pop-culture for the people

Right now, I am having a much-deserved beer after completing an exhilaratingly painful and hellish nightmare, which was actually not without some rewards. I feel great.

First off, let me say this is most-likely my last article for MVSR for a variety of reasons. I really can’t speculate on whether I’ll be back at it again soon, because I have a lot of tough decisions to make in the near future possibly putting myself out of the reach of the good ol’ porn and videogame refuge that is the Internet.

With that said, let me take you down a long and complicated review of the 24 Marathon on FX. Quite possibly, this has been one of the longest days of my life.

12:00am
Flipping through the channels on a rare occasion when I have power over the remote (usually lodged seven feet up my old sister’s ass crack, figuratively, I hope), I come to notice that the Marathon has just begun.

“No one can fucking stay up for 24 hours and watch this whole thing!” I shout. “It’s utter poppycock! Poppcock, I say!”

“No! You’re not going to stay up and watch that stupid show! It’s stupid! And it hurts my head with its abundance of characters and slow-winding plot! Please change it back to the E! Channel before my brain is painfully shocked into working again!” my sister complains.

Ah, but the allure of a 24 Marathon is too much for me. I start thinking of who the perfect person would be to attempt such a thing. He’d have to have intense mental fortitude, coupled with a near critical lapse in common sense. He’d have to have little to no desire to shower, eat, drink, or accomplish anything that could be remotely construed as work. And suddenly, I began to feel a ray of blue light cast down upon me from the heavens… sure, it could have been moonlight through that hole in the roof my father attempted to fix last month, but I’m sure it was some kind of celestial force telling me I was the chosen one. If there’s one person alive intensely pathetic enough to make it through a 24 hour TV marathon, it was I, Scott “Why Do I Bother?” Hazzard.

1:00
After the first episode of 24, my sister had been felled by the suffocating, dismal powers of the dark, bluish mood lighting in just about every scene. She completed her own little marathon of 8 hours straight on free Shockwave games, and was in no mood to sit up watching something that didn’t include moving colored blocks and zapping noises. As a side note, I hate shockwave games, they’re designed specifically to waste time and often include advertisements for fruit flavored candies or motor oil. Since I don’t drive and I don’t eat, I find the commercial assault about as tolerable as drunks singing along to Margarita Ville in bars aptly named “Margarita Ville”.

24 stars Keiffer Southerland (Jack Bauher) as a swank lady’s man, who also dabbles in counter terrorism, reckless gunplay, and predictably idiotic parenting. The back-story is he’s put his wife on pause for a month back in January so he could bang his subordinate at work. I sincerely think that I will have made it in life when somebody sleeps with me to get ahead. Frankly, that’d be my dream come true. However, if some girl tried that now, the only thing she’d be getting ahead in the unemployment line in Auburn, and since the only jobs available in this town are “Hot Molten Ash Shoveler” and “Urinal Cake Taste Tester,” she can be my guest.

2:00
The show continues as Jack Bauher uncovers a conspiracy to kill the first black presidential candidate. To my surprise, apparently none of my redneck relatives are involved. Of course, I don’t think seven flannel-clad Neanderthals with beer cans and shotguns could barely even plan a picnic let alone a full-blown conspiracy. So, you’ve got to think that Jack is dealing with some heavy-duty foreigners. Since there’s probably some math involved, I suspect at least one Asian kid, possibly several Russians, who will shoot anything for a pint of Poland Springs Vodka, and a couple of Germans, who are, let’s face it, evil fuckers that spend all their time acting like their better than us and constantly hounding air-headed American celebrities to wear their shitty designer fashions. And let’s face it, no other group of people in the history of the world has ever sounded more maniacally ingenious over a cellular phone than the Germans. At one point they may have been involved with some kind of plot to piss off or at least mildly annoy Jewish folk, but I’ll have to check my history books on that. My white-trash, redneck public school sometimes left me with the wrong impression about other races and cultures. Boy was I shocked to find out that Native Americans apparently lived all over this country, filling the land with joyous casinos and cheap cigarettes from sea to shiny sea, and John Wayne had to got fuck it all up with his damn Manifest Pox Romananican Destiny bullshit.

Anyway, in the meantime, Jack’s wife is trying to find their stupid-ass daughter who snuck out at night to meet a couple of college boys for a drunken bash in a furniture store. That’s right, it’s time for some sweet love in the Stickely Show room or else the boys will be floggin’ the dolphin alone in The Raymore and Flanagan.

Now, I have a serious problem with teenagers on television, because it confuses me. They usually dress in tight revealing clothes, which make them pretty much attractive, but they also seem to 15-years-old, which makes them pretty much illegal. Of course, one could speculate that the actresses playing the teenagers are actually older than their characters on the show. Since that is only mere speculation, I will refrain from mentioning that Jack Bauher’s daughter has nice tits and a prize-winning ass. It just wouldn’t be the prudent thing to discuss, especially in a classy forum like MVSR.

3:00
Jack begins to discover that the conspiracy and the disappearance of his daughter are linked. The conspiracy part involves lots of dark corridors, arguments between people in suits, and snipers whose faces are never revealed. In fact, if you want to be a sniper, there’s a whole requisite FYS: Lurking in Everyday Life, class you must take to complete your major. This course is also useful if you want to switch your major from Sniping to Axe Murdering… or else, upon dropping out of school, you might be able to impress your friends with your ability to lurk inconspicuously in an effort to catch someone, mercifully opening up a register in Wal-Mart during the mid-day rush.

It’s a good old-fashion, high-tech cloak and dagger kind of story. Still, sometimes I wish Jack would just sprout fangs, fly through rafters, kill everyone just like in that wicked cool Haim and Feldman flick.

4:00
The plot thickens as a TV news reporter threatens presidential candidate, David Palmer. Apparently, Palmer’s son tossed his sister’s rapist out of window. Since this was not done in the state of Texas, it is not deemed “legal” and could destroy Palmer’s campaign. Palmer, having been kept out of the loop, discovers that his whole family and his pinheaded weasel of an advisor all play key roles in the cover-up.

5:00
The show gets extremely captivating with Jack Bauher going from warehouse to warehouse getting everybody he comes in contact with killed via multiple gunshot wounds. He may be nice to talk to, and the ladies love him, but if you can possibly help it, DO NOT go into an abandoned warehouse or any suspiciously lit place with Jack Bauher, because everyone, including you, will be dead, except for Jack Bauher. If I had known this fact at age 15, I would have asked him to my Junior prom in a heartbeat.

Jack breaks all kinds of rules to get his investigation going without revealing too much to possible conspirators. Jack’s “trust no one” attitude enables him to steal cars, punch cops, shoot at shadowy strangers, place long-distance phone calls on other people’s cell phones, kick suspicious or leery pregnant women down the stairs, abort dastardly, no-account fetuses at will, and a whole host of other conspicuously vigilante-esque activities. Jack trusts only Nina Meyers, his old fling, who looks hotter the less sleep you’ve had. By the end of 24, I had written her seventeen nonsensical poems professing my desire for her, and I had called the closest sounding name to hers in the phonebook about six times before the elderly man on the end of the phone actually agreed to go out with me as soon as his divorce is final.

6:00
At this point, I realize that I’m actually in for the long haul, and I’d better get myself a sandwich. During a commercial break, I made the fastest ham sandwich possible without the use of witchcraft or super-human mutant powers. Also, I broke out a liter bottle of Vanilla Coke. This may sicken some of you soda nazis who fear change or maybe spent time in the hospital on account of Crystal Pepsi, but I enjoy Vanilla Coke, because it’s only a subtle change in flavor. I like subtle changes, which is why I elected to only slightly change my underwear during the marathon.

Of course, at this time my father comes home from work and is not please to see me watching television. This is coming from a man who will mindlessly flip channels between Van Damme and Siegel movies until 6:00am every time he has the day off work.

My father’s biggest trial is finding something to do with his free time. He often surfs the Internet for six hours looking up great waterways for kayaking. He does not own a kayak. He owns a canoe. And if he’s not careful with his weight the only way he’s fitting in a kayak is if they enlarge the little opening you’re supposed to sit in to a point a which most people would then classify the vessel, “a fucking canoe!”

The day before this marathon, I asked my father to borrow the van to meet some folks in the city at about 1:30pm. Of course, my father says he’d like to drive, because he’s afraid a bird will shit on his van without his knowledge. I say that I’d rather not go if I can’t go myself, because at some point I became damn tired of the enforced confines of over-protective and clinically insane parents. And also, I wish to spare my father any dealings with my crass acquaintances, who think falling off ladders and breaking their ribs is about the most fun you can have on a Sunday afternoon… I would have to agree since there’s not much else going on in this town.

To make a long side note short, my father objects until five minutes before I have to leave when he gets to pretend he’s Saint Happy Guy and allows me to leave on my own. And I would be grateful, except he does this shit all the time and usually leaves me rushing to get out the door to get some place. I absolutely hate, hate, hate, despise, hate, and hate being at the mercy of his pathetically predictable and excruciatingly paranoid judgment. So, it’s no surprise he would have to throw a wrench into the gears of my dream of watching the entire 24 Marathon.

He says, “You’d better get to bed, son. Tomorrow, you have to help me mow the lawn.” The amount of work he spends on our lawn, I’m surprised he knows we’ve got one. If we had crop circles suddenly in our lawn by father would probably notice them in a few years at which point they’d be vaguely visible and he could conceivably blame them on centrally located dog piss. Yet, I must retire to bed to mow the lawn? We’ll see about this old man! You will not defeat me twice in two days with your baboonery! I have plans for you.

7:00
I don’t remember exactly what was going on in the plot at this point, but the guy who played “The Sentinel” on the “hit” UPN series ends up driving around with Jack’s wife to find both their missing daughters. One might wonder how the Sentinel could be unaware of his daughter’s locations given his heightened senses. And the amount of stupid perfume and makeup teenagers wear these days, how could he not sniff out their dumb asses? I suspected foul play from the start.

As it turns out, The Sentinel is actually an evil agent sent to track the girls and kidnap Jack’s wife. Jack finds the body of the guy The Sentinel is pretending to be in the trunk of some late 90s model car. The body no doubt depreciates the value of the car making resell quite a tricky thing, especially compounded with the cost of clean up. It is unlikely that the car will see use in the near future, but will most likely be sold to my father who will drive it into pieces and let the shell rot and fester on our lawn after many ill-fated attempts to fix it himself with a tool kick so widely dispersed across the household it couldn’t be put back together even by one of those screwed up autistic kids who can do nothing except put together one-billion piece puzzles in 90 seconds. Needless to say, Jack and his family are feeling horror similar to what I go through every time my father says something like, “Hey! Could you get me my 6 1/8 wrench?”

8:00
Eventually, Nina and Jack discover the person who’s been leaking communications to the terrorists. The guy who had been the biggest bug up his ass finally, and unceremoniously, turns face (wrestling term for turning good, and yes, I know, I’m a dork), and helps Jack and Nina continue to uncover the conspiracy. Jack’s wife and daughter haggle with some Dawson’s Creek reject for a chance at escape.

The show is non-stopped excitement and adrenaline as Jack becomes bugged by the terrorists who plan to use him to get a gun through security at the presidential candidates annual “I’m having breakfast with the working man, because I want them to smile when I anally rape them with new hirer taxes and interest rates” meeting with labor leaders. They threaten jack to destroy secret information and aid the assassin.

This is all really cool, edge-of-your seat stuff. The European fashion model the terrorists hire to kill David Palmer is really convincingly cunning and evil, as all European fashion models are. He got a stolen press-pass from a guy who got his wallet stolen after being invited to join the mile-high club. This is the same reason I didn’t want to join the Boy Scouts; besides the sex really isn’t that good, anyway.

9:00
Jack has screwed up the assassination. The terrorist leaders are pissed off, and afraid that foreign rich guys are going to cut off their penis and put them in a blender as punishment for their ineptitude. The terrorists try to regroup as Jack closes in on their location with the help of a computer expert named Milo, who’s actually the Devil from that car commercial where he threatens a guy with eternity inside a minivan… welcome to my world, loser! Further proof that my life is hell. I hate parking this stupid, fucking minivan and having to deal with the fact that my father thinks it’s more valuable than gold and easier to crush than Estelle Getty’s hipbone.

10:00
To my pleasant surprise no one has woken up to harass me. The show continues at a feverish pace and I’m on the edge of my seat, chiefly because moving to the edge of my seat prevents my ass from falling asleep on me again.

Jack abducts an alcoholic waitress and locks her up in a construction site. She is not taken by his charms and threatens to turn him in to the police. He tries to explain the conspiracy to her and her tiny brain pops like a pressured pimple on prom night. So, in her apparent dilemma she gives away his position and Jack is forced to steal several cars and run up the anytime minutes on his cell phone. In fact, the bill Jack gets from Cellular One is the only damned reason he probably works 24 hours straight. Though the amount of times he switches phones, it’d take an equation from that John Nash guy in “A Beautiful Mind” to tabulate his monthly bill.

11:00
David Palmer gets pissy with his wife, who turns out to be a self-serving bitch. This is sad, because you’re supposed to know what kind of self-serving bitch a woman is BEFORE you marry her. The idea is to know she’s a hideous succubus with the potential to devour and shit out your soul like a meatball and cheese Hot Pockett and love them for it anyway. Some guys just don’t understand women.

Anyhow, I’m probably getting really confused about what events happen in what episodes. All I can say for certain is that every episode was quality entertainment, with lots of tire-screeching actions and holy-shit-where’s-the-sniper-this-time-he-killed-everyone-but-hasn’t-messed-up-Jacks-hair-that-so-cool-in-deserves-a-luicuse-amount-of-hyphens suspense. To say that it’s gripping is not enough. To put it in perspective, I’ve been the bathroom exactly once in 24 hours on account of this show. And while I’ve held my water so long I was afraid I may never be able to go again, I still think that any permanent damage was well-worth it.

12:00
At this time my mother chooses to make her first, and most tolerable, appearance in the marathon. At this point, she crooks her finger at me and whimpers that I must go to bed. My parents control every facet of my existence, and are constantly haggling over control of my bodily functions. It starts with the sleeping and eating, but eventually they have plans to restrict my defecation to specific hours and quantities.

My mother’s appearance is brief and serves as a threat that she will some time soon go completely insane and find any way possible to make me wish I shot myself two days ago. That’s what moms are for, I guess, at least when you reach my age.

She returns to sleep to give me a chance to think over the marathon. This is the calm before the storm, I suppose. But I refuse to buckle.

At this point, I take a break from the marathon to piss off my father. Frankly, this needs to be done. He’s a mad man and he must be stopped. I decide to take a quick shower and go mow the entire lawn as fast as possible. This is no small task since my dentally challenged, redneck relatives consider owning a large plot of land to be some kind of a status symbol. Of course for what my father pays in taxes on it, he could certainly use the money to fix things like our flooded basement, our broken kitchen sink, our flaming crap-heap of a stove, our deranged, murderous washing machine… the list goes on and on.

2:00
After mowing the lawn, I return to the marathon where Jack and his family are escaping the terrorists. It’s very much like Die Hard at this point, which is very easy to watch, though not all that intelligent. At this point, my father’s short attention span is snagged by the precious allure of auto-accidents, gunfire, and explosions. Though, he doesn’t want to encourage or interrupt my viewing of the show. My father is too cowardly to play a monster heal (another geeky wrestling term for ‘total dick’) and will never have the mic skills to be a truly influential baby face (another wrestling term, please kill me). Thus, he’s stuck doing minor, annoyingly dicky things like leaning over the couch just above my head to watch over my watching of the show in case something utterly stupid happens that he can make a spitting sound of disdain at before turning in his swiveling computer chair back to his tenth daily email to my ass-tactular little sister who’s forever in his affection for her supposed love of hockey which his hinged entirely on her idea that the Pittsburgh Penguins’ mascot is tirelessly adorable. Simple daily factoids such as this make me wish I had found a way to crawl inside a microwave as a baby and nuke myself into oblivion. However, since no appliances in this house are in perfect working order, I would have probably just ended up with a headache or some lame super-power which would be easily rendered useless by my mother’s ritual afternoon self-deprecating rant about how her life is terrible and her imperfect children (especially the unemployed ones) are evidence of a celestial conspiracy involving Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and Ed McMahon to make her suffer eternally on account of her high moral fiber. Boo-fucking-Hoo!
3:00
Where was I? Oh yeah, the 24 Marathon continues with lots of gunfire, and Jack Bauher finally taking out the terrorists. However, the leaders of the group are on to plan B, C, D, or possible H, and Jack is being questioned by his own people about the unorthodox actions he took to save his family.

Making good on her threats, my mother has decided to continue ranting to herself in the kitchen. Since our house is made of paper and twigs, the rant is easily heard through the screaming tires on the red minivan Jack uses to escape the terrorists compound. I’m tough, though, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from public school, it’s how to put up with ritual verbal abuse.

Thwarted again, my psychopathic mother decided to fight me with the power of laundry. On occasions when I do not sleep or eat to her specifications my mother likes to remind me of the things I take for granted. Of course, I would agree it’s pretty lazy of me to let someone else do my laundry, but in my case, since I change my clothes almost never, I don’t think much would change if the option of free laundry were suddenly cut off. Since I require a clean shirt about twice every month, and I do have more than one, I don’t see what power she thinks she wields with this laundry thing.

So, I wait it out while she snaps the wrinkles out of pairs on jeans like she’s threateningly cracking a whip. All of this is done in front of the television during the marathon, and the folded clothes are piled over and around my head on the top of the couch. My mother attempts to thwart me by confining her activities to a small proximity in order to makes sure I know how visibly upset she is. Clever.
Of course, it’s really clever when she grabs the oldest and first rag she can find and starts dusting the home entertainment center, which hasn’t seen a drop of Pledge since the late 1980s. She dusts the case, the VCR, the TV screen, and every inane trinket on top of the thing including tiny stuffed animal and plastic Mc Donald’s toys and several things that in no one’s right mind should ever be considered for dusting.

Does this stop me? No. I’m a god. I will not be put down by people just because they’re more bored than I am. To give you an example, my father is upset because he can’t follow the plot of 24, and decides to instead…. And I’m not making this up… WATCH THE COMPUTER DEFRAGMENT… that’s right, he sets up the defrag and he sits in the chair for an hour and a half and watches the screen. This is a sign that I am not the singular sick twisted freak who lives in this happy house… I am a sane man trapped in a big bucket of crazy, and I’m clawing at the edges to get out.

The decision to watch the whole 24 Marathon was the sanest decision made by anyone in this house.

4:00
Jack Bauher is closing in on the new terrorist, and David Palmer is trying to figure out how deep the conspiracy around his son goes after his son’s psychiatrist is murdered.

In the mean time, my sister and my mother are both yelling at my father for his obsession with defragmenting the hard drive out of boredom when people could potentially be using to the Internet to post obscure news about woman’s figure skating. My sister complains that she MUST CHECK HER SITES… Of course, I don’t see what an utterly graceless person sees interesting in the flighty twirls a 12-year-old reared from birth by abusive, psychotically pushy over-achievers to attain perfection and beauty on a plain of ice in a competition which only has marginal relevance every four years at which time depending on political allegiances the event could be fixed so the only people who win are from consorting countries or from countries with enough whimpering, bitchy cry babies that they throw out metals to everyone just to shut them up. Excuse me if I don’t see the daily NECESSITY to check figure skating news or to copy that news directly from a noteworthy page on to your own pathetic geocities monstrosity.

Are we all clear on that?

My mother begins to yell at my father for his lack of computer knowledge, since he is always “trying to straighten this thing out” however he’s usually, and I will almost say, ‘always,’ the one who breaks it by overloading it with half-installed software and MP3s from Morpheus. And Morpheus, being a bored man’s haven, sees the hard drive packed, like Anna Nicole Smith into size 6 Guess jeans, with the absolute worst hits of 60s, 70s, and 80s. This is all on behalf of a man who claims the radio only plays bad rotation, yet downloads every Brooks and Dunn song you’ve ever heard.

5:00
At this point, the show is getting hard to focus on. It’s hard to figure out who the bad guys are, and Jack has abducted some banker from his limo. It’s still pretty cool, but I’m hoping the conspiracy turns out to be just a dream, and Keiffer’s still actually hanging upside-down in a vampire bat cave.

I lose it here, and decide it’s time to do some exercises and have a little nap. I don’t wake up until 11:00 for the series finale. Of course, I find out that my father has taken my place, and watched the rest of the marathon for me, meaning he has done absolutely, positively nothing all day long… not even thinking about the lawn, which was so terribly urgent at 6:00 this morning.

I dream every night of lofting a brick at him, and this is why.

11:00
The finale reveals that a longtime player is actually an evil foreign bitch. And the Presidential candidate kicks his wife to the curb. It’s a bad day for the ladies, because the loving wife, after all her painful tribulation gets shot and killed, ending the show on a down note, even though Jack catches the terrorists and kills them all deader than the career of the Electric Light Orchestra.

Do I recommend this show? Yes. It’s the most excellent thing I’ve seen on television in a long time. Do I recommend a 24-hour marathon? No. However, I would highly recommend the DVD, since you can watch as little or as much as you want. I would expect to be highly captivated by it, so set aside at least 8 hours before starting.

Do I recommend a 24 marathon in my house? No, absolutely not. In fact, never come to this house. Never visit. Never even try to visualize the pure horror of existing here. Only through extreme mental endurance and eventual decline into substance abuse could you ever hope to survive more than five hours of this without completely losing your mind.

To quote a famous evildoer, “I was once a man… once a man.”

Thanks and goodbye. We’ve got to get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do.

-Hazzard

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