Charlie Sheen’s on Twitter as of about an hour ago. Which means that by midnight he’ll be calling Biz Stone a filthy backstabbing kike, and by tomorrow morning he’ll be suing J. P. Morgan Chase for 250 quadrillion dollars for implying that someone with his winnosity would ever label his glorious visage as a “twitpic“.
It would be easy to set up and knock down a few hundred words making fun of Charlie – these days it’s the written humor equivalent of Sharpieing a penis on a drunken freshman’s face – and God knows that I am that lazy. After all, cheap, quick jokes like: “Charlie has ‘tiger blood‘ because he snorted Tigger,” and: “Charlie’s on a drug named Charlie Sheen, if by ‘drug’ you mean ‘blow-up doll,’ or if by ‘Charlie Sheen’ you mean ‘DCon-laced Arkansas Winky-B-Gon methamphetamine extract,” really do write themselves.
But I’m not gonna do that, because believe it or not, I actually have some sympathy for Charlie. Not much, and certainly not for his general behavior in life. It’s hard to wish anything but a hard stretch in the pen for a man who beat his wife, assaulted a hooker, and starred in The Wraith.
But imagine, just for a moment, that you’re Charlie Sheen. You wake up on satin sheets next to a porn star. You get out of bed in the dark and bump into a coffee table, knocking several thousand dollars of cocaine – cocaine that loose women with enhanced breasts bought for you – onto the carpet. You fire up the iPad to check your bank balance, and while waiting for it to warm up, you check your voice mail and delete another message from Emilio asking to borrow $200 for a cell phone that Paula Abdul doesn’t have the number for.
You check your account balances see you have a cool 85 million dollars sitting there, which even stuck in the shittiest ING Direct savings account is earning you $850,000 a year for doing absolutely nothing… and you sure as fuck don’t have a shitty ING Direct savings account, because as far as you’re concerned, only Charlie gets to tell people to “touch the ball“.
So imagine you’re Charlie Sheen, sitting there with that life and that money on a Tuesday morning. What do you do? Bang the porn star again? Go out and buy another Bentley just in case some miscreant rolls the one you have off a cliff again? WRONG! You get in that Bentley, sit in L.A. traffic for two hours, and go to a fucking day job. A day job where you have to spend all day talking to Ducky and a mouthy fat kid.
So you wipe the nippleprints off the bathroom mirror and look long and hard at yourself: you’re 45 years old, which means that you’ve got five, maybe ten more good years before you lose your looks and the syphillis goes tertiary. And all you can think is that if you were just a regular schmuck with a regular job who won 85 million in the lottery, you could just quit your job. God, if only you’d been born, Carlos Estevez instead of Charlie Sheen (Yes, I know he was, but remember: you’re Charlie Sheen here, which means that you are extremely high)!
But you work on a television show, which means that you have a contract. A contract that states if you quit, you owe penalties and refunds and God knows what else. And even worse, the show will never be cancelled because it somehow is the highest-rated comedy in America despite being nothing more than the same 22 minutes of Lenny Luthor failing to get laid (Which is a state of affairs more incomprehensible to you than the Higgs Boson) either just before or just after the kid from Hannah Montana Forever yammers an adorable euphamism for “scrotum” that has aired every week for seven fucking years.
So you can’t just quit, and you’ll never be laid off, so you’ll just have to sit there and suck it up, right? I mean, you can’t get yourself fired, can you? You’re the goose that laid the golden egg! You’ve earned your employers millions, and God knows you’ve never been a part of any Hollywood project that might lead you to believe that you can get out of an intolerable employment situation by turning on your boss. And even if you have, certainly nothing has happened recently to refresh your memory about it.
————————
So yeah: Charlie badmouthed his boss, acted weird in public, has been mocked by his peers and the general public, and will probably be forced to live off of his savings out of the public eye for the rest of his life. So of course he wound up on the Internet. He probably heard that we have a name for what happens when you engage in that type of reprehensible shenanigans.
[tags]Charlie Sheen, Two and a Half Men, dark humor, satire[/tags]
