Mysteries Of The Brain
Back in the day, my childhood best friend Agent Weiss and I practically lived outdoors during our free time, roaming the neighborhood, gathering flowers and amusing rocks, scoping out potential fort locations, crashing our bicycles through the underbrush of various non-child-friendly neighbors, and in our travels we would occasionally run into one of our neighborhood’s three resident joggers. We could generally identify the jogger by footfall before we’d actually caught sight of him or her: the thuddump thuddump of Agent Weiss’s father, who huffed gingerly along as though he’d ingested a five-course meal only minutes before; the weary shwop shwop of Mrs. T, whose miserable facial expression suggested that she had a pack of invisible tormentors following her, periodically poking her heels with sharpened dowels as she dragged herself up and down the hills of the surrounding streets; and the dread slap (thwap) slap (thwap) of a neighborhood father of two I’ll call Long Jog Silver. Long Jog, attired in the ridiculously brief Dolphin shorts of the era, usually elected to take his exercise without benefit of a jockstrap or other means of groin-area restraint – thus, the slap of his sneaker hitting the asphalt, followed in short and gruesome order by the (thwap) of his, er, “wonderfulness” hitting his inner thigh. Upon hearing the approach of Long Jog, Agent Weiss and I did our best to scatter before having to greet him; after all, our parents hadn’t raised us to giggle openly at foolish adults, and I can’t tell you how many times we coasted away from him on our three-speeds, biting our lips. Every time, we debated whether Long Jog knew that the world could see, and hear, the sublime horror of his manhood, and every time the discussion followed the same course. “He HAS to know. How could he NOT know?” “He CAN’T know. If he knew, he’d stop, right?” “No, he knows. It’s . . . flapping. He’s got to know.” “Well, that’s my point. If he knew, he’d put a stop to the . . . flappage.” We never said anything – he had a son our age, and since Long Jog Jr. had committed himself to the annals of first-grade-humiliation history by wetting his pants during recess, we felt bad enough for the family – but every time we saw Long Jog, we wondered aloud, “What is he thinking?” In our innocence, we didn’t believe that a grown man could remain so oblivious.
I say that a lot these days while watching the news or reading editorials. I just don’t understand what goes through people’s minds. Take John Rocker (“. . . please”). When the Sports Illustrated article featuring Rocker’s virulent case of logorrhea first appeared, I couldn’t believe he’d said the things he’d said. I’ve met a few racists and bigots in my life, so unfortunately I didn’t have a problem believing the content, but I couldn’t get my head around the fact that Rocker aired his views to a tape-recorder-sporting member of the national press – how could the guy possibly have thought that constituted anything other than a horrible idea? What kind of blooming idiot says these things out loud, and then confirms them when the fact-checker calls? And after a so-called apology that we might charitably describe as “tepid,” Rocker proceeds to follow up his suspension by pitching like crap and avoiding his teammates (before his recent demotion, he’d taken to riding on – get this – the press bus on the way to out-of-town games, instead of on the bus the rest of the players ride in), but does he learn his lesson? Oh, no. No no no. Rocker does not take his medicine; Rocker does not, apparently, vow to learn from his mistake. No, Rocker sees the author of the SI article in the tunnel leading to the locker room, and he screams audible threats at the author for ten minutes. How can a voting adult have that little self-control, that feeble a grasp of how he appears to others? Does Rocker really blame the guy who wrote the article for what’s become of him? I mean, that article has to have written itself – how can Rocker believe that the blame falls on anyone besides himself? “Dear Mr. Rocker: See that thing behind you, that thing that’s sort of hoisting you? That’s your own petard, you rage-addled meatball. Signed, a guy trapped beneath one of the pillars of Stonehenge who still managed to figure that shit out. P.S.: I didn’t know where to send this, so I’ve posted it to Atlanta Braves headquarters, and I trust they’ll forward it to you care of the No-Neck Acres Hospice For The Criminally Stupid. If you can see Darryl Strawberry from the bullpen, please wave ‘hello’ for me.” What is the guy thinking?
What is Matthew Perry thinking? “I don’t have a drug problem” this, “nothing’s wrong with me” that, “intestinal flu” the other thing – evidently, he and his handlers think we still live in the bygone era when the American public believed whatever the publicity machine told us. Alas, we don’t. Never mind that we didn’t just fall off the turnip truck – even an actual turnip, recently uprooted from the patch with soil still clinging to it, would look at the evidence and snort, “‘Stomach bug,’ my rooty little ass.” We’ve watched Perry triple in size, disappear into the hospital for two weeks, and then shear the porch off of someone’s house with his car, and he may not have a drug problem, but he’s got some kind of problem, and I just don’t understand what he has to gain by denying it. I feel bad for the guy, because something has clearly gone seriously awry, but does he really think anyone believes his protests to the contrary? Come on, Matt. Not even cholera keeps a grown man in the hospital for two weeks in this day and age, and we all know it. Just admit that you ground up a handful of Dexatrim and snorted it and came to on the VIP floor of Cedars-Sinai, because the truth will come out sooner or later anyway, and then you’ll have to go on The Tonight Show and play the “Let’s Pretend I Didn’t Have A Stomach Staple The Size Of A Jersey Turnpike Rebar Inserted Into My Abdomen Instead Of Dieting Like A Normal Person” game with Jay Leno, and we’ll all wind up saying the same thing we think now, namely, “What is that guy thinking?”
I have to say, I don’t understand what any celeb is thinking when he or she trots out the old “dehydration/exhaustion” excuse for obviously drug-fueled behavior. Of course, I don’t really understand why Farrah Fawcett strung herself out on god knows what and tottered out on the Letterman stage to rewrite the dictionary definition of “out of it” in the first place, but I definitely don’t understand who she think she fooled when she blamed “exhaustion” for the debacle. If anyone had a problem with exhaustion, it’s Farrah’s dealer, who had probably received several dozen pages that day requesting yet another brick of Bolivian marching powder so that La Fawcett could “prepare” for her Playboy video. And what the hell is Whitney Houston thinking? “I’ve sung several dozen extremely annoying and over-produced ballads, so clearly, federal laws prohibiting the transfer of a controlled dangerous substance across state lines do not apply to me”? I mean, I got arrested for possession because I fired up a doob outdoors, and that’s pretty damn stupid, but if the Houston city fathers had turned the Astrodome into a giant bong, and if I’d taken a monster hit from the Astrobong, and if my brain had melted into a smoldering resin-y lump, it still wouldn’t have made me dim-witted enough to bring doobage to an airport.
But I’m not famous. I just assume that famous people would watch what they say and mind what they do; I mean, if I get hung up by airport security and I pick a fight with the security guard, nobody cares except me and the security guard, but why on earth would Diana Ross do something like that? Why would she grab L’il Kim’s boob on national TV? What is she thinking? I guess famous people really do operate under different rules. I guess they really do believe that they can bewitch us to the point that we’ll believe everything out of their mouths, and that they can appear on a talk show and eat a single Raisinet and convince us that they don’t suffer from eating disorders (hi, Calista!), and that they can blabber on about sex with their new husbands and how they fear that combustion might result from said sex . . . or something . . . to the point where any journalist with nerve endings would turn off the Dictaphone and lean across the table and say, “Look, Ms. Jolie, I know you won an Oscar and everything, but if you and Billy Bob don’t stop it with that, an entire nation is going to barf, so please take this piece of duct tape and affix it to your lips, and for god’s sake stop reading Jim Morrison’s poetry,” and that anyone over the age of five hadn’t already figured out why their husbands strayed, so they’d better go on TV and tell Barbara Walters all about it while the partially fossilized husbands in question sit contritely beside them, as if remaining faithful to Kathie Lee Gifford isn’t a Sisyphean endurance test rivaling certain scenes in The Deer Hunter – excuse me, but since when do we have to remind people that perhaps they shouldn’t start fights, starve themselves, evince symptoms of Tourette’s, and open themselves up to further ridicule? Don’t these things fall under the realm of common sense? What goes through the minds of these people?
And one more thing. You just don’t grab a woman’s breasts, or tear her clothes off, or hit her. I can’t believe men walk this earth who actually think that’s acting right. I feel certain that a degreed sociologist could explain the ins and outs of crowd psychology regarding the Central Park disgrace of a couple weekends ago, but frankly, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care how much you’ve had to drink, I don’t care how long you’ve stood out in the sun, I don’t care how many of your friends egged you on or whether I walked past you wearing nothing but an unwaxed-dental-floss bikini and a sassy grin – you touch my rack without a doctor’s note, you’ve broken the law, and you deserve to have your dick handed back to you on a plate. What in the hell were those assholes thinking? I’d really like to know. “She comes out here in a halter top, she deserves what she gets”? “We’re just kidding around – fuck her if she can’t take a joke”? “Because I can”? I’d genuinely like to hear what, if anything, passed through their minds. And I’d really like to hear what went through the minds of the police officers on duty that day, because I literally cannot imagine looking a distraught fourteen-year-old with ripped clothing and thinking, “Bitch is full of it.” I’d like to know how officers sworn to protect and serve justify these actions as protection of, or in the service of, anything but their own lazy asses. I’d like to know exactly how many cops in this city think to themselves, “White men, I’ve got their backs, but black folks and women better stay indoors.” I’d like to hear the reasoning behind putting a question on the police department’s entrance exam that reads, “Place a check in this box if you have zero compassion for the citizens who pay your salary,” and then letting in all the indolent sleazebags who mark it off. And as for the upright citizen who videotaped the whole thing instead of putting down the camera and wading in to help those women, well, we know what you were thinking, so congratulations. Your footage is all over the news, and you’re still a gutless worm.
So what’s the answer? Apparently, that people don’t think. They don’t think before they speak, they don’t think before they act, they don’t think of how their behavior might affect other people. They don’t think, period. Maybe I should ask myself what I’m thinking, bitching about an unhinged relief pitcher, caring about the narcotic and anorexic follies of celebrities, continuing to live in a wildly expensive city where the police wouldn’t file a sexual assault complaint on my behalf unless I showed up at the precinct wearing a chador. What am I thinking? What goes through my mind?
Now you know.
Pass the Crest, I feel a cavity coming on.
Celebrity “what were they thinking?” capital of the Web.
