I have a certain, shall we say, bad reaction to the scent of a certain type of popcorn. One that makes me feel the burning sting of bile rising in my throat. I’m talking about the kind of popcorn they make in those fake carnival popcorn carts you might find at an employee function they throw at the office. Not real oil-popped, artery-clogging movie popcorn… This popcorn is bland.. It’s kind of like warm, slightly less toxic, packing peanuts.

So the last decade of her life, my grandmother was bedridden in a nursing home and maybe sometime in the final two of those years in constant care facility hell, in what was either an inspired burst of creativity or the result of a weekend seminar for sprucing up your nursing home (Tony Robbins Presents: “Get Them Into the Light with Dignity… and Jazz Fingers!”) they installed a fake movie theatre popcorn cart in the lobby. Which was great because when you opened the door from the outside, instead of having your eyelids pinned back from the smell of piss, you were greeted by a warm blast of bland popcorn, which as you crossed into the patient area, turned slowly back into that Phil Spector Wall of Piss smell. There was even that moment in the middle where it would be half bland popcorn and half old people piss.

And it constantly made me think how bad someone’s life could be when here in America, a country where there are not only countless types of jobs, every type of job imaginable… beekeeper, horse inseminator, blogger, game show host, wine-taster… and these are just my weekend gigs. But yeah, here in America we have countless types of jobs… every single one of which has an industry magazine… (see my latest interview in Horse Inseminating Game Show Wine Taster Monthly)… but here in America the only job you can get is… wiping old people’s butts.

Now, I’m not talking about being a registered nurse. I’m talking about being a caregiver at the nursing home. Last stop. One foot in the grave and another on a bananna peel sitting on top a roller skate covered in KY Jelly.

I’m talking about the social care worker who has to change your diaper when you become a vegetable…

How few options do you have to have?

But you know why they do it? Soccer.

You know where these people come from, the ones who wipe your butts?.. yeah, places like Ghana. So let them win some game that means so much to them and so little to us, except for the millions of you phonies who never give two shits about soccer but because everyone else is talking about it, you start namedropping Landon Donvan in conversations so that people will think you’re cool. Yeah, phony douchebags like you… you’re the ones who someday will be unable to wipe yourself and will need the aid of a nice lady from a far away poor country… and I found this out… they don’t do it, for the money, what little barely beyond minimum wage they can get… but they do it because they feel sorry for you.

They look down at your white, shit-covered ass cheeks and they feel sorry for the time they beat you in soccer… that they had to humble you in the face of the world by playing the only sport they have to play because they’re so poor they cannot afford to play baseball or field hockey or anything other than the national pastime of catching dysentery. These care workers feel sorry for you… So what do you think, Mr. White Man, is going to happen when these kindly old ladies are no longer sorry for you but still hold a grudge? Yeah, that ass wiping aint gonna be so gentle. That’s gonna be grudge wiping. Revenge wiping.

So think about that the next time you’re so hot on American soccer. Or maybe just go find that Landon Donavan guy and kick him right in the balls and tell him no funny stuff four years from now.

American idol is manufactured drama. Nothing could make this more evident than the thirty seven season opening episodes each year that mainly focus on creating humor out of other people’s humiliation. Granted those being humiliated are, more often than not, deliciously unaware of how awful they are. And it should be said that American Idol cross-country audition episodes have done an awful lot to finally promote the idea that red state or blue state, this nation is not lacking for delusional gay males prone to an outburst of nearly restraining-order worthy drama queenery. If there isn’t already a savvy psychotherapist with handful of business cards standing just outside the exit doors of each audition tour city stop, then some mental health care professional is missing out on a freakin’ gold mine.

So, for a show that overtly traffics in publicly humiliation at the expense of the young and more than likely emotionally fragile dingbats of the world, I may add, why is it that we must also toss this pathetic woman onto the pyre of ridicule?

Sure her reaction to one soon-to-be-forgotten musical footnote being chosen over her preferred soon-to-be-forgotten musical footnote is overblown and possibly revelatory of a gaping emotional void no microwave single serving cake or lightly cheesy powder dusted snack food could ever fill. Though I know nothing about this woman and her half-naked male companion laying thankfully mostly under a blanket of some surplus material other than what little I’ve seen in this video, I am almost entirely convinced they would be the perfect demographic for a double-ended shotgun.

But isn’t it obvious this poor woman is completely broken hearted? That she had an emotional investment in the entertainment ponzi scheme known as American Idol?

How meta must we be that we must take someone who probably reveled, as did we all, in the pain of the cluelessly unaware and now revel in her own? Can’t this woman just be kind of pathetic? Must we always be cool 24/7 just In case some dingleberry with a video camera is trying to document the dirty secret that you are slightly weird?

Is this what were teaching kids? Don’t exhibit any individualistic traits that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see because millions of strangers will guffaw at you and not with you?

I am reminded of William Hung, whose tone deaf warbling of Ricky Martin’s now comically ironic “She Bangs” sounded more like something sung in the back of the short bus than a recording-contract-worthy performance. Hung parlayed the fact that he was a joke into a record deal and will probably be remembered long after any of the cannon fodder from that season who just missed the top three.

So what I’m saying, near morbidly obese idol freak fan lady is your fifteen minutes have commenced, the clock is running on the limited time you have to capitalize on this.

Look at that blonde airhead beauty queen from South Carolina. She may have the brains that God gave to a small soap dish but dammit if she or her handlers, the ones who probably have to remind her not to shower looking up at the ceiling or she may drown, figured out she needed to embrace her image as a moron. Subsequently, she’s been cast to compete each week on one of the other massively popular reality competition tv shows in America.

Now what could be more American than that?

If I were Idol Producers, now faced with having to find their Cousin Oliver now that Simon has bailed from this stagnant franchise, I’d pay this woman to point a live camera at her and show the live feed in a small box in the upper right had corner of the screen. That way when the next perfect pitch assassin butchers yet another screechy version of “Ribbon in the Sky”, we can watch her go koo koo for Coco Puffs all over again and wonder to ourselves if someone forgot to take their meds.

Or maybe we can just go that extra mile to dehumanize her and videotape her while she’s on ten toilet. Either way, no matter what corny turd she decides to freak out about next time, we’ll all be able to watch it all go down and feel just a bit more smug about ourselves being somewhat better than all the folks who are wiling to throw away the concept of self respect and restraint when expressing themselves about something they really, really love.

Trust me, I know bloodsuckers who live in gated communites, they’re called Entertainment Executives and they’re the ones who created THE GATES, a new summer series on ABC that looks like the picture perfect Merriam Webster definition of useless bullshit.

From what I could tell during the endless loop of insipid summer series promos ABC ran like clockwork during every one of the seventeen hundred commercial breaks they managed to stuff into the sausage casing known as the Lost Finale broadcast, The Gates is some kind of unholy amalgam of Twilight meets Desperate Housewives.

Really, ABC? Really?

For God’s sake, ABC, if you’re going to combine Twilight with a TV show why not pick Grey’s Anatomy? Doctors who heal their patients only to suck their blood over and over–which now that I think about it could be perfectly set against the backdrop of the American Medical Insurance Industry… but I digress.

Vampire Grey’s Anatomy would be great. That way I could have a valid reason to want to drive a wooden stake through the heart of that annoying asian chick on the show instead of the borderline irrational reason I currently have for wanting to do so.

No, instead we got Twilight meets Desperate Housewives, which may possibly go down in history as the worst intertwining of young and old since that time growing up when the kid next door banged his grandma, and Lord knows none of us want to talk about what we saw that summer either.

Granted, I will admit I am basing my criticism of The Gates solely upon the promos but I can’t be the only one who has seen this ridiculous teaser and then immediately circled my tv set with garlic cloves and holy water to ward it away. Aside from those who have any financial interest in this show, does anyone really think The Gates will be any good?

Truthfully, I think I have a better chance of someday seeing an executive nameplate embossed with the name Kevin Federline on it before I will ever bear witness to a second season of The Gates on TV next year, so schlock fans get your Facebook Fan pages ready and hurry to dip your collectable Team Edward coffee mugs in the bloody water because this whole Vampire well is running dry. That’s right, I’m putting my foot down. I’m not afraid to say “I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about Vampires anymore.”

I just want to know whose brilliant idea it was to just take the archetype of despicable people and then add the burden of also having to be an undead creature of the night with no soul–or as they’re better known in L.A., Scientologists.

But of course, that’s not to say THE GATES can’t be full of sympathetic characters. I mean why not feel terrible for the horrible plight of being a vain motherfucker who can’t see itself in the mirror. That has to be Hell, right?

Because if it isn’t, wasting an hour of my life watching this show certainly would be.

*****

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