Brangelina is stretching and snapping our hearts apart like psycho rubber bands and yet here's the truth: you know them as well as you know that lunatic sitting next to you on the bus whose chapeau du jour is a large hat made out of aluminum foil and wire hangers whose brim speaks secret coded messages to him from the Planet Zantac.
And yet we are crying and singing in our best Dolly Parton, "Jolie, Jolie!"
The aforementioned stranger by the way: a major Trump supporter who trusts and believes in Trump to the bottom of his Daily News covered feet. And yet, odds are likely he never met the Appresidential candidate.
I think in this age of computer lap top dancing we have by association applied all kinds of shortcuts to our lives especially when it comes to intimacy.
Look, I totally get it. Information comes at us like missile carrying drones hitting us from all directions 24/7 and most of the time the news that is heading straight for our heads is not for the desk of Uncle Happy.
The news we watch is basically the newest update from the Grim Reaper which they always try to salvage by ending with stories about rascally puppies or mentally challenged kids making touchdowns and three-pointers.
The subliminal message is: cry here. And we do as a nation. And then the micro oven dings, we strap on our butter filled Jiffy Pop feed bags and get back to the important business of creating emojis and swiping for dates with all the swagger of a sheik blithely picking out that evening's tented and soon to be oiled entertainment
We Americans need celebrities in our everyday lives in order to engage in the national competitive sport of displaced anger venting. And yet the origin of our actual anger, our asshole kids, our asshole mates, our asshole boss winds up something we file away or ignore because it's just too much effort to change the overall personality and compassion of a large rock.
My reaction to Trump at this point is pretty much like Linda Blair in "The Exoricist." If I can't get to the mute button fast enough, my head will spin, pea soup will come shooting out of me and I will levitate off my couch and keep going until I crash through the glass ceiling.
I also know, just like you, that I need someplace to put my leeching compassion and since like most of us, I walk around like the pretzel twisted and defended New Yorker that I am, the quickest and most convenient go-to recipient of all those good feelings are people like Brad and Angie.
I don't even know the names of my next-door neighbors on either side but god knows I feel like I know the Pitt-Jolies as well as I know my own kids, what's their names. To me the Marriage-in-the-PItts are close intimate personal friends to me.
So imagine how deeply hurt I was when I heard that Brad was fooling around with Edith Piaf on his latest movie set.
Reading that made my mind reel and my pulse beat like Keith Moon on a particular good manic high day. I FIXATED on it. It's all I thought about for a whole day. Thankfully my trusty news anchors accommodated me by calling the plays of their dissolution like Vin Scully calling his forty millionth Dodger game replete with replays. Over and over and over and over and over again. Just like Hillary collapsing like a teenage girl at at One Direction Concert.
And man did I ever watched. For endless judgmental hours. We are always in search, I think, for the next Zapruder film mostly to untangle all the paranoid conspiracies that we create by the minute.
I even dreamt about the Pitt-Jolies and woke up in a sweat, fretting about them and their now Little Orphan Annie-thing-you-want-you get kids until I screamed out in the middle of the night:
"Is Love Dead???"
My neighbor's answer: "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
Now for all I know the Not so Jollies-now-Pitted-against -each-others are two severely dysfunctional weirdos.
Or they could be indeed be this generation's Romeo and Joliet.
The point is we will never really know and since the Johnny Depp divorce story sank faster than the first five minutes of the new Kevin James sitcom, we NEEDED some celebrity stranger to divorce or die in order for us to become John Hinkley obsessed once again.
The election is the exact same deal.
Hilary: stranger. Trump: stranger (to modern science as well).
And yet the ventriloquist dummy heads who stand behind Trump swatting invisible flies behind him at rallies have no problem screaming "lock her up."
If you corner any one of those Mortimer Snerds and ask them to cite specific reasons why they despise her so much (which I have) what you get is some kind of skillet scramble ramble about emails and Benghazi which I'm sure they think is a child's cough syrup.
So my advice to one and all is to stop inventing relationships that simply do not exist, stop using celebrities as your official Joe Palooka punch em/kick em inflatable dolls and try spending a little quality time on fixing what is really wrong with you, beginning with your crippling intimacy issues which at some point someone has to create a telethon for. Not to raise money, but to raise self awareness.
Do yourselves a favor, America, spend a little less time TMZ gossiping for sport and stop treating the presidential candidates like they were your belligerent divorcing parents who are forcing you to pick which one to live with.
You do not know them personally. End of story.
Trump does have an edge here because he is walking MRI which reveals he's the anti-Oz: no brain, no soul, no courage. And his sons Fredo and Skittles and his wife Ivanka and daughter Melania (I got that right, right?) are all the same characters in the The Story of Oz.
My vote is based on history not hysteria. In this case I don't need to know Hillary in order to throw my support behind her because I think America once and for all needs mom to take over and send most of us to our rooms to think about what we just said.
So for the love of God do yourself a grown up favor, take a giant step back from all those empty calorie, shallow kiddie pool shows of network television and Superhero movies in the hopes that one day you will eventuallyl finally get that most of your life is being lived out in pure fantasy. None of those characters actually exist and all you are really doing is projecting yourself onto the ones that you relate to the most.
Now as a psychological exercise that is a very good thing. We do it in sports too. On any given day I AM Gary Sanchez or Tom Brady (for looks and wife only).
Working out your aggressions is healthy and important.
But turning celebrities into your imaginary friends is just plain psycho.
We vet Syrian refugees for TWO years (sorry, we don't know them either) yet we have no problem LEAPING into the pants and private lives of celebrity, sports or political candidate in less time than it takes to hit the "buy now" button on Amazon.
And the end result is identical.
For one brief second in time you feel empowered, satisfied and chest puffed, consumer high from the sheer thrill that comes with commitment...which ends the minute Amazon entices you with the message:
Hey, why not get yourself a little something?"
It won't help you and it surely did not help Brad Pitt.
And yet I have to admit to the new ongoing and intoxicating thought that Angelina Jolie is now available.
Yeah, but six kids?
Man, that is just too real.