New Moon Makes Girls Swoon, Unattractive

Call it Karma or simply the machinations of a thoroughly vengeful Old Testament God, we reap what we sow in this life, and all the trite agrarian metaphors in the world won't change that. While I cannot recall precisely what grave sin I committed in the past that merited the punishment, it must have been dire; indeed, there may very well be the body of some innocent girl scout bricked up in the wall of my home, her boxes of thin mints and carmel delights moldering alongside her. Without a tell-tale heart or black cat to alert the authorities, I might have escaped scott-free, and so the universe has taken a more subtle hand, for I can see no other reason how I could deserve the harrowing ordeal I was given. Perhaps this is a generational concern, a reckoning visited upon the son for the father's crimes. After all, during his minority in Ireland, my father was known to drown kittens for money. Maybe I pay for that deed, like my friend who must forever bear the curse of horrible foot odor because his own father once spit on a gypsy. I cannot know for certain. But whatever the reason, I was made to watch New Moon.

Needless to say, death is sweet release compared to the 130 minutes of agony that is this movie, but like the "vampires" that populate the local high school, I must apparently suffer in perpetuity. I put the word in quotes, of course, because they're nothing of the sort. When a vampire is exposed to direct sunlight, they burn to ash. They don't fucking sparkle. Honestly, if I hadn't already seen Twilight (which I'm pretty sure was punishment for a joke I made in 1996 about a special needs individual), I would have burst out into laughter at the sight, as I actually did when I first saw that ridiculousness on DVD. While it's true I now understand the literal meaning of the "I love boys who sparkle" t-shirts I've seen around, the connotative meaning remains the same: "I will die alone, unmourned by even my dozens of cats, which will probably feast on my remains after an indecorously short period of time." Funny how five little words can say so much, huh?

I won't go into how much I hate that movie, for drudging up any specifics sears my very soul. What I can tell you is that every second in that theater corroded my already delicate masculinity, leaving a ruin that will take years of deliberate effort to reconstitute. Thankfully a friend passed along this picture, which is constituted by such raw virility that I no longer entirely despair for my own plight. If you, too, have been subjected to moody stares of Robert Pattinson, the "my acting repertoire consists of four alternating facial expressions" performance of Kristen Stewart, the inexplicable reasoning behind werewolves never wearing shirts but always wearing knee length jean shorts and running shoes, or God help you, a sparkling vampire, behold and be saved: