. All at once, I experienced  a Will Ferrell style Thought Bubble! Someone needs to tell these poor kids’ hard luck stories so that we can all learn to appreciate the things most of us take for granted at Christmas! Unfortunately before I could expand the thought bubble a bit, it burst as some kid pissed his pants on my lap and I had to take the rest of the day off to drink away the stress of it all.

One little tyke in particular told a sad tale that really tugged at my heartstrings, and I asked his permission to record his sad story so that others might feel empathy this holiday season for those less fortunate than themselves. Oddly, he refused to have his story captured, but fuck him, I was wearing my mp3 player under my coat next to my flask and I just hit the ‘record’ button as he spoke. The world needs to know this story! I selected excerpts from the transcripts of our conversation to help illustrate to my reader(s) just what I was talking about. I also snapped a quick pic of him with my cellphone as he left. When he got annoyed about it and asked me if I was taking his picture I just told him I was checking a text from a hooker, which he seemed to accept as a reasonable enough excuse for me to point my camera at him. No disrespect intended, but christ underprivileged tykes are fucking stupid. Snippets of our sad conversation are excerpted here along with a picture of the frowny little fella:

Have you ever seen such a sad face on a psychopathic woman beater underprivileged Christmas tyke?

An excerpt from our little talk:

Me: Hi little feller! Actually you’re not so little at all are you there uhh…youngster? What’s your name son?

Sad Little Tyke: I have a hormone problem. And I smoke too much. My name is umm…Smell….Smell Fibson.

Me: Smell! Quite an interesting name you’ve got there! Why don’t you sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what you want for Christmas.

Sad Little Tyke: Well Santa, it’s been a pretty tough year for me. I lost my whole career and got myself involved in a messy situation with a woman, and I got a bit drunk a few times and well, I kind of fucked everything up.

Me: Uhh…how so Smell? It’s okay, you can tell Santa.

Sad Little Tyke: You know, the usual shit, get drunk, crazy jealous, and threaten your midlife crisis baby mama with a beating from a baseball bat and burning her house down with her in it.

Me: Ooookay…that is a pretty bad year alright, and I think you would agree that you’ve been a little bit….naughty. Santa believes even naughty kids deserve a gift though, so what would you like for Christmas Smell?

Sad Little Tyke: I want a guaranteed Hollywood blockbuster headlining career; I want a call back from Ron Howard; I want TMZ to fuck off and I want a magic device that makes any phone I talk into only say good things out the other end. I heard someone talking about it, it’s called a Discretion or a Therapy or a Lobotomy or something. Some Chinese sounding name like that anyway.

Me: Well, that’s a pretty tall order Smell, but Santa will see what he can do.

Sad Little Tyke (whispering): You better make it happen Santa or you’re gonna be eating some good old Louisville Slugger maple while your fucking igloo melts down around your ears. Mark my words douchebag.

Me (hastily): Thanks for coming son, see you next year!

 

Folks I think you can obviously see that there are people out there in the world that went through a heck of a lot tougher year than you and I did, and I hope you think of them when you are enjoying the warmth and comfort of family and friends this Christmas season. Me? I need a drink. I think what bothers me the most is that someone didn’t see this coming and do something to stop it or help. If only someone, anyone, even a stupid dickhead blogger had seen this coming. Sad, so very sad.

Barack Obama’s ‘Merica

Winter. The season of discontent, malaise, and flagging administrations performing stupid human tricks to capture the bored and housebound minds of a fickle voting public in the run-up to springtime electioneering. Now I don’t want to beat a dead horse but…well what the fuck, it’s dead anyway. The Obama Miracle is slowly but surely morphing oh-so-painfully into the Obama Debacle. One could maybe compare it to Joan Rivers’ morphing from semi-amusing, little bit whiny, harmless GrammaComic to grating beyond-the-grave-plastic-marionette-escaped-from-a-shallow-grave-zombie-cyborg-idiot. Not a very appealing transition. The Obama Nation has truly become an Obamanation. The poor bastard can’t seem to get no love from bank-bailout weary, government stimulus shafted, unemployed, foreclosed and shitting-their-pants-about-how-to-pay-for-Christmas-insanity voters.

And now this. By this, I mean Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Just when the public could not possibly feel more out of touch with the wacky spending, Zegna suit wearing, economic rescue flubbing Democrat White House, along comes Sarah. There she is, larger than life, pullin’ fish out of the net with her kids, wearin’ gumboots around town, making dinner and preaching the value of hard work and determination being the keys to life success. Throw in a little bit of Halibut clubbin’ and Reindeer blastin’ and you are looking at the fixin’s of a recipe for a big public perception headache on the horizon for the Trillion Dollar Baby White House Gang. Never mind the part where Sarah gets choked up trying to articulate her hopes and dreams for her youngest son, who was born with Down’s Syndrome. Voter connection alert! Despite objections from longtime Beltway insiders who considered such things beneath them, the Obama administration has produced a sort of “reality TV rebuttal” to the Sarah Palin TLC series called Barack Obama’s ‘Merica aimed at the reg’lar folk and their all important votes. We here at Oh for ****’s Sake, given our stature in the world of fabricated expository journalism, have obtained advance copies of several episodes of the new series aimed at reconnecting with a disenfranchised segment of the voting public in America: Everyone but the Obama administration and Wall Street douches. Let us have a look at one of our favourite episodes and see how they did, shall we?:

Episode 2: Campin’, Pt.1

“Act brave kids, these common folk can smell fear.”

Episode 2 is part 1 of a two part story arc that begins in a fashion many regular Americans can easily relate to: The Obamas decide to embark on a family vacation to explore one of the nation’s many amazing and wondrous national parks. In the opener, Michelle and Barack Obama are seen having a candid, apparently unedited conversation over a breakfast of foie gras and white truffle quail’s egg omelettes in which they discuss which national park might be their best destination in order to meet the most dirty unwashed regular American voter folk. Although Barack seems set on going to DisneyWorld, Michelle finally convinces him a trip to Yellowstone Park might be more appropriate because it is out West where there might be some voters that haven’t heard of him before and it has the added bonus of sounding “ethnic.” The Obamas are then shown in a typical American family wacky pre-camping scenario, trying to search in vain through their wardrobes for “hayseed” clothes for their trip. Ultimately, they end up sending an obviously harried White House staffer out on a government Lear jet for a quick trip the the Manhattan Bloomingdales “outdoor adventure” department to purchase much needed camping clothes. Barack shows he is ahead of the game however, and in a move that will undoubtedly foster a feeling of kinship with voters, produces his favourite navy blue camping blazer, waxing sentimentally about how he once wore it to a philosophical debate in the wilds of the University of Wyoming. The viewers can feel his awe and respect for the natural world as he describes his nerve wracking outdoors experience walking from the limousine to the campus auditorium at the university. At night, no less!

The rest of the episode plays out in a fairly predictable fashion with the family piling into their private jumbo jet and flying off to Yellowstone. Along the way, they participate in the usual family activities to break up a two hour flight that I think we can all relate to from our own childhood. They have a little champagne (non-alcoholic for the kids of course!) and brie, and learn a little about their destination, useful fun filled holiday factoids like “There are a lot of redneck crackers there” and “Don’t start any conversations with a Republican Idealogue.” Before the plane touches down, the Obamas are treated to a special “Wild America” style briefing from the head of their Secret Service security detail, that instructs the Obama family about what to do in the event of a “Bear and/or Hick Attack.” Viewers will be surprised to learn that the steps are eerily similar with the exception that the last resort, playing dead, might be unlikely to work on the hick who has already become accustomed to kicking, punching, and torching limp lifeless Wall Street effigy dummies. Episode 1 fades to black with the Obamas exiting the family minivan (Air Force One), filled with excitement about the adventure to come over the scheduled three hours set aside for their National Park vacation. Rumour has it that Episode 2 contains a quick visit by Barack to a local landmark known as “The Real Old Faithful,” a storied local outhouse with a glory hole where Vice President Joe Biden is said to have worked the graveyard shift while he was trying to put himself through law school. Viewers will feel an instant connection to Obama as he places his hand on the cracked wall of the faded, fallen into disrepair hut of anonymous "oratory" and looks off into the distance, his voice almost a whisper: “Joe, this nation needs you now more than ever.” Powerful stuff, sure to create a real sympathy with viewers who are also in a tough bind in their own lives.

Episode 4 showcases another quintessentially American past time, the family fishing trip, a screenshot of which is shown below. If it has one-tenth of the amount of “just reg’lar folk” vibe that the Yellowstone camping trip episode contains, Barack is almost guaranteed ride an upswell of voter sympathy that should cause him to lose the election in 2012 far less dismally than most pundits would have forecast.

“This is just like I remember fishing trips with my Dad. And our Butler, Jeeves. He always did such a great job of feeling my excitement for me, as a good fishing guide should.”

Nazis in Our Midst, No Really, RIGHT in Our Midst!

I guess if I had to be totally honest, I would say that I have been accused of suffering from the odd delusion here and there throughout my lifetime. Like there was that one time, when I thought I actually had a shot at asking one of the popular girls in high school to go to a school dance with me. Delusional? Yep. Thank God for handwritten notes. That conversation would have really, really sucked face to face. Or that other time I thought I had been abducted by aliens and taken in a spaceship to a far off galaxy and then mercilessly anal probed for no apparent reason. Another delusion? You got it, homey. Turns out it was just a homeless guy wearing one of those Ronald Reagan masks from the movie Point Break, and the spaceship was just the back alley at Patty O’Drunkigan’s neighbourhood pub and adult video rental store where I had apparently passed out after closing time. I think it’s fair to say my imagination has gotten the best of me at times, but in my own defence, it was probably for the best given the bleak nature of the real situations.

Over time these random delusionary personality sniglets have led to a fair amount of amusement for my friends and family and myself. “University Degree?” laughter erupts! “Going to be anything other than a wage slave the rest of my life?” Hilarity ensues! “Goals?” “Dreams?” Oh, the snickering we would enjoy. There goes that Brent again, head in the clouds and ass in the gutter! This time, though, I really believe that I am on to something that others don’t seem to be aware of, even though the evidence is all around them, practically goose-stepping them right in their stupid, disbelieving faces. Sorry, that last part was a little bitter. I am going to present the evidence to you and let you be the judge. I can’t be the only one who sees it. It seems like everywhere I look, I see Nazis! That’s right, those guys they don’t teach you about in Canadian schools so maybe you could grow up to become one. Sorry, that part was a little bitter too. Can you explain the following pictures?

This woman is apparently someone named Sarah Palin and she is supposedly a politician of some sort. I don’t believe it for a minute. I saw her performance during the last election in the U.S., and I am convinced that she is actually a clone of Eva Braun that has been created by some nefarious Shadow-Reich conspiracy group that didn’t do a good job splicing the genes responsible for brains. Inflammatory hand gestures aside, only someone cloned into present day from the 1940’s could have fucked that campaign up as badly as she did. Case closed.

Okay, can someone tell me what the hell is going on here? I thought the goose-stepping crowd was limited to Stalinist throwbacks and Little Communist Dictatorships That Could, like Cuba. These people are plainly putting on some sort of goose-stepping clinic, with none other than “USA” emblazoned across their backs. The website said something about some martial art called Tae Kwon Do, whatever the screw that is. Sounds like something a Nazi would make up. I’ve only heard of Kung Fu before, I don’t know about you.

As if these public displays of blatant Naziism weren’t enough, I was out on a day parole walk in the park the other day and I witnessed this disturbing sight, which I was lucky to be able to capture in time with my Kodak Instamatic before the little bugger saw me looking and went back to walking normally:

It’s all around us, people, it’s all around us. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when your child comes home with a permission slip to join his school’s “After School Aryan Club” or gets picked up in a school bus with a swastika on the side. The time to act is now, before it’s too late. Let me know how the battle is going, I’ve got a date tonight on a spaceship in a galaxy far, far away. Ready to go Ron?

The Royals: A Lot Like Us, Really.

This post will have the most relevance to my two readers who happen to be from the colonies. There is much debate in this country over whether or not we should sever all ties with the British Monarchy once and for all. Any Americans (also, Albertans and Quebecers and other quasi-Americans) who might happen to read this will understand all too well the desire to distance themselves from the oppressive British and their Crusades, Viral Exports (see Simon Cowell and the BeckHams), and Fish and Chips (they’re called fries, for Christ’s sake!). Why, the Americans already rode those bloody British out once when they all threw their tampons into the bay and had something called the Boston Vampire Tea Party or whatever the hell it was. I can sort of see why the British left, if someone threw their tampon at me I would probably take the hint too. It would also officially make it my sixth worst date ever (don’t ask).

It is true that Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Second (or HRH Lizzy Deuce as I like to call her) has visited Canada on 23 occasions, and that’s pretty friggin’ annoying considering all the schoolchildren that have been forever scarred by cyborg nightmares after witnessing her robotic rotating wave-like hand gesture. We are also burdened with the expense and hassle of having something called a Governor General, an appointed person who is supposedly the Queen’s representative in Canada. The Governor General’s main duties appear to consist of ribbon cutting, medal hanging (draping?), Throne Speech reading, hobnobbing with visiting dignitaries (or in Obama’s case, drooling), and wasting vast sums of government money even existing. Thank goodness she is saving the Queen the trouble of having to do all that stuff here!

After all is said and done, however, I don’t think we ever take much time to think about what we all have in common with our Royal Family, and for that matter, other royal families around the world. Let’s look at a few examples of some of the day to day activities and situations Royals find themselves in that might strike a familiar chord with us, the little people:

“Do you ‘ear a rustlin’? I swear I can ‘ear an eerie kind of rustlin’, and it sounds like it’s comin’ from right near me ‘ead.”

Here we see Princess Beatrice of York, daughter of Fergie, Douchess of York, and Randy Andy, Pimp Daddy of York battling an all-too-common childhood problem. Let’s face it, you had head lice in school, your friends had head lice in school, and lots of people you knew had head lice in school. Hell, you probably have lice a little further south these days for all I know.I didn’t have head lice in school mind you, but I never was much of a follower. The only difference between us and the Royals is that they occasionally suffer from an attack of neon butterflies that have escaped from Her Royal Majesty’s Personal Genetic Engineericist. Sadly, in their frantic effort to copulate before dying, they often accidentally lobotomize their Royal Host, explaining the look on Beatrice’s face in the above photo.

“No, really, if the rice looks dry in the buffet, I can totally hook you up. Psst. FYI, it’s in my hat.”

If you had a nickel for all the times you wore that worn out backwards baseball cap on a first date or to meet your future wife’s parents, you would probably be rich. Royals make headwear gaffes, too. Here we can see Queen Beatrix of the Netherworldlands making the poor choice of a rice steamer as a hat at a function that is obviously more suited to a wok or George Foreman grill. Okay, I have to confess. Not even the most retarded peasant would wear a bamboo steamer to a gala ball. That’s nastay, Beeyatchtrix!

“Hello out there in peasant land! Would you like to come for a ride? Of course I’m joking, you filthy serf! Get away from my carriage before I have my Royal Stallions trample you to death. Guards, remove that insolent miscreant’s right hand for my personal collection. A strong message is needed here.”

Royals are also concerned about the environment, and issues such as Climate Change © and Global Warming (tm), just like you. Queen Beatrix hopes to have a Prius one day, but for now she is making do with her jewel and gold encrusted horse drawn carriage, much as you are making do with your doorless ‘76 Impala until your credit improves enough to lease a Prius too. There’s that hat again! In platinum! How trendy! I guess it’s better than the fucking napkin holders the two portly doormen are forced to wear on their noggins. Every time I see that hat I picture Wile E. Coyote smashing her right over the top of the head with a giant cartoon mallet. How else could you make a hat like that?

“Look, Lizzy, that stupid Git crashed ‘is ‘orse, and now they’ll ‘ave to shoot it!” “Oh, goody goody, Phillip. You know how much I love to be startled by the sharp crack of a rifle! Delightful!”

Just like you enjoy watching the UFC on pay-per-view so you can be in awe of the athletes’ abilities and skills as well as their willingness to kick the living shit out of one another for your amusement, the Royals enjoy a lovely morning of carnage at the racetrack. Why the Queen even has a race named after her, the Queen’s Plate, held every year at West Amblyshire Dunston-on-the-Mews By Wembleyford Royal Racetrack and ‘Ouse of Bettin’. It is said that when the Queen’s Plate race was initially proposed, the Queen herself insisted that at each running of the race “No less than one (1) thoroughbred filly or mare, or the other one that isn’t the filly or the mare shall suffer an injury so unsightly and disturbing as to require immediate dispatching upon the mews with the nearest sidearm or long gun at hand and in a fashion that is most pleasing to the gathered throngs of loyal Royal Subjects, including, but not limited to: the British, the Scots, visiting dirty colonial immigrants and the (sigh) Irish.”

As you can plainly see, we have more in common with the Royals than maybe we thought at first blush. Maybe that’s why they call us commoners! Ha Ha. Ha Ha….umm, actually I think it’s a term of disdain. Oh, well, we still love them!