Dear Morbidly Obese Man at the Bob Dylan Concert

Dear Morbidly Obese Man at the Bob Dylan Concert,

You are prompting a new question as you stand there jabbering away, screaming over the top of the song to your sub-moronic hipster friends:

How many beers can one cretin drink before you can call him an orangutan? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

"Dude! I love this effin' song! It's that effin song with that effin GREAT effin line, dude!"

Yes, yes, yes. Oh yes, morbidly obese man at the Bob Dylan concert. Indeed this is that song. The one with the great line. The line so famous it made Dylan a legend. It made him famous enough that even you and your drooling idiot compadres know who he is and come and spoil the show for the rest of us. It is THAT song.

Fight breaks out behind me. One man punches another in the face and they are both escorted out.

Yes, the timeless songs of Bob Dylan, recreated again before a drunken audience of belligerent slobs who aren't sure if this is a Dylan show or simply a place to get shitfaced and scream at one another.

But not all was lost. A lot of souls enjoyed things without getting out of hand. Most of us, in fact, enjoyed ourselves without ruining things. Behaved ourselves and listened instead of shouting.

"Dude! This weed is effin' killer dude!" Lights roach, inhales deeply, coughs through all 15 minutes of A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.

Well, it was general admission, after all, so what did I expect, Morbidly Obese Man at the Bob Dylan Show? I hope you had a good time, but since you aren't listening to any of the songs I can't help but wonder if you might have saved yourself the $75 admission fee and just stayed in Williamsburg with your pals and smoked up in your apartment while listening to albums for free. Or watching some reruns of Jerry Springer.

Art is a Mysterious Mistress in Deeply Symbolic Ways

Everyone in class read this story and everyone agreed it was deep and meaningful and incredibly important in Symbolic and Artistic ways. One guy read it in five minutes before class, and he had an awful lot to say about how great and ambiguous and Artistic and Groundbreaking it was.

I thought it was just a setting, not really a story, and wondered if maybe the writer was going to do something more with the characters. Because the story was about this guy who goes to the zoo and meets this girl. They talk about stuff for a little while. Then they get all romantic but then he is sad, because he thinks about his girlfriend. It was a little boring to me.

But my interpretation of the story did not win the day! No, you see, it was all Symbolic. It was a long fever-dream sequence, sort of like Joyce, only better. For 45 minutes we talked about this story that was not a story!

The writer was a nice guy. On the way out, I asked him if he intended to finish it. He shrugged and shook his head sadly and said that the class was 'reading way too much into it.' It was unfinished, you see, and he had hesitated to turn it in.

The ways of Art are indeed Quite Mysterious.

Dear Young Man Wearing a Fedora

Dear Young Man Wearing a Fedora:

We see you are wearing a fedora. Unless you are over fifty, or about to star in a period gangster movie, the look does not work for you. We do not care that your friends think it looks hip. They are morons, like you. Please take note: the pork pie hat you have is even worse than your fedora. Do not wear it.

Please, take it off and you will make other people hate you less.

Signed,

Everyone in your neighborhood.

From the Dept. Of Yuppie Self Absorption

Here it is. What appears to be a 10,000 word treatise on how a happy marriage can get even happier through expensive therapy. And New Yorkers wonder why the rest of the country thinks they are insufferable douchebags.

Here's an idea. Skip the therapy and stop being a whiny, self-important shithead. Stop writing things no one except other navel-gazing scum wants to read. Then less people will be aware of how utterly sad and worthless you are.

Must Be Shit

Bob Dylan is clearly insane. That is the only excuse for this.

I love the man and his music. I have about everything he ever recorded and many bootlegs, too. I am also not afraid to admit that there is not one good thing about this video or this song. Sorry, but the music is terrible, he sounds forced and wheezy, and the video itself is a grotesque parody of people having a good time. It is painful to watch.

And come to think of it, the whole Christmas album idea sucks too. Yes, I know it's all about charity. So why didn't he donate all the proceeds from an album that was good?

His last two albums were subpar too. They were overpraised in the same way Stanley Kubrick's final film was. Eyes Wide Shut was pretty much a piece of garbage, but people were afraid to admit a genius could produce crap. Well, Dylan put out two mediocre albums and an album of absolute shit in the past three years. Get over it. He is not God. God does not co-write songs with Robert Hunter.

Let's just hope he can do something decent again before too long--he ain't looking too healthy.

The Worst Sentence Ever Written?

From ESPN, perhaps the dumbest media outlet in existence, comes the most banal and insipid collection of words I've seen since Dan Brown last took pen to paper:

And for these four men, this was a night that couldn't have followed a more perfect script if George Steinbrenner had been able to personally sign the big script-writing free agent in the sky to an $8 zillion contract.

Jason Stark is right. The script couldn't have been better even if all the script writing guys got together and wrote a script scripted by Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the script writing archangels from the beginning of script writing time and scripted a signing for scripts that out scripted every script one could conceive of. Then God could script that too and script himself into a signing bonus, written in Cyrillic script.

Oh, Jayson Stark. You complete waste of oxygen. You toad of a man. You have the intellect of a retarded dog. The IQ of a brain-dead monkey. But you are famous and write for ESPN. Now go and fetch Dan Brown some coffee.

Carl's Predictions