I am Hubris the Great, and sometimes people – in particular, those automatons who breathe heavily when watching TV – do not understand that there is a method to my scintillating madness. There are some who ask Virago why she, a pretty woman with flashing brown eyes, is involved with such a nutcase like Hubris, a guy who dropped out of MIT, Harvard and Bunker Hill Community College; while others ask me, Hubris, a demi-god, what I am doing with a woman who used to run with a biker club and who went through a harrowing ordeal with drug addiction. I will answer this question in more dramatic detail in future blogs, especially the triumphant moment when we first touched hands, and, with that one touch, both our lives were transformed for the better – since that was the moment I went off psych meds and my Virago never again felt the demonic enticement of recreational drugs.
The question I will answer today is the charge that I am so adrift in grand thoughts that I think Virago is a saint. According to the dolt-population of the Boston area, I shout out this sentiment for all to hear from my portable mountaintop. What these dolts fail to grasp with their molasses-clogged neural network is that I have never called Virago a saint. What I call her is the most beautiful, charming goddess ever to stride the bends and curves of the space-time continuum – that she is poetry, she is song, she is art personified. She is my sun, my moon, my asteroid belt. I abstain from the adjective “saint-like” because I loathe saints.
Saints make great stories and may have done a bit of good here and there, like St. Francis teaching animals the difference between a conjunction and a preposition, but they are horrible people to invite over to your house for tea, or even a Patriots game. Saints make it their self-appointed mission to save humanity, when in most cases it is humanity that must be saved from saints. St. Paul is credited for his entrepreneurial prowess in building the nascent Christian empire, but at the same time he managed to transfer his inborn asexuality into the households of married couples, who, because of the saint, were made to feel guilty about the biological act – and don’t get me started on the two-thousand-year set-back he dealt the female half of the species.
Then there were the early martyr saints, for example Saint Stephen, who was stoned to death at the behest of Saul of Tarsus, who went on the blossom into no other than St. Paul. Remember, though, that saints are always given a speaking platform before suffering some gruesome fate. Stephen was no exception. His last words: “Which one of the Prophets did your fathers not persecute, and they killed the ones who prophesied the coming of the Just One, of whom now, too, you have become betrayers and murderers.” Now, dear reader, imagine this guy at a Midwestern wedding reception? “I would like to make a toast to Alice and Eddie, who, let’s face it, betrayed their fathers by hiring a band called ‘Peanut Brittle.’”
Or if you really like your saints cooked over a warm fire of total weirdness, then your man has to be Saint Paul the Hermit, who lived in a cave in the Theban Desert for 100 years, his only company being a raven who brought the lazy bum a loaf of bread on a daily basis, as if the raven would not have been better off getting a life of his own and telling the Hermit, “Nevermore.” I don’t even want to think of this guy at Alice and Eddie’s wedding reception, what with him probably bringing the goddamn raven as his date.
You see, saints are autocratic by nature. St. Dominic, St. Benedict and St. Francis were the founders of the first monasteries – in other words, cults that ruined the neighborhood. These so-called saints unleashed mendicant monks – a fancy word for creative beggars – on surrounding communities. The difference between these idle nuisances and the guy who wipes down your windshield at a stoplight is that the former is a voodooist who tells you that St. Dominic, St. Benedict or St. Francis will sway the Lord to send you to the Eternal Bonfire if you do not fork over a few alms. That’s right, saints were the first extortionists.
One can call Mother Teresa of Calcutta the biggest self-promoter since Oscar Wilde – and at least Oscar would have shined at Alice and Eddie’s wedding by holding up a glass and, saying: “The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding, or better, Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” Meanwhile, Teresa would show up with TV cameras in tow in order to give Alice a stern lecture on the sins of contraceptives and abortion so that, someday, we can all live in over-crowded, unhealthy, poverty-stricken conditions so that Des Moines can be like Calcutta.
There are even people who aspire to sainthood while youngsters and then later are revealed as callous thugs. Joe Queenan is a writer of witty venom – actually one of my favorite writers – a man who went over the top in making it his life’s mission to destroy Don Knots, John Tesh and Dan Aykroyd. These three men were harmless individuals whose only crime was to solidify white trash culture as the dominant force in America, but Queenan treated them as war criminals and hounded them into their respective professional graves. My point? Queenan started off as a seminary student with designs of becoming a saint.
Oh, there was another seminary student, a saint-wannabe, who ended up showing the world his true ruthless and murderous self – and his name was Josef Stalin.
No, my Virago is no saint, thank you very much. She is kind and cool, modest and generous. She keeps to herself, meaning she has no desire to screw with the heads of millions of people just so she can someday be beatified by the Catholic Church. The only person she looks after is me, Hubris the Great, and I look after her, Virago the Beautiful.
Hubris The Great 