Here we go.

I’ve been ready to kill off my blogging persona for a while now. That’s not to say I will stop blogging. I will continue to ramble-rant on the internet, but from now on it will be my actual opinions.

That is not to say that H2$ and Me don’t share a fair amount of opinions, but that is to say that to equate the two is to be inaccurate. The reason I’ve decided to let my alias leave this world he so desperately hates is because I saw Brüno.

First let’s start with my review of Brüno. I promised when I started this blog, I wouldn’t do reviews because so many people already review things that we don’t need one more opinion about how some movie uses an interesting amalgamation of Art Nuevo influences and absurdist joke structure to create a bizarre new-worldian vomitbag, but when it relates to me, I’ll talk about it.

Brüno followed the same basic plot of Borat while accomplishing something completely different. While I thought Borat was interesting insight into the world we live in, the fact that it was so misinterpreted was problematic. With his latest adventure I believe Sacha Baron Cohen tried to combat that misinterpretation by taking the audience through a journey. He forced us down the rabbit hole and then made us see a wonderland that would get us all to the same conclusion – even if only subconsciously.

Brüno starts off with a confusing thesis that mixes the grossness of the capitalist idea of fame and the absurdity of our fear of gay people. He then throws in a series of un-clever Hitler jokes to provide an irrational stereotype of German people. The movie sucked. I was mad. It felt like by conflating his two theses about homophobia and fameseekers he had made a despicable gay character that was really only a reality check to a select few people who could relate to him on both his homosexuality and his desire for fortune. As an audience member you hated him, and you sort of felt bad for Paula Abdul, or the people forced to watch his pornographic celebrity gossip show, or Ron Paul because they were truly dealing with a person with gross morals and virtues. This movie made me scared because the people watching this in the same Maine, redneck Movie Theater that I was watching this in were laughing at how flamboyant this man was and how “crazy gay people are.”

Then Brüno took a turn. After his assistant left him, he comes to the realization that only through turning straight will he become famous. At first this seemed like an easy ploy to get to interview a bunch of gay converters, but this turns into the magical twist in the road that allows this movie to be a brilliant lesson in tolerance. First we are introduced to a house full of swingers. We realize that the “weird” fetishes that Brüno has had that we’ve been laughing at this whole time aren’t any different than the “weird” fetishes that straight people have. It forces you to recognize that if you said: “ahh gross” at the bicycle with a dildo attachment then you also have to say “ahh gross” to the man who fucks a woman in front of his wife while explaining why he doesn’t want to look anybody in the eye right now.

Then there is the brilliant conclusion. By the time we got to the conclusion I was still mad at Cohen for what I thought would become a rallying cry for the homophobic about how fucked up and bizarre the homosexual community was and how they were destroying our family morals. But Cohen saves it in the last five minutes.

His movie takes a break only to come back “months later” so that he can host an ultimate fighting show called “Straight Dave’s Man-Slamming Max Out” with a gross looking mullet and sideburns that look they were shaved off a dead horse. He arrives on stage to raucous applause to only receive bigger and bigger shouts of “yeah!” and “Whoo!” for every homophobic statement he makes. He rips off two women’s shirts only to hear howls of joy and then talks about how he is going to see two men take each other down. The obvious parallels between cage fighting and homosexual sex are too obvious to point out, but the parallels between Straight Dave’s show that received standing ovations, chants, and t-shirts and Brüno’s original attempt at a TV show “A-List Movie Review Max Out mit Brüno” that was called “worse than cancer” are interesting. In both he makes nudity or near nudity a focal point of the audience’s attention, in both he says how much he loves sex, in both he wears an absurd costume that makes him look gross. In his first attempt it was male genitalia, gay sex, and a stereotypically homosexual costume. In his second attempt at fame it was female body parts, straight sex, and a stereotypically heterosexual costume. It was only in the second that he received praise. He then proves his point by turning gay in front of Straight Dave’s audience by having a very romantic get together with his estranged male assistant. The audience turns on him, throwing cups, shirts, and even chairs over the cage walls at the homosexual lovebirds. The shocked and appalled faces of the audience matched the shocked and appalled faces of the audience in the theater I was sitting in as we watched people violently turn on what they supposedly loved only a minute earlier. Neither Brüno nor Straight Dave was a good person, in fact both were awful, but we see through the journey that Cohen takes us on that Straight Dave is, for some reason, accepted in our society, and Brüno is not. Sacha Baron Cohen is not saying that we should accept some crazy homosexual’s shallow desire for fame, but that we should realize that if we are uncomfortable enough to not talk for three full minutes on a hunting trip because there is a gay man in our midst then we should be just as uncomfortable when the same straight man comes to hang out. His movie is simply a diatribe against hypocrisy.

That’s what I have attempted to do here on this blog. I have taken on the character of a hypocrite who sees only in the future past in order to take my audience on a journey. A mix of the indignant Henry Rollins and the lazy Jim Gaffigan, H2$ refused to believe his life had any effect on others’. Only other people’s lives had an effect on him. This led to the selfishness, the pseudo-feminism that refused to take into account historical precedent, and the balls out hatred for other’s happiness. Through his journey of typing down all this hatred, H2$ found that his opinions started to matter because of a growing fanbase and yet he had no idea what to do with that power. He strayed away from the explanations of how peanut butter had found its way under his covers and started ranting about how male representations in sitcom television were both increasing and decreasing his chance to get laid. He thought he needed to say something important. Finally he broke down. He stopped typing. Partly because he was working too much at real jobs to find the time to spend discussing his political agenda on the internet, but also partly because he started to feel guilty. H2$ for all of his hatred, laziness, and indignance is still a manifestation of my personality, and there is nothing that I feel more than guilt. He started talking to his audience, hoping that they would be able to say something more profound than him because this powerful position that he found himself in was new, exciting, and disturbing for him.

H2$ always wanted a world full of himself, but once it happened than there would be nothing to be mad at and then what would H2$ say?

This is where H2$ becomes Me. I have thought of many more articles that H2$ could rant against, but they seemed unnecessary. H2$ had fulfilled his journey. He was a relatable schmuck who was couldn’t be loved, nor whose writing could be put down. People hated him, and loved watching him fail, but were constantly drawn in to watch that failure and feel that hatred therefore only feeding the beast that he had become. I know I seem to be conflating a couple messages here.

1) We give bloggers too much credit and become obsessed with their ideas when they are simply people. Usually people dumber than ourselves.

2) We love to watch failure more than success and therefore seek out the comedy that comes with a character we hate.

3) We relate to this character for reasons we are unwilling to admit.

Here’s how those relate. #2 and #3 relate quickly in that we are hate H2$ but relate to him and therefore that makes us question who we are, but then we also question why we are even reading this, and then we are forced to recognize #1: we’re followers. So, I hope this blog has made you question your own hypocrisies as H2$ refused to do. It definitely made me question mine.

Here are the ideas I had for more entries:

1) Why I’d like to marry the slut and fuck the girl next door.

2) Why “guy” is so often equivocated to “douchebag” as in: “guys will do anything to sleep with you.”

3) Why rain is like god sprinkling down beautiful excuses for me so that I don’t have to be productive.

4) Why I don’t think I’ll ever date a white chick again. And how that isn’t racist – but rather egotistical. (Hint: I equate society’s inability to recognize me a valid human being to being a minority)

5) Why I wish I were gay so that I could check out people with my significant other.

This does not mean the end of Me blogging. I will even keep the same, now horribly misnamed, blog title. I will simply start writing things that I feel like writing without regard to how it fits into my character of H2$. We’ll see how long I go before creating a new character because I’m not quite pretentious enough to think that others will find my real opinions interesting.