The Dating Game: Ages 10 and Up

There's just no way you can help what happened with the women in the end. I mean, when you think about it, once we started demanding that everybody should look like ten year-old girls with abnormally accelerated breast development, it was only a matter of time before people would start hacking out their ribs and having botulism injected into their faces and eating seaweed. Looking back now, it seems so stupid, but each step in the progression was perfectly logical. Though that's not much comfort, because we're up shit creek now since you can't kiss a girl without having mad cow disease squirt in your eye or having her rib cage collapse and you have to spend your whole first date operating the gore suction tube for the shorthanded doctors in the emergency room.

It's a terrible state of affairs, but really we only have ourselves to blame. In retrospect we probably should have thought it all through better, but nobody realized that when we decided that human beings are unattractive, it would lead to having to take our dates to restaurants where they only serve garnish and you have to spend half of your paycheck on breath mints so that your date's breath doesn't smell like barfed up parsley all night.

Nobody was smart enough to figure out how far this would all reach and what a pain in the ass it would become, like not being able to use your microwave to heat up a burrito because the micro-radiation might cause your date's saline breast implants to deform from across the room. Some might damn the torpedoes and heat up that jalapeno colon sled regardless, but I've got no kind of smile on my face when I talk about what it's like to have a date's boob-sack go while you're at the movie and you have to sacrifice the soda you just spent seven bucks on because you need the cup to catch the stream of salt water that's spurting out of her nipple and pissing off the people sitting three rows ahead of you.

But, we're stupid, so we did it anyway. And it's only getting worse, since now all the 14 year-old girls out there have realized that all the women in the world are just trying to look like them, so they've started dressing like extras in a Warrant video. And with all of the plastic surgery shenanigans going on now you can't tell how old anybody is, it's a crapshoot as to whether your date might qualify for the senior's discount or the kids-half-off deal. For that reason it's best not to even try to go to a theme park until you've seen somebody's birth certificate, since you might end up having to buy them all kinds of toys and shit and not even get any sex out of the deal.

All of this makes a "getting to know you" conversation even more perilous, since when you ask what somebody does for a living, they might say "lawyer" or they might say "mostly babysitting and chores," there's no way to know ahead of time. But, you know, it's the terrible world we created because we couldn't handle it when Marilyn Monroe put on ten pounds and her ass got wider than Jack Lemmon's. I'm not saying we don't deserve what we got, we certainly do, I just wish Jesus or somebody had come down and said "Blessed are the fat women" or something to straighten us out before we got carried away.

But, you know, he didn't, he was obviously busy appearing in a taco out in Guam or some place, and here we are. No longer worried about sexually transmitted diseases, but harboring a fear of getting a surprise crick in our neck from carrying somebody's bookbag. Witty dinner conversation has been replaced by clever historical trivia to try and suavely gauge if your date is a hot 25 year-old who's fashionable enough to look like she's 14, or a hot 14 year-old who saved up her babysitting money to buy those jeans that look like the ass is all worn out.

Thanks a bunch, Jesus.

Spare Me the Summer Love
According to the free calendar I got with my last tank of gas, October is Get to Know a Bug Month. Who knew? Personally, I think you should take this as your invitation to crack open a weevil and see what the juicy little bugger has got going... (9/30/02)

Chug a Lung
I've had it, that's the last straw hat I'll ever wear. It's not like it would break the bank for them to put some kind of cheap, flame-retardant coating on these things. A small price to pay to save some serious embarrassment at tiki-torch... (9/16/02)

Lube the Tuber
I've got the word "cambria" stuck in my head for some reason. No idea what it means. Some sort of strange deja-vu like when you think you should recognize a name and then two weeks later it turns out that was the guy you shot accidentally while... (9/2/02)

Herman's Hermits: Your Dad's Got Crabs, Eddie
What kind of noise does your brain make when you think? A hum? A whir? I've come to believe that mine's more of a rattle and frankly, this week that's got me concerned. What could be rattling around up there? Loose juices? Snot? Who can say? For... (8/19/02)