Films To Buried With is a highly entertaining podcast from comedian/writer/actor Brett Goldstein, who you may know from his portrayal of gruff Roy Kent on Ted Lasso or his role on Shrinking, which he co-created with Bill Lawrence and Jason Segal. The premise of the podcast is as simple as it is genius. He tells the guest that he/she has died and there is a heaven populated with people who want to know about your life, but through films. He then asks the guest (actors, comedians, filmmakers) a series of questions such as “what’s the first film you remember seeing?” and “what film made you cry the most?”

I just recently discovered the podcast which has been going on since around 2018, so obviously I have a lot of listening to do. I’m not a famous celebrity. I’ll probably never be a guest on the show, so I thought I would use this space to pretend that I were.

Here we go:

What’s the first film you remember going to see?

The first movie I have any memory of at all as far as seeing something in the theater was Jungle Book. I was so into this film as a kid, that my mom bought me a record with all of the original songs. To this day I probably know 85% of the words to both Bare Necessities (sung by Phil Harris) and I Wanna Be Like You (the King Louie song, performed by Louis Prima.) It was my first real introduction to music, and you won’t find a better start than Louis Prima.

What’s the film that scares you? Do you like to be scared?

It takes a lot to scare me, and most horror films don’t do it. I don’t count things that startle you or that disturb you. If you’re talking about a film that actually scared me, that would be Helter Skelter, a made-for-tv movie about the Manson family murders. I would have been 12 years old when the film premiered on tv. I sat in the living room with my family and was completely horrified. Up until this point, I wasn’t aware that things that fucked up were actually happening in the world. And the scariest thing about the movie was the very end. It stated that Charles Manson would be eligible for parole in just a few years. My young brain didn’t know that he would never be paroled. All I could think about was that he would get out and kill more people, and since the murders seemed so random, maybe I would be the next victim. That film, and the events it depicted, scared me so much that to this day, I get chills whenever I hear the names Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Leno LaBianca.

What film makes you cry? Are you a crier?

I’m not a crier in the traditional sense. I don’t cry at sad real life events (unless it involves the loss of a doggie.) I tend to cry at more happy or hopeful things. It often works like that while watching movies. A movie might make me feel sad, but I don’t necessarily cry. Sometimes the crying sneaks up on me. What I mean by that is that I’m not full on bawling, but all of a sudden I notice that tears are starting to roll down my cheeks. My expression and demeanor haven’t changed, but somehow my robot body is crying.

The dumbest example of me crying during a film is hands down Working Girl, a film in which Melanie Griffith’s secretary character proves her worth, hooks up with Harrison Ford, and gets a big promotion. At the end of the film, she comes in to work, and her secretary (she’s no longer a secretary and has one of her own!) welcomes her. Melanie sits down at what is her secretary’s desk. Her secretary says “that’s my desk” then guides Melanie into what is her new, huge, actual office. Every time I see this movie, I’m so happy for her that I often feel a tear running down my cyborg cheek.

What’s the film you love but people don’t like it and it’s not critically acclaimed?

Cannonball Run. It’s not a good film. It doesn’t even make any sense (the cars in the race leave at different times, but the winner is determined by who crosses the finish line first, not who does it in the shortest time.) But it’s Burt Reynolds, a bunch of idiots and famous women with cleavage being Burt Reynolds, a bunch of idiots and famous women with cleavage. Chef’s kiss.

What’s the film that you used to love but you watched recently, and you don’t love it anymore?

Logan’s Run. I loved this film as a kid when you didn’t get as many sci-fi films as you do today. I recently watched it, and I’ll agree that it’s not a good film. The acting is bad, the dialogue is laughable, the special effects are low budget. But Jenny Agutter still gets naked in it, and I’ll plant my flag there until I die.

What’s the film that means the most to you, not that the film itself is any good, but the experience you had around seeing it will always make it important to you?

A Clockwork Orange. I was a junior or senior in high school (don’t remember) when my history teacher asked me and my group of friends to put together a project for the city’s history day student competition. I had no interest in it at all, but finally agreed to spearhead the project. We won city. Then we won state. And then we got a trip to a university in Maryland for the national finals. During the day, our history teacher, who was fairly young and cool for a teacher (possibly a former heavy drug user,) took us to all of the Washington DC monuments and museums. The night of the finals and award ceremony, we asked him if we could skip it. I didn’t think we were going to win nationals (we didn’t) and I had found out that the campus had a movie theater and they were showing A Clockwork Orange. None of us had seen the film, and I was a big film buff from an early age and was certainly aware of it. To his credit, our teacher let us skip the awards and accompanied us to the movie. The movie, by the way, blew my mind.

I went to the movies a lot when I was young and I have a lot of other movie going experiences that could have been the answer here. I’ll save those stories for an upcoming article I have planned about movie theaters.

What is the sexiest film you’ve ever seen?

I was tempted to say Y Tu Mama Tambien (which features a young Diego Luna, although not the reason I found it sexy.) It’s a Mexican coming of age movie which was not only a compelling movie but had a decent amount of sex and nudity.

But I think I have to go with The Last Seduction. Not only is it a great film by director John Dahl, but Linda Fiorentino is so sexy in this film. She’s intelligent, gorgeous, sexy, manipulating, evil, and will use and fuck over any guy who gets in her way. I could not have been more attracted to her.

What’s a movie you found arousing, but you probably shouldn’t have?

Leon, known as The Professional in the US. I don’t know how old Natalie Portman was in this film (narrator: she was 12,) but I for sure know I shouldn’t have been attracted to her. To be fair, I wasn’t attracted to her as a child, more the idea that this child was showing qualities I would find attractive in an older woman, like being a hit man. Fuck, I don’t know. There was sexual tension in this film, even though neither character wanted to have sex with each other. It was obviously done on purpose by director Luc Besson so blame him. I would also like to say that in addition to the great performances by Portman and Jean Reno, fucking Gary Oldman is peak Gary Oldman in this masterpiece. So to sum up, shut up and fuck off.

What is the film you most relate to?

I’m cheating by having two answers to this. The first is Pulp Fiction. It was revolutionary for me when it came out as it was the first movie that sounded like it was written by someone from my generation and social circles. Lots of pop culture references and just being cool. When Sam Jackson called the weird haircut dude “Flock of Seagulls,” I knew this movie was for me, not my parents.

My real answer would be World According to Garp, based on the John Irving novel. Garp lived a wild and wacky life full of adventures and love and heartbreak and random events, kind of like my life. He was a writer and an amateur wrestler/wrestling coach. I was a writer and a pro wrestling announcer/booker. When Garp was a kid, his mother asked him “Are you gonna go to sleep or you gonna stay up and think your weird thoughts?” Young Garp replied: “I'll stay up and think weird thoughts for a while.” I’ve never felt so connected to a character.

Side note: years after the film came out, I was hosting a local cable show and was on a press junket for another film during which I got to meet and interview Mary Beth Hurt, who was in Garp.

What film is objectively the greatest ever? Not necessarily your favorite, but objectively the best?

I would almost answer The Godfather, but it has that weird part where Michael is exiled to Italy, meets a girl, falls in love, and then she gets blown up. Was any of this really necessary?

Most Martin Scorsese films would make a good answer, as would a lot of Kubrick films.

But there’s a movie that doesn’t have a bad scene, not a single false note, and is entirely captivating, and that movie is the Coen Brother’s Fargo.

What film is the one you’ve watched the most?

I’ve seen a lot of the Marvel movies multiple times. Same with Goodfellas and Casino and Godfather and American Gangster. If the tv is on and Step Brothers is playing, I’m most likely stopping to watch it. A lot of 80’s movies fall into this repeat viewing category for me: Animal House, Blues Brothers. Anchorman ranks up there. But the movie I’ve probably seen the most is a result of me being the right age when my family first go HBO. I was so enamored with being able to see uncut films at home for the first time, that I would watch stuff over and over, especially comedies. And the king of my teenage rewatching was Caddyshack.

What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen?

I could with Brown Bunny, a self-indulgent movie starring Vincent Gallo and directed by Vincent Gallo, a self-indulgent actor/directer who thinks he is more talented and more interesting than he actually is. But I’m going to go with Joker, a self-indulgent movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips, a self-indulgent actor and a self-indulgent director who both think they are more talented and interesting than they actually are.

Most people say Joker 2 was horrible. I never saw it since I thought Joker was a piece of shit. It took elements from the great DeNiro film King of Comedy and mixed them up with a boring look at how a poor schlub was mistreated and disrespected enough to make him a homicidal maniac. It’s a shit story with an ending that is a foregone conclusion. Are we supposed to feel sympathy for him? I felt sympathy for anyone who had to sit through this dragging, boring, over-acted masturbation session.

What’s the film that made you laugh out loud the most?

Caddyshack is right up there. Anchorman. A lot of the films I mentioned earlier. But for this one, I’m going with a lesser known comedy, Hollywood Knights. It’s Porky’s before Porky’s. The movie, set in the 50’s, takes place in one night as a group of teens pull pranks and cause all sorts of shenanigans. It has some of the most ridiculous lines and jokes ever seen in the cinema and I still use quotes from it to this day. It’s one of the earliest films for Tony Danza, Fran Drescher, and Robert Wuhl, whose character is named Newbomb Turk, which was later used as a name for punk band The New Bomb Turks.

Some out of context lines:

“He grabbed it with his dick!!”

“That looks like a penis, only smaller.”

“Did you come? Newbomb, did you come?”

“Bong, bong, bong, live from Tubby’s Drive In, the Iron Box Twins!”

“Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia.”

“Does have a little wang in it.”

And that’s it! Make sure to check out Brett Goldstein’s podcast Films To Be Buried With!

Last night I had my tv set to TNT, not for any March Madness nonsense, but for AEW Collision (rasslin’!) which was airing directly after the Gonzaga/Houston game. As the game ended with a Houston victory, Gonzaga player Khalif Battle was emotional and crying over their elimination from the tournament. Khalif was walking off the court with his jersey pulled over his face like he was trying to escape an apartment fire. And all I was thinking about was the quote from A League of Their Own when Tom Hank’s Jimmy Dugan said “Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying! THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!” And this is one of the many reasons that baseball will always be superior to basketball. Fight me on this. I’ll go through you like drunken New Yorkers chasing a Red Sox fan through the streets of the Bronx, Warriors style.

There are many great baseball films: Moneyball, Major League, The Natural, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams. But A League of Their Own may be the greatest baseball movie of all time simply due to its showcasing the wacky parade of characters that comprise professional baseball.

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”

Last week I watched the opening two games of the baseball season. The LA Dodgers took on the Chicago Cubs (full disclosure: I was born in Chicago) in the Tokyo Dome in front of 45,000 ravenous Japanese baseball fans. Over the past couple of decades, baseball has become very popular in Japan and American baseball players, even the lesser-known ones, are treated like superstars. Mexico and Cuba were once the pipeline for non-American baseball players, but the popularity of baseball in Japan has grown to the point that all 30 MLB teams have had at least one Japanese player on their roster. At the Tokyo Dome games, the Japanese players for the Dodgers and the Cubs were clean shaven and looked like they could be executives at a Fortune 500 company, while the American players all had bad beards and looked like they just came from doing tequila shots at a hooker’s trailer in Florida.

So I’m watching the first game, and as a new batter is coming to the plate, I notice something peculiar in the stands. There’s a diminutive young Japanese woman going up and down the aisle steps…and get this…she’s got a fucking pony keg strapped to her back! The pony keg is almost as big as she is. She’s slogging this thing all around, selling draft beer to spectators. My first thought was “oh, my, this poor little girl is having to drag this thing around like it’s some kind of Greek mythology punishment!” Turns out it’s a thing there. It wasn’t like “oh, not enough big men showed up to work so strap this pony keg to Fumiko and she can do it.” No, they are specifically young women. The are called biiru no uriko, which roughly translates to “beer girls.” Most of the time they work for the beer companies and not the stadium. Some beer companies require them to adhere to certain beauty standards and don’t allow them to work past the age of 25, like they were in a 90’s boy band. But they are a big deal, as you would imagine, and fans regularly get their pictures taken with them. They sometimes get on their knees to serve the beer. It’s kind of a genius move.

During these two games, Japanese fans got to see their countrymen Shota Imanga pitching for the Cubs and charismatic Shohei Ohtani at the bat for the Dodgers. Shohei Ohtani reminded me a lot of New Japan/AEW wresting great Kazuchika Okada. They look like they could be brothers. Now, before you say “you’re probably one of those idiots who think all Japanese people look alike,” let me assure you that I’ve watched a ton of New Japan Pro Wrestling (a lot of it broadcast from the Tokyo Dome) and I am familiar with Tanahashi, Naito, Takeshita, Ishii, Sanada, Suzuki and more. Ohtani doesn’t look like any of them. Just Okada.

Speaking of Minoru Suzuki, one of his nicknames is The Murder Grandpa. Here’s a pic of him. He’s getting older and he absolutely looks like he would murder you.

Another interesting cultural thing: in Japan, when athletes are announced, the order of their names is reversed. For example, if Suzuki was wrestling in the US, he would be introduced as Minoru Suzuki. In Japan, it’s surname first, as in Suzuki Minoru. So from now on, I want to be known as Jett David, like I’m a robot friend of Ultraman.

I kind of got off topic there, but it ties right back into baseball. One of the things I like about baseball is the pacing. Some people find it boring, but if you know the strategies and techniques, it’s actually fascinating. I’m not hear to convince anyone to watch, or to even explain the rules, but I would find a no-hitter game as exciting as one with multiple home runs. The pacing also allows for the television announcers to pontificate on the backgrounds of the players or to go entirely off topic, much like this article.

You might here announcers say stuff like this:

Bradey coming up to bat. Bradey comes from a long line of spot welders in Minnesota, but he decided to take up baseball and was ostracized by the family for a while there. But the kid hung in and now his family weld metal baseballs to their mailboxes to honor him. Swing and a miss. His wife comes from Canada, and during her college days, spent 3 months in a Korean prison for randomly kissing other people’s dogs. Strike one!

Pete Crow-Armstrong, known as PCA, is an outfielder for the Cubs. He’s a superstar in Japan less for his playing and more for his hair. With his helmet on, he looks like that kid from the movie Powder. With the helmet off, he has short blonde hair with stars dyed in, and he looks like Eminem was called up from the farm team.

His mother is actress Ashley Crow, who was a regular on the tv show Heroes and played the cheating wife at the beginning of the movie Minority Report. His father is actor Matthew John Armstong who has been in one episode of almost every tv show since the year 2000. He was in 8 episodes of Heroes, which is where I’m assuming he met Ashley. “Save the cheerleader, save the world. Also, hook up and give birth to a kid who will one day look like a Temu rapper and become a celebrity in Japan cause hair.”

The opportunity for announcers to ramble at length about the most random stuff, like I did above, has given rise to many celebrity announcers such as Harry Caray and Bob Uecker.

The seemingly perpetually drunk Cubs announcer Harry Caray became famous during the early days of cable when superstation WGN broadcast Cubs games nationwide. A second round of celebrity came with Will Ferrell’s impression of him on Saturday Night Live. I listened to a lot of Harry Caray, and as impossible as it may seem, Will’s impression was not that exaggerated.

Bob Uecker, a former baseball player, was the play-by-play man for the Milwaukee Brewers. I never saw a lot of Brewers games, so I knew Bob primarily from his hilarious appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and later on David Letterman. He was a regular guest and was in character much of the time. The character was an average player (which he was) who thought he was one of the greats. If Will Ferrell had done an impression of Bob, I imagine it wouldn’t be far off from his character in Anchorman. The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald was friends with Uecker and often told incredibly funny stories involving him. Here is one of my favorites:

Rounding third back to A League of Their Own and the no crying scene…only a movie like this and a game like baseball can give you a quote like this, which is what made Evelyn cry in the first place.

Jimmy Dugan: Evelyn, could you come here, you got a second? Which team do you play for?

Evelyn Gardner: Well, I'm a Peach.

Jimmy Dugan: Well I was just wonderin' why you would throw home when we got a two-run lead. You let the tying run get on second base and we lost the lead because of you. Start using your head. That's the lump that's three feet above your ass.

Throw in some chaw and dick scratching, and folks, that’s baseball.

BONUS CONTENT! Here’s a video about the Japanese beer girls.

Doggies are better than people which makes them the best. That’s the explanation. Thanks for reading!

Maybe that’s a little short for an article. Ok, here’s more.

The first dog I ever owned, many decades ago, was a Basenji named Salem, although for some reason I ended up mostly calling her Senji. The Basenji is an unusual breed. They started out as hunting dogs in Central Africa and are known as the “barkless dog” although that is a little misleading. They don’t bark in the traditional sense, but are very vocal, with noises ranging from howls and yodels to mutterings that sound like how a cartoon dog would speak. The breed is highly intelligent which can cause both delight and consternation.

When I decided to get my first dog many decades ago, I did a lot of research and settled upon the Basenji, which you can’t just walk into an animal shelter and find. I discovered a husband and wife around two hours away from where I lived, and they owned a pair of Basenjis who had just had a litter of puppies. It was very amusing watching an entire pack of Basenjis roaming around the house as they looked less like a family of dogs and more like a Navy Seal team planning the overthrow of the neighborhood.

The litter was mostly boys with only one girl. She was the smallest of the bunch and the shyest. And, of course, she was the one I picked. On the two hour drive back to my house, she spent the first 5 minutes on the blanket I had brought and the next 1 hour, 55 minutes in my lap. She became a great companion. Because the breed has a lot of cat-like qualities, I didn’t feed her twice a day. In fact, she had no set meal times. I would fill her bowl with food, and unlike most dogs who will eat as much as you give them, Senji would only eat what she wanted. She may eat half of the food and leave the rest for later in the day. I would keep her bowl full of food and she would never overeat. She was highly intelligent so her human word vocabulary was quite large. In addition to food and treat, she also knew the words cheese, fried rice and Taco Bell. I think she got the most excited by fried rice.

If you’ve ever seen the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films, you may recall a running bit where Inspector Clouseau’s manservant Cato would stage sneak attacks to keep the Inspector sharp (and provide us with hilarious slapstick fights.) Senji did this often. She would wait until you weren’t paying attention, run full speed at you and smack you on the butt, and then haul ass into another room where she would wait for you to reciprocate. One time when we were playing this game, I hid behind a couch, waiting for her to come into the room so I could sneak attack. Well, she didn’t show up. I thought maybe she had grown tired of the game. I peaked around the side of the couch and saw nothing. I then slowly raised by head above the back of the couch, kind of like when they looked up into the ceiling tiles in Aliens. As soon as my head came about the couch, Senji, who had been waiting patiently on the couch, took her paw and hit me on the head as hard as she could, and then took off running, and I swear I might have heard laughter.

She was smart, but maybe not as smart as a gang of Dobermans, as they could rob banks, at least according to a series of wacky 70’s movies.

Earlier this past week, I lost my little buddy Olive.

Many months ago, she was diagnosed with cancer. I’m not going into the details except to say that things were done and she was taking medication. Outside of a bad day here and there, she was living a normal, fun, life. Until she wasn’t. Time and cancer caught up to her and she had to be put to sleep so she wouldn’t suffer. She was doing well, until a couple of weeks ago when I could tell it pained her to walk up steps or climb into bed. She slowed down, and had a couple of days where she didn’t want to eat. When I woke up Tuesday morning, she couldn’t walk. At all. She wouldn’t eat. She seemed to be in pain. The medication was no longer working. The vet had warned that this day would come. And it did. It was time for little Olive to go to sleep for the last time.

Olive was a rescue of sorts. She had belonged to a couple who lived down the street from me (my last residence before the house I’m currently in.) I’m pretty sure they were both crack and/or meth heads. They made her stay outside most of the time, and she got out of the backyard quite often. I would see her wandering the streets looking for thrown out boxes of KFC, hoping to find something to eat. One particular night around nine years ago, it was the dead of winter, around 20 degrees outside. I was sitting on my front porch, smoking a cigarette and looking at the snow, when she came walking up to me. She was shivering and hungry and scared but happy to see someone. I petted her and she seemed so happy. As I petted her, I noticed a sore on her back that looked exactly like someone had pushed a lit cigarette onto her. Turns out the idiot couple who owned her were not home and didn’t come home for another day or so. She would have frozen to death by the time they did. That idiot couple (who moved about a month later) never saw her again. She had already found a newer and safer home. A “forever home.”

I’ve always been able to compartmentalize my feelings, especially if there’s something that needs to be done. That’s a trait that makes me good in a crisis or under pressure.

The first job I had out of college was with a small video production/ad agency that employed around 15 people. Gary, the owner, had been a singer/comedian in the last vestiges of vaudeville in the Catskills. He later got into advertising and eventually started his own company. He was quite the character, but drank to excess, so much so that in later life he had giant mood swings and suicidal thoughts. There was once a shoot for a client’s commercial that involved someone dressed in a bear costume. Gary played the bear. The shoot was outside, in the summer, and the heat was, let’s just say, unbearable. Gary was getting annoyed that the shoot was taking longer than anticipated, and he seemed some combination of mad, tired and depressed. He kept saying, “can we get this done so I can go home and take off this bear suit?!” Since that day, whenever I have a hard day or I’m going through difficult times, I always think that I just want to “go home and take off the bear suit.” It just means not knowing how long you can continuing putting up a good front before you just collapse in tears or despair.

Around eight months later, I was going in to our offices on a Saturday to finish a video edit that had to FedEx’ed to a client before the end of day to hit a deadline. (This was before video went digital and you still worked with video tape.) As I walked in, I noticed Gary’s Cadillac parked in the lot. I didn’t see him inside the office but it wasn’t unusual for people to meet there and get in one car to head out to lunch or to meet a client. After I had been working for several hours, another employee showed up. He parked directly next to Gary’s car, so he saw inside. Gary had pulled into the parking lot and killed himself with a shotgun.

There were a few other people working that day, and word got up to me that Gary had committed suicide in the parking lot. The police had been called, one employee started calling the creative director and Gary’s sister who was the office manager. I continued editing. The company had an archivist/gopher/annoying idiot who burst into the edit bay in a panic. “What are you doing? Gary is dead!! Stop working!!” I said, “Gary might be dead, but we still have clients that are depending on this video and I only have an hour to finish it, so get the fuck out of this room.” The idiot’s name was Preston and he was a complete twit. (I challenge you to find anyone named Preston who isn’t a complete twit.)

I finished the edit, got the tape to Fed Ex and held my shit together. I was going out to dinner with my girlfriend that night, and as much as I had held shit together earlier, when I got to her apartment, that’s when I went into shock. I had a blank stare on my face and she could tell something was wrong. I told her what happened and collapsed in her arms.

I managed to get through work this week by staying busy and not talking to anyone about Olive. I listened to podcast after podcast on the way to and from work. When I would get home, I would immediately keep my brain occupied by watching hours and hours of tv until it was time to go to sleep. (thank you AMC for the Mad Men marathon!)

There were times I would start to tear up, but then try to think of something else. And then this happened: even thought I didn’t have much of an appetite, I was heating up something for dinner in the microwave. 1 minute, 30 seconds of cooking time. As soon as I hit “start,” I was left with just my thoughts for 1:30. As I stared at the food spinning, and the clock counting down, I burst into tears. I cried uncontrollably for the entire 1:30. And then the “finish” sound chimed. I took out my food and went to eat, knowing that I wouldn’t be saving the last bite for Olive, who would always sit patiently in the same spot every time. I called it her “waiting spot.” Sometimes she would get in it before I was even through cooking, knowing she was soon to get a little treat.

I don’t know that I’ve ever truly been happy. I don’t think anyone has. Not in the long-term sense of the word. I’ve had moments of happiness, and times in my life that were better than other times, but I don’t think I’ve ever been happy for long, sustained periods of time. I don’t think that’s even possible. I think sometimes people confuse the word “content” with “happy.” You can be content and perfectly fine with your life, and “happy” with your marriage or family or job in general, but real happiness to me implies something else and it’s difficult to feel true happiness except in specific moments. Maybe seeing your favorite band play your favorite song, or witnessing the birth of your child. Moments, not lifetimes. Most of your life is searching for those moments and hoping the feeling lasts until the next one.

That may be why I cry more at things that are happy than things that are sad. One of the dumbest things I ever teared up at was the movie Working Girl. When Melanie Griffith gets her large office at the end of the film after mistakenly thinking she was hired to be a secretary, I tear up. Because it’s a moment of true happiness. When actors have to cry on camera, they often use a technique in which they think about something from their real life. If I ever had to cry on camera, all I would have to do is think of one phrase, “forever home.” Maybe that’s because no matter how many women I’ve loved and lived with, or how many fun adventures I’ve had in my life, I’ve never really felt like I’ve had a forever home. And when a doggie gets one, it makes me cry. Cause doggies deserve to have one.

Olive used to love lying in the sunlight. Any sunlight. She was a master at finding any sliver of sunlight coming in through a window or leaking through blinds. It could be an inch wide, and she would find it and plant herself there. Finding moments of happiness is like finding that sliver of sun. It’s like trying to catch a fleeting ray of light in your hands. It’s hard to do. But you get one of those moments every time you pet a doggie.

I’ve been through this before, so I’m sure I’ll be fine with time. But for now, I just miss my little buddy and I’m untethered.

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In the fall of 1997, Susan Hendricks was walking in the woods behind her house. She stumbled upon her dead husband. Rick Hendricks had been dead for several days. Someone had taken his body to the woods and placed him in a large box. Makeup had been smeared across his face. Susan went back to her home and gathered her two children, Maggie and Tyler. She knocked on neighbors’ doors and implored them to come with her. The Hendricks family and this group of friends went back to the woods, formed a line, and one by one, they walked up to the dead body and quietly stared at it. One of Susan’s neighbors, a real estate agent named Ted, sang a somber hymn. Susan’s children, not quite understanding what was happening, cried as they were led by their mom up to the dead body.

I made up that whole thing. But that’s what a funeral is.

The tradition of a typical funeral is one of the weirdest damn things I’ve ever seen. Here’s the thing: there are many traditions that people take part in every day without ever questioning why. They just know it’s what’s always done. I don’t accept that. My brain instinctively looks for the logic in any situation. So, let’s take a look at some dumb-ass traditions that have outlived their usefulness and we’ll start with funerals.

FUNERALS

I don’t want to see a dead body. This isn’t fucking Stand By Me. I would much rather attend a wake. Family and friends gather to tell stories and celebrate the life of the deceased, not to awkwardly stagger up to a dead body that has been slathered with more unnatural makeup than any contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Anytime I’m at a funeral, all I think about is WHY ARE WE ALL STANDING IN A ROOM WITH A DEAD BODY??? Geez, the whole thing is creepy as fuck.

Then there’s the tradition of burying the dead body in the ground. If you watch a lot of cowboy/mafia movies/tv shows, there’s always a part where someone gets killed in the middle of nowhere, the is being are being pursued, but they take the time to bury the body. Dude, the guy’s dead. He doesn’t care. Leave it there and get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak. Now, I’m not saying we should just leave bodies in the middle of the street for stray dogs to play with, but having a funeral and burying the body is such a racket that the surviving family members could go into serious debt. I think all bodies should be donated to science or cremated, both of which take up a lot less real estate. And here’s the big upside: if a dead body is cremated, there’s no body to rise from the grave during the zombie apocalypse. Use your brains, people, before they get eaten.

I was one the people who spoke at my father’s funeral. I made a few jokes about my cousins, I told some funny stories about my dad. No reaction at all. Just a crowd of relatives sitting in morbid silence. Afterwards, there was a gathering at my aunt’s house. All of a sudden, relatives were coming up to me talking about the stories I told and offering some of their own. They were laughing and celebrating my father’s life. Why did they not react this way at the actual funeral? I’ll tell ya why: CAUSE THERE WAS A DEAD BODY IN THE ROOM! It’s hard to have any kind of fun with a dead body in the room. Just ask some of my ex-girlfriends.

SHAKING HANDS

What a load of horse shit. Why do I want to touch a body part of someone I just met? Answer: I don’t. Maybe if the rules were changed a little, I might find it more acceptable. Like if you were meeting the CEO of a potential client and she was a woman, you could honk her boob and it would be a sign of respect. I would be down for that.

The origin of the handshake goes back thousands of years and was a sign that you meant no harm. It was literally showing that you had no weapon in your hand. You would think that at some point in history, someone would say “hey, we don’t walk around with pistols or swords in our hands anymore, so we can probably lay off the handshake stupidity.” Nope. That’s never happened. People continue to shake hands even though no one (except for the disgruntled) is bringing a gun to a business meeting.

The best thing about Covid it that, for a tiny sliver of time, people stopped shaking hands. It took a literal chance of death to put a pause on this dumb tradition. But bros couldn’t wait for the first “thumbs up” to start shaking hands again.

Why is shaking hands so accepted? What sense does it make to touch someone you just met. I don’t like to be touched unless it’s in a romantic way. Or maybe a friend giving me a hug when I’m down. Other than that, WHY DO I HAVE TO TOUCH ALL OF THESE PEOPLE? Most of whom I don’t want to touch in any way. What if when you met someone, instead of a handshake, you take your hand and put it on their face like you were Spock doing a Vulcan mind meld. People would think that is weird. How is that weirder than a handshake?

If the handshake wasn’t stupid enough in modern times, frat boys trying to be alpha males developed two variations: the high five and the fist bump. The idea behind the fist bump, in the mind of the guy initiating it, is that he is being cool. (He’s not.) He’s thinking, “hey, we do the handshake thing, but I’m a cool guy so I’m going to fist bump to let you know I’m a cool guy.” (Again, he’s not.) I’m actually a cool guy. I’ve made a lot of cool friends in my lifetime. None of us want to fist bump. Wanna know, why? Cause fist bumping isn’t cool. It’s desperate. A fist bump is taking a handshake and adding the element of “hey, I’m not some old dude, I’m a hip dude! Please think I’m hip!”

There’s a weird handshake tradition among professional wrestlers that really ups the weird factor. It’s a tradition that if you are a professional wrestler, and you walk into the locker room for the first time that night at a show, you must walk around and shake everyone’s hand. It’s seen as a sign of respect and older wrestlers get highly offended if you don’t do this. So you walk into the dressing room and there’s the Undertaker, half naked and taping up his swollen knee. Maybe he just rubbed baby oil all over his body. Maybe he just spread some hemorrhoid cream all over his broken-down ass. And now you have to shake his hand? Fuck that noise. Undertaker can get as offended as he wants. Wrestlers are such pussies.

GOD BLESS YOU WHEN SOMEONE SNEEZES

This tradition started when people were dumber than they are now (relatively.) Morons thought that when you sneezed, your soul was attempting to escape your body. Thus, when you sneezed, someone would say “God bless you” so that you would not lose your soul. This was probably around the time doctors used leeches. We now realize that sneezing is less your soul making a run for it and more you having a pollen allergy. So why do people still say it?

First of all, it’s kind of annoying. So, I’m at work and I sneeze. Someone says “God bless you.” Now all of a sudden, I have an obligation to say “thank you.” Maybe I sneeze a second time. Here comes another “God bless you.” Now I have to say “thank you” again. The whole routine is a pain in the ass. I’m just sneezing. Please leave me alone.

And why don’t people say “God bless you” when you cough? It’s the same thing as sneezing except from another orifice. Sneezing and coughing is just your body trying to expel some irritant (definitely not your soul.) What about if I’m a little gassy and I just let one rip. Shouldn’t I get a “bless you?” Maybe my soul is trying to escape out my butt.

And what about the “God” part of this. I’m agnostic which is atheist adjacent. It means that I don’t 100% rule out there being some higher power or spiritual connection, but I don’t believe in God the way that’s it’s presented. I also don’t believe in Zeus, Thor, or Groot. I don’t have a problem with people being religious or spiritual or dancing nude in the forest, or handling snakes, or whatever voodoo you gonna do. Most of my issues are with organized religion (I’m looking at you Catholic Church) but that’s a discussion for some other time. All I’m saying is that since I’m agnostic, the phrase “God bless you” means nothing to me. You might as well be saying “Batman bless you” or “Harry Potter bless you.”

THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

Throughout my entire elementary and high school education, everyday I stood at my desk, looked at an American flag hanging at the front of my classroom, and joined my classmates in robotically reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. As I grew into an adult and attended college, I looked back at this and thought “what the hell was that Hitler youth, indoctrination bullshit?” I just couldn’t see the logic and/or need to pledge my loyalty to the United States of America on a daily basis. I love my dog but do I stand up straight, look at her doggie bed and say a pledge to her everyday? No, she knows the score.

Let’s take a logical look at the pledge. Let’s pretend you live in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Maybe one of you does.) How would you feel about starting each day by pledging allegiance to Scottsdale? You would say, “get the fuck outta here.” You just happen to live in Scottsdale. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. Maybe you just live your life there, adhere to the laws, and contribute to society. Maybe one day you hope to move to St. Louis. Anyway, if cops came by your condo every day and forced you to pledge allegiance to Scottsdale, you would be moving up the calendar on going to St. Louis. Let’s zoom out in the map some. Scottsdale is in Maricopa County. Would you ever think about pledging to Maricopa County. No, of course not. Zoom out more and think about pledging allegiance to Arizona. Nope on that. You can live in a place, maybe you don’t even like that place, but you aren’t trying to overthrow Arizona. Zoom out some more and you get the whole country. Now you’re suppose to pledge. Can we zoom out even more, cause I would probably pledge allegiance to Earth. Unless, Mars offers me asylum and then I would have to reconsider.

I am not currently and don’t plan on conspiring with a hostile foreign country to overthrow or damage the United States of America. That’s a job for our politicians. BAM! Ok, I just live here. I think there are countries that are better than the US. There are some that are worse. But I’m not doing some idiotic pledge like I’m a warrior in Braveheart. And to what exactly am I pledging? The country that massacred Native Americans and stole their land? The country that imported actual human beings from Africa to be slaves? The country that freed the slaves, but then segregated them and treated them like second class citizens? The country that made them drink from separate water fountains and made them ride in the back of the bus? That country? It’s like if you worked on the Death Star and were forced to pledge allegiance to Darth Vader. You might do it so he won’t dark force you to death, but you and your buddies would be saying “Hey, I was all about pledging allegiance to Vader, but that thing he did to Alderaan was fucked up.”

Then we have the whole God think again. “Under God” was not originally part of the pledge, probably due to that whole separation of church and state thing. This country was founded on freedom of religion, as long as that religion is some form of Christianity, I suppose. The phrase “under God” as in “one nation under God” wasn’t originally in the pledge. It was added in 1954 in a bill signed by President Dwight Eisenhower. So, me being agnostic, why would I recite a pledge that says this country is “under God.” It’s all just a little bit too cult-like for my tastes.

However, now that I’m thinking about it, there is a way that I might gladly recite the pledge. If you replaced “one nation, under God” with “one nation, under Batman” then I might be down with that. Cause Batman is cool. And he never blew up Alderaan.

Many, and I mean many, years ago I had some friends in town and they wanted to go out to a blues club located in a heavy tourist area. The line out front was long, and as we got close to the door, we could hear the non-stop barking of the doorman/bouncer: “everyone get out your id’s before you get up here! I’ll need to see your ID! I don’t care how old you are, I’ll need to see your ID! I don’t care if you’re old enough to be Moses, get out that ID!” When I reached the front, I started to hold up my driver’s license and he said, without even looking at my ID, “oh, you’re good, go ahead on in.” WTF?!

Now that I’m exiting middle age and entering an age where I get unsolicited mailers for retirement communities (which actually look appealing cause I’m tired,) I thought I would explain to you younger folk what to expect as you’re getting older and how to spot the signs of really being an old fuck.

Not too long ago, I was seeing a 26-year-old woman. Throughout my life, I have dated older women, women my same age, and younger women, although this was the biggest age gap of them all and by a wide margin. We knew we weren’t going to be a long-term thing, but I still shouldn’t have gotten involved with her. One of the reasons I did was somewhat like George Castanza on Seinfeld, who in an episode was abstaining from sex but found himself with an opportunity to hook up with a Portuguese waitress who didn’t speak English. George said, “I calculated my odds of ever getting together with a Portuguese waitress. Mathematically, I had to do it, Jerry.” I calculated the mathematical odds of me ever hooking up with someone that much younger than me again, and, like George, I just had to do it.

We had flirted and messed around in some very questionable public locations, but I was going over to her house for the first time and full-on shenanigans were about to ensue. I had to sneeze at one point and asked her where her box of Kleenex was. She didn’t have any tissue, she just went to the bathroom and got a roll of toilet paper. I also noticed when I was washing my hands in her bathroom that she didn’t have a hand towel hanging. I suppose she just dried her hands on the bath towel she used that morning. There were other things like this that made me think that although she was 26, she was not an adult. I’m not saying I didn’t do things like that in my 20’s, I’m just saying that she wasn’t an adult and at the time I probably wasn’t either.

You would think that sex with a much younger, very pretty woman would be wild. It wasn’t. She wasn’t wearing anything special when I got there, not that she was required to, but it seems she went out of her way to dress like a 13-year-old boy going to gym class. She also wasn’t very passionate. She certainly liked sex, but it seemed very mechanical and almost more like a school-girl crush that involved a random dick. Many of you know that when a dude is in his teens and 20’s, his penis gets erect at the drop of a hat, literally. A woman could take her hat off and a young dude will get a boner. When you get older, you stop getting random hard-ons and things are much more situational. And it takes a lot more concentration to just get an erection, much less keep one. That’s why I like to “get into character” so to speak. This was difficult, if not impossible, with her. Especially with her pets. She had a very large dog named Boomer (not the dog’s real name. Even dogs get to be anonymous in my articles) and a semi-feral cat. I absolutely love dogs and cats, so this is nothing against them, but she had no control at all over them. So, we’re getting at it, and Boomer, naturally, tries to get in the middle of things. She then would scream his name out to get him to stop. “Boomer. Boooooo-mer!!! Boomer!! Buhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmer!!” This was very distracting and was not exactly the sexiest thing ever. It didn’t help my concentration at all. So, we moved to the bed. Boomer is up and down, and in the bed and out of the bed. The cat is in the other room knocking over all kinds of unknown shit off the counter accompanied by loud crashing sounds. Then there was the constant “Boooo-mer!!” At one point, I couldn’t take it and just screamed out “Oh, my god, this is like trying to fuck Dr. Doolittle!!” And of course, I’m so funny, that when I said that she started laughing hysterically and then so did I, and none of that helped anything in the sex department.

It’s hard being an older guy who isn’t mentally an older guy. I think like a young guy but my body can’t do young guy stuff as often. When it comes to a relationship, I’m always looking for a partner in crime. Someone who doesn’t sit around knitting hats. But also someone who doesn’t want to be partying every night. Just some nights. I saw a Christmas post on social media that said “I’m just going to jingle some of the way. I’m tired.”

I believe that no one over the age of 60 should be able to hold political office. Just take a look at some of these useless, doddering, senile idiots on both sides of the aisle. Mitch McConnell falls over more often than a frat boy stumbling out of Pat O’Brien’s and appears to have more strokes than Tiger Woods. Ancient Nancy Pelosi recently fought the younger democratic leadership in support of 74 year old Gerry Connolly, who was recently diagnosed with esophagus cancer. Both Trump and Biden are at an age where if they were your grandfather, you wouldn’t trust them with the car keys or even the tv remote.

Rock stars getting older is a mixed bag. They can be really old, but still pull younger chicks, much in the same way I can date younger women due to my sense of humor and confidence. Mick Jagger can probably date whoever he wants. I personally think the country/folk singer Emmy Lou Harris gets more beautiful the older she gets.

I once made a joke on Threads (back when I still used Threads) that involved Mike Reno of the 80’s rock band Loverboy.

Seems Mike had been videoed as he recently hopped onto stage at some random tavern to sing a tune with the band. Here’s a screengrab from that video.

The caption is what I posted on Threads. It was just a joke about how a dude that wore red leather pants and a headband in the 80’s now looks like a dad or a granddad. Which he probably is. It wasn’t to say that he should look any different or try to hold on to past glories. In fact, if he had been in red leather pants, then I would have made fun of him. The joke was just that the 80’s are over. People are older. I don’t wear the same things now that I did in my 20’s. My hair doesn’t look the same. Let me show you a pic of me from the early 90’s. My girlfriend at the time was going to school to be a hair stylist. She wanted to put blonde highlights in my hair. She put that Jiffy Pop thing on my head and then violently stabbed my skull with what seemed like assassin knitting needles to pull hair strands out to be dyed. Then my hair grew and my roots got out of control before I re-dyed my hair. Here we go:

A rock star that did not age gracefully was John Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls. (you might remember them from their 1998 hit “Iris.”) Take a look at this dude. He looks like Lucille Ball decided to get three facelifts, multiple Botox injections, and then was in a car accident with a Mary Kay representative.

There was a week in the 90’s where I went to two concerts at the same venue in the same week. I was the youngest person in attendance at one and the oldest person at the other. (I was the youngest at Leon Redbone and the oldest at Julianna Hatfield.)

Here are some signs that you are getting older:

You stopped listening to new bands 10 years ago. My brother has a Spotify account and every time I’ve heard him listening to it, there is a 100% chance that it’s a Del Amitri song. He just reached an age (and he’s younger than me) that he stopped discovering new bands and music.

I once worked with a guy whose favorite band was Cheap Trick. The most current band he listened to was Green Day, and this was back during Dookie. Any band that came after that, he’s never heard of.

Look at your parents. I bet you a house that you can specifically tell me when they stopped listening to any new music. Probably somewhere around the last time Steely Dan put out an album.

One of the things that keeps me mentally young is that I’m constantly listening to new music as well as the old. During covid, there was an 8 month period where everyone at my company worked from home. We talked to each other on G-Chat all day about work things but were not there in person. There were people hired that I worked with that I had never met. My love of music and awareness of pop culture was such that, after making jokes on the chat about Cardi B and WAP and other current things, there was a young woman who was convinced that I was a black man in my 20’s. She was fucking floored when she found out I was an old white dude.

Speaking of music, one good thing about getting older is that if you are into music, you’ve seen a lot of cool bands. Here are just a few of the older bands/dead people I saw live in my lifetime: Johnny Cash, Prince, The Kinks, Rolling Stones, Cheap Trick, X, Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, Wilson Picket, Journey (with Steve Perry,) Go-Go’s, Guns N Roses (original run,) Motley Crue (Girls, Girls, Girls Tour) Styx (Mr. Roboto Tour), Devo, Elvis Costello, Social Distortion. But I’ve also seen a lot of current acts like P!nk, Die Antwoord, Janelle Monae, and too many to list.

You’re getting older if you talk about things that you have to do to survive as accomplishments as opposed as shit you gotta do. The grass in your yard gets too high, you have to mow it. What you don’t have to do is talk about what a great job you did, or what weed killer you’re using, or how you think the neighborhood association should get off your back. That’s old people shit. The only thing young people think about a lawn is that it’s a great place to drunkenly pass out on if you can’t make it to the house. (quote from a friend from high school as me and my brother tried to drag his drunk ass into his parents’ house: “just leave me here on the lawn. It’ll be fine. Just leave me here. It feels soft.” BTW, it was 25 degrees out.)

You know how young people view eating? They get hungry and they eat. Sure, they might have favorite foods or restaurants, but when the meal is done, the meal is done. You don’t hear a young person talking for 30 minutes about a pork chop they had two hours ago. That’s old people shit. Wanna see an perfect example of an old person? If you are married, just listen to your husband after he does the dishes or takes out the trash. Ya know, stuff you just gotta do. He’ll go on and on about what a good job he did. Spoiler alert: no one cares. Old people talk way too long and passionately about what amounts to odd jobs.

Another thing that happens when you get old is your stories get worse. When you’re young, you create a new story every weekend. When you’re old, you may get a new, good story three times a year, depending on how much you drink and how many 26 year olds you’re fucking. And then there’s the injury stories. If you get hurt when you’re young, there’s always a good story to go with it.

“Hey, how did you hurt your arm”

“Oh, that was nothing. I was drinking Jack Daniels and decided I could jump over three cars on a dirt bike using a cardboard box as a ramp and then some drunk gal jumped in my way and I took off wrong, hit a car, and spontaneously burst into flames. No big deal.”

When you are old, here’s the story:

“Hey, how did you hurt your arm?”

“I turned around.”

Men have never gone bald with grace. I have the right genes for not going bald. I have a high hairline, but I don’t have a bald spot on top at all. If I wanted, I could still grow my hair out and make it all rock n roll. Most guys, however, go bald as they age. The thing they used to do, when a full head of hair was valued, was the dreaded combover. Or the fake looking toupee. Neither fooled anyone. Today, men make a preemptive strike. The minute, and I mean the fucking minute, they start to go bald, they shave their head, like it’s a style choice and not rampant hair loss. What a bunch of pussies. Be a man and go bald with grace. Keep that hair as long as possible. Put up a goddamn fight.

Back in the 70’s and 80’s, losing your hair and/or going bald had such a stigma attached that wrestling promotions made big money on “hair vs. hair” matches in which the loser got his head shaved in the middle of the ring in the ultimate act of humiliation. Professional wrestlers Jerry “The King” Lawler and Bill “Superstar” Dundee had a hair vs. hair match in which Dundee lost. The following week, Dundee put up his wife’s hair and lost again. So the crowd at the Memphis Mid-South Coliseum got to see a woman shaved bald. (the wrestlers, and wife in this case, got paid a premium to lost their hair.)

One of the things I do as I get older is reverse things I did when I was young. When I was young, I made more and more friends every year. Now I try to reverse that and cull down that friend list into a manageable and more meaningful group of people. They say you come into the world alone. I guess I’m looking to go out that way. I block people on social media all the time. I’m looking forward to do that in real life. I’m looking to better my experience. I remember that when I was young, I would sit through so much bullshit on a dinner date if there was even a chance I might get laid. Now, I have such little patience (and know I can get laid any time I want) that I might not even make it through the salad before throwing in the towel.

I once worked with a guy several years younger than me, but had a real old man esthetic. He got mad with the proprietor of a glasses shop and told him, and I quote, “go shit in your hat.” I’ve never forgotten that phrase since he told me the story. The Frank Burns character on MASH had a lot of similar sayings. Barney on The Andy Griffith Show was right in there. Just dumb phrases/insults that sound like they are from 1930. So I decided to come up with some. We’ll start with the original and go from there:

1. Go shit in your hat.

2. Go zip up your trousers.

3. why don’t you go set the table

4. tell your mom to go perm her hair

5. you and your buddy can go round up your payment for charity

6. go throw your shoes in a corner

7. asshole, you can go steam clean your curtains

8. listen, lady, why don’t you go flatten your curls

9. all of you people can go rotate your tires

10. listen, why don’t you go shoot a CEO

I think a good way to end this article about getting old is for me to post some pics from throughout the years. You can get a visual of me aging. And I hope I can get all of these posted before my bedtime.

BONUS CONTENT!

You may have found that as you get older, you get more into cooking and cooking appliances. A very entertaining friend on Bluesky posted about this doohickey called Rotato which effortlessly peels your potatoes. I had never heard of it and found it interesting, so I looked it up on YouTube and found the most fucking bizarre product review I’ve ever seen. Here it is:

There’s a scene in Arthur Penn’s 1967 masterpiece film Bonnie and Clyde in which the titular characters are having fun shooting at an abandoned house. The previous owner, a worn-down and no-nonsense farmer, shows up with his sad family for one last look. He and his farm hand had spent years working the land, but the depression was here, and the bank foreclosed on his farm, forcing his family to move to whoever the hell knows where. Normally if you stumbled across the most notorious criminals in the country, you might be given pause. But when Clyde offers his gun so the farmer can get in a couple of shots at the house the bank took from him, he accepts the bandit’s offer and fires away. As the farmer leaves, Clyde proudly says, with an enormous grin, “we rob banks.” The farmer gives him a slight look of approval and in this small moment, the bank robbers become anti-heroes. They may be criminals, but they never forced a family out of their home. The bank did that. (The farmer was so wooden and realistic, that I’m not even convinced it was an actor. Maybe the producers just drove way out into the country and picked the first old, crusty fuck they found.)

The movie glamorized the duo in many ways, but the biggest was the casting of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, two of the biggest, and best looking, movie stars at the time. The real Bonnie and Clyde, known in the 30’s as “Barrow and his gun mol” were not as glamorous. Both walked with a limp, Clyde because he cut off some toes to get out of hard labor during a prison stay, Bonnie due to a car accident which also gave her serious burns.

The Depression-era public became fascinated by Bonnie and Clyde due to a combination of hatred for the banks foreclosing on their homes, their employers taking advantage of them, and a series of photos found on a camera left behind by Bonnie during a panicked getaway. Newspapers across the country published the photos, some of them considered scandalous, which resulted in even more interest and even support for the bank robbing pair. (Bonnie and Clyde robbed very few banks and mostly robbed gas stations and drug stores.)

On December 4, 2024, 50-year old Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot and killed outside of the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel. Brian was attending the annual investors’ meeting for his company, a meeting in which I’m sure he was going to extol the massive amount of money the company made that year, in part by denying claims of suffering people, possibly costing them their lives.

Here’s the thing. A man was murdered and not a lot of people cared. Healthcare insurance in this country is so fucked up that people just saw the same thing as the farmer in Bonnie and Clyde. The public accepted the gun and shot at the house.

I’m not here today to spend time arguing whether or not we should have universal healthcare. (For the record, I’m in favor of it. Pennsylvania’s governor Josh Shapiro said of the CEO murder: “Violence can never be used to try to prove some point. That is not what we do in a civilized society.” Well, a civilized society would have universal health care. Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. What country is missing from that list?)

What I’m more interested in is the reaction to the CEO shooting and the question “are we obligated to care about everyone who gets killed?”

I certainly don’t condone murder, well, for the most part. Do I think someone should have murdered Brian Thompson? No. Do I care that someone did? Again, no. This man was the head of a profit-mongering corporation that for the sake of investors and their bonuses, let people suffer and/or die. Sure, he may have been a great guy to work with. Maybe he was a great dad and fantastic husband. But he led a company that casually traded other people’s pain for money. I wasn’t glad that it happened, I wouldn’t have done it, but I didn’t shed a tear.

On December 7, 1941, Japan carried out an attack on Pearl Harbor, an American naval base, and brought the United States into World War 2. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cites Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between 150,000 and 246,000 people were killed. Most of them were civilians.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack on Israel which killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians. Israel responded with sustained attacks on Gaza which killed over 40,000 Palestinians, more than half of which were women and children.

If the CEO killer had been wronged by insurance companies, was his response proportional and/or just, especially compared with the two examples above? Just something to think about for 3 hours the next time you’re high.

I didn’t watch the first John Wick movie for years because they killed his dog. I cared more about the killing of a fictional dog than I did a real-life CEO. Did Brian Thompson deserve to die? In the movie Unforgiven Clint Eastwood’s character William Munny has the upper hand with Gene Hackman’s Little Bill, who says “I don’t deserve to die.” Munny replies “Deserves got nothing to do with it.” Earlier in the film, after killing several people, the Schofield Kid says “Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.” Munny replies, “we all have it coming, kid.”

The NYPD began a manhunt for the killer which mostly just involved police walking around Central Park with the urgency of your jackass friend trying to help you find your lost keys. A department spokesperson said that officers had been “driving around” and that they have “never seen this level of operational sophistication.” I have a feeling Don Knotts and Tim Conway robbing a bank would be too sophisticated for their operations.

26-year-old Luigi Mangione (no relation to Chuck) was arrested at a McDonald’s in PA after “acting suspicious” and was charged in connection to the murder of Brian Thompson. Before he was arrested, photos floated around, and he became a modern-day version of Bonnie and Clyde. People began rooting for him to get away. The public followed every twist and turn in the case. And a lot of people didn’t care that he may have possibly murdered someone.

Gov. Josh Shapiro also stated, “In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this. He is no hero.” Actually, he might be. My cousin told me that Luigi was one of the X-Men, and my cousin is usually right about this kind of stuff.

The mainstream media, instead of publishing investigative pieces on why he may have committed this murder and how it could have been avoided, flooded the public with articles about how good looking the suspect is and why that may have contributed to people supporting him. Yes, Idris Elba could murder anyone he wanted and because he’s so handsome, people would be ok with it. “Susan, let me tell ya, that Idris Elba walked in and shot my entire family, but goddamn, he’s just so yummy!”

The New York Times published a piece titled “Luigi Mangione and the Danger of a Handsome Criminal.” The New York Times pays its employees to write shit that even People Magazine would be embarrassed to publish. Could someone please provide me with a list of crimes I’m good looking enough to get away with? I know I’m not CEO-killing handsome, but do you guys think I could get away with something like passing bad checks?

Luigi Mangione has plead not guilty to the crimes. Attorneys on both sides are in preliminary arguments over whether to allow those gorgeous eyebrows into evidence.

After Luigi had been arrested, NBC news reported that he had “once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins.” The game? Among Us. It’s a multi-player game where you’re roaming around different rooms in a spaceship. Each player is either a Crewmate or an Imposter. The Crewmates complete menial tasks while trying to figure out who the Imposters are, before the Imposters kill you. If you don’t know the game, here’s a screenshot.

Among Us isn’t Assassins Creed or Call of Duty. It’s a game that’s barely more realistic than Pac Man. It’s like if someone was murdered by a candlestick and the police looked into people that had played the board game Clue. Maybe the police thought Luigi was hiding out in a rural area because they might have found Farmville on his phone.

Police found shell casings at the scene. Three casings with the words Delay, Deny, Depose etched into them. Those words are in reference to a common insurance company strategy. Shortly after the killing, Author Jay Feinman’s book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It” rocketed up Amazon’s non-fiction bestseller list. It’s like Oprah’s Book Club but with more murder.

A 42-year old mother of three was recently charged with threats to conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism after she was denied a medical claim. While on a phone call with Blue Cross Blue Shield, she said, “Delay, Deny, Depose. You people are next.” That’s the frustration level people have with healthcare insurance these days. Next time she emails in a claim, she should probably attach this photo.

Another journalist who has gotten a lot of attention lately is Ken Klippenstein who has been covering the shooting and mainstream media’s reaction to it. (Ken has a newsletter on Substack and you can find it here.) Ken was one of the few people to publish the “manifesto” found in Luigi’s possession. Most newspapers refused to publish it in full, only using select quotes, under the guise of not giving Luigi any undue positive publicity. Well, outside of what a smoke show he is.

Yes, you probably saw this coming, but here’s the complete manifesto. By the way, it’s really too short to be called a manifesto. It’s more like a post you could put on Bluesky in a short thread. Once again, shoutout to the excellent work by Ken Klippenstein.

To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

Not exactly a raving lunatic. I’ve seen more unhinged writing on relatives’ Facebook pages.

I’m assuming the public will be spellbound by Luigi’s eventual trial. And it won’t be because of his rizz and his drip. It’ll be because either you or someone you know once had a horrible experience with healthcare insurance. Wanted posters have sprung up in New York featuring other CEO’s, and articles have been written about the escalating costs of keeping rich people safe. Some UnitedHealthcare employees spoke out about their anxiety over more potential shootings. If they need some advice about being targets of shootings, maybe they should speak with ANY GODDAMN THIRD GRADER, cause kids have been dealing with this this on a daily basis for years. And the fact that there are murders everyday that get nowhere close to the amount of coverage or police action that a rich CEO’s murder does, doesn’t help in making your average person root for the Bonnie and Clyde types less.

If Arthur Penn had made Bonnie and Clyde in 2024, I imagine that when the farmer took the gun from Clyde and started shooting at his foreclosed home, he may have uttered the line “fuck around and find out.”

BONUS CONTENT! Every time I hear the term CEO these days, the first thing that pops into my head is the entrance music for AEW wrestler Mercedes Mone (known as Sasha Banks when she was in WWE.) She even has a little dance for it!

The Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight was made for social media, which is good, because it sure wasn’t made for boxing fans. People from all over the world streamed the most boring train-wreck in history, so much so that Netflix crashed about a gazillion times. I, myself, made jokes about the debacle on social media such as “It was like a boxing match except without the punches.” However, my two favorite jokes came from people other than me, which is unusual. One person said that since it was crashing so much, he would just have Netflix mail it to him. The other person posted “HBO: Michael Buffer. Showtime: Bruce Buffer. Netflix: Network Buffer.” (you can tell I’m old because during the fight, they cut to an aerial shot of AT&T Stadium and my first thought was “ugh, that parking lot looks like a nightmare.”)

A fun use of social media is posting during a live event. A fight, an awards show, a sports event, an election, a war. Anything that attracts millions of viewers is perfect for platforms like Twitter, where you can live tweet your thoughts and share the evening with a group of strangers. It’s like having people over to watch the Super Bowl on tv, but instead of your close friends, it’s maybe your boss’s cousin, your mailman and perhaps a dude you met in an Aldi’s parking lot.

Social media can also be a nightmare. Let’s run through social media sites, past and present, and by all means, feel free to tweet, or skeet, or threet, or plop, squish and splatter your thoughts on-line as you read.

AOL

One of my first internet experiences came on AOL, which was short for the obvious and possibly xenophobic name American Online Company.  In order to use it, you had to load an AOL disc into your computer.

AOL let you visit websites, chat with total strangers, play trivia real time with people all over the country and listen to music. It was the Dave & Buster’s of the internet.  Due to a mutual interest in the writings of Dorothy Parker, I regularly chatted with a woman who lived in San Francisco and was an editor for a PC magazine. I remember her chatting with me about a first date she was going on. The night of the date, she saw I was on-line and messaged me. I asked, “aren’t you supposed to be on a date?”  and she replied “it didn’t go that well. I couldn’t stand him.”

AOL was fun at the time, but it was very much it’s own little world.

LIVE JOURNAL

I never really used Live Journal, which was, as the name implies, a journal. You made entries like you would in a diary. No pics as far as I remember. No music, no chats, no real interaction. People could just log on and read about your sad little life.

Back then I was a manager at a record store. One of the employees was a tall, redheaded dude who was generally a nice guy but very socially awkward. One time I was talking to a cute gal in the store. We were obviously having a conversation. The guy walked over to us, way too close. He was both lurking and looming. As soon as there was a slight pause in the conversation, he said, apropos of nothing, “who let the frogs out? Ribbit, ribbit.” Jesus Christ.  Another time he put a flyer on the employee bulletin board inviting all of us to his upcoming birthday party.  It was the first party invitation I ever saw that had a set of rules. He lived with his mom and she didn’t allow liquor in the house. You also had to be quiet because, again, mom. Obviously, I wasn’t going due to the no-liquor at the party rule.  I quickly forgot about the whole thing. Then one day, I was standing with him and some other coworkers. He said, “nobody came.” We’re all like “what?”  He said, “nobody came. Nobody came to my party.”  I pictured him at the kitchen table, wearing one of those ridiculous party hats, with his mom consoling him. He, of course, had a Live Journal which some of us found. It was both funny and sad.

(Just in case you were feeling sorry for him, he soon met a really pretty woman, started dating her, married her and, although I haven’t seen or spoken to him in over a decade, I assume he’s living a very happy life.)

MY SPACE

My Space was hot shit for a while. You had your own profile page which you could customize, which meant that millions of people with no sense of design choose some hideous background that was so busy, you couldn’t read any of the text. When you went to a friend’s profile, you were greeted by some horrible, automatically-played song by probably Blink 182.  You could read their posts, which were shorter than Live Journal entries but longer than Tweets. You could make comments like “you suck, dickhead! LOL”

The best thing about My Space was your top 8 friends listing. Your profile had a prominently-placed block featuring your top friends and you got to choose who they were and where they were ranked. Moving your friends in and out of your rankings provided way more entertainment than you would imagine. Try dating some gal and then move her out of your top 8 and see what kind of shit you would be in.

I miss My Space, even with all of its dumb black backgrounds with brown text you couldn’t see, and unicorns and confetti floating all around. It was your junior high notebook come to life.

FACEBOOK

Facebook was founded by some college dork who used it to rate the “hotness” of college women, the vast majority of whom he could never had gotten in the sack until he became a billionaire, and even then, it was questionable.

Facebook started as a less busy and more organized My Space. I remember, just like with social media today, when I made the change to Facebook. I had to wait for and/or cajole my friends into coming on the site. Before too long, Facebook was VHS and My Space was Betamax.

As other social media sites emerged, Facebook picked up the rep of being for grandparents. Today, if you have Facebook, it’s only because you have three out of town friends who you are too lazy to add to your phone contacts.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram is all pictures, all the time. Who the hell takes that many pictures? I’ll tell ya, who…women between the ages of 13 and 33. If you are a woman who grew up with Instagram, you have the selfie-taking skills of a photographic ninja. I was once talking to a co-worker on a break at the office. She took a lot of selfies. During our short conversation, she took around 8 selfies. She did it with such speed, preciseness and nonchalance, that it didn’t even interrupt our conversation. That’s some mad fucking skills.

The user breakdown of Instagram goes like this: women who like to take pictures of themselves and guys who like to look at pictures of women. It’s not hard to figure out.

Instagram is responsible for two of the most idiotic designations of our time: influencer and content creator.

An influencer is someone on Instagram who has so many followers that a brand will give her free products (or outright pay her) if she features the products in posts. That does not make her an “influencer.”  We already had a word for this. It’s called being a “spokesperson.” They are saying positive things about a product, like, oh, let’s say, an advertisement. They ain’t influencing me to do jack shit. Also, an “influencer” sounds more like what I do in conversations with women I want to date.

Here’s a compilation of some of the very first “influencers.”

A ”content creator” is just someone who needs to put out pics or videos with no thought given to the quality of the actual content which is, most of the time, shit.  No one with any talent calls themself a content creator. They are writers, journalists, photographers, dancers, artists, broadcasters, anchors, or one of a thousand names for someone in the arts and entertainment. A content creator is some jackoff with a camera and a greenscreen. A content creator thinks the only thing they need to be relevant is a face.

TWITTER

Twitter was my jam. Posts limited to a certain number of characters which made people distill their thoughts. You could quickly scroll through hundreds of posts in not that much time. Tweeting live events and following everyone else doing the same through the use of hashtags made you feel connected to the world. You could use Twitter as a news feed by following CNN, AP Newswire, the BBC, or your local news station. You could block people you didn’t want to see or didn’t want to see you. And then there were the celebrities. For the first time ever, you could interact with writers, actors and musicians. It was like you had a backstage pass.

I was once making jokes during a live event. Artie Lang, comedian most famous for his stint on the Howard Stern Show, saw one of my jokes and retweeted it. That meant that the thousands and thousands of his followers saw my joke. Other people hit the like button on it or retweeted. My phone was deluged by notifications.  For about three hours, my phone beeped so much it was like I was in a casino. Notifications slowed down but were still coming 48 hours later. It was such a clear demonstration of the power of having a huge social media following (Artie, not me.)

Twitter was already becoming toxic before Elon Musk bought it, but he did the “hold my beer” thing. White supremacists posted racial slurs. Trolls existed on Twitter primarily to argue with people about anything, whether they believed their statements or not, in an attempt to boost their engagement. People jumped ship to other social media sites, and every time Elon instituted some new inane policy, more people left. The latest move was to eliminate the block feature. You could block someone, and they couldn’t comment on your posts or interact with you, but they could still see your posts. Let’s say you’re a woman with a stalker. You could block him, but he could still see your thoughts and locations. That sounds problematic at the least, and criminal at the worst.

I’ve been sampling other social media sites over the last year. None are as good as Twitter at its prior best, but all were better than Twitter is now. And, no, I’m not and have never called it X. X is for comic book heroes, skateboarders, and a fantastic, legendary punk rock band from Los Angeles who had a song called Los Angeles.

BLUESKY

The search for a new home for my dumb jokes began with Bluesky, except in the early days, you had to have an invitation or get on a waiting list. When I finally got on, not many people were there. Celebrities disenchanted with Twitter joined, made two posts, and then went back to Twitter. It was a ghost town. We’ll get back to Bluesky later.

But first, a story that I was reminded of by the name Bluesky. One time in my early 20’s, I was at a strip club with friends. I was talking to one of the strippers and she said her name was Skyla. Knowing that stripper names are fake, I asked her why she chose Skyla. She said, “Because I like the sky and I want to live in LA.”

MASTODON

Mastodon was decentralized social media. What does that mean?  It means that Mastodon had the most confusing sign-up process in the history of ever. You had all of these small communities housed on different servers and run by different moderators and they all fell under the Mastodon umbrella. It was annoying and clunky and no one in their right mind thought this was a suitable replacement for Twitter.

COUNTER SOCIAL

Counter Social was an offshoot of Mastodon created by a former (I guess) hacker who is very hands on with his site. I’m not saying anything bad about him or Counter Social (I told you he’s a former hacker, right?)  Seriously though, it wasn’t bad. I interacted with a lot of interesting and friendly people. One of my favorite features was the community “hose” which was a live feed of EVERYONE’S posts. Great way to find new people to follow. The reason I ultimately stopped using Counter Social was the lack of any business or celebrity presence. There was no following your favorite comic book company, or band or film news site or pro-wrestling reporter, because none of them were there. Not even Wendy’s, which has a hell of a funny person running their social media. I like my social media to be a combination of chatting with real people and a news feed.  (I did follow one celebrity who came to Counter Social, and she followed me. It was Kathy Valentine of the Go-Go’s. Cool.)

THREADS

Threads seemed like the app with the most potential to pose a challenge to Twitter. Until you actually use it. I’m not sure what why, but Threads is the biggest collection of engagement bait I’ve ever seen. “Do you dip your fries in ketchup or ranch?”  “what’s the biggest movie from the year you were born” “do you like turtles?”  Quit asking me so many goddamn questions! Being on Threads is like being on a bad date. And then there’s this Threads thing where everyone likes to argue about anything.  Let’s say I made a post that The Eagles are the most overrated band ever. First, that’s a horrible post because it’s obviously engagement bait. But that post will get so many comments, and so many people arguing with me. And then there will be people doing this: “I’ve never listened to The Eagles so I don’t feel like I can comment on this.”   People will comment, to SAY THEY HAVE NO COMMENT!  Oh, my god, what a gigantic waste of time it was slogging through comments by randos who have nothing to add to anything.

Then the Threads moderators went all bitch-cakes crazy. During the election, they were flagging so much stuff that posts talking about saltine crackers got censored and the authors suspended. If someone posted, “I like butter on my crackers” it would get flagged because “cracker” is derogatory slang for a white person. There was no context to anything they did. Fuck them crackers at Threads!

BLUESKY, AGAIN

I’m back on Bluesky. And so are a lot of other people. It’s as if I were a dumbass and showed up at 6pm to a party that started at 8pm. It’s now 10pm and the perfect time to show up on Bluesky.  If you want to find me here, it’s @davidjett.bsky.social

Lots of writers, artists, journalists and news sites are showing up on Bluesky. And their moderation tools are very helpful. You create your own algorithm. You can follow feeds on a specific topic. You can block sexual content if you wish. One of the best features is block lists. Someone will go in and create a list, for example, of people who have Nazi symbolism or explicitly Nazi content. You can hit the “subscribe” button for the list, and then block the entire list. Anyone else added to this list becomes immediately blocked on your account. This is a great feature due to my disliking of Nazis.

Some people have complained about this “block list” feature, and in doing so, use the term “echo chamber.”   Echo chamber is a term used by assholes that you and your friends don’t want to hang out with. “Hey, I’m throwing a party. Should I just invite my good friends, or should I also invite those dudes we know who may have raped women or committed hate crimes? Do you think they bring something to the table?” 

Someone recently made a post (skeeted. Yeah, that’s their term for it. I refuse to use skeet in any way unless it’s in reference to a Lil Jon song or I’m particularly drunk during sex.) The post was describing Bluesky as “the energy of 2013 Twitter but everybody’s back and knees hurt more.”

ONLY FANS

Not really a social media site but more of a “I want to look at this lady’s boobs” site, but you can interact with some famous people. Celebs, as well as some relatively unknown women, charge a monthly subscription fee for you to see their “private” photos. English singer Lily Allen recently said that she makes more money from posting pics of her feet on Only Fans than she does from her music streaming royalties. This is either a condemnation of the current music streaming situation or she has some fucking incredible feet. 

CAMEO

Again, not a traditional social media site, but you can pay to interact with a celebrity. Cameo’s main service is providing personalized videos from C-list celebrities. Most of the videos are around a minute and a half long and are things like “Hey, Grandma Helen! This is Kenny G! Your grandkid Bobby wants me to wish you a happy birthday! Keep it smooth, Granny!” 

The celebrities video these things from their computer or phone and often don’t even bother to properly frame the shot. But it is kind of cool, I suppose. Most of the celebs are B, C, and D-list, but I’m sure someone would get a kick out of Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore wishing them a happy anniversary.

One of the most expensive people on the site is Caitlyn Jenner, which will set you back $2500. Those operations aren’t cheap.  Legendary pro-wrestler Ric Flair charges $500. Woooo!!  James Marsters, Spike on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is $60. That’s very reasonable. Brett Favre is $285, which is a very random and specific figure. Go to the Cameo site. You’ll go down a wormhole that will last hours.

And to wrap things up, I was planning a big surprise. I decided to get a Cameo. I wanted to have someone funny (on purpose or by default) send me a video “roasting” me. David Jett sucks, David Jett can’t write, etc. If the Hawk Tuah Girl had been on Cameo, I would have done that in a heartbeat. She’s sadly not. So I decided to go with former Saturday Night Live cast member Jon Lovitz. I figured he would be really funny running me down. He cost $150 plus tax and services fees. The deal was he had up to 7 days to do the Cameo. At 6 and half days, I get an email from Cameo that read “Although Jon Lovitz tries to deliver 100% of requests, they are unable to do this request at this time.”

I didn’t need this Cameo for anything other than comedy, but if I had bought a video for someone’s birthday, I would have been shit out of luck. If you do use Cameo, I would suggest you start the process around 1973. I read a lot of reviews of the site, and there are a LOT of people who never got their video, even after trying multiple times. Now there may be people on Cameo who do their videos in a timely manner, but I’m assuming that a lot of these barely working celebs do it for extra money but only if they don’t have a gig at the time. It’s like they think “oh, I guess I’ll pick up some extra money from these saps if I’m not doing anything, but if I’m the least bit busy, fuck ‘em.” Hey, what did I expect, after all, Jon Lovitz is best known for his SNL character “the Pathological Liar.”

Since I couldn’t end with a Jon Lovitz video, I decided I would show you what Cameo people look like when they are doing their videos.

“As he surveyed the damage done to the Oval Office, Austin Jeffries knew it was a mistake for his mother to buy him three hookers and a fully-armed drone.”

Now that’s an opening line!

A recent discussion with former bookstore employees included the topic: opening lines in novels. I'm of the belief that the first line in a book should immediately grab your attention and/or set the tone. One bookseller in the conversation mentioned that he knew of a editor who, when he received manuscripts in an envelope, would pull out the first page just enough to read the first sentence. If he liked it, he moved on to the second. If he didn't...page back in envelope, envelope right on the "no" stack.

I thought it would be entertaining to look at the opening lines of famous novels to see how they stack up. And to make fun of them, obviously.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  - A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.

Most people think that’s the opening line. However, the sentence goes on for about another gazillion words or so. It may have been the world's first run-on sentence. But let's consider the shortened version. Great opening line. It's pithy, has rhythm, and sets the tone for the book. Simple, yet elegant. If you leave off the rest of the sentence. Here’s the full version: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."   Now that’s just explaining the joke, so to speak. We get it. It’s like Dickens thought his readers were too dumb to understand the dichotomy of the short version and then had to explain it a dozen times like your boss does to your dim co-worker.  “Are you sure you’ve got this? Let’s run through it again.” 

“Call me Ishmael.” – Moby Dick, Herman Melville

What a completely stupid opening line. Who is Ishmael? Do I know him? No. Do I want to know him? Not yet. Do we even need to go into what a ridiculous name Ishmael is? I contend that "Moby Dick" is a badly written waste of time. Yes, based on the opening line. Well, also because it is badly written and a waste of time.

“In the weeks before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.”  Dune, Frank Herbert

There are quotes at the head of chapters, but I’m considering this to be the first line of the story proper. And as such, this is complete nonsense, and I'll tell you why. It's the word "Arrakis." Here's the rule: you can't have made-up bullshit in your first sentence. Yeah, that's my rule. Your novel can have spaceships, time-travel, vampires, zombies, giant worms, and unicorns. But can I at least get one damn sentence in before you start going all Game of Thrones? So, this opening line sucks by default. What happens when you take out the reference to Tatooine or whatever? You get some old lady coming to visit the mother of some guy named Paul. Some or all of them may be packing to leave. This could very well be the opening line to At Home In Mitford.  Speaking of…

“He left the coffee-scented warmth of the Main Street Grill and stood for a moment under the green awning.” – At Home In Mitford, Jan Karon. 

Absolute brilliance. I'm still never reading this book, but I'm not the target audience. Your mom or grandmother is. And this will hook them. Just look at all the comforting images in there. Coffee, scents, Main Street, an old-fashioned grill, and a green awning. Small town life. The second line has the phrase "early mountain spring." If assisted care living facilities started out their brochures this way, your folks would beg you to put them in a home.

Many years ago, I worked at a bookstore. An elderly lady asked to be taken to the Mitford section. (there’s an entire series of these gentle, slice of life stories.)  She asked me if I had read any. The Mitford books were totally her thing, but in no way mine.  I told her I hadn’t, and then I started messing with her a bit. I asked if anyone got murdered in some gruesome way in the books. She thought for a second and said, “a dog gets run over.”

Let's revisit my "no made-up bullshit" rule. How about a great novel that had all kinds of made-up language.

"What's it going to be then, eh?" – A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

Great opening line. Even more so if you saw the film before you read the book (which is cheating, I know.) Right off the bat you get what seems like either a veiled threat or the promise of trouble. Within the next two sentences we get made-up bullshit like "droogs" and "Korova Milkbar." Followed in short order by "moloko," "veshches," and "mozg." But that's fine. Burgess was smart enough to know not to put any of that gibberish in the first sentence. Cheers!

“In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of Old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,--but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except perhaps,  a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand...” – The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  

This novel has a long introductory thingee and it's hard to tell where it ends and the actual story begins. I’m making a guess. And that’s not even the entire sentence.  I lost interest in typing it. Holy fuck, what a wordy piece of uselessness! Any teacher who forces you to read this book at a young (or old) age, should have an "A" plastered to themselves. The "A" in this case, of course, would stand for "asshole." Full disclosure: I have read this book. I was forced to in school. I thought it was rubbish. Another similar forced read which I did like was Wuthering Heights. Let's put that to the test.

“I have just returned from a visit to my landlord-the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.” – Wurthering Heights, Emily Bronte.

Not bad, I suppose. And either way, at least we got a great Kate Bush song out of the whole deal.

“Who am I?” – The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks

Apparently "Call me Ishmael" was taken. If I had been that editor my friend knew, I would have immediately shoved this nonsense back into the envelope and marked it “Anthrax.”

“Foley had never seen a prison where you could walk right up to the fence without getting shot.” – Out of Sight, Elmore Leonard

Brilliant. One simple sentence and you learn so much. There's even the mention of potential violence. Elmore is a genius.

“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” – To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee.

Eh. If I didn't already know that this was a classic, I might not read it based on that piss poor opening sentence. After this novel, Harper Lee didn’t write another one until decades later. And it was based on a different draft of this one. Maybe Harper should have tried to write a third novel that had a decent opening sentence.

“The senior partner studied the resume for the hundredth time and again he found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper.” - The Firm, John Grisham.

John Grisham has good ideas and plot points. I think his prose is clumsy at best. Fucking annoying at worst. That's why I would rather watch a film based on his books than to have to read his books. (I tried once. Lasted about 5 pages.) However, this opening line is not bad. Except I have to move it to the "suck" pile based on the fact that he wrote "Mitchell Y. McDeere" and not just "Mitchell McDeere." That "Y" gets on my nerves. I know why he put it in there (well, I'm assuming.) A partner is going over a resume. He's looking at the name on the resume which has the initial "Y." He's really studying every part of this resume. It shows an attention to every detail. Except no one, and I mean NO ONE who looks at a resume pays any attention to a middle initial. A middle name, maybe. But a middle initial, no. Not even lawyers who work for the mafia.

“Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” – The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown.

"Renowned?" How many museum curators do you know by name unless you are related to one? Zero. False premise horseshit, a phrase that could adequately describe the rest of the book.

To finish this up, I'm picking something ridiculous. It's not a novel, but here we go:

“Today, I consider it my good fortune that Fate designated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth.”  Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler.

Leave it to this deluded, racist, egotistical asshole to suggest that there was some divine plan to anything he ended up doing. Based on that opening line, I’m not reading this. Also, cause Nazi shit.

Oh, and that quoted line at the top of this essay…I made that up. Although if that were the actual first line of a real book, I might read it. Can’t go wrong with hookers in the White House.

The most famous hardcore sex film is most assuredly Deep Throat, the 1972 film starring Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems. Not only was it used as the punchline for every Johnny Carson joke involving porn, but its title was also used as a pseudonym by journalists Woodward and Bernstein’s secret informant dealing with the Watergate break in. The movie has a ridiculous plot that most people, even those that have actually seen it, are not aware of. Linda Lovelace plays a woman who can’t orgasm. She seeks the advice of a doctor who discovers that her clitoris is in her throat, thus sending her on a dick sucking rampage. The clitoris in her throat part is such wacky science-fiction. It’s like saying her nose is located in her colon.

Years later, when I was in college, I served two semesters as the Speakers Chairman for the Student Activities Council, which meant I had a big hand in who was booked to speak at the university. Agents sent me tons of promotional material and called on a weekly basis trying to get their speakers booked. I remember talking to one agent who wanted us to book born-again Christian Linda Lovelace and still-porn star Harry Reems, who were travelling the college circuit having debates on the merits and/or evils of porn. (We didn’t book them. We did, however, book Don Knotts. He was a huge hit on campus.)

When I was college age, there were no smart phones or internet. If you were a teenager and wanted to see a woman naked, you either had to put in the work in person or hope you stumbled upon your uncle’s stash of nudie mags. Today, anyone on the planet can pick up their phone and see all the naked people they want. Having sex. For free.  It truly is a wonderful time to be alive.

Porn has gotten so accessible that now a person can have the wackiest sexual fantasy and there’s probably an entire genre of porn dedicated to it. There are women on OnlyFans stacking money to the moon by only showing pictures of their feet. And there’s a more specific version of that called “Pedal Pumping” in which women take pics or vids that are closeups of their feet, in various open-toed shoes, pressing down on a car’s gas pedal.

I’m not addicted to porn anymore than your average guy, but…hold on, does that mean I’m addicted to porn?  Let’s not run those numbers. But I have, indeed, seen porn. And if you’re on a site like PornHub or XHamster, you don’t have to spend much time there to see that some people are into what I call Niche Porn.

FAMILY FUN PORN: or as most people like to call it, incest. There are tons of videos where a son wants to do his mom, or his mom seduces him, or a brother is nervous about having sex for the first time, so his sister decides the best way to teach him is to fuck him like a porn star. Young women like to boink their grandpa. Often, there’s a wild aunt who will fuck any and all of her sister’s offspring. “oh, Aunt Holly, what are you doing? Aunt Holly, your hand shouldn’t be there! Aunt Holly, quick question: do you swallow or would you rather I ejaculate on your boobs?”  Of course, it’s assumed that these porn vids are staged and involve no actual family members. But it makes me think about how many sons are out there wanting to do their own mom. If there were some of this going on, you might imagine that the mom is super hot, however, according to these videos, that’s apparently not a prerequisite.

STUCK PORN: I don’t even know if that is what it’s called. But here’s the scenario, and it’s often an offshoot of Family Fun Porn:  let’s say you’re a mom and you’ve taken off your wedding ring, and it’s fallen into the couch cushions. (stay with me, I swear this in an actual thing) You bend over and reach your hand in-between the couch cushions, but your hand gets stuck there. There you are, bent over on your knees with your ass in the air and a hand stuck down the couch. Well, wouldn’t you know, here comes your horny son. He sees that cake all up in the air and can’t help but pull your Lululemon yoga pants down to look at your bare ass. Then he pulls out his wang dang doodle and starts going to town, first on it, and then on you.  Maybe it's not a couch, maybe you get your arm stuck down a toilet as you’re cleaning it. Maybe you stick your head under a chair to see how dirty the carpet is, and then someone comes along and takes advantage with the nonchalant manner of someone picking up a quarter they found on the sidewalk.

Are there a lot of women getting stuck in things like Pooh Bear in the honey jar? And if you bang a stuck woman, how is this not rape? Is the stuck mom just thinking, “oh, I got stuck. This is on me. Might as well enjoy it.” At some point, does one of these accident prone, porn versions of I Love Lucy say, “son, I’m sure you have a wonderful penis and I would be more than willing to go batshit crazy on it, but first, if you wouldn’t mind, how’s about GETTING ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING COUCH!!”

PARODY PORN: I guess this is for when you’re really horny but also need a good laugh. Maybe you’re a big fan of Breaking Bad, but as you’re watching one of the greatest tv shows of all time, you think “this would be much better if they were all fucking each other.”  (there is a Breaking Bad porn parody called Being Bad.)  There have been porn parodies of Game of Thrones (which is almost redundant,) Downton Abbey, Modern Family, Walking Dead, and even Scrubs.  The producers used to be clever with their titles such as Diddle-Her On The Roof, Edward Penishands, and Forrest Hump. Now, they just name these videos the actual name of the show with “a XXX parody” tacked onto the end. Where is the creativity in that?  

One time I ran across a porn parody of Gilligan’s Island. Ok, we all wanted to bone Ginger and MaryAnn, but does anyone really want to see Gilligan and the Skipper do it?

AMATEUR PORN: When porn movies first came along, the higher the production, the better. They wanted to seem legit. Then things shifted. People began to grow tired of big, fake breasts and ridiculously long dongs and wanted to see what regular people looked like having sex.

Here’s the thing, a guy will look at almost any woman if she’s naked. But if you give him the choice of seeing only one woman naked, and the choices were the most beautiful woman on the planet, but he’s never seen her before and doesn’t know who she is, or the average looking woman who works a few desks over from him, guess which one he’s going to pick. There’s an added bit of excitement in seeing someone you know naked. Obviously, if you are really attracted to a person, you will try to connect with them, maybe date them, and eventually see them naked. If it’s someone you really don’t want to date or have sex with, or it’s a married friend, it’s highly unlikely that you will ever see them naked. That’s why catching an accidental down-blouse in real life is such a thrill. You’re seeing something you’re not supposed to see. And that’s the idea behind amateur porn.

I was walking my dog around the neighborhood one time (she was a Basenji, really cool, and left us many years back)  A cute mom had just pulled into her drive with the groceries. She noticed my Basenji and came over as it turns out she once owned one. She bent over to pet my little girl, and this lady wasn’t wearing a bra. When she bent down, I got the down-blouse of all down-blouses. I saw full boob. I’m positive I didn’t hear a word she said until she stood back up.

There’s an amateur site that’s kind of like Facebook for people who want to post naked pictures of themselves. It’s called FetLife and it started as a social networking site for people into S&M.  It evolved into a community of people with any kind of kink, even if that kink was just being an exhibitionist. It was launched in 2008 by a software engineer from Montreal (kinky Canadians!)  and originally had the name “Friends With Fetishes” with sounds like the game app Words With Friends except not boring.

I forget how I learned about the site, but however it happened, I checked it out. People have profiles, pics, videos. There are groups you can join based on your kinks or where you live. And when I was looking at the group for the city I live in, I saw two women I knew. Naked. One was a long-time friend of my brother’s. I had known her first through him and then seeing her out at concerts and such.  Here she was, naked. Not only topless shots, but close-ups of large dicks going into her hoo-ha.

And then I saw a profile from a gal that worked at the same company as me. (it’s my current place of employment, but she left for another job last year.)  She was always telling inappropriate stories about her life at work, so this didn’t surprise me. (such as the time she gave a guy a blow job in exchange for a Frosty at Wendy’s) She, like the first acquaintance I saw, had full nude pics and some interesting videos of a thick dude pounding the shit of her from behind.

I also saw a profile from a cute, 40-ish woman who lived in my town. She had some fake name (as everyone on there does) like Cougar5150 or something.  Lots of nude shots. This gal wasn’t shy on here. And then I saw a pic of her legs and feet propped up on her desk when she was working from home one day. The picture showed the bottom part of her computer screen, and I was like “surely she isn’t dumb enough to show her email signature in this pic?”  She was.  It was blurry, but I could make out her full, real name. And since I banked there, I recognized the Truist logo.  I googled her name and Truist, and sure enough, her LinkedIn page popped up with her job title and location. I, of course, didn’t do anything with that information, but it’s another example of people posting stuff on-line and giving away too much information that could be exploited by bad actors. Although maybe it would be ok it I went to her branch and waited for her to get stuck bent over in a chair trying to retrieve a lost bank pen.

When I was young, my first long-term girlfriend and I tried our hand at amateur porn. Just for us. I’ve had many jobs as a video producer/editor/videographer. Even before I worked in the field, I made home movies and then tv shows for our local public access tv station. I had checked out the video camera to shoot some stuff one weekend. I was hanging out with my gal and we both realized I had the camera with me. We decided to tape ourselves fucking. We got turned on by the idea, but when we watched the tape, we realized that no one ever should watch a video of themselves having sex. That’s not doing anyone any good. Plus, me being me, I couldn’t forget the camera was there while we were going at it, so a lot of the video is me doing something to her with one hand while my other hand is pulling the sheet up over my ass so I was seen as little as possible.  That tape didn’t last a week before we both decided to erase it. I guess it’s a lost classic, like the Jerry Lewis movie The Day The Clown Cried.

WRESTLING PORN: This is like if WWE or the UFC had mixed gender matches that resulted in sex.  Let me ‘splain it to you. There’s a large wrestling mat. There’s a referee. And then two combatants, one male, one female who tussle mildly while trying to rip off each other’s wrestling tights and/or bikinis. If the guy gets the woman’s top off, he tries to pin down her arms so he can suck on her hooters. Maybe the woman gets the beefy dude trapped in a leg scissors and forces him to…ok, I’m not going to describe the whole thing. The winner gets to have his/her way with the other person. I haven’t the Foggiest Leghorn how they keep score, but it seems there are no losers. There’s also a related genre where a mom in yoga pants starts wrestling with her son and that leads to banging each other.

What you learn from porn, especially niche porn, is that any and everything leads to immediate sex. Sitting next to your mom, getting stuck in a couch cushion, having a wrestling match, being in a zombie apocalypse.

My first living-alone experience when I moved out of my parents’ house was a studio apartment in a midtown high-rise apartment building. Since it was a studio, my bed was a foldout couch. My girlfriend at the time came over and we were getting freaky.  I guess the couch/bed was old or we were just really going to town because at one point, the middle support bar of the thing collapsed and the entire couch/bed folded up into a V and we were trapped, mid-coitus, in the goddamn thing.  It made us laugh hysterically, and we managed to get out. But when I think about it now, we did the whole thing wrong. She’s supposed to get stuck in the couch first and then we have sex. Live and learn.

In 2016 Michael Keaton starred in a wonderful, hidden gem of a movie called The Founder. It’s the story of salesman Ray Kroc who hooked up with brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald. The brothers had opened an innovative burger joint in San Bernardino, CA and when he first saw it, Ray was already counting the money they could make. (Not only does The Founder star Michael Keaton, but features Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, Linda Cardellini, BJ Novak and Laura Dern.)  This is one of those movies that you shouldn’t watch on an empty stomach as you’ll want a burger and fries and a milkshake and another burger. It’s like the fast-food version of The Big Night, a movie about the grand opening of an Italian restaurant, that will drive you insane with food cravings.

I don’t eat fast food much anymore. Before covid, I ate fast food for lunch at work on a regular basis. I ate fast food for dinner several times a week. But when covid hit, I was working and eating all my meals at home.  When I went back into the world, one of the things I wanted to do was to learn something positive from a mostly negative experience. One of those things was not going back to fast food. I realized that I enjoyed not having the annoying fast-food experience…the bad employees, the hassle, the wrong orders. I realized I could cut out that stress from my life. But every now and then, I want some fast-food. The problem is that I usually crave food from someplace we don’t have in town anymore or never had.  Danvers, Jack In The Box, Backyard Burger, Long John Silver, Panchos.

One place I miss is Pizza Inn. When I was a teenager, a big group of us went to a Pizza Inn to watch the famous “Who Shot JR” reveal episode of the tv show Dallas on the big screen projection tv.  Pizza Inn had the best pizza and the best buffet. You could get pizza, fries, and corn on the cob. And they had a jukebox. On another occasion, we got into trouble when a few girls in my group decided to start dancing to the music I played on the jukebox. Pizza Inn wanted you to have fun, but not too much fun.

When I was growing up, fast food jobs were held primarily by high schoolers. It was a “first job” situation. This still holds true in fast food places in small towns (where you typically get the best service.)  At some point, more and more adults started working non-managerial fast-food jobs, especially in the bigger cities. A teen doesn’t need much money, but an adult does, especially if this is his 2nd or 3rd job he’s holding down to make ends meet. So eventually wages became an issue. Some cities wanted to raise fast food wages to almost $20 an hour.  There are lots of office jobs, ones that require college degrees, that don’t pay this much as a starting salary.  Do I think fast food workers in my area deserve to be paid this much?  They are generally some combination of rude, clueless and apathetic, not to mention the high probability that they will screw up my fucking order. So on one hand, I don’t think they even deserve what they are currently paid since they are not doing their job. On the other hand, would paying them a decent wage improve their attitude? Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I am in favor of is raising wages across the board at all companies. Wages have stagnated over the years and it’s now difficult for someone holding down one full-time job to even afford a decent one-bedroom apartment on their own.

Two similar, yet vastly different, hamburger joints first opened in California in the 1940’s. You can probably guess one of these, the other you will not.

The McDonald brothers opened their first McDonald’s in 1940 and featured “speedie service,” which was so quick that they misspelled “speedy.” They pre-cooked hamburgers and kept them warm under heat lamps (yummy!) They painstakingly designed their kitchen for maximum efficiency. Ray Kroc came along and convinced them to open franchises. The key profit stream was owning the land that franchises were built on. So they are getting franchise fees and rent. Great effort was put into standardization across all locations so that the McDonald’s burger you had in Nebraska would taste the same as the one in California.

One time my brother and I went on a trip to see a concert in another city. On the way back, hungover, we went to a McDonald’s. I’m very efficient at drive-thrus. I don’t tolerate multiple people yelling out what they want into the speaker. I find out what they want and then I do the ordering. As we pulled up to the drive-thru, I asked him what he wanted. He said, he actually said, “I need to see the menu.”  What the fucking fuck??  Did he think that McDonald’s all of sudden added tacos or filet mignon?  90% of their menu has stayed the same for decades! I can’t even with this.

Numerous comedians have routines dealing with the country’s fascination and addiction to McDonald’s.

In 1948, eight years after the first McDonald’s, Harry and Esther Snyder chose a spot in Baldwin Park, CA to open the first In-N-Out. It was literally 45 minutes down the highway from the original McDonald’s, but was figuratively a world apart. In-N-Out does not franchise their restaurants and until this past year, have rarely expanded outside of California. This strategy has kept them from making as much money as the juggernaut McDonald’s, but their quality has not declined anywhere near as much over the years.

In-N-Out Burger is a California staple. For years I had people tell me that it was the best fast-food burger in the history of ever. Yeah, ok, whatevs. And then I had a work trip that took me to San Diego (the best city in California. Fight me.) Of course, I had to try In-N-Out. I took one bite of that burger and immediately thought, “this is the best goddamn fast-food burger I’ve ever tasted and no one else is close.”  The beauty of In-N-Out is the simplicity of the menu. No salads, no rib-shaped mystery meat. If Ron Swanson from Parks And Recreation ran a fast food place (and he kind of did as Nick Offerman was one of the McDonald brothers in The Founder) this is the menu he would have.

As far as menus go, the exact opposite of In-N-Out would be the ridiculous, headache-inducing Cookout.  Look at this thing:   

It’s not so much a menu as it is a math problem. You may need a calculus degree to successfully order a combo. And then there’s the situation where, as far as crimes are concerned, Cookout is the Family Dollar of the fast-food world. I’m sure crimes happen at other fast-food places, but I see soooo much stuff about Cookout. Employee shoots another employee after argument over cleaning duties, woman busts out customer’s car window, 8-person brawl in the parking lot, etc. Then there is this video: a group of University of Tennessee students get into an altercation. After the idiot, douchebag looking white guy breaks out the N-word, he and his friend get taken down by the dude they were arguing with more cleanly and dominantly than MMA fighter Jon Jones could have done.

Depending on where you live, you may have both, or only one of these similar fast-food restaurants.  And there is a debate on which is better: Krystal (founded in 1932) or White Castle (founded in 1941.) You can like one, or the other, or both, or neither but anyone who says they are the same thing should be punched right in the fucking face just like that dude in Cookout.  They may look the same, but they are not.  And for the record, White Castle is far superior. Here’s why: both offer crappy but craveable food. Especially when you’re drunk or high. (One of the best moments of my life was when I went to a bar in St. Louis and noticed that there was a 24-hour White Castle next door. That particular White Castle was probably the highest grossing franchise location in the United States. They certainly got plenty of my money that night.)  The main difference between the two is the hamburger patty. Both are tiny and square. But the White Castle patty has holds in it so the steam can seep through, thus melding the onion flavor with the burger. It’s genius.

When I was a kid, McDonald’s was the only place you wanted to go. When I was a teen, it was Taco Bell all the way. At the time, Taco Bell seemed hipper. I don’t know why, it just did. You could get a lot of food for not much money. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t authentic Mexican food. It didn’t matter that the names of some of the food were just made up in the corporate office and didn’t actually exist in Mexico. Here’s a Taco Bell menu from back in the day.

Taco Bell has gone in the toilet, so to speak, in quality over the years. In an effort to keep prices down, Taco Bell started using lesser quality cheese and lettuce. The ground beef went from being seasoned ground beef to some kind of liquid goo. The beef in their tacos now is a cross between a Sloppy Joe and something a bird ate, digested, and then spit back up for her nestlings.

Let me end things with a video most wrestling fans are well aware of, but probably not you. Former wrestling manager and then owner of Smokey Mountain Wrestling, a small territory in Kentucky and Tennessee, was driving a van of young, up and coming wrestlers down the highway in search of food after a show. They are out in the middle of nowhere, probably driving down a two lane road. They come across a Dairy Queen. If you are not familiar with Jim Cornette, he’s funny, he’s got a short fuse, he yells a lot and he’s been recorded saying a lot of racist things. His first mistake in the following video is that the whole van full of wrestlers go through the drive-thru instead of going inside. The second is that Jim Cornette is gonna Jim Cornette. Note: the wrestler hiding in the back of the van and taping this whole incident was future WWE/WCW/AEW superstar Chris Jericho.

Full disclosure: I don’t explain Stephanie Weir. At all.  Some things you just can’t explain without firsthand knowledge and even then, you might be stumped as to why someone would commit a particular crime. I can tell you that Stephanie Weir was arrested a little over a year ago, a dog was involved, and a couple of years prior to that, we worked in the same office. I’m about to let the story of Stephanie Weir off the leash, so to speak.

Stephanie and I worked for the same company for a couple of years. We never worked in the same department, and I never had any work-related interactions with her. In the entire time we were both there, I might have spoken to her a cumulative time of around 15 minutes. It was mostly saying “hi” as we passed each other in the hallway. One time she spoke to me about knowing the owners of a food truck that was coming out. I did see her speak with other workers on occasion. That was about it. 

Stephanie always seemed a little off to me, but I could never figure out why. At work she was very enthusiastic about fun office dress up days and participating in any charity event the company held.

Outside of the office, she seemed to be a social butterfly, often attending events and parties around the city. She may have been friends with people in the media as she was always being interviewed for one thing or another.

I’m not 100% sure on this one, but I recall hearing that her mother was affluent. I do know that for a time she dated an older man who constantly took her on trips around and outside of the country. I considered her very pretty and she was easily in the top 1% as far as work fashion. There were rumors that she had had an affair (affairs?) with a person (persons?) at work, but I never had that confirmed to me and I never asked about it. She was released from her job somewhere around the time covid first hit and I understood it to be for job performance reasons, although, again, that was never confirmed to me and I never really asked. I think it was a lay off due to covid but only the underperformers actually got “laid off.”

I could never figure out why I thought she was a little off. Maybe she was just awkward. Maybe she was flat out dumb. Maybe she was just quirky. I could never put my finger on it, and maybe I was being too judgmental. Judgmental about what, I couldn’t fucking tell you.  

Approximately a year after she was released from her job, she was arrested. I was working when a co-worker, who never knew her, came into my office. She asked me if I knew Stephanie and that she had been arrested. My first thought was that it may have been some kind of prostitution adjacent situation or that her and her older boyfriend scammed some people out of money. I couldn’t have been more wrong and I gotta say, I never saw this coming.

Here is the report from WREG News Channel 3:

 A Collierville woman is facing multiple charges after she allegedly downloaded child pornography and recorded her dog performing sexual acts on her, Memphis Police say. According to reports, on May 18, MPD received a complaint from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children involving a woman later identified as 33-year-old Stephanie Weir.

NCMEC told officials that Weir had child pornography in an online cloud account. A search warrant was issued, and the following content was found:

• 3 video files showing children in sex acts with adults

• 5 image files of nude children posing in a sexual manner

• 1 video file of Weir having her pet dog perform a sex act on her

Tuesday, Weir was taken into custody, where police say she gave a confession. She reportedly told officers that she did the following:

• Used her phone to find child porn in social media group messages

• Stored child porn and videos in her cloud account

• Used her phone to take a nude picture of a toddler and sent it to another person for sexual gratification

• Recorded her dog performing sex acts on her

Stephanie Weir is being charged with Sexual Exploitation of a Minor, Criminal Offense Against Animals, Especially Aggravated Exploitation of a Minor, and Aggravated Unlawful Photographing of a Minor.

Holy shit! The scary part is that after she had been fired from her job where I worked, she picked up jobs as a nanny.

As far as I know, her case has not come to trial yet and she is out on bond. Let’s assume for the rest of this article that she is guilty of the charges. And she did confess to these crimes, unless she was coerced into it, which happens, but c’mon on. But to cover any legal bases, just put the word allegedly in front of anything I type.

I’m going back to one of my original assessments of her, that she was incredibly fucking dumb. First, who the hell stores child porn IN THE CLOUD??  Maybe they all do. I don’t know. Anyone into child porn is obviously very messed up and already not making good decisions. Second, I guess she hasn’t watched any crime docs or tv shows or she would know not to confess to anything until a lawyer is present. Again, I’m going with she’s very fucking dumb.

And then we get to the last confession. She recorded her dog performing sex on her. None of the news reports stated what sex acts so we don’t know if it was just oral or if it was penetration. Or if the dog was any good or was just all about his own needs like every other dog.

Once this story hit the local media, it blew up all over social media and was not even limited to this country. This shit went everywhere.

The first two headlines mention a sex act with her dog. Of course, the Star says “hold my beer” and uses the term “bonking” which makes it sound like she had sex with Scooby Doo. Speaking of which, last Halloween, a woman at work came dressed in a Scooby Doo bodysuit costume. When I saw her, I said, “cool, you came dressed as Stephanie Weir’s boyfriend.”

HOT OR NOT??? WT the actual F. Someone was actually doing a Zuckerberg on her. Ok, before all of this came out, I thought she was hot. In a strictly superficial way. Honestly, with my past history of having affairs with fucked up women at places I’ve worked, ( see my article on Red Flags) I’m surprised I’m not the guy at work who may or may not have had an affair with her. (I’m not.)

The Guess Who should come out with a remix of their biggest hit. “American Woman, stay away from me. American Woman, let that dog be.” And now we hear from the dog’s groomer.

I don’t know when she’s going to trial. She’s got a high-powered attorney, maybe paid for by her mom. I know someone in the legal area who did a check and all she could find out was that she is out on bond. Unless her lawyer is really, really good, or she didn’t actually do any of this, she is going to spend time in jail. And as she said in a newspaper interview when she got laid off during covid for the company I work at, “I’m just kind of in limbo,” she said. “I hope this doesn’t last too long.”

BONUS CONTENT!!!

In the early 80’s, there was a Memphis band called Dog Police which put out a low-budget video for their song “Dog Police.” The video made it to M-TV on a show called Basement Tapes which featured music videos from unsigned bands. Here’s the video:

And here’s a video detailing the strange journey of Dog Police.

Someone should have brought these Dog Police fucks out of retirement to deal with Stephanie Weir, whether she was hot or not.

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Playing the jukebox at a bar is an artform. It’s not about just playing your favorite songs with no regard for anyone else in the bar. Unless you’re the only person in the bar, and even then, you still have the poor bartender to consider, and you probably shouldn’t subject her to three hours of Tool. Playing the jukebox is 100% about fun. Making the bar more fun, encouraging the patrons to have more fun. Have I mentioned fun?

What is fun for one crowd might not be so fun for another group of drinkers. If you are at a bar in the afternoon or early evening, and most people there possibly qualify for AARP, you don’t want to play a whole set of Swedish death metal.  Conversely, if you are there at 1AM, you shouldn’t be playing Natalie Merchant (the solo stuff. You might get away with 10,000 Maniacs.) I’ll have more jukebox tips for you in a bit.

Jukeboxes first became popular in the 1950’s at malt shops and drive-in diners. They housed actual physical records, 45’s to be specific. You walked up, put in your quarters, and played some tunes. The name comes from juke joints, which were little dive bars where people went to eat, drink and dance. A jukebox is a juke joint in a box, kind of like pizza in a cup. When I first started going to bars in my 20’s, jukeboxes were mostly the same as those in the 50’s. (I could go into the invention of the jukebox but the story is dull and would be like playing Nick Drake in a crowded bar.) Once digital music and the internet came along, jukeboxes were touchscreen music streaming devices. And each brand has its own app so you can purchase credits and select your music on your phone without ever leaving your bar stool. This came in handy if you are playing something that might anger people or embarrass you. With the app, you can play your Taylor Swift and no one has to know it was you.  The app can also access the jukebox from several miles away. So you could play something stupid and not even be in the bar.  Or you could do what I did at a bar once.  I played Also Sprach Zarathustra (the classical piece from the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, but better known as Ric Flair’s entrance music) from my car in the parking lot. From the app I could see when my song was going to play. And when it came on, I made my grand entrance complete with theme song.

I was with some friends at a bar we frequented in the downtown area. It was directly across the street from a large concert venue. We were having burgers and some drinks when I noticed people filling up the bar and they all looked relatively the same. Skinny dudes with unwashed clothes, unwashed hair and lots of scraggly, unkempt beards, or as close to a beard as they could grow. I was all “wtf?” and then I remembered: there was a Phish concert happening in the venue across the street that night. It was an invasion of damned dirty hippies! The jukebox there had a little trick that only the bartenders and waitresses knew (and a waitress had told me.)  You could put in one quarter, do this little trick, and get 10 songs.  I did the deal, and I thought to myself “what could I play that would annoy the fuck out of Phish fans?” I decided hair metal was the answer. So I loaded up the jukebox with Poison, Guns N Roses, KISS, etc.  Needless to say, they all hated it and you could tell. And I wasn’t worried about pissing off a whole bar of Phish fans as I felt I could probably beat the shit out of any of them. It wasn’t like I was trying to piss off frat boys or Hell’s Angels.

Speaking of hair metal, Ain’t Nothing But A Good Time is a documentary series currently available on Paramount+. It covers the rise and fall and debauchery of 80’s hair metal. One of the people interviewed was a Los Angeles radio DJ with the name Full Metal Jackie, and that might be the greatest dj name in the history of music.

Side note: Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt (one of the best guitarists on the planet) is one of the few musicians that doesn’t come across as what you would think hair metal bands would be like. Meaning he didn’t sound dumb. Actually, he sounded quite intelligent and came off the best out of all of them.)

And now, just because it’s a great fucking rock song, here is Swollen Princess from Nuno’s solo album.

Before jukeboxes were digital, a bar lived and died on what limited amount of records the bar owner put in there. You had access to maybe around 30 to 50 songs, not 10,000. Occasionally I would stop in a particular dive bar that also happened to be a lesbian bar. The first thing I did, after I got a drink of course, was play the jukebox. It had some good stuff on there including Patsy Cline. And all the records were definitely geared toward lesbians. And when one of the songs I played came on…it was I Touch Myself by The Divinyls. And the women in that place rose and came to life like it was the National Anthem. And in that bar, maybe it was.

There’s a place my friends and I hung out at a lot back in the day. It was a decently large bar/restaurant and by restaurant, I mean burgers, wings, cheese sticks and such. Bar food. Maybe a Monte Cristo sandwich. It was in the artsy mid-town area of the city so it was frequented by neighborhood residents which sometimes included families. If you came in during the day, you might see parents with their kids.  However, at night, it was a BAR. No kids. There was loud music from the jukebox and often loud music from loud bands. One Saturday night we got there around 9:30. There were several tables pulled together to host around 15 kids. KIDS!! IN MY BAR!!!  Seems it was a little league softball team. After the game, their shit for brains parents took them to a bar. If it had been earlier in the night, well, I wouldn’t have liked it but I would have understood it and put up with it. But 10:30 rolls around and these kids were still there just hanging out and making kid noises. I finally had enough. So, I went to the jukebox and played the longest string of profanity laden songs I could find. The dirtier the better. The parents decided maybe it was time to wrap things up before their kids learned that Trina’s couchie was mad tight.

Professional wrestler/announcer Jerry “The King” Lawler has lived in Memphis, TN for most of his career. Around 2004, two Memphis police officers were arrested for planning a robbery of Lawler’s house. At the time Lawler lived in a nice but modest home. Modest because he really didn’t like to spend money except on comic book and Coca-Cola memorabilia. (He didn’t live in a mansion, but he owned a fully functional Batmobile.) The officers knew the layout of his house and were planning on stealing $200,000 in cash that Lawler supposedly kept in his vintage Coca-Cola jukebox. They may have gotten this info from one of the officer’s accomplices, a young woman name April Veach. Lawler said “This young lady is someone I knew two years ago.”  I take that to mean that he once fucked her. Lawler also stated to a reporter,  "I would certainly want people to know I do not have 200 thousand dollars in my house.”  Well, not anymore.

One afternoon I was at my favorite dive bar. It was me, the bartender, and a handful of older women out for a few drinks and to watch Jeopardy on the bar tv. After the game show, I played some tunes on the jukebox. I kept it to things the women in there would like. Or at least not hate. Then a group of around eight rockers came in. Turns out it was the symphonic metal band Sacred Symphony who were playing a show next door later that night. They came in for some bar food and shots. Maybe an Irish coffee. There were band members, maybe some of the crew. I shifted my jukebox selections to accommodate them. Mostly, I wanted to see if what I played would get a reaction out of any of them, which is a fun game to play. It’s kind of like “I bet I know what would get this person grooving.”  One of the crew members was bopping his head to an AC/DC track I put on. There was some Ramones. The main band members were these two:

You might incorrectly think that a metal band only likes other metal tunes. What got this guy moving turned out to be an Oasis track. What got her moving was Groove Is In The Heart, cause when it comes down to it, even a metal chick really just wants to dance.

Here are some tips to successfully playing the jukebox:

Playing music on the jukebox is the easiest way to turn up the energy in a bar, assuming you know how to do it correctly. And the easiest way to turn up the energy in a bar is to aim your selections at the women. If you get drunk women dancing and having a good time, the guys will follow. (You don’t need to worry about men unless they are the only ones in there.)

Don’t play anything that makes people want to commit suicide. Seems obvious but you wouldn’t believe what I’ve heard some sad bastards play. Don’t play a lot of slow songs. Don’t play a lot of depressing songs. People come to a bar to have fun and be entertained. If they wanted to be sad, they could stay at home eating a Lean Cuisine and contemplating how often a week they should change their underwear.  

Don’t play all the same kind of music, and especially not all the same band. Just because you’re some geezer who is old enough to know a lot of 70’s music, that doesn’t mean that’s the only decade that you should represent. Play some rock, play some soul, play some dance. Crawl up to the 80’s and play some new wave. Play some 90’s alternative. And do one thing most people playing the jukebox never seem to do: play some current stuff. For the love of all that is good in this world, if you play James Taylor one more fucking time, I’m bashing a guitar over your head. Also, if you play something by the great Warron Zevon, it better the hell not be Werewolves of London. He had a shit ton of other great songs. Pick another. In fact…

Try to sometimes play a song by an artist which is known, but not the most well-known. This trick will get you some music cred in the bar. If you play Outkast, don’t play Hey Ya, play Bombs Over Bagdad. If you play Tom Petty, don’t play Free Falling, play Even The Losers. If you play Europe, well, you kinda have to play Final Countdown.

Music should have a progression. If someone else has played a song, try to play a song that transitions from that song to the one you really want to play. A jukebox is crowdsourcing dj’ing so you want to work well with your team. Unless some jackass is playing Steely Dan, then you just gotta bulldoze into some better tunes immediately.  Jukebox apps have a feature where you can pay extra to skip songs someone else has put in and play your song next. I rarely use this. It’s an insult to the person whose song you have skipped. Unless someone has played a lot of songs and you and your friends really only want to hear one song. It’s ok to skip in that case. It’s also ok to put your songs in front of someone else’s paid for tunes if that person had played some really fucking awful shit. Then it’s kind of your duty.

If you don’t have any clue how to play a jukebox, don’t play more than one or two songs. Leave the real work to the professionals. Let me give you an example of a good song progression on a jukebox. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of other progressions and song choices. But this is a good one. It eases people into the music and then slowly shifts into getting the women at the bar dancing.

1.       Jackie Wilson, Lonely Teardrops

2.       Rolling Stones, Tumbling Dice

3.       Billy Idol, Dancing With Myself

4.       Any song by The Ramones

5.       INXS, New Sensation

6.       Deee-Lite, Groove Is In The Heart

7.       Taylor Swift, Shake If Off

8.       Bruno Mars, Uptown Funk

9.       Bell Biv Devoe, Poison

10.  Rancid, Ruby Soho

Remember, playing the jukebox is an artform, not a right. It’s a privilege. You have chosen to entertain friends and strangers through your selection of music. Choose your music wisely.

BONUS CONTENT!! YAY!!

Here are three songs about jukeboxes.

and my favorite because of how 80’s wacky it is…

In 1972 legendary comedian George Carlin released his fourth album Class Clown. The stand-out stand-up cut, and what would go on to be his most well-known routine, was “Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV.”  Those words are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. He was correct because I don’t think I ever heard Andy Griffith say any of those. (Aunt Bee, maybe. She was a dirty old bitch.) We’ll get back to that list of words later.

One of the first motion pictures to use profanity was 1939’s Gone With The Wind when Rhett tells Scarlett, “frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  Quite salty language from a character who had raped Scarlett earlier in the film. The Motion Picture Code at the time forbade the words hell, damn, and S.O.B.  And, unless used “reverently,” Hell,  Jesus, Christ, Lord, God and/or Gawd. The film’s producers had to argue before the MPPDA board to get that line in.

By the 70’s, films had come to reflect the way we talk in real life. Every curse word you could think of and some you were eager to learn.  The first R rated film I ever saw was when I was visiting my aunt and uncle and my uncle took me and my cousins to one of the lesser known Clint Eastwood movies, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. George Kennedy was playing a fellow criminal and at one point in the movie was working as an ice cream truck driver. He stopped for a kid who schooled him on how he was not doing the route correctly. George’s character replied, “look, kid, go fuck a duck.”

Television loosened up a bit on the language front in the 70’s.  But you could only use damn or hell and only once an episode. And not in every episode. When I was a kid, my two favorite shows were The Bob Newhart Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Lou Grant, the gruff news director on TMTMS was usually the one saying the hell or the damn. I was shocked, SHOCKED, when sweet Mary Richards was the one who cursed on an episode. My parents didn’t curse in front of us kids so I guess I thought only news directors and sailors cursed.

Another one of my favorite TV shows growing up was MASH. There was not a ton of cursing in the show (as opposed to the movie it was based on) so when innocent Radar O’Reilly was dealing with a sick horse and said “Hell!” it was unexpected. (Radar is probably the biggest example of a tv character being retconned later in the show’s run. He started out, much like in the movie where he was also played by Gary Burghoff, as a sly and smart company clerk who smoke, drank and fooled around.) MASH also famously managed to work in the word “bastard” which was definitely not allowed on tv at the time. Hawkeye was trying to save an injured soldier and said “don’t let the bastard win,” the bastard being death. The producers fought hard to get this line in.

It’s always funny when you hear someone use curse words incorrectly. To this day I remember an episode of the tv show Alice (based on the 70’s movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which was about 1000% darker than the tv show.)  A man from another country came in to Mel’s Diner and Mel greeted him with “How the hell ya doing?”  and he replies “I am the hell fine!”

Just because you really couldn’t use any of Carlin’s words doesn’t mean tv producers didn’t get as close as they could. It’s the hypocrisy that drives me nuts. So you can’t say tits, but you can say boobs. Tits and boobs are the SAME EXACT THING. Why is one word considered tolerable and the other banned?  This makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Or should I say no freaking sense?

The 70’s tv show that pushed the most boundaries wasn’t a gritty cop show or a tense medical drama. It was a game show that aired in daytime hours and it was called Match Game. Hosted by your favorite pervy uncle Gene Rayburn, Match Game had celebrities try to guess how contestants would answer fill in the blank questions. And those questions could always be answered dirty. They didn’t say the dirty words, they just let the audience in the studio and at home do the dirty work themselves. Sure, sometimes Richard Dawson or Brett Summers would answer a question with “make love” or “boobies,” but that was the limit of what they would say. Again, what is the difference between saying “make love” and “fucking.” They both mean the exact same thing. Ok, maybe there’s a slight difference. Trent Reznor wouldn’t have done as well if the line in Closer was “I want to make love to you like an animal.”

Here are some actual questions from Match Game: Mary never told anyone her *blanks* were fake.  Mary likes to show off her *blank*  Raquel prefers to *blank* in the dark.  You can see these and a few more questions in this clip.

Before there was cable and streaming, all tv shows were on one of the three networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, and since they were broadcast over the airwaves, they were controlled by the FCC.  If some language or nudity snuck in, you could be sure as shit it was a special set of circumstances. Otherwise, you got damn or hell. Until cable came along. HBO had tv shows chock full of cursing and nudity. How was broadcast television going to compete with that?  By the FCC slowly expanding the words you could use. However, to this day, you still can’t say any of Carlin’s words on broadcast television.

Cable itself had a weird evolution when it came to curse words. FX had shows like The Shield which featured streetwise cops and criminals using all sorts of language you couldn’t hear on regular tv. But FX still had some banned words. (I think The Shield used about 4 of Carlin’s words.)  FX eventually just gave up and as Kramer once said on Seinfeld, the “let the expletives fly!”

FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which has been on the air for 19 years, started out using more suggestive language than practically any show on tv. But some words were still banned. I don’t know specifically when this happened, but FX at some point just didn’t give a shit anymore. I was watching an episode of Sunny, and not only did they use the word fuck, but they used the word cunt, and you can’t get more of a banned word than that.

Most women don’t like the word cunt, at least that’s what we’ve been led to believe. But I’ve heard several women at places I’ve worked refer to other women as “a cunt.”  There was even one woman who referred to someone she disliked as a “thunder cunt,” or TC for short. Every time she used that particular phrase, in my head I always heard AC/DC’s Thunderstruck. “you’ve been…Thundercunt!”  (When you’re a kid, one of the funniest things ever is to take popular songs and insert curse words into the lyrics as you’re singing along.  Never fails to get a laugh.)

Speaking of Thunderstruck and Thundercunt, here’s a story from my days working in wrestling. I was riding to a show with WWE wrestler (now behind the scenes producer/trainer) William Regal. We rode together to a lot of shows, and often spent the drives listening to comedy cd’s by Derek and Clive (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.)  The English don’t have the same stigma attached to the word cunt. In England, it’s almost interchangeable with the word idiot. On this one day, Regal pulls up, I hop in his SUV, and he’s beaming. He had stopped at Best Buy and bought AC/DC’s first five CDs for the trip. As we’re on the interstate, rocking and about to head out of town, a woman cut him off and he screamed, “bloody fucking cow’s cunt!!” That was a new one for me.

Women also, supposedly, don’t like the word bitch. As with anything else, it’s probably who uses it and how they use it.  I’ve used the word bitch at work on a couple of occasions just to get a laugh.  Many years ago, I was a manager at a Tower Records. I was in the back office with another manager, my friend Richard. Our mutual friend (and a manager at the store) Charity called in to talk to Richard. He answered on speaker phone. They started talking and I guess Richard was doing that thing where you talk weird when you’re on speaker. Charity noticed this but then misspoke. She asked, “do you have me on call waiting?”  And I screamed, “it’s called speaker phone, you dumb bitch!”  She died laughing.

At another job, I worked for a while in cubicles with other account team members. One of them had forgotten her contacts and/or glasses and had her face pressed to her computer monitor to see.  We were kidding her about that. She was also asking me some questions about some accounts she was working on.  About the third time she asked me something, I responded with “what do you need now, you blind bitch!”  Every one in our quad fell out laughing. (I’m not suggesting you use this word around women you work with. If you do, you better have impeccable timing and you better be really fucking funny.)

Another word that women may not particularly like is pussy. I’ve heard women refer to it as a hoo-ha, a va-jay-jay and simply kitty. (the funniest thing I’ve ever heard a penis called is when robot Bender on Futurama called it a “wang dang doodle.”) I don’t get offended at the word pussy, but there was this one time…

In my early 20’s I entered a stand-up comedian contest at a local comedy club. I was sitting at a table with several friends, one of whom was a woman I was interested in dating (spoiler alert: we eventually dated for around 5 years.)  After I had done my set and returned to my seat, a drunk woman plopped herself down next to me and gushed over my performance.  She was obviously interested in me, but I had to walk a fine line since I hadn’t yet told my friend how I felt about her. Anywho, as the kids say, this drunk gal was also a “comedian.”  It was time for her set. She walked on stage with the confidence of a 20-year comedy veteran. Then she opened her mouth. She started her set with this: “Ladies, don’t you hate it when your pussy itches?  I hate when my pussy itches. I have to get my hand all in there and…”   That’s about all I heard. I may have blacked out. I just knew I didn’t want to be sitting there when she came off that stage and sat back down right next to me. I went to the restroom, and I may have been in there for 30 minutes.  

Let’s get back to Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on tv. I’m going to give you a question for each word, and as you’re reading this, imagine what acceptable word you would use in place of the curse word, just as if it were 1973 and you were a contestant on Match Game. 

John hated his boss, so he jumped on the hood of his car and ________.

Mary was in the swimming pool and was too lazy to get out so she just took a ________.

Peter wasn’t one for being subtle, so he just walked up to the pretty woman sitting by herself at the bar and said, “hey, wanna _______?”

Sam saw Rachel taking off her pants and said, “wow. you’ve got a really spectacular ___________!

John wondered if he sucked a cock, if he would then be known as a __________________.

Samuel L. Jackson was on a plane, saw a snake, and said _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.

For an older lady, Aunt Bee sure had some nice, big ___________.

Years ago, I was invited to a lavish Christmas party hosted by a giant media company (tv, radio.) A beautiful woman caught my eye, and I worked my way over to her and started chatting her up. My hair was a lot longer than it is now, and she complimented me on it. She said she would like to grow her hair out long, but it grew slowly due to the number of anti-depressants she was on. Let me state that I have no problem with people taking anti-depressants, or any medication that improves their quality of life. However, maybe this is not something you bring up to a person you have known for 30 seconds. If she told me this right off, what were the secrets she was holding back? Geez, charm me a little first before we jump right into that.

Another time I was at a dance club. I found myself next to a cute woman. We started talking and she told me her cousin from Atlanta was in town visiting and they were out for drinks and dancing. I mentioned that I had travelled many times to Atlanta for both work and personal reasons. She said, “yeah, Atlanta is ok. Except for all the ******’s.”  I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what racial slur she used. She was not only racist, but because I’m white, assumed I was, too.  As soon as that came out of her mouth, and without saying a further thing to her, I turned and rudely walked away from her. As far as red flags go, being openly racist is right up there. That’s also the same reason no decent woman should date Hulk Hogan.

The term “red flag” is used in racing to announce, “EXTREME DANGER, STOP IMMEDIATELY” This past year saw a Formula 1 event in which driver George Russell had a dramatic crash late in the race. Russell was relatively unharmed, but his car was close to a turn in the track. He desperately called for a red flag on the radio to alert other drivers to stop immediately. Russell didn’t want to be obliterated by high-speed cars crashing into him. Instead of calling a red flag, race officials, in a controversial move, used the yellow flag which means reduce speed and be prepared to change direction. Russell was in a position where he needed drivers to immediately stop.

Russell said afterwards: “It’s not a pleasant place to be in the middle of a high-speed corner on the racing line… It doesn't sound like a lot but you can have three cars coming around the corner in the space of 10 seconds. When you're doing 250km/h in a corner and there's a car in the middle of the road, I was really quite worried.”

“Red Flag” is also a term commonly used by people in potential relationships. It means that the person you are interested in may have some qualities that could derail the relationship at best, or end up with you in jail at worst. You see someone you want to date, that person says or does something that calls for a red flag. It’s a sign you may want to stop immediately.

Red Flags are often obvious. So why do so many people ignore these signs and plow full steam ahead around the corner, possibly crashing into another driver? Why do so many people call for a yellow flag instead of a red flag?

I went out on a first date with a woman. We had only met one time before and it was a chance meeting at a bar. The night was pleasant enough. We went out for drinks and then back to her place. We were hanging out and she began talking about making an appointment with a plastic surgeon. Seems there was some stuff she wanted done to her face (there was nothing wrong with her face and she was quite pretty, but whatevs.)  Then she launches into a story. Seems she had been hit in the nose by a beer bottle (don’t ask) and that it left a scar that would require plastic surgery.  Prior to getting her nose fixed, she had been at a bar and said that two younger women were staring and laughing at her. As she’s telling me this story, she’s now in the middle of a drunk, ugly-crying jag. The girls had called her “Scarface!” (I could not see a scar on her nose. I guess she got it fixed.) Then, and get ready for this, as she’s still bawling her brains out, she says “them calling me Scarface has traumatized me ever since it happened…11 years ago!” What the actual fuck?!  This was enough of a red flag for me that I knew I wasn’t asking her out again. (Full disclosure: she also said she thought I was very handsome but didn’t think I was particularly funny. I was done with her right then regardless of the Scarface story.)

Sometimes you date someone you may not have much in common with outside of having fun together. But then sometimes you meet someone who has so much in common with you, it’s like the opposite of a red flag. It’s a green flag! All engines go!!  And then, fuck, the red flags come out.  I was a manager at Tower Records many years ago. There was a customer, a woman my approximate age, who was into all the same cool music as me. I don’t think I had ever dated anyone who liked all of the music I liked. Our tastes aligned so perfectly. I went out on a first (and only) date with her. I decided that in order to make a good first impression, I wouldn’t drink or smoke as much as I might normally.

I prefer getting to know someone in casual conversation. She started in on me like it was an interrogation. “Do you dogs or cats?”  “What’s your favorite cereal?” “Do you like peanut butter?” “Do you like movies?”  Not a certain type of movie, just “movies.”   My head was about to explode. “Do you prefer unicorns or fairies?” Bitch, I don’t know! Quit asking me questions! About 15 minutes into this date I was doing shots and lighting cigs like I was Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.

On top of investigating me like she was on Law & Order SVU, she told me she was afraid and anxious over any kind of public display of affection, including kissing. She had been married previously and told me she spent days in turmoil before the wedding because she didn’t see how she could kiss her new husband in front of all those people. Let me state that again. She was afraid to kiss her new husband during the fucking wedding ceremony. I can’t even with this shit. That was our only date.

Here's a big red flag that I knew about but completely ignored: a girl I dated and eventually lived with at one point was an ex-stripper. Let’s all guess how that turned out. But she was fun, as you would imagine. One night we were out for a concert held downtown and afterwards we went to eat at a bistro in a fancy hotel. Long pickles came with our sandwiches. She seductively ate hers like she was giving it a blow job. I hate pickles so she ate mine in the same way. It became obvious that the kitchen staff (and probably everyone within a 3 mile radius) was eagerly watching this entire show because when she finished my pickle, they brought her a whole plate of them. Obviously, she was fun, but with such a big red flag, why did I get involved with her?  I was young and she was an ex-stripper. Duh. But there’s another reason. I’ll get into that later.

She did have a thing I later called “stripper mentality.” It was a complete obsession with things or people which could change at a moment’s notice due to something inconsequential. It was an ability to do anything with anyone, especially things of a sexual nature, no matter what the consequences. She would justify any decision she made, right or wrong, by placing the blame for that decision on another person. She was just living her life and if she somehow hurt you, that was your fault, not hers. If she felt guilty, it wasn’t that she did something wrong or hurtful, it was that someone else was making her feel that way. If you try to break up with her, she will say “I will do anything you want me to do!”  This is such a red flag, and I knew it. If anyone says, “I will do anything you want me to do,” run. They don’t mean it. That phrase is used by someone who wants to keep the status quo for the time being, generally until they get involved with someone else. There’s only one other woman I’ve dated that I thought had “stripper mentality” and she wasn’t a stripper, ex or otherwise.

I was older at the point I met this next woman. In her life, she ricocheted from one obsession to the next. She spent a lot of her time in high school drinking, smoking weed, and passing guys around with her girlfriends. On several occasions, she had casual sex with a guy in a room full of other people. This was followed by a complete change of course in which she became super religious, attending church and Christian rallies and concerts on the regular. Eventually, she had an affair with a married man from her church. His wife found out and they were all called in to speak to the pastor. The wife stayed with her husband but was so upset that she forced her cheating guy to sell their house, and they moved to a different area. (I assume some of the fornication had taken place in their house.)

At the time that I met her, she had a boyfriend. After I had known her for a couple of years she started telling me private things about him. She complained about him constantly and would even tell me when he would come over to her house to have sex with her. Details of how sex was initiated, how she had to be in a certain position to orgasm because he wasn’t that well endowed. How she wasn’t in the mood for him but just gave in to it cause ultimately, she “needed some dick.” 

She said she wanted to break up with him. Then, things started to get flirty between us. She would lie to her boyfriend, who had picked up that something was off. She would tell him she had stuff to do when what she was really doing was sitting around her house, drinking, texting with me, and sending me risqué pics. I ended things between us on two different occasions because I didn’t want to be involved with someone with a boyfriend. She eventually broke up with him and we picked back up and started really fooling around. Several months later, she started being dishonest and outright lying to me. I could tell because I knew her playbook. It made me think that she may have been lying to me from the start. We eventually stopped seeing each other and she got back together with the original boyfriend. I would assume she is still lying to him to this day about things that happened the first time they were together which wouldn’t be good as almost as soon as they got back together, she got pregnant and they now have a kid.

It’s no surprise she eventually (or immediately) lied to me, it’s her thing. But knowing this about her, why did I get involved with her?  Am I an idiot? Probably. I’m somewhat embarrassed I let her into my life in any way in the first place, even as a friend. But that’s not the reason I ignored her red flags. I’ll get into the real reason later.

Not everything is a red flag to everyone. Maybe a red flag to me might seem minor to you. The character Seinfeld once broke up with a woman because he didn’t like the way she ate peas. But here are the TOP TEN RED FLAGS EVERYONE SHOULD AVOID:

1.       If your date tries to run you over with her car.

2.       Your date says she may or may not have murdered someone and it’s none of your business.

3.       A guy reveals that he is not into porn, except for “animal stuff.”

4.       A potential date tells you about his new business idea and describes it as “an Uber service for girls aged 10-16.”

5.       A potential date has been to 23 concerts by the band Phish.

6.       A guy you met has bragged that he has never read an entire book in his life.

7.       He’s really not that close to his mom except when they take showers together.

8.       Watches documentaries on World War 2 and roots for Hitler.

9.       They have a TikTok video of themselves dancing pinned to the top of their Linked In profile.

10.  He owns one or more tight satin shirts with images of snakes and wolves and shit.

So, you might ask, if people see red flags in other people, why are these people still hooking up?  Well, some people are just idiots. Or some people may have more red flags than the other person (a couple needs to be balanced in their red flags.)  For most people, though, the answer is simple, and you already know it. You just really enjoy spending time with that person. You hear them say stuff like “I was really young then,”  or “I’ve matured the last few years,” or “I’ve changed and I’m not that person anymore.” Guess what? They are still that person.

The truth is when you find someone who makes you feel happy or excited or intrigued or even just horny, you will ignore a lot of shit. Instead of calling for a red flag for EXTREME DANGER, STOP IMMEDIATELY, you call for a yellow flag to PROCEED WITH CAUTION and hope you can survive the car wreck.

POSTSCRIPT: if you read my essay about AI, you know I’ve been playing around with an AI music and lyric generator app called Donna. I decided to do one for this post. I fed a few phrases and descriptions into a text prompt box and within 2 minutes it came up with a song, including lyrics. Here’s the deal: I thought it would be funny. It really wasn’t. It’s actually a little harsh. I instructed the AI to do a country song. It sounded really good. By that I mean, it sounded like a bad country song that would be played on the radio. Maybe some Post Malone country thing. Again, it wasn’t good, but it sounded real. At that point, I had a decision to make. What if a woman I wrote about in this essay somehow heard it? That’s not likely. I’m not exactly Taylor Swift doing songs about her ex’s. But what if it happened. And even though I only put in a few phrases and AI just came up with 80% of it, would I want a woman to think that this song is indicative of what I think about her now? My answer ended up being, “yes, that’s what I think now.” So, here’s the song!

News recently hit that that a Buc-ee’s travel center was opening up around 45 minutes from where I live. People here lost their shit. “oh, my god, we’re getting a Buc-ees!”  I viewed this in the same way as the scene from Steve Martin’s The Jerk, when Navin ran around like, well, a jerk exclaiming “the new phone books are here!”  The joke was, why would someone get so excited about a phone book. I thought the same thing about Buc-ee’s. Sure, if I were traveling on the interstate and needed some food and beverage, maybe needed to pee, I would be happy to see a Buc-ee’s. But people in my city were making plans to drive 45 minutes specifically to go to a Buc-ee’s. People in a city that had numerous stores and restaurants that offered far superior products.

Country singer Keith Urban recently performed a free, surprise (pop-up as the kids say) concert in a parking lot next to a Buc-ee’s in Alabama. 6,000 excited fans showed up to hear songs from Urban’s new album and to test whether the convenience store really had what are claimed as award-winning bathrooms and the best and cleanest toilets outside of Lionel Richie’s house.

Buc-ee’s (I liked it better under it’s original name, Winter Soldier) is a conglomeration of a convenience store, Cracker Barrel, and Stuckey’s. It was founded by Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, which sounds like the name of a villain in an Adam Sandler movie. It’s basically a glorified truck stop which is ironic because they don’t allow 18-wheelers at its locations. Their travel centers typically have 80-120 gas pumps. That’s a lot of gas pumps. They also offer a lot of signature food items, such as Beaver Nuggets, which are tiny corn puffs coated with caramel and sugar. But that’s an unfortunate name. Beaver Nuggets. It made me think of a time when I drove by a Jack In The Box and the sign out front read “come in and get a Breakfast Jack!” It’s a good thing Buc-ee’s doesn’t offer a Breakfast Jack or their bathrooms wouldn’t be so clean.

Most of my youth was spent in movie theaters, arcades or convenience stores. One of the convenience stores was a neighborhood business owned by a Pakistani immigrant named AC Patel. It was called Quick Stop. I think. Maybe. Or something like Pac N Stop. Or Stop N Quick. Or Frank N Stein. I don’t fucking remember. All I know is that it had pinball machines and video games, and we spent so much time in there he should have charged us rent. Me and my buddies were very serious about our pinball and video gaming. Often when we would get a little too physical with a game, AC would shout out “Hey, you bang on my machine, I’ll bang on your head!”

An adjunct buddy of ours who was a year or two above us in grade worked there at night. It was like being at a bar before we were old enough to be at a bar. We would play Missile Command and Donkey Kong and watch a parade of older students come in and out in a most ridiculous manner. One night there was an older student who came in to get to a coke for his girl who was puking her guts out while sitting on the curb in front of the store. Obviously, they had been drinking. The dude saw us looking concerned over his girl’s condition. He slowly turned to us and in a slow, stoner drawl that would make Matthew McConaughey jealous, said “never feed a young girl wine.”

Another time, once again, a student older than us came into the store. Somehow, and I don’t remember why, we started talking to him and the subject of reading came up. He proudly said he had never read an entire book in this life. I tried to give him an out. Maybe a short story, maybe a magazine. Nope, he said, I’ve never finished reading anything. And he said it in a prideful manner, like he had just won the Nobel Prize. It reminds me of people today who have disdain for science or academics or just not being a dumb fuck.

AC Patel sold me my first nudie magazine. I was only 17 and was not legally allowed to buy anything like Playboy. But he sold me an issue of Penthouse. Young people today might not understand how big of a thing this was. Today you can call up free hardcore porn on your phone in a matter of seconds. When I was a kid, the only thing you had was looking at the bra section of the Sears catalogue. And maybe a few years later you got dial up internet and you started downloading a pic of what you thought was a topless woman and you sat, and sat, and sat while the glitchy little download bar kept getting lower, and lower, and, what the hell, she’s wearing a tube top! I’m calling bullshit.

I really had to talk AC into selling me this Penthouse. But I had a good reason. I had to convince AC that selling me that nudie mag was for research. That year I was the editor of my high school newspaper. I was a straight A student, but it came so easily to me that I got bored. And I always had a creative mind. So shit happened. That month, a former student at my high school, who now lived in Los Angeles, had come back to visit her family and promote her being the Penthouse Pet Of The Month. I managed to get in contact with her people and, without telling anyone on the faculty, brought her into the high school one afternoon for an interview for the school newspaper. She came in, immediately plopped down her portfolio in my lap, and I tried to keep my shit together as I interviewed an older woman who was showing an underage kid naked photos of herself. School officials got wind that she was there, stopped the interview, and my article about her was not published in the school paper. It was what it was. They really couldn’t let that article go in the school paper just because some kid had watched too many episodes of Lou Grant.

My interview subject on that day in 1981 was named Sheila Kennedy. She was only two years older than me but seemed like she was 30 years older. She was also, as I suppose a lot of the models were, a live-in lover of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione. Years later she sued Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose, saying he raped her in a 1989 attack in a New York City hotel. Now that would have made a great article for a high school newspaper.

7-Eleven, just like Buc-ee’s, was founded in Texas. And in 1991 was purchased by a Japanese supermarket chain, which seems appropriate since for much of my teen years, 7-Eleven was the Godzilla of convenience stores. There are no 7-Elevens where I live now. They were all over the city when I was young.

My neighborhood 7-Eleven had a small room off to the side that housed exactly two pinball machines. One was named something like Starlight or Starbright or Moonglow…I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter as we considered that game to be a consolation prize of sorts. Something you might pluck a quarter in while you were waiting for you turn on the Main Event of pinball machines: Tri-Zone.

We spent so many hours there, playing pinball and eating cheap microwave burritos, that we could put in one quarter and then win so many free games that we could play for three hours without ever putting another quarter in. We often maxed out the number of free games you could have on the board at one time. This was back when pinball machines didn’t tilt if you breathed hard on them. I remember one game in which the ball came down to that little metal divider to the side of the flippers. If the ball fell one way, it went back to the flippers. If it fell the other way, you lose the ball. The ball was almost suspended on this divider. I took my hands off the flipper buttons, jumped to the side of the machine, gave it a good shove to ensure the ball went in the right direction, and then, like a pinball ninja, leapt back in front and got my hands back on the flipper buttons in time to hit the ball back into play.

One Saturday afternoon we were in there playing Tri-Zone when a man in his mid to late 20’s walked in the doors of the 7-Eleven. He was wearing a tuxedo. Damn, this convenience store had a strict dress code!  He nervously came into the pinball room and asked if he could slot himself into the player rotation. We’re like, sure, whatever.  He played pinball with us for about an hour and a half. Then, like they were the FBI or Secret Service, two other guys wearing tuxes came in. They grabbed him by the arms and said “we gotta go!”  Turns out the first well dressed man was the groom in a wedding taking place down the street. He had gotten nervous and left to get a Slurpee and clear his head. The other dudes were dragging him back to his wedding. I wonder if the bride was at another convenience store playing Ms. Pac Man.

This may sound like blasphemy to some, but I never liked Slurpees.  They were too sweet for me. But I did love the Slurpee cup promotions. 7-Eleven often had superhero Slurpee cups and I delighted in collecting them. Recently, I was thinking about those plastic cups and wished I still had them. I decided to look on E-Bay and such sites and look at what I found. There’s someone selling 107 of these cups for only $1000. Would you guys be willing to chip in to a GoFundMe so I can buy them?

My favorite 7-Eleven product was the Big Gulp, a giant cup filled with your favorite soda for only 39 cents. There may have been more moments in my teenage years where I had a Big Gulp in my hands than when I didn’t.

My high school buddies and I were excellent students. I grasped the lessons so quickly that I often got bored. One year we had a new math teacher. He was a relatively meek, nerdy guy and had no control over his classes.  There were students that liked to be disruptive, in a very harmless way, but still disruptive. We hated this at first because we actually wanted to learn. But after months of this, we realized that this teacher wasn’t ever going to be able to do his job properly so we kind of gave up. One day before his class, we took Big Gulp orders from the other students. Three of our gang drove up to the 7-Eleven and bought around 25 of them, including one for the teacher.  They were a few minutes late for class. But they arrived with several large boxes full of Big Gulps. One of us stood at the front and called students names. “Randy Johnson, please come get your Big Gulp.”  Like we were handing out graduation certificates. So then you had an entire class of high schoolers sitting there drinking Big Gulps. This sounds too ridiculous to have actually happened. (it actually happened.)

As I’ve written, convenience stores were mostly neighborhood affairs in those days. I was driving to drop off something at my grandparents’ house. I stopped in a random convenience store to get a Dr. Pepper (the whiskey of colas.) I immediately spotted a Pac Man machine. I was stupid good at this game. I put in a quarter and immediately got the high score. You might think that the greatest achievement for a high schooler would be graduating Valedictorian (which I did) or being the charismatic quarterback for the football team or being the cutest head cheerleader ever. It wasn’t any of these. It was getting the high score on a video game and getting to enter in your initials for all to see. I got the high score on this Pac Man and put in my initials.  There was an older couple behind the counter. Probably a husband and wife who owned the store. As I left, I heard them say, “Jimmy is going to be heartbroken that someone beat his high score.”  They sounded so sad. This neighborhood kid’s score had been supplanted by a stranger. A drifter. I wish I had been wearing a black Stetson so I could have tipped it while saying in a western drawl, “sorry, ma’am. Sir. I don’t take any pleasure in it, but it had to be done.”

This is how much getting high scores on games meant to me. I was with friends at a local video arcade, and I was playing Stargate Defender. I was within reach of the high score when a very minor incident occurred. The building caught on fire. Black smoke started pouring from the ceiling like that smoke monster in the tv show Lost. My initial (and total) reaction was to keep playing. Finally, a fireman grabbed me by the arm and shoulder and dragged me out. I didn’t get the high score. I suppose I was going to keep playing until me or Stargate burst into flames.

Back when I worked as a professional wrestling announcer, I was going to wrestling shows in small towns all over a tri-state area. Often, I rode with wrestlers. The first thing we would do after a show is find a convenience store or truck stop where we could get something to eat and drink. Places like this along the highways always have tater logs. We stopped in a place one night, and a wrestler named Curtis Hughes (he was also known as the Big Cat when he was in WCW) walked up to the food counter and spied catfish. He asked the lady behind the counter “hey, could I get some catfish?”  She asked, “how many do you want?” and he said “a whole mess of ‘em!”  Not exactly an exact measurement or anything from the metric system, but what the hell, we were in the south. She probably knew what he meant.

Stores like Buc-ees are designed to appeal to a sense of neighborhood. Just good folk having some brisket and gassing up the car. But they are designed to service the most people in the shortest amount of time to maximize profits. People may only go to one once. Just a stop on their trip. When we used to go to convenience stores, it wasn’t a stop on the trip, it was our destination. Maybe that’s why people in my city are so excited to go to the new Buc-ee’s opening. Maybe they were like me and hung out non-stop in neighborhood convenience stores in their youth. Or maybe they just want a fucking big Dr. Pepper. Maybe someone just wants a big mess of catfish. Maybe I could etch my initials onto a bathroom stall but that might screw them come bathroom awards season. All I know is, if there’s not somewhere there I can put my initials, I’m not interested. Unless there’s a Buc-ee’s somewhere with a Tri-Zone. Then even Keith Urban wouldn’t be able to get me out of the place, even if it were on fire.

My father was born in a rural area of Mississippi but had the good sense to move to Chicago, IL before impregnating my mom with me. And although he lived in the north for a decent amount of time, he still had speech idiosyncrasies that were mos def from his southern upbringing. (I had a cousin around my age named Perry, born to one of my father’s brothers who still lived in Mississippi. Perry’s nickname was Bubba. I think you get the point.) My dad pronounced any word that ended in an “a” with an “er.” The Crimson Tide was in Alabamer. If the tv went out, he had to fix the antenner. Fred Flintstone’s wife was Wilmer. My cousin Perry was Bubber. Actually, no, he wasn’t. Somehow Bubba was grandfathered in as Buh-Buh. Please don’t ask me to explain Southern speak. That is not what this is about and I don’t have the time or the Mountain Dew needed to get into that.

This is also not about other regional dialects or slang. I’m not talking about how Canadians pronounce “about” as “aboot.”  I’m not talking about how everyone in Boston (and I mean every-fucking-body-in-Boston) inserts the word “wicked” after every third word. I’m not talking about people in Louisiana boiling “skrimp” or people in Tennessee getting a “skrawberry” milkshake. I’m not even talking about people saying “libary” instead of “library.”  (although seeing as how the Olympics just happened, I should probably mention that it’s called a “Triathlon,” not a “Triath-a-lon” as probably about 99% of most people you know would say. Including you. You people are wicked wrong in going aboot saying that.)

What I would like to discuss are words that are used incorrectly, or misspelled or are just plain stupid in the first place.

LITERALLY: This king of misused words is literally “literally.” Most people use it as an exaggeration. “I literally lost my mind when I heard the new Post Malone track.” Or “I literally shit my pants when my wife caught me with that hooker.” The word means that it ACTUALLY HAPPENED! Like for real, for real. Now maybe someone, somewhere actually shit their pants when their wife caught them with a hooker. Maybe he said “My head literally exploded!” No, it didn’t. Unless you’re that dude from Scanners. “I literally can’t take this job anymore!”  Yeah, you can. Unless you follow that sentence with “I quit right now and all y’all mother fuckers can literally suck my dick!”  Actually, I would literally pay to see that but you better be pulling out that thang and letting your co-workers get in line.

SUPPOSEDLY: I know several people that pronounce this word as “supposably.”  I want to think they know what the actual word is. I want to think they just have a weird speech malfunction with this one word. I want to think that Hulk Hogan isn’t a blatant racist, but supposedly there are video tapes that prove otherwise. (not supposedly, but literally.)

BABY DADDY: I don’t think there’s a term I hate more than baby daddy. This one tightly packaged phrase lets people know that you are both low-rent and easy, whether you literally are or not. Supposably, this term originated from Jamaican Creole, which I can get. It sounds very Jamaican, especially if you say things in a very stereotypical accent. “Oh, look at the little baby daddy with his little baby.”  (I’m pausing here while you say that with an accent.)  But here’s the deal. Let’s say you are a woman. You have a baby with a man. This man is not your husband. Maybe you are not with the father of the child in any romantic way. You could just say, when referring to the father of your child, “Steven’s father is coming over for the bbq.” Saying father, which is what any baby daddy is, is a perfectly good word. Saying baby daddy implies that even though you have a kid with this baby daddy, you are still down to clown. If I hadn’t seen the movie Baby Driver, I would have assumed it was about a dude driving his child around town while the mom is busy fucking someone else.

KNOW WHAT I MEAN: this filler speech drives me insane. (not literally) I know several people who end every sentence with “know what I mean?”  No, I fucking don’t. I don’t understand words and I can’t comprehend context, and I’m deaf and didn’t hear anything you said. OF COURSE I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN!!! YOU JUST FUCKING SAID IT!! No one ever uses this phrase at the end of a sentence I might not understand. Like “if you put too much oxygen into a bloodstream, your corpuscles might spontaneously explode unless you stick your finger into a light socket to let the electricity counteract the process. Know what I mean?” No, I don’t know what you mean! What the hell! Please explain this to me further so I don’t die!  This is never the case. It’s always stuff like “I think we should vacation in Chicago this year because they have good pizza, know what I mean?”  This phrase is used by simple people saying simple things and they just want validation. It’s like when a guy does the dishes and brags to his wife for a week and a half about how good and clean the dishes look. Washing dishes is a task that simply needs to be done. It’s not your thesis on husbanding.

SHOULD HAVE: This is one that’s only in writing and it’s annoying as fuck. It’s the quickest way to show that you are an illiterate idiot. I offer a caveat here to people using computers and smart phones. Auto-correct will mess you up. (when I first started using smart phones, auto-correct would always assume I wanted to type duck instead of fuck. Now, after that AI has learned my habits, if I try to talk about a water fowl and type in duck, it asks me “you wanted to say fuck, right?”)  I’m not going to drag anyone if I see a “there” instead of “their” in a text or social media post.  But you should’ve paid a little more attention in English class so you didn’t type “should of.”  That is not auto-correct. Auto-correct isn’t that stupid. If I see a post or text with “should of,” I’m assuming you are literally a massive moron, know what I mean? (I often use the word “gonna” instead of “going to” when I’m writing. I do it for comedic rhythm. No one writing “should of” is doing that.)

YEET: I’m only including this one because a friend on Threads mentioned she was mocked for using this incorrectly. Yeet means to throw something with violent and comical force. You can yeet something out the window, but you can’t yeet out the window. The term yeet started as an exclamation of enthusiastic approval. For example, this club be lit! Yeet, yeet! It morphed in 2016 when a viral video showed a girl handing her friend a drink, saying “Hey, Terry, you want some?”  Terry, upon realizing the beverage can was empty, slung that can down the school hallway and yelled “YEET!!” Thus, the sport of yeeting was born. Warning: don’t confuse Yeet with Skeet. Skeeting is a different activity and if you do it in public, someone might literally yeet your ass into a different zip code.

TEXT ABBREVIATIONS: LOL. That’s a common one. Laugh out loud. It’s what you used before there were emojis. Often when I see someone using LOL instead of the laugh emoji, I think “holy shit, that person is old.” Since I’m not a 14 year old girl, I sometimes have to google text abbreviations. IYKYK. A recent one I saw really annoyed me: ELI5. That sounds like it would be the name of a robot sidekick on an 80’s science-fiction tv show. It means “explain it to me like I’m 5.” It made me want to type ELIOV16.

Emojis were invented to do heavy lifting in an entertaining way. If you reply to a pic of a hot woman with an eggplant and water drops, that means you either have, or are planning to, jack off to previously referenced pic. She can either take this as a compliment or call the local authorities. There are a lot of sex emojis. A taco followed by a tongue means you want to eat a woman’s pussy.  A taco followed by a purple face means Taco Bell let the meat sit out too long. A peach is a very nice ass.  A peach followed by a tongue followed by a taco means you may be doing things in the wrong order. A woman texting a peach followed by an eggplant followed by a red no symbol means “no butt stuff.”

I once had a co-worker who became a good friend. And then, as Ron Burgundy once said, “well, that escalated quickly.”  She was telling me about the one time she had anal sex. She said it hurt, quite a lot. I imagine that it did. We were progressing closer and closer to fooling around so she told me that based on that, her policy was strictly “no butt stuff.”  That phrase made me laugh and I thought how great (and funny) it would be to throw that phrase, unprompted, into situations. Like in a job interview: “we would really like to hire you.”  “Sounds great, but I gotta tell ya, no butt stuff.”   Or, let’s say, someone asks you for help: “could you help me throw these boxes into the dumpster?”  “sure thing, but no butt stuff.”

ITCH/SCRACH: this one probably annoys me the most. I can’t believe I have to explain it. You have an itch. You need to scratch it. Pretty simple. Somewhere over the last decade, people (stupid people) have started to interchange the words for no apparent reason other than they have the basic brain functions of a weasel’s dick. Someone has an itch they can’t reach and says to a friend, “hey, come itch me.”  No. Absolutely not. They can come scratch you, but they can’t come “itch” you.  That’s fucking not what that fucking word means. You can’t just all of sudden decide a word has a different meaning. Try to do that and I’m literally gonna have to yeet you across the street.  There are some dictionaries that maintain that if a word is commonly used for a meaning, even though that is not the word’s meaning, that it now has that meaning. Again, get outta here with that noise. If thousands of people decide to start calling the ceiling a “floor” that doesn’t make it a floor. It’s a ceiling. The word floor can’t mean both the floor and the ceiling. Do people not get why we have words? 

Wrestlers have a unique language. It started, along with wrestling, in the carnival circuit. This wrestler language, called carny, was once only known by people in the wrestling business. But as the internet came along and provided people with an expanded world view and knowledge base, carny words began to be used by fans and the secret language became not so secret. You may have heard terms like heel, face, broadway, kayfabe. One of the carny words is “gimmick.”  Gimmick has multiple meanings, similar to aloha. It can mean a wrestler’s persona. “the Undertaker has one of the best gimmicks ever!”  It can mean a foreign object such as a chain that a heel might use to win a match. “ok, so Ric Flair is about to lose the match, so he hits the babyface with a gimmick.”  Wrestlers use the term gimmick so much that it now means just about anything in the known universe. I’ve been at a restaurant with wrestlers and heard one of them say “hey, could you pass me the gimmick?”  Salt, pepper, hot sauce… what do you want? Use your words!  I once worked with a woman whose husband was into wrestling and even logged some time as a wrestling manager. He used the word gimmick around her so often that one day at work some dude came in wearing an extremely stupid hat and she said to me “that hat gimmick isn’t working.”  I may not have heard a funnier statement from anyone who wasn’t me.

Words have meanings. Those meanings might change over time. But a word doesn’t change its meaning just because you use it incorrectly. And using some words just makes you sound stupid. You don’t have to be a Poet Laureate to sound intelligent. But people do take notice of what you say and how you say it and it will definitely influence how they think of you. So, if you have a baby daddy who literally talks all wrong, tell him he should of thought about that before someone like me yeets his gimmick ass across the room. And remember, even though I used the word “ass,” I have a strict “no butt stuff” policy.

The 2014 documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (available on Prime Video as of this writing) tells the story of Israeli cousins Menahem Golen and Yoram Globus whose love for cinema was undone by their total lack of being good at it. Their go-to game plan was to come up with a movie name, create a poster, and then use the poster, along with their unbridled enthusiasm, to convince international investors to buy a film that had not yet been shot. Often, they would secure the acting services of a once big-name Hollywood actor who wasn’t getting work anymore. And if you were an actress in one of their b-movies, you were probably getting naked. A lot. Their action and sex infused movies included American Ninja, Bolero (which feature a very naked Bo Derek,) The Delta Force, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Masters of the Universe, and The Last American Virgin (which was an American remake of their Israeli film Lemon Popsicle, both of which predated the teen sex comedy Porky’s, and both of which were much darker in story.) And, of course, Breakin’, a movie that introduced a lot of people to break dancing.

Cannon somehow got the rights to produce the sequel to the Charles Bronson revenge flick Death Wish. In the original, Bronson plays an architect who loses his shit when criminals break into his home, murder his wife, and rape his daughter. Good times. He goes on an anger-fueled vigilante killing spree, and audiences, especially at drive-ins, cheered him on as he shot the fuck out of lowlifes and thugs. As exploitative as this movie sounds, Cannon’s Death Wish 2 seemed to exact its vengeance on anyone in the theater with any semblance of good taste. DW2 is one of the most exploitative movies ever, making I Spit On Your Grave look like a Merchant-Ivory production.

In this bleak sequel, and try to keep up with me here, Bronson’s daughter Carol is now in a mental institution following the trauma of her rape in the first movie. Bronson’s character is back to being an architect. His friend Paul goes to pick up the daughter from the nuthouse to take her to the fair. They get attacked by a gang of thugs named Nirvana, Punkcut, Stomper and Cutter (subtle.) The gang later ends up at Paul’s house where they take turns raping his housekeeper. They kidnap Carol, move her to a secondary location (as Norm Macdonald might say) where she gets raped again as she does a version of planking and they rip her top open to expose her breasts (to themselves and the movie audience.) She tries to escape and ends up flinging herself out of a window, falls on an iron fence and impales herself. And then Bronson eventually kills everyone to the delight of any sicko who has made it this far into the film.

One of Cannon’s more notable films was 1984’s Breakin’, the story of a troupe of young break dancers and the hardship and ridicule they endured to practice their art. Special K (not sure if she’s named after the cereal or the drug) teams up with Ozone and Turbo to enter a regular dance competition. Not only do they win, but they also get a standing ovation from the judges who miraculously have opened their minds to a new dance style. This is, in fact, a movie. If Osmosis and Super Sonic and Lucky Charms (or whatever the hell their names were) competed in the Summer 2024 Paris Olympics, they may have earned zero points like B-Girl Raygun.

The reason Breakin’ was notable has nothing to do with the actual quality of the film and everything to do with the fact that it was successful enough to warrant a sequel with the ridiculous title Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogalo. (a young Ice T had a role in the original Breakin’ and was billed as “Rap Talker,” which shows that the term rapper was not yet common, or the people making the film were idiots. Probably both.)

The simple explanation for break dancing is: ya know, that thing where a dude in a tracksuit throws some cardboard on the ground and spins around on his head. The longer explanation is: break dancing is a style created and popularized by African Americans and Latinos in New York City in the early 70’s (like every dance created since the Fox Trot.) It’s a combination of intricate moves, speed, creativity, gymnastics, and fun. The “break” part of it comes from the term used to describe dj’s mixing records to provide a continuous beat.  It was the club before the club became the club.

It’s obvious that if break dancing were to be an Olympic sport, it should be represented by a white girl from Australia. (she got zero points from the judges, so no Electric Boogaloo for her.)

Simone Biles. LeBron James. Katie Ledecky. The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris saw the world tune in to cheer their favorite athletes as they created viral moments that will be cherished by sports fans…oh, fuck it, let’s talk about that goofy performance by Australia’s Rachel Gunn, known as Ray-Girl BBGun. Hold on. Correction. B-Girl Raygun. (B-Girl Raygun was my favorite member of The Cramps.)

Rachel Gunn, who tried her hand (glide) at jazz, tap and ballroom dancing, was encouraged by her breakdancing b-boy boyfriend to give it a shot. (Now you know who to blame.) Rachel competed and placed in numerous Australian breakdancing competitions before taking a break to complete her PhD thesis Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl's Experience of B-boying.  I know every PhD thesis ever written has a title that sounds like the biggest load of horseshit you’ve ever heard, but this one has so many stupid combinations of words that I’m not convinced her Olympic performance was not her just having a stroke.

There have been so many internet memes about her performance. “Me getting up in the morning”  “me not wanting to go to work”  “me having sex with someone who has lied to me so I’m gonna stick it in there but I’m not putting any work into it.”  (that last example was oddly specific.)

Here’s a Sky News Australia report on B-Fab VaJayJay’s performance at the Olympics. It starts by showing a great break dancing performance by the guy who lost his Olympic shot to Rachel Gunn. And then this Sky News anchor just fucking drags Gunn through the fucking mud and I’m here for all of it. I want to marry this news anchor.

Was Rachel Gunn’s Olympic break dancing performance really that bad? The only positive thing I can say about it is that at least she didn’t hurl herself out of a window and impale herself on an iron fence.

POSTSCRIPT: the horror that is Death Wish 2 is currently streaming on Max. I tried to watch it in full for this post but good lord is it horrible in so many ways. I had to tap out about 20 minutes in. Maybe it would have been more appealing if they had titled it Death Wish 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Chicago, IL has given birth to many things, two of which are me, and the melodic rock band Styx. In early 1983, Styx released their biggest concept album to date: Kilroy Was Here. This Terminator meets Tipper Gore tour-de-force was the brainchild of keyboardist/vocalist Dennis DeYoung, who seemed to have Broadway aspirations and probably would have preferred winning a Tony to a Grammy (he won neither.) I was a Styx fan and was excited to hear their new album. Luckily, the local rock station (which is what classic rock stations used to be called) had special Friday night programming in which they would play a new album in its entirety. And they were to feature Kilroy Was Here. None of these songs had been played on the radio yet. You couldn’t buy it at stores (obviously there was no such thing as streaming yet.) Rock 103 had gotten an advance copy and they were gonna play it for us!

I was def ready. Not only to hear their new songs for the first time, but to record the whole fucking thing! I had one of those console units that featured a radio and a tape deck built into the same unit which meant I could record shit off the radio. (People tried this all the time back then, but you had to contend with stuff like radio disc jockeys talking all through the intro to the song, not quite knowing when your favorite song was going to come up in rotation, and just the whole fat-fingering the clunky buttons on the tape deck and missing the whole thing.)  This night, in a departure from their norm, the Rock 103 DJ decided to start with side two. Why? Because the James Young (guitarist/vocalist) penned song “Heavy Metal Poisoning,” a rock and fucking roll banger, was the first song on side two. The first song on side one? The Dennis DeYoung written “Mr. Roboto.”  That poor Rock 103 dude just wanted to burn one and rock out! He wasn’t too thrilled starting out with a hokey rock opera about a rebel with a very nice head of hair running around in a robot helmet while trying to fight…other robots? I think. Maybe the Moral Majority, who were trying to censor rock albums at the time. Maybe he just liked cosplay. All I knew was I was capturing all of the songs about robots running things, all on my little cassette tape. Technology, bitches!

When cassette tapes were first introduced to the mass public, some musicians declared it to be the end of the music industry (not Led Zepplin’s Robert Plant who said, “You can't even imagine how it felt to have a cassette that you could take with you with a microphone so you could put down an idea and not have to hum it a million times to remember what it was.”) At the time, most musicians made their money primarily from album sales. Radio played songs to promote the album. Bands toured to promote the album. A ticket to see a band live often cost less than buying the album itself. Of course, today it’s almost the opposite. Bands want you to stream their album (from which they make almost no money unless you’re Taylor Swift) and then pay $1000 a seat to see them on tour.

If you are old enough, you’ve listened to (or bought) the same albums in a myriad of formats. Vinyl records, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, cd’s, illegal streaming, legal streaming and back to vinyl records. As you can see from the things that come after cassette tapes in that list, cassette tapes didn’t kill the music industry. But that kind of rhetoric comes from idiots after any technological advance. “oh, that’s it, they just invented something new, we’re all gonna die!!”  And that brings me to the topic of AI, artificial intelligence, specifically when it comes to creative endeavors. 

My very first job was as a video editor. (I skipped the whole “teenager works at McDonalds” thing.) I was the night editor which meant I was doing the mundane work the daytime editor didn’t want to do. However, I was so creative that the video producers who worked there started scheduling their edit sessions at night so they could work with me.  The daytime Senior Editor could operate the equipment. Hell, he knew the names and models and brands of every piece of video editing gear (which was before you could do it all on a single computer.)  He was all “yeah, put that in the Grass Valley 5800 and swap over the Johnson Rods into the Sony TX-13001.”  I couldn’t tell you what any of that shit was called because to me it was like knowing the brand name of a hammer you’re using to hang a picture on the wall.  It was a tool.

No one with a decent amount of creative talent is going to be replaced by AI. It’s just not going to happen. Creative people will see it as just another tool to get done what they need to get done. The only people truly afraid of AI are the people whose ideas were never that good to begin with. When it comes to making a joke, humorous comment, or just being plain funny, do you think I’m worried that some AI is going to come up with something funnier than I would?  Joe Rogan might be worried about that, but I’m not.

Side note: before I ended up using Joe Rogan as the example for this, I thought about using Matt Rife cause he seems like this generations Dane Cook. This was before I actually saw any Matt Rife. I just knew a lot of younger, not-that-well-seasoned-in- comedy people hold him up as their favorite comedian. He’s ripped, so obviously shallow gals love him. But before I used him as an example, I watched some of his stuff. He’s not that brilliant of a joke writer, but he does have a lot of charisma. And he’s got good timing and that’s about 80% of being funny. He also talks about things that young people will understand and relate to. So maybe he’s not Bob Newhart, but no one listening to him knows who Bob Newhart is anyway, so I’m leaving Matt Rife out of this.

There may be dangers to AI. Deep fakes, misinformation. But you can’t blame AI for that. There’s not some giant robot sitting around trying to figure out how to fuck with elections. Let’s suppose you lived in 1856. James Buchanan would eventually win the presidential election by defeating John C. Fremont.

John C. Fremont, “ok, listen up, team. This shit-head James Buchanan is ahead in the race. This is what I want you to do. Intercept all the letters he mails. Frank, you open those letters and figure out what kind of pen he uses. Edward, practice signing his name just like him. Clarence, find out where we can buy the same stationary he uses. Gentlemen, we are gonna deep fake this backwoods cow-fucker!”

I use Photoshop AI to create the lead pics in my essays. You start with a blank canvas. There’s a prompt box and you put in a written description of what you want your pic to look like. Then after around 30 variations and adjustments of the descriptive text, you get a half-way passable image. If David Jett Explains Things was a million dollar enterprise, I would pay an actual graphic artist to produce the images for me. It’s not, so I don’t. No one is losing work because I used AI because the work was never there at all. But it helps my site look a little nicer. Let me show you how Photoshop AI works and you’ll get a clearer idea of why you really shouldn’t be that worried unless someone has a whole hell of a lot of free time on their hands. (and that person is gonna fuck up people whether AI is there or not. It’s like the gun argument. Should there be common sense gun laws to prevent some of the killing? Yeah, of course. Obviously, if someone wants to kill someone, they are gonna kill someone even if they have to use a butter knife and a sock monkey. Should there be a few roadblocks for making it too easy? Yeah, probably. Should there be some common sense laws to protect people from some nutjob using AI in a malicious manner? Yeah, probably.)

Here's a pic I had AI create for me in Photoshop. I made AI do all of the work on this, which shows AI is actually just as dumb as the rest of us. I typed in “AI can lead to problems.” The result looks like a painting hanging in a LuluLemon sponsored yoga studio. Not very threatening

My next prompt, in which my brain did all of the heavy lifting, was “giant AI robots take over a city as people are running around in fear.”

Not so bad. You can see that AI can do things, but not on its own. It needs a creative human brain. (And a gazillion internet reference images.)

Let’s try “bald headed muscle man stands on a stage with a microphone not being funny.” 

Goddamn, AI really captured that! (or did I? See what I’m saying. If I had typed in “Joe Rogan isn’t funny,” we would not have gotten this.)

I tried a lot of different prompts to get the image at the top of this essay. The one that finally produced that image was “cassette deck turns into an evil robot.” Before I put in the word evil, I got a lot of happy kids and happy robots and happy tape decks.

See, AI isn’t evil. It takes a person to do that. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been playing around with an AI program called Donna, which does both music and lyrics based off of prompt, for a future post. Since I was messing around with it, I decided to do a David Jett Explains Things theme song. The prompt I put in was “David Jett Explains Things. He’s funny. Sometimes his joke are offensive.” That was it. The following is what Donna AI came up with. No one is losing a job over this. Well, unless you are the band Nerf Herder, who I actually like. Anywho, here’s my new theme song!

When covid first hit, I worked from home for many months. I barely left the house except for groceries. Suddenly, I wasn’t doing any of my normal activities. No going out to eat, no going to bars, no going to concerts, no going to movies, no going to the gym. (it’s true, during covid I never went to the gym. I never went to the gym before covid but let’s not get sidetracked.) I wasn’t spending the kind of money I would normally spend, and I was bored. So, I started ordering shit from Amazon. That poor driver was at my house nearly every other day.  Before covid, I owned three to four pairs of shoes. I now own over 20. “Do I really need that” became “covid quarantine says order anything you want.”

My mother and grandmother were avid shoppers. This pair of Edith Bunkers would hit every sale, every new store, every old store, just looking for…I don’t know what the hell they were looking for. But they sure as shit were out there looking. When I was a kid, my family, including my grandmother, made a trip to St. Louis to visit relatives. Obviously, my mother and grandmother were going out shopping at stores we didn’t have where we lived. One of those stores which hadn’t yet made it to our city was Target.  The problem was they didn’t exactly know where it was. Remember, back in those days there was no GPS or internet or cars with navigation. We drove around and periodically they would pull into a parking lot to ask a random stranger if they knew how to get to the store. (this seems like it would be dangerous today. It wasn’t then.)  The main problem was they misremembered the name of the store and careened around STL asking bewildered passers-by if they knew how to get to the Bullet, a name more appropriate for a store in East St. Louis.

Before there was such a thing as the internet, and on-line shopping, you could sit your lazy ass at home and flip through mail-order catalogues. My mother and grandmother’s absolute favorite was Fingerhut, purveyors of the biggest collection of junk you have ever seen. When Christmas rolled around, the kids were sure to get something from Fingerhut. Started by brothers William and Manny Fingerhut (yeah, that’s right) Fingerhut was originally created to sell automobile covers to car owners across the country. Using their marketing prowess by mailing their jam-packed catalogues to every housewife in America, the brothers grew their company from selling seat covers to somehow compelling my mother to buy a cow-shaped butter dish she didn’t need.

And speaking of things you don’t need – ladies and gentlemen, here’s Temu.

Temu is an on-line shopping company owned by the Chinese company PDD Holdings, a commerce group registered in the Cayman Islands with its main office in Dublin. That all sounds shady as fuck. Between the one-two punch of Temu and TikTok, China is Invasion of the Body Snatchering both the teens and the grandmas.

The juggernaut known as Temu hit the US in 2022 and rapidly ensconced itself into the lives of people who wanted to get on their phones and impulse buy things that were cheap, both in quality as well as price. That’s what I understood Temu to be: a place to buy crap but at least you didn’t pay much for it.  It’s the same concept as picking up a street hooker at 7 in the morning.

Temu ads started popping up in my social media feeds. I’m pretty good at ignoring ads, but one item caught my eye. It was so incredibly stupid (and cheaply made, I’m sure.)  I started thinking about finally downloading the Temu app. I resisted for so long. But this item…have I told you it was incredibly stupid? I knew I had to have it if only for the entertainment value. (don’t worry, I’ll show it to you later.)

The Temu app itself is a total circus. It’s like looking through the Fingerhut catalogue at super speed like you were The Flash. More pop ups than a Bluechew-powered circle jerk. If Temu could speak, this is what it would sound like “HEY, YOU’RE BACK!!! SPIN THIS WHEEL TO GET A DEAL!! DO YOU WANT 70% OFF??!! OH, SHIT, WE FORGOT! WE HAVE A SPECIAL GIFT FOR YOU!! DO YOU WANT IT!! ALSO, YOU ONLY HAVE 5 MINUTES TO DECIDE!! AND WE’LL PUT THIS COUNTDOWN CLOCK ON SCREEN FOR YOU!! HAVE YOU BOUGHT ANYTHING YET?  HERE’S THAT THING YOU LOOKED AT YESTERDAY!! BUY IT, YOU SAD SACK OF WEASEL DICKS!!  OH, FUCK, YOUR TIME’S UP! DO YOU WANT MORE TIME?  WE’LL GIVE YOU CREDIT FOR A FUTURE PURCHASE IF YOU BUY THIS DOG BED THAT IS ACTUALLY SMALLER THAN YOU THINK!!  OH, SHIT! THIS ITEM IS ALMOST SOLD OUT! EVERYTHING WE HAVE IS ALMOST SOLD OUT!!  BUY SOMETHING!! BUY THIS THING FOR $1.98 AND WE’LL GIVE YOU 100% OFF AS LONG AS YOU BUY THIS NEXT THING!! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD IN THIS WORLD, WILL YOU PLEASE BUY THESE GLOW IN THE DARK SOCKS!!! FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU IF YOU DON’T BUY SOMETHING RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!”

If you don’t have the app, you think I’m exaggerating. But as the kids say, IYKYK.

A co-worker of mine bought a dress from Temu. It actually was a very pretty dress and I never would have guessed it came from there. (let’s forget for now that 23 kids in a sweatshop probably made it.) However, when I was browsing men’s clothing, I didn’t see a single item that looked like it would be worn by anyone other than a total douchebag. Temu should have called it the Date Rape Collection.  Let’s take a look at a few items.

Oh, so this is “Causal.” Is there a “Formal” version of this I can wear when I go to a wedding or city council meeting? I almost want to buy this and wear it to work just to see the bewilderment on my co-workers’ faces.

Breakproof? These shitty Wolverine rip-off claws would break just being put into a shipping box. Also, they are not “realistic.” I’ve never seen a wolf with claws like this.

Ok, the prelim bouts are over, let’s get to the main event. What is the item that was so stupid that it compelled me to download the Temu app? Here it is. (btw, it’s currently on display on my desk at work and the following picture is now my profile pic on my company’s G-Chat.)

Yes, it’s cheaply made. Yes, it didn’t cost me much. Yes, it is incredibly fucking ridiculous. But you gotta admit, William and Manny Fingerhut couldn’t come up with something this dumb on their best day.

Postscript: I recently attended a wrestling show put on by a local promotion. (years ago I was a wrestling announcer/producer. I’m sure I’ll get to some of those stories on here at some point.) There was a women’s wrestling match and one stocky blond combatant came to the ring wearing THIS EXACT GODDAMN HAT!! As I sat there waiting for two women to simulate beating the shit out of each other, all I could think about was “I know where you got that hat! You got it from Temu!”

The Quentin Tarantino film “Django Unchained” features a scene in which Leo DiCaprio, playing an unscrupulous southern gentleman/entrepreneur, orders two of his slaves to violently fight (beat the shit out of each other.)  This scene, also known as the “mandingo fight,” takes place in an ornate game room complete with lavish bar, sitting chairs and a billiards table. People mostly go about their business and converse while two bloody men break bones and battle to the death in this parlor that looks more designed for serving cucumber sandwiches and petit fours than for an MMA match.

When I first saw this scene, I was immediately reminded of Apartment Wrestling, one of the dumbest things in the wrestling industry (and wrestling is nothing if not a series of dumb things.) What made apartment wrestling so incredibly ridiculous was that in a business that is predominantly “fake,” apartment wrestling managed to be even faker.

In the 70’s and 80’s, before the internet and cell phones and WWE worldwide broadcasts, if you were a wrestling fan, you only got to see your local TV program. Wrestling had territories all over the country (Memphis, Florida, St. Louis, Dallas, California) but none of those were shown nationwide. So a wrestling fan craving scoops and info on what was happening outside their local region had to rely on what eventually came to be known as “the Apter mags.”  Although he didn’t create these wrestling magazines, Bill Apter was the predominant editor/photographer and more or less the face of the company. Magazines like Pro Wrestling Illustrated, Inside Wrestling, and The Wrestler dominated the newsstands at 7/11’s and dime stores.

Unlike today, where journalists like Dave Meltzer of The Wrestling Observer newsletter and Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful.com cover the actual business of wrestling, the Apter mags treated wrestling like it was real. Like for real, for real.  Thus the magazines themselves were printing fake articles and fake interviews about a fake sport. And when sales would dip, they went to the one thing of which they were sure: men like to look at almost naked women. And it was even hotter if the almost naked women got into catfights.

Apartment Wrestling, on the surface, was women having wrestling matches in apartments, or as I like to call it, a typical weekend. But let me make this clear: apartment wrestling did not exist on wrestling tv shows. You couldn’t go to your local arena to see apartment wrestling. You couldn’t even go to apartments to see apartment wrestling (which seems really fucking dumb.) These women were not really wrestlers, they didn’t tour with wrestling shows, hell, they weren’t really wrestling. They posed for photos that ran in the magazines (and more importantly, on the covers) and the accompanying stories were totally fabricated.  In a world of fake wrestling, apartment wrestling managed to up the ante.

The 1995 film The Usual Suspects featured the quote “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Apartment Wrestling did the old flippity-flop on that quote as it convinced the world it existed when it actually didn’t. Let’s take a look at a few magazines featuring apartment wrestling.

Her diary really isn’t confidential if they are publishing it in a FUCKING NATIONAL MAGAZINE!

Who demanded this match be stopped? Are there apartment referees? Maybe the building super thought they were making too much noise and he couldn’t hear Mama’s Family.

Now it’s called Apartment House Wrestling? Is it a house or is it an apartment. Is there such a thing as Duplex Wrestling? This should really all take place in a mobile home.

At first, the inclusion of apartment wrestling increased sales of the Apter mags many times over. Cause guys wanna see women fight. And in a classy setting like an apartment, not at the self-check out aisle of Walmart. Eventually, the magazine publishers decided to put out a mag with only apartment wrestling and none of the actual male wrestlers at all. It was called Battling Girls and was just as ridiculous as it sounds.

So, the next time you’re sitting around the living room in your swanky apartment, reading a book or watching a relaxing television show, think about how much better if would be if there were two women in bikinis right next to your Wayfair coffee table, not fighting, just posing as if they were. A freeze-frame from a catfight. A moment in time from something that never really existed. Like Keyser Soze.