
I am not going to cover all of the things I don’t care about here. That would be a three-volume set, and I plan on pounding out no more than five hundred words before I take a beer break. From Anthony Scaramucci to the Legend of Zelda, the world abounds with people and things I wish I would never hear about again.
I am the opposite of the three characters in American Pickers, a reality show my Significant Other follows. These people plunge into dusty garages and filthy basements all over America, dealing mostly with rustic characters who have funny accents and boring backstories, in pursuit of junk they like, and they like all kinds of junk. They look at items like a gaily painted carburetor or a bust of Sitting Bull made entirely of duck feathers, and bubble over with enthusiasm. They pack their van full of the used plumbing parts and diesel-powered doll houses that they crave, and roll into the sunset, back to their home in Iowa, which I presume they selected because it is right in the middle of the country, equally close to New Englanders who have a collection of genuine whaler underpants, and Texans who own station wagons entirely covered with armadillo hides.
And they can stay there, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a crap about their crap.
And then there’s the likes of Luann de Lessups, another demi-celebrity competing for my attention. She is a Real Housewife of New York, who apparently has a real capacity for making an ass out of herself because she has a real drinking problem. I’m taking a pass on caring in the least little bit about that. I’ve got my own drinking problem, which Luann is too wasted to give a crap about, so fuck her.
The media competes with the TV and the Internet in offering up nuggets of boredom. As I write this, I hear my special lady watching the Rose Parade, which she DVRed. She indulges in this sort of incomprehensible behavior all the time. The Rose Parade is a spectacle that has made my eyes glaze over since I was but a boy, being raised in a family that enjoyed watching parades both live and televised. I don’t know how I got related to those people, since adoption could not possibly have been involved, but they dragged me off to Thanksgiving and Fourth of July parades year after year. On New Year’s Day, we had to either attend live or watch the Mummer’s Parade in my native Philadelphia on TV. The Mummer’s parade was my childhood introduction to ennui. It consists of drunk hetero white men playing banjos while stumbling through the cracked streets of South Philadelphia, the same tunes over and over again, while dressed in tights and glitter.
Believe me, it sounds more interesting than it is. I could go on, but I just hit five hundred words on the nose. Beer time!