Rock Show Power Hour

Dearest Satan we have not heard you belt out your pet peeves in the shower in a long while.  What has happened to you?  Have you lost your anger and gone soft on us?

Trudi

Portland

The problem, Trudi, is that I have not taken a shower since I discovered the beautiful round pleasure peach called a bath balm.  This hot but crazy temptress called Mandi made me buy some when I was sifting through the shelves of her girl-smelling shop looking for a man-loofah.  She told me that after tossing one of these tingling time balms into the bath with me that the only showers that would hit my body would be from the falling rain.  I am not one to turn down a try at woman-product bliss so I purchased a plethora of sexy scented snowballs and raced to my bathroom to get nude (so nude in fact, that I even took off my socks)[i].   Once disrobed, I submerged my submarine and the rest of my beefy man-body into the bathwater and dropped the balm.  As soon as the ball of bliss hit the high seas of my sex palace pond I knew that my life above ground was never to be the same. The time I spent floating in bubbles and foam with my first bath balm was so exciting and exfoliating that I could never see myself standing in the shower using a sponge to scrub a layer of my skin off ever again.  With that said, I am the same super savage beast called Satan.  I get angry about everything every day but now I enjoy taking baths to relieve the stress instead of singing in the shower.  Have no fear!  Your unfriendly neighbourhood Satan will always be here!  Speaking of things that make me angry; I hate books that have to have proclamations from a billion publications on their front covers to tell the whole world how great they are  (“A must read” – Entertainment Weekly “The best novel of our most recent time” – The New England Journal of Home Cooking).  I have been sucked in before so I try to stay away from reading these novels because if they need to pay some lame-ass corporations for a sentence to cut and paste on their work then it must not be worthy.  Also, after purchasing[ii] one of these praise jacketed tree remains I would open it to page one, thinking that it was going to be the best thing to hit the planet since the asteroid that killed T-Rex and his friends which would start my pass through the pages with high hopes.  In most cases these high hopes would sink and drown like lice from my man-body in the above mentioned balm-basted bathwater.  Why would anyone want to sell a book this way?  If it is truly a great work of literature then the work should stand for itself and if it is really a murder of language then it will seem like a bloodbath to the people that went in expecting to read “The Hardy Boys #1: The Tower Treasure[iii]”.  The only pardon I have given for this peeve is to a wonderful work of fiction that I finished last night called, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon.  While at the local bookshop last week I noticed this novel lying on a dusty table in a dark corner after some rebel reader had tossed it aside.  I was curious to find out why this book had been treated like a drunken uncle at a wedding so I picked it up.  At first glance I was mildly incensed.  The front cover only contained two unnecessary verbalisms; “#1 International Bookseller Whitbread Book of the Year” and “A superb achievement – Ian McEwan”.  The cover also contained a picture of an upside down poodle-type dog so I thought I would give it a further inspection.  I opened the book, flipped through the description and was further intrigued by mention of an autistic fifteen year old boy who goes on a Sherlock Holmes style man hunt after he is falsely accused of murdering the neighbor’s dog.  I was closing the book in preparation of the long ten foot journey to the closest cash register when the front cover flipped open to expose the evil that had been cleverly hidden beneath it.  To my horror the canine on the cover was a cut-out, sitting there begging the book’s soon-to-be owner to look behind it.  I did look behind it and was appalled to find well over fifteen quotes all showering, and not bathing, high praise upon a book that was probably never opened by the quoted spokesmen.  My face flushed with anger and rage and I threw the blameful bonfire-bait back on the table in the dark corner where the last tempted reader shamed and discarded it.  I started to storm out of the store when the cashier cut me off with her long kung-fu action arm and inquired about the reason for my rapid departure.  After I explained the situation to her she said to me;

“I completely agree with you sir.  I have worked in this store for many years and have seen many simple books branded as classics and the faces of many fabulous printings of my favourite books tarnished with pop-culture magazine review scripture.  It is definitely a battle to try and figure out which books like these are truly great but trust me on this one.  You need to buy that book.”

The book lady made some sense and she kind-of scared me with her long lady-arm so I purchased the acclaim encrusted novel.  To my delight, for the first time ever, a novel with a glorification glazed cover was great!  Oh, and of course after reading this novel I needed something to make me angry again so I went strolling the streets looking for fanny-pack brandishing, lululemon pants wearing people.  They make me so angry.  I think I’m going to sing about it before getting in the bath.

Satan