Stop Takin’ Our Damn Words!

Remember the movie star one-name trend? It seems one day celebrity dieting got so out of hand that the weight of a surname was too much for anyone living in Hollywood's Hills to carry and suddenly stars such as, Brad, Angelina and George were left holding only single name monikers.

Presumably these abbreviations were purely altruistic, as they'd lesson our burdens when talking about important things such as Ocean's Thirteen, and Tomb Raider, and should these single names add confusion to conversations involving non famous Brads: perhaps a son, a mentor, or a life partner, well that was a small price to pay.

Now though, I'm starting to get worried. The one word name trend has spread beyond people and is now sweeping the restaurant industry. Here's a conversation I heard last night when visiting Hollywood:

"Have you eaten at Craft or Ammo?"
"Yeah but I prefer Milk or Eat."
"I've always wanted to try Chocolate, let's go retro progressive and do a Chocolate - Milk thing!"

What if I want milk as a thing to drink or ammo as a means of killing zombies? And frankly I've got a friend named George and he's getting upset that I'm now completely confused by any reference to himself and automatically launch into conversation about ER and Clooney's brief run on the Facts of Life upon hearing his name.

With restaurants and celebs doing this, it's not long before car-makers, trade associations, cable news channels, babies weighing more than five pounds eight ounces, and every-friggen-body-else start claiming hole entire words as their own. You'll ask for "eggs" "benedict" and end up with a debutante from Alabama infected with a very specific form of Lyme disease. The English language will break down as we know it and we won't even be able to shoot each other cause we'll be trying to load our firearms with crap ass eateries located on Highland pushing eighteen dollar broccoli soup.

Anyway, I'm gonna go work on my cave drawings.

Hey you! Let’s get famous together!

These days, probably the most important thing in the world when judging a person is whether or not that individual is famous. The famed are better than the rest of us, and are thus allowed live by a different set of rules.

Then there’s you and me: one cares if we’re hired, or fired, or tossed out of an airplane. No one would mind if we were attacked by bears, or eaten by sharks, and if you and I happened upon some sort of mythical beast and it devoured our flesh? Well people wouldn’t give a friggen rat’s ass about that either. Because we’re not famous, and no one gives a damn about us and our not-fame!

That’s right. You and I are the furthest thing possible from famous, and thus don’t even merit the air we breathe. In fact, I’ve been holding my breath a lot lately. Have you? I know! We’re supposed to nowadays, because otherwise we’d be taking up all that air for the famous, and you and I definitely don’t fit into that category. Have you been cutting back on water too? I haven’t seen us in a flashy magazine. Photographers don’t hide in our bushes and harass our loved ones. So it seems we’re not important. I think there’s like a law where we have to practice conservation to preserve our limited resources for the famous community: community to which we most definitely do NOT belong.

Come to think of it, not being famous also means we’re also probably not supposed to be dreaming. Who’s to say there’s not a set amount of dreams to go around? If that’s the case, won’t we get in trouble if any of our nonfamous hopes, goals, or wishes get in the way of the big important exciting ones of the famed set? Won’t we get yelled at if our struggles for meaning, happiness, and love interfere in any way with a famous person’s exactly identical but infinitely more important ones?

So yeah, I guess you and I only have two options. We could refrain from living our own lives and make extra sure to fixate upon theirs, all the while knowing the famous are the best people possible and acknowledging that they are like us only more special, more human, and more sculpted of divine. Or we could go with my other plan.

I was thinking: let’s just go kill somebody. Killers are like the most famous people of all! And if anyone deserves fame it’s us. So how bout it? Let’s just go kill somebody. It’s about time that we got special too!