Birds are chirping, flowers are coming into full blossom & those frozen homeless people the city council tried passing off as a radical new form of surrealist ice sculpture are starting to thaw. Yes friends, springtime is once again upon us bringing with it chances for new beginnings and affording the opportunity for a slew of cunning folk to prattle on about how SPRING SURE HAS SPRUNG ON US THIS YEAR! and OUT WITH THE OLD IN WITH THE NEW IS WHAT I SAY!
Having been brought up in a devout Catholic household, no part of springtime holds more importance than the annual celebration of Easter. For those of you unaware, Easter is that one magical time of year where small rural farming communities and villages comprised of hard-working surly mountaineers are terrorized by the reanimated corpse of Zombie Jesus. He's back from the dead and ready to turn water into pain. So all you Jews and Mormons had better stand to notice, because this year the holy Eucharist is frigging pissed. The only way to bed his thirst for brutality and destruction is by paying reverence to a giant anthropomorphic rabbit, at which point Jesus will be lured back into his grave, content to rest and bide his time until humanity let down their guard yet again.
I don't really get Easter's pertinence to our current cultural landscape. It doesn't bring anything unique to the table, instead opting to Game.com it by providing a bunch of mediocre applications in one bulky wrapping nobody really asked for. Toys, feasting and candy? Sorry Easter, maybe you haven't heard of Christmas, Thanksgiving or Halloween. Go back to the kid's table with Arbor Day & The Chinese New Year.
For starters, Easter toys always suck. I mean, I understand why. Christmas is a few months removed and you don't have to stop acting like an indignant little shit for at least seven more months. You don't deserve presents and deep down, most of us knew it. That's the only reason we were able to tolerate receiving a bunch of crap which looked like it had been pulled from the bucket of "prizes" they'd let you pick from after a visit to the dentist. Congratulations, Timmy. You're going to need braces. I'll bet you'd planned on kissing Mary Jane this year, eh slugger? Not so fast, sport! One look at that affront to God you call a set of teeth and she'll be running right into the waiting arms of the kid who nailed you in the jewels during that game of kickball. Enjoy seven years of awkward pubescence and being caught by your mother while gratifying yourself to her health & fitness issue of Woman's World, champ!
Hold on just a second, Tiger! Don't forget your spider ring!
Ball & Paddle
Bounce a tethered rubber ball against a wooden paddle for as long as possible, THEN TRY AND BREAK THAT RECORD! Or, like most children, get sent to your room upon discovering its more fun when used in reverse to hit your kid brother.
Silly Putty
Enjoy it for those precious ten minutes before your mom takes it away from you during Easter service or you manage to mat it into the carpet. Roll it into a ball and bounce it for a while. Or, press it against the newspaper and find out if reading Garfield backwards makes it any funnier.
 ProTip: It doesn't.
Balsa Gliders
Yeah. Here's a sound concept. Jack a kid up on sugar and watch as he loses patience with the meticulous process of inserting wing A into tab B. You know what's easier than trying to put one of these together without breaking it? Throwing the package into the fucking garbage and playing Nintendo instead.
The candy, if possible, is even worse. Popcorn bunnies find ways of lodging kernels in between sets of teeth you didn't even know you had and Creme Eggs manage to take all the surprise out of biting into an inflamed testicle. But every year, much like the most delicious lord & savior this side of the caramel-coated Buddha, one candy manages to resurrect itself and ascend to its position atop the throne as king of tooth-decaying garbage. I'd use this point of transition to crack a hilarious "Passion of the _____" joke, but Kevin Smith already has his dick rammed so far up the horse's ass I'm having trouble discerning where death ends and heaving, sweaty hack begins.
Hint: There's dozens and dozens of them.
Wanton acts of Jewish sadism aside, nothing has ingrained itself into the hallowed spirit of Americana as being synonymous with Easter quite like the marshmallow Peep. Developed in the early 1920's by a pair of our nation's top thinkers striving to bring about change to our stale and convoluted confectionary market, Peeps hit the shelves at a crucial point in American history. The 20's were a very progressive decade for America. Why, even the darkest of Nigerian kings were free to pilot their autocars amidst the streets of Chattanooga en route to dancing the Charleston at a swinging late night pet store without fear of violent recourse. Not women though. We still needed them to pull our carts, God forbid one of the oxen were to fall ill. Now, I'm not too keen on the exact details, but I'm pretty sure the development process went a little something... like this;
Scientist 1: Okay, Steve. I've got it. You know marshmallow and gelatin, right?
Scientist 2: Yeah, what about them?
Scientist 1: Fuck BOTH of them is what about them. There's GOT to be a better way!
Scientist 2: Now just hold on a minute, Bill. Just what is it you're trying to say?
Scientist 1: I'm saying we COMBINE the two! Just think about it for a second; marshmallow and gelatin in the SAME confectionary! Its genius!
Scientist 2: Are you daft, man? Its madness is what it is! You know the public will never stand for it! And even if they do, how do you propose getting around all of the marshmallow and gelatin lobbyists down in Washington? Surely the Capital Hill fat cats will see to it that any research funding stays bound up in mindless bureaucracy for years!
Scientist 1: That may very well be... but we've GOT to try! Regret may not come today and it may not come tomorrow, but someday you'll be sitting fireside, admiring your bearskin rug while swirling a snifter of brandy and you'll wonder to yourself "what if I could go back? What if I could go back to that one day... to that one moment, and strive for something different - something... better?"
Scientist 2: You've... always known how to cut through to the heart of me. I'm in, dammit!
Scientist 1: You're a good man, Steve, and a damn fine scientist. History won't soon forget y- hey, we're supposed to be in the roaring 20's, right?
Scientist 2: Yeah, I think so.
Scientist 1: Oh. Well in that case, I've got to hop on down to a juice joint and see a man about a dog.
Scientist 2: lol
Scientist 1: lol
Peeps, for you foreign heathens who aren't acclimated to the ways of civilized society, are little marshmallow-shaped animals covered in a coating of hard colored sugar. They've got the texture and consistence of a dry sponge without any of the flavor and about a thousand more calories. Usually sold in packages of five, Peeps come joined side-by-side looking like some bizarre still-born siamese chicken fetus. On average, they'll retail for a dollar and change, but you'd be better served by wetting a bag of marshmallows, covering them in sugar, leaving them under the radiator for a few weeks and using that extra money on postage for when you've got to mail the business end of my shoe back to me after I lodge it up your ass for even contemplating buying them in the first place.
Call in the firebats. We've got to torch the hive.
What's worse yet is that people have embraced Peeps as some sort of cultural phenomena, using their limited availability as an excuse to hoard enough high-caloric gobs of fat and sugar to sufficiently gorge themselves until the next coming spring. Maybe I'm just naive and these people know something I don't. Perhaps our economy is set to buckle under the weight of the national deficit and in this new post-apocalyptic warzone we would once call a nation, Peeps are going to be as valuable a commodity as say, gasoline or Pez dispensers. In either case, the Internet has once again provided refuge for people who by all rights should've been shunned from all but the darkest corners of society by allowing them to converge and share in their ridiculous passion.
Take this webcomic for example. It falls victim to two of my largest Internet pet peeves. Idolizing something that doesn't deserve the praise and making blind references to another aspect of society without putting anything close to resembling a fresh spin on it.
Three Card Monty is a time-honored game of chance in which the "mark" tries to uncover the solitary red card out of a set of three while the dealer bilks another idiot out of a bunch of money. What we see here is that same basic principle, with Peeps used in lieu of playing cards. Unless illustrating the basic fundamental of the game and showing children that its okay to swindle people providing they're dumber than you are is supposed to be the joke, I'm hard pressed to find cause for laughter. That's not comedy. That's just irresponsibility.
Maybe I'm just focusing on the wrong aspects of the season though. Perhaps we should work toward distancing Easter away from this grasping-at-straws commercial mentality and steer it back toward a religious celebration of redemption and salvation. This spring, make the effort to help spare at least one holiday from the indignity of superfluous mascot nonsense. Spend some time with your families this Easter, guys. They're not going to be around forever. And unlike Jesus, a Phenox Down won't be enough to fix that.
SCREW THIS, HOLMES! SORRY IF I'M BEIN' TOO REEEEEEEEEAL FOR YOU!
Don't feel sorry, Carlos. You're just calling it like it is.
|
