My mother used to say that there was no rest for the wicked; I'm not sure exactly how she knew this, because I don't think my mother was wicked, so it wasn't from first-hand knowledge. She was a little screwed up, much like most people, and not the most pleasant person, but wicked? Naw, I've got a couple of ex-girlfriends that were, so I know from wicked, but their rest habits? No clue.
I do know this much: your Pope (that would be me) just gets back in town from one "missionary" visit, gets sent off by the Bored Of Elders of the All John All The Time World Church to investigate property on the planet Hyperion, barely gets back in town from that trip and is sent out again to check out a bunch of sausage-heads in straw costumes at the Shrovetide Festival in Thuringia, Germany and now that the Harley Dog and I (Harley being the "official" canine of the Popemeister) are back from Sausageland, I'm ready for a break. I'm pretty sure I'm not wicked either, so I can't figure out why I can't get some rest.
Yeah, good luck.
Harley and I returned to the bucolic and almost always sunny San Fernando Valley last week, and when we got back I told my consigliore, the Right Reverend Monsignor Michael Jordan (no, not the one that does the Hanes underwear commercials) to convey to the Bored that our traveling days, at least for a short time, were over. Hey, I'm the Pope, I can put my foot down if I want. I just have to be careful where it comes down, that's all.
Well, I guess the Bored was sympathetic, but we'll see how long that lasts. Anyway...shit, hang on, the Popephone is ringing...
JTT here...hey, Mike...no...no...damn it (Janet, and if you haven't seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show movie, you won't get that) I'm not going out again...no...we just got back last week, no...no...a TWO year subscription to Big Hooters Monthly?...(large sigh of resignation here)...all right, where are we going this time?...Michigan?...no, I HATE the Pistons, no, not Michigan...shit...no...shit...all right (another large sigh of resignation)...send me the details...yeah...okay, we'll get together when I get back...yeah...shit.
Well, so much for the Bored's sympathy.
According to my consigliore, we're off to Grand Rapids MI on one of our "missionary" trips; it seems the good folk of Grand Rapids are in need of the soothing balm of Johnism, and guess who gets to fly there and deliver the message? That's right, your Pope and his faithful sidekick, the Harley Dog.
Usually we get the AJATTWC ground crew guys to fire up the Royal Unionship Kidding, or RU Kidding for short, my atomic powered rocket ship, for trips like this. The Kidding has HyperAromaDrive, which enables the craft to achieve speeds in excess of the Speed of Aroma, which in this instance, going from LA (pronounced LAH) to Grand Rapids, would take about 5.36 nanoseconds, or about the time it takes Lindsay Lohan to get arrested from the previous time before. (Listen, I've explained the whole "Speed Of Aroma" thing a bunch of times in my previous posts, so I'm not doing it again here, okay? If you want to know how it works, go back to the archives and look it up. And yes, I get cranky when I'm tired.)
But since this was to be a short trip, I decided to leave the Kidding and Harley at home this time (Harley's my back-up navigator when we're onboard) and just take a commercial flight to Detroit, rent a car, you know, the usual gig. According to my map of the United States, Grand Rapids is just a little over six inches from Detroit, so it shouldn't take too long to get there by car, I wouldn't think. Less than a fortnight, certainly.
...later the next day...
Well, here I am in Grand Rapids MI, known world-wide as the "Furniture City", which seems like a rather dubious claim to fame indeed. GR may know furniture, but according to Jack Ryan, a reporter for PostChronicle.com and the main character in most of the really good books by Tom Clancy, some of their residents don't understand marriage, or more to the point, don't understand that you have to divorce one wife before you marry another, unless you want to be charged with polygamy and gross stupidity.
(Full disclosure: I once had a wife, and while she wasn't wicked, much like my mother wasn't, she was an occasional pain in the ass, and though we did have a lot of fun times, and she is the mother of my daughter, who is simply the finest person I know in the world, I wouldn't have wanted to have more than one of her around at a time. My wife, I mean. The Mormons were big on this "main wife, several auxiliary wives" nonsense, but you know, the Mormon faith was founded by a guy who claimed to find golden tablets with divine messages on them about founding a church, and was directed to these tablets, which were discovered in upstate NY, by an Italian angel named "Moroni", so how much credibility do they have? No, one wife per marriage, thanks.)
Per an article on PostChronicle.com by Mr. Ryan (ex-CIA analyst and/or future/already President, depending on where you are in the "Jack Ryan Saga"), a Richard Barton, currently of Grand Rapids but previously from Rhode Island (I didn't know there were actually people living in RI, did you?), made the "more than one wife per marriage" mistake recently, when, after marrying a nice lady in RI in 2004, he subsequently proceeded to go out one night, get arrested and incarcerated, all unbeknownst to his RI wife, and never returned home, ever again. Ever.
Apparently he decided, upon release from jail, to make a fresh start of his life in Grand Rapids, including remarrying; the only problem with that was the somewhat sticky point of divorce: he was never granted one from the RI wife, which would make him a) a polygamist and b) a glutton for punishment.
His RI wife is the one who blew the whistle on Mr. Barton; in his zeal to shed the old and enhance the new, he did two more rather stupid things, as if being married to two women at the same time wasn't bad enough; first, he "defriended" the RI wife from his list of Facebook "friends" (and I'm not quite sure how the RI wife didn't know where Mr. Double Play was at if they were FB friends, but, hey, what do I know?), and then posted wedding pictures of himself and the MI wife on his FB page. RI wife duly noted both, and responded accordingly, by notifying MI authorities that they had a dumb polygamist (and isn't that redundant?) in their midst. So Mr. Barton was arrested for doubling his pleasure, and is now facing up to four years in jail if convicted of polygamy, and several hundred years for being crazy enough to even BE a polygamist.
After hearing of this calamity in MI, the Bored Of Elders of the AJATTWC decided I MUST go to Grand Rapids and preach the message of Johnism to its people, because if there are citizens in GR that are crazy enough to be married to TWO women at the same time, (or several women who agree to be married to the same guy at the same time) yeah, there's some folks that need help.
To tell the truth, though, I'm not even sure if Johnism can help these folks. (The first five words of that last sentence begin with the letter "t"; bet you can't do that. Although I did do it by accident.)
In a completely unrelated event, the management at Facebook recently announced a new "common sense" requirement to establish an FB page; that's right, race fans, FB will now require that each person attempting the create a new page must take and pass a simple "common sense" test (FB says there will be several versions that individuals may choose from) before being granted access to the website. FB spokesperson I. M. Notjoking was quoted as saying that "Facebook has decided to institute this new procedure to, hopefully, protect some of our potential FB users from themselves."
(Okay, I made up the whole thing about FB and a "common sense" test, and the quote as well, but from a strictly humanitarian viewpoint, you have to admit that the idea has merit.)
I just spoke to the RRMMJ a few moments ago; he told me that the Bored of the AJATTWC wants me back from MI ASAP. FYI. (I couldn't figure out any way I could jam the acronyms ASPCA and NASA and NAACP into that last sentence and have it still make any sense. But I tried.) It seems there's a breaking story they're monitoring about a Twitter subscriber in Chicago IL who was recently arrested for "mopery", for announcing in a "tweet" that the 2011 Chicago Cubs would win the National League Central Division, and then proceed on to the World Series. Chicago Police Department officials arrested the man, "pursuant to the recently passed city ordinance that makes the possession of the level of "goofiness" sufficient to make a person either a) want to be married to more than one woman at a time or b) be a Cubs fan, an arrestable offense".
You know, maybe we should add one more item to the "level of goofiness" test: or c) anyone dumb enough to be a Justin Beiber fan.
Love and the Tabernacle Choir,
PJTT
copyright 2011 Krissongs, Inc.
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