By Max Burbank
I was eleven when it ruined
my life. I’m scarred now, tainted and I’ll never get clean. You’ve seen
me. I’m that guy at work who looks like he got slapped on the back while
reading a Dear John letter and his face froze that way; The Joe who’s
most cherished secret dream is to be a fact checker for “E! True Hollywood
Story”; That friend who when someone says, “I know, lets fix him up
with Joanie” you kind of go “Nnnnn…” and you don’t know why but you’re
sure you’re right.
See, around the time Wendy
Marvin and Wonderdog first started chumming with the Superfriends, there
was this comet that was going to pass near Earth, and it was going to
be BIG. Extra Bad Ass Funky Big, as big as a harvest moon, her tail
would stretch across a quarter of the night sky and they called her
Kahoutek! For months I trembled in a perpetual state of what I later
learned was arousal. Then the astronomers abruptly changed their minds,
reevaluated their findings just a scootch and decided that as opposed
to the biblical marvel heretofore forecast Kahoutek would instead be
basically invisible to the naked eye.
And no one killed them!
No raving mob with torches dragged them through the streets; not one
single soul even tried to bind them with wet rawhide beneath the burning
desert sun!
And hasn’t that been the
pattern of our lives, we children of the Shitty Comet? Professor Kahoutek
taught us early on the basic truth; life is a Big Rip. Do you remember
“Star Trek the Motion Picture?” Particularly the six hour scene where
a Swollen Scotty pilots Kirk to the enterprise? That look on Shatner’s
chubby puss, like a pervert leering through a schoolyard fence? Or the
precise moment you realized the whole damn movie was just a rehash of
the ‘Nomad’ episode? When the Moody Blues got back together I should
have known they’d be repulsive tummy tucked Boomers, but who could have
possibly guessed their new music would be so totally, irredeemably,
undeniably bad?! Or that such badness could open a time warp forcing
me to realize they’d never been what you’d call ‘good’ to begin with?
Or that they would disprove the existence of loving God by STILL BEING
AROUND, EVEN NOW, making PBS pledge week even more intolerable!
But that’s how you tell
a true Kahoutek Baby. We never learn. Rats in cages get the picture
far more rapidly than we do. Like those inflatable clown punching toys,
we slam the canvas only to bounce right back up, a stupid ‘punch me
again’ grin lathered across our moronic mugs! Brady reunions with a
fake Jan! Shouldn’t that have taught us?! No promised sequel to Bucaroo
Bonsai! How much must we bear before the truth sinks in? Gary Truedeau
came back from hiatus worse than the clone the Beatles got after Paul
died! (Well, up until the ‘Ebony and Ivory’ period, anyway. ‘The Gosh
Darn Girl is Mine’. Yeah. Nothing like watching a pedophile and a senior
citizen mix it up over a dame. God Bless MTV.)
So we knew, didn’t we? I
mean, you felt it coming, didn’t you? You could smell the tepid, soulless,
wash of Episode One long before it soaked you, right? OF COURSE NOT!
YOU’RE A CHILD OF KAHOUTEK! YOU ALLOWED YOURSELF TO HOPE! All right,
okay, hope is allowed, hope is what makes us human, isn’t it. But… George…
Jar Jar Binks? Jar Jar BINKS? JAR… JAR… BINKS!? By what right do you
thrust that steaming, rubbery bastard offspring of Steppin Fetchit and
a TOAD upon loyal fans? I made elaborate plans to travel to Skywalker
Ranch and immolate myself, but in the end I called in sick to work,
stayed up all night watching TV Land and ate six pints of Ben and Jerry’s
Phish Food.
I’m finally getting callused,
though. When I learned Chris Claremont would once more write the core
X-men books, I was as devoid of emotion as Jake Loyd . And I was right
to protect myself. What has the greatest X-men scribe given the faithful?
Plane crashes and super villain extras. I mean, if comics were real
and you knew the X-men, would you get on a plane with any of them? How
many times do these poor bastards have to walk away from the burning
remains of a Blackbird (or space shuttle or space ship or orbital, you
get my drift) before they start taking the bus? And what’s the deal
on Thunderbird that he bought the farm the first time he flew the friendly
skies, when every other mutant with an X on ‘em has walked out of the
wreckage about eleventy-billion times? And ill-defined super villain
henchmen. Did we need more, honestly? I mean, didn’t we have forty thousand
or so at last count, almost all of whom are assumedly unemployed at
the moment? And their names, sweet Christ, their names! It’s as if someone
snuck up behind Claremont, sawed his skull off, scooped out his brains
and poured in Rob Liefelds! Lament? Dirge? Requiem? Bloody Bess? Big
Casino? The Sea Dogs? The SEA DOGS?! Check me on this, I may be wrong,
but didn’t Sea Dog used to crew for Captain Crunch way back, oh, I don’t
know, oh, lets see, when was it, around the time of … KAHOUTEK?!?
