Oh, it’s ending all right — as sure as “Apocalypse Now” seems to be turning up on three channels at once these days. Think I’m exaggerating? Well, check out my 21 reasons why it’s all over, and you’ll quickly join me in Chicken Little-dom:
Nowadays, Justin Bieber seems kind of cute and harmless, no longer a dangerous irritant … The same goes for Shia LaBeouf … Dare I say Charlie Sheen and even Lindsay Lohan seem relatively cuddly these days, too? I’m scared …
People have been leaving Twitter in droves because it involves too much typing. One sentence! … A murderer I know said his life can only get back to normal when the cameras will leave him alone. He said this to a camera! In between tweeting about his TV appearances! (No, he hasn’t abandoned Twitter.) …
I had to go for a minor medical test and called a million times in advance to make sure it was all covered. But four months later, I got a letter from the insurance company saying, “The anesthesiologist wasn’t in network.”
The fake Julia Roberts — Sandra Bullock — is way bigger than the real Julia Roberts, and the imitation “View” — “The Talk” — has surpassed “The View.” … The longer we wait for Barbra Streisand’s “Gypsy” movie to happen, the older she’ll get … Meryl Streep’s going to get nominated again.
Want to be a journalist these days? Well, you not only have to write three times more than before, but you have to be a publicist for your own work (“Please click on this link. Please!”) and then turn into a one-person collection agency when you try to get paid. They don’t teach any of this in J school, I assure you.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” has a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it was a complete “Wow!” with audiences, too, but I found it noisy, relentless and unbearable. I walked out after 30 minutes of sheer hell involving screeching cars and minimal dialogue. How on Earth would you even call that a movie, let alone a classic? …
Karma used to work, but it doesn’t anymore. The people who’ve dogged you for years — the ones with the morals of junkyard dogs — are still kicking and apparently will live even longer, thanks to their unerring sense of survival and sheer ruthlessness.
Remember when rewards cards actually got you something substantive? Well, I just earned five bucks in rewards points at Kmart, but I was told they can only be cashed in if I buy $25 or more worth of groceries and linen!
Meghan Trainor became a star singing about fat acceptance, but I hear that in person, she looks like she weighs about 90 pounds. … Britney Spears actually won a battle of wits with someone. (It was Iggy Azalea, but still.)
I go to every event on Earth, only missing two in recent history, and they turned out to be the two most momentous happenings of all time!!! I was notably absent when Caitlyn Jenner made a surprise appearance at a NYC Gay Pride event to deafening fanfare and also when Ellen Greene reprised her role of Audrey in New York City Center’s Encores! Off-Center Series’ retread of “Little Shop of Horrors,” garnering the greatest huzzahs since Laurette Taylor. (Encores! resolutely refuses to invite me to anything, and always has.) I guess I need to go out more, and maybe even pay sometimes …
I recently ran into an old club person from the ’90s who always had an icky look complete with truly awful plastic surgery. Well, he looked worse than ever as he breathlessly told me, “I’m off to meet my boyfriend.” Wait — he has a boyfriend and I don’t????
TCM, which specializes in really old movies you can turn to in your times of nostalgia-related neediness, now sometimes shows Brat Pack movies! You head there for Chaplin and get “St. Elmo’s Fire!” At least it’s not another showing of “Apocalypse Now.”
When some amazing advance happens, like the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, the media thinks the right thing to do is to endlessly interview the people who are fuming mad about it. The Supreme Court changed the face of equality of all time, but we’re gonna focus on what Billy Graham’s son has to say! Imagine if these channels had been around when slavery was abolished? “Today, we’ll devote our program to a series of slave owners who think this development is a disgrace in the eyes of God.” Um, they lost. Who cares what they think? Trap door!
Need another reminder of the dumbness that’s out there in droves? On a social network recently, some gay blogger attacked me for allegedly having said that trans people are homophobic hypocrites. But what I had said was the mass media are homophobic hypocrites for jumping on the trans bandwagon just because they deem it to have commercial cachet these days. I pointed this clarification out to him, and he still kept attacking me as if I’d said what he thought! Blocked!
Then someone else agreed with him, writing that they’ve never liked me because I’m basically a writer for hire who’s always gone after the dollar!!! I’ve been accused of many things, but being a mercenary? I was one of the first out columnists anywhere, and for 29 years, wrote up LGBT issues and attacked the big guys for an alternative weekly, paying the price every step of the way. My outlets continue to be alternative, snarky and often LGBT — except for The New York Times, where I write profiles of drag queens and gogo boys. If that’s the road to being a whore, then fine, line my pockets with gold!!!
But enough about me. Narcissism is a major factor in the ending of the world, and I don’t want to contribute to that.
Michael Musto is a contributing journalist for TheBlot Magazine.
