“It’s 8:00 O’clock.” My wife informed me one Sunday evening. “Don’t you want to watch your show?”
I looked up from my Blackberry and went over the Sunday night television schedule in my head, trying to remember what shows were on HBO.
After all, everyone knows that Sunday night is HBO’s night for original programming, and since Game of Thrones was still a few Sundays away and Big Love’s final season already wrapped up (No spoiler alerts! I still haven’t seen the last episode!), I struggled to think of what show she was speaking to.
“What show?” I finally asked.
“Celebrity Apprentice!” She reminded me, thinking that my previous enthusiasm translated into loyal viewership.
It is true that a few weeks back, I was flipping through the channels on a Sunday evening, and I landed on the final moments of the show. This was around the time when Donald Trump began his inexcusable journey down Birther Road and-yes-I wanted to be briefly reminded of why this turd is treated with any modicum of respect. I fail to see why America would lend any credence to an ego-inflated buffoon who has failed in nearly every endeavor, lies just as comfortably as he does when telling the truth, and who views those around him with the contempt of someone who’s never earned anything through traditional, American ideals.
But that’s just me.
What really got me keyed in was the teaser that they aired promoting next week’s show. In the clip, cast member Meatloaf unloads on Gary Busey, for reasons that could only be explained through actually watching the episode on the following week.
I made a mental note to tune in.
While the clip didn’t suggest what prompted the outburst by Meatloaf, one could logically assume that it was Busey’s fault because Gary Busey is not operating with a full deck regardless of what brief moments of clarity he still has.
The problem with Gary Busey is that those moments of lucidness trick the people around him into believing that he was many of his capacities still in tact, and since that is the “truth,” any event involving Gary rubbing his Celebrity teammates the wrong way could easily be seen as sabotage or intentionally mean-spiritedness.
The thing is, when Gary Busey split his head open on that infamous motorcycle accident from a few decades ago-the injury resulted in enough head trauma that Gary has lost the ability to feel empathy. As a result, he says shit and does stuff with total disregard for others that it’s misconstrued as him just being an insensitive asshole.
And he must have certainly been a royal asshole to get Meatloaf worked up as much as he did during that next episode.
Yes, I remembered enough to tune in to the Celebrity Apprentice episode featuring Gary against Meat.
Don’t get me wrong, I known that Meatloaf is not the most stable person ether. After all, you don’t follow up a widely successful debut with years of silence and without a single note of music.
I didn’t realize that all of those years of nothing merely amounted to Meat having a nervous breakdown of such epic proportions that his swagger, confidence, and god-given talent all took a back seat to anger issues, anxiety, and self-doubt.
But it did, and it was in full display again during a disagreement over painting supplies.
Meatloaf purchased his art supplies for a piece of art he was doing for an auction, and evidently, tensions between him and Busey were fragile at best, with Meat giving plenty of distance between him and Gary.
Smart move, but so is checking the bag for your purchases thoroughly. While Meatloaf through such a conniption over not being able to find his supplies, you could easily feel that he was just one blood vessel burst short of having a complete stroke or heart attack.
He gets in Busey’s face, to the point where the dude from Sugar Ray is holding him back, caressing his mind with soft spoken bro mantras of teamwork an half-assed hippie ideals of how it’s all “for the charity.” It doesn’t work as Meat continues to throw of fit before somebody locates his shirt paints and brushes, painting him as a dunce while Busey looks innocent.
But to suggest that Busey was able to juice up a sabotage of that kind of detail is absurd. Busey can barely take his attention off of pairing the first letter of names and words with some kind of meaningful phrase.
Meatloaf made the fatal mistake of assuming that Gary Busey intentionally took Meatloaf stuffs because, well, I guess because Busey acted like kind of an asshole. To Meatloaf’s credit, instead of getting defensive, Busey could have reminded him not to assume that he stole anything, Because “assume” means you could have the potential of making an “ass’ out of “u” and “me.”
Nowhere in my wildest dream did I imagine that Meatloaf was just as batshit crazy as Gary Busey with the only difference being Meat’s ability to hit his wackiness just a little bit better.
So after seeing that episode, I watched the following one too, where Busey gets that crazy half-Manson/half water vapor look in his eyes while the Sugar Ray dude tries to throw him under the bus after realizing that Busey’s shenanigans are ultimately going to get him kicked off the show.
I could see where it was going: Trump knew that Gary Busey was ratings gold and made a very Trump-like decision of dumping the Sugar Ray dude while hanging on the Busey for another week of Celebrity Apprentice.
It’s almost sad in a way, as was the way that Meatloaf failed to recognize that the puppet master’s strings are easily visible for us observant viewers. And that little display of having no control whatsoever has permanently tarnished what little respect that I had for Meatloaf up until that point.
But whatever. Game of Thrones is on the air finally, and my brief liaison with Celebrity Apprentice has ended, leaving me more certain of Gary Busey’s ignored condition and of Meatloaf previously unnoticed anger issues.
With “reality” this dismal, is it any wonder why I now enjoy the solitude of Thrones’ fantasy world?
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