Honey, I'm Home

When I last left you, gentle blog, I planned on returning to you within the day with my thoughts concerning that night's Grey's Anatomy. Before I left I promised not to sleep with any other blogs while I was away, which I didn't think was going to be any big thing, as I was only going out for bagel crisps, bottled water, and cigarettes.

Then fate - that crazy whore - intervened. Instead of just going to the store and purchasing food, I fled hearth and home, dismantled my life piece by piece (a surprisingly easy and quick procedure), grew a beard, learned yoga, shaved, learned even more yoga - went native, if you will - then emerged from the fever dream of my flight from reality several months down the road, intact except for my illusions and one of my kidneys. When I came back to myself, many things about my life and its relationships with the outside world had changed irrevocably. After all, many of those close to me had assumed I was either dead or had become a pirate. Both of which were, at one point or another during what I now think of as my spirit quest, were true, actually, but that’s a different blog. What matters for our purposes is that instead of being gone forty or fifty minutes, I was gone for the better part of a year.

And yes, Grey’s Anatomy blog, what you’ve heard from your friends is true. I was with other blogs while I was away from you. I was with many other blogs, in fact. Blogs about politics. Blogs about my feelings. Blogs who had been strippers for long enough, you know, and were now looking to get their Associate's Degree, so as to provide not just money but a solid example for their little blog children.

And I’ve changed. You’re right. But I never – not even when I was hipdeep in one of those other blogs – stopped thinking about you. I miss you, McNightmare.Blogspot.Com. I miss your smell. And I know, in the same way I know how to tell when my first mate’s become mutinous and when to call him out on that shit just before he challenges me to a knife fight so that I can “accidentally” open up his femoral in the heat and smoke and excitement of raiding an Icelandic cruise ship, that you miss me too. So what do you say, sugartits? Reunited and it feels so good? This time you can be Peaches. Awesome.

Grey’s Anatomy changed a lot in my absence, as I had feared it might. Meredith got together with Chris O’Donnell, which was a relief to me because last I’d heard from him, he had just been run down awesomely by a train in Fried Green Tomatoes. Attaway to bounce back, C-O’c. But then he got run the fuck over again, this time by Meredith’s infidelity with Patrick Dempsey, and then by the all-consuming fury of her craziness. Damn, C-O’c. Tough break. Walk it off.

Also Isaiah Burke earned my eternal affection by choking the shit out of Patrick Dempsey in an onset melee (huzzah!) and lost it again by calling T.R. Knight a faggot (boo). Then he wrote me a lovely poem in which he compared my eyes to the moon, my hair to silk, and my buttocks to – well, that’s between myself and Isaiah. Anyway, now I don’t know what to think!

Well, come to think of it, that’s not entirely true. There are some things I know for sure. I know ice cream is delicious. I know that you can eat ice cream with a spoon. And I know I also know that I own many spoons, and that the 24hr bodega next door sells ice cream. And I know one more thing. I know that Patrick Dempsey (a.k.a. Derek Shepherd, a.k.a. McDreamy) is my enemy.

And maybe that’s all I need to know.

Plan of Attack

Tonight I will watch the most recent episode of Grey's Anatomy with my mother, an avowed Grey's Anatomy fan. I'm expecting several tense moments during this viewing, capped off with a big fight over something I plan on not being able to keep from saying during the montage that will almost certainly cap off the fourth act.

I will blog the carnage for you, my loyal readers. That way you do not have to think for yourselves about how you feel about this episode or about my relationship with my mother, as it will be laid out for you in blog form.

In conclusion, Patrick Dempsey was the guy in Outbreak who served as patient zero for the killer monkey disease. Joel pointed this out to me last night, and it has quickly become the defining fact of my existence.

Triage

I was exposed to Grey's Anatomy the same way the goats they tethered to oblivion on Bikini Atoll were exposed to radiation: a) against my will b) with disastrous consequences c) after being tied to a stake, fed a bit of lettuce, and told "everything is going to be all right." It is, I suppose, conceivable that the goats have, in the intervening decades, forgiven their murderers the pain inflicted upon them. If so, I think you’ll agree, goats are chumps. For the record, I am not a chump.

As one of my captors was putting the Grey’s Anatomy: Season 1 DVD into the player, I made the mistake of asking what, exactly, made Patrick Dempsey, who plays Dr. Derek Shephard and who – in the parallel universes of many of the show’s female characters and many of its fans - goes by the nickname “McDreamy,” so goddamned attractive.

I didn’t have to wait long for my answer. In unison: “it’s his personality.” And then, from Captor 2: “it’s a combination of his looks and his personality.” After a bit of thought, Captor 1 endorsed this take as well. Unlike people I’ve read about who were kidnapped by lunatics who threatened to shoot them in the face every day but who came to implicitly trust, and even love, I can honestly say I never felt even the faintest stirrings of Stockholm Syndrome as regards the people responsible for Grey’s Anatomy becoming part of my life.

Anyway, because I, going into Grey’s Anatomy, knew what it was some other people find so appealing about Patrick Dempsey, it makes since that you, going into this blog, have explained to you why I find him so unappealing.

It’s a combination of his looks and his personality.

Looks first: fucking shave already, Patrick Dempsey. Buy an electric razor that you can keep at the hospital and then, whenever you get a chance between your busy schedule of neurosurgery and perving on your students/employees, go to the goddamn bathroom and shave. Also, stop putting so much crap in your hair. I don’t know sort of product you’re using, but it looks like axle grease, so I’m assuming it’s industrial strength pomade. That shit can’t be sterile. Either cut your hair or resign yourself to the occasional bad hair day.

If you’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy, and, let’s face it, America, you fucking have, you already know the deficiencies in Patrick Dempsey – and I’m not going to get used to typing Dr. Shephard, so just get used to that – are far too numerous to list. I think you’ll find that if you start to think about any one specific thing about Patrick Dempsey’s behavior you find objectionable, what may at some emotional distance seem like a fairly isolated, if annoying, problem (for example, his habit of initially shooting down Meredith on whatever hare-brained quasi-doctorial Quxoticness she’s pinned her emotional stability to this week before quickly reversing course and doing whatever it is she wants this time, all the while staring meaningfully at her) metastasizes into this huge, all-corrupting soullessness that you find yourself recoiling from because you think it’s possible the horribleness that is Patrick Dempsey is going to leap through the television screen and out at you like a rabid dog going through the throat. Your throat. The throat you need to live, to go on living.

This is all by way of saying that much in theway there's no way to summarize the wetness of the ocean or the deadness of a nuked goat, there's no way to verbalize my hate for Patrick Dempsey. To do so would be to disrespect my hate, to unfairly limit it. To be faithful to both the enormity of my hate and the responsibility/need I feel to express that hate to like-minded television viewerS, I'll try to marshal my descriptive angels to the cause of blogging the trauma Grey's Anatomy has brought to me. It's all I have left.

Hating You Is The Most Exhausting Thing I've Ever Thoroughly Enjoyed, You Smarm-Vomiting Turbo-Schmuck

In her defense, Meredith Grey has a lot on her plate. She's a surgical intern at the least professional hospital outside of Clown Island, which is an island I just invented populated entirely by clowns. Her mom has Alzheimer's, on top of being a super-powered hyper-bitch. Making things even worse, Meredith Grey lives with Katherine Heigel, which, let's face it, can't be good for one's body image. That being said, I have to think I'm just better put together than Meredith Grey when she goes around saying things like "hating [Patrick Dempsey] is the most exhausting thing ..." Because, at least from my perspective, wishing pain on Patrick Dempsey is not only not exhausting, it's invigorating.

This is a blog I've created about how much pleasure I get from hating Patrick Dempsey, and other horrible things foisted on me by the popularity of Grey's Anatomy, a show that, were it a neurosurgeon, would probably insist on operating on patients by leering inappropriately at the surgical intern I'm birddogging to make myself feel better about my horrible marriage, all the while hoping that whatever tumors may have attached themselves to said patient's brain-stem are just magically charmed off because I haven't shaved in exactly two and a half days and I'll be damned if it's not a flattering look for me.

Seriously, I don't know how Patrick Dempsey sleeps at night.