Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: An All-Book Breakup 🌭

These two books discuss love. I recommend avoiding love.

Love is for gamblers, and thus easy to find on cruise ships. You might meet your spiritual match. You also might lose your time, dog, and smile. And that’s if you’re on the side with serial killers. Serial kill-ees risk everything.

If you insist on trying, learn to read odds. The one that got away? A smart bet, and rare. Bad bets, however, are abundant. Otherwise the casino wouldn’t exist. You’re much more likely to meet someone with a secret family than a sense of humor. Because despite the slogan, investors don’t like apps designed to be deleted. That’s like a landmine designed to spare civilians.

There’s one bad bet every sane adult should avoid: writers. Drug dealers can be nice. Murderers can be reformed. Dictators can treat you like royalty. Just don’t date writers.

Today’s books explain why. Chad Kultgen and Hilary Winston wrote about each other, and then published it worldwide. Every English department mixer for the rest of history is now a War Games scenario. We’re used to hacks and lunatics here, but that’s not today’s main event. It’s two creatives ensuring neither can walk in sunshine with normals again.

We’ll start with the novelist Chad Kultgen. It’s fitting that his debut book, The Average American Male, is mostly known for its commercial. Here’s CNBC talking about it while Iraq burns:

Okay, she’s actually saying “It’s the book everyone is talking about, whether you’re the average American male or not. And it has spurred viral marketing genius.” But I’m an adjunct writing professor. I deal in subtext and food stamps.

They used a cash-register sound effect, by the way. TV journalism can be profitable or dignified, but never both.

That said, I like money. Let’s learn how to make money. One kaching!-worthy ad for The Average American Male features a restaurant date. The following captions are real:

Yes! Stop resurrecting Triassic sound effects and tell me how to make money! I’m selling 300 page bricks in a 280-character world.

Ah. The secret to making money is trolling. Specifically, Troll Strategy 17: antagonize half of the culture war, harvest ire, and sell to the other half. This works for anything. You could bottle the tears of caged children, call it “White Power Juice,” and sell it at CPAC.

It’s standard Barstool fare now. But Kultgen deserves some credit for acting out in 2007. Back then, people posted like there were consequences.

Like many ads, this spot’s provocative by design. Unlike many ads, it reflects the product. Chad writes in a bored, bitter, and horny stream of consciousness. “What guys are really thinking,” to quote the book jacket. Which made me expect sex, food, and constant awareness of death. Instead, just sex.

Before I quote it, a disclaimer for 2022. I did not write this book. I did not edit this book. I did not roll the author on his side after a long night of drinking Jagermeister alone. If I wrote this book, it would be about robots objectifying wizards. Cool? Cool. Here’s a chapter opening:

Classy.

To the young/elderly/mentally well: my age bracket called this style “fratire.” That’s a portmanteau between “fraternity” and “tire fire.” Something that sounds cool to step into, but you immediately regret.

I’m surprised mainstream fratire died out. The audience still exists, based on the fact that Sam Hyde can afford food. And the culture war lives on, based on the fact that Sam Hyde can afford food. You could pitch this at Warner today, get two seasons of breathless Vulture headlines, and retire. I guess Elliot Rodgers took the fun out of counting money.

Two plot threads unfold, but I only care about one. The narrator’s zombie relationship with his girlfriend, Casey. Casey’s a loose collection of coastal stereotypes, sprinkled with insecurity. I’ve slapped Chad around a bit so far, so I’ll sample some stronger prose:

The sex politics are middle school, but he has a point about improv. While improv comedy is less disturbing than killing cats, it’s equally attractive. And stealing jokes is worse. At least rogue taxidermists produce original flesh dolls.

The subsequent story involves cheating on Casey, dumping Casey, and replacing her with a younger Casey. Imagine Eric Cartman as Don Juan and you have the gist.

Eventually, Chad’s narrator dumps Casey in front of her parents. The scene elegantly demonstrates the merits of dueling:

Inventive. I think that’s why this book outlived its genre. Most Tucker Max types tried to pass off this fantasy as reality. Chad was smart enough to call it fiction.

Lest we correctly judge Chad for incorrect reasons, this book came out before prosecutors explained “last minute resistance” to judges from sane eras. His gorilla thoughts are his own, and have a defeated mordancy missing from “Spotting Damaged Prey 201.”

So why’s this matter? Kultgen wanted young men to see themselves in the book. Instead, one young woman did. Namely Hilary Winston, his ex. She took depiction as a vapid sexual cadaver as well as one could, by typing, spell-checking, and trademarking the breakdown.

My cyberstalking says that Hilary Winston’s written for TV since 2003. She’s got diverse credits, from the merchandising vehicle Community to the cult favorite Lego Ninjago Movie. Or maybe it’s the other way around, I did grad school drugs at the time. As Roland Barthes once wrote, drugs are a hell of a cocaine.

She also has this book, called My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me. It’s about her boyfriend writing a book about her.

Enter Player Two. Nonfiction, so no dumping anyone in front of their parents without getting shot.

If Chad’s an explosive striker in the humiliation octagon, Hilary’s a pure wrestler. She takes her time and wears him down. She’ll risk a hit to the chin (identifying as “fat-ass girlfriend”) to get the armbar (incel jokes). She even dedicates much of the book to other romances, which we’re skipping because my target word count was five pages ago.

Her general portrait of Chad is a short, 69-obsessed child. His gaming habit catches strays as well. Note that Chad is “Kyle” the way Hilary was “Casey,” because lawyers save countless careers every day.

I can’t pretend I didn’t immediately identify Star Wars Galaxies. I suspect Chad was “NineInchSaberstaff,” scourge of virtual Dathomir. I assumed my rival merely neglected his education, like myself, rather than his partner. Perhaps that’s why I lost.

One interesting tidbit amid the jabs at hobbies and fetishes: Hilary maintains that Chad has OCD. I have my own diagnosis, but I majored in “liking books” and don’t plan on getting sued this year. In any case, she lists her evidence:

Seems harml—

I have no idea. I’m recovering from Twitter, so every time I guess at mental health a chip inside my spine shocks me unconscious. But the list aims for embarrassment, and succeeds.

Hilary gives space to the good times as well. This tender moment comes between a pregnancy scare and Chad’s inability to say “I love you:”

From here, “The Kyle & Hilary Show” sounds like her friends wanted Tony Jaa to kick them into heaven. But she co-wrote For a Few Paintballs More, so benefit of the doubt. Besides, I imagine true balance between his blowjob jokes and her navel-gazing is comedy zen.

Her friends do want Chad to get Jaa’d. They gently suggest that marrying a man with fourteen different insults for her ass would have gone poorly. But with their funny and his ticket to Tatooine or something like that, she felt unstoppable. And if we understood love, we’d replace Bumble with joy.

They meet one last time at the original Olive Garden. I’m pretty sure every joke I’m considering here is the true form of reverse racism. I’ve had some rough breakups, but I never dumped anyone at a Golden Krust. Then Hilary ends her book with emotional growth. This, like love, is a mistake.

This is my Super Bowl XXV. Football’s not my sport: I specifically polled ten fans and two search engines about the worst late-game screwups. My brother said XXV, and to stop calling before dawn.

Sure it’s fine writing. But the grudge match comes first. Never show mercy a second before the bell. That leads to a starring role in Surprise Knockout Reactions 14. Who knows what slander Chad is cooking up while–

Weak.

A natural question: who won? As a black MFA survivor, I’m a federally licensed diss track judge. You can see me in most King of the Dot videos, scoring slurs on a clipboard. I sat behind Jeff Ross on Roast Battle, noting the best punchlines and potential alibis. I shouted “he’s choking” in 8 Mile.

Consider it official when I say that Chad Kultgen loses for quitting in the first round. The riposte is harder than the opening attack, and skipping it is as good as rolling on your back, neck exposed, and tweeting “I’m sorry you were offended.”

This should be his greatest shame. Not Hilary’s book. Not his 8chan Bukowski prose. Not trading love for a dead MMO. The fact that he didn’t publish My Girlfriend Wrote a Book About Me Writing a Book About Her.

In fact, open invitation to everyone I’ve dated: let’s embarrass each other. We could retire off of this. Imagine writing My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me Writing A Book About Him Writing a Book About Me Writing A Book About Him Writing a Book About Me. Then imagine the movie deal.

After reading both books, let me guarantee: you can write one in a week. In fact, I’ll write both sides. Just let me put your name on a few bestsellers.

What do you say, Jess? Kyung? XxSniperGurl_GanjaSquad? Let me make up for all the forgotten birthdays and names with cash. I’ll work with any of you, even [Name Removed By Request of Blexit Foundation Legal Team].

There are lessons here about conflict resolution, the nascent antifeminist backlash, and moving on. Forget them. Just remember to never date writers. If you can’t absorb that simple lesson, let’s grab lunch at La Fontaine Duchamp this Saturday. Ignore the laptop, I’m just taking some notes.

Dennard Dayle wrote the book Everything Abridged and some New Yorker stuff but really just hopes you like Everything Abridged. His exes selfishly refuse to write about him.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: 101 Things to do During a Dull Sermon

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Bill O’Reilly Comic Book 🌭

In 2007, a comic book company was formed that set out to make something different– comics about whatever the fuck. Bluewater (who later changed their name to StormFront who later learned that was a Nazi name who later changed their name to TidalWave) published adaptations of ancient novels, profiles of celebrities, reimaginings of 80-year-old science fiction movies, and an entire series about politicians and right wing propagandists called ★Political★Power★. Which means they published an illustrated biography of serial sex criminal Bill O’Reilly.

You’re probably thinking, “A comic book about the cranky guy known for saying racist things from behind a desk and nothing else? How does it open? With him saying cranky, racist things from behind a desk?” W-whoa. That’s exactly how it starts.

This non-fiction tale of heroism opens with the main protagonist screaming at Geraldo Rivera about how America needs to deport a specific drunk Mexican. Geraldo tries to explain to our hero how exile is not how you punish a misdemeanor, but Bill won’t listen. Geraldo tries to ask why Bill is so mad about this guy being Mexican, but Bill won’t listen.

It’s a good example of how subtle modern racism can be. When our grandparents were on the lookout for bigotry, they could simply ask, “I saw the WHITES ONLY sign on your STRAIGHTS ONLY asbestos store… is there any wiggle room there? Because I’m almost positive one of my kids is half Italian.” Today you need to pay closer attention. No one comes right out and says “I’m racist” anymore. They might do something more understated like go on TV and tell a Latino man, “I don’t care what the rules say. Those laws are for white people and Mexicans should go back where they belong.” I mean, it’s sneaky. You have to really be watching for it.

By the way, the first seven pages are like this. Seven pages of Bill O’Reilly arguing with guests on his TV show, getting most of the details wrong, but being noisier. Here’s his interview with Barney Frank where after several minutes of screaming they disagree to disagree about which word they’re fighting about:

Look, adaptation is a difficult skill. Taking something from one media and translating it to another requires a deep understanding of both. And say what you will about this being a dumb idea from the very concept, as an adaptation, it’s maybe not possible to fuck up more than this. These people were turning a cable news show into a comic and their idea was “Maybe a verbatim transcript of an argument furiously scribbled into dozens of word bubbles? Over a picture of them sitting?” It fucking sucks. I dare anyone to read this panel of Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Al Sharpton:

As the only person who will ever live to read that, let me sum it up. Some study came out about fourth graders in Sudan being bad at reading, and Bill O’Reilly blamed Al Sharpton because he’s also black. Well, not “blamed” exactly. Bill was just pointing out how he’s a hypocrite for protesting some black issues while ignoring what’s going on in Sudanese grade schools. Again, it’s “racist,” but only after it’s “stupid,” “insane,” and “belligerent.” The point is, Bill O’Reilly thinks he’s proven he cares more about Sudanese kids than Al Sharpton and he’ll never listen to how he’s wrong, which means blacks shouldn’t be allowed to protest, so who’s the real racist now?

It’s a terrible argument, made even worse when you consider it was chosen as one of his greatest hits for this biography. How empty and meaningless has this guy’s career been that they included the time he screamed at Al Sharpton to ignore Burger King’s civil rights violations because of African elementary teachers? So, yeah, okay, it’s the bigoted trolling of a delusional idiot, but would a delusional idiot also add this detail to the story?

Al Sharpton secretly, after the cameras were off, privately admitted Bill O’Reilly was right.

But so far the comic has only shown us the Bill O’Reilly we knew from TV. He’s a bad listener. A bully. An idiot. A total asshole. A full-blown racist. Smugly confident he’s not any of those things. I was starting to suspect this was a sarcastic hit piece so I looked up the author, Jerome Maida.

Jerome isn’t a prolific comics writer and these batshit ★Political★Power★ books seem to make up most of his work. He focuses mainly on right wing nutbags like Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and Donald Trump, so it’s safe to say these aren’t sarcastic. Jerome Maida was just the only freelance writer who said yes to the question, “Are you available for a 3 hour contract adapting white nationalism for kids?”

So he’s a bit of a Nazi apologist for money, but Jerome’s real passion is martial arts.

Specifically, Jerome is passionate about The Martial Arts Kid, a 2015 film starring Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Cynthia Rothrock. It very much sounds like a fake movie where a caterer was murdered on an episode of CSI, but The Martial Arts Kid is real, and all 47 articles Jerome Maida wrote for martialartsentertainment.com are about it. Jerome wrote a feature article on every casting decision, press release, and soundtrack choice. One of them was simply called “The Martial Arts Kid Will Be Great Movie.” I’ve extremely never seen anything like it:

I’ve been on the Internet a long time and I’ve seen a lot of articles built from IMDB searches, but I’ve never seen anyone write forty seven articles based entirely on a single IMDB Full Cast and Crew list. It’s unthinkable. It’s a fake mental disorder you’d make up to explain why the killer targeted The Martial Arts Kid on an episode of CSI. It’s also very distracting from why we’re here– to talk about Bill O’Reilly’s heroic origin story:

Bill had an angry and abusive father, but in a… let me see if I’m understanding this comic’s tone properly… a cute way? “MY FATHER WAS THE KUNG AND I WAS THE FU!” jokes Bill O’Reilly, who I was starting to have more sympathy for until he said that.

Starting from the whimsy of a father beating his son, Bill’s journey starts to get darker. Let me show you one of the pages they chose to represent Bill O’Reilly’s childhood:

It’s relentless images of rage, torment, and fascism coming together to make an angry, bitter, fascist. It’s Bill O’Reilly’s origin story, so I don’t know what else I expected. I guess I only find it interesting because my expectations were met so precisely.

This panel of young Bill having a shitty meal actually helped me understand him. Bill O’Reilly finds this strange pride in his misery. It lets him complain constantly while thinking of himself as a tough guy who never complains because he thinks he’s bragging. For instance, his family rarely went out to restaurants, and when they did, they were awful and had no appetizers. This obviously isn’t interesting enough to tell anyone, much less include in a comic book. Bill tells it because he thinks it taught him the quiet dignity of meatballless spaghetti, but what it really did was teach him to hate decadent spaghetti cowards, humiliating America with every calamari for the table. It’s stupid, right? This is a guy who, multiple times, has dropped millions of dollars trying to jam a thumb up a co-worker’s butt and here he is judging you for wasting $4.99 on jalapeĂąo poppers. Shut the fuck up and suck your sad spaghetti, sex pest.

As if you needed to be told this, there are a lot of panels of young Bill O’Reilly alone and angry.

For pages and pages we see how sad, bitter, antisocial, and constantly violent Bill was, but we also learn how self-reflective he can be. For instance, the angry, racist young dick was kicked off his little league team because the coach didn’t like him “for reasons unknown to Bill to this day.” What a mystery! We may never know why this likable team player spent another baseball season alone and angry.

Bill’s childhood story continues through more random images of trauma and fascism…

I didn’t doctor that. This page of Bill O’Reilly’s origin story really does go from Mussolini to child abuse to vandalism to snowballs to the time Bill yawned in church. In storytelling, this is what’s known as raising the stakes.

Bill’s life story just keeps fucking going like this. Like all true patriots, he attacked a kid for trying too hard in school, blew up his neighbor’s house, assaulted a kid with a firearm, and even gave his father a dirty look. And maybe it’s because Bill O’Reilly is a known liar, but it’s hard to believe a lot of these things happened when they’re categorized together like this. No one tells a story like “I once threw a bomb at my neighbor” and then adds “I didn’t give a shit– I’d yawn in church, shoot people, look my dad in the eyes! By the way, my dad was a Nazi who punched my arm and I have a little joke about it: he was the kung and I was the fu. Do you get it? Because I don’t! I say it a lot, but is it a pun? Maybe some kind of unformed racism? This is how you put together a biography, right?”

Anyway, here’s a probably mostly fake story about the time young Bill O’Reilly tormented a kid so much the boy’s father chased Bill into his own house. Right in front of Bill’s dad.

I bet you know what happened next! Bill O’Reilly’s father, the abusive Mussolini of Hitlers who never bought appetizers… calmed the man down! Asked him to leave! Told Bill he needs to stop being a bully! Wait, something doesn’t– holy shit, wait, is the dad not the villain? Ohmygod, is Bill O’Reilly the bad guy in this Bill O’Reilly comic?

The next story is about Bill assaulting yet another kid.

Bill O’Reilly famously called his show the “No Spin Zone,” so I think he’ll appreciate how I’m not spinning this story. Some guy said, “NICE JACKET, BILL!” and then didn’t finish his next sentence before Bill punched him in the face. This is a poorly made book by a disinterested karate master, but his decision to give young Bill the same face, shirt, and haircut as his father is a pretty good way to artistically represent a cycle of abuse. It was definitely an accident, but maybe Jerome Maida is also starting to figure out Bill O’Reilly is the villain.

The next story is one of betrayal.

Bill couldn’t find a date to a high school dance, so he asked some guy to go with him “so the girls would think he’s cool.” The guy said no, but then that “so-called friend” went to the dance anyway. Doing “the twist” like a madman! How could this so-called friend do this!? It’s a real question! Before you read the next panel, guess! Guess why this so-called friend told Bill O’Reilly he wasn’t going to the dance!

You were right! They weren’t friends and he didn’t want Bill around because he didn’t like him and nobody else liked him. Honestly, if this happened to me I wouldn’t tell anyone about it, much less my biographer. How empty is this fucking piece of shit’s life that we’re 23 pages into his story and he’s still sharing every last teenage drama? These sound like the stories of a loser who peaked in high school after you take out all the sports, academics, popularity, drugs, and girls. You’d think a wealthy TV personality who has publicly spent $45 million in sexual harassment payouts would have led a more interesting life than this.

As if you needed to be told this, Bill O’Reilly had trouble getting laid. But actually? A-actually, he’s glad! Yeah, he is glad he had no “moves” and waited until he was more mature to have sex. But enough about Bill being a violent, lonely incel and how honorable that is when you think about it. Let’s move on to the origin story of Bill’s racism.

As if you needed to be told this, content warning: Bill O’Reilly’s comic about himself from 2010 has several hard-r n-words.

Growing up around only whites, Bill didn’t really have a chance to be racist. In fact, since he attacked, shot, and tried to explode many of those whites, he’s statistically less racist than Liberty Medal-winner, Muhammed Ali, who punched a much higher percentage of black m– hold on. I went into that sentence sarcastically, but I think I accidentally wrote a real Bill O’Reilly argument? Do I now “get” Bill O’Reilly?

Bill knew of blacks from his television and was such a champion of civil rights he liked Willie Mays even more than “the white New York Yankees superstar” Mickey Mantle. Bill loved Willie Mays so much he was known around his all-white town as the non-racist, and out of respect for Bill’s famous “No Spin Zone,” I won’t try to spin this story. When the local children accused him of liking black people, Bill O’Reilly would punch them in the goddamn face. How could that be bad, everyone? Why, it’d be almost vulgar to call that racist.

Please remember, this story was proudly told by Bill and included in his biography to demonstrate his dislike of bigotry. And like all colorblind champions of equality, he includes an exact headcount of all the blacks in his stories:

I’m not leaving anything out of this one. This is the whole Bill O’Reilly adventure. He once met four black guys and got to know half of them. If a person had weird issues with skin color would they waste 5% of their biography on that story? Ridiculous. So this person who saw all people as equals but still kept careful track of how many times he met blacks and how many there were on each occasion, tells the story of the second time he encountered non-whites:

The second “experience with race” Bill had was when he met Nate, who didn’t like Bill as much as two of the four first blacks he met (who were funny guys if you can believe it).

Nate was right to hate Bill, who sat next to Nate as part of an undercover sting operation to expose “reverse racism.” See, Bill “heard a rumor” there was a teacher who gave a B+ to every black student which means someone on campus, for some reason, was keeping track of the black people and their suspiciously white grades. I have a suspect, but for now let’s assume it was not angry racist loner Bill O’Reilly, but one of his many friends who uncovered this suspiciously racist data. “Please look into this, bitter liar who tried to grope my roommate! You’re the only one I can trust with my shameful secret prejudice!” they probably said.

So anyway, the bad races were getting B+s in a compulsory course, and College Bill was on the case!

Sure enough, the “sensitive” teacher gave Nate a B! Oh, a B? The “rumors” said he was supposed to get a B+, so never mind. I guess the “rumors” were wrong. You know what, though? Maybe Bill should write a column for the school newspaper about how black people don’t deserve Bs even without the plusses. It’s what any non-racist would do.

Later, off the record, Nate sort of admitted he didn’t enjoy the “jive-ass” class. Busted! From his own account, Bill was more right about race than one of the races again! Ever the journalist and storyteller, Bill kept track of Nate after he dropped out of school and yadayada he EVENTUALLY MURDERED A POLICEMAN.

Over the course of a person’s life, there should be at least a few incidents where, especially with this level of embellishment, they were a hero. Like maybe you only called in a noise complaint when your neighbors started arguing, but if you tell that story right, the cops got there just in time to stop a murder. My point is, Bill has been alive more than two decades at this point and -in his own opinion- the closest thing he’s come to heroism is working to ensure one black guy couldn’t get an education. And when offered the opportunity to make up any details he wanted, he said, “That guy I harassed out of school, I can’t remember what color he was, he went on to… I don’t know… kill a cop, probably? All I know are the facts: twenty percent of blacks go on to murder policemen. Forty percent are funny guys, though.”

After a successful(?) college career, Bill O’Reilly got a job as a teacher.

Once the bitter, stupid asshole arrived, there was an outbreak of graffiti. It wasn’t about Bill, though! It was about a whore named Susan and Mike O. who… what did those rascals say about their fellow teen, Mike O.? Oh, right, he “takes it in the keister.” What I’m saying is the sudden graffiti did not focus on the smug, unloved bigot who has ruined every life he’s touched since he was born.

So what did Bill do? He did what any obvious sex expert would do: he told them there are studies proving people who write graffiti can’t fuck.

“What a genius you are for making up those sociological studies linking graffiti to sexual confusion!” marveled the students and teachers.

“I didn’t fucking make them up!” said the man who made them up to characters he made up.

In many ways it’s the perfect story to end on. It’s dumb, it didn’t happen, and it wouldn’t happen, but it shows how Bill O’Reilly’s mind works. He starts off by making up a story where he solves a complicated issue with his brand of no-nonsense verbal abuse. He then creates straw men who adore him and praise his craftiness, but then he gets mad at them because he’s not playing some game! It’s basic, no-frills, white wisdom! Later, all of the vandals would go on to be immature about sex and murder a policeman.

And that’s the tale of Bill O’Reilly! He attacked many children, has a lot of holes in his stories, wasn’t good at anything, met five blacks, got most of one of them kicked out of college, and told some kids they can’t fuck. And nothing could have trained him better for a life of right wing media. The comic wraps up with a few panels on unrelated tragedy, unexplained deaths, and two soldiers getting torn apart by bullets in a war Bill did not attend? I don’t know why.

After waiting until the last page of his biography and their deaths to describe his five closest loved ones, Bill leaves us with one last thought: 

“I was a fucking dick, I did some great racism and punching, my only friends were lost in Vietnam or ‘found dead from some rare illness,’ and I’ll die alone. Bye!” – Bill O’Reilly

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpottyReception, who is going to great movie the The Martial Arts Kid!

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: CAKE! SLAP!

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Upsetting Day: Insurrection! 🌭

What if a race war could be fun?

Wait! I don’t mean the real, sad one with a two century winning streak. This is a purely fictional black uprising through a Robert Ludlum filter. The book Insurrection! is the most fun you’ll have with white anxiety short of dating in Florida. 

Insurrection! is a novel (or novella, if you have grad school debt) about the black conspiracy to take over the country. Or at least I wish it was. It’s really about taking over three states, reflecting the tyranny of low expectations. If the white insurrection can breach Congress, I’d like the black one to at least shoot for the Supreme Court. We’ve feuded with the bench since 1857.

Before I dive in, I’ll confront two fair concerns. First, I’m not a white nationalist. I applied for a few groups, but they wanted someone “less simian.” I’m also not a hotep, since I have trouble believing black people created the Parthenon, Shaolin Temples, and Good Will Hunting. I simply love human madness and stupidity, two forces stronger in Insurrection! than man’s inhumanity to nearly identical man.

Author Dan Brennan starts things off slowly, with the secret cabal ruling Black America. All of it. The masterminds behind those damn marches interrupting Bewitched reruns have a simple plan:

I said simple, not sane. They’re seizing control of Minnesota by attacking a country club. If this sounds like Hideo Kojima rebooting The Boondocks, then your name is Dennard Dayle and you’re writing this article. Hi Dennard! You’ll find love eventually.

Maybe that’s not fair. Let’s see how Insurrection! summarizes its own plot.

Finally. A lifetime of Jean-Claude Van Damme, tabloids, and Greek incest plays trained me for this. The ultimate exploitation story. I’ve waited for an action thriller about Tucker Carlson’s subconscious since my thesis advisor asked if I was there to clean her office.

Sadly, we can’t start at the Country Club Kumite. Half the book follows a skirmish between the white nationalist “Minutemen” and the “black military underground.” The intent’s something along the lines of “extremists on both sides ruined the racial harmony America enjoyed before 1970.” Judge that for yourself. The black team gives us gems like Corp. Gasson:

Keep in mind: Gasson’s a willing front-line recruit in the war foretold by Anne Coulter. And this is how we meet him. His main motivation for taking up arms against the American Empire less than two years after King’s death is ass. He’s pro “big bottoms” and anti “bony bottoms.” You may be smarter than Corp. Gasson. You’ll definitely live longer (spoilers). But you’ll never have a more committed Hinge answer to “What are you looking for?” Gasson has transcended mortal stereotype and become the avatar of ass men.

Gasson’s teammates are more focused. Take Larry Johnson:

A little less fun than the ultimate ass man. I’ll give Dan Brennan points for efficiency. This character’s smoothly tagged with “likes books” and “KILLWHITEY.EXE.” Killbot Larry represents Brennan’s general thesis on humanity: we’re more than our race. We’re our race and a hobby.

It’d be tough to relate to this guy’s brother, wouldn’t it? Especially if he had the same bias, with poetry swapped for tennis? Keep that in mind later.

On the other team, enjoy the first conversation between white characters:

Here, we have a perfect snapshot of how dullards across the political spectrum imagine racism: robots waking up every morning, throwing the window open, and singing “What a Fine Day for Lynching.” Not normals like you and I, writing timely thrillers. It’s also worth noting they’re talking about Larry/the black Dylan Kleibold, so Brennan felt compelled to make them at least a little right.

The weirdest thing in this book? There’s a chapter that’s good. Not irony-good. Not so-bad-it’s good. Straightforward, semi-literary, junior year writer’s workshop good. The most schizophrenic move a book like this can make.

First, meet Smoke Johnson (I know), black tennis player and asshole.

He’s also KillBot Larry’s brother, implying Larry somehow isn’t a Terminator sent after Kid Rock. Smoke is less racist, e.g. the level of racist found outside of hate crime sentencing hearings. He’s got a game against Bob Volkund, white tennis player and double asshole.

Civility declines. Smoke takes out a few dozen pages of “black in 1970” on Bob’s life, through an exhibition game in a zero-contact sport. It comes off as cooler than all the conspiracy word salad that precedes and follows it.

The hospital treatment, perfectly suited for the amount of sunlight, worked:

I don’t know what this chapter’s doing in this book. It’s off-tone, off-topic, and wholly lacking in cougar fights. My operating theory: the Ghost of Writers Future visited Dan Brennan. It left a cryptic message in graveyard dust:

“Fifty years from now, a Jamaican—No, that is not in Africa—a Jamaican-American nerd will find your book. If you want the future to know you could put two words together, add something of substance. After that, find and slay Edward Zuckerberg. His spawn kills hope. In fact, forget the book.”

The country club also features this veteran, who keeps a vigilant eye open for unannounced jazz-Americans:

I can relate. This is how I felt when I spotted Vlad Tepes, immortal lord of Dracula’s Castle in my neighborhood. Something unnatural was afoot, and a whip was the answer.

Col. Davidson assumes the first black guy he sees in his country club is the angel of death. In every book printed after Insurrection!, this would spark a ponderous speech about tolerance and therapy. Here? I left out Larry’s name. Col. Davidson is totally right. He’s like racist Batman. If you thought Batman is racist Batman, please find a second thought and/or brain cell. Your friends hate you, either quietly or loudly after you leave the room. You are the Chicken Little of prejudice. The author of this racist fever dream from 1970 has a better grasp of literature, race relations, and silence than you.

Anyway, Insurrection!

The glue for this lunacy? The author actually knows things about guns, knives, and tennis. Not so much people. The fight between the black Illuminati and klan benchwarmers unfolds with Tom Clancy efficiency, and none of his awareness of how other people think. And yes, I mean by Tom Clancy standards. 

In this plot thread, Brennan also takes the time to caricature indigenous people. The character’s a bit like Tonto, plus forced labor, minus the indignity of Johnny Depp.

If it helps, Smith doesn’t have a good time. Despite his confidence in John Wayne’s Guide to Native American Magic, he gets captured. Earning a role in the book’s best action set piece.

Think of the long, fun history of black guys captured by patriotic vigilantes. Then imagine the race war’s taken a literal turn. What happens to a black soldier captured by the klan’s sister school? Place your bets. Options include “megalynching,” “a week in the Wisconsin court system,” and “forced marriage to a lesser Jenner.”

Did you guess “arena cougar knife-fight?” No. No you didn’t. History’s cruelest slave-owners only got as creative as pitting slaves against each other. Only the mad genius Dan Brennan thought to bring back the coliseum.

Sidebar: while writing the above, I googled “Did mandingos fight cougars?” The results weren’t informative.

Writer’s rooms around the country have an adage. “How do we get paid like the pretty people? Why do cameras turn away from our blighted, twisted forms?” After the wailing dies down, they also say “Always come through on genre.” It’s important to fulfill the promise the audience sat down for. Insurrection! does this with verve, dedicating thirty unforgettable pages to the military siege of a country club.

I’d like to call for unity. Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you think about crosses and kerosene, you should be laughing. This is a cartoon. A mescaline-fueled one from the 70’s alt comics scene, but a hilarious cartoon nonetheless. The image of the mega-Panthers calling in artillery strikes on Norman Rockwell families is hilarious. At this moment, I’m less of a commentator and more of a medium.

The finely-trimmed hedges burn. To what end? Build-up for the best threat in fiction. The black military underground sends a national ransom note to the leader of an atomic superpower. One with nukes, and a button that shoots nukes at the nukeless. Nuclear bombs, nuclear rockets, and for some benighted reason nuclear landmines. And yet:

That’s 1970s money, when one million dollars made you a baron. And let’s be clear: the White House would firebomb every golf cart in the nation before giving up half a Virgin Island. The president responds the way 45 out of 46 commanders-in-chief would: resegregating the country and shooting everyone in decent shoes.

In comedy, some words are crutches. Overusing them can lead to people misinterpreting you. This, in turn, leads to fleeing Comedy Central and agreeing with Joe Rogan about who is and isn’t human. I’m going to risk it here, because I can’t, in good conscience, refer to this scheme and its outcome as anything but the niggapocalypse.

Anyway, I hope you got something from this. Sleep well, knowing there’s no plot against your declining empire. I’m late for the meeting.

Dennard Dayle is the author of Everything Abridged and can be seen in The New Yorker, Clarkesworld, and never conspiring against country clubs.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Eddie Vedder Margarita 🌭

I guess we have to talk about this.

Sometimes you build up an image of a celebrity in your mind and then, in a single moment of lost control, they slap it to pieces. Since celebrity worship is literally the modern American religion (and don’t even bother arguing with me on that), a moment like this can be felt by the public as actual trauma. But, a little time has passed now, so I feel like this is a good opportunity to try to process it. Let’s watch the clip, walk through it moment by moment, and try to understand.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, I’m obviously talking about this infamous incident in which rock legend Eddie Vedder drunkenly makes the worst margarita of all time. WARNING: If you’ve never seen this video, it takes an abrupt, upsetting twist near the end.

Before we continue, Jason’s new book is up for pre-order on Amazon, B&N and Bookshop! Yes, this is the latest from the New York Times bestselling John Dies at the End franchise! Holy shit! Here’s the cover, only real small!

The clip is from a lockdown-era Zoom gathering, a livestreamed substitute for the canceled Ohana Music Festival in September of 2020. Eddie hosted it from his kitchen (or maybe it’s just the wet bar in his music room?) and immediately it’s clear that what Eddie is about to make is by no means his first drink of the day.

“In honor of my favorite group…” he slurs before pausing, smiling and briefly forgetting where he is, “well, one of them, but from Seattle for sure, my favorite group Mudhoney, this is gonna be my last margarita for the summer.” A bold proclamation to make on September 24, Eddie!

Into a plastic cup of ice he pours all of the tequila that remains in one bottle, finds another bottle that he believes also has some tequila in it and pours all that in, then finds a third bottle and says, “A little bit of this, whatever the fuck that is.” Finally, he grabs a bottle of Pineapple juice and says, “A little bit of this, to sweeten it up a bit” and dumps in about two cups’ worth. He drunkenly sings, “Suck… you dry…” as he grinds it all up in his Magic Bullet blender, then takes a sip directly from the blender cup:

“Whew! Jesus…” he exclaims. “It needs a little lime and I just went all through the place to find a lime and I don’t have any limes.” While saying this, he glances around as if he did, in fact, search his entire home for a lime, because he exists in a space in which no lime’s discovery, regardless of location, can ever be considered a surprise. He takes another drink and, in what I believe should be featured in future textbooks as an example of drunk logic, shakes his head and says, “It needs somethin’ green.” He hunts around and finds the only thing green in his Margarita Room: 

A fucking jar of pickles.

Pleased with his good fortune, he enthusiastically slaps one down on the counter, looks around for something to cut it with, reaches down…

…and, without hesitation, confusion or comment, grabs a full-size ax: 

Rock legend Eddie Vedder then proceeds to chop up the pickle with his ax in a way that suggests he has done it many times, then plops the entire chopped-up pickle into his margarita. He takes a drink, sounds like he is crunching one of the pickle chunks, and says, “It ain’t that bad!” before ending the segment by holding up the cup, saying, “Here’s to Mudhoney!” a band which, based on the context, he apparently hates.

Now, readers under a certain age might be a little confused. “From what I gather, this ‘Eddie Vedder’ gentleman appears to be a cross between Jimmy Buffett, The Dude from The Big Lebowski and Homer Simpson from the ‘Flaming Moe’ episode…”

“…that is, he just appears to be a chill old guy living his best life, refusing to let the troubles of the world spoil his ‘I define the beach as wherever I happen to be!’ vibe. I kind of wish he was my dad.” Unfortunately, explaining the significance that this video holds for someone like me requires a brief history lesson and a bitter preview of the cold, treacherous wilderness that is middle age. So, buckle the fuck up.

First, note that cultural trailblazers always get watered down with time, and here I mean “watered down” in the sense that the Grand Canyon is the result of granite getting “watered down.” That’s why some of you only know Dr. Dre as the Beats headphones guy instead of a gangsta rap pioneer, and it’s why when Robin Williams passed, the internet was full of, “Oh, no! Not Mrs Doubtfire!” 

In the case of Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, we must briefly rewind to the mid-1980s, when rock music had seized on all of the satirical tropes from This is Spinal Tap and turned them up to 11. Sorry, I need a moment to reflect on the fact that the “This goes to 11!” joke is nearly 40 years old, so for today’s kids it’s the equivalent of the ancient WW2-era Bugs Bunny cartoons I watched as a child in elementary school. Huh.

Anyway, that was the state of rock when I was a kid.

The music was shallow, stupid, sexist and theatrical to the point of absurdity. Then, in the early 90s, a pack of bands from the dreary Northwestern USA blasted onto the scene in a cloud of flannel and unwashed hair. The music was honest, stripped-down and emotionally raw. Mindless lyrics about partying with underage groupies were replaced with heart-wrenching tales of abuse, depression and longing. They were the proverbial ax to the glam metal scene’s pickle.

The most celebrated of these groups was Nirvana but the most commercially successful was Eddie Vedder’s Pearl Jam. Vedder was thus plastered on the cover of TIME magazine as the face of the movement:

“‘All the Rage?’ Is that supposed to be some kind of ironic joke?” says my hypothetical young reader. “The Eddie I just saw looks about as angry as a heavily sedated capybara.” But the younger version of the grinning, middle-aged sentient pickle margarita you saw earlier once hit the scene with a voice that seared itself into the zeigeist like a fucking branding iron, combining thunderous arena rock with lyrics that displayed his innermost trauma like a vivisected animal pinned to a dissecting table. Pearl Jam’s first album arrived when I was 17 and some of these songs hit me so hard that I couldn’t listen to them. I couldn’t handle it. There’s no joke here; I emotionally couldn’t make it through some of these tracks without finding it hard to breathe. 

This man took all of my most closely-guarded self-loathing, dragged it out into the light and set it to music so haunting and piercing that I couldn’t believe it existed. It felt illegal. No artist has touched me that way before or since. “This man,” I said tearfully to my disapproving parents, “wants no part of your artificial, shallow, picklerita world.”

On stage, he glowered and trembled, seemingly struggling to hold his fragile sanity together. In interviews, he brooded and mumbled, hinting at his dark past and how music was his escape. “Some day,” I said in awe, “I hope they make a Batman like this.” 

But there was always this hint of negativity behind the scenes, the other Seattle-area bands frequently making snide little comments to the press. For you see, Eddie Vedder was not from there, he was a surfer kid from San Diego who, some claimed, made the move to the Seattle scene specifically because that’s where the most lucrative deals were getting done. Further, some enjoyed pointing out that the brooding, tortured act vanished the moment he was out of the public eye, Vedder instantly becoming a smiling, life-of-the-party goofball.

And where Kurt Cobain absolutely did come from a troubled background of abuse, addiction and homelessness, it didn’t take long for music journalists to figure out that Eddie Vedder’s similar claims were a real surprise to the people who’d actually known him. Rolling Stone interviewed a bunch of his old classmates who pointed out that young Eddie was maybe the most popular kid in school, a star drama student who took the lead role in every play; a joyful, magnetic personality who was clearly going places. The tortured grimacing you saw on stage, the article implied, was the work of a trained actor playing a character, a career-minded striver who simply figured out where the market was going. If he’d been born ten years earlier, maybe he’d have been up there in teased hair and leather pants, singing about how he wasn’t looking for nothin’ but a good time.

“Back up,” you say, “I feel like a few minutes ago I was watching a dude chop a pickle like a limp log, how the fuck did we wind up here?” 

Good question. To bring the point around, let’s turn our attention to one of the guys you probably thought I was going to talk about at the top of the article: a longtime standup comedian who, to the kids, is probably only known for his animated voice work. I am of course referring to Larry the Cable Guy. It has to be confusing for any youth finding out that the cartoon character Tow Mater…

…is credited to “Larry the Cable Guy”…

…when of course “Larry the Cable Guy” is also not a real person, but a cartoonish redneck character played by comedian Daniel Whitney. In other words, it’s a character played by a character played by a guy from Nebraska who was educated in one of the top private schools in the country. I realize no adult should be surprised to find that’s not his real accent or personality, but it’s still startling to see him do interviews out of character (though not as alarming as hearing Gilbert Gottfried’s real voice). That’s when you realize that, unlike his co-stars, when Whitney leaves the studio and goes out into public, he can’t really be himself — he can only pull back one layer, to yet another character. That has to be weird, right?

But then you think, wait a minute, is it possible that all of his peers are doing the same thing? Is everyone in the public eye just playing a role they’ve carefully developed in front of a mirror, the way Eddie Vedder was accused of consciously practicing his “deep, disturbed artist” mannerisms? I mentioned earlier that some kids today only know Dr. Dre as the Beats headphones guy and/or Eminem’s grouchy mentor, but really old-school fans remember that before he was a gangsta rapper, he was the DJ for the ‘80s electro dance group World Class Wreckin Cru. That’s him, in in the red vinyl suit:

“But Dre really did grow up in South Central LA! Gang violence was so rampant he had to change schools!” Sure, but my point isn’t that these people are all phonies (though you have to wonder where Dre would be today if he’d successfully gotten the job at Northrop Aviation he applied for out of high school); my point is that it has to be a kind of prison, feeling like you have to play a character every moment you’re in public. The lingering suspicion no one loves or cares about you, but only the costume you wear, must be suffocating. Hell, can you even fully drop the act in private?

And even worse, for some reason we have no trouble believing the seemingly happy dude is secretly tortured, but really struggle to grasp that some do the opposite. That’s the paradox of Eddie Vedder; it was liberating for a young me to hear that I didn’t have to perform being happy, that I could talk about my trauma and openly allow it to be a part of who I was. But at some point, it became cool in our culture to be the brooding depressive. As a society, we started to equate sadness with thoughtful intelligence and happiness with blithe ignorance. Now, it’s like you’re not cool unless you have trauma — we demand that even our Superman struggle with PTSD. If a TV character smiles too much, then their happiness needs to either be the result of vacant obliviousness…

…or a mask to disguise a tragic past:

That, for me, is the lesson of the incident the press would come to call Pickleritagate. The initial shock implied that somehow Ten-era Eddie Vedder had tricked us into thinking he was a deep, thoughtful artist instead of the ukulele-plucking Spicoli he was behind closed doors. But why can’t a fun-loving goofball also make profound, emotionally complex art? Why can’t we acknowledge that all of us are playing roles for the public, especially in the social media age? Why can’t we feel it as relief when a superstar drops the mask, even if we don’t like what we see? Especially if we don’t like it? 

After all, aren’t those the moments that put cracks in our collective delusion that these people are somehow larger-than-life demigods instead of regular human beings with extremely specific, lucrative talents? I say the sooner we shatter that delusion, the better. Let’s be very frank here: There’s only one “celebrity” you should be “worshiping” and you won’t find them in Hollywood. 

You know exactly who I’m talking about: It’s this sassy disabled raccoon food critic on TikTok.

The new book is called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe, pre-order on Amazon, B&N or Bookshop and get your future self a surprise gift! It’s the latest from the John Dies at the End universe but you don’t have to have read the previous books or seen the movie to get it, they’re all a bunch of tangled, incredibly upsetting nonsense.