On the two-hour ride to the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, I told my brother that corndogs were invented there and they’d once made a movie about the event.  I didn’t even know if any of that shit was true but I had told work, Facebook, my probation officer, and Ruthless Reviews that I was going to the Fair this summer, and so, instead of Adventureland, the vaunted theme park a mere three miles from the fairgrounds, I talked my brother and his kids into the state’s annual agricultural showcase. I needed to keep them interested.

My PO told me when he slid the travel chit across his desk that, along with abstaining from the use of drugs and alcohol, I may end up spending a lot of money, and he knew what he was talking about.  What was once an all-inclusive bargain has given way to more gaudy commercialism and an opportunity to nickel and dime city slickers at every turn.  I doubt Judy Garland and Clark Gable had to pay $2.50 a head just to get inside the “Snake House” or drop a dollar per person to watch a cow take a bath back when they were in Iowa making that movie.  Even the carnies have come up with a new scam.  Have you ever heard this one?  You’re walking through the midway, a big stupid grin on your face, shrewdly making eye contact with every carnival barker you see, when one drops a dart or a baseball on the ground in your path.  He purports that it was an accident and, just because he dropped a dart, somehow the carny code mandates he must give you a free throw.   So you pop a balloon and the idea is that you’ll be so fired up by your accomplishment you’ll spend $5 for three more darts.  Fortunately, my brother was there to talk me out of emptying my wallet trying to win a Jay-Z mirror.

Beside my commitment to half-known Facebook friends, my other (true) motive for paying all that money to drive, park, and get into the Iowa State Fair was of course food.  At our ages, rusted-out carnival rides no longer grab our attention.  Even when the cars have that sparkly paint that’s always been so cool ever since I was a kid.  Matter fact, I toyed with the idea of just listing an inventory of things I ate at the state fair and turning it in to Erich but I figured I’d just report a partial list of what ultimately cost me over $80 (no shit) and get on with it.  Within a 6 hour period I ate, amongst other things:  Teriyaki chicken on a stick, a turkey leg, fried Oreos, two sour licorice whips with a soft gooey center flavored to compliment the main licorice flavor, pretzel rods dipped in caramel, Nitro ice cream, part of my nephew’s Octo-dog, part of my niece’s cheese fries, and a Twinkie Log.  Which is a frozen Twinkie dipped in white chocolate and rolled in cashews.  Also, I took home some tiger fudge.  Everything was probably so expensive because it was ethanol-based.

Aside from the food and leering pedocarnies there were really three other things going on at the fair (since we missed the previous days’ Vanilla Ice concert!) and those would be tractors, overpriced and under-maintained rides, and farm animals.  Oh, and a Boys Like Girls concert on Friday night. Inexplicably, the fair organizers booked a band that, just by showing up, would be placed in grave danger of being called “fags.”

The tractor show had the usual disappointing Purple Tractor! and a “Transformer Tractor” that didn’t transform.  We tried to steer my nephew away from the rides as long as we could, so we spent an alarming amount of our day looking at farm animals. Reading the hourly schedule of farm animal events for any given afternoon at the Fair, the uninitiated is reminded that this whole thing is one big celebration of agrarian accomplishments and values straight out of a Wendell Berry poem, where barefoot, wheatgrass-chewing kids pile into the family truckster once a year and try to sell their prized steer that, to me, looks just like any of the four fucking million other head of cattle lethargically mooing at one another down row upon shitty row.  Where you’re at there are probably tall buildings and things to do but here in Iowa people will drop $10 every day to see a different kind of cow-milking strategy.

And those dudes off the farm did not seem to take kindly to us city folk.  Us hip Vanilla Ice fans.  As I walked through the pens, obviously looking only for deformed animals, every John Boy and Bubba laid out on a bale of hay gave me the stinkeye like I was finna grab one of their sheep and run.  If I was presumptuous enough to actually stand and look at a cud-smacking bovine for too long my Boston Celtics jersey quickly gave me away as an elitist whose only motive was to take pictures of big piles of manure with my Blackberry.  They knew I had no interest in buying one of their increasingly sexy lambs, or stapling a blue ribbon to some nappy pony with distinct virtues apparently not clear to the untrained eye.

I started to worry that only animals hoping for a prize would be displayed, but for all the showcase swine and beasts there were also some fucked up animals meshed amongst the studs.  A bunch of goats with chopped off horns and concave legs.  A duck with a Donald Trump haircut who turned shamefully away when we walked by.  Tomacco addicted sheep.  And finally, a 1,400 pound hog with a goddam set of balls that looked like Billy Corgan spooning Jean Luc Picard somewhere deep under the monster’s great belly.

About the only other possible free shit was these random rural games played at intervals throughout the fairgrounds – cow pie bingo, rooster calls, and fucking..I don’t know..wife-beating contests?  I couldn’t help but be waylaid that producing the 14th best Pickling Cucumber in Iowa is something to hang your hat on.  I sort of felt like I could just pick one up from the store and get a prize if the winner’s list runs so deep.  I asked myself several times during the day’s festivities, “How is this a Blue State?”

Finally, after seeing enough chickens to last a lifetime, we took my nephew over to the rides.  He got to choose three, because we needed money to get home, and I was going on one of them with him.  In a surprising display of judiciousness on the part of the sex offenders maintaining the equipment, the boy was prevented from getting on any of the bigger, faster ones because of his size.
We had to stick with the little stuff.

Preston first went for the lame looking haunted house where he and another kid, who wished he was at Adventureland, too, rode a little train through some darkened particle board.  They came off it like Bart and Lisa in The Simpsons except our carny didn’t apologize.

Then we did The Gravitron together which is by far the best carnival ride in America, just updated with an Eminem jam instead of Def Leppard.  I don’t know if it’s my advancing age though or the 2,000 grams of sugar I ingested earlier that afternoon but there was one scary moment during the ride where I feared my Twinkie Log wouldn’t get the chance to become a proper Dookie Log.
And I can’t even remember the last ride he went on but I’m pretty sure it was terrible and not worth the five bucks his dad paid.

As our day started to wrap up and we were herded out the Fair like broke ass cattle, I considered that everybody around me, all these new friends we’d made that day – the carnies,  hot tub salesmen, cowpokes, midway barkers, pork queens, turd-farmers, and all the other unsuspecting rubes of Bartertown – these people’s votes are going to count more than yours in deciding our next President.

Also…don’t take a 5-year-old kid to the State Fair unless he has a lot of money on him.

Upon hearing that this new wave classic is being remade in 2010 with the Fresh Prince or I, Carly or whoever, I was reminded of the era when it was originally released, and how my brothers and I had an 8 hour VHS with Footloose taped in between 80′s action juggernauts Cobra and Bloodsport. Surely there must have been common elements that drew young men such as ourselves en masse to such seemingly disparate movies.

Tagline:

One Kid.  One Town.  One Chance.

Summarize This Movie In the Style of Run-D.M.C.:

Kev-in Bacon plays this boy named Ren
who moves to this town where dancin’ be a sin
Lori Singer stars as a skeezy psycho
her daddy is the preacher
played by John Lithgow

JJJJJJohn Lithgow JJJJJJohn Lithgow Lithlithlitha Lithgow

JJJJJJohn Lithgow

Homoerotic content:

Let’s cut to the chase. At Ruthless, we look for gay subtext in 80′s action films. As well as in basically any life situation. And we shouldn’t have to look far here because Footloose is a musical. And Sarah Jessica Parker is in it. But wait. First, SJP is actually kind of attractive in this movie, which will shake up everyone’s sexual identity and second, the males in the cast are mostly svelte and nimble. Except Chris Penn. But we’ll get to him in a minute.

An 80′s movie, starring a mostly young male cast and no brawny beef-pecs slathered with oil? It like, confuses the viewer’s confusion. Well, this is a different kind of gay altogether, folks. Packed with twinks and choreographed dance numbers, this flick went for the softer side of men who usually sought out hot bear action. Sure, they may have thrown a couple funny-looking bitches in the mix, and chicks in the 80′s possibly thought Kevin Bacon was cute, but don’t be fooled. No movie that goes from a shower scene in the boy’s bathroom replete with a fuzzy bushel of pubes closing in rapidly on the camera right into a montage of one guy teaching another one how to dance isn’t trying to send a brash message.

Also, early on, when Ren first registers at Beaumont High School and all the boys discuss,  “making the team,” conventional teen movie wisdom tells you they’re surely referring to football. Huh uh. They are talking about getting on the school’s men’s gymnastics team. And there is pretty heavy competition amongst the young men of the town to make the cut. In Beaumont, Bumfuck, Utah. Ruthless will send you an old T-shirt if you can find a single member of the male gymnastics squad in any town in Utah with a population of less than 10,000 people.

Is There A Dance Fight?

No. But there is a real fight. Ren and Willard (Chris Penn) beat up Chuck and his dirtbag buddies right before the big dance. I would argue though that there’s a couple times where Ren is sort of dancing during the squabble.

Also, there is a tractor fight. Which apparently is how they settle things in Beaumont, Utah.

Why Did This Movie Make a Shitload of Money?

Because it’s a classic popcorn rabble-rouser and only a select few picked up on it’s Trojan Horse message of gay love. Plus, there are some genuinely great scenes and pretty infectious tunes. Admittedly, it’s a hoot watching Kevin Bacon driving through town in his VW Beetle blasting “Metal Health”.

Essentially, you have Ren McCormack reluctantly moving with his mom into a town run by preacher Shaw Moore, played by the always great John Lithgow, with a daughter named Ariel who is both a filthy whore and completely insane. Because she is the preacher’s daughter. And also because apparently her brother, Pastor Moore’s son, was killed a few years ago in a car accident, presumably after snorting a couple lines of dancing. And so the activity is outlawed in Beaumont. Which means twinkle-toed Ren has a very difficult time adjusting.

Ariel is fucking nuts. I understand having some issues after the loss of a close loved one but she tries to commit suicide no fewer than two times in the first half of the movie. And in decidedly gruesome ways. Yet our most pressing concern is supposed to be dancing. I’m certain Ariel cuts her arms and before she gets on Ren she’s dating this 25 year old scum-neck named Chuck who abuses her. Like she likes it.

The bloodthirsty Ariel feverishly endorses violence throughout the entire film, including rooting for Ren to die in a game of tractor chicken with Chuck. But when Ren ends up winning, of course she’s all up on his shit. Somewhere in between all that, she shows Ren a crappy poem she scribbled in a cave, yells in church, pawns her Purity Ring, destroys a truck, and skanks out to Shalamar in a fast food parking lot. Forewarning that if they ever actually do hook up and move to the big city like Ariel so desires, she’d dump Ren for a couple train pulling bruthas within weeks, after lustily watching them beat him to a pulp.

Also Chris Penn is in it. Has there ever been a more miscast fat guy in film history? I guarantee it took a six weeks of one-on-one boot camp just to teach Penn those few moves he busts during the final sequence. None of that makes him any less fun to watch though. Shit, it’s Chris fucking Penn.

One important scene has Ren bringing most of the student body to a town hall meeting where they all loudly disrupt the affair with handmade signs implying our President is a Nazi and a socialist and proving that a small but fervently petulant minority can spike a rational, compassionate health care proposal that..oh wait. Actually, Ren talks about how they used to dance in the Old Testament and who can argue with that? Cause Bible beaters always listen intently when confronted with all the ridiculous contradictions in their paper-thin ideology.

Footloose carries a good amount of momentum up to the raucous and crowd-pleasing senior prom in a barn. Which happens to be right across the Beaumont County line. Because though Ren finally chips away at Pastor Shaw’s hypocritical fundamentalism, Beaumont doesn’t lift the dancing ban.

Which makes no fucking sense, really.

Novelty Dances:

The beginning title sequence is pretty cool. All these different pairs of feet and shoes are dancing while the cast names are put up. One guy has those white Nikes with the red swoosh that were the best shoes to have until Air Jordans came out.

When Ariel uses Chuck’s radio to play some black music, a fry cook jams out while grilling some burgers and this guy starts dancing while playing Space Invaders. It might have been Galaga though.

Surely, when Ren dances by himself.

And then at the end, there is some pretty dope-ass breaking. God knows where these kids learned how to do Body Rocks and Coffee Grinders in a small town with no dancing, or in a small town period, but they do put on a fun show.

Corpse Count:

That’s not what 80′s Dance Action was all about! Douchebag.

Political content:

I maintain that following in footsteps of The Village People, Footloose was one of the first salvos openly fired from the gay rights cannon. A young, fashionable sharpie swishes into small town Bible Belt America straight from Illinois and immediately tries to makeover years of repressed sexual tension and all-out lust. One might theorize that Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, in a more tolerant post-Reagan climate, picked up where Footloose left off. Especially considering the flannel shirt male bonding going on between Ren and Willard and how their old ladies kept yanking them by the hands in different directions.

This movie was an early statement of gay rights, by way of dancing in the face of stuffy conservatism. After his uncle berates him for trying to change the town’s status quo, Ren runs off and dances alone in a warehouse. Complete with the move where he puts his back up against the wall,  spreads his arms out and passionately jerks his chin to the sky. It’s telling.

Where most of Hollywood in the 80′s sent their message undercover to angry, burly white men by releasing flicks showing sweaty steroid freaks substituting fighting for fucking, movies like Footloose shouted out to that lonely, dejected gay teen, agonizing away in small town America. Letting him know there was hope and maybe, just maybe, if he started dancing to the rhythm and took to organizing a flamboyant ball he’d be lifted on shoulders high instead of being dragged behind a pickup truck while guys in the bed threw spent beer cans at his lifeless body.

Special Ruthless Data:

• Number of times during Footloose you thought Lori Singer was a hottie: 4
• Number of times you thought she was a nottie: 3
• Number of black guys in the movie: 0
• Number of black artists’ songs on the soundtrack: 4
• Number of times you did the robot while watching this movie:  1
• Number of times you thought Kenny Loggins was a pretty good pop songwriter during Footloose: 4
• Number of times you fantasized beating Don Henley to death during the course of the film: 3
• Number of times you fantasize about beating Don Henley to death during the course of a normal day: 4

It’s getting hard to trust aging punk bands’ output after so many disappointments in the past couple years. Pennywise, Poison Idea, Bad Religion – there comes that point where a loyal fan must accept that his heroes have run out of new ideas. When the old guys in Motley Crue are releasing more exciting material than NOFX you start to contemplate if punk has a creative ceiling.

I was reticent picking up Rancid’s Let The Dominoes Fall. Initially passing it up new for $9.99 at Best Buy, I then found myself facing a classic used CD store Catch-22 when I saw such a recent release on the shelf at the secondhand price of $7.99, a price that seems like a no-brainer for the latest from such a legendary band until you think about how someone in town sacrificed about $5.00 in possible disgust. I considered listening to it on Youtube before shelling out the money but the store is all the way across town and I figured I owed it to the band if only for the timeless …And Out Come The Wolves and my five finger discount of their previous album from the internet.

Rancid’s newest turns out to be much less of a letdown than some of the aforementioned bands’ last releases. You’re not getting a reinvention of the wheel here like with Wolves and coming six years after the all-over-the-map Indestructible, maybe fans were hoping for a little more predictability. With Indestructible, band founders Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen were immersed in so called “side” projects to the point that it was expected to feel like a second-thought album, which does not seem to be the case on this release.

To this particular critic, now in his mid-30′s and listening to like six new records a year, LTDF is a helluva solid comeback. Blasting off with another charged opener, and a singalong tribute to their stomping grounds, “East Bay Night,” a hopeful but cautious smile crept across my stupid face. Four of the first five songs in fact are pretty infectious and though it doesn’t seem as classic as Rancid’s past material, part of that could be due to my sorry lack of knowledge about new music.

Not every song gets to be an anthem though, except if it was on AOCTW, and therefore we put up with some of Rancid’s now trademark mid-tempo filler come songs numero 6 and 7. Perhaps being lulled into apathy by those two then, I’m now doubly excited about song 8 and what would have to be the record’s next single, “New Orleans.” A heartbreaking love letter to an unjustly scorned American city, this is a folk song on par with something by the likes of Bob Dylan or John Fogerty, just with reved up guitars and some flying spittle. The band doesn’t go out of its way to bust the government’s chops on their sinful response to that tragedy, and like “Rwanda” from 2000′s self titled release, just keeps it a show of support to the town and its people and that’s what makes the song so great. That and a remarkably uplifting melody. And is there anyone else out there who can rock a slide guitar like Tim Armstrong? “New Orleans,” is Rancid’s best song since the mid-90′s. And that’s saying a lot.

The populist screeds “Civilian Ways,” and “Lulu,” recount more working class song stories, a band trademark and, “You Want It, You Got It,” lights up the back side of the album between a couple weak moments. One issue I had– Armstrong has one of the most distinct voices in music and Frederiksen is a welcome growler but to me bassist Matt Freeman sounds like he’s trying to force out a bunch of vocals while running out of breath and is reminiscent of that guy from Dropkick Murphys who they let sing sometimes too and I thought to myself “why would Rancid invite Dropkick’s underwhelming backup singer to sing on this?” Then after a couple listens I realized it was Freeman, who they let touch the ball out of charity a couple times in the past. Seems pointless and why toy with such a successful formula but hey, why carp? I think it’s safe to say punk doesn’t boast the most rangeful of vocalists. They also have a new drummer. I liked that other guy but I can’t say I’m able to tell the difference.

Nineteen decent songs with a couple killers close out with, “The Highway,” a little acoustic gem that becomes disarmingly yearning as it goes along and has a distant last song ever quality to it. Which after listening to Let The Dominoes Fall, I sincerely hope is not the case.

Tagline:

100% Pure Adrenaline

Entire Story In Fewer Words Than Are In This Sentence:

Agent Keanu learns to surf to catch surfing bank robbers.

Homoeroticism:

Look, I can’t completely cash in on our running gimmick, as brilliantly revealing as it is, because we’re creeping into the early 90′s
here and certain familiar elements of the (gay) male-oriented action movie were being cast aside in favor of more earthy tones, normalized heroes, and possibly even an effort to reflect a more tolerant society at large. Which means less homo-anticipatory frustration in film, as men wore their hair longer, donned earrings, didn’t take steroids, etc. and those once stigmatizing features no longer got them called a “faggot” by a burly guy who secretly wanted them to pound his butthole.

That’s not to say there isn’t some serious male bonding going on in Point Break. Patrick Swayze’s zoom zen beachmonk, Bodhi, takes an increasingly unnatural liking to so-called lawyer Johnny Utah, played perfectly by the impressionable, indecisive Keanu Reeves. Bodhi’s come-ons to Utah range from the admittedly seductive, “Johnny has his own demons, don’t you, Johnny?” to the bizarre, “you’re a pitbull!” But Bodhi doesn’t look particularly heartbroken either when Johnny succumbs to Lori Petty’s gruesome charms after an impromptu night surf. Maybe that’s only because she is nasty-ass Lori Petty and the only hot chick in the movie belonged to Warchild.

Swayze is continually shirtless but unlike with the staples of the 80′s action movement that’s maybe not meant entirely to make you and your brother swoon as this movie drew in a pretty hefty female audience. And that’s not to say it only pulled in fat girls either. I guarantee that James LeGros’ grin made an oily Sly Stallone look positively troglodytic to any chick who saw this movie.

The guys in these surfer tribes portrayed in Point Break definitely have a tight bond but I’m going to hazard a guess that they’re less interested in glistening beefsex than they are some light bromance over spraying cans of beer and the occasional leap from an airplane while holding hands.

Corpse Count:

10 maybe.
Two for sure during the botched, hilariously unorganized drug raid. Anthony Keidis also shoots his foot off during that part, and an FBI guy gets stabbed in the back but I think those end up being superficial wounds. The real serious deaths occur after Utah is exposed as an agent. A bank security guard gets one, an off-duty cop trying to be a hero takes two to the chest, and young Nathaniel dies in Bodhi’s arms. Then, when Angelo Pappas (Utah’s scruffy partner played by Gary Busey) illegally takes Utah somewhere that isn’t jail after punching his FBI boss in the face, Pappas is shot to death but not before giving Roach a bullet that will later prove fatal. It’s said near the end that Rosie, Bodhi’s henchman, was killed in a knife fight in Baja. And then of course, Bodhi’s tragic demise.

How Bad Is It Really?

The premise is possibly the most insane in movie history next to maybe Iron Eagle. A tight-knit group of surfers don masks of former U.S. Presidents and rob several banks throughout Southern California while evading the law for no apparent reason. Ok, they don’t go for the vault. Which suggests the banks’ losses aren’t that profound. And more importantly, they don’t initially kill anybody while committing their crimes. And so the situation isn’t all that much more crucial than a few held-up liquor stores.

For some reason, the FBI gets involved, and this is where the viewer starts contemplating yelling at the screen. Pappas and Utah’s plan to teach Utah to surf in an attempt to infiltrate the criminal gang is improbably successful and leads to several inexplicable subplots, one of which has Johnny climbing into a small airplane with a group of bandits who know he’s undercover and he knows they know he’s undercover and they know he knows they know. But they don’t even get to kick him out of the plane at 10,000 feet because he goes ahead and jumps out of it, with a dubious parachute on his back that one of the criminals admitted to Johnny that he packed.

Also, undercover agent Utah just leaves his wallet lying around where anyone can find it, and of course just flipping over the fold reveals his ID with the words “F.B.I” written in big letters. In one early scene Pappas, a veteran Federal Agent, just gives up on dealing with bank-robbing methods that have been foiled throughout law enforcement history at one time or another and dismisses the Ex Presidents as “ghosts”. Well, they must be.
Either that, or surfers.

Aside from the entire plot though, the movie is fucking radical. How talented director Kathryn Bigelow managed to stay on and shoot all those incredible action scenes around such a mind numbing plot is anyone’s guess but in doing so, she nearly transformed Battlefield Earth into fucking Die Hard. Make no mistake, this is a fun movie and highly re-watchable even today.

Pre-mortem One-liner:

Nobody really talks shit after someone dies, but one that would have been awesome if it’d been said pre-murder is when Roach says to Johnny, “Johnny, you’re about to jump out of a perfectly good airplane – how do you feel about that?” right before Johnny leaped out of it, but for some reason they didn’t sabotage his chute, even though he stood as the biggest threat to their lives and it was the perfect opportunity to get away with it.

Previous mercy for him didn’t stop Johnny from digging his boot in Roach’s wound later though after Roach complained about dying.
“You’re cold because all of the blood is running out of your body, Roach. You’re gonna be dead soon. I hope it was worth it.” Oh snap! What a dick.

Stupid Political Content:

Actually, there’s some pretty awesome political content. At the end of Point Break, Johnny Utah throws his badge in the ocean because he realizes that working for the FBI is fascist and even though killing people in bank robberies is wrong too one can obtain an existential contentment in traveling around the world surfing every day. As Bodhi once told his crew, they are fighting against, “a system that kills the human spirit.” They’re standing up showing the suckers, “inching their way down the freeway in their metal coffins,” that the human spirit still exists.

Is There a Stupid Chief?

Well, he’s not really stupid but Ben Harp, Pappas and Utah’s FBI boss, is an asshole. And he’s not open-minded at all. I’m guessing Harp shot down all of Pappas’ theories. That the Ex-Presidents are ghosts. That they’re surfers. A bowling team. A circus troupe.

Novelty Deaths:

Despite the story, this is a movie that takes it’s deaths fairly seriously. Bodhi’s is sort of novelty though because when Johnny finally catches up to him a year after everything went bad and people died, at Bell’s Beach in Australia, where Bodhi’s whole life was leading up to the perfect wave, they have a short fight on the beach but then Johnny lets Bodhi go out in the surf before his would-be arrest. Johnny knows Bodhi isn’t coming back, that he’s sacrificing himself to the sea after nailing like an 80 foot wave. The fucked up thing though and what makes the scene completely anti-climatic is that Bodhi doesn’t even stay on his surfboard for more than a couple moments and appears to just failflop into the sea. I expected they’d show him tearing shit up for at least 15 seconds but he eats it immediately.

How Did This Movie Make You Feel?

Terrible. I first saw Point Break when I was living in Virginia Beach the summer of ’93. I was obviously younger, I had sun-baked, flowing curls, a fearless disposition regarding soaring my bike off ramps, bungee jumping, stage diving, or you know, going to the beach.

Now my knees wobble on a 12 foot ladder and I’m afraid to touch a spider. Watching this film from my couch coffin, my human spirit diminishing in reverse proportion to an expanding waistline, I felt fucking terrible!

Dear Shep,

May I call you Shep?  Great.

I write to you on behalf of a number of concerned citizens at the Ruthless Reviews website, a burgeoning community of progressive, enterprising young men and other men, engaging regularly in respectful debate on the same domestic and international political issues that animate the dinner-table conversation of families across America.

Iconoclastic often, patriotic always, Ruthless Reviews has gained the respect of the serious internet political world with sharp commentary, incisive probes, and flagrant disregard for journalistic ethics. We do this with our unmatched talent for drawing overnight conclusions based on a handful of leaked pseudo-factoids.  And having Kos wedge our theories in on his website once or twice a year.

For example, we know some guys who know Matt Taibbi.  Also, we broke the (incorrect) story that Trig Palin was really Bristol Palin’s child and Sarah took responsibility, even though she really didn’t.  Additionally, one of our admins took a picture with Ralph Reed at the mall, and last but certainly not least you probably heard about a little-known, well-known incident in which one of our members was photographed urinating on President Nixon’s grave.  We are serious players in today’s political arena.

And Shep, it pains many of us so much to still see you consorting with the most despicable scumbags on television this side of a Steve Wilkos marathon.

You’ve been with Fox since Juan Williams wore jheri curls.  Your loyalty is unquestionable.  In 2007, they re-upped your contract for three years at a rumored $8 million a year.  And why not?  Your early evening show, Studio B, pulls in the largest daily ratings for a news program in its time slot.  In surveys of the viewing public, your name is up there with Brokaw and Russert as a credible news reporter during a time when well-crafted spin on behalf of like three multinational conglomerates passes as journalism.  In fact, insider reports suggest that the Big Rupe looks at you as his most trusted anchor in the schedule.

But we’ve all learned that unlike that fat fuck Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch is a bit less about ideology than he is about money.  I think the man knows that losing you would turn his entire station into a round the clock circus without a straight man to wrangle the clowns, or without a straight man period, thus leaving only the rabid cretins beating off to Bill O’Reilly’s retarded Pinheads and Patriots segment while twittering Obama death threats on the crawler.

But you know what?  Fuck that crazy Murdoch, T.  Currently, you probably walk tall at Fox studios but in so many ways you are a co-dependent in an abusive relationship who sticks around cause your husband buys you nice things.  Cause man, what happened to that thing you call a soul, brutha?

When we saw you punk out the bewildered Sean Hannity when he tried to portray the tragedy of Katrina as just some black folks going for a swim while you were standing in a moat full of corpses, some of us figured that might be your last report from Fox News.  Even though you had always spoken to the viewer with a mischievous gleam in your eye, as if you were in on the joke that was your network, this was raw, fed-up emotion viewers saw at home, and it was unclear whether the network would stand for it.

Yet, you came back.  All the way through the ’08 primaries and into the most relentless, vicious attacks a national media outlet has unleashed on a Presidential candidate since the Richmond Enquirer called James Buchanan a “homo.”

But we who can sense the slightest bit of suffering can see the changes, Shep.  The subversive twinkle in your eye has now glossed over.  That dashing grin?  Only on Fridays.  Nobody with your assumed level of decency and integrity could withstand the convenient lies coming out of Hannity’s face every single fucking minute he speaks.  A man who would panel Randall Terry and G. Gordon Liddy to discuss Obama’s relationship with William Ayers.  You had to show up to witness the cross-eyed Steve “This is Huuuuge!” Doocy, his Predator-faced manboy Brian Kilmeade, and that goddamn retarded blonde woman wrap up their 4th morning segment on Jeremiah Wright to then go on and praise Sarah Palin’s watertight brand of Christianity that holds up a pastor who hunts witches in Kenya during Passover as one of its heroes.

And Shephard, I’m not so sure you haven’t been drinking.  Being a drunk my whole adult life I learned how to turn the put-upon Jeckyl into the brutally honest Hyde and now, in recovery, I can spot many of the signs.  I don’t think it was a sober man who made fun of Glenn Beck’s silly studio cushion fort a few months back.  And that time you let one rip on the air?  Live? Though that may have been the juicy fart of a plastered anchorman, I recognized it less as a momentary lapse of biological control and much more clearly as a cry for help.
After all, what better means of communicating a grievance to that narcissistic, knuckle-dragging crew of cavemen with whom you work?

By this point, you’re probably taking a double slug with your Honey Nuts just to get out of bed and face that ghoul, Brit Hume.  Gatorade and vodka during rehearsal.  Another pinch before they go live.  I been there, dawg.  You think it’s sober Chester who’d loudly remind his step-dad he’ll never be his real father during the man’s retirement party?  Not bloody likely.  But that bottle is not gonna give you back your integrity, Shep, not as long as you are hobnobbing with the propaganda clowns at NewsCorp.

And last month, I think most of us saw the beginning of the end.  Stuck between a couple of neocon stooges during a live segment on torture, you couldn’t stand it anymore and I’m told you threw your chair at the audience and told everyone in the studio to go fuck themselves. Or something along those lines.

Brother, you are spinning in this shame spiral due to the guilt of accepting a paycheck from that vile network and only a blitzed outburst, in the form of blowing mud at a hapless co-anchor, or a pointed curse word, gives you any sort of release from the internal hell you must be going through.

It’s time for change, Shep.  Your contract expires in ’10.  Can you imagine what MSNBC would give for your dashing, Midwestern charm?  Or, since you’ve already danced with the devil lo these many years, fuck it and write a tellall.  We know you have to have dirt on Sean Hannity.  What’s he into?  Adult diaper baby porn?  Coprophagia?

Or tell CNN to make an offer.  They put you in the driver’s seat of a commentary show…and put that shit up against The Factor.  Sheeeeit!
I could see you whooping both Olbermann’s and O’Reilly’s asses. With Spongebob still whooping all y’all, of course.

Nonetheless, this is an opportunity.  Let that insanity parade march itself right into oblivion.  If you were to find greener pastures, and given your reputation, they WOULD be greener, your old network will eventually go the way of daytime talk shows.  We know you want out of there.  We know you’re one of the good guys, but right now you’re holed up with the bad guys, only we can tell that your Stockholm Syndrome is starting to wear off bit by bit. We here at Ruthless wanted to extend an encouraging hand.  We don’t see ‘em change to the side of decency and  virtue too dang much anymore in this crazy world, but we see it just enough to be inspired.  As with Arlen Specter.  David Brooks.  Randy “Macho Man” Savage. And now it is YOUR time, bro.  Because though you may not be parroting all that conservative propaganda those right wing douchebags around you are, as long as you have your wagon hitched to Fox’s dark star, you are enabling wrongdoing.  And you know, they’re still sending old man Nazis up the river for that kind of thing.

Mr. Smith, we beg of you to depart that disgusting purveyor of deception, cynicism, and hate.  You have been walking through the valley of darkness for far too long.   Beset on all sides by the selfishness and tyranny of evil men.  And it IS Foxnews that is evil. And selfish.  And weak.  But you sir, you are the righteous.  You are the protector of truth.  Of justice and humility.  And as we toil through the cold, vengeful black, we call on you to lead us out.  Because you sir, you are the Shepard.

And we’d be honored to be your flock.

Love,

Chester

I never had much respect for Great White. Their popularity in the late 80′s came completely on the strength of a cover song and I think it’s bullshit when bands are allowed to get away with that. Where you can be fined $1,200 in America for downloading and listening to a copyrighted song, if you re-record it a couple years after it’s performed by the original writers and strike while the iron’s hot on your particular genre of music, your band can walk away with a few million. Cause you can be certain Great White weren’t going anywhere with their first stab at a hair metal anthem, the melancholy “Rock Me”. Even the band’s chosen name was a cash-in on the inexplicable craze of using your band name to pay homage to a random white animal.

That’s not to say Great White’s version of “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” wasn’t infectious, or that the video wasn’t outstanding. Remember when they all drove their motorcycles into that warehouse or whatever and those groupies were line dancing and there was the particularly smoking one wearing just a bra, like the voluptuous, traffic-stopping Sue Ellen Mischke? I’m not saying Great White maybe didn’t deserve a spot opening for the downward-spiraling Ratt or whatever but based on just that one ripped off song, Great White started headlining arenas and I think they were up for a fucking Grammy!

I will say, even though all they really had was one #1 cover single followed by a slew of mid-tempo half-hits, the band did earn my props a little bit with the brilliant “Wasted Rock Ranger”, one of the best songs to come out of the entire 80′s canon. Sadly, for some ungodly reason it was an obscure B side and not even on the Twice Shy album and most of you Finnish weirdos who loiter at our website have probably never even heard of it.

So I live in Waterloo, IA, and and it’s a miserable craptown and we rarely  get any good music coming through here. But sometimes, when the annual My Waterloo Days festival has its three-day run, some burnout adviser convinces the city council to spring for a rock group straight off the pages of Metal Edge magazine. A 1986 issue of Metal Edge magazine. And I’m not gonna lie, I usually look forward to it. Two years ago, we got Quiet Riot in the park and that night was a blast, all the way through to when I woke up in a crackhouse spooning a fat black woman with dentures.

Last year, Bret Michaels was the featured act, but I missed that one cause fuck him. Awhile back we got Lynyrd Skynrd, with Ronnie Van Zant’s cousin fronting the group, because Ronnie is dead.

’09 presented some new wrinkles. In honor of this year’s festivities, the ribbon was cut on a newly renovated downtown square which was probably financed with our FEMA funds from the ’08 floods. It lays just south of a 12-story retirement home where I’m assuming many of the residents were shaking their fists out the window all night for 10,000 people to get off their lawn. There was another big difference in 2009- I was attending the My Waterloo Days extravaganza sober for the first time since I was in middle school. Ah yes, I rolled in with a crowd of anonymous alcoholics. We wore fake beards and sunglasses to conceal our identities. Well, I did. Because there’s nothing like that awkward 14 seconds between when a hot girl you know yells out your name and boozily stumbles in your direction before she realizes you’ve started your new career as a total stick in the mud. And so, because I hate my life, I just decided to concentrate on the upcoming stage action. Diet Mountain Dew in hand.

Now, before we proceed any further, I just want to mention that I heard more than enough mean-spirited jokes that you can probably just write your own, such as “Boy, I’m sure glad this show is outdoors!” I decided not to even go there, because that’s all between Great White’s former tour manager, the Rhode Island state’s attorney, and God. But don’t think we didn’t experience a minor tragedy of our own on the closing night of My Waterloo Days.

The band came out playing and their guitarist – new guitarist – took the stage with the familiar opening riff to one of their mega-hits, “Once Bitten, Twice Shy”.  Predictably, that quickly bled into a different, obviously lesser-known song, “Desert Moon”. Now, I wouldn’t recognize any of the rhythm section anyway, but most of us who ever tight cuffed our lightning-washed jeans know who the fuck Jack Russell is. The hard-drinking, big nosed front man with the straight blond mullet. Well, whoever the hell was singing had a big, curly, black afro. And this was even weirder in light of the fact that Kevin Dubrow showed up in 2007 without his trademarked big, curly, black afro and instead rocking a spiked golden top similar to Ozzy’s old ‘do. What was going on? Where were we? Did hamburgers now eat people?

These motherfuckers did two songs before the bass player crept nervously up to the mic and informed the audience that unfortunately, and I am not fucking making this up, Jack Russell fell off a ladder and could not be present that night as he was healing from his injuries. You have got to be joking. That’s the best they could come up with?

He went on to tell us that in Russell’s absence we’d be entertained by the ex-lead singer of the band XYZ, Terry Ilious. Yeah, me neither. I could Google my own name and get more hits than I did on Ilious when I got home last night.

So it’s not enough we have to exist in Waterloo, Iowa but we now had to watch the spitting image of Frank Stallone substitute for the lead singer of a band whose claim to fame is a shamelessly lifted power anthem. Surprisingly, few people besides me were really all that upset. Of course, they were all drinking delicious, icy, refreshing beer. Beer that flows like cold fresh spring water on a hot summer day down the Rockies and…FUCK! There was this one guy wearing a Jack Russell T-shirt that said something about Russell rocking a Jack Daniels festival in Kansas City or some shit. That guy did look pretty bummed and I felt bad for him. Nonetheless, the show went on.

One would think that after unleashing this disappointing news on an unsuspecting crowd of drunken revelers, “Great White” would launch into an uptempo rocker to quell the discontent. Instead they plucked out a slow, bluesy bar jam for the better part of the next seven minutes. Then, the godawful power ballad, “Save Your Love” and then another fucking despondent low-tempo blues song following that. This shitty block of tunes probably lasted 20 minutes. A guy behind me told his old lady, “they better start playing some cover songs or something”.

I saw three downies and their keeper backtrack through the crowd. If you can’t keep a downie entertained, you need to find yourself another line of work, pal.

After that, the band played “Mister Bone”, which is sort of a righteous song, “Rock Me” and finished out with the only crowd-pleaser left in their holster, “Once Bitten, Twice Shy.” One of my drunken buddies who I ran into there said to me “Oh, that song is by these guys?” Why were you even there, Jon?

The only real bright spot of the evening came after the audience had thinned down to a few crusty bikers, when the band came through on some sporadic requests they were getting to play the anti-anthem, “Wasted Rock Ranger”. I have to admit, that put a smile on my face.

So all in all, at least we have this cool new town square in the heart of our city. It will no doubt meet the same fate as Auto World in about five years but right now it’s kind of pretty to look at.

As for the music scene in our little burg, well, one common theme for the bands that are coming through here is they are either fresh off a horrible tragedy, or they have one soon after they leave. So maybe that means next year we’ll get Mayhem.

As we second guess ourselves through Obama’s first 100 days, conservatives are falling all over one another swearing allegiance to their dying cause.  Assuring themselves that by sticking to their dogmatic worldview and neocon principles they’ll recapture the hearts and minds of the American people and win the next election. Most of us know that that is an absolutely stupid strategy.  They look stupid and they sound stupid when they espouse it.  But nobody is as quite as stupid as Glenn fucking Beck.

“Where the hell,” you ask, “did this clown come from?”  CNN.  Where his one-man lounge show raked in a fraction of the viewers of MSNBC’s constantly rotated and retooled Joe Scarbrough.  Hoping to somehow compete against college cheerleading trials on ESPN2 again, CNN finally pulled the plug on Beck’s Nielsen poison hour. Apparently feeling their fair and balanced programming schedule was just tipped too far in Alan Colmes’ favor, Fox News scooped up the self proclaimed arch-conservative.  Now, when perusing my favorite pinko internet blogs, I not only have to learn about this cretin’s despicable worldview, I have to watch clips of him crying.  That’s right.  Glenn Beck was given the standard newshour time slot between 5-6 pm on the most rugged station on your satellite in late January and he’s already been caught bawling on camera no less than five fucking times.

Is this the new face of conservatism?  A red-nosed recovering alcoholic?  Granted, Beck pulls in 6.5 million listeners on his radio show.  I have this hypothesis all worked out on that, though.  20 million people tune in to Rush Limbaugh.  Yes, Rush Limbaugh is certainly a big fat pussy but he has his acerbic down to a science, creating a voice for disenchanted, mean-spirited American white men.  Plus we all know he packs Viagra, chomps cigars, and may even bang one between the toes once in awhile.  It pains me to say it, but Rush Limbaugh does bear some resemblance to a man.  A paunchy, pasty, balding one, but he still has male characteristics.  Beck though…  Who the fuck would listen to this numbskull?  Who are those 6.5 million fans?  I think the majority of them are women.  Conservative women to be sure, but when Gomer Joe rolls out in his pickup in the morning, tuning into Rush or possibly Toby Keith’s latest gem, the missus sits down to listen to her favorite reverse beard, Glenn Beck.  Only a home-schooling housewife could possibly enjoy this low-hanging teabag.

Beck is an ignorant, ill-informed caveman, but he’s not a useful caveman.  While the other males are hunting, gathering, and fighting dinosaurs, Beck stays back in the cave.  With the cavewomen, doing the cavework, while listening eagerly to all the bitching and grunting about how Lothar has been pulling her hair too violently and it’s just impossible to get tar out of a leopardskin cloak.  If Republican punditry were a junior high clique, the alpha narcissist Sean Hannity would wipe boogers in Glenn’s hair while Ann Coulter humiliated him with withering sarcasm.

You’ll find Beck continuously falling back on his alcoholic past to excuse all the pouty, petulant, terrified-of-the-world, acrimonious diatribes spewed from his fish lips each day.  But what he really needs is a 12 step program about how to recover from being such a little bitch.  Can you imagine being this guy’s sponsor?  Panicked wakeup calls at 3 AM- “Larry, I’m having that feeling again that we’re gonna have to fight them over here if we don’t fight them over there.  I’m thinking about taking a drink.”

Beck imagines every apartment building on the East Coast housing a cell of Ali Babas cooking up dirty bombs in their toilet tanks.  He’s in love with Jack Bauer but I suspect in his wildest, sexiest daydreams Beck doesn’t imagine himself being Jack Bauer but rather being Jack Bauer’s sensitive male sidekick.  His Smithers, if you will.

I in no way want to assist conservatism as it flails about, wildly desperate to remain relevant, but as a simple, professional courtesy I’m saying that y’all need to do something about this guy.  You might think that the deluge of right wing bullshit and pseudo-facts he regularly unleashes is what’s threatening to send your Randian dream the way of a Whig-voting Dodo, but you’d be mistaken.  I mean, Beck’s an idiot, of course, and certainly shouldn’t have a radio or TV program and maybe oughta be doing mini-mall commercials on Youtube instead, and none of his cynical misinformation is particularly original in this saturated market, but these are not problems when it comes to successfully advancing the right wing message.

No, it’s that unconservative combination of neediness and wussiness that Beck exudes for several hours a day, betraying the very tenets of your coarse ideology.  Your woman is getting a scrambled, counter-intuitive message from this dude and it doesn’t correlate with right wing themes such as you bouncing her head off the table cause she forgot to buy Ranch Dressing.  Sure, you need some dipshit to accompany her to Mamma Mia, offer a platonic shoulder on which to cry (about your abuse), and keep her entertained, lest you are forced to deploy that mental deformity you call a personality.  But that’s all a fucking liberal’s job.  Don’t let your longstanding traditionalism get peed on by this pussy beggar.  He cries on television, fellas.  You guys really need to get this basket case off the air and shut him up already.  A producer at Fox has to take forward thinking control and cut Glenn Beck.  And by “cut,” I mean open one of his kidneys with a steak knife.  For the good of the republic.

Carrying on the tradition begun last year by Wax and Erich ,  let’s move on to the next substance abuse lesson.

Take a moment to learn….

The ABC’s Of Hard Drugs:

Anhydrous Ammonia:
A quality ingredient found only in the finest meth kitchens from Luther, OK all the way to Trimble, MO! Add this to your ice and make $20 more on the gram. Anhydrous is the stuff that gives meth it’s subtle laundry detergent taste. Usually only two ways to come across this organ dissolving delicacy though. 1)Be a farmer. 2) Rob a farmer. You think siphoning gasoline is risky? Try sucking this shit out of a tank while an angry farmer fires buckshot in your ass.

Bender:
Your mom, your 10 year old niece, your boss – all in close contact with one another as well as with all area hospitals and jails. Not knowing you’re in the rundown Rose Petal Inn two miles away under the name “Pat Magroin” where the Columbian maids are starting to think you’ve got a bit of a drug problem.If you were a little white girl they’d have called off the Amber Alert by now. It’s been five days. You struggle with whether to keep your cell phone on so you can order up another fix or whether to keep it off to keep your nosy wife and kids at bay. Not to mention GPS tracking concerns. By the time you reappear alive, your loved ones will wish you’d been undergoing torture in a tranny clown’s basement dungeon.

Cokeface:
Not only do you suck up blow like a Hoover, your face looks like the front of a vacuum cleaner. You may even sound like one, given the wheezing between the gaps in your huge looking horse teeth because you can’t breathe through your nose. You’re fidgeting through the club with a face that is an attractive combination of the old school Joker and Ted Haggard and it’s only a matter of time before you too give in to gay drug sex.

Dogs:
These things fucking suck. How convenient for the lazy idiot cops that a German Shepard can sniff out the tiniest amount of drugs in a 4,000 square foot mansion. Scumbag vice police would’ve had to surrender in this retarded war long ago if not for these goddamn animals. If dogs only knew the abject sociopolitical and economic failures of the nation’s Draconian drug war, whereby America now has a higher percentage of it’s population in prisons than any other country, bar none, and their own integral part in it, maybe they’d stop fucking barking at people at the airport.

Ephedrine:
Because of those scheming crankster gangsters you can’t even clear your sinuses without three forms of ID. Mules are now mapping out all strategic truck stops and cigar stores in their 100 mile radius because one box of pills can trade for a gram of dope. It’s now actually possible to be arrested for having Sudafed on your person. Some tweakers, lacking other ingredients, have chewed these nasty things pure hoping for the same buzz they get from the final product, meth. Instead they find themselves in the ER on a defibrillator, thereby suggesting that a combination of lithium, ether, fertilizer, and battery acid is necessary to prevent overt health problems while using.

Family:
The long suffering victims of your pathetic lack of willpower. Don’t believe in the War On Drugs, eh? Tell that to these poor bastards. Yes, you could make a reasonable argument that money is funneled into failed forced attempts to reduce the trade and people with diseases are locked up in zoos with rapists and murderers, but what good does that do for your family when you haven’t bought anyone a Christmas present in eight years? Medicine cabinets will be emptied first, bank accounts second, and living rooms third. You’re incapable of doing your people favors because you possess nothing and your skills have been whittled down to good scoring techniques. With drugs, not basketballs. Your daughter can’t afford to take gymnastics. Gymnastics! They don’t even have to buy any equipment, dickhead. Your brother hasn’t seen you sober since 1997. Sometimes you help your 4th grade cousin with his paper route and he throws you a Hamilton. And by throw, I mean he tosses it to the ground and you scramble to grab it.

Glass:
Yes, it’s another name for methamphetamine but more generally, we’re talking about the glass pieces people blow and shape to fire up their stash. You have 12 of these, all handcrafted and yes, decorated and shaped like dragons and swans. It’s an OCD hobby derived from your hands needing something to do while your brain is registering a new thought every three seconds. You blow more glass so you can smoke more dope so you can blow more glass so you can… Tricking these things out is a lot like putting primered flames on your coffin. This is more a tweaker pastime as crackheads just bust a narrow rose vase they sell at ghetto gas stations, stuff it full of Brillo, and get down to business.

Heron:
Smack. Junk. Black Tar, Taliban Tammy. Whatever name it goes by this stuff is the old school. Hollywood was feasting on the H while your great grandpa was battling Germans in Dubya Dubya Two. Heron remains the most dangerous drug out there as it seems like there’s a hair’s difference between a cool buzz and a fatal overdose. You can be functional and keep your job for awhile while banging, but make no mistake – your ass will be dead broke, all the time. If your boss is down with you sporting the same stained, stanky khakis and decrepit moccasins to work each day, go for it. You can take anyone’s Lean Cuisine from the company fridge around lunch time. That’s what they’re there for, evidently. Coats and purses too.

Inpatient Treatment:
You’ve stolen cars and held pistols to heads but now you’re groveling to an abusive counselor regarding a sleeve of Fig Newtons that showed up somehow in your pillowcase. You’ll probably leave with some bizarre sort of PTSD requiring you to keep a supply of plastic cups on hand for urination for the rest of your natural life. During Empowerment Group this afternoon you’ll dab tears from your face while recognizing the similarities of a leathery 45 year old grandma’s list of “Unmanageables” to yours. You’ll give her a hug while nine people whoop and clap. You feel like you’ve developed a profound bond with Gary No-Teeth but in seven days you’d sooner run into traffic than have to pass him on the sidewalk outside of this place.

Job:
You might could still have one. But how dare they ask incisive questions about two more unscheduled days off because yet another grandmother in yet another city fell in the bathtub and is in intensive care? How dare they ask how she’s doing, requiring you to even remember the lie, told while searching through the carpet for something to smoke 20 minutes after 9:00 yesterday? Why don’t they stop hassling you?

I mean, you don’t know where your PC went. It was here when you left on Friday!

What do you mean you can’t use the drive-thru window as a pillow?

“Oh, I see. Wilburn lost his fingers because in my sleepless haze I turned the bandsaw on while he was cleaning it? Whatever you say there, Chief! “

Knuckling Down:
You’re a runner. You don’t have the ingenuity or resources to slang yourself, but more importantly you don’t have a shred of willpower. Each week you’re pawned off to a new, more disrespectful James Spader, dangling a carrot sprinkled with crack in front of your face while a Japanese businessman waits in the next room. This job is more stressful and labor intensive than manning the sour cream gun at Taco Bell. And it pays less. You’re a middleman of middlemen and you put yourself in harm’s way several times a day just to stay high. You have to drive an 8 ball across town on expired tags because you have nothing left of value they want except your ability to take the fall. And now that they post detailed county arrest records on the internet you can’t even flip if you’re busted because your dealers know the time, the place, and the unlikelihood of you being back on the street hours after getting pinned with 11 different baggies all marked with different dollar amounts. It’s not like they posted bail for your disposable ass. You’ll be forced to eat your wire at gunpoint before getting two to the chest.

LSD:
Meh. Nothing to write home about from prison really, but it’s registered a funny story or two. Remember the one about the kid in the hospital who thinks he’s a glass of orange juice and can’t be moved or he’ll spill? Or that LSD is mopped up by the nerves in your spinal column giving you that “acidic” sensation. Or that after a few hits you’ll carry on an actual, genuinely intelligent, conversation with a cartoon character? That’s all bullshit. LSD just makes you laugh a lot and say retarded shit that makes your buddies think you’re a gaywad.

Meth:

What kind of fucking alien shit crash-landed on an Iowa farm in 1971, had it’s chemical components copied by biker scientists, and was meted out to Section 8 apartment complexes throughout the heartland? Unlike weed, shrooms, heron, coke, or even crack, meth has no organic properties. It’s the margarine of drugs. It’s the CGI of drugs. Or just some meteor drippings not from or intended for this world. This shit has the same effect on the average Joe that earth’s orange sun had on Clark Kent.

Feel the need to spank it for 48 hours straight? Smoke some shards. You say a water break is part of an 11 hour dismantle and rebuild session on a Chevy 383 370HP/455TQ Vortec engine with forged Tri-Level Pistons? You pussy. Bang some fire in your arm and get back out here and help me figure out a way to pry open this ball bearing. It’s no wonder people launch themselves out 4th story windows on meth. If you can have sex for three days straight without stopping to eat so much as a tic tac why wouldn’t you believe you can fly too?

Niacin:
Just another failed body-cleansing tool. At least this one’s fairly cheap and didn’t require you to pawn your brother’s DVD collection to get it. Cause of course, damage control is usually done “after” you’ve blown your paycheck. So, they tell you to take a bunch of Niacin with the intent of speeding up the release of toxins from your kidneys. Apparently it’s supposed to smoke out the fugitives camped out in your bloodstream because Niacin burns like a motherfucker. It turns your skin red too. So that during your UA, the sniffer dog of usage detection, not only will you drop dirty but you’ll feel like you’re having a heat stroke.

Outpatient Treatment:
Just your presence taunts the in-patients. Your soda, the brandishing of your cell phone, your jingling car keys. All connections to the outside world that these losers lost access to cause they were too stupid to lie during their Substance Abuse Eval. You get to come and go as you please while they have to get up at 5:30 am and cook each other breakfast. And ironically, you’re still getting high. In fact, given that you’re probably still not “serious this time” you could make great connections and possibly even fill some orders.

Paranoia:
This is the one that separates the men from the boys. Sure, weed gives you paranoia; no doubt about it. The intensity of the paranoia however is so materially different from the X files your mind is flipping through after being up for a few days that it’s commonplace for meth and crackheads to ask burnouts for safe harbor. The wild and colorful parade of completely fleshed out characters chasing the sketched tweaker would be too much even for a Guillermo Del Toro movie. As a true hard doper you will create entire premises about who is after you, even mentally outlining backstories for the principal threats. You keep hiding and re-hiding your shit because a car honked four blocks away. You think your hair will get you a possession. You’ll end up tethered to a toilet while clinging to a bottle of Clorox, so that at the first sign of plane in the sky, you can flush everything and pour the bleach over your head.

Quitting:
Given that most people don’t quit of their own volition we’ll drop those pretenses right now. You get busted. If you’re white and just notched a possession, generally you get some treatment options. Drug courts are the new 90 days in jail. Good for the criminal justice system. Seriously. Just be aware though, that abstinence needs to arrive swiftly and certainly. Who cares if you couldn’t get out of bed the day before without at least a chopped up Oxycontin pill? You better find the tools to stay clean by morning, dipshit, or they’ll yank your deferment.

You’ll hear often in treatment that it’s not about not using drugs, it’s about recovery. Yes, abstaining of course, but really developing healthy living skills and learning how to handle life’s stressors. It’s about appreciating riding a bike again and balancing your checkbook. Forget about the loin churning, mouthwatering cravings you’ve developed over two decades. You need to figure that shit out on your own, fuckface. Oh and here, pee in this. We got your PO on line 1. Really though, if you are quitting of your own free will, good luck. Your kids… will probably still remember you, man.

Rock:
Add a little baking soda to your stepmom’s little white secret, a dash of water, maybe some cinnamon, and then go ahead and add five more years to your sentence. Crack rock. Oh you scourge of urban decay, you neighborhood-wrecker. The stuff that’s been sending bruthas up the river since Red Alert was laying mad beats for the Zulu Nation. Why don’t we just airdrop a couple tons of this on countries we’re fighting with like we did on Brooklyn in 1981? Then just let the insurgents start sucking our soldier’s dicks instead of shooting at them. Sadly, for all the disparate consequences associated with rock, baseheads could get twice the benefits for half the jail time if they’d only get accustomed to speed.

Sucking Dick:
The most viable career option for the late level crackhead and a top brick in the “..but I’ll never do that!” addiction pyramid. A modern touchstone of the hard drug trade.

You’ve unloaded any possible material trinket with but a single circuit of technology, including your 13 inch B&W and your analog alarm clock. Now it’s time to get by on raw, slurpy talent to keep the party jumping.

On the flip side, for the opportunistic John, a hummer can be had in most American cities for $20-40. However, the John is under pretty heavy time constraints in a Houston alley at 3am where a gangbanger strolling by just might turn the tables and make that John blow him. For free.

Tomorrow:
Oftentimes, the worst day of the week for the true drug addict. Some have the luxury of sleeping it off, even though their next tomorrow usually mandates more degrading hustles. For you though, there will come a point today when the realization of your horrific situation settles in. A lot of times it’s after waking up from a 45 minute function shutdown nap. Holy fucking shit! I told my boss I was in a car accident and broke my spine and I’m a quad and couldn’t make it to work. How am I going to talk my way out of that?! Your wife and kids are still waiting for you to return with the Benadryl from three days ago and you don’t have the money for another night at this motel. You have 16 voicemails on your phone you now have to listen to during your devastating comedown. At this point it’s best to just start drinking away the guilt and worry, right….NOW!

UA:
As mentioned, Niacin is one of many failed antidotes to the contaminants swimming through your veins, souring your kidneys, and betraying you in a little Dixie cup you once sold at your lemonade stands during better days. The job UA is usually fucking cake. You don’t even have to use your own piss because nobody goes into the room with you. Some have been known to get by with a syringe of Mountain Dew, kept warm by their sweaty taints.

A clean correctional UA is a little more difficult. If your usage is four days old or more you might be able to drink some of that overpriced shit like Urineluck and pull it off, as long as your corrections officer doesn’t mind that your piss is neon, smells like sulphur, and has five times the Creatine content than it’s supposed to. But if you’ve used in the past two or three days you might as well own up to it before dropping, as a preemptive stab at mercy. Cause I think my PO has sucked enough dicks in his lifetime to know the difference between a real one and a floppy roll of pink latex with a metal spout on the end.

Vicodin:
You get a tooth pulled. Your dentist prescribes the pointless IB 800. You quickly start crying in front of him, railing about the pain and how you don’t know how you’ll ever sleep with such a gnawing throb for the next several days. He thinks you’re a faggot but whips up a scrip for good ol Vicodin. You don’t care what he thinks and spit the gauze out on your way to CVS where you eat two Baby Ruths and a box of Milk Duds while waiting for them to fill your prescription. You get your bottle and down five before even leaving the pharmacy.
The rest of the night, you delightfully scratch every square inch of your body as the opiates seep out your pores.

Weed:
Pfft.

X:
Or Ecstasy, baby. Yet another threat to your freshman daughter’s purity. And she’s conscious during sex on this, so you can’t even get mad. This is like the wine cooler of meth. Marketed to college kids, there’s some speed, sometimes some opiate mixed in, some LSD, and a little bit of ketamine, maybe that shit that Somalians chew. People admit to just wanting to “be touched” and “felt” while rolling on E. Can you home school for a BA yet?

Yay:
Cocaine. Just the smell makes you shit your pants with gastrointestinal anticipation. You make coke calls to grade school teachers because the endorphins released always bring along their friend, nostalgia. You believe everyone feels as good as you right now. And if they don’t, you want to spread out rails, even though this is the worst drug to share since you know you’ll blow through it before midnight, knocking back another one every 20 minutes. You sit on a bed with a buddy and a bunch of licked CD cases, making bullshit plans to take a trip to New York next month or start school again. You converse excitedly, interrupting and talking over each other, until it all runs out and the thought of choking out another word is agonizing. Around 6 am the buzz is gone, your nose is clogged, and your heart is beating out of your chest while chirping birds serenade your crippling depression. The horrible, horrible comedown is an exact 180 of the high you felt last night.

Zzzz:
Stealing this one from The ABC’s Of Drunkenness because it’s an integral part of either addiction. You haven’t had REM sleep in weeks. The few times your body forces you to crash always come with flashing images of the activities right before you started getting high. It’s probably some strange indication of guilt. If you do find rest, it’s at the most inappropriate times. The maintenance man at work has to jimmy open the lock of your stall because you’ve been sprawled out on the can for two hours. You pull picket fences behind your car as you start to nod off while merging into highway traffic. You go through life seeing movements out of the corner of your eyes and sometimes you swat at them.

In the pantheon of great Francis Ford Coppola films, The Outsiders stands firmly above the rest. The heart-wrenching drama of the Northside Greasers daily oppression by the Soches, Soaces, Socs…?, the rich boys from the Southside of a small Oklahoma town launched the careers of several sassy young hotshots and provoked a national dialogue, in 1983, on the critical state of affairs our young teens face in small towns in the 1960’s.

The story follows the Curtis brothers: Darry, Sodapop, and Ponyboy, characters clearly cast from the same discerning mold that sprung to life Sonny, Michael, and Fredo. Darry is the older brother, played with the chiseled authority of chemo-hunk Patrick Swayze. Bold Rob Lowe is Sodapop Curtis and C Thomas Howell plays Ponyboy, the heart of our story. Thepain of life on the wrong side of the tracks is etched on Ponyboy’s face, and his unfortunate neck mole helps illustrate that these Greasers have it tuff.

Ponyboy’s best friend is Johnny, played by Ralph Macchio. Johnny’s face is a little damaged cause his dad beats him or something, but it’s the profound bond between Ponyboy and Johnny that gives the viewer a lump in his… throat. What happens is that after a drive-in movie the two BFF’s are walking these fucking bitches home and they are attacked by a group of Mustang riding Socs led by Bob, played by the heir to the throne of James Dean, Leif Garrett. Bob and his gang try to drown Ponyboy in a fountain and Johnny stabs Bob hard and kills him. This sends the two young teens on a journey, helped by an older boy names Dallas Winston, played by the dark, mysterious Matt Dillon. Dallas, or Dally, is like wildfire, a dangerous and breathtaking young rider. See, he masks his pain with machismo. Dallas helps the two fugitives secure a hideout where they cut each other’s hair and read Gone With The Wind. Oh God!

Along the way, we meet other Greasers, randomly played by Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez,  and did I mention Rob Lowe? Along with other young heartbreakers, they all have this rumble where it rains and shirts come flying off and–oh Jesus–there’s an elegiac beauty to it all, and the viewer feels he’s in the middle of that greasy battle.

After the fight, Dally scoops up the injured Ponyboy, like a hurt bunny, and they go to the hospital and watch as their young friend Johnny dies in their arms. Well, actually he doesn’t die in their arms because he has burns covering 70% of his body but it was sad because it’s obvious that some fat nurse didn’t do her fucking job right and that’s probably what made him die and how come Dallas got so mad.

Which leads to the unforgettable climax of the film. Dally is so shaken by his friend’s death that he robs a liquor store and goes down in a hail of police bullets to cross that rainbow bridge on high. The curtain falls on this beautiful masterpiece and one can only whisper that dictum of youth to the surviving studs, “stay gold.”

Stay gold.

I resented Guns and Roses when they came on the scene. I imagine that, as a dipshit 7th grader, it had something to do with my musically challenged philosophy that they were ripping off equal parts Metallica and my beloved Crue. If you remember, it was only after “Sweet Child O’ Mine” that they rocketed into the stratosphere and at that time I was fully unfamiliar with the rest of the album except for a vague recollection of seeing the “Welcome To The Jungle” video. Since we were Iowan trash without cable I wasn’t exposed to the rest of the album . Thus, given the balladry of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and the amount of people I didn’t like showing up to school wearing G N’R tees, I figured them for another hair-farmer, girl-bait band. And yet, Motley Crue were somehow paragons of integrity.

Sometime in 1988 my older brother plucked my head from my asshole and I experienced a few full listens of the greatest rock album of the past 30 years, Appetite For Destruction. For me, like many other kids, it changed my world. It was antagonistic, mean-spirited, looking for a fight with liberal usage of the word “fuck,” and god damn melodic in the face of salty old detractors and critics clinging to their Beatles records denying what was apparent. Out of the cellar of zebra spandex and Z2 double neck guitars with, well, zebra patterns, came a rabid, snarling bunch of psychotics with a record that blew doors off those dusty, near-mint record collections.

What makes Slash’s autobiography interesting is that one is constantly reminded that five dysfunctional, drug-saturated, chemically imbalanced young men were able to lay down those 12 tracks and inarguably change the face of rock and roll. For like, a couple years. Until Nirvana did it all over again, but that’s another biography.

Reading this mashup – while learning that Slash’s real name is Saul for Christ sakes – you find yourself perplexed at how it was to all come together. Seems that all these guys were bouncing around other bands on the Sunset Strip, seemingly directionless and going nowhere fast. Slash actually auditioned for Poison at one time, for the love of God (which turned out to be one of the funniest stories in the book). Mostly there was this incestuous swapping of musicians between bands like London, Hollywood Rose, whatever else Tracii Guns had going on, Slash’s dropout band, which didn’t even have a singer, and like, Jetboy.

Slash was already dabbling in H and Axl, even then, was already a moody prick that couldn’t be counted on and told Slash’s grandma to “fuck off”. You almost have to respect that money didn’t really change Axl. Apparently, he was always fucked. Izzy Stradlin had focus but was picking up his own drug habit and Steven Adler was a gigolo since he was 12 and was without trustworthy skills in the eyes of the other soon-to-be band members. It turns out some of Duff McKagen’s connections came through at the right time and place more than once to keep this shifty bunch of undesirables from unraveling and going their separate ways before any songs were even written .

I’m always fascinated with rapid rises to fame and the rise of this group of already extremely dysfunctional men could be considered one of the most meteoric in music history. It did take a year before Appetite caught on with the public after its release and the band started headlining, but shortly after that – if you can even remember the fall of ’88 – they pretty much ruled the planet. However, what’s most interesting is reading about the events right before they broke big. The band was opening for Queensryche, Ratt (Slash labels Stephen Pearcy a “moron”), Motley Crue (respected by Guns and Roses as incredible partiers), until they finally got a headlining slot with bands they hated, like Faster Pussycat, opening for them. Slash and Izzy were full blown heroin addicts with Slash downing a bottle of Jack or vodka per day. Those posters we all saw were not faked. You know, the ones with Slash crumpled on the ground, top hat and hair hiding his closed eyes with the neck of his guitar holding his head up? He was passed out at the shoots. And Steve Adler with a gigantic clenched teeth grin on his face? He was the band’s resident cokehead.

Fame didn’t really seem to change our boy’s habits much either. Slash had two main interests outside of playing guitar; dope and booze. As a matter of fact, and I’ve read about a lot of other junkie musicians, Slash so far is the biggest fiender I’ve ever come across. Not necessarily a junkie I suppose, but Slash was the kind of scrounger who would throw rocks at his dealer’s window at 4 in the morning, ask everyone in a public place if they could score, get his stash, and like a squirrel running off with a nut, scramble to a bathroom to fix immediately without a care that everyone knew what he was doing. At one point he says even his dealers started avoiding him.

One of his best heroin stories comes from a time he was supposed to be detoxing at an Arizona resort but instead was speedballing. He became so paranoid that the once friendly hallucinatory little corner-of-his-eye army men chased him right through the glass of his shower and eventually fully nekkid into the lobby of the hotel where he dodged between some businessman to shield him from the spazz warriors. Oh, and Slash recalls that the little bastards looked like Predator. I suspect this horde of mini-soldiers were cousins of the tiny robots that chased our head groundskeeper Erich around his pad and the little figures that repeatedly did kama sutra positions I used to see in my darkest hours.

We all know we don’t like Axl, right? I mean, for a decade it’s been common headbanger knowledge that he was the monkey in the wrench, the ointment on the cock, and that somehow – though we never really understood – it was his fault that G n’ R disbanded. Well, according to Slash, if only half of what’s written here is true, Axl Rose is the biggest piece of shit in music. If I could unsee his band of fools (your brother must be spinning in his grave, Tommy) I paid $65 to see in 2002 I absolutely would. It would’ve been more appropriate if Roseanne Barr and Margot Kidder were in the band and they called themselves The Bi-polar Bitches because Axl is the poster child of that pathetic disease.

Slash to his credit refuses to blame Rose entirely. He recounts the Use Your Illusion tours in which the singer, with perpetually hurt feelings, would keep the band waiting and go onstage three hours after they were supposed to, causing more than a couple riots, and embarrass the other guys in front of Metallica with lavish theme parties such as, seriously, Roman bathhouses and Mexican fiestas complete with big sombreros. Not to mention the biker shorts. Those fucking biker shorts. My dilemma is that I wonder if I can ever hear a G n’ R song the same way again. I just keep thinking of the little bitch that the screeching singer was all those formative years. Slash is nice enough to blame many of their problems on the addictions that overwhelmed certain band members, even though he contends that at show time, they were all, except for the lobotomized Adler who was no longer with the band, ready to go on. But not Axl Rose, no, because the lead singer of the most dangerous band in the world was as womanly as your fruitcake mother-in-law.