My name is Hubris the Great, and that’s an understatement. My mission is to alter society through the force of my vast mind, as, with megalomania stuffed tongue in cheek, I assume that my inferiors – i.e., the rest of humanity, with the exception of Megan Fox – will bend their feeble intellects toward my nuclear reactor of a brain and act accordingly to fetch me a cup of coffee. If that fails to do the job, then I will use my talent for hopping from one franchise job to the next to hypnotize various spike-haired department supervisors, bipolar multi-tattooed Starbucks gals and cashiers who prefer Vonnegut to Mailer (a subject for another posting). In short, I now emerge from my self-imposed exile in a trailer park to change the Universe using my formidable wit, good looks and Planck’s Constant.
I am Hubris the Great, and my muse is Megan Fox, but I choose to withhold this information from the source of all my torment, Virago the Waitress, a black-haired vixen made skinny by an addiction to coffee and cigarettes, and who is the only lady to whom I can hold forth on everything from Sumerian stone tablets telling the story of how colon polyps defeated Gilgamesh to the post-modernist poetry of Geico TV ads. True, Virago will offer little give-and-take during these disquisitions, except to exhale smoke and roll her eyes in a dramatic arc reminiscent of the epic orbit of Io around Jupiter, but I am convinced that below the heavy make-up and mysterious nose-ring is the boundless depth of Mother Nature, if Mother Nature was still taking classes in Art History.
At present, I am doing a field study on Mark Wahlberg, or as my dearest Virago calls him, My Dearest Mark. The impetus for squandering my investigative prowess on a former thug turned golfer in charity tournaments is to convince Virago that my soft, non-Wahlbergian physique is a tribute to my superiority to all Mankind instead of her own misguided interpretation that I am slothful and fearful of gymnasiums (from the Greek term gymnos meaning naked). True, I fear gyms, but only because the men who choose to revel in their nakedness are decaying men in their eighties, with sagging breasts and more protuberances than a squid with multiple goiters.
The difference between Wahlberg and me is that he leads with his pectoral majors when addressing society (which, in his case, includes mammals that eat prey sans spices), while I address the Universe through pure synaptic force. Mark Wahlberg without pecs would be like Prince without platform shoes, or Grover Cleveland without muttonchops – the man would be shorn of an essential prop…But wait, Hubris! Is not your incandescent cerebrum not a prop in its own right? To which I say, my gray matter is essence, and, to paraphrase Sartre, essence precedes protein shakes, horrible footwear design and facial hair reserved for Yankee Clipper captains who flog their sailors for drinking too much rum. In the movie, Date Night, the character, Phil Foster, played by Steve Carell had it right when he told the character (who was Wahlberg by another name) played by Wahlberg to please “put a shirt on!” To which the amateur movie critic will say to me, “Hubris, to create authenticity in The Fighter, Wahlberg had to expose his glorious pectoral majors, at least in the scenes shot in the ring” – to which I, Hubris, choose to side with Hobson from the movie Arthur, who said: “This is a robe. Put it on.”
I posited these arguments to Virago while seated at the counter of her place of employment, Sactum Sactorum’s Diner. She is not allowed to smoke while on the job, which was fortunate for me when I maintained that I was superior to Wahlberg in the same way that halo bacteria is to E. coli in terms of environmental fitness, to say nothing of how my facial profile (a classic image modeled on the Caesars, mind you) makes Wahlberg’s sideways countenance look like that of an itinerant bulldog.
I could see that Virago wanted to blow a cloud of stinky tobacco smoke into my aforementioned beautiful mug, but had to settle with grunting:
“Hube, what the hell is an itinerant bulldog?”
Hubris The Great 