Shut Your Piehole

A review from Rassles, who I for one fucking love.


Disclaimer: It is four o’clock in the morning right now. I just got home from the Watchmen premiere, and I’m predictably pleased and provoked. And pooped. So Doug, I want to apologize that you’re not getting the sassiest review. But I’m not really that sorry, because you’ve been incessantly poking people in the paunch to pull this review out of their pockets, and that gets old.

I am one alliterate asshat right now.

For the record, I just did that thing where someone clears her throat for effect, in this case to cue the commencement of the review, and I don’t know how to spell it.

About a year ago, during one of the many times in my life I ran out of money for a week or two, a couple of friends and I decided that we were going to have good, old fashioned sober fun, junior high-style.

So we rode our bikes over to 7-11 and bought some Slurpees (total lie, we drove) and headed out onto the mean streets of Chicago, armed with Sharpees and a stack of stolen napkins, hunting douchebaggy cars.

Lexus in an alley? “Behind you.”

BMW by the lake? “Open your trunk.”

Maybe not the cleverest quips, or the dirtiest, but it really wasn’t that kind of night. This was about entertaining ourselves. There were Venn Diagrams and flow charts and “sorry about your headlight.” People would stare at us with our Big Gulps, coeds in their late twenties, running around cars and giggling like sixth graders, leaving napkins under windshield wipers.

To be clear, Doug does not write like a sixth grader. It’s that I’m almost ashamed at enjoying some of his stuff, because ideally I want in-the-know wit and a grand nexus of faint metaphor and the spirit of chuckles amidst the blood and the soul and the fists. I want fucking brilliance, and now I’m giggling because he said “piehole,” which is a much greater word, I think, than people realize.

I’ll bet Doug’s family and friends get a big fat kick out of his blog, because I’m sure it reads exactly how he speaks. To a stranger however, it looks like you’re having a blast, but I really like another kind of fun.

Not the biggest fan of the snarkyfauxnewscommentary. Snarkyfauxnewscommentary is fucking tired and basically fucking never ever ever fucking interesting, unless a writer either (a) is the first to comment on whatever news issue, or (b) dexterously weaves it into a personal experience. And there’s a lot of that crap in here, without necessarily following (a) or (b). Frankly, I just skipped reading them after the first thirty-seven.

His strongest posts relate to his family. Doug’s wife sounds like one good woman. This is good fun. Nearly always, though, I hit an interesting story that you NEED TO EDIT. This is a good dialogue buried in introductory dogshit. Take out the first seven paragraphs. They are completely unnecessary. Move a couple key sentences and integrate them into the post later on. Because really, which sentence is a better opener:

“Just so she's not a stripper or something…” my lovely wife joked, because she has a wonderful sense of humor.

All 3 of our children are now over 18 years of age.

Yeah.

We all know that Doug is an avid defender of Humor-Blogs, the fucking According to Jim of the blog world. So his earlier posts end with Humor-Blogs self-pluggery, but within the past couple months they’ve ripened into just-the-tip-just-to-see-how-it-feels quips. Still there, reminding you that no matter what he’s gonna stick it where he wants, but he’s not being a hoodrat about it. It’s nearly charming.

You get a shiny single star. But stick around. Edit. Talk about your Lovely Wife more, and your son that dates the stripper. That’s good shit.