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Jonny's Top 10 Enemies of 2013
As always, there were surprises this year. For the fourth time in the past five years, my number one enemy of the previous year (in this case, the dreaded Proposition B, which mandated the use of condoms in porn shot inside Los Angeles) failed to make the list. But there was a return to form for Bro Joe who, after not making the list for the first time ever last year, came back strong in 2013 with his highest ranking yet. So committed were my old enemies to finally destroying me this year that only two newcomers, Emmy nominee Wade Sheeler and the Republican party, were able to crack the top 10. The rest were old favorites who have been crawling up my ass in order to kill me since I began charting your sins. And #1 nearly did on numerous occasions.But I've kept you waiting long enough. Here are Jonny's Top 10 Enemies of 2013:
And so we begin 2014 with a clean slate. Perhaps an entirely new group of irritants will populate this list at the end of the year. Perhaps the 10 assholes named above will use their placement here as inspiration to annoy me to an even higher level over the next twelve months. However it turns out, I'm ready for you. Bring it on! |
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What a year it was. I began 2013 when Eddie Frierson ran off with my new Year's Eve date (a photograph of Mara Marini) so I had to ring in the dropping of the ball with a photograph of my nemesis Misty LaRue, setting a tone for disappointment and horror that followed me through to the end of December. I visited New York where it was so muggy that sweat oozed out of me with the consistency of toothpaste. Yentas like Stephanie Fredricks, Jaz Davison and Harmony Sanchez competed with each other for who could annoy me the most. My beloved pug Winston greeted me each morning with a newly minted poop on my otherwise pristine carpet. And Jeff Daniels in The Newsroom beat out Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad for the Emmy Award. The nightmares were nonstop in this hellhole of a year, but there were only 10 slots to compete for, and competition was high. Here are my past Top 10 enemies:
Wade Sheeler is arguably the most accomplished person on this list, having won his second consecutive Emmy nomination this year for producing the reality television series Top Chef. But even with those golden kudos, I provided the highlight of Mr. Sheeler's 2013 by casting him in the role of the alien Commander General Paulbogart, a red extraterrestrial whose society is based on an old VHS tape of the 1972 Christmas special The House Without a Christmas Tree that had the last ten minutes erased so nobody realized that you were supposed to expunge all your dickishness by the time Christmas finally rolled around. It is an excellent metaphor for Mr. Sheeler himself, for whom I keep waiting for the time when he'll have an epiphany that will make him stop annoying me but it never seems to come. Our ugliest disagreement this year came when he was doing his duties as a commentator for the movie website 
She coined the term "asspotato" to describe me, after a rare root that grows only in Southern Florida and parts of The Congo which becomes highly toxic if exposed to the kind of raging hot gusts of wind that result from a yenta incessantly flapping her jaws. My nemesis Misty LaRue spent 2013 doing her best to dice me into French fries but I remain standing despite her most obvious attempt to do me in on the 4th of July, when we got together to shoot off fireworks she had purchased in Tijuana with her profits selling anal sex to members of the Pacific Fleet stationed in San Diego, and my middle finger became mysteriously and very painfully infected. Being confronted by someone in agony is Ms. LaRue's Happy Place so the sight of my swollen finger propelled her into full yenta mode and she insisted that we take my throbbing finger to the local emergency room to have it lanced. I never discovered what caused my digit to inflame to the point that it looked like an over-baked summer sausage covered in horse radish, but I cannot help but believe that the dark forces which Ms. LaRue calls on to keep the vice squad at bay were also conjured to cast an evil spell on my finger. She was nowhere to be found months later when my eyelid suffered a similar infection and had to be drained of evil spirits (aka puss) by an eye doctor. My physician expressed confusion at my ailment, telling me that kind of infection could only have resulted from contact with a rare root that grows only in Southern Florida and parts of The Congo. I guess coincidences like that happen.
A brilliant actress whose worked ranged from playing "Hispanic Mother"in 
Rob Vestal cracked the list at #9 last year but rose to the #7 spot when he took on the guise of "The Dick," the arch-enemy of the Jonny League of America, a coterie of superheroes made up of ILoveYouMan, The Piece of Shit & Toilet Paper Boy, Goddess Girl, The Yammering Yenta, and Winston, my pug (Winston is so awesome that he doesn't need an alter ego to be super). The jerkish supervillain was the overwhelming winner in an online poll to determine the primary foe of the League, but being a total dick wasn't much of a stretch for Mr. Vestal since he spent the rest of his time lounging on South American beaches while effortlessly picking up hot chicks. I got depressed at hearing about Mr. Vestal's constant success with the ladies until I concluded that the only way to vanquish The Dick was to expose him to a sexually-transmitted disease, a scenario that I like to think is more than a slim possibility when I picture Mr. Vestal inserting his wang in every willing bikini-clad Chiquita in Colombia. You're probably are wondering why I'm spending my time fantasizing about Mr. Vestal having sex with hot Latinas when I could be picturing myself doing the nasty, but even in my imagination there are no self-respecting Colombian women who will have anything to do with me. They're all afraid of the STDs I'm probably carrying around with me.
The Republican Party which was so outraged over the implementation of the Affordable Healthcare Act that they banded together to shut down the federal government to minimum capacity on October 1st rather than allow the scourge of ObamaCare to bring the nation to its knees. After a lot of huffing and puffing - notably during a filibuster from Texas senator Ted Cruz (although technically it wasn't a filibuster because it didn't delay the vote for anything; its literal designation is a "publicity stunt"), during part of which he read Doctor Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham - the GOP finally relented and passed a bill ending the shutdown of the government which required over a million federal employees to go on furlough or work without pay. The political equivalent of the Republicans taking their ball and going home did nothing to delay the rollout of ObamaCare, a technical disaster at its debut which the right claimed proved their point. It seemed to me there's something wrong with doing everything in your power to fuck something up and then smugly declaring it a triumph when it shows up at your door fucked up. I think that the Doctor Seuss book that Mr. Cruz should have read was The Cat in the Hat. It's the story of one selfish asshole who comes in and messes everything up and then it takes everyone working as a team to clean it up again. The GOP could learn a lot from that. 
Bro Joe spent most of his time this year sitting in various Starbucks coffee shops writing condescending Facebook posts about the weirdos around him. What Joe failed to take into account was that everyone around him was writing condescending Facebook posts about the weirdo who was constantly staring at them and trying not to look like he was eavesdropping while writing condescending Facebook posts. My favorite Joe adventure of 2013 was when a professional matchmaker wrote him that he was "adventurous, outdoorsy, just downright fun to be around, and not to mention good looking - you are the ideal man."He was strutting around for days after reading that until I pointed out that this yenta's definition of an "ideal man" was a guy who will provide a female client DNA material and financing for her last-ditch attempt at having a baby and otherwise remain docile and comatose unless she needs to drag him out of his crypt to accompany her to a family wedding or a Sunday dinner at Mother's house so she finally won't be nagged to death about when she's going to settle down and find a man. Joe's history of alcohol abuse and conversational ineptitude makes him the perfect mate for such women since he'll spend his nights passed out in the basement after drinking a bottle and a half of Jack Daniels while she's in the nursery reading Ayn Rand books to Junior. That definition doesn't exactly make him a hero to the freaks that he hangs out with at Starbucks but compared with them, he's about as ideal as anybody who's desperate enough to hire a professional matchmaker can reasonably expect.
The moment that defined Tom Ashworth for me this year was when I created one of my delightful Facebook cover illustrations of myself and Mara Marini doing a carefree Astaire/Rogers-type ballroom dance with some anonymous tuxedo-clad extras standing behind us. One of them was Mr. Ashworth, who seemed to be regarding the two of us jealously as though he wanted bitterly to be in one of our places. Even though the image was created with Photoshop chicanery, I found it disturbing that I couldn't make up my mind if it was Ms. Marini's or my place that he appeared to want to take and I've tried to give Mr. Ashworth a wide berth ever since. He continues to somehow insert himself into my affairs like an unexpected Trinidad Moruga Scorpion red pepper in a bite out of an egg salad sandwich on Wonder Bread. Whether he's method acting the role of God in a play called God Help Us, showing up at acting auditions armed with canvasses he's painted in the hopes of selling them to a casting director, or crawling up my ass because I write flatteringly of Shakespearean tragedian Richard Burbage but fail to include a kind word about his contemporary comic actors like Will Kempe or Robert Armin, Mr. Ashworth has the ability to irritate people in ways they'd never expect. There are times that I wish he would take Ms. Marini's place in my life. I can see a real benefit to his taking out a restraining order that kept me 500 yards away from him at all times.
Amy Ball started her Enemies List year by declaring her fondness for "The Beardo,"a knit cap with a knit faux beard attached to it, and ended it by reprising her role as Peaseblossom, the beautiful green elf inexplicably married to the muse Jonny M. in 
The biggest surprise of the Enemies List year was when I posted one of those idiotic "Who's Hotter?" polls putting me in competition with Mara Marini and I walked away with almost 80% of the votes. At first I thought that was a pretty reasonable figure since I'm in 100% of my sexual fantasies whereas Ms. Marini is only in about two-thirds of them, but then I had to admit that as sexy as I undoubtedly am, I have to think that there must have been some monkey business at the polls. Ms. Marini (best known to the general public for playing porn star Brandi Maxxxx in the NBC sitcom Parks & Recreation) has admitted to owning a Laker Girl, angel, cop, dominatrix, Flashdance, Dorothy, RCMP, vampire, witch and Elvira costume, whereas the only erotic outfit I own is a sock to put over my engorged genitalia to spare my potential sexual partner for the night from having to look at my misshapen junk until the last possible second. Ms. Marini did draw the line at a French maid's uniform, being under the impression that wearing it would require her to do domestic servitude (I explained to her that if she wore such an outfit, most men would happily clean her house from top to bottom with their tongue just for the chance of ripping the get-up off her when they were finished). She has appeared on these pages more than any other individual despite the fact that I risk serious jail time for so much as downloading her picture and superimposing the head over a Playboy centerfold, so she must have some allure to the general populace; even if she is only able to come up with a meager 20% of the vote in an online "Who's Hotter?" poll that I control and that is voted on by my core fan base. It may take me hundreds of hours of Photoshopping her picture in perverse scenarios, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice to get to the heart of her mystery. If only I can find some sufficient images of a busty woman in a French maid's outfit that I can stick her face on, I know that I'll be on the right track.
It is the great challenge of my life that I am forced to interact with the most annoying collection of people in the history of human civilization. Yet there is one individual who, week-in and week-out, manages to get under my skin on such a regular basis that he has been featured on these pages more than anyone else save Mara Marini. And since he doesn't have the advantage of my wanting to get him in the sack, Jonny Award winner Jesse Merlin must be considered my greatest enemy of 2013. Whether he was appearing as a troll key chain in an operatic adaptation of Peer Gynt (which he performed in another city in an obvious passive-aggressive power play to prevent me from seeing it), as a man whose wife is sleeping with all the other characters in Sketches from the National Lampoon (although not with members of the audience, a classification I was relegated to in an obvious passive-aggressive power play), as a defrocked priest in Exorcistic the Rock Musical Parody Experiment (in which I was seated next to lunatic with the maniacal cackle of a laughing hyena in an obvious passive-aggressive power play) or as various roles in Silence! The Musical (for which he won an LA Weekly Theatre Award in an obvious passive-aggressive power play), Mr. Merlin has spent the year with the singular objective of annoying the crap out of me. And even when he sweet-talked me into joining him for an evening when I could let my hair down and relax (when he is attired in either a crushed velvet smoking jacket or a tee-shirt bearing the logo of the gross-out art movie Saló or the 120 Days of Sodom, if not both), he makes sure to ultimately.fuck me over in an obvious passive-aggressive power play; such as when we attended a screening of the 1985 science fiction classic LifeForce (a "classic" apparently being any film that is over 20 years old, since this incomprehensible piece of crap had no other qualities which one might use to apply such an honorific) and Mr. Merlin subjected me to a Q&A with the film's star Steve Railsback who turned out to use the event as a forum for a stream of nonsensical ranting the likes of which I haven't heard since the last time I screamed in my bathroom mirror for two hours about how everyone I know is trying to destroy me in an obvious passive-aggressive power play. Mr. Merlin thinks that he's clever but he's on my radar now and I guarantee that when the dust clears in 2014, it will be him that is lying beaten in pool of his own blood and guts and not me. All I need to do is come up with a really kick-ass passive-aggressive power play.