La Cage

I'm working for an idiot artist.

He's pretty bad. He's hired a private instructor to teach him how to draw. Once a week, the three of us meet for a few hours.

He's one of those really "open minded" New Yorkers.

At one point, the I.A. pulled out this enormous painting he had been working on and showed it to the instructor. Its back was to me so all I had to go on was his description which was, if not exactly this, then pretty dang close:

"I really wanted these horses to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse. See? I'm looking at pictures of horses for these. And this is the resurrected Christ in the center here. And there are people protesting and picketing his return on this side, and people happy about his return on the other side. And then, of course, there's this soldier leading him away and naked Christ has an erect penis."

Yeah. Whatever the eff THAT'S supposed to mean.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that the audience's imagination could create horrors more horrible than anything he'd be able to capture on film which is why so many of his "horror" sequences are captured at odd angles or don't show a lot of what's going on.

This case, however, is an exception. The real thing IS worse than anything you could imagine. When I saw the actual painting I wished I could go back to my imagined version. It was SO much better.

That aside, the instructor is a pretty down to earth kinda guy. Married, young, a very talented artist. He also does some IT work for some company and every now and then they have him go into people's accounts to snoop around and see what websites they've been visiting.

"So I found this HILARIOUS animal/porn website called...oh, what was it? Erotic Falconers or something. It's apparently for people with FALCON FETISHES. Isn't that weird?"

I.A. burst in a little TOO quickly with his, "That's just GREAT! That's FANTASTIC!"

The instructor looked at I.A. a little funny. I knew exactly what I.A. was doing and I WASN'T going to let him get away with it.

"Yeah!" I said, "That's just BUH-ZARRE! People can be so WEIRD!"

"That's great! That's just great! Good for them!" said I.A. a little louder, opening his mind so wide you could see the neurons firing.

"Yeah, it's really weird," agreed the instructor.

"Surely it MUST be a JOKE!" I declared. "I mean, BIRD fetishes? That's SO STRANGE!"

"That's just great! That's so great that they have a community where they can come together like that! That's GREAT. That's JUST SO GREAT! I'm SO GLAD!"

Sometimes I wish these "open minded" New Yorkers would stop and listen to themselves. I mean REALLY listen to themselves. In this world where absolutely anything goes and everything is permissable--I just don't know. I know we're soooo smart nowadays. I know we're sooooo enlightened. I know those fuddy-duddy family-oriented squares in the 50s were all just kidding themselves. But come ON, people.

While this tiresome brand of New Yorker would quelch our opportunity to express ourselves, at some point the rest of the human race HAS to be allowed to draw a line and say, "Normal things go here. Weird things go here."

Because if we don't, future generations WILL laugh at us. A LOT.