"They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab ..."

Folks like to think that they understand tragedy, but they really don't. Sure, they know it when they see it, but sometimes the greatest tragedies of our time slip right past us.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda is as good an example as any. Sure, we knew it was happening. We just didn't care until Don Cheadle made us cry several years after it was all over. Of course, that's not to say that I supported a military intervention. I can't tell a Hutu from a Tutsi, and neither can you. That being the case, expecting a 22-year-old from Nebraska to is only likely to get him dead and further complicate foreign policy more than it already was.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Randy Travis' decision to quit drinking is as bad as the slaughter in Rwanda. I'm suggesting that it's even worse. There was absolutely nothing funny about Rwanda, but Randy's adventures over the last twelve months are among the very greatest things I've ever seen.

The "Look Heart, No Hands" singer was arrested Feb. 6 for public intoxication while sitting in his car at a Baptist church in Sanger, Texas. Travis paid a fine and was put on probation for 90 days.

Five months later, the musician was arrested for driving while intoxicated. When cops arrived on the scene, he was completely nude, with his Pontiac Trans Am crashed into several barricades off the side of the road. TMZ reported that threatened to "shoot and kill the Troopers working the case."

The early August arrest was utter nonsense, especially the "threats to shoot and kill the troopers working the case " part. I don't know how worldly you are, but those kind of threats from a naked drunk are the least serious in all of Christendom. After all, where would he hide a gun?

Seventeen days later, on Aug. 24, Travis was cited for simple assault after getting into an argument with another man outside a church in Plano, Texas. The "Diggin' Up Bones" was said to be "extremely intoxicated" when he arrived at the local hospital.

You know, it's just like the Goddamn Liberal Media to only tell half the story about the August 24 altercation. Randy says that he stepped in to protect a woman that he saw fighting with her estranged husband. Was he supposed to just ignore the situation, simply because he was falling-down drunk? According to the cops, he was.

I guess gallantry really is dead.

Most of you come here because I know how life really works. And I'm here to tell you that if you've never been found drunk and naked in the middle of the road and subsequently charged with threatening law enforcement, not only have you not had a good time, you probably don't know what a good time is!

I spent much of this summer on Twitter saying that not only is Randy Travis a hero, he might be the greatest hero of our time. He's certainly more than willing to tell the friggin' government what time it is, which I think should make him the frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. I like Rand Paul just fine, but I like Randy Travis a whole lot better.

But the unholy power of the state has been employed to break Travis' spirit, and it looks like it succeeded.

That's all well and good, if you're some kind of asshole. But rehab certainly doesn't look like everything it's cracked up to be. How do I know that? Glad you asked!

The convertible hit Phillip Moreno so hard that it knocked him out of his shoes and lodged him in the windshield.

As he lay dying on the hood, police said, Sherri Lynn Wilkins kept going another two miles until other motorists swarmed her car at a traffic light and grabbed her keys.

Wilkins, who was charged Tuesday with murder and driving drunk, told police she struck the man after leaving work and panicked. Police said her blood alcohol level was more than double the legal limit.

Her arrest on a street corner between home and her job as a drug and alcohol counselor seemed to be a return to a dark past that Wilkins once celebrated leaving behind. The convict and recovering addict had recently gone back to school, gotten a job and was reuniting with her family, including a new grandchild. (emphasis added)

That's all you really need to know. Drinking is fun and leads to all kinds of magical - and not infrequently, naked - harmless adventures. Sure, it annoys The Man, but it's just good, clean Texas fun!

On the other hand, if you give up the sauce, and especially if you get all evangelical and annoying about it, there's a really good chance that you'll knock a dude out his shoes and lodge him in your windshield while you keep going. That's just common sense, people.

I get that telling people the dangers of sobriety is an unpopular mission, but if I don't do it, who will? You? No, you don't have the balls! It's pretty much just me and Lindsay Lohan (and sometimes Amanda Bynes) on the frontlines of the battle between good and evil.

There are days when it seems that I'm the only one out there for people like Randy Travis. It's lonely, but it couldn't be more worthwhile.

Why the Internet is Important: A NSFW Exploration of Us and our Times

For nearly two decades we've all been told that the Internet is one of the most important advances in human history, but nobody has ever really come out and said why. Usually, you'll get some insipid trope about how instant, world-wide communication has the potential to broaden our intelligence more than anything before it.

Well, look around. Do people look any smarter to you than they did in a bygone era when books and newspapers were popular? Indeed, I would argue that most people are immeasurably dumber than they were just twenty years ago, despite having instant access to virtual encyclopedias of knowledge and endless other intellectual resources. The lowliest janitor can now converse with the greatest professors of our age, but those professors are actually more anonymous than they were thirty years ago.

As a means of bettering ourselves and our intellects, the Internet has failed spectacularly and indisputably.

No, there are reasons to love Al Gore's greatest invention above and beyond its wildly overrated ability to enhance the mind. And I'm not just talking about the unlimited porn out there, either, although I can't stress the importance of that enough. Nothing has broadened the horizons of  lovemaking quite like the Internet.

In the end, the single greatest function of of the World Wibe Web is that it serves as a permanent living monument of our time. Remember that cell phone video you took of yourself getting your clit pierced in college? There's every reason to believe that people will be able to see it hundreds of years from now, allowing them to get a glimpse of how we lived as a species.

Imagine if you could see and hear, for example, Genghis Khan or Jesus Christ at work. Imagine if we could see Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation without relying on Spielberg to re-create it for us.  Imagine the insight we'd have into our own civilization today!

Well, we're creating a record of ourselves for future historians to study for all time. Sure, most of it consists of us drunkenly drawing cocks on each other's unconscious faces, but that's better than nothing, right? There will be no doubt about the way we lived.

Hundreds - maybe thousands of years from now - our descendants will be able to see this ....



(NSFW warning: Extreme language and disturbing content alert! If you fucking daredevils choose to watch this without headphones from the office, don't come crying to me when you get shitcanned directly into Hell. I couldn't be more serious about this.)

Could anything be more important than that? I would suggest not, and I'm an internationally famous student of history. Those three minutes and seven seconds will tell future scholars everything they need to know about life at the dawn of the 21st century. They'll learn about economic disparity, health care and contemporary human sexuality, but that's not all. They'll learn the exact moment that we understood as a species  that public hair is evil and better done away with. They'll learn that white-trash women fucked themselves with home pregnancy tests, which is a fact that somehow eluded even me!

But there's still more. This might be the single most compelling dissertation on love and loss that I've ever seen. If history books are delinquent in anything, it's that you never get a proper understanding of the personal passions of a particular age. How common people were truly feeling, the heartbreak they suffered and the hope they held on to. Well, no longer is that left to the imagination.

Those that survive us in the great experiment of life will have immediate access to the documentation of our lives that we leave behind. All of it will be at their fingertips. And I can't help but believe that this video will be the most prized find of all.

So much of what we put out there is little more than a cultural Potemkin village of our highest aspirations rather than a true reflection of what we are. We pretend that we're symphonies, the Bolshoi and the Guggenheim. But we're not. Not really. We're not even Kim Kardashian.

No, this video is the most accurate representation of who we really are at this moment in time. Culturally, politically and spiritually; we're crab-infested grandmas, mourning the loss of our pestilent little friends to the point of our own ultimate self-destruction. We love the discomfort and shame our condition causes us, but we miss it with all of our despondent little hearts when it's gone.

All that we are, all that we can ever hope to be, is written in that video file, just as the word "crab" was written in the sand.

It is the Yad Vashem is American life. And it will never be forgotten!


Editor's Note: I couldn't be more grateful to my personal hero, Drunken Stepfather (also deeply NSFW) for this great and most excellent gift to the ages. I couldn't be more confident that Drunken Stepfather will someday be seen as the unsung hero of our age. For this and everything else he's contributed, I thank him.

On Alexandra Wallace, the Racist UCLA Broad and Momentary Internet Sensation

As a misanthrope, I really don't understand racism. Actually, that's not true. I understand it, I just think that it's the height of intellectual laziness. Hating someone on the basis of the race, religion, gender or who they fuck just shows that you're not motivated enough to get to know somebody well enough to loathe them on a truly personal, individual basis. I'm 41 years old. I've hated a lot of people for a long time. My contempt is precious to me and I don't like to waste it on life's trivialities.

On the other hand, I try not to leave the house unless getting laid is a virtual certainty. I also haven't been in a library since I was in college, twenty years ago. I have more than enough books to keep me occupied and I have Al Gore's fabled interwebs. They keep me company and inspire some of the most frenzied onanism you could ever hope to see.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to Alexandra Wallace. Apparently, she's a political science major at UCLA - two well-known symptoms of being an idiot - and has a titanic hard on for Asians. So she did what modern man is currently most famous for ... she put her thoughts on YouTube.

Having heard that Miss Wallace's video caused quite the brouhaha this week, I tried watching it. I really did. But other than noticing that she did a reasonable Rush Limbaugh impression, I sort of zoned out after about three seconds.

This is because Allie is a really cute blonde with big fake tits. I've had girls like that threaten to kill me and I did nothing more than nod and smile. It might be hypnosis, the dull throbbing in my crotch, or some twisted and wrong combination of the two. If you're a really cute blonde with big fake tits, I probably won't notice anything other than that you're a really cute blonde with big fake tits. The racism escaped me, but so did practically everything else. Except the Limbaugh impression. No one should do that.

To be fair to myself, I'm like that a lot with pretty girls. When Brampton MP Ruby Dhalla was accused of running a human slavery ring out of her mom's basement, I defended her because she's really hot. And I should point out that things like organized human slavery usually upsets me quite a bit. I might just be a really shallow fellow. I try not to be, but the evidence that I'm failing is pretty irrefutable at this point.

But there is a bright side to all this unpleasantness. I managed to learn something from Miss Wallace even though I didn't really hear a word that she said. I abhor racism because it's lazy. But if you absolutely insist on being a racist, like everybody tells me Alexandra is, try to be a really cute blonde with big fake tits. Then I won't notice. And when I don't notice stuff, that's when the healing can begin.

Come to think of it, if everyone were just a little more like me, we'd be better off as people.

Video furiously stolen from Five Feet of Fury

"All the Single Ladies ... "

Mash-up video ruthlessly stolen from Antiquiet.