TLC is the Weirdo Channel

Where's his dipstick?

Once in awhile the missus and I watch one of the many bizarre shows on TLC.  TLC used to be called The Learning Channel. Nowadays is should be The Fucking Weirdo Channel. Whether it’s crazy religious fucktards with nineteen kids, or people who eat drywall, TLC has cornered the market on weirdoes. Recently I saw an episode of a show, let’s call it My Strange Need for Attention, where a grown man was in love with his car. Now I love my Harley, but I’m not about to French kiss it or stick my naughty bits in its gas tank. The guy’s father thinks he’s nuts and I agree. They show the guy under the front of the car kissing it on its grill and the whole time I’m thinking “where the hell are his hands?” Is there not enough free porn out there to keep this guy busy? Can’t his dad just go down to the junkyard and buy him a bumper so that he can jerk off in his room? Even JGBallard would think this guy is a quart low.

But he’s not as fucked up as the people who eat odd things, like drywall or toilet paper. Only in America would some corpulent, trailer-housed moron, be shown on the teevee munching away on building supplies. They eat paper, wallboard, etc. No one ever eats nails or staples. Maybe it gives them heartburn. I think people like to watch it because it makes them feel better about themselves. If someone castigates me for eating a tube of cookie dough I can say: “Hey at least I’m not eating caulk like that creepy fucker on TLC!” Eating strange things is only a part of TLC’s appeal to weirdness. Apparently there are a lot of little people out there and they all have shows. Sure little people are fascinating. I love the way they always end up in people’s dream on the teevee. I think David Lynch pioneered this with Twin Peaks. Why? The phantasms conjured by my feeble consciousness never contain dwarves, midgets or otherwise under-sized people. My dreams are always so much like waking life that they cause me even more anxiety than if I had nightmares. I have to take Xanax within my dreams just to make it through the night. 

Why don't I have my own show?

Then there is the Long Island Medium. Think Snooki, with psychic powers. Of course she has the requisite Bumpit and the French tip manicure that goes with it. I’d rather watch bigfoot wrestling Newt Gingrich than this drivel. I guess if Snooki were actually psychic, she would have known she was going to get pregnant and would have cut back on the alcohol and Ecstasy so that her kid doesn’t emerge waving glowsticks.

Speaking of kids, TLC loves the people with hundreds of kids. It started with Kate Gosselin. Most of the viewing I got of that show came from “The Soup,” and that was all I needed to see. Kate was a shrill Harpy with a vagina like a clown car. An evil woman who now attempts to hold on to her fame by clipping coupons.  She had a whole lot of plastic surgery, bleached her hair, veneered her teeth, ditched that strange haircut, and modeled herself a MILF in the hopes of landing a new show and a man. No man that has seen a clip of her being a diva will go near that hunk of shriveled bacon. Two words: VAGINA DENTATA.

Unlike Kate, the Duggars are a case study in Evangelical insanity. Adherents of the Quiverfull doctrine, Jim Bob and his helmet hair are trying to raise an army for Jesus’s angry return to Earth. When it happens, Jim Bob will appointed to Jesus’s cabinet as minister of Bad Haircuts and will force all men to wear combovers and women to grow their hair long according to Old Testament rules. He will then attempt to inseminate any female angels in an attempt o recreate the Nephilim and thereby battle Jesus for supremacy.

Finally, there is the infamous “Toddlers and Tiaras.” If you’ve never seen it, I will give you the entire plot line of every show: Fat white trash mom makes over little girl to look like pint-sized drag queen, drives two hundred miles with said princess, fills her full of sugar and makes her “dance” like a stripper while mom dreams of making enough money to move out of the trailer and into a condo in Hollywood. The best thing is that these little girls, with their spray-on tans and heavy makeup are well suited for their future at the Foxy Lady strip club.

The whole network begs the question: Would these people exist if it weren’t for television? Are people inventing themselves as freaks simply to get on the teevee. Then others copy them hoping to become America’s Next Big Weirdo and the cycle perpetuates itself until all of these become legitimate diagnoses in the DSM-IV. Someday we will have a President who is a psychic Little Person that makes love to her coupon filled car, while her twenty three kids make cupcakes dressed like drag queens. I can hardly wait.