Jonny's Top 10 Enemies of 2021
I only had one New Year's resolution this year and that was to stop making this stupid list. But as usual, you people were too annoying not to take to task. In fact, I hard such a hard time narrowing it down to ten that I inadvertently wrote the first draft with eleven. Alas, if I started bending the rules for one, I would have to open a floodgate for other worthy irritants so Donald Trump was deleted. Not so much because he was less irritating than the ones I've included (he was actually placed higher than some who made the cut), but because seeing his ugly orange face on my website again made me queasy. But even with that minor bit of cobtroversy, I feel solid about the people I've named although I have no doubt that I'll be hearing whining from a lot of you because your favorite didn't make the cut. To you I say, there's always next year. For now, shut the hell up. At about this time, you're probably asking yourself who I've taken to task since I made that original list in 2009. The complete selections can be found here: 2009 • 2010 • 2011 • 2012 • 2013 • 2014 • 2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 • 2020 But considering the hellish shape that the world's in, it's best not to focus on the past or the future, but the here-and-now. On that note, I give you my top 10 enemies of 2021: Rosanna De Candia who slid from the number 3 spot last year. I went out of my way to avoid Ms. De Candia in 2021 after the nightmare she made of my life last year, but she managed to raise the bile to my throat late in the game when I happened to catch her appearance on Jay Leno’s update of the old Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life. Mr. Leno got a great deal of mileage talking about Ms. De Candia’s consciously practicing celibacy for the last twenty years (despite my best efforts to try to get her to break her streak). But what really ground my gears was when she began talking about the mystic qualities of crystals. I knew that Ms. De Candia was a devotee of holistic voodoo, but I was floored when she admitted that she usually put jewels in her bra to get their maximum mystic effect. Until then, I had always scoffed at such superstitionss as silly but I was forced to reexamine my beliefs and give into the necromantic force of jewels. It’s the only explanation I can find for the hypnotic power that her rack holds over me. My beloved friend Harmony Sanchez, who amazingly makes her debut on the list this year. I say “amazingly” because I’ve known Ms. Sanchez for some 25 years, although not by the name Harmony Sanchez. That’s just the moniker she goes by on Facebook. Her real name is…now let me see. She calls herself Melody Colleen on Instagram, but that isn’t it either. Truth be told, I only interact with Ms. Sanchez/Colleen on the Social Network these days (along with almost everybody else) and I’ll be goddamned if I can remember her by a name other than the ones she uses online. For all my aging brain can remember, her secret identity is Bruce Wayne. And that’s just fine since I only have any use for her on the web, it really doesn’t matter if I can remember her actual name or not. After all, when Gotham City is beset by super criminals, nobody bothers to call Bruce Wayne. They log onto the Melody signal and seek out Harmony Sanchez. Scout Olson-Ball, who sets the record for the youngest person to ever be called out on this list. Ms. Ball is the daughter of my associate Amy Ball (and her partner Jake Olson), who made the number five spot in 2020 for preparing to give birth to someone who is genetically equipped to be as irritating as she is. But since Scout’s debut in March, I have found her to be even more annoying than her mother. The chief reason is her name. I had presumed (along with, I assume, everyone else; although I never actually surveyed anyone to see if this was accurate) that Ms. Ball would name her daughter after me, her closest friend (another assumption that I never bothered to verify). Instead, she gave her the unusual moniker Scout after a character in her favorite book To Kill a Mockingbird. I must grudgingly admit that Scout is a wicked cool name that will serve the young lady brilliantly throughout her life but imagine how many doors would have opened for her if her handle was Jonathan George Mullich Olson-Ball. True, the name never did much good for me until relatively recently and I can speak from experience in warning Ms. Olson-Ball that if she did have my name, she could look forward to nothing but wedgies, playground tauntings and sadistic rejections from the opposite sex for her first couple of decades (the sadistic rejection thing will go on for much longer). It’s probably just as well that her parents named her Scout. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who tried to whitewash his corporation’s part in spreading Donald Trump’s evil plot to spread misinformation across the Social Network by giving it the name Meta, which was like Kanye West expecting the world to forget all the batshit crazy stuff he’s done after he tried changing his name to “Ye.” But for all of Mr. Zuckerberg’s sins (and they are many), what finally got him on this list was when Facebook deleted no less than three of my posts. Two were Hack Werker covers titled Sex Games on Sex Beach and Sex Sleigh (both of which can be viewed here), so if you’re uptight about artistic depictions of the physical act of love between adults, I guess that I can’t take issue with that. But his third act of censorship was this photo of my beloved pug Boris and me standing in a parking lot preparing to see Jesse Merlin perform at a screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show (more on that later in the list). I grant you that both Boris and I are unusually sexually arousing specimens but I don’t get why Mr. Zuckerberg was so offended by this image that he couldn’t bear to have it on his website. Maybe he’s more of a The Room fan. Master Thespian Thomas W. Ashworth, who makes his first appearance on the list since 2018. I depicted Mr. Ashworth on many Hack Werker covers this year and he responded to all of them as if they were acting roles which he actually performed, reminiscing on the difficulty of achieving the “shot.” I didn’t have the heart to explain to him that they were paintings used as book covers (okay, they were Photoshopped but you’re supposed to accept them as paintings) that he was never actually in attendance for. I was afraid that if I shattered Mr. Ashworth’s fantasy that his feeble mind would collapse, so I haven’t had the heart to set him straight. If that means that he’s keeping his many creditors at bay with promises of residual checks for his work on Bad Ass Santa or Heat Wave on Sex Beach, so be it. Truth be told, he probably didn’t make that much less on my Hack Werker covers than he did for his “real” acting work on the movie Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! Jesse Merlin, who returns to the list this year after somehow managing to be off my radar in 2020. Mr. Merlin annoyed me most last year when I finally witnessed one of his signature performance pieces miming the role of The Criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show while the film was projected behind him. It was a delightful experience although I was furious because while the audience loved Mr. Merlin and his colleagues acting out the movie in real time, whenever I try to something similar at one of my favorite porno theaters, the police inevitably get involved. I thought that he wouldn’t be able to top himself after that, but he was even more irritating a scant few days ago when I visited him at his palatial mansion to watch the DVD of U.S.S. Pinafore, the stage production at which we first met over a decade ago. The show held up well until Mr. Merlin left the room and returned a few minutes later wearing his Starfleet captain’s uniform and began miming the action unspooling on the television in real time. I would have objected but I didn’t want to miss my cue to throw rice during the big wedding scene. Lacie Harmon and Robin Greenspan, my treasured married lesbian pals who make their first appearance on this list since 2018. The Covid crisis has kept many of us separated and Labin (as they are known in the media) have made pains to assure me how beloved I am to them despite our physical proximity from each other. And as the shroud of the virus appeared to lift this year, we made numerous appointments to get together, break vegan bread (because on top of all the other pains I’ve endured from them, I have to put up with their self-righteous eating habits) and express our mutual devotion face to face. Yet every time one of our scheduled love fests approached, they communicated to be that some dire emergency had taken place (I think one was when Squid Games premiered on Netflix), forcing them to postpone the get-together. As of this writing, Mrs. Greenspan-Harmon and Mrs. Harmon-Greenspan continue to express their undying devotion to me while bending over backwards to avoid me. Bro Joe, who came in number 8 last year but upped his game in 2021. I turned 60 this year and when Joe tried to bust me chops about it, I pointed out that he was actually two years older than me so he might want to consider shutting the fuck up. His response was “the last time I climbed a mountain, no one asked for an I.D.” His point was that his lifestyle of hiking, mountaineering, camping, and similar macho outdoorsy activities somehow put his age in reverse, and he was now actually younger than me in the grand scheme of things. He makes an interesting point but it all becomes irrelevant when you consider that on his last major adventure, he contacted me with the specifics of his trip and the contact information of the local ranger stations because the trails he was traveling were so dangerous that he only had a 50% chance of survival. Mercifully, he made it out alive but if his age-defying activities continue at their current pace, I can look forward in a year or two to being air-lifted to the top of some glacier or the bottom of some Amazonian valley in order to identify his body. On the bright side, it should look like it belonged to a nubile teenager by then. The Omicron Variant, which made its lethal debut just as I was being lulled back into the fantasy that Earth wasn’t a terrifying place to exist. Like many of you, I had assumed that because I was vaccinated and boosted that I could now wave my magnificent ass defiantly at the virus. But instead, it crapped out a son who was immune to all the stopgaps we had set up for its poppa like we were living in a goddamned Godzilla sequel. What pisses me off most is that all the scientists like Fauci & Company warned us that this was going to happen, and we ignored them like we were living in a goddamned Godzilla sequel. It’s becoming clear that to destroy the virus, we must look back to the original Godzilla movie and devise an "Oxygen Destroyer" which disintegrates oxygen atoms and causes organisms to die of a rotting asphyxiation, and detonate it off the coast of Tokyo as thousands of frightened Japanese flee in terror, which is how they snuffed the legendary rubber lizard the first time. I’ll suggest it to Dr. Fauci but something tells me that he already recommended it to the government months ago and they ignored him. It’s how science works. Snow Mercy, who made her first appearance on this list as the number 4 entry last year and ascended with an unprecedented rise to the coveted number 1 slot just 365 days later. As most of you know, Ms. Mercy is a world-famous dominatrix so you would think that our association had rendered me black and blue, but such was never the case. Despite my subtle maneuvers to get her to treat me like the worthless little bitch I am, she has accorded me with nothing but respect and affection whenever we are together. Whether we have spent time in each other’s company going on long bike rides (which left me so sore that I couldn’t get out of bed the following day), taking vigorous hikes (after which I had to ice both knees for a week), spending pleasant hours as I assisted her in reorganizing her studio (leaving my back in such agony that I couldn’t stand up straight), or putting a spotlight on the issues of people experiencing homelessness by sleeping in the street (for which I am still undergoing physical therapy), there has never been a hint of the masochistic attitude which has made her a legend in her field. Although I must admit that after re-reading this paragraph, I now realize that I didn’t get off as easily with her as I thought. Maybe she does think of me as a worthless little bitch. I had no idea that I was that sexy. And so we close the door on the anal fissure that was 2021. I must admit that I feel a cathartic surge of relief posting this list and I hope that its subjects havve learned their lesson and will try to pick up their game in 2022. Will there be a list at the end of next year? That's up to you!
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