WHAT’S MY AGE AGAIN?*

You know your boyfriend works at MTV when…

You see one of the guys from Blink 182 at a restaurant and he knows him well enough to go up and talk to him.

You know your boyfriend isn’t just your ordinary Hollywood starfucker when…

All he really wants to tell him is that he was just listening to his music last night… while playing Donkey Konga.

________
* The Blink 182 song featured on Donkey Konga is actually “All the Small Things”, but this song seemed to fit better as the title for this blog post.

WARNING

This blog as you know it may just be over.

No, I’m not giving up or relocating my cyberhome like poor, unfortunate Drew. I’ve just got something new to write about, and I fear that it will infest my blog as much as it will infest my life over the next few months. It’s good news — great news — that will simultaneously make me very happy, very stressed and extremely boring.

Drew and I are buying a condo.

It’s not the biggest or the prettiest condo in Los Angeles, it’s thankfully not the most expensive, but darn it, it’s ours. I don’t have any pictures of it yet, but here’s a picture of Drew signing the contract at Quizno’s:

That picture was taken three weeks ago. Two days after it was taken, Drew and I found out we had been outbid. We were heartbroken. Out of desperation, we put in a backup offer in case the buyer changed his mind. Then we spent three weeks looking at other condos, none of which were as nice or as big or as cheap or nearly as close to Fatburger. We got very, very discouraged.

Well, desperation paid off. My advice for you: always put in a backup offer.

Sure, there’s still a chance our inspection will turn up whatever the other guy’s did and we’ll end up backing out, too, but unless and until that happens, this place is ours.

Expect fascinating stories about inspectors and appraisers, the thrill of selecting new flooring and light fixtures, the exhilaration of painting and the gripping edge-of-your-seat excitement of finding great places to buy cheap furniture.

I’m warning you: get out now. I’m too far gone already. Save yourself before it’s too late.

MOVE OVER, JEANE DIXON

I thought it was weird when I saw this article on Defamer, which linked to this article on MSNBC, which referenced an article in the Globe, which said that former American Idol contestant Corey Clark, the kid who got tossed off the show way back in season two for abusing his sister, was threatening to expose details of a supposed sexual relationship he supposedly had with Paula Abdul.

It was weird to me because I remembered when these allegations first surfaced two years ago. Why was it being reported now like it was fresh news?

So when Drew got home, I asked him about it: “Did you see that story on Defamer about Corey Clark? He’s claiming he had sex with Paula Abdul.”

“Shut up!” he said. “It did not say that!”

“Yes it did. I just don’t get it. That story’s like two years old.”

“Uh, no it’s not,” Drew insisted. “Shut up, you’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m sure of it. I distinctly remember hearing about it.”

“But you’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That didn’t actually happen! That was your April Fool’s joke!”

Stunned silence.

I had to think about it for a minute. Maybe I was in denial, or maybe I was expecting the sky to open up and the final act of NBC’s Revelations miniseries to play out in my living room. Rarely have I been so freaked out.

See, it was my April Fool’s joke… two years ago. (Scroll halfway down the post and cue the “Twilight Zone” theme music.)

I don’t know what’s scarier, that I’ve ceased to be able to distinguish my April Fool’s jokes from reality… or that they’ve started to come true.

Okay, definitely the latter.

You’d better believe I’ll be waiting for further details to emerge. If Corey starts calling Paula a “predator” and saying she has “ugly dogs”, the end is nigh.

And if you see me carting a little Chinese girl to kindergarten in the near future, don’t be surprised.

NO FOOLIN’

If you sensed a blip in the universe last week, if suddenly it seemed that down was up and yes was no and blue was some sort of brownish gray, I think I can explain…

This year, I skipped April Fools’ Day.

And yes, it was as painful as it sounds.

I realize that George Clooney considers April Fools’ Day to be amateur hour. But that’s not fair. Unless you’re Ashton Kutcher or Dick Clark or maybe — maybe — the star of O Brother Where Art Thou, April 1 is the only day you can pull mean-spirited pranks on your loved ones and not be a total asshole for it. So I spend 364 days a year building up trust, doing good deeds and convincing people what a kind, pure-hearted soul I am. But it’s all an act – an act orchestrated in service of the once-a-year unleashing of my true demented self.

April 1 is my Christmas, a day I look forward to and plan for months in advance, my devious little head busily concocting acts of deviltry my friends and family mistakenly think I’m incapable of. Sometimes in August or November or even early May, someone will notice my gaze drifting off, my little mind wandering, and they’ll ask me what I’m thinking about. “Oh, nothing,” I’ll say. Little do they know I’m plotting my next attack.

Last year, I pulled a prank so big, which fooled so many and angered them so greatly, it may have inadvertently been the prank to end all pranks. This year, I woke up to find myself in the prankster’s worst nightmare.

They were on to me.

By mid-March, my usual marks were dropping hints that they were expecting something. They were whispering the name Fu-Ling in my presence, tossing it about in mass emails and subtly inquiring what I had in store for this year.

This made things difficult, if not impossible. I had to rethink my approach. As my wily mind churned away, I began to ponder my remaining options…

• Find a new audience. I have a new job this year, and thus a whole new crop of poor, trusting souls who know me only as the wafer-thin façade that is Innocent Jerry. Unfortunately, my work schedule had me out of the office on Friday, making it difficult to pull and impossible to fully enjoy any prank, thus foiling my scheme. Drat!
• Prank the blog. I considered doing an elaborate makeover of my site, redubbing it Why Geri Why and plastering the image of Geri Jewell (beloved cousin of Blair Warner and poster woman for C.P.) everywhere. I’d fill the content with behind-the-scenes gossip from the set of Deadwood, bitter rants against celebrity spanking advocate Lisa Welchel and links to Cerebral Palsy resources and foundations. But it felt too much like a copy of pranks others have pulled on their blogs, and Jewell pics were surprisingly hard to come by. Plus, I couldn’t convince myself that I’d know how to get my old content back come April 2. Curses!
• A postmodern prank. Maybe instead of doing what people expected me to do, I could prank them by not pranking them – better yet, by making them think they were being pranked, when in actuality, I wasn’t pranking them at all! And I had the perfect story. I’d let everyone know that I did a pilot for MTV that had been picked up for ten episodes. I’d throw in just enough details to make it seem semi-plausible… “Honestly, I was just spitballing ideas with Drew one day, and he heard something he liked, so he asked me to type up a treatment. Then, he submitted the treatment anonymously to his department, and they actually liked it!” Then, I’d wait for the poor chump to say, “Oh, right. Happy April Fools’ Day to you, too!” And no matter how much I swore it was true, Chump would just be more defiant, eventually turning up his nose and stomping off thinking he’d outsmarted me for once. Cut to: many months from now, when the show finally hits the air, I’d call up each chump as the credits were rolling and shout, “April Non-Fools, Sucka!” The problem: my news seeped out in the weeks before the big day, and there was no one left to use it on. Plus, those credit windows are so small these days. Zounds!
• Pull a prank so elaborate, even the skeptics would have to believe it. If only I could work myself into the Michael Jackson trial or invent a time machine, perhaps I could top myself. Maybe I could convince my friends and family that I’d been appointed the new Ambassador to Zaire… if only I could learn Swahili and somehow arrange a congressional hearing to be aired on CSPAN. Eh… not with a Republican president. They’d never buy it. Argh!
• Simplify, simplify, simplify. On the flip side, maybe what I needed to do was exactly the opposite. People were expecting something big. What they wouldn’t expect was, “Ow! I stubbed my toe! … April Fool!” Hmmm… or maybe this is why Dr. Ross thinks it’s amateur hour. Harumph!

So I chose another, regrettable option:

• Retire from pranking permanently.

Sure, it’s drastic, but unfortunately it’s the only dignified choice. Nothing’s sadder than a guy who thinks he’s pranking people when really, they’re onto him the whole time, sharing a derisive snicker at his futile attempts to deceive them. “My, how Jerry has fallen,” they’d say. “Sad, isn’t it?” And as pranks go, last year’s goof wasn’t a bad one to go out on. I can resign proudly on it.

Besides, think of all the time this will free up – not just on April 1st, but on all those other occasions when I’d daydream about pulling the perfect stunt, blueprinting elaborate deceptions in my head to see which ones would have the maximum impact. Think of what I could accomplish in all those wasted hours. I could take up a hobby, learn a trade, feed the homeless.

Or then again, maybe I’ll just start learning Swahili.