Finally outside of the firehouse in a futile attempt at forsaking their usual indoor activity of "not entertaining me in the slightest" for the first time since their respective planes touched down on the Logan runway some weeks before, Jason and Elka turn up in the increasingly infamous laundromat, apparently the only other location in town not requiring the use of NASA-approved spacesuits custom-designed to withstand the bitter chill of either exploring as-yet undiscovered planets billions of miles from the sun, or traveling through a typical night in the frigid wasteland that is The Real World's tedious sixth season. That was the longest sentence...ever. Jason stares too long at a dryer, the repetitive spin of laundry a pretty apt approximation of our experience watching them on a week-to-week basis. The difference, of course, is that Jason is a brilliant observer of the world around him who can always parse poetic meaning from even the most seemingly banal of occurrences in our everyday lives. The difference, of course, is that Jason is an artist. And here is how he recaps the riveting series premiere of Spinning Clothes in a Dryer for mightybiglaundry.com: "Hey, Elka, is this your underwear? Is this your bra? You have a pair of green, striped underwear." Hey, Jason, you missed the "I'm With Poser" t-shirt she feels so mysteriously inclined to wear whenever the two of you hang out. Elka acts all play-angry and girlish and Sister-Mary-Katherine-never-made-fun-of-my-days-of-the-week-panties-in-the-parochial-school-laundry in repeatedly telling him to "stop staring at it!" She runs up to him and tries to physically remove him from the front of the dryer, pointlessly pluralizing, "Leave my underwears alone!" And if that weren't enough non-sexual un-tension so far for one dazzling sequence in this hotbed of eroticism, Jason takes this opportunity to rudely non-sequitur, "I can't believe you're a virgin." Shut up, Jason. I can't believe you're not. He displays his excessively adept listening skills by expressing shock that there would be "an eighteen-year-old virgin" left on the planet, and she corrects him that she is in fact a nineteen-year-old virgin. She asks if he thinks it's because she "can't get any," and he lapses back into his default Seth Green in Can't Hardly Wait defensive white-boy cadence in telling her "Oh, no, baby, I know you can get some. Don't go there. We're not even going there." Hey, Jason, here's a tip: Women who possess that enviable sense of moral fortitude and realize that there is an inherent part of their womanhood that they feel the need to preserve and not just give up to the first man who compliments her lingerie, love -- just LOVE -- to be called "baby."
After an approximately fifty-hour montage of the two of them staring aimlessly at what must be an utterly fascinating laundromat ceiling (um, Bumin? Murray? Nah, don't wake 'em), Jason gets all deep with the inventive, "Have you ever loved anyone?" Elka willfully attempts to answer the question, "If love is thinking about someone all the time..." before Jason gives new meaning to the words "rhetorical" and "why did you even bother to show up?" with his continuing congressional filibuster, "Like let them in, to the softest part of you, man? That could...they could hurt you? It's the scariest damn thing that I've ever had in my whole life." End this tirade. END!!! Or not: "I don't obsess, at all. I think and I go. 'ow!' Like, I was walking over here and I was like, 'damn! Ow! That hurts!' Y'know?" No, sir. I do not know. I think he means that he misses his girlfriend. Oops. Looks like someone forgot to separate his whites from his raging, self-obsessed idiocy again. I can't believe we're still in the freakin' laundromat.
Cut to Jason alone in a coffee shop at a completely different stage of facial-hair development than in the scene just , journalling the day away. We learn in voice-over the history of Jason's relationship with his girlfriend, an area of knowledge for which we had all been thirsting, no doubt: "My girlfriend's name is Timber. She's an incredible girl. It was hard to say goodbye to her, but I was really ready to leave. And I really needed to do something on my own without her around. I just kind of set that part of my life over here and looked toward Boston and started, like, trying to take all of that in." Eh? Yeah, um, can we just go back to watching the laundry spin? Any time, really. Ah, there it is now.
For no other reason than to blow the memory of the scenes out of my mind with a sensory assault akin to when the State department blasts excessively loud music in an attempt to drive exiled Middle Eastern dictators out of isolation, a blasting rendition of the Chili Pepper's "Roller Coaster of Love" accompanies Syrus (hey, stranger. How you been?), Jason, and Sean bumbling through an all-women's step class while Montana keeps up admirably. Montana is wearing a tank top with a corporate logo of some kind across it that the producers have decided to blur out (it's a Nike swish, okay? I'll try not to let its presence emblazoned across Montana's chest influence me into purchasing this product I otherwise would never have heard of), and I muse for a moment that the surprising flatness of her stomach almost diverts my attention away from her chronically problematic bangs. ["I don't think that's Montana; I think it's just some other chick with bad red hair. Seriously, Montana has shoulders like a linebacker, and that chick doesn't." -- Wing Chun] Almost. Meanwhile, the boys continue floundering around in the back, much to the continuing amusement of not me.
Cut to the surprisingly touchy-feely burgeoning relationship between Syrus, Sean, and Jason, out at a bar drinking and then back in the firehouse slapping each other repeatedly on the back of the neck. We learn that Syrus believes that Jason is a "cool guy," and that when it comes to Sean and Syrus, well, Jason "dig[s] them both." Awwwww. Continuing montage of the three faux-wrestling in towels and underwear, and I miss a few seconds of screen time looking up "male-bonding, gay-themed" in the As-Yet-Unexplored Themes section of my Real World Guide to Why Every Freakin' Season is Starting to Look Exactly the Same as the One Before It manual and finding this entire sequence cross-referenced. Syrus kicks back in a confessional and lets us know what's what: "Sean is, y'know, my boy. Jay's my boy too but Sean's, y'know, my boy." Back in the firehouse, I continue to have no freakin' clue what the three of them are talking about. I even need to employ the assistance of the closed captions, which provides little assistance in matters of clarity. Syrus: "We'll see who's got the verbal milk, or the verbal baggage, to carry the rest of the green and the cabbage. Whatever you want to do, I'm down to do. Me and you, one crew, one diggity-two. Brother Sy, never through." Then he throws a hat at Sean and departs from the room with the strangely triumphant, "Go drink a brew." What? WHAT? Jason averts his eyes as successfully as possible from this tidal wave of sheer pointlessness, staring into a suddenly fascinating past journal entry or two and doubtlessly thinking, "Unless something has changed in the house / While I sit here and indulgently grouse / Terribly imagined and even more terribly delivered spoken word free associations while we're on MTV's lease / Are really more my area of expertise." Ooooh. I think I just channeled Jason. I hope my head doesn't explode. Or if it does, that the debris doesn't stain one of my many cool-guy knit caps or pairs of yellow-tinted sunglasses I have, for some mysterious reason, recently acquired.
Back in the linear, non-rhyming-couplet-esque world of character development, Sean admits in a confessional, "Syrus is the first really black friend that I've had." His first "really black" friend? As opposed to all of those multi-shaded, chameleon-esque friends of Sean who have fallen somewhere within the raw umber/burnt sienna color spectrum who don't necessarily qualify as "really" black? The country mouse/really-black-city-mouse juxtaposition continues into Syrus's confessional, in which he helpfully elaborates, "We are complete opposites." No. Really? Then why has nothing been said of this fascinating dichotomy before now? Oh, wait. It has. Every six seconds. "I'm a city boy. He's a Wisconsin boy. I'm from the warm weather. He's from the cold weather." Wasn't this a Paula Abdul song with an animated cat in the video? Back in the firehouse, Syrus suggests that Sean come with him "to the hood" sometime, and then we're back with Sean's confessional, telling us, "We come from really different walks of life. So we both have a lot to learn from each other." And the two hit the street together and head away from the firehouse, Sean perpetually enthralled that the pages of his junior high National Geographic subscription have finally come to life, yielding the sociological experiment he has misconstrued for a legitimate friendship. Shut. Up. Sean.
Back at the firehouse, Jason is helping Genesis with the complex machinery known as "the internet machine" and Elka approaches them, as if she's just walked into the house for the first time ever, to ask what they're looking for. Jason replies that their search concerns, "lesbian stuff," and I wonder momentarily why Genesis would need a web sherpa for this particular world wide journey, considering both her frequent forays into the world of internet smut as well as the fact that in 1997 you could pretty much just smash your palm flat on the keyboard, type ".com" after whatever that yielded, hit "enter," and end up at a site that at least linked to copious, unregulated photos of naked women, if not a major supplier of them itself.
And back to a Jason-oriented confessional (which looks like it was recorded on or around the time of his fifteenth birthday, what with the pre-pubescent "Bar Mitzvah Boy" moustache and the surprising appearance of what appears to be a rather ferocious mullet), he endears us to him and his deeply loving relationship with his "girlfriend" not even one bit with the admission, "In all my relationships in my past, every relationship I've ever been in, I have cheated on my girlfriend. I have never been able to be faithful." Uch. Back in the living room, Jason expresses to Kameelah, Sean, Montana, and Syrus that he is interested in a lot of other girls and he would "like to sit down and kiss them," adding just so there's no ambiguity, "I want to smooch on big, fatty lips." Yuck yuck yuck. A thousand times yuck. And I mean that. Cut to the well-edited sound of a ringing phone, where the aforementioned "Timber" phones the firehouse with the happy "surprise" that she's coming to visit in, like, one second. For a week. Jason hedges more than common courtesy will allow, asking if maybe she wants to avoid Boston, where it's "the zero degrees," telling her that she would benefit to "just stay there." Because if I were cold weather's natural enemy, I'm sure I would choose instead to remain in the tropical paradise of February in Boulder, Colorado. Realizing this diversionary tactic may be in the process of failing him, Jason brilliantly just opts for a big, honking lie: "I want you to come. I want you to come," as a confessional finishes up, "I'd rather her just stay away for the six months." Thank you, ironic intercut voice-over. But in this situation, we didn't even need the back story to know what an inveterate hypocrite this swarthy bastard really is. You can tell. You can just plain tell.
Jason takes the 'T' to the airport to pretend he's happy to see the unbalanced load we will soon come to know as "Timber." Jason's voice-over compares having a "girlfriend" to having a "mother," adding, much to my continued, eye-rolling horror, "I don't want my girlfriend around, because I've got to learn some things for myself." Like the part about not being an inveterate hypocrite swarthy bastard, for instance? Did that particular assignment make it onto the syllabus for the Jason Self-Actualization Seminar? Because you might want to consider employing the skills of an outside tutor trained in such matters if you have any realistic expectations of making it past the midterm. Bastard. Sadly for Jason, though, punishing karma comes along presently in the form of a clip of him publicly performing free-association spoken-word poetry, an artistic form I can barely even hear him indulge in, drowned out as it is by Alan Ginsberg spinning so fast in his grave that he actually comes ripping through the coffin, leaving an exact print of his body's silhouette, much in the style of Bugs Bunny jumping through a window and leaving a perfect outline replica of himself behind, ears and all. Even to recount the whole of Jason's homily on his fears of a future of domesticated, mini-van-driving, American style all-you-can-eat excess would be a disservice to those of us who collapsed in horror the first time we saw it and used up a boxing ring's worth of smelling salts to restore ourselves to consciousness. So instead I'll recount another spoken-word poem whose actual intent was to be as funny as this one turned out to be. And here it is: in the opening scene of the highly underrated Mike Myers comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer, his character takes the stage to perform a poem in his oft-chronicled "Woman, Woman, Woman" series. While a small jazz trio punctuates his every line with satirical Beat pretense (as is the case with Jason's verse), Myers looks at a slide projection photo of his last girlfriend and preaches the wise words:
Woman! Whoa, man. Whoooooooooa, man!
She was a thief, you gotta belief
She stole my heart and my cat
[Pathos-ridden stare. The snare does its snare thing it does so well]
Betty, Wilma, Josie and those Pussycats
They made me horny, Saturday morny
Girls of cartoons, leave me in ruins
I want to be Betty's Barney
[And then, spoken soulfully]
Jane? Would you get me offa this crazy thing...called love?
[fin]
[Raucous applause and the throwing of hotel keys]
Over in the firehouse (where Jason is apparently both on his way to the airport and in the bathroom sitting silently though this conversation, even further indicating just how two-faced he is), Sean continues to grill his "friend" Syrus on the matter of race relations in America, telling him that he doesn't agree with affirmative action. Then they talk about race a bit more. Gee, do you think Sean has noticed that Syrus is black?
Back at the airport. Jason frets that "it's going to be different" when he sees Timber, but tells us in a confessional, "If we can just be honest with one another, let each other know where we're coming from, then it'll be cool." Timber, an average weight, average size, average beauty girl -- a fake-blonde more generic than Pathmark brand diet cola -- saunters out of the gate. Jason feigns frightfully happy to see her. Silent cab montage of her attempting to establish any amount of physical intimacy with him, and him looking out the window helplessly like she's a old man who has just fallen asleep to him on a bus. The car pulls up at the firehouse, and they take exactly no time to introduce themselves to the other members of the house, seeing as he "wanted to have sex with her...immediately." And so they shut their roommates out and hole up in the bathroom for maximum, nookie-making potential, while shower caddies come crashing to the floor and mysterious naughty bits begin slamming against the wall. While the lot of them just sit there, rather than running like gangbusters to their local drugs and sundries retailer to begin a rigorous price comparison for the latest developments in hygienic flip-flop footwear. I would never walk in there again. I mean, in the shower? Come on. And also a big "come on" to the woeful editing team of this episode, who saw fit to intercut unsubtly phallic shots of fast-gushing waterfalls and uniformed men in a Boston parade -- no, really -- shooting off guns. It reminds me of the scene in The Simpsons where Marge and Homer send the kids off so they can make some serious whoopee, and it's followed by shots of a train entering a tunnel and a meat-processing plant spitting out rolled sausage and then Bart and Lisa are revealed to be watching those shots from inside of a movie theater airing a "stock footage film fest." Get it? It's making fun of the exact, contrived editing style we're seeing unironically in action right now.
Over in the children's center, Jason wails that he's worried about his relationship to anyone who will listen, including a few innocent youngsters passing by just in time to hear the sentiment, "Where's Timber? She's recovering" and "When you haven't seen your lover for a month, you've got to get used to them again, y'know?" Have I incredulously screamed "oh, come on" yet? Oh, twice, you say? Yeah, well. Back in the firehouse, Timber is actually in the process of combing the phone bill, looking for who else Jason has called besides her since he's been in Boston. Jason voice-overs that he hates jealousy because "it makes you completely irrational." Yes, poor Timber, acting out solely on the basis that you've just shared with a national audience that you have never been faithful to any (note the all-encompassing nature of the word "any") of your girlfriends, ever (note the all-encompassing nature of... oh, never mind). And while I will admit that Timber seems to have just flown in from a little south of sanity, I will say that I can rationalize every one of her psychotic actions (until the chalk incident, but let's just pretend that we don't know anything about that yet, okay?) because of how badly she wants to please him. It's pathetic and sad, yes. But it's still all his fault, because he's been on my TV longer and the animosity has therefore expanded exponentially . Cut to them in a bar, where Timber begins to cry because she feels she's being mistreated. Jason storms out and she follows, and he calls her at least four words worthy of a bleeping. Ah, young love.
We return from a short (okay, six minutes. God, I love recapping MTV shows) commercial break, to find Jason and Timber still outside the bar, Jason screaming, "I'm not gonna work anything out with you right there!" Why not, she asks? He word-poems, "Because of the way you acted tonight, because of the way you treated, because of the way you fronted!" Hmmm. I know most of those words. Just not in that order. He tells her that he can't handle talking to her when she is "this hammered," and Timber trips over a particular vexatious patch of, well, air, that happened to get in her way on the sidewalk right in the middle of an already unconvincing lecture about how not hammered she is. Uh. Huh. He tells her, "I love you but I hate you right now." He tells us, "My mom used to drink," driving home the in a long string of comparisons between the women he dates and, apparently, the only woman he'll ever really love. He also tells us that Timber's father left her when she was five, because, well, wah. Cut to Jason dropping her back off at the airport (man, the remaining six and a half unaired days of that visit must really have made for some riveting television. Guess we'll have to wait for the DVD version to know for sure), the hopeless romantic in all of us feeling for the following words of sincerity and trust. Like, ha ha. Not. Let's listen in! "I could always be there and always reassure her that I'm gonna stay with her, that I'm gonna stick with her. But that could be a lie."
I, um, don't even know if I can recap this same exact conversation for the sixtieth time in the last twenty-seven minutes (minus eighteen or so minutes of promos for the MTV Movie Awards). I really, really don't. You can practically hear the director yelling, "And, action!" before Syrus barely stops himself from yelling "Yeah, but we've said all these words already," and instead reads from the provided script: "Back to what we were talking about, Sean. Your views on this whole black and white thing." They walk down an endless stretch of pavement doubtlessly known as The Longest Street in Boston, while Syrus speeches the masses about "little subtle things as a kid. Even looking at pictures of Jesus Christ as a white man." The soundtrack takes a turn for the dramatic, with scary strings ahoy, in a frighteningly calculated attempt to prove to the ten remaining viewers that Syrus and Sean's conversation has taken a profound turn for the theological. Which it hasn't. Sean Minnesotas (is that an adept enough active verb description of his speech patterns?), "You should be able to take responsibility for what you do yourself." And then his confessional lets us know, in all his ultra-left wing liberated glory: "I don't think the black people's issues are that intense at this point in our society." Sean tells Syrus that he thinks "it's all relative," that Sean can be assaulted in a black neighborhood just as easily as Syrus would be mugged or otherwise compromised in a white neighborhood. There's even a quick shot of children's center, in which Sean and Syrus are predictably in the process of doing anything besides watching any children today, arguing over -- get this -- what color the construction paper background of a project they're working on should be. Syrus cracks up. Because he made a funny.
And, finally. Back in the firehouse, Timber calls Jason and actually gives it to him straight: "I'm not trying to put any weird pressure on you. And if you really need this time to yourself and you really don't want me to come out there, then I really need you to say that." Nice. She's not portrayed even as close to berserk as we will come to know. I think we're even supposed to feel a tiny bit bad for her at the end of this episode, when Jason ambiguously breaks up with her with the is-it-a-kiss-off kiss-off, "Let me do this on my own." But what I really want to do, rather than sit and sympathize over the loss of this stand-up fellow in her life, is fly out to Boulder, administer whichever of Timber's many stabilizing meds she's expected to take today, and high-five the hell out of her for getting the monkey called Jason off her back...For now.