APOKALIPSIS

My friends, when we look back on this past year, I think we can agree upon one thing: it has been dominated by FURY. The signs have been unmistakable: rampant gnashing of teeth, howls of discontent at all hours, pencil jars rattled from fists pounding desks, incessant stomping, unceasing glowering. Rage is, in fact, all the rage.

You might be hearing that things will not be so bad, and that we all need to settle down, but if you stop to think it, there are just as many things to be ENRAGED about now as there ever were! FURY reached the boiling point long ago.

In fact, fury is now boiling over and there is NO ONE to turn off the burners! As evidence, look no further than the normally sensible folks at Free Printable Fun, who have in fact, no lie, made Furious White Boy note cards.

“I had a vision. The anger of Aaron Humphrey could be controlled. Like a laser beam it could be focused and condensed. It could be used for good. I could harness his tremendous ire to do the bidding of the people. I could create Furious White Boy Notecards.” – FreePrintableFun.org, who I swear I have no affiliation with.

Regular readers can never forget that awesome, terrible day I unleashed the Furious White Boy mask upon the world. Now, not only can you cover your face with the my vicious visage, it can also serve as the cover of your most important memos. Truly, the revolution is at hand.

Your rage does not have to be a boiling pot that will make a mess of the kitchen! With these note cards, it can be a laser beam! FPF.org explains:

“Just think of it… how powerful would a letter be if it was written on the back of a Furious White Boy’s face? You could lobby congress for national health care, demand equal pay for equal work, force social change upon the country. You could tell people where to get off at and mean it! It would be glorious!!!”

These note cards appeared about a week before the US Presidential election. Now, I’m not saying that my spontaneous art project had any bearing on the outcome of that contest, but let’s be honest: the timing sure lines up.

I should have posted this earlier, but I found out about it in the midst of packing for a trip to Queensland. I have to thank Free Printable Fun for not just giving a shout out to the mask I made, but for getting the joke and having fun with it on their own. Cheers, you mavens of cut and paste!

Bonus #1: My good friend Joy recently South Park-icized her posse, and created startling accurate portraits of some of my best mates. I was honored to be included. Here is her interpretation of the Furious White Boy:

This looks more like me than I care to admit. I think it’s the clenched teeth that seal the deal.

Bonus #2: In case you were wondering what a Furious White Boy sounds like, Roger Daltry of The Who captures it perfectly in this clip from the classic song “Don’t Get Fooled Again”: REEEEEEEEEYYAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Adelaide has a reputation for being Australia’s least exciting city. Sydney is where the action is, Melbourne is where the alternative scene is, but meanwhile Adelaide is “the City of Churches.” Can you get more square than that?
However, perhaps because I’ve spent most of my life in towns that give new dimensions to the word “boring,” I’ve found Adelaide to be quite charming and vivacious. I’m staying in Kim’s apartment in the middle of the city, on the corner of the main thoroughfare and a small alley of boutique clothing shops and pubs. Right across the street is a small empty square of urban landscape that often serves as a blank canvas for local artists.
There’s been graphitti and chalk drawings, pasted up pixel art from Commander Keen, scribbled posters of squid, all sorts of wonderful things done to the square. Eventually it all gets erased or taken down, but something else always crops up in its place. The best of these urban exhibitions happened last Tuesday. We were driving home from playing poker out in the country, just about to pull into the parking garage, and I saw this:

Someone had turned our square into a cardboard menagerie! There was no artist’s signature that we could see, no further information given, just this gift of cardboard animals to the city. The most remarkable thing, to me, was that whoever put this little diorama together must have known that it would be gone in the morning before hardly anyone could see it. Drunken revelers would certainly see to its destruction.
What we were seeing was like the raffelesia flower in Borneo … something that only blooms occasionally and for a short period of time, but is spectacular to those fortunate enough to see it. Thankfully, unlike the raffelesia, the animals did not smell like rotting flesh.

I went down to see what was left in the morning. It had been rainy and windy that night, so if the average citizen didn’t destroy our little patch of jungle, mother nature certainly would have. Sure enough, just about everything was gone. All that was left was this elephant head: