I’m sooooooooo tired. C’mon, Pigeon Police. Give me an easy one tonight!

pigeon

watching Caligula with Glim

Hm. That might be kind of an easy one in the sense that I don’t remember too much about it, but I don’t not remember it, so it’s not dead. Funny that yesterday’s was all centered on Glim as well.

Also funny, I remember almost nothing about the movie except for fleeting images of the “violent and sexual content.” And to be honest, mainly I just remember the fisting scene. Glim, bless her, was the perfect person to watch this with. Little ol’ relatively sheltered me in my early 20s, all gawk-eyed at perversion on display, safe by my strong brave girlfriend. I couldn’t look away. It was like fireworks for some illegal part of my perception of how the world works. There’s something so honest about violent and sexual content.

It reminds me of this other time when a small screen playing something salacious was more fascinating than I would’ve wanted to admit. It was at the Pilot House in Cape Girardeau, a place that spawns multiple pigeons of its own and maybe this is one of them, so if it is and it comes up later, I’ll just have to take some different angle on it I guess, but anyway, I was sitting there with my brother and my father (a rare convergence these days) waiting for our bbq sammitches, and they had this dinky old TV playing one of those MMA, barely-any-rules, steely, hardass, glowering fight shows on.

Talkin’ about “submission holds” and all that stuff. Uncanny how many times they say the word “submission” on those shows.

Just sayin’.

Cuz like I’m supposed to be this educated, temperate (according to whom??) enlightened, sensitive (HEY, I SAID ACCORDING TO WHOM??) type of guy, right? (BITCH ACCORDING TO WHOM?? WHY ARE THESE YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF YOURSELF? DON’T YOU REMEMBER DREAMING OF BEING A PIRATE??) And so there’s parts of me that get VERRRRY uncomfortable, kind of shift around in their psychic seats, pulling at their psychic collars, when something as raw as two guys beating the shit out of each other elicits this underground flow of roiling magma —

But no, let’s be real, it’s not about two guys beating the shit out of each other. It’s about ONE guy beating the shit out of THE OTHER guy. The barebones, naked humiliation of it.

That’s where the power is. That’s the dynamo. The warp drive.

I can see the headline now: MIDDLE AGED MAN EXPLAINS APPEAL OF GAY BDSM.

Ha ha, OK fine, but nevertheless, I said I was going to be honest (wait, did I actually say that?) so I’m just being honest: I think this is all related to what some people see in certain power figures like, oh, let’s say just out of the blue, our current president. Or anybody obscenely powerful, because of money, position, influence, corruption, whatever, doesn’t really matter how or why.

Right? The civilized side goes on and on about policy, principles, reason, rationality, and then they get all twisted up when they lose, but it’s because while they were over there by the chess boards having beards and raising salient points, the main event was some naked oiled-up Emperor fist-fucking a Praetorian soldier.

We love simplicity, right? Love it like we love sugar and fat and processed carbs. If sometimes you have to choose a side, and sometimes the only viable sides are top and bottom, well, that’s something we can wrap our heads around. Or if not our heads then at least our asses.

I don’t know. I’m probably wrong. I haven’t done any research. I don’t have any graphs.

But I bet, whatever happens next, the gangs are gonna be more or less OK. The uniformed, official gangs, like the cops and so on, they’ll thrive because whoever’s the cops to the cops is either getting a blank check or else if they’re from the wrong part of town they’re getting fired. Meanwhile the gangs on the bottom, the desperate ones in the city streets who already didn’t have anything to lose, they still don’t have anything to lose so what the fuck’s the difference.

But those of us in the wan middle are gonna suffer in ways we’re not used to or able to predict. The unaffiliated — or affiliated with the effete — those of us whose plans and schemes depended on the permanence of a system that was like water to a fish (“What the hell is water?”) — we’re gonna be ... disoriented, to say the least.

Yes, there’s subversive ways to fight. The rain destroys the bulldozer, that sort of thing. And you have to. Because power isn’t love until it’s paired with someone who knows how to love. Thing about the rain, though, it never seems to be in too much of a hurry.

Unless there’s a flash flood.

He said mysteriously, then wandered off to see if Caligula is available online anywhere for free....