So. Xmas is over and how grateful can we be for that? For all of you shitball right-wing Christians who think that my saying, “Xmas,” is sacrilegious, you dear morons know less about your own obsessions than do I. If you bothered to be certain that “Merry Xmas” is a blasphemous remark before shooting off your silly mouth and making threats upon my person, you’d have been saved the embarrassment of learning the truth post-incident. You’d have likewise escaped the case of puncture wounds to your upper thigh, said wounds perfectly matching the denture patterns of a certain half Chihuahua-half Whippet puppy.

Of course, if said shitballs bothered to check their facts before taking stupid positions on things, they wouldn’t even be right-wing Christian shitballs. They’d likely still be shitballs, but of some other variety.

See, Xmas is the shortened version of Christmas—a code name invented by the Greek Christians to evade additional torments at the hands of the anti-Christian tormentors of their time. The “X” in Xmas is the Greek letter for our C, so Xmas means Christmas, shitballs. It is the same fucking word.

Which reminds me. Did you guys see the Pope’s Xmas routine this year. As usual on Xmas day, his royal highness, La Popie, stood as nearly erect as possible at the golden alter in one of his chapels—as erect as one can stand when wearing fifty pounds of gold thread robes, gold trimmed hat and I’m sure a cutesy red thong—to deliver his annual Xmas mass message. There’s gold everywhere and thousands-of-dollars of fresh flowers ringing the alter area.

We can’t have the Pope seen without fresh flowers, you know, and maybe he should do squats to build his strength. I tried to stand straight holding a fifty-pound dumbbell and I’ll tell you that it requires a solid core strength.

The gold used to weave the finery and plate the alter, the scepters and other artifacts that set the scene of the Pope’s lecture are all items stolen from third world countries over the two thousand years we’ve had Catholics to plunder unfortunate civilizations. In the photo I saw from this Xmas, I bet there was $10 million worth of gold pictured in the cropped picture published in our paper.

I’m talking $10 million of the gold at the market price per ounce and not the value as art and artifact.

There he stood—twin sister of Queen Elizabeth—in the immaculate, perfect framing that only the Pope of the Holy Roman Catholic Church gets to use. And guess what the theme of his message just happened to be. Come on, guess.

His theme was “The over-commercialization of Xmas”[.]

That’s right, that pompous and silly shitball lectured the population of the entire world about our crass commercialization of the holiest of all Christian holy days while standing in and among 2,000-years worth of evidence that the Catholic Church is the crassest Christian organization in history. In response to the old Popster’s message, please allow me to post my response.

Dear Pope,

Hey buddy, how’s it hanging? I hope the holidays have been good to you and yours. Things here have been quite nice recently, thank you, and if God sent Mr. Dave my way to service this hen house, please tell him of my gratitudes.

The reason I’m writing you is that I saw some of your Xmas speech and was moved by your words. OK, I watched your lips move while a very manly robed man translated for you. The translator seemed to be working quite hard to keep his voice low and emotionless. He sounded like Anna the Amazon when she tries to sound like a man, and I’m concerned that she might be manly more than your translator. Look, we really don’t care if you guys are gay, or not. But when you work so hard at looking straight, you cause us to think that all of you are gay and hiding in the massive closets there to Popeville.

“Come out, come out, whoever you are!” Really, we do not give a shit. Maybe if you guys come out of the closet you’ll stop molesting children and take full responsibility for those already molested.

But I digress.

Look, dude. You crazy fucking Catholics invented the commercialization of Xmas. Your entire dealie has been to take everything valuable away from everyone you meet. Since your first years as a club, you started stealing some food, and then a few gold coins—you know, the ones with Caesar’s face stamped on one side—and then things escalated from there. You moved on to stealing people’s land, their gold and other valuables, their livestock and other worldly possessions, and then you started stealing the people themselves, making them your slaves.

You did all of this stealing of commercial goods and services in the name of Christ, or “X” as the Christian Greeks-in-hiding called Him. You, dear man, are the head high muck-a-muck of the organization that is the original instigator of all things crass and commercial about Xmas.

The way I see it you started it, so you stop it. I’ll even make you a deal. I’ll give back every single thing that my family has ever taken from any other person without paying that person full market compensation, if your church will do the same. I mean I’ll give back every single item from forever in the history of Johnsons. I’ll give back that Navajo rug my grandfather bought from that old lady up to Amarillo that one time. He paid $10 for a rug with a current market estimate of $20,000, and I’ll give it back to that old lady. If she’s not with us, I’ll seek out her heirs and give it to them. I’ll give back the the quarter I stole from Mother’s purse when I was seven.

Hell, Mr. Pope, I’ll take Mr. Dave back over to the old folks home and tell him to stay there.

I’ll do that if you return all of the shit you guys have stolen. And if you do it and I do it, I bet we can get a whole bunch of other people to do it. We’ll call the movement “Paying it backwards” and then Steven Spielberg will make a movie out of it and let me write the screen play. We’ll get Jeff Bridges to play me and Chelsea Handler to play SAC Ellen.

OK, wait. SAC Ellen might prefer Sandra Bullock to play her part. Sandra already has experience playing a federal agent. Of course that was the FBI and it was a comedy role. If it was ten years ago, I’d say let’s cast Sharon Stone in the role. SAC Ellen is as steamy hot as I used to imagine Sharon Stone to be.

You claim to be close to God, talk to him for me. You share the same God with the Jews, right? Steven Spielberg is a religious guy from what I hear. I’ll bet he’ll give all of his stolen stuff back too.

Anyway, I just want you to know that you come across as an insincere and ludicrous sack of shit when you do things like that. You know, when you get pissy with the rest of us when we use Christ as an excuse to collect material things. You invented it, and perfected it long before the rest of us gained enough civilization to have any fucking disposable income to waste on fruit cake, Air Jordon sneakers and Xmas lights.

I mean really, has this shit not ever crossed you mind? Dude. Give this a little thought. We could make a lot of money from this idea and not need to steal anything.

And hey, I’m in such a great mood I’ll let you steal this idea from me without any payment of thanks or credit. One last theft to make it all worthwhile.

So until next time…

Hugs and three of those silly European air kisses,

Mooner Johnson

I need to print this letter and go mail it to the Pope. I’ve got his address somewhere around here from when I wrote the last Pope guy about Catholics’ Nazi support back in the WWII. Grab yourself an icy Carta Blanca beer and I’ll see you manana, y’all.

So. Halloween was a mixed bag of tricks. When we got over to Planned Parenthood, there were no protesters in sight. It seems that they were all at their churches celebrating the holiday. Catholic anti-abortion protest lady was dressed as a witch (appropriately, I must say) and handing out candy to the tricked-out treaters at her church. Everyone in the Johnson family party was rewarded with a cellophane bag of candy corn except for me. I got the same treat as always from the sawed-off little fuckbag—bug-eyes popping out of her skull and spittle flying from her lips as she tells me to, and I’ll quote her here, “Go to hell and rot with my husband.”

I wonder if her husband dressed as an anti-anti-abortion protester for Halloween? I’ll bet his costumes weren’t as clever as mine. I was wearing my new sandwich board that says “I’m An Abortion And I’m OK” on one side and “A Woman’s Right To Choose Is Sacred” on the other. I decided to carry a basket of fertilized eggs that I had soft-soft boiled, and I had a box of straws and an icepick.

I was chanting my two slogans as I made my way through the church. Whenever I managed to draw a large crowd, I’d icepick a hole in one of the eggs, salt and pepper it, and then suck the tasty innards through a fresh straw. One lady actually puked on the carpet there in front of the picture of Jesus cooking his famous fish sandwich dinner. At least I’m guessing he, oopsie He, cooked the fish.

Since the Japanese hadn’t been invented in Jesus’ time, they didn’t have sushi back then. Which has always confused me about the entirety of conservative Christian dogma. If you believe that the only truths and realities are the ones contained in your Bible, then how do you explain today? Today isn’t in the Bible, in fact the last 2,000 years are not covered. If your Bible is a “Living book” as so many preachers say, maybe it’s time to lube the paddles and crank up the defibrillator.

I wonder what the latest books of the Living Bible would be called. Maybe after Revelations would come “Dark Ages and The Crusades—Spreading the Word”[.] Then we could have “The Inquisition—A Millennium of Christian Enlightenment”[.] OK, wait, maybe The Inquisition would come first.

But where would we house all of the new Bible books? They would be New nor Old Testaments neither. We’d need another Testament. I vote for the “After Peter Testament” in honor of the founder of the Holy Roman Catholic Fucking Church. Which reminds me. Have you ever Googled “who founded the Holy Roman Catholic fucking church”[?] With all of the record keeping the Catholics have performed since their inception, those silly shitballs cannot agree on who was their founder.

Anyway, I was seasoning my embryos with a pinch of fresh-ground French sea salt and pink peppercorns. I wish I still had fresh tomatoes. A big slab of purple Indian would be quite tasty with my par-boiled eggs. OK, a big slab of Purple Indian tomato would be great with a blow job.

Which brings up another point. Why would Christians celebrate a holiday based upon Paganism? And why do the celebrating inside the actual Christian church? Heresy, I say. Her-e-fucking-cy!

OK, I need to plug my book, so here is the linkster:

http://www.amazon.com/Full-Rising-Mooner-Inappropriate-World/dp/1456339869/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319551191&sr=1-1

Buy the book. When it arrives you should roll a fat one, stock a small cooler with icy-cold Carta Blanca beers, and begin. I put a lot of effort into that silly book and I would appreciate your feedback. Good or bad, I’d like your comments.

So buy the fucking book and come back manana, y’all.

So. I was sitting at the big table in the kitchen reading the newspaper, and I started thinking about change. What sparked this line of thought was the thinness of today’s paper. It wasn’t ten years ago that even a Monday newspaper was a couple-pound bundle of newsprint paper and ink. Today’s paper hit the scales at less than a half-pound, and that was with the fat, tan rubber band that bound it into a loose log.

Which reminds me of when I was a kid and got a paper route, responsible for delivering newspapers for both morning and evening additions. I loved that job for the first three months I had it, which were June, July and August. After that, I know I felt like one of those eleven-year-old sweat shop slaves making sneakers fourteen hours a day over to Bimbolu Land, or whereverthefuck all of those sweat factories are.

I’d get up at 4:30 am so Granddad and Daddy could take me to town. They’d drop me and my bicycle at the corner in the neighborhood of my route where the bundles of papers were dropped. We lived in the country so I had to get a paper route in town. My paternal family men would drive over to Cisco’s for a huevos rancheros breakfast, and then pick me up for the trip back to the ranch. After school restarted, I went straight from pitching papers to the school house.

Then after school, Mother would drop me and the bike back to my corner where the evening addition awaited. I’d finish about 6:30 pm, when Gram would be waiting in her spiffy Hudson Hornet hot rod. My grandmother has always liked fast cars, a trait I managed to contract. She’d race me home to supper, then homework and then bed. The only time I had to myself was after throwing the morning-only editions on Saturday and Sunday. And even then I had chores on Saturdays and Baptist church on Sundays.

Newspaper rubber bands used to be red, and thin. Newspaper boys had to buy them from the newspaper publisher, and that was the subject of the first labor dispute with a non-family member I ever had. In fact, it’s how I managed to get fired so that I wouldn’t have to quit, because, as my Gram drilled into my head, “Johnson’s never quit shit.”

I remember how hard I worked to get the fat papers rolled tight enough to get the red rubber band double-looped on each day but Sunday. I’d get my papers tight as a baseball bat so I could first get them stuffed into the double handle bar bags, and second so that I could throw them effectively. And Sunday’s papers were sometimes so full of ads that it was tough getting the the entire paper inside the rubber fastener at all. And that ink. I think that I ingested and wore so much of that ink on my skin that when I do die, it will be from cancer caused by that fucking ink. It was nasty shit.

Having said that, I have been catching tremendous heat lately for my language. This morning, as I was bitching about the Republican fuckball who wrote the right-wing editorial in today’s paper was the latest. “Mooner, honey, you really do need to clean your potty mouth,” Mother said to me. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is for me when people ask if it really is you writing that Internet thing?”

Even after ten years of retirement, my mother still has that “school teacher” voice that makes me want to stuff a box of chalk up my ass one stick at a time. I spent a full dozen years of my life listening to teachers attempt to correct my behaviors with that fucking condescending voice. I blame all of that on the Baptist church.

I was in college at UT before I had the first fucking teacher, OK he was a professor, who wasn’t a church-trained Baptist evangelical shitball. Every time I did something not fully-approved under the tenants of the Baptist church, I’d get that fucking voice. Many times the chastisements had nothing to do with school policies. Like the time in Seventh Grade when Gloria Muckleroy’s bosom blossomed.

“Mister Johnson,” started Mrs. Leticia Browningwell, my Spanish teacher and wife to Pastor Browningwell. “What are you finding so very interesting that you are distracted from our conjugation of the Spanish verb aprendar?”

“Well, Mrs. Browningwell, Gloria has got some interesting lumps in her dress and I’m trying to aprendamos what they are,” my clever response.

“What are you speaking of, Mooner?” She had to ask. Mrs. Browningwell had to fucking ask.

I poked my pointy finger at Gloria’s right breast and said, “This right here, Teacher.” And with that poke, I ended up further exploring Gloria’s lush new bosom with both hands.

“That feels nice, Mrs. Browningwell, I like when Mooner does that,” Gloria said. “They just showed up all of a sudden. You want to see them?”

First time I ever got to second base. Found out later that Gloria’s daddy beat me there. Beat us all to home plate as well. Just like the asshole that raped me as a kid, Gloria’s daddy was a Deacon at our Baptist church. The same Baptist church attended by my family and as where Mrs. Browningwell’s hubby was the pastor. Still is the pastor.

It’s a wonder I don’t hate the fucking Baptists.

Anyway, it was re-brought to my attention that more people would read my shit if I cussed less. This was re-brought by Mother and also at breakfast this morning. I had my mouth full of food when Mother admonished me, so I couldn’t immediately respond. The pause allowed my grandmother to speak for me, and I think quite eloquently at that.

“Oh who gives a shit, Mother. If’in cuss words hurts yer delicate fuckin’ feelings, then go fuck yerself, and the shithead what brung ya too. Now pass me them biscuits an summa that blackberry jelly. That jelly tastes better an a college freshman’s honey-dipped pecker.”

Mother got this disgusted look—her disgusted martyr look—and opened her mouth but couldn’t get any words to come out. Gram winked at me and broke her biscuit in half to butter it.

I love my grandmother and in spite of myself. One minute I want to stick her with a butcher knife and the next I want to hug her to death. “I love you, Gram,” I told her, and I moved her way to give her a hug.

She shrugged away from me and said, “Don’t you touch me with them dirty fuckin’ hands, Mooner. Don’t ya know that newsie ink will give ya tha cancer?”

I think I had a point about change and how quickly the world is changing, but my brain has gone into full ADHD fritz mode. It was a smart observation about how maybe things are changing too fast for us to assimilate the realities of modern life. Now. All I can think about is how wonderful Gloria’s new titties felt all those years ago. OK, and the other fifteen lines of thought swirling around inside my skull.

It’s got to be Five O’clock some fucking where. I’m cracking a Carta Blanca beer. Manana, y’all.

So. Life is strange. Remember when you were age ten when you had your first “I’m-so-much smarter-than-when-I-was-X” epiphany? You know, you come to some important realization about yourself or the world around you, and then you feel a burst of pride that you have matured sooooo very much since whatever age it is that you are comparing your current self to?

Like right this minute, I’m thinking that I am sooo very much smarter at self-editing than just a few years ago. When I first started writing, I would reread that last paragraph and think to myself, I’d think, “Well said, Mooner my man. Well fucking said.”

But today I see those same words and realize that– -while I said exactly, and with great specificity, precisely what it was I wanted to say—I might have communicated accurately with maybe 41% of you guys.

Which reminds me. Yesterday’s breakfast conversations centered on the inappropriatenesses of my various bloggie behaviors. I told you about one aspect of the debate when Mother accused me of being a racist and ruining her life. There were more, many more recriminations against my actions here to bloggieland. Mother was on a roll, and I don’t mean a blog roll. Or an egg roll, dinner roll or even a role model. It was more she was whacking me with her rolled up Baptist Prayer leaflet.

Another of the things about my blogging she finds unconscionable, a second harbinger of her fall from grace in her Baptist church, is my use of the word “guys.” OK, and let’s stop for a second and look at this little dealie. How in the fuck do you decide where to put punctuation marks around quotation marks when the marks are not an actual part of any modifications or adornments to whateverthefuck it is that’s placed between the quote marks?

And now, for shitsakes, I have managed to mangle multiple thoughts and story lines all at the same time. I’m confusing myself. Let me start over. First, should that period (the punctuation mark and not the unit of time) have been placed inside the quotes or, rather, immediately after. Said another way, was it grammatically correct as done, like this: “guys”.; or should I have gone like this: “guys.”… And holy shit, where do I place the fucking question mark I wanted to put after the second example of quote punctuation?

Shit. What I want to communicate to you is my confusion and I have the confidence of near certainty that you do, indeed, get that. That I am confused.

So, Mother said that when I call you guys “guys”, I am hurting many of your feelings. “Most women will even be offended when you call them guys,” were her specific words.

Since that pissed me off, I stewed all day and finally decided to look up the definition. What I found is that the formal use of guys is intended for male genital-attached humans only. However, in it’s informal use the word guys is meant for all sexes.

Therefore, when I say “you guys” I am doing so informally so as to be neither racist nor discriminatory in any manifestation of bigotry. Rather I am being magnanimously inclusive of all creatures, races and religions. Well maybe not all religions, or for that matter magnanimously either.

But my ADHD has managed to digress the ever-loving shit out of us. Where I meant to go with this is to say that I have had many of those certain-age epiphanies. When I was ten I looked back at my nine-year-old self and giggled at my earlier childishness. The when I was nineteen I did the same with sixteen. Again at twenty-five and thirty and thirty-eight and so on through life.

I started to have one of those moments last night when I looked to the dictionary to settle the dispute over calling you guys “you guys.” (OK, now look at where I placed that period. Is that correct?) I was starting to think that I am soooo very much smarter than when I was a kid when it hit me, and it hit me hard.

I realized, a realization that still sits like three-pound bean burrito in my stomach, that as I get older I realize just how much I don’t know. I realize that I’m not getting smarter, I’m just getting older. And what a fucking Ugh! moment that was.

Do you guys have Ugh! moments. Ugh! moments are like Oprah’s Aha! Moments except without all the bullshit and silly pretenses. Ugh! Moments are when you realize the you or the world are fucked up. Like now.

Ugh!

At least T-Q freed me from the chains of racism. He approved of my behaviors. So let’s hoist a Carta Blanca beer to T-Q and drink to racial diversity.

FUCK RICK PERRY, and I’ll see y’all manana.