(Don't) Watch What Happens

During the early days of Charlie Sheen's monstrous, fast-talking public wild-out, I will admit to being pretty blown away by it, and I guess by him. What at first seemed like The Highest Shit Ever -- complete with the amazing coke-decision to start his image-rehabilitation tour on the radio program of 9/11 Truth godfather and overall crazy person Alex Jones -- became... well, it stayed really high-seeming. The over-the-top verbosity and epically poor rhetorical decisions and general thermonuclear grandiosity, after all, being what an already jerky/cocky guy -- who has gotten away with decades of conspicuous substance-consumption, property destruction and woman-hitting -- would sound like were that guy coked to the fucking gills. In a "Christ What An Asshole" sense, it was kind of gripping and mostly amusing.

And it still is, when you read the stuff Sheen has said on the page/screen. But listening to his sad sped-up crackpipe voice going on about himself -- always about himself, always going on -- or watching his prematurely wizened and withered visage, little pet's eyes flashing around restlessly, while he's spouting all that bullshit is not really funny to me. It's hugely discomfiting and increasingly depressing, and this is true even if the bullshit itself, the "I'm an F18 with tiger blood and poetry-spouting fingertips" stuff is actually amusing on its own. (It's doubly amusing when, thanks to Buzzfeed, it is attributed to other organisms)

Again, too, because it's the internet, my revulsion is enhanced by being able to watch other people watching this. For me, the hundreds of thousands of rubberneckers who opted to Join The Revolution and follow him on Twitter -- Sheen got 810,000 followers in a little over a day -- were basically people fighting for front row seats at a bumfight, but that's the internet, and that's what you get on the internet. But as Sheen continues (improbably, I know) to pass drug tests, it's getting tougher for me to laugh at any of this. He is indeed "high on a drug called Charlie Sheen," which is why he is continuing to talk about Charlie Sheen all the time, in these amazingly grandiose and insight-free ways. Dude is having a very public manic episode, and whether it's drug-fueled or not doesn't make it any more or less amusing to me. The "bi-winning" thing is funny, on its own. When it's said by a textbook dual-diagnosis bi-polar dude acting like a textbook dual-diagnosis bi-polar dude, you wince. Or I do.

Sheen is better-spoken, better-looking and marginally better-dressed -- I'm not really feeling his bowling shirt couture, personally -- than the crazy person in sweatpants screaming shit about how the CIA can just COME FUCKING GET HIM outside my office yesterday. He is rich enough that he could never find the mountain of blow he couldn't afford. And I don't really like being on the side of those clucking news program types who are like "don't you feel bad about choosing to ingest all these substances?" because fuck that noise, he's a grown-up and can do what he wants to his body. That includes being a total epic dickhole and starring on Two and a Half Men, both of which he has successfully managed to do for years without me really noticing. Or I'd be inclined to say that, I guess, if he wasn't also socking women in the face and keeping his crack rocks so near his young kids.

But I'm going to unplug from his I Need My Meds Tour for awhile, and be glad to do it, because I don't want to watch a crazy person be crazy in this way. I have no doubt that Charlie Sheen is not a very good guy -- hitting a woman once is proof enough of that, and the fact that his kids got removed from his sprawling and no doubt very hygienic home at Eight Balls And Shaved Pudenda Estates yesterday is abhorrent. More to the point, though, I am increasingly unable to laugh at this guy as he hurtles vainly, ragingly, biliously over the edge, blathering anti-semitisms and noxious self-praise as he makes his way down to the bottom. I'm not going to sit here and Dr. Drew you about how I want him to get help -- I'd think that's probably a good idea, but I do not now and never have given a shit about Charlie Sheen. Mostly I just think that pointing at laughing at this mentally ill narcissist in mid-breakdown is maybe not the best use of a week's free time.

Ride Things Or Die: The Paula Deen Experience, With Brendan Flynn

Paula Deen's giant howling orange face and Chico's be-swathed form is alternately and simultaneously one of my most and least-favorite things on television. The Food Network fry-mistress is one of the absolute monsters of our time -- with the complexion of a photographic negative, a brash and brazen ignorance that she wears on her linen (always linen) sleeve and a jones for butter so severe that it could coax a reproachful "dude, you are an addict" from Tom Sizemore, Deen embodies every glorious, galling excess currently on display in our culture. But while her goes-to-11 shrieking is tough to take, and while it's a bummer how fearlessly she has made her howling and proud lack of interest in any type of cooking but her own a part of her brand -- she's basically a culinary Tea Party, demanding a return to some unhealthy and imaginary yore in which the streets were viscous with shortening and men were still free -- she's also weirdly gripping to watch. Guy Fieri, for all the myriad things that are profoundly wrong with/about him, at least wants you to know that he knows how to cook. Deen just wants to laugh too loud at what didn't even seem like a joke and then shove cookies into your face.

Anyway, the internet is clearly in P-Deen's thrall as much as I am, and today the very amazing and very strange Paula Deen Riding Things photoshop tumblr lit up the parts of the web where I hang out. I discussed this with Brendan Flynn, one of our generation's foremost tumblr-readers, someone who reads Cook's Country for the articles, and who is as taken with the mysterious and richly umber Deen as I am.

brendan: Paula Deen Riding Things, currently trending on twitter. Internet 1 Brendan 0 today.

David: Yeah, I saw some of that earlier. The internet is just better at this than we are. I didn't even know I wanted to see that.

brendan: and Paranormal Blacktivity. that's also trending. but yeah, the internet is better. Paula Deen is terrifying. I can't even watch the top chef she's on. it just sits in my dvr box.

David: Sits in your DVR box, screaming and getting cream cheese on everything.

David: I also cannot imagine her food being good? Her show is fascinating, though. I watch it until I get too nauseated to watch it. I like when she drags her poor dumpy family around.

brendan: no, it doesn't look good. and I like Durkee Fried Onions a lot.

David: Her husband looks like a grumpy Southern Santa Claus, and she's just pulling him around like France, screaming about something and terrifying pedestrians with the force of her great gusty laughter. The guy looks ashamed to be there, but also like he'd rather be at home, eating chips.

brendan: grumpy southern santa claus is awesome.

David: Big golf belly hanging out. He should have his own show. His orange wife in loose Chico's linen garb, howling. Her giant teeth. She dresses like Missy Elliott in the "I Can't Stand The Rain" video, only the weird garbage bag outfit is from Chico's in her case, and she's screaming about frosting, and how you can-too fry it. Did they let her grade the food on Top Chef? Did everyone have to make tartar sauce, and then she did a shot of it and decided which version she liked best.

brendan: he's sort of the opposite of the barefoot contessa's husband.

David: I haven't seen that dude, although I guess you don't get to be a Contessa without a Count in the mix. What does he look like? A banker? A duke?

brendan: a banker, which he is. and been a clinton appointee. seems incredibly affable and happy to eat/listen to a story.

brendan: according to Wikipedia, he also was in the Nixon whitehouse, dean of yale school of management and at one time managing director at lehman brothers.
wow.

David: Affable plutocrats, man. Can't beat 'em. Paula Deen's husband ran a gun shop for awhile, then retired because he felt like he wasn't eating enough fried fish. He was sick of the bullshit.

David: So who do you think wears/owns more loose-fitting linen pants, The Contessa or Paula Deen?

David: And I do have a follow-up.

brendan: it's a push, maybe. But I'm going with Deen b/c they're probably cheaper (contessa is strictly lands end) and she seems to favor volume

David: That was my follow up -- which one's wardrobe comprises more linen by yard, not by item. How did you anticipate that.

brendan: it just makes sense.

Confederacy of Assholes

I have a longer post in mind on the general topic of proud ignorance and political narcissism and sad-stupid bigotry -- yes, besides this and this and this and whatever else -- that I am way too busy writing other things to write right now. So I'm jut going to note that Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on the Tea Party is pretty freaking great. And I say this as someone who does not like how amused by his own excellence Taibbi generally seems to be, or a bunch of other things about him. But also, this. This:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

Or this:

You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.

Condescendingly Taibbi-ian? Sure, yes, absolutely. But right is right, and even if dude kind of loses the thread in the last third of the piece, it's always bracing to see idiocy met eye to eye and engaged on its own shriek-y terms. I might've written it differently, but dude is not wrong.

I know you can't stop what's coming, and that this is what's coming for just about everything made of words, but I really hope Rolling Stone doesn't die. Someone needs to review Linkin Park records (just kidding, no one needs to do that) and someone needs to run good political writing with curses in it. Or at least someone out there needs to pay for writing like that. Otherwise I'd pretty much have to quit.

Department of Miracles, American Juggalo Edition

Well, this just about settles it, I guess, as regards the whole "Miracles" thing. Professor Violent J puts it all in perspective, sort of. I'm about to link to an Insane Clown Posse official website called "The Hatchet Herald," by the way. This is that link. I know, I know:

I mean, yeah, we get it. It’s funny to people on the outside lookin’ in, seeing two clowns rapping about space and shit, while floatin’ around in an orgy of screen savers. And SNL’s parody was off the hook hilarious. But when you step back and really look at all the genuine hate it got from everyday people, it’s hard to believe that so few got it.

Yes, most of the miracles we mention can easily be explained away by science, that’s why we say the line “fuck scientists.” Their factual findings sometimes explain away the Earth’s cool mysteries...Part of me doesn't want to know how they really make crop circles.

Not included: the last word on fucking magnets. Or the controversy surrounding fucking magnets. Incidentally, this is how magnets work.