New Fangled Old Stuff With Grandpa Lou: My Entourage likes Entourage

Man oh man what a week it's been. Can you believe the country we're living in where debt ceilings are nearly broken before glass ceilings? Where our generation (I assume you're all old-timey youngsters like myself) is making less than our parents when adjusted for inflation, and where morons are not only elected into office, but they can sling racial slurs at the president and no-one with any power seems to give a shit? Where our only options at the federal level are a giant douche & a turd sandwich?

Where our "progressive" president tells us that the best option for all of us is when neither political party gets what it wants and where no-one in government wants to take "credit" for turning a very simple vote into a nearly catastrophic (and still likely detrimental) debacle?!

Meanwhile, corporations in this country are gaining record profits while laying off employees, but the tea party doesn't want to extend unemployment past 26 weeks even though the jobs aren't coming back and they haven't created a single fucking job since they've been in office and meanwhile your dear old Grandpa Lou is Depression-era poor so basically what I'm saying is I'm getting hammered on a Tuesday afternoon off cheap rum and Aldi brand diet soda, contemplating ways to get rich by falling down at the grocery store. So here I am, gubmint cheese in my hand, cooking The Filthiest Hobo™ Brand Beans over a fire I set in my girlfriend's living room, fully aware it's god damn 400 degrees outside but let's be real here, we hoboes have two purposes in life:

1) To tell old-timey hobo stories to young tramps on the railways and

2) Mischief, including but not limited to methamphetamine use, identity theft and stealing pic-a-nic baskets.

…Oh also, 3) Buggery (it's just how we get down).

So I didn't just want to sit here and bitch about what's awful in this wide world, as I'm sure you are mostly aware of it, and so instead, I wanna tell you young tramps a story to take your mind off the terrible taste of these beans. To pick a topic randomly (and I did, because I've been drinking and it's 20 minutes past my deadline) let's chat briefly about celebrity. Who doesn't want to be famous? Idiots, that's who. In a world where everything seems to be falling apart at the seams, more and more of my friends are asking me if I've taken the time to watch any of the Real Housewives shows or something called "Teen Moms" which I actually had to look up because since I grew pubes a few years back I'm no longer what one would call "part of MTVs demographic." It got me wondering why my friends are so willing to waste their time on this kind of thing and my guess is that most of them are likely filled with the same malaise as I am. Whereas I dull my pain with this Bacardi I made in my neighbor's bathtub while he was gone for a week, my homies turn on their TV to go to their happy place; a place filled with sassy old hoes doing sassy old ho things, or trashy kids whose parents weren't around to explain that sticking wee-wees into other wee-wees makes babbys come out. This is what celebrity is now; just a random group of people like you and me, doing stupid shit that stupid people do, being followed around by other people like us holding inexpensive digital video cameras, and being watched by people like, well you I guess, I'm not drunk enough to watch this garbage.

Still though, being a celebrity must be amazing. If you've seen Entourage, you know that once you're famous, you and your closest friends are basically set for life, and any problem you have manages to fix itself over the span of a few half hours (except for E and Sloan's relationship woes—can't she see that he only wants to love her?!) and more often than not, you start off rich and end up wealthy. For those that don't know the difference, a dude like Entourage's Johnny Drama, played by the always lovable… uh, Matt Dillon's brother, is rich. He's a TV star and though he's had some ups and downs, I'm sure his royalty checks are more than some of you made last week. A dude like power broker Ari Gold, played by the surprisingly good if completely douchey Jeremy Piven is wealthy. The difference of course, is that Matt Dillon suffers the indignity in one episode of losing $1500 a hole at a golf tournament and the show casts him in a very sympathetic light as though he can not afford it, even though he makes more money per season of his fictional TV show than you or I will likely see this decade. Meanwhile, when Ari Gold has the bad fortune of losing the opportunity to own an NFL team, we are also supposed to sympathize with him. I was willing to look past these ridiculous plot points and keep trudging through til the series finale, for escapism's sake, right up until I watched last week's episode. I could not fucking believe that Turtle, the only chubby hetero guy on the show, lost all his baby fat this season and went from being the Fuck up glorified cab driver to the guy making a fortune selling tequila and now everyone on the show looks great and is on the path to wealth and here I am HAVING JUST EATEN A CHAIR LEG WITH SRIRACHA SAUCE ON IT FOR SUSTENANCE. I really would love to escape, HBO, and I appreciate your attempt at letting us live vicariously through your sometimes enjoyable show, but let me tell you, the world is crumbling and you're just another Nero with a fiddle at this point. I don't want to care about the lives of rich people. I want to see rich people care about the lives of the rest of us, and until that happens, your show, and them Housewife broads and ESPECIALLY the turd sandwiches on Wall Street and Capitol Hill can consume a gigantic bowl of hobo shit, which is sitting right here next to me because I'm too superstitious to use the toilet.