Mad Atoms

When I was a kid a day at the circus meant I get to see (and possibly be hurt by) smoking chimps, high diving mules, dancing elephants, lion tamers, bears riding bikes, and a dude getting shot out of a cannon.

Oh what's that you say? "I'm a dick and I don't like those nasty-ass circuses. The tent was put together by prison labor and the animals are sad!" Well you and yours will be happy to know that an invasive species has pushed the American circus to the brink of extinction. . . The French Canadians.

The FC's introduced the Cirque De Soleil sometime in the early 1980's. Since then the days of the freakshow, and the 'funny car' have been numbered. Where once you could pay five dollars to see a 'little person' set ablaze and chased by a lion, you now pay two hundred dollars to watch men in spandex dry hump each other in 'the clouds' to the soothing sounds of Enya.

The French circus, or cirques's' have something like nine different fanciful shows in Las Vegas alone. Each Cirque has a different magical theme: Water, fire, light, the Beatles.

Every show is packed with colorful skintight costumes and clever special effects leading up to a grand climax of song, ballet, flowing banners, boners, pouty faces, audience participation and orgy piles.

My dad saw one of the cirques’s in Vegas. He described it to me like this: "it was actually really cool, there was an army of the dark trying to stop the dream child from saving the princess of love. He took the orb of imagination and climbed to the top of the tower of dreams and thrust his life force into the time eye!"

I had to slap my father as if he were the hysterical girl in a horror movie. What have they done to us? What have we become? Where will the monkeys earn their smokes?