Tales From Salted Earth

Gather ’round, children. Don’t you wonder why we live in the cold and poisoned world that we do? Looking back, around a decade ago, everything got too salty. 

We used to come home from work and watch TV, enjoying longtime creature comforts. Television shows were devoted to entertaining us, with characters we could identify with. That’s how it was in the 1990s.

The troubles began with Friends.

Friends was as relatable as a Benetton advertisement. Every male character was a cheap imitation of an existing one, and almost all women watched it because of the hairstyles of the lead actresses.

This was the death knell of the sitcom. Now it was no longer about laughs per minute. It was all about appearances, and the content didn’t matter, because women would watch it anyway. The standard fell through the floorboards. Now we have unfunny smegma like The Big Bang Theory.

Earth: salted.

I don’t have a television set, and I haven’t had cable since 2009. I don’t say this to be trendy or hip. I just have no reason to allow that shit into my domicile anymore. When I was a boy, one simply purchased a TV, plugged it in and turned it on. That’s why there were commercials; to pay for the broadcast. But you bought a radio or TV, and that was it. No further purchases required. 

Welp, that’s all dead. Why? Over-reaching corporations. Monopolies. If you can’t get consumers to pay for the latest thing, then destroy what they already own. (Or trick them into destroying it themselves.) Now they have to pay. 

Are you a married man? Then you’re fucked. These companies will do everything imaginable to ensnare your goodly wife. Women spend money, and they care how they appear to other women. Better sign up for Netflix, cable, Internet, satellite radio, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Otherwise, prepare for a painful, confusing break-up.

Once it became clear that TV was extra lethal to women, TV solved the issue with channels specifically for women. One is even owned by Oprah. Voilà, a direct line to the female brain, ready for a saturation-bombing of propaganda. The best part: the women on TV are very nice, so you feel like a shitheel criticizing anything. Ta-da!

WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS

In the middle 1990s, black-trash ball-slinger O.J. Simpson found out his white wife was fucking her tennis coach, and brutally murdered the both of them in front of his Brentwood home. Then his buddy Al Cowlings picked him up in a white Ford Bronco, and drove O.J. to the black part of L.A., so he wouldn’t be tried by a white jury. It worked; O.J. was acquitted. Since then race relations in America have been a real barrel of laughs.

The cancerous tumor that ensured this murderer’s freedom was called Robert Kardashian. I apologize for making you read that fucking unspeakable surname on this site.

One of this rich lawyer’s whore daughters was videotaped being pissed upon by “Ray J”, the brother of Brandy Norwood, who was known first for R&B and then for vehicular manslaughter. The whore Kar-daughter parlayed the resultant fame from the piss tape into a reality show, where she and her room-temperature-IQ sisters lolled around posh hotel lobbies like leopard seals in Gucci sunglasses. These daughters possess all the charisma of a discarded dental dam. Legions of young women paid untold sums of money to emulate them.

Need I even mention Bruce Jenner?

Did guys stop watching TV because of this wretched family of festooned slatterns? There’s actually a browser app that blocks all links to the name “Kardashian”. What does that tell you?

Earth: salted. Guess what: if I hate a person on TV, and I don’t want to see, hear, or in any way support that person, I avoid TV. TV didn’t win. I did. All their money is wasted, as well as their time. I don’t care about “getting references” on South Park and The Simpsons, because I obviously don’t watch those shows. Or anything. And I’m far from alone in this.

My life is no longer based around TV. In the late ’90s, like so many others, I had a ritual; I would come home from work, watch my favorite shows, and use the commercial breaks to prepare food or go to the bathroom. I actually appreciated Jay Leno, because like Carson before him, his pace was calmer and more soothing, ideal for the hours before slumber. I had the TV on most of the time because it was a pleasant companion. I even found one of those PBS shows where an artist would paint a picture while telling a story. I was a happy, willing viewer.

All of this is dead and twisted now. I lived alone in a cinderblock shack; the TV was plugged into the wall. I took what I could get, which was PBS, The Simpsons, daytime TV and Seinfeld. I was years away from having Internet at all; it was still a novelty. “A/S/L”, in caps, was typed more often than “lol”. Print magazines like Entertainment Weekly wrote articles about the inherent folly of “eBay”.

Let’s see, how do I watch The Simpsons now? It’s on TV: I don’t have one. Hey, maybe it’s on the Internet! Nope, that was a bad link. Wow, that link gave my laptop a virus. What the fuck?!

Hey, maybe I can watch it on YouTube! Ehh… this is labeled The Simpsons, but it’s a ten-second clip from twenty years ago. Apparently there’s some copyright issues. It’s only on YouTube if it’s a few seconds long, or distorted into “vaporwave”. Or “poop”. Sigh.

I guess I’ll watch the show at my friend’s house, where I’m far less comfortable, and I can’t watch it while working. He still has cable. I think; maybe Netflix. Hmm. This episode is bloated with references to Hunger Games, Twilight, and a bunch of other crap I don’t care about or understand. Fuck this shit. I’m going home to forget all about The Simpsons, a show that brought laughter into my life for decades.

Salted.

It’s not the Law of Diminishing Returns. That was valid up until the 1990s. Now it’s the Law of Hermit Crab Shells. Grab up whatever looks good and climb in.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

SUPERBREEDERS

Just ten years ago, a woman could turn her uterus into a clown car, and get a contract with a cable channel. Actress Angelina Jolie would probably like to forget “Octomom”, a severely disturbed woman who surgically altered her face to resemble Jolie’s. Oh, and she birthed eight children, after parading her horrific distended belly across the Internet.

If you’re a man, and you had a girlfriend around ten years ago, I can predict two things: you groaned aloud when I reminded you of this horror, and you’re not with that girlfriend anymore.

Worse than “Octomom” was a venomous harpie named Kate Gosselin, mother of eight artificially-inseminated fetuses, which were delivered by Cesarean section. Her desire to wring fame from her multi-brood was so myopic, she destroyed her marriage (to, admittedly, a contemptible dullard) and finally her professional image. She was appealing to no heterosexual man.

Women ate the show up. 

This created a situation where compromise was impossible. Couples could not watch this show together, and since it was on television and therefore “validated”, it felt like couples were the problem. Girls wanted like crazy to watch Jon and Kate Plus 8, because it was a total shit-show with a pussy-whipped hubby, and guys wanted like crazy to get away from it. To me personally, Kate Gosselin’s face looks like a ball-shredding sausage grinder. What a surprise it is that nothing came into or out of her loveless vagina.

You think I could crack these jokes ten years ago? Do ya? You think you can co-habitate with a beautiful woman, and make these kinda comments? ahBULLSHIT.

This isn’t even the complete picture. The Mormons inevitably got on board, with 17 18 19 and Goddamn Counting. It might even be 20 by the time I post this. That’s the Duggar family, by the way; the gold standard of clown-car vaginas. I once saw a photo of the mother. If you can’t tell from her face that she’s totally disturbed, you’re either a fan of the show, or one of her offspring. Either way, you’re fucked.

There are kids with makeup on TV. I’m no historical expert, but that’s the sort of thing that heralds a “mass cleansing”. It should never be normalized, or accepted. Reality shows became normalized, and look where we are now. Look what’s about to actually happen in a couple of days, whether you like it or not. Remember a time when people were arguing about gay marriage? Funny thing; 1995 was the year Ross’s lesbian ex-girlfriend married a lady on Friends, and Ellen DeGeneres came out as gay on her eponymous and forgotten sitcom. Kevin Smith handled the trendy lesbian issue in Chasing Amy with equal delicacy and reverence.

And here we are, 20+ years later. We don’t watch any of this stuff, because we didn’t relate to it, like the stuff we used to. We still watch TV shows from the 1950s to the 1990s because they contain elements that we still relate to. Shows were intended to appeal to the entire family, without talking down to anyone. Those are the ones that endure. Nothing wrong with coming out of the closet, but it’s not a common and relatable experience to a majority of viewers. Now that it’s “out of the closet”, shows that don’t address the matter look retrograde by comparison. Now “common experiences” must include a spectrum of made-up stuff that might support a particular agenda. If L and G exist, so must B, T and Q, regardless of how harmful the association may be. It’s more neuroses for Big Pharma to salve. More money. More brainwashed children to walk this Salted Earth.

Listen, just because I hate kids doesn’t mean I hate good families. I’m the proud black sheep of my graduating class; almost everyone else turned into great moms and dads. I have nothing against people who have children, and then devote their existence to those children.

But I have never, I repeat never, looked out upon any place on Earth and said “you know what this needs? More people.”

It’s just too much salt for the earth.