For Renée

If you'll pardon the intrusion, I will take a moment of your time here, Internets, and I will tell you a thing:

The thing is, I am breaking up with American Idol.

I explained this to Renée in great and pointed detail yesterday, by way of an email which may or may not have included some but not all of the lyrics to Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You As Performed By Whitney Houston Crack Is For Poor People Kiss My Ass (you can't prove anything). This post is more on the topic of that, and it's mostly for her, because she will put up with my rambling - you may have heard I tend to go on awhile - and we all need someone who understands us, right? Right? Right.

So I am breaking up with American Idol, after a decade-long courtship. Part of my present-tense use of "breaking up with American Idol", as you may have noticed, is the clearly attached connotation that I have not done so - not yet. Which: If you're a practitioner of the Context Clue, you know means that me and AI, we're still seeing each other. Up 'til now. But not for long.

Eventually I will address Steven Tyler's blatant disregard of Aerosmith and the human populous in general, but before we get to that place, there was this performance by the surviving members of TLC. The ones who are both alive and also not Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes (because she's dead; CONTEXT CLUES). As regards both the T and the C, I can't help but think they must be in some dire need of the moneydollars, and I hope they have been well-paid for showing up and taking their medley of '90s hits out for a walk. Because I remember how they were the picture of barely-composed bravery, all brave with their brave selves and their hand-holding on that stage at that awards show. I remember that standing ovation and the shaky composure and our security in the knowledge that not a single either one of them would (probably) ever set fire to a sports guy's house again. And then they packed themselves up and put themselves away to go about living lives or whatever, out of sight and also mind, like you do. Quietly respectful of the world's knowledge that without Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes there is not, no, there is not a TLC - no indeed. And they - like us - felt good about that, because it was good, but alas also over, which we all agreed about and we moved on. Older, wiser, and with both straps of our overalls fasted securely where they belong.

They left us as they should have: with the fond memories of their gawky, condom-adorned adolescence (I cannot WAIT for the stats on site referrals to this post! I dare you to count and list all of the moneyshot words contained herein!), and then about how they grew up to be fine young ladies and the eventual Sickle Cell trouble and all the bankruptcy and arson - and even these beauties felt unpretty - even them! And because we remember all that we just wanted to sort of wish the various stages of TLC well and feel good about what we meant to each other at the time. You know? But now here we are, all these years later, it's the cultural relevance equivalent to T(*)C drunk-dialing us and hollering into the phone about how we never did give back their Depeche Mode CDs. It's not like we're unhappy to hear from you, T(*)C, but not like this, because this is sad in that Sarah McLachlan-behooving-us-to-save-animals way.

Perhaps you, like me, kept expecting the medley to give way to some new song, but alas: 'twas not to be. No new material whatsoever (the inclusion of tiny rapping personification of the Predator alien man we won't ever mention again notwithstanding). I'm sure you know - as I do - that performing new music is understood and included in any live television broadcast's TCO for retaining an artist to perform. Because otherwise nobody would ever show up. Tom Petty is like 'I would rather die than sing Refugee one more time, DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THIS'. So we're essentially watching the rapping Misses Havisham all up in our business with their ancient wedding dresses going on about stopped clocks or chasing waterfalls (rather than sticking to the rivers and the lakes that they, themselves, are used to) or whatever, meaning to save us from misery like their own.

Backfire! Which reminds me: Steven Tyler.

Part of my "it's complicated" with AI means that thus far I have not only been exposed to Steven Tyler exposing himself as a solo artist (I know! That is not the way we expect nor are accustomed to!) in a new video, some black and white jobbie with circus animals (which: fitting, granted) and women younger than his daughters and possibly mine about how (It) Feels So Good (the 'It' is his penis). This video, I will embed it in the post script of this post. The post's post script, if you will, which I know: you totally will, don't even front.

So anyway, the point - I have one - is that I would like to go ahead and be on the record about how I find all of this Steven Tylering-around-in-our-faces-and-making-with-the-Aerosmithing-solo-while-that-sir-is-an-Aerosmith-song-and-that-right-there-is-the-standard-scarving-and-crotch-issues-of-the-Aerosmith... I find this deeply disquieting.

It's like how even as I myself am a consumer of the Americanized reissue of the BBC's Being Human show on SyFy, the show Being Being Human - I do not understand it. The casting choice of Sam Huntington, this I understand. I enjoyed him in Detroit Rock City and I have been pleased to note that he done growed up and caught himself a case of the adorbs. But this American re-issue: it perplexes me, it is a thing which is totally beyond me.

As I am a person who speaks English in What, I am also a person fully capable of both understanding individuals who tawk funny like them Brits as well as obtaining the avenues by which to do so. So too am I a person capable of watching Being Human without requiring it to be set in Boston and delivered to us in Americanish by cute Sam Huntington and his flatmates - roommates, sorry - that vampire with the too much face topography all up in his facial face and that woman who is No Annie, no ma'am. I just can't seem to grasp why we need separate and distinct forms of the same thing.

Which is sort of like how I can't really understand Steven Tyler having a Steven Tylering solo career and then not Steven Tyler Solo Album Single performancing on the AI, but Aerosmithing without Aerosmith on the AI. You dig? It's complicated. What I'm saying is Steven Tyler performed Dream On. Which: Aerosmith song, maybe you've heard of it?

Except there is nary a Joe Perry nor any of those other people including the one with the unfortunate hair and the other one with the terrifying babyman head from that one video, and possibly others but they can be and remain beside the point - of whom, and I am admittedly bad at math but this math is the kind of math that allows me to say "this math is in my math WHEELHOUSE", okay: the sum total of all of these absent parts plus the crotch guy equals Aerosmith.

So this thing, it was happening, and I just sort of cock my head and Simple Dog shapes appear and I look at this thing that I should know except it is not the thing I know, and there is no Sam Huntington anywhere. But there is Steven Tyler's horrible caricature of a face and also crotch everywhere and the whole world apparently co-signing on how this is an acceptable thing.

I will miss Ryan. The end.

P.S. Do you know what happens now, Gentle Reader, when I write blog posts? I worry about every word that barfs forth, because Think Of The Children. My children, not so much yours, but mine, because mine are denizens of the Internets, now. They are that old, and I know they are going to read this - and other things I have written - sooner rather than later. And I just said "crotch everywhere", you see what I did there. I think I'm probably okay, what with how my teenager spent 5 minutes cracking testicle jokes over peanuts last night. So there's that.

P.P.S. I warned you I was going to do it: