I used to have a next door neighbor, whose two favorite things were the band Kiss and Disneyland, which I always found odd because when I think of the two, the only thing that comes to mind is overt capitalism at its worst. Both entities seem to me to be all about fleecing you out of every single dollar at your disposal until you are dead broke in the streets.

VH1 recently had a 24 hour Kiss retrospective, which despite providing their fans with 24 hours of Kiss footage, also was nothing but a huge 24 hour commercial for some new box of crap that Gene Simmons was trying to sell now that the caskets aren’t moving.

The Kiss footage played on about half of the screen. The left third of the screen was a commercial letting you know that if you purchased the box of crap that you would be able to run a personal message to Kiss that would scroll by for two seconds on the bottom third of the screen. Knowing Gene’s ego, he probably actually did watch all 24 hours of this mara-commercial, his penis hard as a rock for all 24 hours of it. Usually, when this happens to a man of Gene’s age it is called priapism and means that you need to immediately see a doctor, but in Gene’s case it was copasetic, because we all know that Gene enjoys selling stuff way more than he enjoyed sleeping with the thousands of women that he claims to have bedded.

You can even almost imagine that Gene never really had any real desire to sleep with even one of his paramours, but that he figured that if he put in a thousand or so nights of hard work that it would someday help him sell more Kiss paraphernalia.

Gene’s only saving grace is that he pretty much admits all of this. Gene Simmons is probably the only guy in history other than Don Kirchner that thought the Monkees struggle to express themselves as real musicians was artistically insulting to the people that were shaping their image. Gene would have slapped Mike Nesmith silly. “They are letting you go around and act like a rock star without putting any work into it and you are complaining? You whiny, little, thankless bastard!”

Gene is essentially Colonel Sanders in an even more garish suit. Ask Gene about his musical contributions to the world and whether they are appreciated and Gene will gladly repeat the line that’s been playing on VH1 for weeks. It’s something about moving a billion dollars worth of crap and not having to care what anyone else thinks.