The Butthurts: An Open Letter To Some Cranky Neighbors

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Butthurt,

    We ain’t much for flowery speeches down here at apartment 1108. Hell, last time I made one was at my cousin’s wedding, and that ended with people throwing rice at me. I tried to correct them loudly with a scolding finger pointed at their fat faces, “Hey, I’m not the one getting married, fat-faces!” but the volley continued for quite awhile. In between absorbing the shots that landed and making the “jack-off” motion in the direction of those who missed, as if to say, “Ha! You missed me, jack-off!,” I thought to myself, Hey, I thought you wasn’t supposed to throw rice at weddings anymore ‘cause they make birds explode. And then, Nah, probably just an urban legend. Fireworks and some bread, now those are what you want if bird-explodin’ is your game.
    See? Not much for flowery speeches.
    As your neighbors, we feel it’s important that we keep the lines of communication open, Pete and I. To close them off would be a bad idea, like having too much white zin at your cousin’s wedding and wondering aloud if the bride to be had ever been to the Eiffel Tower, if ya know what I mean. (Uh, the sex act involving two men and a lady, not the landmark in France.)
    Your complaints about the noise coming from out apartment have not gone unnoticed, Butthurts. Too many people smoking cigarettes outside? Complaint. GG Allin’s voice rising through your floorboards, filling your apartment with too-vivid descriptions of less-than-palatable sex acts? Complaint. The mysterious case of all those birds exploding? Complaint. And all duly noted, Butthurts.
    Where we seem to differ is in what we find offensive to the ear holes, and with a nod to the communication thing, we feel it best to be earnest to this point.
    First off, what’s with the wheelchair? We’d never complain about this if we were sure that Mr. Butthurt was truly infirm. But sometimes I see him outside, just rollin’ along, and it sure looks like he could get up at any moment and surprise us, like the bad guys in movies always do. (I’m not comparing you to a movie bad guy here, Butthurt, just pointing out that you have that look to you. Sure you get that all the time.) As for that machine that lifts the male Butthurt, wheelchair and all, from the base of the stairs to the front door: sure it might be convenient, but it sounds like a robot getting a dry hand-job from a lady robot. So sir, we beg you: If you are truly crippled (doctor's note?), please consider finding a method of getting from the ground to your apartment that’s more respectful to your neighbors (pulley system?).
    Another thing: have you ever heard Mrs. Butthurt’s voice? As the Jews might say (apologies in advance if you guys are Jewish. No offense! Big fans of the Coen Brothers! LOL!), oy vey. My uncle spent six months in a cage designed for (and filled with the feces of) lar gibbons back in 'Nam, and was poked with sharpened bamboo chutes for hours at a time each day. (Except for his birthday of course, when his captors baked him a cake--which sounds nice, granted, but Uncle Terry maintains to this day that he tasted an unmistakeable hint of lar gibbon turds in the frosting--bunch of tricksters, those VC guards.) Anyway, when I listen to Mrs. Butthurt talk, it’s all, Whoa, somebody find me a lar gibbon cage! You know?!
Of course, I’m exaggerating for effect here, but you know those birds? Grackles, I think they’re called? Yeah, she sounds like a grackle who has learned to speak through some terribly regrettable miracle, and only uses its new gift to complain about stuff. “Who keeps throwing all these beer cans on our patio?!”* What a drag.
    Anywho, I’d never presume to know the relationship between the two of you, but since she so reminds me of a less comical Edith Bunker, maybe she’d think it was funny (and get the point) if you were all like, “Stifle yourself!” Ha, great show.
    Hope this letter finds you well, Butthurts, and that this may clear the path for a future of mutual respect, and perhaps even friendship--Heck, I was thinking about going to Halloween as Wolverine this year, and I could use a convincing Professor X... Mr. Butthurt, I’m looking at you! (‘Cause of the wheelchair, I mean).

    Neighborly,

    Your neighborliest neighbors

*To fully appreciate the tone of the letter, Mrs. Butthurt’s quote should be read in a hilarious, grackle-that-somehow-learned-to-talk voice.

Dr. Pepper Ten: My Commercial Pitch

[SCENE: Dude-bro in “FBI: Female Body Inspector” shirt (sleeves cut off) strolls through  a post-apocalyptic wasteland, alternately shooting and bayonetting anyone who crosses his path, and casually sipping a Dr. Pepper 10.]

Dude-bro (Looks at camera): Hey women; you think you can handle the high intensity, low-cal kick in the testicles that is Dr. Pepper 10?!

Yeah, we didn’t think so, because you don’t have any testicles! (Cut to diagram of female reproductive system.) See?! No testicles!

You see women, you might have won the right to vote and to drive--but this is Dr. Pepper 10! This ain’t no pussy-ass Congress! (Cut to photo of pussy-ass Congress.) And it’ll be a cold day in hell before we allow women to horn in on the veiny, boner-fest of a man-jam that is the low calorie soft drink game! Go bake us a fucking pie!

Speaking of pie, Dr. Pepper 10 is sweet! But not too sweet! That’d be gay!

One time, I fed my girlfriend’s dog a bunch of whiskey and it was totally funny. But she didn’t think it was funny, and then she got all upset when it died--because she’s a sensitive lady! And that’s exactly why she could never handle the bold waterboarding of taste buds that goes down every time you take a sip of Dr. Pepper 10!

Don’t like monster trucks?! Fuck you!

Never seen First Blood?! Die of bird flu, nancy!

Occasionally menstruate?! No dice!

Joan of Arc led the French to several major victories in the Hundred Years War--but even if she hadn’t been burned at the stake like a thousand years ago, she couldn’t have led herself to the outrageous elbow drop of flavor contained in each drop of Dr. Pepper 10--because Dr. Pepper 10 is for men only!

A therapist once told me that my unhealthy views of women might stem from my strained relationship with my mother. Mom wasn’t around much when I was growing up, and I think ever since then, I’ve struggled with intimacy. Sometimes when I was a kid, I just wished she was there to say “Goodnight,” or read me a story. I wonder if only she knew how much I needed her back then, if she would’ve left Uncle Tyrone and come home for good. (Pauses, looks wistfully off into the distance, then back at the camera.)

Oh, sorry. Got off on a bit of a tangent there.

Anyway, drink Dr. Pepper 10! Unless you’re a broad!

(Voiceover): Dr. Pepper 10 is not intended for women, including but not limited to:

*Your sister
*Fergie
*Pat Summit
*That nice lady who cleans the house
*Your mother
*That one girl who played the pregnant girl in “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”
*Ruth Bader Ginsburg
*Any of the Baseball/Basketball/Football Wives from VH1
*Gloria Steinem
*Queen Elizabeth II
*Gisele Bundchen
*April O’Neil
*Uma Thurman
*The Pussycat Dolls
*Molly Ringwald

Dr. Pepper 10: Don't be a pussy! Go low-cal!

A Rubber Dong For Clara

    Perry’s face brightened upon hearing the familiar rhythm of Clara’s heels, coming down the long hospice hallway in what, he thought, approached perfect four-four time. He had long ago come to terms with the disease that would soon separate he and his young wife, and, optimistic sort of fellow he was, resigned himself to the simple pleasures that remained, like this visit, and good, long fap sessions to that Spanish channel--the one that always showed ladies in lingerie for a reason beyond Perry and I.
    “Holy shit,” Clara said, licking a finger. “Did you know they put a Pinkberry right next door?”
    “Uh, no,” Perry said weakly. “Just been, uh, hanging out here.”   
    “Well you should go sometime, seriously, it is amazing.”
    Watching her lick the rest of her fingers, Perry was reminded of the purpose of their meeting. “Clara, so I was thinking--”
    “Hey, did you hear they’re doing a new Footloose? I’ll probably see it, but it’s like, ‘How can you improve on the original, right?’”
    “Clara, we need to talk. About the mold.”
    This had been weighing heavily on Perry’s mind since the initial diagnosis sank in. In those days, it was customary for a soon-to-be-widow to have a rubber mold of her departing husband’s penis made, particularly if the married couple in question were young--like Perry and Clara Horningsickle, 31 and 29, respectively. It was a sign of eternal love and faithfulness, the idea being that, once the woman is widowed, she may feel as close to her husband--and his dong--in death as she was in life; a sign that his was the only dong the woman would ever need. It was really a very sweet sentiment, as far as the manufacture of dildos goes.
    Aside from that, this was seen as a positive bit of progress, as in the years before the penis molding idea, women were given the choice of being buried alive with their husbands or facing public ridicule, being called “skeezers” by the townspeople and the like.
    “Oh, yeah,” Clara said. “Well, whatever, I mean, you can do what you want.”
    “But, don’t you want it?” he said vulnerably.
    “Uh,” she said, moving her gaze from the screen of her phone to the room’s television. “Has Stuart Scott’s eye always been like that? Creeps me out, you know?”
    “Clara. The mold.”
    “Jeez, is that all you ever talk about?”
    “It’s just that the Dr. Arnett said I only--”
    “Look, I don’t want to fight.”
    “So?”
    “Uh... No, not really, no.”
    “Clara, I know you’re not the kind to keep a rubber dick around--”
    “No, actually I have a bunch. They’re in the drawer under the--”
    “But it would mean a lot to me. I'm not going to be around for much longer, and I want you to have a piece of me with you always. And that piece is my dong.”
    Perry had tears streaming down his face now. The drugs they were pumping into him to ease the pain had had sever side effects, and one of them, apparently, was that he had turned into a total pussy.
    “It’s just what people do, Clara” Perry said finally.
    “Yeah, I know,” Clara said, looking at her phone once more. “Hey, I’ve got to skedaddle. Tyra and I are going to go to Austin for the weekend, so I’ll think about the whole rubber schlong mold thing and see you when I get back.”
    “But, Dr. Arnett said--”
    Clara leaned down and kissed Perry on the mouth, stifling the words--a retelling of Dr. Arnett’s latest, grimmest assessment--into a peculiar hum.
    Before he could gather his thoughts, Clara was striding from the room.
    From the long hallway, Perry listened to the rhythmic clicking fade and fade. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hands. He was exhausted and lost in thought--so much so that he didn’t hear that clicking reverse, growing and growing, drawing nearer once more. He looked up to see Clara smiling at him from the foot of his bed.
    “Forgot my hair clip,” she said. “TTYL!”
  

Wild Animals & Other Potential Threats

   Wolves

 

“Were you raised by wolves?” Marcia asked sharply, and the child wondered what had tipped her off. Could it have been that he was behaving like a wild animal? Had he unwittingly taken up the practice of walking around on all fours? Or was it all those claw wounds?

Spain

The bullfighter stepped to the center of the ring. He peered into the crowd and saw his lady love waving down at him. Her eyes were occupied at once by fear and love. The bullfighter was enraptured by her beauty, her piercing green eyes and her bodacious cans. He put one hand to his mouth and blew her a kiss--and then, “Hey, who put this horn in my side?”

B&E

My boss, Mr. Banks was pretty upset that I had taken his lunch from the refrigerator. “And another thing,” he yelled, “How’d you get into my house?”

How I Survived the Sinking of Titanic

    I was working as a struggling artist in Paris when I first heard of the unsinkable ship called “Titanic.”
    Amazed at the sheer enormity, luxury and unsinkability of the ship, I packed up my crayons and headed to Liverpool shortly. There, I won my ticket from some Scandinavian guy--on a lucky hand in a game of “Go Fish.” Two tickets--one for me, one for my stereotypically goofy Italian best friend, Alessio. “That’s a spicy-a meatball,” Alessio said after we’d acquired our tickets.
    The trouble started summarily.
    For some reason at inspection, Alessio was let right through. But, despite my insistence that I was an American and thus lice-free, the inspectors inspected me scrupulously, digging through my beard with gloved hands and administering the skin test, which seemed to me quite similar to an Indian sunburn. Another guy came along and started poking me in the eye. I protested that I didn’t think that was a very good gauge of my personal cleanliness, but he just stared at me and kept right on a-pokin.’ The guy combing my beard found a bag of chips and a flask of whiskey in there, and he confiscated the items.
    “This stuff could be dangerous to the others,” he said, washing down a handful of my chips with my whiskey.
    The guy who was poking me in the eye finally stopped, and instead began knocking on the top of my head and studying the shape of my skull. Phrenology buff, I guessed.
    The first guy polished off the rest of my chips and whiskey and began combing my beard again. “You got anything else in here that I could confiscate? Some jewelry maybe, or a rare painting?” I told him I didn’t think so, but he just kept at it. He found a Rembrandt eventually and got really excited at first. Then he threw the painting on the ground and glowered at me. “Who do you think you’re fooling here, buddy?” he said.
    “That guy?” I guessed, pointing over his shoulder to a random passenger.
    “That’s nothing but a cheap reprint.” He spat on the painting, and on me, then on me again.
    “Puh. Puh. Puh.”
    “Can I go now?” I asked. “I’ll give you some of my artwork.”
    I produced my portfolio. He eyed the stick figures, and the stink lines that emanated from most of them. “This is no fake Rembrandt,” he said. “No, these are amateurish at best.”
    “I could do a new one,” I said. “Just imagine: You, combing my beard and prodding at my eyes as the sun sits high in the sky, smiling from behind a pair of sunglasses.”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re pretty filthy.”
    I protested again, but he pointed out that I was covered in spit.
    The horn sounded, signaling that the great ship was about to depart.
    “Well, I’ve enjoyed our chat,” he said. “But it looks like we’ve run out of time.”
    “Could I at least get a refund on my ticket?”
    He took the ticket and quickly stuffed it in his mouth. He swallowed with a gulp, and then said, “What ticket?” holding his hands out at his sides.
    I hung my head.
    “Yeah, it’s a shame,” he said. “Say, do you have any more whiskey? That ticket made me parched.”
    “If you haven’t found any by now, I wouldn’t Imagine so.”
    “Too bad.”
    With the help of the amateur phrenologist, he tossed me from the ship. I landed can-first on the dock, and the crowd that had gathered to watch the ship depart pointed and laughed. “It’s called a delousing station,” someone cried. “Use one.”
    I scratched my beard and a fist-sized rock fell out. I threw it at the slowly departing ship. It hit my friend Alessio in the head. “That’s a painful-a rock!” he said.

Remembering the East Coast-West Coast Emo Feud

    Throughout the whiny annals of the emo genre, no two bands have made such an indelible mark on the scene as have Cutwrist and Sadface. The former, led by the ever-mopey Gerald Holland, was established in Los Angeles shortly after Holland’s girlfriend broke up with him; the latter was founded by friends Alex Patterson and Mark Cohen in New York City, when Cohen heard Patterson artfully bitching about having to do his chores.
    “Hey, let’s put some music to that mope,” Cohen is said to have remarked.
    The two bands rocketed to superstardom in their first few years of existence, with Cutwrist issuing such hits as, “Heart-Punched” and “I’m Really, Really Sad,” and Sadface offering such memorable hits as “Alone in the Blackness” and “But I Thought We Were Soul Mates...” With such immediate success, the two bands found themselves touring together in 2003 and became fast friends.
    In less than a year however, their friendship--and careers--would be torn asunder by mutual enmity.
    The feud began at Wet Blanketsville, USA, the studio owned and operated by Sadface. It was a cool November evening, and Holland was recording vocals for the Cutwrist track “Sleeping Pills--That’ll Do the Trick.” Between takes, he stepped out of the booth and into the brisk Manhattan night to smoke a cigarette. He had just lit the cigarette when an unknown and masked assailant accosted Holland and stabbed him three times with a used knife from a nearby Arby’s.
    After the stabbing, Holland whinged with even greater zeal, and Cutwrist’s financial success, after the release of “Stabbed With An Arby’s Knife... In the Heart”, grew to rare heights; but his friendship with Cohen was over. Holland claimed that the attack was set up by Cohen and vowed revenge. Shortly thereafter, Holland was arrested on two counts of being a pussy when he was seen sobbing at an airport. His stay in jail would do little to assuage his feelings of hatred toward his former friend.
    Upon his release, Holland took the beef to the studio. He released the dis track, “You Can’t Kill Me (I’ll Do It Myself)” just three weeks after he was freed, a resonating screed against Sadface, their record label “Boo Hoo Records” and, indeed, all East Coast emo bands. Accompanying the track was a video, in which a tearful Holland intimated that he had sex with Cohen’s girlfriend.    
    For the usually reserved and despondent Cohen, this was the last straw.
    At the Source Awards For Emo in New York, Holland continued his verbal assault. After winning the award for Most Likely To Sob In Public, he took aim at Sadface’s producer, Sean “Puffy Eyed” Mattingly, who could be heard crying in the background many of the group’s songs and videos. “If you want to just be sad and alone, and not have the producer all in the videos... all on the songs... come to Sad Sack!” he said, a reference to his label, Sad Sack Records.
    The remarks were met with bristling from the New York crowd, but this time, Cohen would fire back. After presenting the trophy for Pussy of the Year, Cohen remarked, “You don’t know a thing about sadness, buddy,” pointing at his former friend. “It’s sunny every day in LA! No existentialist thinker has ever come from a tropical climate, douchebag!”
    The audience once again bristled, but the war of words wasn’t over. After a performance of “Cuttin’ The Day Away,” Cutwrist’s cofounder and guitarist Aaron “What’s the Point?” Heckert took aim at the New York audience. “Y’all don’t got love for Cutwrist?” he yelled. “Y’all don’t got no love for Sad Sack Records? Well fuck y’all!”
    It was a seminal moment for both bands. Rather than continuing on being a bunch of whiny-britches, the mutual enmity between the bands made them angry, and this was reflected in their lyrics. The titles of the respective bands’ subsequent albums were “Suck My D***, New York” and “F*** Yourself, LA.”    
    Fans, used to the downtrodden whinging of Holland and the melodic bitching of Patterson, were disappointed by the bands’ newfound sense of not being disappointed and sales plummeted. Meanwhile, the tension between the East and West Coast emo scenes grew, as they blamed one another for the anger that had so affected the genre.
    Soon, both bands split up.
    But the story doesn’t end there.
    Both Holland and Cohen experienced a similar, and possibly career-saving phenomena after their respective bands split up, their lives as musicians possibly over: they got sad. The new sense of sadness has reportedly become fodder for a comeback, and there have been talks of an upcoming comeback tour for each band. We recently reached Cohen at his sadly unfurnished New York loft, and he has confirmed that plans are being made for the “Still Sad Tour” 2012, and that a new, depressing record would be released later this year.
    Will the two bands be able to finally bury the hatchet and just focus on being sad? Will Cutwrist and Sadface return to the heights they so quickly achieved, and from which they even more quickly fell? “Would,” Cohen asked us rhetorically in our recent chat “anyone care if I was gone?”
    With that attitude Mark, you better believe they would.

A Mother's Love

It was a cool spring morning, a Saturday in Bloody, New Jersey. Bennie sat alone in the family’s living room watching television and picking his nose--havin’ a good ole nose-pickin’ type of time. Between episodes of Cheaters, with a multi-textured bugger sitting just out of his reach, there was a curious rattling at the door and, disregarding the rules pertaining to opening doors for strangers, Bennie streaked from his perch on the family couch and answered.
    Upon swinging the door open, Bennie discovered that, unlike most guests at the Patterson house, this one was a bear. A grizzly. A bona fide, picnic-stealin’ trout gobbler.
    Bennie shrieked in terror. The grizzly growled in hunger. Bennie’s mother went, “Guh,” in confusion.
    She descended the stairs quickly to find her son cornered by the lumbering beast. Grabbing a broomstick from the closet, she knocked her son out of harm’s way. And you know how they say women experience an almost superhuman strength when their children are in danger?
    Well, she didn’t have that. She was mauled to death.