And Lo, After Three Days They Rolled The Rock Back With a Mighty Crash…

UPDATE: The Popcorn Mafia piece is up. You can check it out here.

Alas, I am not dead, so all celebrations need to stop immediately.

The American Jerk has been silent for a few reasons, the first being an unwanted intrusion from Ann The Anvil, who hurt me so badly during Nerd Prom. During that mostly-lost night, I remember seeing multiple flashes of light, which at the time I passed off as being simple microstrokes, or perhaps nothing but common pinprick brain hemorrhages, and I put them out of my mind… but it turns out that Ann was injured just as badly by the evening and, amazingly, holds a longer and stronger grudge than I do.

She sent me a cryptic email implying that terrible photographs of that evening exist, and that I might not want them to be released to law enforcement, and that I could only make this ugly little problem vanish by actually going to a movie and reporting on it for her Web site, Popcorn Mafia.

Which I probably would have done without the added duress (“Just write the thing, Reuter. Do you want the Department of Homeland Security to see you with that thing in your pants?”), since the site – a collection of regular podcasts of two comedians talking dirty about the movies – is so simple and genius that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it at a movie… but then again, I don’t think much at the movies, as evidenced by the following excerpt from what I sent her about my attendance at a screening of Man On Wire:

Our troubled negotiations with the hired help meant we missed the trailers. By the time we took our seats, poured two inches of Coke out of the paper cups out on onto the floor and replaced it with fresh whiskey, and managed to look at the screen, we saw a split-screen montage of the World Trade Center, looking disturbingly Ground Zero-like during initial construction on the left, contrasting with some hairless French acrobat prancing on a tightrope on the right.

“Too soon!” I shrieked, “Too fucking soon! You Goddamned heartless, exploitive motherfuckers! Too – “

I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned and looked up at who I guessed was the manager. “Sir, stop shouting! Are you okay?”

“No, I am not! How can you show something like this considering the tragedy we’ve been through?”

He looked confused. “Sir… that was seven years ago, and – “

“My cousin was a Flying Wallenda, you insensitive douchebag!” I sobbed as my girl put her arm around me in a comforting manner. “He died three weeks ago! Poor Uncle Adolf. I don’t know how Aunty Eva can be so strong.”

“I’m so, so sorry!” the manager blurted, “Did he die, you know… in a high wire accident?”

“Nope! Heart attack. Thanks, dude; I feel better now. Sorry about the outburst. Goddamned diabetes.”

I felt kind of bad copping out and savaging Man On Wire, since Ann, her partner Grae, and my buddy John Keating already did it… but I felt even worse when Ann admitted that her “incriminating pictures” were just flashless camera phone photos I tried to take down the front of my pants that you can’t even see anything in… and I swear it’s because of the lack of flash; not the lack of anything else. Anyway, the full piece should be up at Popcorn Mafia sometime in the next day or so, so check it out so that my near-arrest wasn’t in vain.

When the movie piece was finally done, I sat down to do some writing here, only to find that my own fucking Web site wouldn’t let me log into it. This crappy little rag is run by something called WordPress, which allows the use of third-party add-in applications called “plug-ins” that extend the site’s functionality. Which, when they work are great, and most of the stuff here that isn’t a foul animal pornography joke is powered by them… but when they don’t work, you start remembering that, on the master list of “plug-ins”, you can also find the butt-plug.

And considering most of these plug-ins are written by the software development powerhouse known as “some dude,” good luck getting any help fixing them. So after a fevered evening of ripping shit out and putting it back together to get things working again, I decided to punt on writing yesterday and instead played hooky to go Go-Kart racing. Because after all, emotionally I am no older than twelve years old… but unfortunately, physically I am 237 years old.

I am physically crippled today, because apparently I am too old and out of shape to drive. After two hours of wrestling a rack-and-pinion steered go-kart around hairpin turns, my palms and forearms are more infirm and crippled than they’ve been since I faked sickness to get out of school when I was fifteen so I could spend eight uninterrupted hours slo-moing through the pillow fight scene in Animal House.

And God knows it was a week that I should have been writing; there’s a potential 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout that I could have been making fun of, except for the minor detail that I don’t in any way understand it. To the best I can figure out, it’s like an old, crusty white guy whose spent every day for eight years taking a running start and kicking you in the balls, and then presenting you with a bill to repair his arthritic knee.

Plus, there’s the first debate between McCain and Obama tonight… maybe. McCain’s threatening to not show up if he can’t push the bailout through, which means that he’s unwilling to audition for the job of President because he’s too busy being a completely ineffectual Senator. That’s like skipping the orgy so you can jack off to the Sears Catalog when you’re completely impotent anyway.

So it might be ninety minutes of Obama debating himself… or if the debate people are smart and want to get ratings that make American Idol look like a 2 a.m. Sham-Wow infomercial, ninety minutes of Obama debating the Puppetry of the Penis people (“Eeewww!” “I’m John McCain, and I approve that message!”).

Either way, things should be back to normal here directly. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna use the last of the energy I have in my crippled hands to dial up some porn and see if what happens if I blow on it.

[tags]Man On Wire, John McCain, Barack Obama, Presidential Debate, Wall Street bailout, dark humor, satire[/tags]