Soundtracked

Lovelorn Punk Werewolves Of Buttscratchers

"As Seen On TV: Write a script for a late-night infomercial — where the product is your blog. How do you market yourself? What qualities do you embody that other 'products' don’t? What are the benefits of reading your blog?"

Ah, you guys! My people! How's everybody's days been? Good I hope. Not that I can do anything about that, but what the hell...I'm here and you're here, so we may as well give it a shot, right?

Because I sorta like most of y'all, I'm not gonna lie...I kinda like me a good, trashy infomercial. Having insomnia and no cable in the pre-internet days meant limited 3am television viewing options, so it made sense for me to get acquainted with the likes of Billy Mays and Vince Offer and the boys. These cartoonish nutjobs, doing their best to be men who've had it doing menial tasks the boring, old fashioned way, took it upon themselves to hawk a contraption meant to add more steps make life even easier, all for a low, low price as long as you CALL NOW!! That's good time- and brain-killing tv watching, y'all...BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!!

And the hook was always that...get a second one of something you don't need for half the price, using money five minutes prior you hadn't intended on parting with! Shipping, of course, pretty much ate up that difference, but who cares? Now you've got two   buttscratchers   for the price of IDGAF. I'll betchya that when Jesus and the GOP invented the tee-vee, they never imagined a day when programming of questionable quality could be combined with products of questionable quality in an effort to divorce you of your hard-earned Lincolns and Jacksons (those wages gained no doubt from employment at the Buttscratcher Factory and after paying your Local 069 Buttscratcher's Union dues).

But here's the thing (there's always a thing): Writing a script? I'm not in the mood for it right now, to be honest. I love this prompt but my head's in a million other places right now. I could totally see myself hawking some silly blog all "Infomercial Guy" style, with one of those cheap hands-free headsets talking to a studio crowd, waving my hands like I'm putting out imaginary fires to my left and right simultaneously, and taking a *wink wink* volunteer out of the studio audience for random hi-jinks...all in between prerecorded testimonial footage about how some old lady read my entries to her comatose husband and they snapped him out of it, or little Susie down the street using it to coax her cat out of a tree (thus giving the firefighters more time to put out those imaginary fires I was just talkin' about), or lordy be could you imagine that Howie the Hobo from the dumpster behind the 7-11 turned his life around once he read all the advice I'm not qualified to give out and started going out with new women each night  ? Good christ, if I actually felt like writing a decent script, I'd say there's half of it right there! One half-hour of an insomniac's wet dream, ladies and gentlemen...that's why I'm a Premium Member of WDC (free shameless plug for the imaginary partner here ).

What else? Let's see...this product will basically last forever, with no upkeep on the user's end. Like, literally for-eeeevvv-errrrr  . You can't front on that. And as anyone who's familiar with this fat slab of internet bacon can testify, the benefits of this product are multi-fold, which is a fancy way of saying numerous that I'm sure wasn't an expression at all three-point-six-nine nice minutes ago, and is also curious relating to something that is physically impossible to fold once, let alone multi times. Wow, this might be one of the most ridiculous paragraphs in all my too many years of blogging...let's move on and wrap this segment up.

I'm tellin' you guys...there's no shame in wasting some time watchin' infomercials. There's always some cool-ass shit that makes you feel dumb for not thinking of it first so you could be the one makin' stupid money off it, and the three weeks that product actually works after you've bought it are seriously the three best weeks of your life (says the man who has never been married or had kids ). What I'm trying to say to you- what I'm really trying to do here- is this: Lower your expectations. You're not watching this garbage to learn something or enrich your social status or somethin' like that; you're watching this because the four other channels out of however many your television provider offers you that you normally watch have something even less interesting on, and you're really hoping your life isn't so bad that you fail to accomplish the simplest of tasks   in a reasonable manner, or don't look so incompetent and flustered when you do.

“Hearts are breakable," Isabelle said. "And I think even when you heal, you're never what you were before.” -Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels "How true is this quote? Do you think total healing isn’t possible once your heart is broken?"

Huh...ya know, all this time I just thought we all assumed we knew once we got our heart broken, sure it'd heal and all, but nope nope nope, there's no goin' back to who we were before. You can't unring a bell, or put the toothpaste back in the tube, or any other metaphor for attempting to glue back together a shattered glass after you dropped it on the floor and expect to drink out of it without swallowing some shards and dribbling the cheap Merlot you bought to drown your sorrows all over your clumsy stupid hand.

As a veteran of several broken hearts, I can assure you once and for fucking all that this Cassandra person is 1000% accurate. It's basically that "Butterfly Effect" that you've heard mentioned before, and this is for the people in the back who are looking at each other like "Huh, Butterfly Effect? Whaaaat?!": Basically, if a butterfly lands on an elephant's nose in Africa and it sits there for five seconds instead of eight, the elephant gets angry and chases off the prowling lion. The lion runs into a less-wooded area, where it gets shot by Donald Trump Jr. and his rich scumbag trophy hunter buddies. You hear this on the news in the US, causing you to pause an extra two minutes in front of the tv before heading out to the bar to get shitfaced with your homies, and the news horrifies you and makes your disdain for humanity as a whole that much darker and deeper...and that two minutes spares you of the car that was gonna hit you once you stepped off the curb because of the driver's recklessness. When you arrive at the bar you're sullen and chicks dig sullen guys until they've decided three minutes later your sullen, shitty attitude is no longer attractive, and you end up dying alone just like all the houseplants you've forgotten to water but are too lazy to get rid of.

See? Everything counts, one way or another. You can't undo all the memories you've experienced with a person. You can throw out belongings and burn pictures and scratch over their phone numbers in barroom bathroom stalls, but the imprints etched on your soul are there forever to some (often varying) degree. Like infomercials in the previous segment, they're there and you can't really do much about 'em; it's up to you how much of you you're willing to indulge them with.

         

"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's;
Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein.
Aa-hooo! Werewolves of London!
Aa-hooo!"
"Werewolves Of London" -Warren Zevon  

"It's up to you to tell the rest of the story; I can't wait to read what happens next."

First, let's refresh ourselves:

Werewolves are shady, in my opinion. Possibly the shadiest of all the stereotypical Halloween-type creatures (and save your Teen Wolf   nostalgia nonsense for someone who isn't grounded in reality ); they'll talk a good game while they're pickin' your pockets, I'll bet. They're probably ridden with STDs and have banged all your friends except the one who really wants to hook up with one, and all your friends have warned you about them but you don't listen because you're stupid and have worked the blatant art of making mistakes into your daily lifestyle to the point where you can no longer function unless you're wondering how it is you constantly fuck everything up like a mayor. So when he (and why are werewolves always a he? Someone needs to research this and/or introduce some lady werewolves into modern-day folklore, because men deserve having their hearts ripped to shreds by them too) offers to meet you at a nice-but-not-too-nice Chinese restaurant, your dumb ass is literally trippin' over your trimmed-up landing strip of pubes to say "Yes, of course, and have all my half-werewolf babies, you sexy-ass sumbitch!"

And that's when it starts. He *finger-quotes* forgot his wallet, so you have to pay for dinner and drinks (and yo, him ordering piña coladas   shoulda been your first red flag, buuuuut...). By then your defenses are down, and you become *that couple* makin' out at the bar at 9:30pm on a Tuesday like silly horned-up teenagers. When it comes time to get out of there because his instincts are kickin' in and your hormones are a 13 on a scale of 1 to 10, he suggests your place because he *again, finger quotes* hasn't had time to properly clean up and didn't expect a lady to be comin' over, and you gummily accept his self-imposed invite like a complete, utter dolt. There's nothing more pathetic than a lovestruck fool who's too blind to the consequences of their actions.

You get back to your crib and you're goin' at it as soon as the door clicks shut behind you. Everything feels soooo...familiar. The scents, the breathy grunts and sighs, the way everything he whisper-says sounds like a sneer, the placement of all the silver bullet scars from the many attempts on his life...but you don't care. Craven you needs the comfort of a familiar touch. And it's been too long.

The next morning you wake up and before you can even open your eyes, the last evening blurs through your mind as you attempt to piece it together from fragments while your head pounds and your breath feels like sand going down your throat and into your lungs. The last remnants of familiarity with this creature expose themselves with each choked-out snore. You attempt to gather yourself mentally as he rolls over, and when his eyes slowly open all you can say is "Good morning, sweetie...would you like some coffee?"

"Sure," he says, "and bring me the newspaper. I need to call and cancel that personal ad I took out for you to meet me at the Chinese place, like in that 'Piña Colada' song...what a dumb song! Catchy though; I can never get it out of my head. And while you're up..."

The toilet flushes and you realize why it is you want him out of your life so much. "And while you're up, you need to clean all your god damn hair out of the drain! Every friggin' day, I swear-" but you're interrupted by a blast and a shattering of glass, followed by a large thud. "They finally got him," you think to yourself, and exhale a little, "and it's about damn time. For all the money I spend on silver bullets and snipers, he shoulda been dead 13 times over already."

But as you walk in on a dying werewolf, you can't keep your heart from sinking into your stomach. For all his faults and flaws (and there are too fucking many to list in this blog entry, which is long enough as it is already), you loved him. You really, really loved that hairy bastard.

And then like the soulless twat you are, you shrug and think, "Eh, it's October...there are plenty of other werewolves out there lookin' for this hot piece of ass!". After smacking yourself on the rear end for effect and reminding yourself you still got it, you decide this weekend will include a "girls night" so you can find his replacement.

I'm posting this mainly for Lyn's a sly fox because she runs "Love Shouldn't Hurt" , which is an amazing group dedicated to giving a voice to victims of all types of abuse...I've read a couple articles already about Rupi Kaur, who's basically an Instagram poet (speaking of which...I've just joined that place recently for no good reason and I don't understand it or me, but if you wanna follow me they call me Fivesixer   over there too), and she's recently published a book   of her meme-poems. Personally, some of them are pretty basic and aren't great, but there's definitely a market for them out there...and as someone who has written about pain and abuse   she has opened up a lot of people to her work by exposing it in non-traditional means first (obviously through social media and stuff). So Lyn (and anyone else reading this), check her out if you haven't already, because you might find her interesting.

And finally, it's funny how earlier in this entry we discussed the As Seen On TV aspect of blog promotion...I was going through my Pocket app looking for cool stuff and I recently saved this Mental Floss article   about the ShamWow guy, Vince ( more proof I need to stay off the internet- period- after I've taken my late-night "Get Yo Ass To Sleep" meds). He...is not a good person, actually, but that's another story for another time (or a previous time, as I'm almost 94% sure I've written about him before, but I'm too lazy to look up the entry right now ). But M_F can always be counted on for useless tidbits of info like that...that's what I'm really tryin' to say .

Wow, soooo...this entry got a little crazy today. #SorryNotSorry y'all...you'll have that, minus a money-back guarantee. But thanks for playin' and be sure to tell all your friends. Hope you enjoyed this as much as I'm wondering if I should've bothered. Peace, I saw Lon Chaney, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!