Fox Searchlight Pictures

10. My blood feud with Michael Cera

For years, the very sight of actor Michael Cera has launched me into a blind rage. When I see him in commercials or in magazines, I immediately want to bully him. I’m compelled to give him a wedgie and steal his lunch money. I’m filled with an irrepressible urge to stuff him into a locker. My entire being burns with a desire to grab his arm, keep slapping it into his face, and ask him why he keeps hitting himself.

The thing is, I’ve read enough interviews to feel fairly comfortable that he’s not the same person he seems to play in every movie. And I actually have no problem with his most famous role, as lovestruck George Michael Bluth on Arrested Development.

I think it was Juno that sent me over the edge. The idea that a chirpy young high school girl who looks like Ellen Page would willingly surrender her virginity to Cera’s Paulie Bleeker enraged me to a degree that’s usually reserved for the genocidal atrocities inflicted by tribal warlords in third world hellholes. Which probably says more about me, and the simmering mixture of regret and self-loathing I carry around about my own awkward high-school misadventures with the opposite sex, than it does about Michael Cera.

But man, do I just want to give him a purple nurple something fierce.

9. My grammar elitism

Sometimes I do cringe a little when I hear myself say things like, “Oh, you’re one of those poor souls who says ‘towards’ instead of ‘toward.’ Don’t worry, it’s not your fault you weren’t raised properly. Bless your heart.”

But only sometimes.

8. My literal bias

On a somewhat related note: I have a tendency to pick apart perfectly innocent things my friends say. For instance, when someone says something like, “He flew off the proverbial handle,” I find myself smugly, passive-aggressively asking, “Oh, what proverb is that saying from, exactly?” This kind of activity once caused my good friend Jason Mallory to dub me “Mr. Literal.”

It wasn’t meant as a compliment.

7. Blink-182

I like to think my musical preferences are above reproach. I’ve logged a fair amount of time as a music journalist and critic, and my tastes are broad and deep enough that I can usually find common ground with almost anyone. I don’t apologize for the things I appreciate; I believe that we like what we like, and it cheapens us to be ashamed of the things we enjoy (with the exception of torture, pedophilia and Pauly Shore movies). So I don’t subscribe to the notion of guilty pleasures. Although if I did, my abiding fondness for Blink-182 might qualify.

As a man in my 40s, I sometimes worry that my affection for Blink’s breakthrough 1999 album Enema of the State, filled as it is with odes to adolescent immaturity and post-pubescent romance, heralds an impending midlife crisis. But I don’t care. I’m kind of iffy on Tom DeLonge, who dominates the band’s more recent albums and picked up an annoying British accent on 2011’s spotty Neighborhoods, but Mark Hoppus is an underrated songwriter who knows his way around a catchy three-minute pop-rock tune (check out “Going Away to College,” “Shut Up,” “Roller Coaster” and my favorite, “Wendy Clear”); “What’s My Age Again?” never fails to strike a chord in me matched only by certain songs by Too Much Joy. And there are some days I think Travis Barker may even be a better drummer than Neil Peart.

That alarming sound you hear is the collective gasp of several of my Rush-idolizing friends going into cardiac arrest. So let’s quickly move on to …

A&M/Octone Records

6. This story about my music snobbery      

Several years ago, when I was working at a weekly newspaper, I once didn’t hire an intern simply because her email address proclaimed her love for the band Maroon 5. Nothing about her interview stood out in a negative way or raised any red flags—at least any more so than any other college intern. . There was nothing wrong with her writing, she didn’t smell bad, and she seemed perfectly pleasant to be around. No, her only crime was that all of her email correspondence with me originated from a personal account whose name was something along the lines of worldsbiggestmaroon5fan@yahoo.com (that wasn’t the actual address, but it may as well have been). And I just didn’t want to work with someone who was that enamored of Adam Levine and company. I should probably be a little bit ashamed about that.

5. My poor ogling  admiring skills

Like most straight men, when a nice-looking woman walks by, I like to cast a discreet glance of appreciation. Unlike most men, however, I don’t do a very good job with the “discreet” part. Maybe it’s the way my eyes pop out of my skull, or my head spins around 360 degrees like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Or it might be the annoying bleat of an old-fashioned “ooga” air horn that accompanies said moves, like something out of a Tex Avery cartoon.

Whatever the tipoff, I can’t (OK—won’t) tell you the number of times someone I’ve been checking out from across the room (or restaurant, or hotel lobby, or parking lot, or … you get the idea) makes eye contact, purses her lips into a frowny face and quickly turns away. I usually try to play it off legit: give the girl a nod and my best “Hey, girl, how YOU doin’?” Despite being measurably more handsome than Ryan Gosling, however, this tactic rarely makes things better. (And by rarely, of course, I mean never.)

Go on. Tell me you don’t see it.

4. This Doctor Who dream

Last weekend, I dreamed I auditioned for the role of the new Doctor on Doctor Who. I wore a long, flowing scarf a la Tom Baker, puzzlingly paired with a cool black leather jacket like Christopher Eccleston’s. And when the producers asked me why I thought I was right for the part, I told them that it was because I had my own time machine as a kid (true story). And that I’d once wanted to film a Doctor Who takeoff with my Super 8 camera in which I was a mysterious time-traveler known as The Captain who traversed the galaxy in a device that, on the outside, resembled a port-a-potty (also a true story, although thankfully that particular home movie never came to pass). I woke up confused and bitter that I didn’t get the part.

3. Road rage

I mean, sure, leaning on your horn and flipping the one-finger salute to someone who committed the unpardonable sin of moving too slow seems like a classless dick move when other people do it. But it always seems justified in my case.

2. This personal anecdote

There’s a diner down the street from my house where I have breakfast several times a week. One of the other regular customers is an elderly gentleman who sits alone, his white hair swept back and feathered in an immaculate mane, and quietly reads the paper. When he’s finished, he gets up, pays his bill at the cash register, and then shuffles over to the kitchen to find whoever his waitress was that day so that he can hand-deliver his tip into her hands.

For some reason, this really irks me. It’s not as if the diner is in a high-crime area known to be terrorized by roving gangs of tip thieves. Most of the customers, at least in the morning, either know each other personally or have a passing familiarity with one another, enough to exchange a friendly nod in passing.  In five years, I’ve never once had reason to suspect that the tip I leave on the table on my way out is in any danger of being pilfered—and I’m a paranoid bastard.

Anyway, it’s gotten to the point that whenever I see this gentleman, I have to fight an impish urge to walk over to his booth, lean menacingly over him and mutter “All right, pops, fork over the tip and no one gets hurt, capisce?” It’s not actually that I want to steal his buck-fifty; it’s that if he’s so convinced his tip is in danger, well then, I ought to give him a reason to feel that way.

In other words, I’m a terrible, terrible person.

1. Beverly Hills, 90210

Back in the mid-1990s, I was working the weekend graveyard shift at my local copy center. After a long weekend of sleeping all day and spending my nights either doing absolutely nothing or busting my hump catering to the needs of bratty college kids who’d put off their assignments until the very last minute, I’d come home around 9:30 on a Monday morning looking forward to a few days of relative normalcy. Despite being dead tired, I wouldn’t want to go to bed right away; I wanted to experience some of this daylight I’d heard so much about. So I’d stay up and watch a little mindless TV. My tolerance for Jerry Springer and the glut of TV shows with judges dispensing crotchety justice in fake courtrooms was pretty low, so that left me with syndication reruns of the early-90s teen-soap sensation 90210.  One of the local stations started showing it every weekday in two-hour blocks starting at 10 a.m. … and thus began my descent into madness.

And I didn’t stop with syndication. Oh, no. Soon I began watching the show in prime time every week. It helped that this was around the time Tiffani Amber Thiessen joined the cast, after the characters had graduated from West Beverly High and implausibly matriculated nearby at fictional California University (oddly enough, also the name of the school where Will Smith went to college on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I’m still disappointed there was never a crossover).

These actually turned out to be my favorite episodes. I don’t much care about the high school years—except of course for the world-shaking summer when Dylan hooked up with Kelly  while Brenda was studying abroad (I mean, c’mon, I’m only human). In point of fact, I couldn’t get enough of the college years. Even after Luke Perry left, long after I ceased being fascinated by Tori Spelling’s gradual plastic-surgery evolution into something resembling an alien life form’s idea of a stripper. Even as I began to objectively realize that the quality of the scripts was plunging downhill faster than a runaway roller coaster, sometime during junior year. Maybe it was because that scenario mirrored my own college years (not the sex and the ridiculous intrigue—the way it cratered during my third year).

I have seen every episode of Beverly Hills 90210. Every. Single. One. Many more than once. Yes, even after the gang graduated from college. (Did you know the show ran in prime time for 10 years? I do. Because I watched every. Single. Episode.)  I should probably be a little ashamed about that last part—I mean, they were pretty much phoning it in by that point, especially after Jason Priestley left the cast, which, like Steve Carell leaving The Office, should have been the end of the ride. But for some reason, I just couldn’t quit 90210, man.

Side note No. 1: If not ashamed, I am at least a little uneasy about this: Somewhere along the way, I’ve discovered that I am a fan of Brian Austin Green. I hated David Silver during the show’s initial high-school run, but once he went to college, lost his dorky look and started having sex, I began to warm to him. I’ve actually enjoyed Green’s acting in subsequent roles, like the recently canceled TBS series Wedding Band, or his improbable but effective turn as a gritty freedom fighter on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And I’m told by a source I trust that his hip-hop album still brings the funky-fresh flava, almost 20 years after its release.

Side note No. 2: Just because I burned off countless brain cells following the tangled romantic webs of Brandon and Brenda and Dylan and Kelly and David and Donna and Steve and Valerie and The Guy Who Ran The Peach Pit, don’t assume that I hold a similar fondness for the misguided train wreck that was Saved By the Bell: The College Years. To this day, the memory of the half-hours I wasted watching this contrived and painfully unfunny cash-grab sends me spiraling into a pit of existential horror not even H.P. Lovecraft could emulate.

For that, at least, I am ashamed.

Well, not the whole world.

This is the way my world ends, then.

You look confused. Let me back up a little.

My name is Billy Bishop, but you may know me as The Big Bang—the world’s most powerful super-powered hero.

Actually, you don’t, although you used to. Don’t worry, I’ll explain that in a bit.

When I got my powers, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Sure, absorbing all that radiation stung like a son of a bitch. My hair fell out, my skin turned a sickly yellow, and my body burned for months in places you places you literally cannot imagine. But I was alive! The experimental treatment not only got rid of my cancer, but it imbued me with the ability to reshape reality itself. I could alter the chemical composition of molecules with a gesture, rearrange subatomic particles with a glance. I could travel through time and space and other dimensions you’ve never even heard of like crossing the street.

Pretty sweet, right?

Problem is, I’m not really good with science. Physics makes my head hurt. So instead of, like, bringing water to deserts, or transforming barren regions to produce crops and feed the world, I could barely transmute the turf of my high school football field into a decent strain of pot. (Hey, what do you want? I’m a teenager.)

But one thing I could do was shoot fire from my fingertips! That was fucking cool. So my course was clear. I became The Big Bang and set about fighting crime.

I was so stoked when the League of Heroes came calling. I mean, this is the A-list. I’ve read about their exploits since I was a kid. The Regulator, menacing scourge of the underworld! Bruce Bronze, the two-fisted scientist with the bulletproof copper skin! Analog, the perfect artificial man! Vesper, the seductive sorceress!  And that star-spangled primate, the U.S. Ape!

Oh, man, it was awesome. Doctor Bronze started mentoring me on how to use my powers. The Regulator tried to give me lessons in menacing one-liners. And the U.S. Ape trained me in all kinds of hand-to-hand combat. After several months of training, I was ready to go out in the field.

Or so I thought. Things were pretty shaky, at first, I’m not gonna lie. I almost turned the sky above Washington, D.C., into hydrogen while fighting the Flammable Five (yeah, not good). And then there was the time I accidentally converted half the Amazon Rainforest into gold, triggering a financial and environmental catastrophe. Man, Doctor Bronze bitched me out for weeks.

And the more I screwed up, the worse my control of my powers seemed to get. After I ended up giving Black Lung to a hospital full of terminally ill children while tussling with the Alchemical Brothers, every newspaper, website and cable news show in the country called me a menace. Analog called a team meeting to propose shooting me into the sun. The rest of the League didn’t go along with that idea, thank goodness, although Doctor Bronze did suggest I simply might not be League material, and that I might need to be shipped to somesuper-secret scientific facility in the Arctic Circle for further investigation.

Yeah, things didn’t look so hot. But then I fell in love with an angel.

I mean, really, can you blame me?

No, literally. Her name was Providence, and she was a first lieutenant in the Second Choir of the Seraphim, or something like that. She came to the League of Heroes for help when a cadre of evil angels kidnapped the Almighty and imprisoned him in a trailer park in South Georgia. (It’s a long story.)

Anyway, she was regal, and powerful, and although she was older than time itself, she had a smoking-hot, eternally 19-year-old body that would have made Kate Upton bawl like a baby.

The first time I met her, she was so gorgeous and so divine that, well … I wet myself.  She looked at me like something she’d scraped from the bottom of her flared thigh-high boots.

Analog laughed so hard I think he busted a few circuits. “Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” he crowed, slapping me on the back with the artificial strength of 10 men. Analog could be kind of a dick like that.

But I didn’t care. I was in love. Touched by an angel, if you will. Her presence made me want to do better. To become better in every way. To live up to–nay, to exceed–my potential.

And so I did. I single-handedly stopped the Hollow Men from conjuring the Twilight Kingdom into our reality. I trapped the galactic marauder Heat Death in a black hole. I defeated the Lizard King and his armies, and even held back the godlike Supernals. I was becoming the most powerful being in the universe. I won “Hero of the Month” six months straight. And I swear, even Providence was starting to look at me differently.

And then the end of the world came. And it wasn’t the interdimensional tyrant Thanatopsis, or the Quintessence, or even the Quantum Mechanic who brought about the end of days.

It was me.

Remember that experimental radiation that gave me my powers? Turns out every time I messed with the fabric of existence, I was infecting it with some kind of radiation poisoning.

That’s right. I gave the universe cancer. Yay, me.

Doctor Bronze gathered the world’s top scientists and started cobbling together some fancy high-tech machines the size of the Sears Tower. Vesper consulted mystic beings from planes I’d never even heard of. Analog? Sat on his artificial ass and didn’t do shit. Asshole.

Anyway, we finally came up with a plan. I don’t really understand it all myself—remember when I said I’m not good with science?—but basically, with the help of technology and magic, my job was to give all of existence the most intense round of chemotherapy ever, from the safety of a tiny pocket of space-time separated from the rest of reality, to contain any radioactive fallout.

The U.S. Ape shook my hand. Doctor Bronze told me how proud he was. The Regulator patted me on the back and said, “Don’t fuck it up.” Providence even gave me a kiss for good luck. On the cheek, sure, but still, I got an erection.

And then they all left, and I opened creation’s hood, channeled all my power, and …

Well, you’ve probably guessed that we won. I mean, you’re alive, listening to me, right? Everything’s back to normal.

Except for me.

As it happens, I ended up rebooting the universe’s operating system. And since I was outside of it at the time, I was written out of its code. As a result, I don’t exist. I mean, I’m here physically. But no one remembers me. I have no family, no home, nothing. Not even my powers—although on the plus side, I can no longer give the universe cancer. So there’s that.

Oh, and Providence? That beautiful, flawless, angelic whore? She’s dating Analog now.

No family, no friends, no powers, no glory and no girl. I saved everyone—I saved everything—and now I have nothing to live for.

This is the way my world ends: No longer a Big Bang. Just a whimper.

With all due apologies to T. S. Eliot.

All characters are the intellectual property of the author.

The ice caps are melting …

The meteor that slammed into the Chelyabinsk region last Friday must have seemed like something out of a Michael Bay movie to the poor Russians who witnessed it: loud, bright, fast and utterly incomprehensible. And like the first Transformers movie, it was only the beginning of the madness. (That very weekend, Russia suffered the indignity of serving as the setting for the cacophonous empty-calorie spectacle A Good Day to Die Hard. Hadn’t those poor people endured enough?)

5. Heavenly bodies

That same day, witnesses saw a fireball streak through the skies above California. And then there’s the little matter of a 150-foot asteroid with the chillingly bureaucratic name of 2012 DA14, which came within 17,200 miles of our planet—one-fourteenth the distance between here and the moon, and lower than the altitude of some of our satellites. We’d known about that drive-by for a couple of years now; scientists knew it wasn’t going to do more than graze us. The meteor that careened into Russia, injuring more than 1,000 people and damaging many more buildings, like something out of Transformers: Dark of the Moon? Yeah, turns out we didn’t know about that one. (Or did we?)

But by the time we were getting buzzed by giant space rocks, an even more ominous occurrence had already taken place—an extinction-level event on the magnitude of a comet wiping out the dinosaurs: the release of the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.  Which, for the second year in a row, bore the image of Kate Upton on the cover. Why, you may ask, is that more momentous than space debris raining down on the Russians? Good question. Simply put, the 20-year-old model’s Antarctic photo shoot argues that our species has reached its evolutionary zenith. Forget those dreams of our children’s children curing cancer, inventing flying cars or developing godlike powers—mankind has peaked. It’s all downhill from here, folks.

Something about that beard just screams “Evil!”

4. Fringe was right

Fans of science fiction found themselves on the end of a good news/bad news scenario on Tuesday, when a scientist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory suggested that we’re vulnerable to being wiped out by a parallel universe, “if you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation.”

No, really. As Joseph Lykken told NBC News, “The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us.”

The good news, of course, is that all those hours upon hours, years upon years spent watching Doctor Who, Fringe, Red Dwarf, Buffy, Star Trek and even Community haven’t been in vain—there really are alternate realities similar to (but oh so different from) our own. The flip side, of course, is the trade-off: that whole destroying-our-universe thing. But what should we expect? What do those all those fictional parallel realities usually have in common? Yup. They’re populated not just by evil beings, but worse, by evil versions of … us!

Well, okay, sure, this is all just conjecture. Lykken is, after all, a theoretical physicist. (Oh, did I leave that part out?) And the above quote about the alternative universe is simply him, well, theorizing. (Not to mention, he doesn’t even allude to our evil alien counterparts.) It’s much more accurate and fair (though not nearly as cool) to quote him saying this instead: “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out.”

Still. Having linked the Higgs Boson particle to a hypothetical probable extremely likely invasion from the Mirror Universe, Joseph Lykken is now officially the coolest theoretical physicist ever. (Sorry, Sheldon Cooper.) So if you happen to come across your dopplegänger—a virtual carbon copy of yourself—and he (or she) is sporting a neatly trimmed pointy beard? Head for the hills.

Someone buy the Antichrist a comb …

3. The fall and rise of the Postal Service

The U.S. Postal Service earlier this month announced plans to suspend Saturday mail delivery starting in August. And during the very same month, the Postal Service, an indie-rock band featuring Death Cab for Cutie frontman (and known Antichrist) Ben Gibbard, announced a reunion tour in support of the 10th anniversary reissue of their aptly titled 2003 album Give Up. Coincidence? We think not. Especially since, like all rock bands, the actual postal service is diving head-first into the merch game.

Thousands of hipster kids are going to throw perfectly good money away to buy an album they already own, full of songs written and sung by a sensitive man-child who, despite great wealth, doesn’t know how to dress or comb his hair—and yet managed to marry the chick from The New Girl. And many of those hipster kids will also go to see him in concert, blissfully unaware that they’re all just pawns in a series of elaborate incantations designed to lower the testosterone count of everyone in the audience by hundreds of points. What those kids don’t know is that thousands of sweaty, unwashed hands unwrapping the packaging of the Give Up re-release is actually the opening of one of the seven seals. Sam and Dean dealt with this back during Season Four of Supernatural, but they had the angel Castiel on their side. What have we got? Not even the Vicar of Christ …

Not even they can help.

2. Pope Benedict XVI retiring

His Holiness doesn’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing. He’s 85 years old, after all, and his faculties aren’t what they used to be. He knows that when the first four seals are opened, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be released upon the world. And he hasn’t completely closed his mind to the idea that there are five of them, not four, and they already walk the Earth as One Direction. So what if he’s the first living pope to step down in 598 years? He’s seen the signs: Chris Brown and Rihanna. The falling rocks. Kate Upton. The parallel universe (in which his devil-worshipping counterpart no doubt sports a neatly trimmed Van Dyke, to signify that he’s you know, evil). He’s seen that episode of Supernatural. He knows that merely being selected as God’s representative on Earth by a conclave of gnarled old men possessing an unhealthy preoccupation with women’s reproductive systems doesn’t grant him the power required to vanquish Zooey Deschanel’s ex-husband. He knows it’s time to relinquish the Chair of Peter to someone younger, more vital, more prepared to face the coming trials. Someone like Battle Pope.

But no. A man accomplished enough to have ascended to the leadership of the Catholic Church will know that the tribulations yet to come require us to think even more outside the box. What we need, he’ll have determined, is someone of the modern world, able to meet the Antichrist where he lives. Someone who’s been through the modern crucibles of sex-tape fame and reality television. Someone toughened by a stint behind bars. Someone who’s fought Sam and Dean on Supernatural and lived to tell the tale. Someone wise enough to have studied at the feet of the Buddha, Oprah, and Giorgio Armani. Someone like …

Or is THIS the Antichrist? We’re so confused …

1. Paris Hilton, self-empowerment guru

The world’s most convincing wax mannequin has apparently heard of Sophocles. Or at least, whoever handles her Twitter account has.

Yeah, we’re all doomed.

“THAT’S for not returning my emails!”

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’m a violent guy.

No, really.

First of all, I’m a consumer of violence. I’m drawn to thrilling crime fiction, in which sex is used as a weapon and bullets pierce the night like lightning bugs.

I geek out on superhero comics, with grim-faced vigilantes and haughty superegos in bright primary colors dispensing justice while acting outside the law. 

I rarely miss an action movie: The first Lethal Weapon is encoded on my DNA, and John McClane’s “Yippie Ki-Yay, Motherfucker” might as well be tattooed across my chest.

Encoded in my DNA. (Translation: I used to have this hair.)

And while I enjoy hip-hop, especially gangsta rap, I respond most viscerally to rock and roll: the loud guitars, stampeding drums and primeval howling, pounding out the soundtrack to our lustful desires. And I get an adrenaline charge from band names that scream of rebellion and conflict: The Clash. Rage Against the Machine. The Stranglers. Alice in Chains. The Violent Femmes. Megadeth. Even the Drive-By Truckers.

And last weekend, like many of you, I watched the Super Bowl, experiencing a rush as modern-day gladiators smashed into one another with the impact of a car crash—even though I didn’t have a dog in the fight. (Note how I even use violent imagery to describe a lack of emotional investment.)

As a journalist, and as a storyteller, I’m also drawn to conflict. And for me, the most fascinating theme is man’s endless capacity for cruelty toward his fellow man—whether it’s the evil that men do in the name of love, money or power, or the more mundane brutality of arrogance, condescension and thoughtlessness.

Unfortunately, it’s that latter variety that I just can’t leave behind at the end of the day. It’s an obsession that follows me everywhere, like a junkyard dog spoiling for a fight. It’s the never-ending story projected onto the high-definition flat-screen of my subconscious, the parasite that swims like a shark in my bloodstream, determined and relentless.

Sorry. I just had to.

I’m constantly parsing the words of others for the smallest hint of insult. My sensitive antennae can extrapolate a challenge in the most innocent act: the guy who does two sets on the weight machine at the gym; the car that passes on the right instead of the left; the woman who blocks the supermarket aisle as she studies the endless array of hemorrhoid creams.

Trouble is, this beast is no longer content to gorge on the slights that hide behind everyday actions. It’s never satisfied, ever on the lookout for insensitivity or a lack of consideration. Lately, it’s taken to anticipating offenses before they even occur: scrutinizing other movie-theater patrons, just waiting for one of them to whip out a cell phone during the feature presentation.

Not long ago, I reached out to a fellow writer here in Atlanta to set up an interview for an article I was writing. When I didn’t hear back from him, instead of chalking up his silence to a busy schedule or perhaps an overly aggressive spam filter, I naturally read it as nothing less than a total rejection of me as a human being.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw some pictures of him on Facebook. In the pictures, it’s his birthday, and he’s having a good old time. And in one of them, a young, willowy blonde, clearly his girlfriend, is sitting in his lap. Immediately, I was filled with outrage that he should have a girlfriend at all—that anyone should love him or like him or celebrate another year of his existence. Didn’t they know what a dick he was? That he had not answered my emails?

I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you that I had an epiphany, then. I’d like to tell you that I was able to let go of my unreasonable hatred of this man I’d never even met.

I’d like to. But I can’t.

Seriously, is this the face of a well-adjusted man?

What I can say is that this eternal vigilance, this state of perpetual alert, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a witch hunt that finds evidence of the darkest sorcery under every rock. It’s an unending campaign of violence against myself, and it’s wearing me out. It’s time I started fighting back against this enemy within, and channeling some of this fury where it belongs.

The costume is almost finished. I’m having some trouble with the chest emblem; I need just the right image to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers.

And then … you miscreants who talk too loud in restaurants, who enter through the door clearly marked “exit,” who try to sneak 11 items into the 10-items-or-less checkout aisle … well, you’d best beware, lest you find yourself falling victim to the furious fisticuffs and blazing assault weapons of Mister Manners—avenger of the affronted!

Until then … have a nice day.

Or else.

This piece was written for Write Club Atlanta‘s open-mic offshoot Naked City, and performed there on Monday, Feb. 4, 2013.

Tenacious D, the mock-rock duo comprising actors Jack Black and Kyle Gass, announced recently that they’re looking to host Festival Supreme this October, a kind of Lollapalooza of comedy-rock acts that could include such names as Flight of the Conchords, the Lonely Island and even Spinal Tap and Eric Idle (although “It might just be Tenacious D and Weird Al,” as Black concedes).

The concept of such a festival has me ambivalent. I became a fan of Tenacious D through their half-hour HBO episodes somewhere around the turn of the millennium, and eagerly bought the pair’s self-titled album when it came out in 2001. But after a while, I just kind of  … moved on. The joke seemed to have run its course, as the 2006 film Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny made painfully clear.

Last year’s comeback album Rize of the Fenix has its moments (it helps that the band addresses the Pick of Destiny debacle head-on right away), but it seems to me that most comedy-rock acts have a limited shelf life. The Lonely Island’s output is uneven at best. Flight of the Conchords? Last seen touring New Zealand. Spinal Tap? Does anyone remember Break Like the Wind? Even “Weird Al” Yankovic’s career seems to wax and wane.

Which brings me to the tragic crash-and-burn arc of one of the greatest parody rock bands ever created. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the brief, untold and unasked-for history of Def Black Riot.

Like all great rock bands, Def Black Riot can trace its genesis to a collision of teenage hormones, boredom and a Saturday night spent playing Dungeons & Dragons at my buddy Styb’s house—not to mention a silver pen and an Al Stewart cassette.

Yes, you read that right: A cassette tape. (I’m older than you. Shut up.) And yes, you also read that other part right: Al Stewart. Mr. “Year of the Cat” himself.

The cassette tape that launched a thousand heavy metal song parodies.

Now, I have no problem with Mr. Stewart’s work, at least the small part of it I’m familiar with. But then, I’ve passed the 40-year-old marker, and one of the things having logged four full decades on this earth affords you is the ability to say “I kind of dig ‘Time Passages’” with impunity. However, the same does not hold true for 16-year-old kids. At least, it didn’t back in my day. For all I know, there’s a whole subculture of young Al Stewart fans loose in the hallways of America’s high schools in 2013, sharing lyrics and historical references from Stewart’s songs, speaking in fake Scottish accents and scrawling the lyrics to “Key Largo” in each other’s yearbooks.

But in the crowd I hung out with, you kept that kind of thing to yourself. Styb may have gotten away with liking Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson, but he was already established as being “cool,” and that granted him the freedom to have more diverse tastes than the rest of us. My friend Larry, on the other hand, was not afforded the same luxuries. (Note: this was the same Larry who taught me the proper title of a certain KISS album.)

So suffice it to say that the discovery of an Al Stewart tape in his possession (right next to Bryan Adams) was an engraved invitation to open mockery and the desecration of his personal property. To wit: the words DEF BLACK RIOT, which Styb scrawled across the cassette case with the aforementioned silver pen.

And this was born … a legend.

Although it was Styb who came up with the name (an amalgamation of Def Leppard, Black Sabbath and Quiet Riot), my friend Tedd and I took the concept and ran with it. In short order, we constructed the band’s lineup, history and discography, as well as the lyrics to some of their many hits. These consisted entirely of parodies of popular hard rock songs, with me channeling lead singer Motley Osborne and Tedd writing in the voice of lead guitarist Stuart “The Iron” Maiden. (Among the other band members in DBR’s checkered history were Dee Purple, Fast Forward Freddie, Hyper Spasms  and the dear, departed duo of Barrow Smythe and Fred Zeppelin.)

The songs were often aggressively silly, immature or just plain weird, simply because it amused us. One of Tedd’s more memorable contributions was “Still Eating Food,” a play on the Scorpions’ putrid ballad “Still Loving You.” I can’t claim the high ground here: Typical of my input were such sophomoric gems as “We’re Not Gonna Break Dance” (from Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”) and “You Really Hate Me” (via the Kinks/Van Halen staple “You Really Got Me”).

Clearly, Weird Al had nothing to worry about.

Our crowning glory, to my mind, was an Osborne-Maiden collaboration from the band’s early days. Set to the tune of a Black Sabbath classic, it spun the dark tale of a horde of warrior fruit that decimated everything in its path, until some townfolk doused them with flour laced with radioactive chemicals that turned them into regular old, non-sentient figs. Hence the immortal couplet: “No more war figs have the power/ Dumped in radioactive flour.”

But soon, just dicking around with the lyrics to heavy metal songs wasn’t enough. I decided it was my mission to convince someone—anyone—that Def Black Riot actually existed. And so I submitted a review of their latest album, Metal Childhood, to my high school newspaper, Bear Facts (named for the school mascot, the Bonnabel Bruin).

Although I was never on the newspaper staff, in my senior year I began contributing pieces—without being asked—by slipping them under the newspaper adviser’s door between classes. (I was destined to be a freelance writer from an early age. Years later, I even got paid for it.) Almost all of these unsolicited submissions saw print, among them interviews with Sherlock Holmes and the protagonist of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, as well as album reviews both current and not so much (including Meet the Beatles).

Alas, my first attempt to spread the gospel according to Def Black Riot hit a roadblock: Oh, the review ran, but with the words “A Parody” slapped over it.

A lesser soul would have given up, but I was made of sterner stuff. Was it a challenge? Of course. DBR’s lyrics, album titles, even the band members’ names were a compendium of bad puns and nonsense. And the songs themselves often concerned such subject matter as the importance of brushing your teeth (we were way ahead of the Imagination Movers) or, you know, fricking “War Figs.”

What should have been one of my proudest bylines.

Still, I was undeterred. My next submission was a lengthy interview with Motley Osborne himself. In anticipation of the band’s “upcoming concert,” the article delved deep into the group’s convoluted history and explained the thinking behind their latest release, Metal Childhood, a loose concept album built around the naggings, warnings and safety lessons that bombard children from a young age, with such song titles as “Don’t Burp at the Dog.” It also teased some new music the band was working on, including the rebellious anthem “We Rob Mules.” (Trust me, all of this sounded hilarious when we were dreaming up the lyrics. It might be that you had to be there.)

As the photos above and below make clear, I wasn’t yet the smoothest of writers, nor was I the hawk-eyed editor I would later become. (It also bears mentioning that as a professional adult, I make my living making sure that blatant fictions don’t make it into print.) But I digress.

The finished piece was way too long and entirely too enamored of its own cleverness. So I promptly slipped it under the door, as usual, and rubbed my hands together and cackled with glee, anticipating the inevitable “Hey, man, can I borrow one of your Def Black Riot albums?”

My early attempt at deceiving the masses, outsmarted by an editor.

But it was not to be. Once again, some sharp-eyed editor made sure no one was taken in by my lovingly crafted ruse. This time, the piece was branded “A Satire.” Hmph.

I kind of lost my zeal for Def Black Riot after that. It was clear the Powers That Be at Bear Facts were dead set on blocking me from perpetuating a great rock and roll swindle on the student body of Alfred Bonnabel High School. And besides, in no time I was off to college, where KISS, Iron Maiden and Van Halen were elbowed to the back of the class to make room for the Replacements, R.E.M., Neil Young and the like. Those artists were certainly ripe for lampooning in their own right, but I just didn’t have the enthusiasm for it.

My love of a good, chest-cracking power chord never completely went away, and in time I returned to the hard rock bands of my high school days. And over the years, my tendency to blurt out sophomoric parody lyrics to obscure heavy metal songs has not diminished. Which leads me to think that maybe it’s time to drag Def Black Riot out of the pages of my high school newspaper and into the real world. I’ll recruit players from heavy metal tribute bands, and we’ll don spandex and ripped fishnets, douse ourselves in Aqua Net, and start cranking out the tunes. Goodness knows I’ve got plenty of inspiration for new material, thanks to Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, the Cult, Soul Asylum, etc., etc. (To say nothing of Nickelback—if parodying Nickelback isn’t, you know, redundant.)

And in tribute to the man who started it all, we’ll close out the night with my long dreamed-of thrash-metal cover of “Year of the Cat.”

But maybe we’ll skip over “Still Eating Food.”

Wikimedia Commons

I’m not a big fan of compiling “top 10” lists (despite having done so for more than a decade), as my tastes and favorites often mutate and evolve from one day to the next. But as a reader, I’m as susceptible to their allure as the next person. So here’s a subjective, subject-to-change list of 10 albums released last year that I enjoyed, for those who might be interested (both of you).

1. Rush, Clockwork Angels: Rush left concept albums behind back in 1978 after the excellent Hemispheres, and charted a hard-right turn into more modern rock sounds as the 80s dawned and the flowing robes and fantasy trappings of progressive rock started to look a little silly in the cold, harsh light of the Reagan years. But the Canadian power trio didn’t chuck complex compositions or thought-provoking subject matter into the dustbin with their Spandex tights: From the outset, 1980’s Permanent Waves showed that they were still deep, man, and each album since has possessed an overarching theme, as the music has gotten tighter but no less adventurous.

So the idea of this latter-day Rush returning to the concept album holds a certain appeal, a kind of bridge between two worlds. The result is one of the band’s best and most consistently rewarding albums, building on the maturity and vitality that gave muscle to 2007’s Snakes & Arrows. But that success is largely a musical one: Unlike Rush’s past forays into conceptual waters, which usually maxed out at around 20 minutes (Hemispheres and 2112 weren’t concept albums so much as concept sides), the story here wears thin over the course of a longer running time, due in part to the fact that it’s really just a series of vignettes. (When you need to read the novelization to understand what’s going on, I’d argue you’ve got some work to do. Hell, even Kilroy Was Here established who the good guys and bad guys were.) Nonetheless, the band seems energized by the whole endeavor, turning in some of their finest moments, among them the sweeping overture of the title track, the menacing stomp of “BU2B” and the existential fury of “The Anarchist.”

2. Soundgarden, King Animal: The last time Soundgarden released an album, 1996’s underrated Down on the Upside, no one had heard of Monica Lewinsky, Titanic had yet to make box-office history, Tupac was still alive and the Spice Girls had yet to unleash “Girl Power” on an unsuspecting populace. It’s a different world today, but you wouldn’t know it to listen to King Animal, and that’s a good thing. Soundgarden isn’t trading in nostalgia, churning out analogs to “Black Hole Sun” and “Rusty Cage”; instead, it’s building on the erratic chord progressions and sinewy charge that have been a key part of its sound since Badmotorfinger and the addition of bassist Ben Shepherd, a key songwriting contributor here. It’s a tad overlong (“Black Saturday” and “Worse Dreams” should have been saved for bonus tracks) and lead-off single “Been Away Too Long” doesn’t quite fit the rest of the flow, but those are small complaints. The magnetic swirl of “Non-State Actor,” the jagged snarl of “By Crooked Steps” and the unsettling beauty of “Bones of Birds” showcase a band whose visceral pull has only matured with age.

3. Japandroids, Celebration Rock: I’ll keep this one brief and to-the-point, in the spirit of this short, sharp set: Every song is a love letter to the yearning, transformative power of rock and roll.

4. Matt Boroff, Filling in the Cracks:  Full disclosure: I wrote the press release for this EP, which is less ornamental than Boroff’s 2010 solo album Reaching For Sparks and also starker and more emotionally direct than his three solid albums with his band the Mirrors, while still displaying his affection for film soundtracks and the vintage blues, jazz and vaudeville explorations of Tom Waits. Lagniappe: A guest appearance by Mark Lanegan (who duets on “Garbage Man”) makes up for that singer’s disappointing 2012 release Blues Funeral.

5. Dash Rip Rock, Black Liquor: This long-running Louisiana ensemble has a bit of a reputation as a party band, thanks to its legendarily energetic live shows, but Dash Rip Rock has always been more versatile and musically adept than that rep would suggest. Black Liquor provides plenty of proof (pun intended), with singer-guitarist Bill Davis and company dialing back the country-thrash “cowpunk” for a leaner approach fueled by hard rock muscle (although the rockabilly strut of “Go Ahead, Baby” hints at Davis’ abiding love of rock roots). And aside from pseudo-novelties like “Voodoo Doll” and “Beck Moi Tchew,” Davis employs a newfound lyrical and thematic depth as well (with an assist from co-writer Cheryl Wagner), as when venting a Southern Louisiana man’s frustration with ineffective levees on “Dirt.” Good stuff.

6. Guided by Voices, The Bears for Lunch: GBV guiding light Robert Pollard has always been prolific, churning out Guided by Voices albums and side and solo projects at a prodigious rate, sometimes inadvertently making an argument for quality over quantity. In 2012 he released no less than three albums with the “classic” GBV lineup known for producing such heralded ADHD indie-rock landmarks as Bee Thousand. The Bears for Lunch is the most consistent, quality-wise, of the trio, and shows that Pollard is better served having another singer and songwriter to switch things up: Tobin Sprout’s “The Corners are Glowing” and “Waving at Airplanes” are standouts.

7. Matthew Ryan, In the Dusk of Everything: Again, I admit to a certain bias: I’ve been a fervent fan of Ryan’s since his major-label debut, 1997’s May Day, and I’ve known him personally for more than a decade. I’ve always been partial to his two major-label works, especially 2000’s criminally underappreciated East Autumn Grin, and have had a harder time embracing his forays into electro-folk. In the Dusk of Everything is his best effort in several years, bringing a welcome grittiness to spare, emotionally frank compositions.

8. Santigold, Master of My Make-Believe: Honesty compels me to admit that this album’s inclusion here is largely due to my love of Santogold, the 2008 debut of singer Santi White (who since dropped the “o” in her nom du disc to an “i” to avoid confusion with the professional wrestler Santo Gold). While Master of My Make-Believe isn’t the breakthrough its predecessor was, there are some moments that compare favorably, most of them coming in the album’s first half.

9. John K. Samson, Provincial: Samson, frontman for Canadian rockers the Weakerthans, displays his usual keen lyricism on this solo debut, although the more sparse, pastoral backdrops can dilute some of the impact his brainy ruminations have when placed against a more conventional rock arrangement.

10. Richard Hawley, Standing at the Sky’s Edge: There’s a sense of sweeping, majestic urgency at work on this album that separates it from the British singer-songwriter’s earlier works. Hawley cuts loose here with a collection of moody, layered soundscapes, both cacophonous and psychedelic in their swirl. The result is quite literally hypnotic, drawing the listener into a meticulously crafted world of guitars, echoes and other effects, grounded by his gentleman’s baritone. Lovely stuff.

What are these guys smiling about?

So Dec. 21, 2012—the date the Mayans supposedly singled out as the end of the world—has come and gone. But here in the scary, post-Mayan Calendar landscape of 2013, we face no shortage of troubling signs about the future: North Korea’s recent rocket launch, more strife in the Middle East, the coming Antichrist and that whole Honey Boo Boo thing. But true tribulation and suffering rarely come from expected corners; they sneak up on us from the cover of those places we’re not watching. It’s the quieter, more mundane omens that are the most troublesome: “This is the way the world ends,” as T.S. Eliot intoned; “Not with a bang but a whimper.”

5. Bobby Petrino Gets Another Gig

At first glance, the casual observer would look at Petrino, the former Arkansas head coach whose affair with a subordinate and subsequent scandal cost him his job, and say: “Everyone deserves a second chance.” That’s certainly the position taken by Todd Stewart, athletic director of Western Kentucky, who hired Petrino to lead the university’s football program last month. “This is the United States of America,” Stewart told reporters, “and we’re a country of second chances.”

That’s true. Trouble is, by any competent reckoning, this is a man whose resume is an overstuffed exhibit of odorous and unethical behavior. Despite obvious warning signs, he’s been given second chance after second chance by employers more concerned about winning football games than with character or integrity.

While a coach at Louisville, Petrino met secretly with Auburn officials about taking over their team, even though Auburn had made no decision about retaining their current coach, Tommy Tuberville—who happened to be Petrino’s mentor. He left Louisville for the Atlanta Falcons less than a year after signing a 10-year contract extension, only to bolt on the Birds for Arkansas 13 games into the season, blindsiding his coaching staff, leaving copies of a goodbye note on players’ lockers and embarrassing owner Arthur Blank, whom Petrino had assured he was staying around just the day before.

And then of course, there’s the whole sordid mess that cost him his job at Arkansas: Giving his mistress a university job for which she wasn’t qualified (as well as $20,000 in cash) and trying to hide the fact that she was his passenger during a severe motorcycle accident, even going so far as to lie to his superiors about it.

Now, I’m not going as far as Jeff Pearlman, who has called Petrino “slime.” For all I know, this whole incident has really opened his eyes and made him a changed man. If so, that’s great. And yes, he deserves a second chance at life and happiness. Just not necessarily a second chance to become a wealthy football coach whose job description includes molding impressionable young athletes into men.

4. Rihanna and her batterer may be back together

Speaking of second chances, Chris Brown and Rihanna sparked a did-they-or-didn’t-they controversy over New Year’s, adding to speculation fueled by recent public appearances together.

Now, if a successful pop star decides that her ex-boyfriend is worth another shot, I suppose it’s really no one else’s business. Even if that ex-boyfriend is the same one who famously battered her almost four years ago, causing her to be hospitalized with bruises on her face.

That said, it’s really, really difficult to just shrug our collective shoulders, wish the happy couple well and move on. Maybe it’s because in the intervening years, Brown has done little to convince the public of his contrition. I think most of us would feel a bit more charitable toward Brown if he appeared at all repentant. But rage-filled temper tantrums and combative Tweets to his “haters” paint a picture of a young man who hasn’t matured or learned from his mistakes, who in fact still seems prone to violent behavior. That should be a giant, blazing red flag for anyone considering a relationship with Brown—although sadly, it instead seems to be a massive turn-on for these shining paragons of judgment. (Their parents must be so proud.)

Coming on the heels of recent news that a California Superior Court judge declared that a woman didn’t put up enough of a fight while being raped, the rekindling of this romance between two young, wealthy performers is cause for concern for victims of domestic abuse. As the most famous poster boy for man-on-woman violence since Ike Turner or O.J. Simpson, Brown should serve as a cautionary tale to other would-be batterers. Instead, his reconciliation with Rihanna suggests to young, impressionable males everywhere that if you lose it and beat the crap out of your significant other in a moment of passion, well, there’s a decent chance you’ll get away with it. (This also can’t be welcome news for women who’ve recently dumped a guy: I’ve got $100 that says we’ll hear an increase in heartbroken cries along the lines of “Rihanna took Chris Brown back after he beat the shit out of her, and you still won’t get back together with me??!!!”)

Here’s hoping the world never has occasion to shake its head and mutter “I told you so” where Rihanna’s concerned.

3. Hugh Hefner, Kate Winslet tie the knot (but not with each other, thank goodness)

While we’re on the subject of celebrity couplings, chew on this: 86-year-old soft-porn magnate Hugh Hefner just married a former Playboy playmate 60 years his junior. It’d be tempting to look upon this head-scratching episode as just another instance of the Playboy empire exploiting confused young women, except that over the last decade, it’s become increasingly apparent that Hef’s “relationships” are either a) part of a lame effort to keep the magazine in the public consciousness via the extraordinarily contrived Girls Next Door reality series, b) an attempt at “keeping up appearances” by an octogenarian whose public image as an epitome of classy male virility was never that convincing to begin with, or, most likely, c) both.

Sad as the whole spectacle is, much sadder is the news that Kate Winslet is once again off the market. And as if that news weren’t bitter enough, it comes with an added dollop of “You’ve got to be effing kidding me” and a scoop of “Why do you hate me?”: her new husband is a gazillionaire relative of Richard Branson who goes by the regrettable name of Ned Rocknroll.

2. Madonna tour is top grosser of 2012

It would appear that more people paid to see Madonna live in 2012 than paid to see Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga or anyone else. Granted, I found Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance more entertaining than expected (put another way: I was able to sit through it), but putting on a decent show during the bathroom-break segment of one of the most-watched events ever televised doesn’t explain how an artist who hasn’t been musically relevant since at least the mid-1990s was able to make more money last year than any other big-name touring act. Seriously, how do you explain such a thing? It’s like coming face-to-face with Cthulhu—I simply cannot wrap my head around such a concept.

1. Rush to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Pigs have taken flight. The damned are ice-skating in Hell. The Canadian progressive-rock trio Rush (about whom I’ve written before) are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Well, almost. They’ll be inducted into the 2013 class, along with Donna Summer, Heart, Randy Newman, Albert King and Public Enemy.

News of the band’s acceptance into the Hall of Fame sparked a predictable eruption of ecstatic tweets, posts and exclamations from diehard fans, who’ve long seen the band’s dismissal by the Hall (as well as much of the rock-critic establishment and, to their eyes, society as a whole) as an injustice somewhere between Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment and the seasonal availability of the McRib. I’ve never lost any sleep over the band’s snubbing by the Hall (it’s a private entity and entitled to its own criteria as to membership), and in fact I’d long ago come not only to accept it but to embrace it. Rush’s status as a dark horse, reviled and rejected by the mainstream, was to me a sign that the universe was still adhering to natural laws. All was as it should be.

Because the dirty little not-so-secret truth about Rush fans is that their appreciation for the band and its music is enhanced by its outsider status. Sure, you may be drawn in by the squirrelly time signatures, the intricate instrumental interplay, the Herculean musicianship and the crunchy guitar chords, but you stay for the lyrical shout-outs to outcasts and misfits, the themes of self-determination and thinking for yourself. Which is to say: Rush’s appeal is most keenly felt by outsiders, by the misunderstood, the loners and thinkers—the kids who get picked on in the schoolyard, or are shunned for being not just different but smart and sensitive. It’s not a stretch to say that Rush fans have taken the band’s lack of acknowledgment—as personified by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—personally, because to discount the band is to continue to discount them. And by extension, the band’s acceptance into the pantheon of rock royalty (however arbitrary) amounts to an acceptance of the fans themselves. Love Rush, love me.

But it’s gotten harder and harder to nurse that grudge against the band’s detractors in recent years, as Rush has produced some of the most vibrant and vital music of its long career. 2007’s Snakes and Arrows was musically expansive and yet disarmingly accessible, and 2012’s concept album Clockwork Angels is even more adventurous, and serves as a high-water mark. The trio’s mainstream profile has been raised recently as well, thanks to an appearance on The Colbert Report and in the movie I Love You, Man, as well as the engaging 2010 documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage. In fact, one can look at Rush’s Hall of Fame induction either as the icing on the cake of mainstream recognition, or as a particularly sweet instance of bandwagon-jumping.

Either way, it’s a nice honor for a band facing the tail end of its career. Drummer Neil Peart is 60, and guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/singer Geddy Lee aren’t far behind. The Atlanta stop on the current Clockwork Angels Tour showed Lee, in particular, feeling the strain of advancing years and a heavy touring schedule, and it’s not a stretch to imagine the band curtailing its ambitious road work significantly—possibly with a final farewell jaunt, affording the faithful one last opportunity to put aside the alienation and get on with the fascination, to catch the mystery and catch the drift.

In the meantime, on April 13 in Los Angeles, Rush will officially join Elvis Presley, Smokey Robinson, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Van Morrison, the Eagles, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper and Neil Diamond in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And if that’s not a sign of the end times, what is?

Tony was one of my best friends in high school. When his parents kicked him out of the house, which was often, I let him sleep on my bedroom floor without telling my parents. When I lost my virginity to a woman 12 years my senior, it was Tony who helped engineer the whole thing, borrowed my car to take all of our friends home from the party at her house, and slept in my car in her driveway the next morning.

I moved to Atlanta 11 years ago, and we haven’t been really close for far longer than that. Word is Tony’s been having a hard time of late. Friends who have seen him describe a stranger: aggressive, divorced, struggling with substance abuse.

So on my trips home to New Orleans, I’ve made a point of seeking him out. I asked friends for updates. I took trips down to Jackson Square, where he used to make a living painting portraits of tourists, asking the other artists if they’d seen him.

Last weekend, I heard from a friend who finally ran into him at a comic book convention.

Tony told him that he’s been purposely avoiding his friends to stay off the government’s radar, and gave the impression he has no interest in reconnecting with anyone from his past. He pays cash for everything to avoid a paper trail. He never checks his email, and if he’d known a friend of his was going to be at the convention, he probably wouldn’t have gone (but, you know, no offense).

I found myself taking this news personally. I know it’s not my fault my friend is living off the grid and is probably fashioning tinfoil hats to keep from falling prey to NASA’s mind-control lasers. Friendship is a two-way street, and Tony has made no more effort to keep in touch with me than I’ve made to keep in touch with him.

The important thing, I remind myself, is that I’ve made the effort—or tried to. Regardless, I’m left feeling profoundly sad, as if I’m somehow culpable.

And that makes me think of others I may have hurt through my own inaction.

Like Mandy*.

Mandy transferred to my high school sometime during junior year. Like many of my friends in Speech and Debate, she was different from the other kids, and found kindred spirits in our group of self-proclaimed outcasts.

For whatever reason, she developed a crush on me. I told her I was pining for someone else, which wasn’t really true, and I began avoiding her. Looking back on it now, I felt her need, her yearning for acceptance and approval and affection, like a lead yoke on my shoulders. The commitment, the responsibility felt like too much.

Unfortunately, Mandy was more troubled than any of us knew. She ran away from home not too long after that, and none of us ever saw her again.

I’m not vain enough to think that it was my lack of interest that sent Mandy packing, but I do wonder if I could have done something to prevent it. If I could have been nicer, if I could have listened and talked more. And hell, maybe I could have given it a shot. Two lonely souls finding solace in one another amidst the hell of high school—would that really have been so bad?

Really, ladies?

It’s not as if I was drowning in female attention. I kissed fewer girls in four years of high school than John Mayer does during lunch. In fact, it wasn’t until years later that I learned about the girls who liked me—in the you know, liked me sense—but whose affections I’d never had a clue about. You want to talk about regret? The experiences you missed out on because you were afraid are one thing. The makeout sessions you never had because you were too fucking obtuse to know when you were being flirted with—those are the ones that really sting.

Foremost among these was Becky, a tall, milk-skinned brunette who looked like a cheerleader. The very first time I saw her, I shed a tear, while an imp cracked open my chest and punched the words DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT into my heart with a staple gun.

Becky would visit my Speech and Debate class during lunch with her friend Michelle, who would often make disparaging remarks about my appearance while Becky turned a gorgeous shade of pink and said nothing. It was only years later that my friends informed me that this was a kind of fucked up Cyrano de Bergerac scenario.

Upon learning this, well into my twenties, I cried for a week and a half.

Becky had moved on by the time I met Vicky. Vicky’s skin was even paler than Becky’s, she had more curves than the Mississippi River, and she was a redhead (my kryptonite). On top of that, she had a kind of slurry laugh that suggested either slight mental retardation or the recent consumption of alcohol. Or both.

And oh, man, her eyes. Vicki’s eyes danced with mischief. It was a gaze that took your measure and issued an invitation, that hinted at something darker, like Lauren Bacall’s come-on to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Kevin? You just put your lips together and … blow.”

Side note: I regret that I never learned to whistle.

It was Tony who told me, years later, that Vicky had harbored a serious crush on me.

“What?” I shouted. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Hey,” he said. “If I couldn’t have her, no one could.”

You know, I’m starting to regret Tony’s absence a little less.

*Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Performed at Naked City, Dec. 6, 2012.

Editor’s Note: The following text is a lecture on tranquilizers written and performed for Syllabus: Animal Husbandry on Wednesday, Sept. 26. Syllabus is an offshoot of Write Club Atlanta in which six guest “professors” each present a seven-minute “class” on an assigned topic relating to that month’s major, which is chosen by the winner of the previous month’s event. (This month’s professors had the mischievous mind of Jackson Pearce to thank for Animal Husbandry.)

Good evening, class. I’ve been asked to address you tonight on the subject of tranquilizers, especially as they apply to the practice of animal husbandry. As it happens, my family history makes me uniquely qualified to speak on this topic.

Many of you are no doubt familiar with the work of my great-great-grandfather Alphonse Moreau—as immortalized by H.G. Wells in his 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, a loosely fictionalized account of my ancestor’s horrific experiments.

Alphonse was a renowned physiologist consumed with the idea of transcending his own animal nature to become the perfect human. Toward that end, he performed experimental surgery on wild animals, creating a society of beast-men struggling to shed their bestial ways.

My Uncle Lafayette Moreau was obsessed with my great-great-grandfather’s work, and decided to follow in his footsteps. But lacking the resources and scientific know-how required to conduct genetic experiments, he was at something of a loss as to how to proceed.

And then, in 1987, he had an epiphany.

For those of you too young to remember, 1987 was the year Def Leppard released their multi-platinum album Hysteria.

Specifically, I’d like to draw your attention to the second single from that album, “Animal,” which contains this chorus:

“I got-ta feel it in my blood, whoa oh
I need your touch don’t need your love, whoa oh
And I want
And I need
And I lust.
Animal.”

In those timeless words, my uncle found his life’s calling.

I read to you now from his research journal:

“It is not our animal natures that inhibit us from greatness, but rather our human selves. The ideal state is not to be found in the banishment of our baser instincts, but by embracing them. And the only way to achieve that Nirvana, it is now clear, lies in the psychic and physical communion of man and beast.”

And so my uncle became a docent at Zoo Atlanta, to gain access to his subjects, and also became a self-taught expert on the subject of animal tranquilizers.

The use of tranquilizers in the breeding and mating of animals is not new. They’ve been used to reduce stress, and to prevent aggressive behaviors. But there’s no record of them being used to make animals open to sexual overtures—especially from a pasty human with male pattern baldness and an ill-considered RATT tattoo scrawled across his chest.

My uncle tried everything.

• Anxiolytics, or anti-anxiety agents.
• Neuroleptics, also known as antipsychotics—the hard stuff.
• Telazol, used to tranquilize large mammals such as bison and polar bears.
• Ketamine, also known as Special K on the streets.

But Uncle Lafayette was not a licensed medical professional. And so he found himself, in no particular order, mauled, mangled,  impaled, clawed, gouged, gored and, in one particularly gruesome and overly detailed account, sexually assaulted.

"You want a piece of this?"

By an ocelot.

It was after this last incident that my uncle stumbled upon the answer to his dilemma. Laid up on the couch, shot full of black-market phenobarbital, with all six seasons of The Nanny streaming on Netflix and a bag of Cheetos in his lap, he drifted in and out of consciousness for days, until he experienced what felt like an unbelievably sloppy but touchingly affectionate blowjob. He awoke to find his beloved Chocolate lab, Pudding, lapping up the fine orange Cheeto powder off of his crotch.

The solution had been under his nose the while time. If he was going to become one with an animal, what better candidate than man’s best friend?

Unfortunately, dear old Pudding proved no more receptive to his sexual advances than had the population of Zoo Atlanta. My uncle tried a variety of drugs—selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, beta-blockers, Dramamine … even Ibuprofen. But, as he wrote, “While these have had a marked effect on Pudding’s general temperament, they do nothing to lessen her anxiety when I attempt to mount her.”

Two days after that journal entry, Pudding dug a hole under the fence and escaped, never to be seen again. Uncle Lafayette gave up his research soon afterward, and within six months died of internal injuries sustained during the aforementioned ocelot assault.

I thought that would be the end of these sordid experiments. But like my uncle before me, I’d become hooked—transfixed. I was convinced that his goal was not only worthwhile, but imminently attainable. After all, if the point was to free oneself from the burdens of human thought, then that by extension meant that the ideal partner would be one who was freed from consciousness—and, preferably, control over his or her motor functions.

You can find a number of suitable depressants in any bar in Atlanta: not just alcohol, but cannabis, Codeine, Oxycontin, Barbiturates, muscle relaxants, even antihistamines. But I would need something more assured of success.

The Rohypnol was surprisingly easy to obtain.

I walked into the Corner Pub that night, selected an attractive female, and engaged her in conversation.

But months of deep immersion in my uncle’s journals had left me so scarred, filled with images of ocelot-on-man action, that by now I was mainlining whatever I could get my hands on:

Cymbalta. Klonopin. Ativan. Paxil. Serax. Luvox. If there was a drug named after a character or a planet from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Farscape, I was taking it.

As a result, my hands were shakier than an NFL replacement referee’s judgment as I attempted to drop the tablets into my intended target’s drink.

You can probably guess what happened next.

I awoke in a jail cell, where for the next several weeks I engaged in sex that was neither dependent on tranquilizers nor altogether voluntary on my part, with an inmate who appointed himself my husband.

Not this guy.

I don’t know his name, but the other inmates called him Animal.

Class dismissed.

And as has so often been the case in our recent history, that unity was short-lived.

Whenever we’re confronted with a terrible tragedy, from the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School to the multiple attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we come together long enough to mourn, to shake our heads at the scale of the catastrophe. And then, inevitably, we begin to conscript it for our own ends.

Less than 24 hours after the slaughter at a Colorado screening of The Dark Knight Rises, it was business as usual on the Internet, with gun-control proponents and big-government opponents alike attempting to fit the heart-wrenching events of that night into their own political narratives. And, predictably, this cynical co-opting of the dead and the wounded has had little effect: a new national poll shows that public opinion on gun control remains unchanged following the killings in Aurora.

Nor have too many minds likely been changed in the current uproar over remarks made by Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy. Those who flocked to the chain’s locations on Aug. 1 to show their support for Cathy’s First Amendment rights are conditioned to react a certain way when wealthy, powerful figures with conservative political and religious views are criticized, and no arguments about the “rights” of the aggrieved party are ever going to sway them. If the Chick-fil-A brouhaha has managed to accomplish anything, it’s been to wipe the Aurora killings out of the public consciousness.

The people who entered that movie theater two weeks ago, with no greater desire than to enjoy a few hours of entertainment, deserve better than to become pawns in an ongoing game of political one-upmanship. And they certainly deserve a hell of a lot better than to be forgotten in the rush to the next battle on the ever-shifting front lines of a culture war. They deserve a real effort to try to prevent such a senseless thing from happening again—not just from our elected leaders, but from all of us.

Does there need to be a rational, intelligent conversation about gun legislation? No doubt. How much of a difference would such a dialogue make? It’s impossible to say. No matter how many laws we write, how many guns we confiscate or how many metal detectors we erect outside of movie theaters, we will never be able to stop madmen from attaining weapons and using them to inflict violence on others. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to take reasonable steps to mitigate the odds of such an occurrence.

The same holds true for the sickness inside James Holmes, the alleged shooter. As of this writing, we’re no closer to understanding what drove him to act as he did. We don’t know what form of mental illness got him in its grip and refused to let go. We’ll never know whether therapy or even a measure of sympathy could have prevented his actions. We can (and should) have a serious discussion about mental health care, and whether mental or emotional issues should be part of the background check run on those who buy guns.

But policy discussions, however necessary, take time, and the issues at hand are ultimately decided in arenas removed from our everyday lives. So what can we do?

We can’t go back and stop Holmes from committing such a heinous act. But we can exert some control over the way we treat others, and ourselves.

So many of our daily interactions are driven by our fight-or-flight reflexes that we barely even register the effects of our behavior. The smallest, most insignificant encounter becomes part of a protracted us-vs.-them struggle. We honk our horns at drivers who take an extra couple of seconds to hit the gas when the light turns green. We hurl insults at those who subscribe to different political beliefs. We castigate strangers who had the audacity to be born with a different skin color. We question the morality of those whose unpardonable “sin” is to fall in love with someone of the “wrong” gender.

We latch onto the things that separate us. But we can choose to act differently.

That choice can be as simple as electing not to shout obscenities at the cyclist whose perfectly legal right to occupy the same road as you poses a temporary impediment to your need to speed. We can choose to show empathy and mercy and forgiveness. We can choose to forge more links between human beings, rather than to sever them.

And we can decide to show that same compassion to ourselves. All of us have felt the grip of envy, resentment or hatred like a vise upon our hearts. That behavior can also be changed by conscious choice. Bury a hatchet. Let go of a grudge. Forgive a slight. Make peace with someone who’s wronged you. Or even better, ask for the forgiveness of someone who has reason to believe you have wronged them.

Believe me, I’m acutely aware of how sappy and naïve this must sound. I’ve spent much of my life scoffing at such simplistic creeds as “All you need is love” and bumper-sticker sentiments like “Commit random acts of kindness.” I’m not suggesting we all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” and all negativity and evil will be banished from the world forever.

But I am saying that somewhere along the way, James Holmes fell victim to a cancer in his soul that convinced him that the lives of others have no worth. Maybe it’s been a part of him since birth, and maybe it’s the culmination of a series of setbacks and frustrations that pushed him over the edge.

Either way, the darkness won out. And the best way I know to honor Holmes’ victims, to give their deaths some small sliver of meaning, is to fight against that darkness, in ourselves and in others. To take a step back instead of forming a fist.

Maybe, in that small way, we can continue to stand united.