Senator Mysteriously Defies Time, Lives in 1950s

ust when you thought the limits of science were established—girl, look out! Here comes Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the politician who magically defies the change of time and remains stuck in the 1950s.

Santorum alerted the rest of America, scared and turbulent, but still living in the year 2003, when he stated in an interview printed last Monday that the Supreme Court would endorse incest and other immoralities if they overturned a Texas sodomy law the Court is hearing.

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything," said the senator living in the decade of the TV dinner and TV westerns.

Some Democrats and fellow Republicans have denounced the senator's remarks and asked for his resignation, worried that living in a time period of 50 years ago would interfere with Santorum's ability to keep informed in current issues. Key Republican party leaders have guaranteed to study the senator closely and divulge his knowledge of important government and cultural stuff.

"I guarantee you," said a personal aide to Santorum, Jeff Richards, "the senator is in full control of his faculties and knows what year it is. I can't explain any more than that. I've seen the TV on in his house, I assume he must get the news and the usual programs… he's just somehow filtered them out." Girl, I tell you, that Richards gave this reporter the eye. Beep beep on the gaydar, that's all I'm saying.

Few from the scientific community have stepped forward to explain, though a group at Harvard's Department of Quantum Mechanics are posing theories of collapsing personal wormholes. Psychologists from around the world are seeking medical background from Santorum's representatives, particularly interested in previous incidents of head trauma or hallucinations. The extremely early onset of Alzheimer's has not been ruled out.

Other theories have been offered, but not yet fully explored. My girl Ladyboy Smacky, she say Santorum look just like this guy pick her up three nights in a row last April and call her "Mommy" while she dress up like Martha Washington, but that guy had a mustache and was in Frisco, but she swear that dude Santorum so deep in the closet he sittin' on the box to a Colecovision.

Despite the failure to pinpoint the source of Santorum's confusion, others are stressing the importance of bringing him up to date with the year 2003 before it becomes a problem.

"We have 50 years of history to cover with the senator, so obviously we'll have to pick highlights," said Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Chicago and real sweetie Isis Oviate. "We should start with telling him World War II is over—more than likely he knows, but we shouldn't take chances. The geographical maps and political make-up of the world should be explained slowly so he knows all of that, about Stalin's death and, eventually, the fall of the Soviet Union, of course. We would hate to offend an ally with some disparaging remarks against Russia. We'll tell him all about Iraq, but one thing at a time. Take it slowly. The sexual revolution alone ought to leave him quaking in his wingtips. Maybe we'll just sum up the Kinsey Report and see how he responds to that."

Iraq blah blah blah Suicide blah blah blah Dead

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At one time a distant relative of mine told a timid and anxious nation that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And mostly I agree with that, except I thought I'd ammend it since it's a different world today.

For one, first and foremost, in the wake of recent events, there is a renewedfear of bio-terrorism. Anthrax, anthrax everywhere! Sure, it would seem likewe're not in any immediate danger if we don't work for politicians or newspeople, but now they say that crap can rub off on other mail just by being mixed together. Whoa-ho! That ought to send a chill creeping right up your spine.

Let's not forget what started all this panic. We have to admit that we have terrorist attacks and retaliation to fear. More specifically, we have crazy hijackers commandeering planes and flying them into national monuments and highly-populated tourist attractions to fear. Not to mention long-standing favorite terrorist actions, like driving exploding trucks or cars into populated buildings or planting undetectable bombs where we can't find them to fear. That's pretty scary shit.

Then there's the whole idea of Muslim retaliation from foreign countries and militant groups that side with terrorists. They could rip apart global alliances or even, in most drastic situations, start a holy war with our country. Jesus damn! How did this shit get started? You're goddamn right we have that to fear, even if not as much as some of the other stuff first. And everybody's got a nuclear bomb these days. What if some nutjob decides to set it off? Or the president gets really pissed off or we elect some senial nut like Reagan, remember the '80s when every day you woke up thinking today is going to be the day that wrinkled fascist thinks he's he's buzzing his secretary and BOOM! Fucking Ameritoast. So even if we don't get bombed by our enemies we could explode ourselves into smithereens, thank you very much, Mr. As-Yet-Unknown Senial President of the Future.

Oh, shit, I didn't even mention trying to get on a plane. If you think those college dropouts laid off from the McDonald's are going to check your bag well enough to find any potential weapon, good luck to you. These guys are lucky to dress themselves in the morning, I bet. Or they'll be so busy checking for Arabs with boxcutters they'll let Johnny Militia and his constituency of fruitcakes through the metal detectors with Ryder truck manure bombs strapped to their fucking back. Remember, it wasn't so long ago when young white Americans were the biggest enemy to freedom you'd ever fucking seen. These assholes are so worried about the threat the U.N. poses to us they must have missed, oh, I guess the part of the Constitution that says don't blow up your own fucking country, you dumbasses.

And that ain't it, no sirs. Let's not forget the big G, the Creator, the Man Upstairs, His Holy Capitalized Self. He's always giving us the shit: Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Earthquakes—check that out, wake up for a nice day of going to work and making some bread and the fucking ground opens up under you! Holy shit! Forgot to mention that part in the Bible, eh, Your Holy Groundripper, Sir? I don't know what apostle was supposed too get that shit into the Bible but he sure fucked up big time.

Then there's always the dumb shit. Getting hit by lightning, falling off the house while re-shingling it, the real dumb stuff the obituary columns won't even print 'cause it looks so retarded. And then there's car accidents up the whazoo. Car accidents claim more people in a regular year than any terrorist attacks do.

And disease and cancer and getting shot by some random dumbass who thinks you flipped him off in traffic. Shit, you know what, I don't even want to get up in the morning anymore. Nothing to fear but fear itself? Yeah, that's kind of right, ol' Mr. Roosevelt. Although I think you forgot to mention, oh, EVERYTHING. Thank you very fucking much.

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Nothing can distract you from your miserable, carless existence better than a new watch. Especially a really bitchin' new watch that does shit.

Most people are happy to settle for watches that don't do a goddamned thing other than tell the time and look swanky on their wrists, but not Omar Bricks. I've always demanded more from a wristwatch. Over the years I've had watches that said the time out loud (to save my valuable looking time), watches that told the temperature, the direction, the altitude, my heart rate, and watches that recorded me saying some spooky ventriloquist shit that I could play back during meetings when my mouth obviously wasn't moving.

I had one watch that worked as a remote-control for the TV. This was pretty sweet, but what I really wanted on that worked as a remote-control for a remote-controlled dune buggy. That would have been the cat's ass. But I guess I was a little ahead of my time in that desire because they never made one.

As a kid, I'd generally been satisfied with lame-assed time-telling watches, until the third grade when I collected enough box tops and sent away for a watch that played the video game Frogger. Holy shit, I thought at the time, now there's a watch. My current green plastic watch was clearly in need of replacement, as the picture of Fozzie was badly flaking off. Most kids were going the Swatch route, since those things came with some gay-assed band of plastic that kept the front from getting all scratched and kept you from having to figure out that arcane hand-based system of time telling, since the protective band blocked your view of the rest of the watch anyway. A few others had thrown their lot in with the Mickey Mouse watch, but I knew that was verging into ass-beating territory in the higher grades so I steered clear of any of that happy bullshit.

Nope, the Frogger watch was the one for me. As the six to eight weeks of estimated shipping time dragged by, I daydreamed about school days spent Froggering away in the back of the class while the rest of those dopes learned fractions. And they'd never be the wiser, since it's not like I was dragging a full-sized arcade version of the game into the classroom with a coat thrown over it or anything. No way man, I was on the low-down, for all they would know I was back there trying to adjust for daylight savings time or jerking off or whatever. It was the perfect plan.

After seemingly forever, the watch finally in the mail, in a bubble-wrap envelope no less. Talk about Christmas coming twice in one day, the long-awaited watch and bubble wrap. Shit. I busted the watch out, laughed at the Taiwanese instructions, and within minutes I was in Frogger heaven. Or something. In actuality, playing the watch wasn't anything like playing Frogger, but it had some stickers of the frog from the game on it, and that was pretty cool. And if you had an active imagination, you could imagine that one of those black dots that was blinking on and off was the frog from the picture, sort of, and it was kind of like what playing the game would be like if you had severe brain damage.

And hey, it was on a watch, and pretending it was Frogger was a whole hell of a lot better than studying the Spanish Civil War. So I was on sunshine street for about three days, until one day the watch took a hit during a tetherball grudge match and that piece of shit fell apart. Then, to make matters worse, that little asshole Toby Sklar got a PacMan watch out of a box of Kix as if on cue and everybody was lining up to kiss his ass after that. Everyone could see that the actual game looked exactly like the Frogger watch game, just a bunch of black dots blinking on and off, but there was a Pac-Man sticker on the wristband and Pac-Man had always been more popular than Frogger. And it wasn't broken, he definitely had me there.

So I did the only thing a third-grader can do in that situation, I hit Toby in the head with an apple, and when he fell down he landed on his arm and the watch broke.

And that's the problem with watches that do cool shit, those fuckers break like Korean cars. Not long after you figure out how to use all the cool features, you get shut in an elevator door or you get in a construction site fight and there goes the damn watch. You can play hockey with watches that don't do anything, they always last forever even when you don't want them to.

This is a trend that's about to come to an end, however, because I just got the bitchinest watch there is. This thing tells the time, temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, cardinal direction, GPS coordinates, how far away you are from bacon, Sig-Alert status… Hell, for all I know this thing could free South Africa. Plus it's got a nightlight that would blind Stevie Wonder, I don't even think it's night any more when I turn that thing on.

Rest assured that this is now Omar Bricks' Watch For Life, nothing's happening to this bad boy. Plus, the thing's the size of a soup can so there's no way it's going to get all banged up from being worn on my wrist like a common timepiece. I'm thinking of keeping it in the box, that thing seems pretty well padded.

Now I just need find somebody who knows what time it is. Bricks out.

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