Paul Ryan’s Visit To Our Owner, Who Is Mister Papa John
These two people are very chummy and they love each other
The Shocker is having a hard time with its ownership. We’ve been keeping quiet about it for the most part, for the purposes of safety and tact and other bastardizations of grace, but we’ve decided now to be honest like we were when we were children. We’re rebelling against the Papa, the bad pizza man who owns our website for no clear reason and keeps us stowed in a storage chute underneath one of the big assembly lines of dough in his big bad pizza factory.
Why are we rebelling, again? Well, Wisconsin Senator and Speaker of The House Paul Ryan visited the Papa recently, and let’s just say it was sort of creepy and set off too many of our deep-down demons. Plus don’t even get us started about that orange guy who’s in charge of everything in the America place for four years now. That guy has made us pretty mad too and now we don’t respect authority, however much garlic spray may have been sprayed to its skin. The papa keeps a bottle on his bedstand, applying a coat every morning and night.
When the senator came, he and the papa (that’s right, I’m going lowercase on his ass now) gave each other pizza-dough massages for hours, while moaning about the intricacies of free markets. At one point the papa shouted, “Tell me where the sauce is bubbling, Paul,” and Mister Ryan shouted that it was bubbling in the stock exchange rooms, where men are allowed to be men these days.
That was when we decided to start drinking from the rivers of magma marinara just a few feet from our in-factory fortress. We’re forbidden to be near the rivers, and certainly to have any contact with them. What we’re supposed to be doing is writing the papa a play about the ways he serves the United States (which we have taken to calling the unUnited States, in our new rebellion!) with his (faux!)-Italian machinations.
The play so far involves the protagonist moving through a tunnel of mean men holding big baguettes and being whacked with them as he tries to crawl through their gauntlet of humanity, whilst singing a number called “How To Invent Love Again In America: It’s Pizza!” Mister Ryan hears about this when the papa tells him in front of us—humming the Wagnerian melody as he does—and Mister Ryan smiles and says that he will “pet [us] properly later.”
Both of those guys got so mad when we went to the river. They came sprinting downhill from their box-office lair, along the privileged golden escalator between their shiny box in the factory’s hangars and the ground that we live—in our “office”—partially under. As we slurped from the river of sauce, the senator dipped and kicked his leather shoes into it, to splash the stuff into our faces. What Paul was not expecting was that we liked that shit. We started to scream words like “Marinara merriment!” which infuriated the papa, who is always telling us to “put those words down” when we do puns or wordplay of any kind. “Those words are for good boys and you haven’t proved that you’re good boys,” he shouted.
The rest of the day was spent this way. Two dad-guys chased us around the factory as various pizza-things became the fodder for our friction, dough and grease and industrially cured meats spattered about faces and clothes. We considered this a victory. We are sloppy people, willing to get messy in the name of our principles. No longer will we suckle from such a sinister teat, obsessed with stealing our joy so to fit it into self-portraits unconcerned with art!
As of publication time, we are researching new ways to be published, new despots to own and engineer our platform of stupid words. Hopefully we shall have more to report back to you about that, very soon. There is a good and promising lead in our lives but we do not want to spoil it by speaking too much about it too quickly. But we should say that we’ve recently learned of the existence of benevolence in the world.
