Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Notes

1

1. Hopefully Charlie Rose, if he’s still alive.

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2. The notable exceptions being Vertigo (where the softhearted Barbara Bel Geddes gets jammed by sexpot Kim Novak) and My So-Called Life (where poor Brian Krakow never got any play, even though Jordan Catalano couldn’t fucking read).

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3. “Sometimes” meaning “during college.”

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4. Here’s one example I tend to deploy on second dates, and it’s rewarded with an endearing guffaw at least 90 percent of the time: I ask the woman what religion she is. Inevitably, she will say something like, “Oh, I’m sort of Catholic, but I’m pretty lapsed in my participation,” or “Oh, I’m kind of Jewish, but I don’t really practice anymore.” Virtually everyone under the age of thirty will answer that question in this manner. I then respond by saying, “Yeah, it seems like everybody I meet describes themselves as ‘sort of Catholic’ or ‘sort of Jewish’ or ‘sort of Methodist.’ Do you think all religions have this problem? I mean, do you think there are twenty-five-year-old Amish people who say, ‘Well, I’m sort of Amish. I currently work as a computer programmer, but I still believe pants with metal zippers are the work of Satan.’”

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5. “A certain kind” meaning “bad.”

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1. An obvious example: White kids using the word like phat unironically.

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2. Kevin from RW 1, Kameelah from RW 6, Coral from RW 10, etc.

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3. Norman, Beth, Pedro, Dan, Chris, et al. 4.

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4. Julie, Elka, that big-toothed Mormon, the girl with perfect lips from Louisiana, and Trishelle.

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5. Joe from Miami.

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6. Judd from San Francisco.

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7. Dominic from L.A.

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8. Kind of like that dork from Hawaii who fell in love with the alcoholic lesbian and then dated her sister.

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9. Theoretically Ruthie, the drunk chick from Hawaii—although (in truth) she was actually more reasonable than everyone else in that house.

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10. Cory in San Fran, all the other girls from Hawaii, Tonya from Chicago, and every other female who spends at least two episodes of any season staring at a large body of water.

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11. Julie from the first NYC cast, the blonde from New Orleans, Kevin in the second set of New Yorkers, and Frank from Vegas.

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12. I say “seemingly” because this argument appears totally superficial—until you find out the context: It happened during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, a fact that MTV never mentioned. As a rule, The Real World does not deal with the issue of context very well, consciously skewing it much of the time. When David (the black comedian in Los Angeles was kicked out for “sexually harassing” future NBA groupie Tami in RW 2, the viewing audience is given the impression that he had been living in the house for weeks. In truth, it happened almost immediately after everyone moved in.

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13. Relatively speaking.

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14. This is partially because everyone who does use postmodern in casual conversation seems to define it differently, usually in accordance with whatever argument they’re trying to illustrate. I think the best definition is the simplest: “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art.” So when I refer to something as postmodern, that’s usually what I mean. I realize some would suggest that an even better definition is “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, product,” but that strikes me as needlessly cynical.

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15. This was that chick with Lyme disease.

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16. This was the gay law student with the spiky hair.

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1. “Close to the Borderline” was also the inadvertent cause of the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me. I was playing Glass Houses at college—this was like 1991—and my roommate Mike Schauer walked into our dorm room at the exact moment Joel was singing the lines, “Another night I fought the good fight / But I’m getting closer to the borderline.” Mike made a very strange face and said, “Is this Stryper unplugged?”

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2. It just now occurred to me that—if Billy Joel were to actually read this—he must hate how every attempt at advocating his genius is prefaced with a reminder of how cool he isn’t.

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3. Actually, it turns out I was completely wrong about this: When I eventually had the opportunity to interview Joel (months after the completion of this essay) I asked him about “Laura,” and he said it was about a family member. He noted, “There’s a complete giveaway line where I sing, ‘How can she hold an umbilical cord so long.’ Now, who the hell could that be about?” Obviously, I can’t argue about the meaning of a song with the person who wrote it. But I still think my interpretation is more interesting than his truth.

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1. Three days before Pohlman’s haircut, Dischner had told me that “What sets us apart from the other twenty-two Guns N’ Roses tribute bands in America is that we don’t wear wigs.” This new development with Pohlman’s scalp was not to his liking.

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2. Premonition’s two singles, “He Is Rising” and “Mr. Heroin,” were both (presumably) about Carlos and allegedly charted in Greece.

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3. The last time Paradise City performed in Harrisonburg, they received a death threat from two Middle Eastern patrons after playing “One in a Million.” Over the course of the weekend, this story is breathlessly recounted to me six times.

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4. During the Paradise City set, Punky will lay on the dressing room’s concrete floor after falling down a flight of stairs. Though he will continue to post-party with the band for most of the night, Punky will need to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance the following morning when—upon finally sobering up—he will realize he has broken his wrist. Oddly (or perhaps predictably), the band will simply leave him in Harrisonburg and drive back to Ohio.

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1. It’s possible that The Man Show might be off the air by the time this book is released, mostly because Jimmy Kimmel seems like something of a rising cultural force. Of course, it’s entirely plausible that Comedy Central would replace The Man Show with an innovative new series featuring two guys sitting in a beer garden each week and comparing their wives’ vaginas to that of a Hereford heifer.

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2. Although the fact that he never missed a cut-off man in his entire career somehow makes this seem acceptable.

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3. And—as I mentioned earlier—it’s surprisingly unsexy (it’s sort of like watching that cow get butchered at the end of Apocalypse Now).

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4. However, you gotta give Steve Nash this: On December 11, 2001, Nash scored 39 points against the Portland Trail Blazers on 12 of 16 shooting. He scored 17 points over the final 6:23 of regulation, including two free throws with 3.9 seconds remaining that gave Dallas the win. And then he went back to his hotel room AND PROBABLY HAD SEX WITH ELIZABETH HURLEY. Nice night, dude.

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5. And here’s something you only notice if you’re as obsessive as I am: Kid Rock likes to mention in interviews how he hates Radiohead; in his video for “You Never Met a Motherf**ker Quite Like Me,” he actually wipes his arse with toilet paper that has the word Radiohead embossed on every tissue. On the surface, that might seem like a statement against pretension and elitism, almost as if Rock is saying he’s the anti–Thom Yorke. However, it actually has to do with Mötley Crüe. On page 358 of the Crüe biography The Dirt, Tommy Lee mentions that Pamela threw a massive birthday party for him when he turned thirty-three, and Lee says she “cranked our favorite band, Radiohead, on the sound system.” I have no doubt that Pam has told Kid how she and Tommy used to adore OK Computer, and it drives him crazy. Kid Rock hates Radiohead for the same reason I hate Coldplay (as described on page 4).

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6. Approximate.

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1. And losing to Poland!

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2. And also Jake Gyllenhaal.

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3. My statistically obsessed compadre Jon Blixt once made a brilliant deduction about World Cup soccer: It must be a nightmare for gamblers. “I cannot comprehend how casinos could set the point spread for these games, as it appears the favored nation wins every single match—yet never by a margin of more than a single goal,” he wrote me while watching Italy defeat Bulgaria 2–1 in a 1994 World Cup semifinal, a contest that was immediately followed by Brazil’s 1–0 win over Sweden. “Perhaps they only bet the over-under, which must always be 2 ½.”

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1. This is probably not true.

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2. Two entities that—to the best of my knowledge—are not in conflict.

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1. Except, of course, my mom.

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2. One Web designer actually told me that focusing a discussion around the topic of porn sites “insults” the Internet, prompting me to ask him if the Internet gets jealous when I use the microwave.

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3. Best known for her role as the teenage werewolf slayer.

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4. Are people (besides Al Gore) still using this term? Probably not.

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5. Well, actually, “yes.”

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1. Proof that America is ultimately a sympathetic nation surfaced in 1976, when a consumer election sponsored by General Mills indicated that over 99 percent of Trix eaters felt the flamboyant six-foot rabbit deserved a bowl of Trix, which places his approval rating on par with Colin Powell in 1996.

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2. This is not to be confused with the short-lived Oatmeal Cookie Crisp, a cereal fronted by the good-natured wizard “Cookie Jarvis.”

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3. Although this would make you very cool in Syria.

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1. Until now, I suppose.

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2. This is less true now, since unpopular kids are more willing to wear trench coats to school and kill everybody for no good reason.

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3. In fact, M*A*S*H followed this template so consistently that these twists ultimately became completely predictable; whenever I watch M*A*S*H reruns, I immediately assume every guest star is a flawed hypocrite who fails to understand the horror of televised war. It should also be noted that there is one Saved by the Bell script that borrows this formula: When beloved pop singer Jonny Dakota comes to Bayside High to film an antidrug video, we quickly learn that he is actually a drug addict, although that realization is foreshadowed by the fact that Jonny is vaguely rude.

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4. It’s been several years since I’ve seen this episode, but what I particularly remember about it is that—while intoxicated—all the kids sing a song in the car…and in my memory, the song they sing is Sweet’s “Fox on the Run.” However, that just can’t be. It was probably something like “Help Me Rhonda.”

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1. I know nobody uses the term Generation X anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It’s simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It’s not pejorative or complimentary; it’s factual. I’m a “Gen Xer,” okay? And I buy shit marketed to “Gen Xers.” And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.

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2. Case in point: When Episode I—The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, all the adults who waited in line for seventy-two hours to buy opening-night tickets were profoundly upset at the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks. “He’s annoying,” they said. Well, how annoying would R2D2 have seemed if you hadn’t been in the third fucking grade? Viewed objectively, R2D2 is like a dwarf holding a Simon.

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1. As opposed to this essay, which tends to be philosophy for shallow people.

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2. Unfortunately, this does create the one gaping plot hole the filmmakers chose to ignore entirely, probably out of necessity: If Leonard can’t form new memories, there is no way he could comprehend that he even has this specific kind of amnesia, since the specifics of the problem obviously wouldn’t have been explained to him until after he already acquired the condition.

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3. Holland’s #1 memory-destroying vodka!

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4. For those of you who’ve seen Mulholland Drive and never came to that conclusion, the key to this realization is when the blonde girl (Naomi Watts) masturbates.

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1. This is similar to the way rich white kids in places like suburban Connecticut fell in love with N.W.A. records in the early nineties.

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2. Although it should be noted that David Lee Roth seemed to have no problem with Ronald Reagan hailing from California.

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3. And don’t even get me started on the line “You’re my fact-checking cuz”!

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4. Like Tesla!

62

1. It should be noted that certain experts disagree with me on this point; some are prone to classify one genre of serial killers as “mission-oriented,” which means they aspire to kill specific people (such as hookers) in order to improve society. Other classifications include “visionary motive” types (who imagine voices inside their head), “thrill-oriented” killers (who find the process of murder exciting), and “lust killers” (who actively get a sexual thrill from torture and execution).

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2. One of the Zodiac’s many coded missives included a reference to the semi-esoteric mathematical concept of “radians,” which are 57.3-degree arcs used to calculate circles (2 × pi radians = 360 degrees). Amazingly, it turns out Zodiac’s victims were always found at perfect radian intervals in relation to the summit of nearby Mount Diablo. It does not appear that this could be a coincidence, especially since one of Zodiac’s victims was a cabdriver who was instructed to drive to a specific location before being shot. This kind of “evil mathematical genius” behavior is part of the reason some people erroneously suspected that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski had been the Zodiac Killer as a younger man.

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3. In fact, Eric gets kind of annoyed when people dwell on the fact that Gacy sometimes dressed as “Pogo the Clown” and performed at children’s birthday parties. “I think the clown stuff is really overdone,” he says. “He was just doing that as part of a civic group—it was really just an outreach of his political involvement.” Weirdly, this is true: Gacy was a political junkie who was once photographed with then–First Lady Rosalynn Carter. You’d think the GOP could do something with this.

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1. These are people I would phone immediately if I was diagnosed with lung cancer.

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2. These are people whose death from lung cancer would make me profoundly sad.

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3. These are people I would generally hope could recover from lung cancer.

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4. Obviously, I’m not counting the New York Post or The National Enquirer or anything else that defines itself as a tabloid, as those publications have no relationship to journalism.

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5. Then again, maybe these people are just way Zen.