Shame: Packaged In 60 Minute Intervals

Me: Funny, you rarely see Asian men with white girls.
Wife: That’s because they don’t treat their women properly.
Me: (chuckling) Now there’s an interesting cultural theory.
Wife: (quick retort) It’s true.
Me: (long pause) I think you need your own blog.

Cutie that she is, my wife has a vigorous jones for C-grade horror flicks looped incessantly on the SciFi network. Yes, the SciFi network, bastion of giant attacking tomatoes, mutated rodents, extra-terrestrial viruses, and reruns of Stargate SG-1 (starring a tidily mullet-less MacGyver). And while microwaving an oil tanker’s worth of Orville Redenbacher Ultimate Butter for the special encore of “Re-Animator” isn’t on my bucket list, I’ll concede to some guilty pleasures on the tube. Rain or shine, I crave heaps of VH1’s “I Love The…” decade-by-decade orgasm of music and fads, illustrated by a cast of unfunny hacks and some truly amusing comics. The music documentary, regardless of artist, is the crack pipe squirreled beneath my boxer shorts, the weasel dust hidden in the sock drawer. Somehow I know I should refuse, should Just Say No; but more often than not my discipline explodes, brains running onto the floor as cultural pundits expound on the David Lee Roth scissor-kick. Admittedly, VH1 rides a different brainwave from National Geographic or BBC America, but at least I’m not cruising the Thirty Mile Zone nightly, or absorbing paternity tests on Maury, fist buried in a bag of pork rinds. If Viacom thugs insist on senseless paeans to Simon LeBon, I’ll swallow that pill preparing for another descent down the manhole of synth-laden debauchery. Hard and happy. Big dumb grin on my face.

Shamefully, I’m the guy glued to a Bay City Rollers biopic like a catatonic savant while half the world bakes on the beach. And you, when you’re finally dragging in that surfboard and rolling up the blanket – freshly bronzed skin, hearty complexion, lazy feeling of contentment soaking into every pore – I’m burying my face in the pillow, choking back tears as I tremble. Because I hate the Bay City Rollers. Everyone does.