Satan Don't Wear Lederhosen
Illustration by Jerry McDonald
When I was a trendy clubgoer in my irreverent teen youth, I would always beg my grandfather to let me wear his Masonic fez out. It had rhinestones on it that spelled out "El Jebel Band" next to the Masonic compass symbol. One day grandpa gave me a fez, but with all of the rhinestones ripped off, and little holes where the stitching had been removed. "Where's the one with the rhinestones?" I whined, feeling ripped off. "Oh, you can't have that," he said. Apparently the rhinestone hat was too Mystically Potent to party in. It was then that I decided that the Masons thought they wore pretty big secret pants in the world.
After grandpa died, I got the real fez with the rhinestones, and also his Mason ring. I made my love interests wear the ring. They regarded it with a certain degree of fear, as if it contained questionable voodoo powers. I wore the real fez once with a business suit for Halloween. "Who's that little Nazi guy?" all my co-workers asked, duped by my Masonic male drag. I always felt that Grandpa was looking frowningly from the grave at my flippant adoption of his private Mason paraphernalia, but I continued to do it anyway.
My friends and I like conspiracy theories, because they vindicate our feelings of bitterness and alienation towards the powers that be. We each have a favorite. My boyfriend favors JFK, triangulations and grassy knolls and hi-tech pellet guns filled with fish poison. I like the alien coverup, "greys," cattle mutilation and extraterrestrial spacecraft kept in a secret hangar in the Nevada mountains. I especially like it when you glue a couple of theories together, like "Do you think your alien abduction was really just a mental schism brought on by the CIA conducting low-frequency electromagnetic radiation experiments on you, because you did all that research on Oswald and you got too close to the TRUTH?"
Next page: The complete de-sexualization of the human foot
