Remember when Madonna was awesome? It’s weird. She was hot and got some credit for being pretty talented and generally, there was a feeling that she was driving pop culture as much as any woman ever had. She was sort of the new Marilyn Monroe but she was also rock and roll and dance and even kind of hip hop somehow, AND she was sex positive when that kind of shit was even more frowned upon than it is now. What the fuck happened? These days, she epitomizes lameness. She’s desperate, sinewy, obnoxious, constantly overcompensating. She’s just absolute bullshit of the most pathetic order. How did this come to pass?

I mean, if I told you guys that I’d once been on a plane with Madonna and that before she got on board, some handler person came on the plane and told everyone, in no uncertain terms that Madonna was not to be looked at, spoken to or acknowledged by anyone at all, you’d believe that story, right? It’s not true, but that’s the level of unspoken dipshittery we’re dealing with. We’re talking about a woman so lame that a story about her being a horrendous shithead is so plausible that there’s not even reason to doubt its authenticity or be particularly surprised. Weird.
Now, check out one of Madonna’s early contemporaries: Cindy Lauper, she’s great. She’s still hot and she comes across as a pretty nice and together lady. I just saw her on Good Morning America and heard her on Howard, and I was able to imagine that we’d get along if we were, for example, forced to take a road trip together. She seems nice and personable and very human. Now, I’m not stupid enough to think that her public face necessarily has anything to do with what she’s actually like, but superficially, I like Cindy Lauper as a person.

Madonna, however, just seems like an impossible cunt. And that’s how she’s perceived. That’s been filtered through a team of very smart people whose livelihood depends on the world at large liking Madonna. Can you imagine what she must actually be like if her carefully marketed public persona is as reprehensible as it is? I mean, if you extrapolate, she’s gotta be a cock punching, dog punting horror that smells like pigshit and constantly scrapes her nails on the blackboard.

Let that be a lesson to you: You’re gonna become such a bummer as you age. You’re either gonna become terrified and reactionary, or you’re gonna swaddle yourself in your quirkier impulses which will drive everyone around you insane, or (and this is what’s gonna happen to the majority of us) you’ll just give up and you won’t become a hideous turd, but you’ll become so boring that it’ll be almost an aggressive boringness…a boringness so boring that it flies off you like a tennis ball out of one of those things that shoot tennis balls and assaults those around you and makes them angry, not because you’ve done anything, but actually precisely for the opposite reason: you haven’t done anything in so long that your boring life is all the ammo you have, conversationwise. Suddenly, you’re halfway through your story about your neighbor’s kid and you’re trying to remember if they went to Skidmore or Swarthmore, or if fifteen and a half miles is a reasonable estimate for how far you had to travel to have dinner with the mother of someone you used to work with or whatever the fuck that everyone over a certain age seems to feel fine about passing off as a story that anyone would ever be interested in hearing. This completely extraneous detail, one that has no bearing on the completely dull story about people and places no one else has heard of or gives a fuck about, is actually causing the dumb story to stall and take longer. Because, god forbid we could grasp the subtleties of the tale about your nephew trying windsurfing if we’re thinking he’s doing it in Egg Harbor but he actually did it in Benton Harbor. What’s next? You’ll just stop telling us if the church is more due-north than northwest from where the gas station where you bought the losing lotto ticket and the milk was? How will we, as listeners triangulate your speculated location????? I bet Cindy Lauper does this shit too, and I’m POSITIVE that Madonna does.

Anyway, that’s all. If someone who’s embodied the cultural zeitgeist as much as anyone in my lifetime is gonna turn into a horrendous old monster, something shitty’s gonna come over me too, if it hasn’t already. And if it’s gonna happen to me, then it’s gonna happen to you.

Okay, I have to call the bank. I hate them so fucking much.

Have a good one.