Listening to an illegally downloaded Madonna song wearing shitty headphones, while mom scribbles in a Sudoku book and dad’s gawking and repeating all of the events playing out on re-runs of Punk’d on the TV Guide Channel. Re-runs of MTV and VH1 programming that I can hear more clearly from behind me than slow techno beats thumping in my ear.
Only moments ago, I sat through a re-run of Real Time with Bill Maher, while dad interrupted my only vaguely reliable source of news to make cheap jokes of his own or explain punchlines to mom, who diligently stared at numbers on a grid.
Before that, I was watching a Rifftrax coverage of the first Fantastic Four movie. The humor started picking up when I realized that they really did know how bad the movie was.
This only sours the opinion of my parents that I’ve accumulated over the years, remembering how they don’t give a shit whether actors can act or jokes are funny, they’ll be entertained by anything that distracts them for more than a few seconds, like goldfish chasing an idiot’s finger on the other side of the glass, or even more accurate, like the idiot showing the fish his finger just to watch them chase it. I know that this is very critical of me to say, and I know how they’d react if they ever find this commentary I’ve made of them, but I don’t think I can manage much more. I’m remembering why I enjoyed staying awake only at night. It was to avoid them, if you’re too stupid to figure it out on your own and you actually give a shit about the unimportant little things that whack away at the inside of my skull. On the outside of my skull, I knock with a fist, every time they suck on their teeth like apes, or overly exaggerate stupid habits, like stomping their feet in overplayed shock for the comedic benefit of the audience watching their every move, and the whistle in their snore, the childish giggling at stupid “jokes” that they tell each other every night while “flirting”, or the generic universal grunting when they fuck, and the limited playlist of three songs that dad can ever whistle.
They make me cringe and gnash my teeth, and squint until I give myself a headache.
