Strange Christmas Traditions Explained

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Max T Kramer

Ah, Christmas. Such a magical, wondrous, contradictory season. When it comes to poorly explained, nonsensical, and confusing traditions, no other holiday comes close to competing with the juggernaut of Strange that is Christmas. Think about it. Take your time. Let’s face it, you’ve got plenty, since bidding just closed on that must-have cat sweater on Ebay, and your chafed genitals need a break before your next bout of furious masturbation to internet porn. You might as well use thirty-six seconds to actually contemplate the absurdities of the Christmas season, and then hopefully completely re-evaluate your life’s choices.

So what is Christmas, exactly? According to American’s, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Republican Jesus, who, on December 25th, 1976, burst from an oil well in Texas and defeated the Mexican Super-Devil in a fiddling contest. This makes sense, since Christmas has its roots in the Spanish Christ Mas, which of course translates to Christ More, as in, on this day Christ was More powerful than the Super-Devil. To celebrate this holy triumph of good over evil, the American public is ordered to spend the entire month of December at the mall, in a vain attempt to resuscitate their dead retail economy, so that its zombified corpse can stagger on for one more year of bad debts and child labor exploitation.

Americans, of course, are known to get things wrong sometimes, so let’s break Christmas, and our popular Christmas traditions down into small, easily digestible chunks.

Tradition 1: Celebrating Christmas day on December 25. Most Christians I know believe that Christmas day is the anniversary of Jesus Christ’s birth. This is not so. While the holiday, ostensibly, is a celebration of Christ’s birth, the date is arbitrary. It was actually chosen by Roman Catholics in order to compete with what were, at the time, more popular pagan solstice celebrations. For all we know, the messiah was actually born on November 2nd. Or in June. But totally, get up for midnight mass on Christmas eve, the day really has special significance to god.

Tradition 2: Recreating the nativity scene. These are the crappy plastic or porcelain statues you usually see half buried in snow outside of churches and old Italian women’s houses, with the baby Jesus lying in a three sided shack, surrounded by his parents, barnyard creatures, and the three wise men, who have, wisely, provided the drooling son of god with presents of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Now, I’m not knocking the gift of gold, as its practical uses are manifold, but do you know what Frankincense and Myrrh are? They’re tree sap. Back in the year zero, people smelled like congealed ass cheese, so they would waft themselves with strong smelling smokes, such as the smoke you get from burning Frankincense or Myrrh, to hide their shameful lack of hygiene. Fantastic Wise Men, you gave the baby who may or not have been your god deodorant.

Tradition 3: Santa Claus. He, supposedly, is a supernatural diabetic who resides in the North Pole, and with the assistance of unionized elf labor, creates toys for all the good boys and girls, which he magically delivers on Christmas Eve. I’ll give the fat man one thing. At least he’s nominally Christian, which is surprisingly rare for the traditions we retain on the holiday named after Christ. Most of our beloved Christmas traditions don’t have a single connection to Christianity. The Santa Clause mythos however, originated in the 4th century with Saint Nicholas, the bishop of Myra, who was evidently a totally cool dude and was exceedingly generous and loved children in a hopefully platonic manner (but I wouldn’t count on it, he was a Christian clergyman after all). After his death around 340AD he was buried in Myra (Turkey), until his bones were exhumed and stolen by Italian sailors, who brought them back to Italy as a souvenir, naturally increasing his popularity throughout Europe. Thanks to the silly Dutch, the Saint Nicholas myth was kept alive through the centuries, where it morphed from the Danish Sint Nikolaas to Sinterklaas to our modern American Santa Claus. The real Saint Nick’s generosity explains the current Santa’s penchant for gift giving, but why he lives at the North fucking pole surrounded by midgets, I have no idea. Funny side note, St. Nick and Santa Claus are obviously the same person, but old Chris Kringle, is not. Chris Kringle is actually Christkindl, or the Christ Child, so man were we way off on that one.

Tradition 4: Krampus, the Yule Lord. Krampus, in the awesome versions of Christmas, is St. Nick’s horn-headed hairy demon side-kick, who punishes the bad boys and girls while Santa rewards the good boys and girls. His, I think, is the most fascinating tradition, firstly because my little Grinch heart is warmed by the idea of punishing bad boys and girls, and secondly, because his is the oldest tradition. Krampus, as a modern avatar of the horned-god of the witches, is so pre-Christian that Neanderthal children used to tell Krampus stories around their cave fires when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

Lord Krampus punishes a naughty girl by pulling her hair.

Lord Krampus punishes a naughty girl by pulling her hair.

Tradition 5: The Christmas Tree. A far better man than I, Jim Gaffigan, said it best when he described the Christmas Tree phenomenon as the behavior of a drunk guy. What you do is, you go out into the forest, you find the most beautiful, healthy, vibrant young fir tree, which has just passed from tree-childhood into tree-adolescence, and is beginning to notice how beautiful all the young lady trees of the forest are, and you murder it in cold blood, and then drag its frozen corpse into your living room, where you put it on display and decorate it like some sort of grisly war trophy. Brutal? Fir-sure. The Christmas tree may have some pre-Christ Christian connotations, since the Christmas trees were once decorated with hanging apples, perhaps to symbolize the paradise tree in the garden of Eden. Then again, they may have been decorated with apples and popcorn because electric light strings hadn’t been invented by Ben Franklin yet. The well lit, tinselly Christmas tree as we know it was really popularized by Queen Victoria’s husband, the German Prince Albert, who clearly just liked attaching shiny shit to things, since he also popularized shiny metal wiener piercings.

Tradition 6: Mistletoe. These colorful little plants were used by Druidic priests 200 years before Mary’s first missed period, and they have nothing to do with Christianity. The Druids liked them because they stayed green in winter. It has associations with Frigga, the Scandinavian goddess of love, which explains why you can get away with kissing people other than your spouses while standing under this little magic plant.

Tradition 7: Holly and Ivy. Similar to Mistletoe, these plants were revered because they stayed green and pretty in winter when the whole world was grey and bleak. Also if you hung them over your door, their magic protected you from Kharoulke the Wind-walker, or winter vampires or something.

Tradition 8: Candy Canes. Used by clever parents to keep their bratty kids quiet during long boring-ass church services, Candy Canes have been popular since the 17th century, but they really took off in the 1950’s when a machine was invented to mass produce them.

Tradition 9: Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. The Montgomery-Ward Company, department store operators, used to purchase and distribute children’s stories as gifts to their customers during the Christmas season. In an effort to save money, they commissioned one of their own employees, Robert May, to write his own story, so they could just distribute that for free instead. In 1939, he wrote Rudolph, which he based on his own experiences as a weak nerdy little outcast growing up, and that year more than 2 million copies were distributed. By 1947, May was able to recover the copyright for the story, which he then produced commercially for the first time, making him a rich man and making Rudolph an enduring hit amongst misfit youth.

Tradition 10: Horrible Claymation Christmas specials from the 1960s and 70s on TV. I…have no ideas why these are still aired. They’re terrible. Same with horrible public domain Christmas music, which is endlessly covered and redone by whatever talent-less hack can blow their way into an open recording studio, and then constantly shoved into our earholes by heartless corporations starting in mid November every. single. year.  even though I clearly explained to them that if I have to hear one more Katy Perry cover of Jingle Bells, the whole world is going to burn.

Tradition 11: Christmas Caroling. At some point there must have been a well-meaning but idiotic church choirmaster somewhere who created Christmas Caroling as a thing, and may he burn in hell for all eternity. I have fucking Pandora and iTunes, I don’t need that shit. If I want to hear live music, i’ll buy concert tickets. The only thing worse than hearing professional singers grunt out another wretched Christmas tune on the radio is having a herd of untrained, tone deaf, unprofessional singers do it. Live. At your house. Uninvited. Do you know who I want showing up at my house uninvited? Nobody. Ever. And it’s not like they’re trick or treating, you can’t even bribe them with candy to go away. Nooooo, they’re going to insist on standing on your front stoop and singing every fucking song in their Christmas music song book, including the second and third verses that nobody really knows, not even them, but they’ll still try to gargle through it like a Japanese chick at a Bukkake factory while you stand awkwardly in your dressing robe nodding your head like you appreciate their butchered rendition of the little drummer boy as visions of mass murder dance in your head.

Tradition 12: The Gallon Milk Challenge. This one isn’t terribly widespread yet, but I would like it to be. In this tradition, my cousins and I, after gorging ourselves on Christmas dinner, and stuffing our face with Santa’s cookies, and eating hot peppers to give ourselves some incentive, drink as much milk as possible, as quickly as possible, until we vomit everywhere. The last one to vomit, or the first one to finish their milk, wins. This Christmas tradition was tolerated by our parents and aunts and uncles and grandma when we were children, since it just meant we would surely be visited by Krampus and beaten with tube socks full of batteries in the night, but now that we’re almost thirty I fear our beloved tradition is less than popular amongst whoever happens to be hosting our Christmas gathering that year.

These are all the pre-eminent universal Christmas traditions I could think of. If you think of any more, please let me know about them, so that we may wallow in the world’s crapulence together.

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What I did when I visited South Africa

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Max T Kramer

I don’t usually treat this blog like a diary, because I’m not a 13 year old girl, and my life is boring and ordinary, and I doubt anybody wants to read about the crap I do, but today I’m going to make an exception.

I just got back home from a short holiday in South Africa, and I’m going to tell you about it here because (1) I feel special, and (2) I don’t want to tell the same stories over and over every time I see another friend or family member in the next few weeks. This way, when someone I know asks “Oh my glob! How was Africa!? Did you see Kangaroos!?” I can simply reply “You should know how Africa was. It’s all on my blog. Which you clearly don’t read. Thanks for the support. Also, Kangaroos live in Australia dummy.”

So how was Africa? It was awesome. This trip came about because a few months ago Cauldron (formerly known as Col-Bang) invited Shady, Garbage, and myself to come on an extreme safari to rediscover our roots, and then demanded we send him large sums of money via PayPal, which we did on a regular basis up until we sat down on our flight from JFK out of the States Nov 7. Honestly, until we started taxiing down the runway, I was 40 percent certain that there was no trip, and that Cauldron had scammed us good, hopefully to support a previously secret gambling or drug addiction. The fact that we weren’t scammed, and the trip was really happening, and that I hadn’t suffered through a series of invasive and intimidating sounding inoculations against terrifying Africa germs for no reason was a pleasant surprise.

Once we were in the air, everything went smoothly, and I spent the 7 hours from New York to London, and 13 hours from London down the Cape Town doing what I always do on planes. Mainly I drank, tried to sleep, conducted science experiments with the disgusting plane “food”, and imagined what would happen if the plane crashed. Don’t worry, in my imaginings I always survive, along with all the most beautiful women from the plane as well, who then become my plane crash brides, and we live out our days in idyllic splendor on whatever tropical island or desert oasis I find for us through suitably heroic measures. After way too many hours in the air with no mechanical problems or tragic casualties, we landed smoothly in Cape Town, passed through customs, and I set foot for the first time on the Dark Continent. It was, admittedly, a bit underwhelming. The balmy coastal air was nice of course, but with the modern, clean airport, and well maintained road infrastructure into Cape Town, it didn’t seem Africa-y enough, you know? Our first impression was that South Africa is more like Africa-lite, which isn’t a complaint, just an acknowledgement.

I had expected to be greeted, and possibly threatened by swarms of biting insects, 8 year old militiamen, and animal pelt wearing tribal warriors, but instead I was greeted by a Kentucky Fried Chicken Franchise, and Katy Perry on the radio. As our safari tour guide explained later in the trip, “KFC is very popular because the black guys love fried chicken.” God damn you Africa.

We spent our first two days in Cape Town proper, staying at The Backpack hostel on New Church Street. We mostly just bummed around the city trying to get used to the time difference, pickling our insides with local beers, and enjoying the buying power of the US dollar for once, which is currently exchanging at approximately 1-10 with the SA Rand. During this time we also took a cable car ride up to the top of Table Mountain, which is the dominant land mark at the edge of Cape Town, and, according to their brochures, one of the new natural wonders of the world. Once at the top of Table Mountain, we wandered around for a bit, and then we began the adventurous part of our trip by abseiling (rappelling) off the summit on the longest commercial abseil in the world. Here we also experienced our first (but not last) bit of SA humor. Basically for every dangerous, semi-dangerous, or potentially dangerous activity we did, no matter where we were in the country, all of the workers took great pleasure in telling us, in detail, exactly how unqualified they were, how bad the equipment was, and how likely we were about to die horribly.

Abseiling from Table Mountain

After reaching the bottom and hiking back up, we enjoyed nature for a while, and then waited impatiently for approximately 6.2 hours for Shady, who had wandered off on his first mysterious disappearance of the trip. Then we went down to the Cape Town waterfront, and gorged ourselves on as many local beers and exotic game animals we could find. We also spent time wandering through the Woodstock neighborhood of Cape Town, which is a rougher neighborhood, but has a large amount of world class graffiti on a lot of the buildings, so seeing that was worth the risk. We did pussy out about going into one of the townships, which are the large shanty towns full of the poorest of the poor, surrounding most of the larger cities in SA. Several tours of the townships are offered, but it felt weird to us to go there. I know if I was poor and lived in a homemade shack with no electricity or running water, I wouldn’t really want rich foreigners gawking at me and taking pictures.

The following morning, the other guys got up painfully early to go out on a shark cage dive, and I, feeling sluggish and lethargic from all the dead animals packed into my large intestine, instead slept in and had a leisurely breakfast at the hostel. Here I met other American tourists, the first I had seen, and I realized exactly why the rest of the world hates us. While I was eating my breakfast I heard the two guys sitting at the table next to me speaking English, which didn’t really mean anything, since everybody everywhere speaks English. I knew they were Americans however when one offered to get the other’s camera bag from their room, and when he returned with the bag and his friend opened it, there was a Smirnoff Ice hidden inside. After much groaning and laughing, he got down on one knee in the middle of the dining room, and chugged the Smirnoff. I was in South Africa, and I saw a dude get “iced”. Stay classy America. FYI, one thing that I thought was uniquely American that it turns out SA is big into is “Movember” where bros grow funny mustaches throughout the month of November to raise awareness for men’s health issues. Another thing they have evidently only recently discovered was beer pong. Almost every bar we went to had a table set up and the bar tenders made sure to ask us if we’d ever heard of beer pong.

“Beer pong?” we’d say, “it sounds vaguely familiar. We’ll give it a try.” We would then destroy our local opponents, chant USA and take 1 dollar shots, because we come from the States, we graduated from UCONN, and I’m pretty sure we invented beer pong.

After breakfast, I was picked up by our tour guide Nico, a SA local who proved to be a total bro and a good fit for our group. With him was fellow tour-goer Nigel Goldstein, a quintessentially British Jew, and a genuinely nice guy, who nevertheless did nothing to dispel any of the stereotypes about either of those two ethnicities. We then picked up two young women from the Netherlands named Amber and Iris Van der Booben, who despite having stripper names, were complete sweethearts, and never took their clothes off. Our final pick up was a middle aged Swiss woman named Franny, who had been staying in Cape Town with her aunt, but had grown bored, so she signed up for the extreme safari last minute. I felt a little bad for her, both because her English was limited, and because she was probably twice as old as the rest of us, including Nico, but she was very nice, and appeared to have a fun time. With her collection, our party of 9 was complete, and we were able to begin our quest to destroy the one ring at Mount Doom, and or drink a million beers and look at goofy Africa animals.

That afternoon we all got to know each other by filling the van with an international mix of farts and playing “would you rather”  while we drove to the southern tip of Africa. Here I was able to proclaim my dominance over the earth by peeing off the last rock on shore into the mixed waters of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. After I had completely replaced both oceans with my urine, we drove to our first hostel outside of Cape Town, the Cape Aqulhus Backpackers. We spent the night wandering on the beach looking for whales, had a communal dinner with the other guests at the hostel, and then drank a million beers because South African beers cost approximately 1 US dollar.

After this point, everything blurs together thanks to booze, adrenalin, and sleep deprivation, so I’m not really sure what happened when. We kayaked and hiked to a waterfall. Garbage almost died quietly after discovering a hidden hole in the rock underneath the waterfall. He did not die. We walked with tame lions that are being trained to become movie stars. We did not die. We got kissed by an ostrich slut, and I rode an ostrich. We crawled through some caves. We went on scenic hikes. We saw a monkey park. We saw wild Baboons. We saw crocodiles. We rode elephants. We went zip lining, and the employees, in between telling us how unsafe their zip lines were, laughed at us because we reeked of booze and could barely string coherent words together. Shady spent approximately 48 hours total pooping. We had a braai at the Avoca river cabins. We partied at Pilli Pilli, a beach bar in Sedgefield at the Afrovibe. We partied even harder and got weird at the Island Vibe in J Bay, and I pressured Shady into enjoying a devil’s threesome with me and a chubby Norwegian chick. He somehow resisted her trollish charms, even through I explained to him that neither Mistress or his lady, Urkel Gooseparty, would be angry with us because humor always trumps jealousy, and nothing in all the lands of men could have been funnier than getting with that Nordic beach ball. I was moderately disappointed that he didn’t agree with me, and instead of making the beast with two (three?) backs, we just got painfully drunk and carried Garbage back to his room after he turned his brain into Swiss cheese and passed out face down in a pile of tainted doom weed on the bar.

Animal Encounters

My favorite experiences during the trip were when we bungee jumped off of Bloukrans Bridge, the highest bridge bungee in the world, and the actual safari ride through the Addo national park. While there we got up close and personal with wild elephants, warthogs, kudu, impala, zebra, and lions. We didn’t see any black rhino because unfortunately they probably don’t exist anymore.

Bloukrans Bridge Bungee

Some things that SA does right, according to me: Driving – slower drivers all move over to the shoulder of the road so that faster drivers can pass them even when no passing lane is available, and everybody courteously thanks each other for it. Food and Drink – SA is big and fertile, and supports the growth of a lot of free range beasts which are tasty, and excellent wine grapes. Prices – Even with the heavy European influence, SA is still Africa, and it has a lot of poverty, which is sad, but does keep prices low on most local goods. Weather – we were there during the beginning of their summer, and the weather was perfect. Only complaint I have is the waves were small the entire time we were there, so we had no real opportunity to surf. At the end of our safari, after bidding good bye to our new international best friends and returning to Cape Town, we did some more eating, drinking, and shopping, and ended our holiday with a completely disorganized wine and brandy tasting tour of various wineries in the Stellenbosch area. Once we were good and drunk, we baked in the sun for one last afternoon, then rode back to the airport to start our long journey home.

Big Ben

This time, instead of powering through as quickly as possible, we broke up our flights with a full day in London, where we did the tourist thing, taking photos of famous London landmarks and sampling the local bitters in various pubs. Then we flew back home, collected our cars at Shady’s, and limped back to our respective lairs to rest and lick our wounds. Soon I’m going to have to readjust to East Coast time and go back to work, but for now I’m stringing my holiday out as long as possible with one last cocktail and one more day of relaxation.

I can’t say that I’m pleased about going back to work, or about being back in winter weather, but other than that, it’s good to be home.

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The cure for divorce.

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Max T Kramer

9 out of 10 experts agree, marriage is the leading cause of divorce.

I’m the tenth expert. I kind of disagree. Sure, marriage is the only cause of divorce, but that’s just because we’re doing marriage wrong.

Before I state my case, allow me to explain my qualifications. According to the tastefully embossed certificate I received in the mail from the Universal Life Church.com, I am a fully ordained minister. According to my business cards, I’m the Max of “Minister Max’s Magnificent Ministries ™ and if the success of the one wedding ceremony I have officiated to date is any indication, I am actually the best minister to ever exist in the history of ministers and weddings. So yeah, I’m a fucking expert. Any more questions?

Now that I’m a rising star in the cutthroat ministration game, I’m always looking for ways to differentiate my product, to make my services more desirable to my discerning clientele. Unfortunately, marriage as an institution has taken some hits lately, and isn’t as common as it once was. Obviously, this is bad for business. I have therefore been dedicating a lot of my Free Thought Shower Sessions ™ time to solving the marriage problem. Luckily for the world, I’m a genius, and I have done just that.

To solve our problem, we must first identify the issue. So what is wrong with marriage? Why is the rate of marriage declining in most developed nations worldwide? Well, that’s an interesting question, thank you for asking it. The answer is complex, but I believe in your abilities to deduce and reason.

Partially, it’s because women are, for whatever reason, treated almost like real people now. They have educations. They have jobs. They are empowered. They buy their own houses, pay their own bills, make their own decisions. Basically, they don’t need husbands anymore. So marriage as a financial necessity for women is kaput. Also, these days it’s frowned upon to gather up all your brothers and cousins and uncles and ride to the next castle over, carrying various sharp and pointy pieces of metal, and demand the neighbor family’s virgin daughters as wives, or else. What a time we live in.

Also, it’s partially because people are living longer, healthier lives. This is a twofold problem. First, they’re not so focused on getting married and birthing babies in what used to be the approximately 6 month window between youth and complete decrepitude that our ancestors had to work with. Instead, they’re spending more time as young adults studying, or traveling, or working on their careers, or dating around, or being happy, instead of settling for the mind numbing drudgery of marriage. Secondly, with the longer lives we are living, comes the realization that once married, the sweet escape of “till death do us part” is depressingly far away.

Marriage is all well and good when you’re meeting your significant other at 15 or 16, getting hitched in your physical prime, having sexy young people sex for a few years, and then dying of bad humors, or wolf attack, or drizzling shits, or old age by twenty three. Now that we’re not even meeting our partners until our thirties, after our best years are already over, but when we still have several decades of physical infirmity and hideousness left to look forward to before death, marriage as it is currently defined loses its flavor.

Sure, you can always get a divorce, but this is a long, painful, expensive, upsetting process, and nobody starts their own marriage expecting a divorce. That’s just what the rest of your family and friends expect. Obviously, even with all of the bad facets of divorce, it’s still worth it for many people, who would rather lose their house and children then look at their partner’s ugly fat face for even one more day. I get that, but I don’t like it. Not only is the fear of divorce keeping some people from ever getting married, divorcees are, understandably, wary of getting remarried. This is also bad for business, but it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m telling you now. Divorce is obsolete.

I have discovered the answer to all our marriage woes.

:: insert suitable anticipatory drum roll here ::

Contractually. Limited. Marriages.

How have we not thought of this before!? Consider: you want to get married, but you’re too scared/insecure/realistic to be stoked about “Till death do us part”. Well, why does it have to be “Till death”? Why can’t marriages be for a lesser term? “Till your contract runs out in 5/10/20 years” sounds a lot less intimidating, doesn’t it? Would you sign a lifetime contract for a cell phone? Of course not! That would be dumb as hell! What if another, better model comes out? You’re might want to upgrade eventually.

I’m not saying you’re definitely going to want to upgrade your husband or wife, but if after a few years of marriage, you find that you do indeed want to try a different one on for size, you should have that light at the end of the tunnel to look forward to. This way, we can completely eradicate divorce by the simple expedient of making it completely unnecessary. I suggest beginning your marriage journey with one of my trademarked “trial marriage” packages to start. You get all of the joy and excitement and presents of a real life wedding ceremony, but you’re only bound to a five year marriage contract. Then, if things look good, you can renew, or upgrade to one of my more advanced, also trademarked longer term marriage packages. This way, you get the joy of reaffirming your love and re-upping your contract with another sweet wedding ceremony, with even more presents. Or, if things aren’t working out, you can walk away, no hard feelings, no legal liabilities or unpleasantries. Sorry Charlie, better luck next time. Hopefully this will also change the perception of marriages ending from one of failure to one of opportunity. You did it! You had a marriage, and you absolutely rocked at it, and now you have the opportunity to do it all over again, even better.

This is a win, win for everybody involved. More people will commit to marriages when they know that even if shit goes wrong they still have an escape option, with just a few contractual hurdles (there’s fine print about kids and stuff), and after a clearly defined amount of time of course. This will be good for the wedding business (me). This will be good for the couples, who can commit fully to their relationships because hey, why fuck things up with an affair, or a shitty ass divorce when you can be legally back on the market in a few short years anyway? That way, they leave their relationships feeling optimistic and validated, and with such a good taste in their mouth, that they’ll be more likely to quickly jump back into the marriage game, which will also be good for the wedding business (me).

This will also benefit the older-adult dating pool. No longer will various internet dating websites be populated solely by unlovable losers and the emotionally crippled. Instead they will be lush playgrounds for successful, adventurous, emotionally available, prime meat, who, high off the great success of their last marriage, will be looking to keep the good times rolling again with their next soul mate.

Don’t fret, traditionalists and sadomasochists can still opt for the “till death” marriage contract, but there should really be options for the what I assume is massive amount of people for whom “till death” doesn’t sound especially enticing.

I know this idea has blown you mind. I know it’s a lot to absorb all at once. Take your time, let it sink in. Once you’ve come to the realization that yes, this groundbreaking new form of marriage is right for you and your partner, come find me.

I’ll be waiting with your perfect marriage package. You’re welcome.

 

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Congratulations, you’re a crappy parent.

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Max T Kramer

So you’ve had a son or daughter and, as if that weren’t a bad enough mistake, you’ve decided to actually raise said child. Yourself. Even though you are clearly unqualified. Even though, literally anybody would do a better job. Even though you were never fully licensed to be a parent. In fact, you are so not-qualified, you weren’t even aware there was a licensing program for that. Well there is. Not that it matters, you wouldn’t have passed it anyway. Mowgli in The Jungle Book received a better upbringing from a pack of jungle wolves than you are capable of providing for your seed. Do you know how I know that? Answer the following question:

Do you want what is best for your child? Yes ____ No ____

What did you check off? You checked off Yes, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU!? You poor, misguided fool. Why would you do that to your innocent and defenseless child? I understand, you have only the best intentions. You want to protect your son or daughter from all of the bad things in the world. You want to provide them with the things that are good. You want them to always be happy, and never be sad, or angry, or scared, or embarrassed, or hurt, or uncomfortable. You want them to have it easier than you ever did.

Question: What type of person do you think that will make them?

We are shaped by the entirety of our experiences, and a fully varied and diverse spectrum of experiences is absolutely essential to creating a well-rounded, functional, durable human being. Let’s face it, eventually your child is going to grow up, and eventually they are going to be confronted with difficult situations or disappointment, and you won’t be there to shelter them, and how they respond is going to be determined by how they learnt to deal with difficult situations and disappointment during their formative years. Will they persevere with grace and dignity? Or will they bitch and moan and blame everyone else for their failings? You are doing them a disservice by trying to protect them from these tough situations in their youths. You may consider your little Suzy or tiny Tim to be a perfect diamond, but you never really thought about what it takes to actually make a diamond, did you? Intense heat, and incredible pressure. Where’s the pressure when tiny Tim gets a bad grade in school, and you punish the teacher? Where’s that heat when little Suzy demands a brand new car for her sixteenth birthday, and you buy her one instead of helping her apply for jobs, so that she can learn the value of a dollar, and eventually purchase one herself? You know what doesn’t take intense heat and incredible pressure to form? A big pile of  poop. That’s what you or your woman squeezed out of your/her front butt and are currently clogging up your friends’ Facebook news feed with terrible pictures of. A big steamy pile of human shaped feces.

Do you know what Helen Keller, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Dr. Steven Hawking all have in common? They overcame great hardships in their lives, and they achieved incredible things. I postulate that there is a causal relationship between the former and the latter, that perhaps the very hardships which so affected these great people forced them to rise up, and find within themselves depths of character and determination which may never have been discovered had they simply gotten everything they ever wanted when they wanted it. Now, I’m not suggesting that you blind and deafen your child, or subject them to horrible debilitating disease, or systematically oppress and dehumanize them. I’m just suggesting that maybe you let them skin their knees once in a while? Maybe you let them fail? Maybe you let them learn that sometimes the real world which we are stuck living in isn’t always fair? Maybe if you see your child fighting with another kid on the playground, instead of immediately stepping in and rescuing your son or daughter, you let them learn how to stand up and defend themselves? Nothing builds confidence like successfully solving a problem. In order to build that confidence, which they will so desperately need later in life, your child needs both some problems, and the opportunity to solve them by themselves.

I’ll admit, my reasons for providing this advice to you isn’t entirely altruistic. I’m giving it to you because, even after you’re dead and out of the picture, my children and I will still be stuck living alongside your (potentially) terrible kids. I would much prefer if those kids grow up to be useful, contributive members of a functioning society than not. Raising a bunch of whiny, bratty, overly-sensitive, entitled prima-donnas is all well and good when you live in the most powerful nation on earth. Unfortunately, I don’t think those same donnas of prima are going to be capable of keeping the good old US of A the most powerful nation on earth. Our democratic process has already become a mockery of what it once was, with our Federal government grown into a bloated, ineffective, mutant behemoth of greed and corruption, where politicians are bought and sold by mega-corporations and the Uber-rich, and citizens’ votes are worth less than the paper they’re printed on. What happens when our government finally shuts down (oops, that already happened), we default on our massive loans to China (any day now), and our Eastern rivals decide the only way they’re going to recoup their losses is by annexing some prime real estate, which they already technically own anyway, and a billion-man army suddenly shows up on our shore?

I know I’d rather be part of a nation of rugged bad-asses who know how to handle themselves in a fight, and don’t back down from opposition in a scenario like that than a bunch of namby-pambys who would rather talk about their feelings and demand someone else fix their problems for them.

We don’t need more children who think they’re special. We need children who actually have the capability to truly become special. That’s on you, parents. Don’t fuck it up.

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Farting in the desert

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Max T Kramer

If you rip ass in the desert, does it make a sound?

…Yup.

Before we moved to Connecticut and sold our souls for money and unhappiness, Mistress and I used to live in Bend, Oregon which, if you’re not familiar with it, is located in the High Desert, to the east of the Cascade Mountains. It’s been years since we’ve been home, but we are finally back visiting for the week. No matter how long it takes between visits, there are certain things I always remember about being in the high desert; like the intoxicating scent of juniper and pine, or the view of the mountains, or the creepily homogenized plethora of beautiful white people.

One thing I always seem to forget about visiting here however, is the non-stop flatulence. I’ll be the first to admit, Mistress is pretty susceptible to the bubble guts anyway, and my insides are always a half step away from total catastrophe, but not like this. Never like this.

Using my traditional fool proof scientific method of thinking of something that kind of makes logical sense, and going with that without any actual research or verification, i’ve decided that we turn into perpetual fart box machines whenever we come to Bend because of elevation change. Living as we do, at sea level, in Connecticut, coming to the high desert is a dramatic change in altitude. Evidently this is enough to make us cut more cheese than a Tillamook dairy farmer. Usually we can just crop dust around town, leaving behind an anonymous legacy of SBDs and hidden shame, but this week for some reason we’ve been hitting the poop breeze trifecta – odorous, frequent, and loud.

For me, the shartmageddon began on the plane, before we even landed in Oregon. I’m not sure where we were flying over, but approximately midway through the flight I was awoken from my peaceful slumber by some rude dude busting a gnarly ear popper of a fart. Unfortunately, I was that dude, and the entire plane heard me. I’m not saying it was the loudest fart ever, that distinction belongs to Mistress, but it was loud. Loud enough that the pilot put the fasten seat belt signs back on, and loud enough that I was identified and subsequently tazed by an air marshall who didn’t appreciate being stuck in a sealed petri dish with my stink for 3 hours. To the passengers of Delta flight 7033, if any of you got pink eye, I sincerely apologize.

For Mistress, her close encounter of the fart kind happened once we were already in town. We went out for some food, and after dinner we decided to extend our evening a little further with some drinks around the fire pit on the patio beside Anthony’s restaurant, which is a pricy, fancy establishment. There we were, sharing the warmth of the fire with four other people, me with my Jack and ginger, her with her Gin and tonic…and her smelly little secret. Midway through a compelling story, Mistress decided to share her secret with me. Unfortunately, her sphincter spoke too loud, and she shared her secret with the entire restaurant, and I must admit, it was a long, eloquent, and multi-faceted secret. Maybe she could have gotten away with it, maybe, if she didn’t immediately start laughing so hard that her eye liner was running down her face. Subtle Mistress. Subtle.

Needless to say, we had to depart shortly thereafter, to post up in our room for the night, left alone with our poots and our giggles.

We’re happy to be back in Bend. Bend’s feelings about us however, are mixed at best.

Mistress and I floating on the mighty Deschutes

Mistress and I floating on the mighty Deschutes, undoubtably farting up a storm

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