NOBOBY NEEDS "ENTOURAGE: THE MOVIE"

Earlier this week, Warner Brothers gave Entourage: Tequila Shots Bros and Hot Ass (I assume this will be the movie’s title) a green light to start production. So yeah, that’s fun, I couldn’t be happier that the world didn’t end when it was supposed to and now we can enjoy this amazing work of art that will no doubt be a critical and box office success. Oh wait, just kidding. Entourage is fucking terrible. It’s thirty minutes of People Magazine being acted out by below-average actors with as many vapid/poorly acted cameos sandwiched between Kevin Dillon scowling and Jerry Ferrera wearing fat kid shirts and Kevin Connelly puckering through that punch-me-in-the-face puss of his. Oh and Jeremy Piven—Ari was funny for MAYBE nine seconds. Now I just wish Piven would go back to eating  too much mercury-infused sushi and drop dead.

Whoever birthed this unholy nugget of shit and pushed it into production should be ashamed of themselves. As should HBO, which is hard for me to say because I love HBO. I bet Tina Turner felt the same myriad of conflicting feelings whenever Laurence Fishburne did five pounds of cocaine and smashed her in the face with a lamp. On one hand, HBO, you are a genius, and you bring me so much joy. On the other, you produce piles of garbage that aren’t worth thirty seconds of anyone’s life, let alone two fucking hours. How about a Deadwood movie? Or maybe a movie that continues a storyline from The Wire? I guarantee you could make a more engaging, entertaining, and provocative movie featuring only Slim Charles meticulously cleaning his assortment of pistols than one that will (obviously) feature Adrian Grenier running around Hollywood telling everyone he’s from Queens, being an unaccountable douchebag, and fucking diner waitresses while his loser friends wait underneath the table for scraps. If I were Matt Dillon I would stop paying Kevin Dillon’s rent immediately and force him to stop contributing to nonsense like this.

Bottom line, Entourage was shiny toy intended to be as complex as putting on a pair of socks. Which is fine, I guess, if you enjoy watching rich people dick around with zero consequences and complain about life being “hard.” If this show had any balls it would have explored what life is like for a young actor with piles of money and shitty friends who are along for the ride. How about stupid Vince gets addicted to heroin and gets infected with HIV and has to make a comeback as that actor with a crippling disease? Or how about Fatso Turtle gets into a drunk driving accident and commits manslaughter and Vince blows his fortune protecting his fat stupid friend? But Noooooooooooooooo. If the producers had explored circumstances that were interesting and controversial, then they never would have landed that awesome Tom Brady cameo, which America really needed. From what I remember (I watched the first two seasons and then melted my eyelids closed with a cigarette lighter), Vince’s conflicts involved not being able to fuck some forgettable pop star and having to rent a $2,000,000 house instead of buying it. WOW. WE CAN ALL REALLY RELATE TO THIS SHIT. But all was resolved when he made himself feel better by buying a Lamborghini or something and banging a makeup artist on a yacht.

I wish Mark Wahlberg had kept his goddamn humble-bragging tales of him and his bros to his miniature-self. Great, you have leech friends and you wear black t-shirts--let’s write a fifteen season arch based on your fucking trouble, “playing by the rules” even though the rules really don’t apply to you because you’ve been handed bundles of money and fame since you were walking around in your fucking underwear singing songs in a garbage dump.

If you hadn’t starred in Boogie Nights, The Departed, and Ted, I would fucking hate you too.

Fuck Entourage.

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SICK PEOPLE STAY HOME

Everyone is sick around me. On the train, in the streets, in the office. Sneezing, coughing, vomiting blood in the bathroom (I assume). It's horrible. And yet, here they are, at work, tapping away on their computer. Why? Why are you spraying germs all over yourself and your coworkers? Would you come to work if you knew you had the Ebola Virus?

"Hey guys, don't mind me, my limbs are falling off and I am going to die in five hours, but I need to get a couple of meetings set up before my eyes melt into my skull."

No. Instead, you would do something cool like rob a bank because it’s your last day on Earth, and as you're making your getaway, someone would trip the silent alarm and you be cut down in a blaze of gunfire trying to shoot your way through the police barricade. And after the cops confirmed you were dead, they would discover that your gun was loaded with blanks, and you were planning to send the stolen money to the Ebola Virus Cure Foundation. And the cop who shot you would go home that night sad and withdrawn, replaying the event over and over in his head. But then his wife would yell at him because it took her almost two hours to make pot roast and it's going to waste because he's "not hungry" again. Asshole. The next day she would wake up and find only a note in the spot where her husband sleeps. All it would say is, "Life is too short to live with a Harpy Bitch." And now the cop's wife is feeling regret and would probably start dabbling with meth and prostitution because even though he was always bringing his work home with him, she lost the best thing she ever had. ALL BECAUSE YOU CAME TO WORK WITH A COLD.

People who work in an office force themselves to come to work sick because agents from Corporate America LLC secretly break into their homes at night to inject paranoia into their brains while they sleep.

"Steve is sick? Bullshit! I bet he's lying and he’s just hung over. Or he cheated on his wife. Or he murdered a hobo in an abandoned house with a shovel. We’ll show that fucking asshole what’s up by squirting bacteria into his snoring mouth."

And I'll be the first to admit that I've been injected by this paranoia--I freely admit that I am part of the problem. When someone is out sick, I automatically assume they are in withdrawal from heroin. Most likely this not true, but because I’m under suspicion, so should Devin—doesn’t anyone else find it weird that she always talks about Trainspotting? It came out like 15 years ago. An yeah, most likely Devin is home in bed, resting her body so she can return to work and not make everyone else sick. Or she is strung out and burying a corpse in the woods. One or the other.

The other issue with germs in the workplace is not everyone 'gets' what is 'hygienic' and what is fucking gross. I used to work with a guy who constantly used a handkerchief. He would sneeze and hack into it and then stuff it right back into his pocket. Then he would ask me what I thought about the White Sox or whatever. What is even going on here? I’m not going to have a conversation with you--there is a flesh-eating disease in your fucking pocket!  I'll talk to you if you give me a fucking hazmat suit. Someone should have thrown him in jail and stuffed his handkerchief up his ass. Who carries a fucking handkerchief nowadays? It's not 1934, when everyone was toeing the poverty line and had to be exposed to germs every nine seconds. There are hand sanitizer stations everywhere. A pack of Kleenex costs like a buck. Antibiotics are no longer a luxury of the rich only. Who do you think you are, Jay Gatsby?

I am lucky because I have a pretty good immune system. Maybe it has something to do with eating 500 bulbs of garlic a week and smelling like a goddamn Napolitano pizza shop owner, I don’t know. But I do get sick once or twice a year, and normally it’s only for a few days at a time. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to break a bottle over the head of anyone coughing on the train, because instead of rationalizing my body's ability to fight off germs, my brain always assumes the worst: Oh wow, that guy looks sick. And he's wearing a suit, so he's obviously in the CIA. Maybe some government lab exploded and he was the only one to escape? Just like in The Stand by Stephen King? Now he's going around and spreading his germs to everyone he knows, and then we're going to spread our germs to everyone we know, and then us survivors (I assume I will survive the impending plague because I eat garlic) will have to move to Boulder, CO and fight the guy who plays Vice President Walden in Homeland. Makes sense, if you think about it.

But like everyone else, I’m not Superman (yet), and I do get sick, I normally don't go to work. But the paranoia in my brain still buzzes, thus forcing me to make a conscious effort to prove my sickness. I usually leave a voicemail at 5am when I sound like I smoke 450 packs of Kools a day, just to drive home the point that I am not feeling well. Then when I'm well enough to return to work, my boss will make a comment about how sick I sounded on my voicemail, and I will somehow feel vindicated, even though I really was sick and I was better off being in bed and not spreading my disease.

I am also fully aware that it's fucking insane that my brain has been trained to think this way, but such is life, right? When in Rome, right? Que se ra ra se ra, right? (Jumps out window)

In Europe people stay home if they have a headache, and I bet nobody thinks twice about it. In fact, I bet they probably send Swiss chocolates or baguettes or some other delicious European shit to said person's house and wish them a speedy recovery. We should look to Europe and mimic their work ethic and morals instead of assuming every missing coworkers was arrested over the weekend for arson, and is using the flu as an excuse for being in jail and sharing a cell with some rapist named Mack Daddy. Never mind Europe's impending bankruptcy and constant unsettlement--it's more important to trust a coworkers who claim to be sick, if only so I won't get sick and then have to prove my sickness in weird unnecessary voicemails.

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