Getting pregnant for spite: Yea or Nay?

Oh, I’m kidding…sorta…So our new neighbors moved in downstairs and guess what? She’s three months’ pregnant. A squalling infant right under us — coming soon! These people also plan to build a pen in the front yard for their pitbull. But they seem nice and plan to leave us to our weed hut in the backyard, which is a relief, I guess. Sigh, trouble in paradise. I joked with Dave that I should get pregnant just to retaliate. Stay tuned.

Corey, Corey, Corey!
When I was about 10, my mom and I were aghast to find tabloids like The Enquirer at my grandparents’ house. Even though I’d read them, of course. One of my favorite stories was teased on the cover with the screechy headline “WOMAN TURNS INTO BALL OF FIRE!!!” then in the actual story, it seemed more like some old lady was having hot flashes or something.

But anyway, around that time my mom also told me she’d read about a poll in which readers of the Enquirer said that even if they were told definitively that the stories were fake, they’d still buy the paper. Why on Earth would anyone waste his money and time on some rag filled with made up crap, I, as a young, impressionable pell*y, wondered.

Fast forward to old, supposedly jaded pell*y eagerly tuning in to this season’s second exciting episode of The Two Coreys , which opens with Corey a deux hiring people to assist them in doing nothing. Haim once again reigns triumphant in our running douchebag contest, edging out Feldman handily when he “jokes” to Feldman and his wife, his invited dinner guests, that they’re not real people or something. har HAR, corey. That “i love you, i hate you” game is also gobs of fun. Haim’s rambling rants about Feldman irritate me but do get amusing at times, too. Like he’ll start off kinda mellow with some platitude like “We will always be friends, we’ve always been there for each other,” then degenerate into almost spittle-spewing rants like “if he wasn’t such a fake-ass jerk of a punk, everything would be just fine…”

Anyhoo, I was just starting to explain that I was too stoned to remember what happened in the show when my plan to paste in this comment from Defamer jogged my memory:

“I know for a fact the ‘assistant interviews’ were staged. So maybe he’s a better actor than I gave him credit for. He’s now graduated to Heidi Montag status in my book.”

Not terribly shocking, no. But it raises an unsettling point about these guys like Haim and Dustin Diamond on Celebrity Fit Club, who are so appallingly douchey, so shockingly lame, yet on a scripted show, so….does that mean that they are awesome actors to pull this off? Or are they this lame in real life too but simply find it a breeze to portray jerkoffs of such tremendous proportions?

And then there’s the observer effect: How does a camera bearing down on Corey Haim’s trainwreck of a life derail the cars (or avert the collisions that might have occurred if they weren’t there)? For any reality tv watcher must realize that no matter how loathsome and insulting the premise of someone’s reality show is, the person that show presents is still a “star” in some sense.

The shows affect the stars in more obvious ways of course too; for instance, enabling the semiliterate, drug-addled has-been to feed and clothe himself without getting a real job. Dave and I were perplexed watching Haim shop around for LA apartments, talking with a realtor on his Blackberry, and were like, wait, isn’t he destitute; why does he have money? And then we remembered, oh yeah, from this show we’re watching.

I’ll stop with the freshman media literacy analysis and pose a question related to Haim’s teary vexation at the mean comments about him and his cringe-inducing Variety ad (see first Corey blog): How could a sexually abused former child star with a raging drug problem be unaware at this point in his life that the world is cruel? That people are mean? I guess it’s just his narcissism again. “But I’m a Corey!” Eh.

I have a dinosaur sell sheet to proofread so I’ll just needlessly tell you that the whole time I’ve been (ehh) writing this blog I’ve been listening to Operation Ivy and plagued with strange nostalgic desires to go sit on a filthy curb somewhere with a warm beer. I don’t know why. Even though I know drummer Dave Mello is married to my friend Sarah and they’re raising wee Max (ie, they’re adults), I still can’t shake the weird adolescent urge to run out of this office and throw rocks at cars or something. Ugh.

I’m willing to bet Corey Haim would give still more teeth in exchange for being back in 1989. But I hope not, for his sake.