Just Off Center

In the past few weeks my commute to work has gone from the usual hour to damn near ninety minutes. Fucking snowbirds are out in force. Why have they come here? What do they want? Why don’t they just live in Arizona? And most importantly, why the fuck do overpampered, overindulged, retired, old fucks feel the need to clog up the arteries of my beautiful metropolis during goddamned rush hour? Every time I see a license plate from Wisconsin, Utah, Montana, or Nebraska I just want to run them right off the road. I don’t want to kill them; just scare them enough to leave and tell everyone back in the cold lands that Arizona has the most dangerous drivers on Earth.

So to compensate for the time I’m losing dodging seventy-year-olds in Lincoln Towncars I’ve avoided the highways. Whenever I see a sea of brake lights a quarter mile ahead I pull into the far right lane and take the side roads. Even with stoplights I’ve gotten back to my original hour-long commute.

This morning on one of the side roads I passed a mid-sized Methodist church. What caught my eye as I was approaching was the Marquis out front. The illuminated sign read:

QUITTING COCKS
CURES HOURLY BINGES

Now, I’ve seen many church marquis with funny little captions like “staying in bed screaming ‘Oh God’ does not constitute going to church”. But this slogan had me flummoxed at first sight. What the hell could they possible mean? Of course I can assume that the “quitting cocks” portion probably doesn’t have anything to do with the abstinence from consuming male poultry. What else could it mean besides abstaining from sex, or at least the handling of penises? But even if it does mean that, what binges could that prevent, much less cure? And what binges do we sinners engage in on an hourly basis anyway. Some of us like to smoke a cigarette every hour, but that’s not exactly binging is it? This whole thing has me confused. So as with everything else I don’t understand, I’ll break it down piece by piece.

QUITTING – To abandon or put aside; to cease or discontinue. People quit all sorts of things. They quit drinking, smoking, and sleeping until noon.

COCKS – Those wonderful and wildly varied slabs of manly flesh called penises, dicks, knobs, and schlongs. The vociferous obsession of all men and the usually quieter obsession of all women. As the song says, “Every boy has one. It’s my favorite part.” Either that or it means a fucking rooster. But there aren’t too many roosters’ cock-a-doodle-doos ringing out in Mesa. Hehehe…cock. And since it seems logical that a person (of either sex) can get all too addicted to dicks, or at least the vices which it represents, I have to assume that COCKS is intended as a metaphor for all carnal addictions.

CURES – It seems odd that they chose to use this particular word. It doesn’t help prevent hourly binges. It doesn’t reduce hourly binges. It doesn’t even altogether stop all hourly binges. No, these binges are such a curse, that they require the healing power to be put down. One cannot stop, but they can be cured. The weird thing is that one is never truly cured from an addiction. They can be clean or free from its grip. But any addict will tell you that a cure is never available.

HOURLY – Aside from the literal meaning, perhaps this is meant to suggest that the binges that are cured are a continuous problem. I’ve enjoyed my drinking to excess several times. But I sure as fuck never felt the urge to get drop down smashed every single waking hour. I doubt many of us have had any binges that we have indulged hourly. Surely whoever this poor bastard is, they must be very weak. And if the marquis is focusing it attention on only the weakest, well that’s just not very good marketing.

BINGES – A binge is a period of excessive or uncontrolled indulgence in food or drink. I expect that most people believe that a binge can apply to anything one is addicted to. I am rather fond of my marathon-like sex binges, personally. But when one thinks of binging I bet it conjures up images and memories of strapping on a bottle until one can no longer form words. It makes you think of sucking back an entire chocolate cake and sitting around both ashamed and at peace. Binging is as much emotional as it is physical. And we all know that the church does not exactly condone physical indulgences in the extreme.

Well after applying some logic and decryption techniques I learned as a boy I think I may have cracked the code of the Methodist marquis. Of course, this is a bit too long to be put on a marquis. I think what it was trying to say was:

IF YOU GODLESS, CUMDRUNK WHORES AND FAGS DON’T STOP SUCKING EVERY HARD DICK IN YOUR PATH, TAKING UP YOUR EVERY WAKING HOUR THAT YOU COULD BE SPENDING SERVING THE LAST PERFECT PATRIARCHY, THEN YOU WILL BE UTTERLY UNABLE TO EXPERIENCE THE BLISS AND SANCTITY THAT COMES WITH THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF YOUR FILTHY, WRETCHED, SEX-CRAZED LIVES AND A LIFETIME SPENT IN SUBMISSIVE SHAME AND BEGGING FOR FORGIVENESS FROM A GOD WHO NEVER ACTUALLY SAID ‘DON’T DO THAT’.

Of course it could have just been an anagram pieced together by some terribly clever teenagers. I’m inclined to believe that’s true since, after driving by later, I noticed the words were altogether removed from the sign. Originally, it could have read:

TRUSTY COUCH NECKING SOIL
IS SO QUEER

That would fucking RULE! And it makes perfect sense too.