I’ve watched this video over and over.  Seriously, I’ve watched it at least three times (that’s like a half hour) and I’m listening to it as I type this.  I’m not quite sure why.  What is it about Phil Collins that has transfixed me and at the same time made me want to kick my own ass.  I have better shit to do than watch “Take Me Home” over and over, don’t I?  

Right now I would give anything to be Phil Collins right then, in that moment.  He is finishing up a concert in front of what appears to be 50,000 Germans.  (The last time that many Germans got together on one thing, it didn’t end well. BTW)  But he is rocking out.  He’s working the mic stand.  The way he says “remember”  or reMEMba!  He’s a fuckin’ god in a tucked in party shit.  What the hell?  There is absolutely nothing cool about Phil Collins, but somehow he made it to playing sappy songs in stadiums, thrilling and depressing thousands of people AT THE SAME TIME!  He manages to rock their shit silly and then remind them to drive home safely.  Not only is he a rock god, but he also cares about responsible driving and road safety.  

How do you do it, Phil?  You have Rip Van Winkle/Allan Ginsberg on guitar.  You have “guy in red parachute pants and matching v-neck parachute shirt” as a backup singer.  Wait, is that why you are the coolest guy on the stage?  Because you surround yourself with these characters?  I’m on to you Collins.

Aside:  Do you think during rehearsals before the tour starts, he’s rocking with the band, throwing out reMEMba’s like crazy and then stops everything to berate the drummer:

“Whoa Whoa WHOA!  Stop.  Stop everything.  What the fuck, Jason? ”

“What’s that Mr. Collins?”

“Are you fucking retarded?  How many times do I have to tell you, mate?  Its high-hat high-hat cymbol.  HIGH-HAT HIGH-HAT CYMBOL!  Get it fucking right.

“But I thought-”

“Oh you thought? You thought, huh?  Did you think that you used to play drums in a little band called Genesis?  Was that you?  How many gold records do you have?  Well?”

“None, Mr. Collins.”

“Then how bout you shutdafuckup?”

“Yessir”

“Now you miss that one more time, and your going on tour with Don Henley.”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

“Now where was I?  Oh yeah.  Take me hooooooooooooo-o-ooooooome”

[... and scene]

That’s all for me.  I just needed to get the Phil Collins out of my system.  I don’t even know how I came across it on youtube.  But I did, and it consumed me on this evening.  I wonder what Phil Collins is doing right now?  He’s probably asleep across the pond, in jolly ole England.  But where ever you are Phil Collins, thank you for writing Take Me Home.  Tonight, it made everything seem right.

Personally I am lost.  Brady hasn’t missed a game since he took over for Drew Bledsoe in 2001.  He has been a rock, leading game winning drives and banging some of the hottest tail in the world. He is a personal hero of mine and the news of his injury, and the fact that he may be out for the season, has left me without direction.  I am spinning with no gyroscope.  I can’t eat, but have no problem drinking… in excess.  In my eukaryotic cells, the pyruvate has refused to enther the mitochondrion, thus it isn’t becoming full oxyidized by my Krebs cycle (which is now only running on evaporated dreams), so respiration isn’t taking place and my cells are fucked.

The only silver lining I could come up with is that this year I won’t have to wait until February to learn that the Pat’s aren’t going to win the Super Bowl.

What the fuck?  I need answers.  When did I take up residence on the Htrae?  The Colts lose to the Bears?  The Chargers lose to the Panthers?  If nobody gets stabbed at the Raider game on Monday night, I am packing up and moving to Canada, because shit will have officially become to weird for me here.

All of the above was how I felt until I viewed the following clip.  It explained everything and now I get it.  Everything isn’t right, but it’s as it should be — and who knows, maybe Matt Cassel is the next Tom Brady (or maybe I’m the next Tom Brady.  We’re both slow, white dudes with rocket arms and charming genitals.)

Just replace “Kenny” with “Tom Brady” and you will understand.  Enjoy!

(You might have to refreah the page before you can get the clip to play)

Thank you and help a hobo.

The Midwest is underwater.

Our President might be blind and is definitely retarded.

The Celtics are up 2-1 over the Lakers.

Lets face it, the end of days is nigh.

The ship has gone off the rails and soon angels and demons will be fighting for our very souls. Naturally, I will be betting on the outcome. I’ll take heaven beating hell by day six and with day seven not needing to be played.

Will I be left behind? Probably not. I’m sure I have a suite reserved in hell, somewhere between the obese/unwashed hobos and the anal rape sauna. I’ve been resigned to this for a while, and have been increasing my fiber intake as a precautionary measure.

But I am not ready to go yet. There are a few things I would like to accomplish on this earth, before I am plummeted into hells fiery pit that only plays techno music. I have been in a list making mode, lately, so I give you my veritable but not venerable (and hopefully funnier/more entertaining than the movie) bucketlist of things I want to do before I die.

10) Fire a gun.

I’ve shot a paintball gun and a BB gun (without putting my eye out, mind you) but never a real gun. I would prefer it was a .44 Magnum, but I’d settle for sawed off shotgun.

9) Get into a fight

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to get into a fight, but I am kind of a pussy, so I guess what I am really wondering, is what it would be like to get my ass kicked. Either way, I want to know what I am made of (cotton candy and tears?)

8 ) What a dick tastes like.

I’m not gay (not that there is anything wrong with that), but I am curious. Women seem to enjoy it, or at least pretend to, and gay guys seem to love it. Am I missing out on something great? (Am I like the one person who has never tried chocolate and then eats a Hershey bar and falls in love with it and doesn’t stop eating chocolate until I’ve given myself type 2 diabetes?) Why has it always struck me as icky? I bet a cock tastes better than a vagina.

7) Courage

I’m afraid of most things. I wonder what it would feel like to be John McClane. Hell, I’d settle for what it feels like be Sgt. Al Powell (and that would take care of #10 too, because then I would also know what it was like to shoot a gun… at a kid)

6) I would like to be either famous or notorious for a day.

I really don’t care which. I do want to make my living as a writer and know that there is sometimes fame attached to that, but I have a feeling that I would become very J.D. Salinger in no time at all. I bet it’d be fun for a while though. I’d got to fancy restaurants and order off the menu and adopt a black/asian (blasian?) baby. I’d wear big sunglasses and a “who farted” t-shirt everywhere too.

5) Experience Zero Gravity/ Go to space

How cool would that be? To float around and do summersaults and piss into a bag and fly among the stars. There is no cooler occupation that astronaut. Period. Which brings me to #4.

4) Fuck in Zero Gravity

Many view this is crazy and say that it wouldn’t be very good because you’d keep floating apart. I don’t care. I want to do it, because it would be super sweet.

3) Fuck Elizabeth Berkeley

I don’t care how old she is or how many shitty movies she makes, this has always been a fantasy of mine. I totally thought she was more attractive on Saved by the Bell then Tiffani Amber Thiessen or Lark Voorhies, and she will always be Mama Jessica “Jessie” Myrtle Spano to me.

2) Burn down a Starbucks

What? I work there and hate it. Seeing a smoking pile of rubble that used to be that bane of my existence, before the earth implodes would great. Fill it with a handful of asshole customers and I’d think it was my birthday.

1) Get a haircut I was satisfied with

Yep, I have never been truly happy with a haircut. Maybe its not the haircut but my lack of hair or general appearance, but dammit, if existence as we know it was coming to an end and I see Jesus flying around punishing sinners with his laser eyes, I would like a fucking decent haircut. Is that to much to goddamn ask? I mean shit, I am a grown-ass-man. I just want a haircut that doesn’t make me look retarded/riddled with cancer.

There you go, my “bucketlist.” What would you like to do before you shuffle loose this mortal coil?

Thank you and parking will not be validated.

You may now commence lovemaking.

C$

We are supposed to use this assignment to dig deep and reveal something about ourselves, and in the process probably learn something about who we are along the way.  Sadly, I don’t have any juicy stories to tell about a misspent youth or public urination.  I’m just your typical white, middle class, average guy.  My closets are filled, not with skeletons, but cobwebs. 

I really only have one thing that I don’t let people know, most of the time, and that is because it is more embarrassing, then anything else.  For you see, I have a slight problem (or maybe its a gift, who the hell knows) and that is my memory.  For some reason, I usually can’t remember where I put my shoes, how to factor radicals or the number of States in the Union, but I have no trouble calling up useless facts about 80s and 90s television shows.  Who’s the 23rd President?  No clue.  Who played Boner on “Growing Pains”?  Andrew Koenig.  Did I remember to pick up my wife’s dry cleaning?  Nope.  Do I remember the name of the comic strip that Ted Knight drew in the sitcom “To Close For Comfort”?  Yep, The Cosmic Cow.

As you can imagine, this can be quite frustrating for those around me.  It is very rare that I am able to make use of my almost encyclopedic knowledge of “Saved By the Bell.”  Nor do plot points from A-Team episodes ever show up on finals.  In fact, I once had a teacher return a paper to me because I didn’t follow the spirit of the assignment which was “Write about a teacher that inspired you.”  I wrote about “Head of the Class” teacher Charlie Moore played by Howard Hessman.  I guess the fictional teacher of a mish-mash of honor students didn’t inspire my teacher to give me an “A.” Or maybe it was just because he was older and would always view Howard Hessman as Johnny “Fever” in “WKRP in Cincinnati.”  I’d like to think it was the latter.

My wife has told me that I should seek help for my little problem, but that seems ridiculous.  I can’t sit across from a shrink and pay her $80 dollars an hour on this.  Sure, the first woman I can remember being sexually attracted to was Nancy McKeon or Jo on the “Facts of Life,” but does that make me crazy or just a little gay?  No, for I alone must bear the cross of watching the nightly news while secretly wishing that Jim Dial was the anchor and any minute he will go to Murphy Brown for her interview with the Secretary of State, and then back to Frank Fontana for sports.

About now you might be thinking to yourself that I just looked all this up on the internet.  I wish.  I wish this shit wasn’t constantly speeding around my head faster than John Wesley Shipp can eat a giant bowl of cereal or taking up more space then William Conrad aka The Fat man in “Jake and the Fatman.”  

But where do I go from here? Should I regress further and pen a threatening letter to Ben Stiller about how I loved is wife Christine Taylor first when she was Melody on Hey Dude! or tell you that I believe that old Mr. Belvedere episodes are a better source of life lessons than the “Bible?”  (Yep, I attend the Church of Belvedere and while my religion might not be a sanctioned one, it is the only one with a theme song by Leon Redbone. )  

I’ve been this way all my life.  In fact, when I was a little I wrote the people at FOX to tell them I was very upset that a Dodger game was on after school, instead of the next episode of Batman.  It wasn’t Batman the Animated Series either, it was the 1960s Batman.  I didn’t realize that what I was watching after school every day was actually reruns of a show what was canceled 20 years earlier.  I thought I got a new episode ever day and was pissed because the last one was a cliffhanger  in which Batman and Robin were replaced by the Penguin Protection Agency and due to a series of unfortunate events become fugitives themselves and when they show up at the Penguin’s pier carnival to set things straight, the get captured by the Penguin’s henchmen and strung up behind some balloons.  Then low and behold Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara show up and are going to shoot pellets at the balloons to win a prize, but the no good Penguin has replaced the harmless pellets with real bullets.  REAL BULLETS!  So I tune in to see how it all pans out and what do I see?  Jose Offerman bobbles the ball and doesn’t make the play at the plate. I was pretty pissed off, as you might imagine.  It wasn’t until months later, when they re-aired the episode, that I learned that the Dynamic Duo had bulletproof soles and their shoes and blocked the bullets by kicking them.

So there you go.  That is my dirty little secret.  I love old, bad television.  Love it so much that if I could be any fictional character, it wouldn’t be Batman or Superman, but “Three’s Company’s” Larry Dallas.  Why?  Because Batman and Superman never it on with twins.  Thank you and goodnight. 

Thanks for stoppin' by!

This morning I woke up and the day was nothing but possibilities.  I was happy, rearing to go and excited because yesterday I had made plans with a friend to go see a movie.  A movie which was the fourth in a series of movies that I absolutely loved.  This was a big deal because I had never seen any of these movies on the big screen before.  Raiders of the Lost Ark came out the year before I was born.  I was two when Temple of Doom was released and was still in a Ninja Turtles phase when Last Crusade bounded onto the screen.  I had to make love to these movies through a VHS player and a 27 inch screen and while pleasant, wasn’t ideal.  Now, finally, in 2008 I would see a new Indiana Jones movie, in a theater!  Not only that, but Spielberg was directing, Harrison Ford was starring and even Karen Allen was back.  Hot damn.

At 3:45pm PST the movie started.  At 3:55pm PST I began to get worried.  At 5:45pm PST when I left the theater I felt like something was terribly wrong.  I struggled with words.  I tried convey a sense of what I just went through, and that is when I realized…

On Tuesday, May 27th, 2008, I paid $8 for George Lucas to rape me.  

What the fuck happened in this movie?  Has Spiderman 3 been set as the bar for good filmmaking?  Instead of original characters and actions, we prop up caricatures and hide spaceships?  Also, I’ve never been less afraid of Russians in my life.  What a bunch of pussies!  I never imagined that during a movie I’d be thinking to myself, “You know what’d make this movie better?  Nazis.”  Why was I yearning for Nazis?  Fuck you, George.

Like I said before, I became uneasy very early on.  This was due to the fact that Indy survives an Atom Bomb explosion and there was an alien kept next to Ark of the Covenant.  All wasn’t lost though, because soon there after, Indy was back at the University teaching and their was talk of Conquistadors.  Conquistadors?  Fuck yeah, I’m back in.  Alright.  Mayan ruins and ruling a lost Amazonian city.  This is the Indy I remember.  I can totally overlook the opening and love the shit out of this mov-

What?

Aliens?  

Really?!?!?!?!

Oh Goddammit.  

Wait, there is an explanation, they aren’t aliens.  Good. 

What?  Fuck you, they’re from another dimension.

I just don’t get it.  There were like 10 drafts of the script and that is the best they could do?  Why?  Was it because they just gave up after a while or was it because of the “Story by George Lucas” that kept everything at the point of failure for the entire process.  If this was the gist of the story from the beginning, then I can’t blame the writer.  One can put a bow-tie on a turd, but at the end of the day, it is still a piece of shit.  

I do want to take a moment to say how much I still love Karen Allen, though.  She has such a great smile that throughout the film, I forgot about some of the retarded shit going on, and felt at ease.  Getting a Karen Allen smile is most definitely on par with wining a Pulitzer or seeing a rainbow in a new born puppies eye.  It is intoxicating.  She might be a little bit older from the last time I saw her, but hot damn, she is still amazing.

That aside, I must wonder if there is some kind of proposition, that Californians could compose and get on the ballet for the next election, that would ban George Lucas from having anything to do with the furtherance of the franchises he has created.  Could someone in George’s inner circle just punch him in the throat the next time he has an idea?  It would be doing us all a favor.  He obviously blew his load with Star Wars and all that we have left to look forward to is… nothing.  We have nothing to look forward to from this man.  He might as well change his name to Uwe Boll or Sam Raimi.  

Also, you might have noticed that I have largely spared Steven Spielberg from much of my criticism.  That is mainly because he has made some of my favorite movies and this is my first major disappointment from him.  I’m sure he was subjected to Lucas’ crazy ideas and once a shit snowball gets rolling, it is hard to slow it down.  Spielberg made Munich, nuff said.

Lastly, who the fuck thought it would be funny to keep repeating the Shia “comb” shtick till I wanted to kill everyone in the theater?  We get it, he’s a Greaser.  Don’t beat me over the fucking head with it.  Didn’t they realize that in the time spent on the comb bit, they could have had them go over 18 more water falls that would probably have killed every last one of them?  

In conclusion – Go fuck yourself, George Lucas.  Next time, give me the movie that you sold me in the trailer, throw in some Nazi’s, and call it a day.  Shit, I would’ve better accepted the return of Short Round then aliens other dimensional  beings and spaceships.  You know when people stopped watching The X-Files?  When they made it all about aliens.  Oh and George/Steven, if you are going to have a movie about Aliens and have John Hurt in it, you better have the alien pop out of John Hurt at some point.  I’m just sayin’.  Thank you and try the halibut.  

I have watched the first six episodes of A Shot at Love 2 with Tila Tequila.  God help me.  The worst part is, I haven’t yet hit bottom. For you see, I foresee watching the rest of the episodes and inevitable reunion episode that MTV is so fond of.  

How’d it begin?  Like all things, I started innocently enough and is now rapidly spiraling out of control.  One night, five weeks ago, I couldn’t sleep and was channel surfing (do people still call it that?  Somebody ask “the kids”) and landed upon the show.  I watched until the first commercial break, at which point I looked at my dog laying next to me and said, “This is fucking retarded.  Who are these people?”  The dog just groaned and went back to sleep.  Now, like any self respecting, hetro-identified male, I switched over to SportsCenter and tried not to think about the brain cells I would never see again.  

But in the words of one Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.”  That’s right, my willpower/dignity packed a duffle bag, complete with toothbrush and Q-tips and caught the first train out of town.  I flipped back to MTV and thus began my torrid love affair with Tila Tequila.  

Sure, at first I played it off.  I thought, “I can write a witty piece for the blog about it.”  Sure, that is why I am watching it, for the jokes.  But the jokes didn’t come, or were just to obvious.  The show itself is a joke.  Tila crying and getting emotional about just wanting to find love and having her heart broken on the last go-round.  Wait, hold the phone, she didn’t find love on a reality show?  It is such a tried and true method for finding a soulmate.  Obviously it worked for The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, the fine folks on Joe Millionaire and Temptation Island, didn’t it?  They all found committed relationships and the loves of their lives, right? Hell, everyone that ever went on The Love Connection is married and still making whoopie, thanks to Chuck Woolery and Cialis.  

Somewhere along the line, I started to see girls kissing and coincidently started caring. Why can’t a rare flower like Tila find herself a man/woman.  She isn’t even eliminating half the population from her dating pool, like most people.  If you walk on two legs, have opposable thumbs and even the most rudimentary language skills, you have at least a shot (at love) with her.  She thought she had found it, with some guy named Bobby from season one, but their love flame just burned to hot and to fast, and it was Tila, who got burned in the end.  (MTV if you need someone to write cheesy/trite/cliched/ descriptions for the website, consider that last sentence my resume.)

Sadly, her little bi-heart was broken.  But she is back on the horse and ready to let down her guard one more time.  She picked up her phone, called the MTV producers and said, “Get me a house.  Fill it with as many douche-bag guys and hot lesbians as possible and lets kick the tires one more time.”  MTV obliged and even threw in a stripper (which seems to be the MTV’s modus operandi this year, because they also broke the stripper barrier on The Real World: Hollywood, too.  Strippers for everyone!) for good luck.  

So how does she go about finding love?  Physical Challenges!  The whole show is based upon the notion that people will do anything for somebody they find attractive.  Why did Clyde Barrow rob banks?  Because Bonnie had great tits.  Why did Shakespeare write such lovely sonnets?  Because as talented as he was, his dick wasn’t going to suck itself.  So what, pray tell, will people do for an Asian chick with tits that are only proportionate with her gigantic head?  They will eat a pig’s vagina.  What the fuck?  Really?  Does nothing else say “I love you” like eating a pigs vagina? (If so, Hallmark give me a call, I have an idea.) If I was a contestant on the show, I might view that as foreshadowing (actually, if I was a contestant on that show, I probably wouldn’t know what foreshadowing meant) and start to wonder how much Tila’s box and pig vagina have in common.  

The real geniuses of the show are the producers.  They, somehow, managed to get 20 people to appear on television and vie for a chance at contracting Hepatitis.  The kicker, she isn’t even that hot.  She has nice tits and a flat stomach, that is all!  Her neck is going to snap from the weight of her watermelon sized head, any second.  I just don’t get it, but sadly, I cannot stop watching.  

I hate you MTV.  When I was growing up, you used to give me quality masturbatory TV.  Great shows like The Grind and The Real World Seattle.  Shit, even House of Style had Cindy Crawford, who was an actual goddamn supermodel.  I would’ve eaten a pigs vagina and taint for a shot at her, but Tila Tequila?  I wouldn’t wouldn’t eat a ham sandwich for her (I would eat it for me, though, because I love ham sandwiches.)

So, that is my confession.  Hopefully one day, I will be able to put this whole thing behind me and move on with my life.  But, this is more likely to be just one infected, herpified pustule, of many, on the long shaft that is MTV original programming.  I just need to ask this favor:  If I were to have an embolism and die while watching this show, could someone please change the station to the Discovery Channel and tell everyone I died watching MythBusters?  Thank you and try the veal.