Barbelith Underground > Creation > Return of the son of cocksmoker!

here's something I recieved as a private message submission for Cocksmoker or whatever it's called

The oldest heroes in the world come from Greek mythology. Hercules. Achilles. Basically if the name has an ?es suffix it?s a safe bet the fucker?s Greek. It?s also a safe bet that they?ve never existed.

Two heroes that do exist are Mohammed Ali and George Best. Ali is most famous for being involved in a sport where the object is to pummel your opponent into submission, and George is famous for his ability to kick a round shaped ball between three long sticks.

When I sit back in my fat Leather swing chair and ponder, as I do sometimes on these cold winter nights, I occasionally find myself comparing the old Greek heroes to these so-called sports stars. When was the last time you read in the paper that David Beckham had taken on and defeated Cerebus, the three-headed hound that guards the gates of Hell? The closest David has come to that was when Vinny Jones tackled him in an English-Welsh friendly and even then he lost the fucking ball. I wonder whether maybe our current state of affairs is the result of a millennia?s worth of inbreeding.

What if, many moons ago, a distant family of homo sapiens, superior in intellect to us, crash landed on the barren planet earth.

What if they only bred with other alien species from their distant planet, to avoid the obvious problems that dog Hillbilly Southern America in particular.

Food for thougfht.

Another thing I ponder is world records. ?My god, that man can throw a javelin further than Archie Blowhard did in 1406. Quick, give him a medal.? I?m not a pessimist. I?m all for being productive with our sports heroes. For example, why don?t we save money on military planes, which cost us millions and millions, by building bombs shaped as large pointy poles and then send our best javelin throwers into the field of battle to fight the good fight?

A distant cousin of mine, in his pubic years, took up a keen interest in comicbook superheroes. When I would on occasion visit him, he would take great joy in showing me the illustrations in said comics, and, whilst it would be wrong of me to feign that I took some heartfelt interest in the comics he showed me, it would be fair to say that the rather childish little drawings and caricatures were somewhat memorable.

?RATMAN? screamed a ?pop-tastic? logo from the front cover of one of these little pulp novels. I endeavoured to discover what powers this Ratman had, and, whilst I found the little speech bubbles somewhat hard to make out, having not thought to bring my reading glasses, I am quite certain that this fellow had absolutely no super-powers at all! What?s more, I discovered that this hero had a sidekick named ROBBER! How terrible I thought, when society in this day and age looks to the petty criminals for heroic inspiration. I scolded the boy and gave him thirty lashes.

When my father was not busy in the factory, he would sit me down by the fire and tell me tales of my grandfather who was a fighter pilot in the Second World War. These were grand tales, that made me believe in the majesty of the heroic ideal, the fundamental value of sacrifice, and more than anything they made me realise that all heroes were essentially desperate men, because I myself became desperate to be a hero, just like my grandfather in these amazing stories my father would tell me - Of dog-fights over Berlin, and stealth missions through the heart of Frankfurt.

It did not dawn on me until many years later that my grandfather was killed in the war, and hence my father could not have known about his exploits. Under further investigation I discovered that my grandfather was actually captured two days after the war started, when his plane malfunctioned over Munich. He served as a boot polisher for the highest ranks of the Third Reich, before being personally executed by Hitler in 1944.

My father was a compulsive liar, and was not to be trusted.

I'll come up with some illos time permitting...

in the mean time the biggest question I have seems to orbit around web-server space & an actual URL...

www.what?