Charlie Sheen Is Righteously Depraved

Pleasure is the most basic human desire. Our predecessors struggled through a nasty and brutish, yet they still got their serotonin receptors firing through putting meat on fire and inventing sexual perversions. Today, our world is just as nasty and brutish, but we have refined the realm of pleasure so completely that we’re tempted never to leave. Soon, we will have nutrient rich cocaine and fully realistic sex robots. Until that time, booze, coke, porn, and hookers will do nicely. At least that’s the case if you ask Charlie Sheen.

Mr. Sheen is the ultimate heathen. He seizes pleasure at every opportunity. In and out of marriages, rehab, and career trouble, Mr. Sheen unapologetically comes back to the pleasure drug. You can call him a drug addict or a sex addict, but he is simply addicted to Pleasure. He is a Junkie. The Junkie finds something he likes and does it until he does not like it any more. Usually, he stops liking it because it trades off with something else and the high is not worth it any more. The rules of the tradeoff don’t apply to Mr. Sheen.

The Junkie may lose his family. Without a doubt, some junkies feel the Guilt and Shame of the penitent Old Testament sinner- the type of resonant fire in his brain extending up from Dante’s Third Circle- each time they satiate their gluttonous desires. If Mr. Sheen is indeed the garden variety junkie, then he should be susceptible to God’s double-barreled Guilt and Shame shotgun of repentance. But Mr. Sheen puts no stake in fidelity. His treatment of fidelity ranges from indifference to the type of scorn usually seen only in abortion clinic protests. Mr. Sheen has broken up with more women than most men have imagined while masturbating. He has ended relationships with threats of beatings, actual beatings, and Old West gunfire. He has five children in the custody of three women and exalts the fact that he doesn’t have to worry about tracking down a reliable and tight-lipped babysitter when he has the urge for a 36-hour bender. At a minimum, one could say that family life is not the anchor that will keep Mr. Sheen’s flighty spirit grounded.

[RIGHT- Stay gold, Ponyboy's brother.]

The Junkie may lose his career. Regular saps like us can’t get away with devoting our lives to the pursuit of pleasure because it gets in the way of the Daily Grind. If we spent our nights smoking crack and fucking hookers from dusk til dawn, our productivity would take a hit. Lindsay Lohan is a junkie with some of the same pleasure-seeking qualities as Mr. Sheen, but her career has been derailed. He has maintained a more successful career with a more ambitious pleasure addiction. His secret is that he has landed the perfect junkie gig. He plays himself on a mindless sitcom. Every week, the network turns over a bank vault worth of unmarked, non-consecutive $100 bills and returns to its blissful ignorance. Mr. Sheen can show up hungover and read his lines off cue cards one afternoon each Thursday. He gets a bankroll for his pleasure addiction, CBS gets ratings, and the mouth-breathers get season upon season of Two and a Half Men to serve as a soundtrack for their pathetic march to the grave. Everyone wins.

The Junkie may lose his health. Indeed, the Overdose is the Junkie’s Waterloo. Without it, John Belushi would have his own mindless sitcom. Adam Sandler wouldn’t have to dress Kevin James up like Chris Farley and pretend to laugh every time he shows his gut. But the Overdose is real. The problem is that the Overdose scares everyone other than the Junkie. The Junkie wants his next infusion of pleasure- he is not concerned with the opportunity cost of death. The Abyss is the natural end, after which there is no pleasure and therefore nothing to interest the Junkie. Mr. Sheen’s orienting principle is pleasure, so the complete absence of pleasure does not register. It is not his concern; it is ours.

Mr. Sheen cannot bottom out. He can keep drinking, smoking, and fucking his way to pleasure as long Angus Jones still looks young enough to play a kid on TV. The Junkie gets religion when he has lost everything and hits the low bottom. Mr. Sheen does not have a low bottom. He has days where E! News talks more shit about him and the Average Joe’s give water cooler high fives in his honor. He might even have to spend a weekend in a glamorous rehab facility on the beach, which is nothing less than an indulgent vacation. With his batteries recharged and nothing to lose, Mr. Sheen can jump back on the train and embark on his quintessential human pursuit of pleasure again and again.

Mr. Sheen is a Shimmering Monument to Hedonism. But we are pathologically unable to acknowledge his achievement. He has attained great heights in a domain that we are not allowed to enter. Non-golfers cannot appreciate the genius of Tiger Woods and we- sad sacks of mediocrity- cannot appreciate the genius of the greatest heathen alive. Mr. Sheen is a Pleasure Junkie, and nothing could be more righteous.

Tech Review- iPhone Update great for stalkers, sex criminals

By Tricia Mallendum

PORTLAND- With great power comes great responsibility. No corporation has become more aware of this life’s lesson over the last two-and-a-half years than Apple, who has dominated the smart phone landscape since the release of the iPhone. Perhaps that experience has helped them to learn the truth of another maxim: heavy is the head that wears the crown. With unprecedented expectations surrounding every new update, Apple has had to stay a step ahead of the competition by continually innovating and putting more power in the palms of users’ hands than any other device. With the new software update 3.1.2, Apple has proven once more that their dominance of all things communication is warranted, and then some.

Apple has drawn the ire from sex criminals, especially child molesters, since the release of the original iPhone for not allowing picture messaging. Until now, the software required users to send pictures through e-mail, a cumbersome task that many sex criminals felt left too much of an evidentiary trail and not a quick enough reward. But no more. After monitoring SMS traffic on their network, Apple determined that they could make the software update to picture messages, an innovation sure to mark the dawning of a new era for all types of child porn.

Brittany Sloan, a 15-year-old currently dating a 24 year-old love of her life, expressed her excitement at her new ability to sext. “I just know my boyfriend will be so excited that I can send him pictures of me with my shirt off!” Sloan gushed. “I thought he would tell me he loved me when I agreed to let him have sex with me without a condom, but I know that this new iPhone app will do it!”

Rob Harris, Sloan’s aforementioned boyfriend, had slightly different reasons for his happiness about the ability to send and receive picture messages. “Do I want her to send me naked pictures? Yeah, I guess,” Harris said. “I could show it to my buddies, cuz they totally don’t believe I’ve been boning a 15-year-old, but they’d probably just make fun of her, call her pimple tits or something. I don’t know, I guess I’d like to have them just in case I ever need her to do anything for me.”

When told about Harris’ comments, Sloan began weeping uncontrollably, and continued for 11 days.

[LEFT- The iPhone has come a long way since its beta version.]

Other iPhone update enthusiasts include child pornographers and those involved in long-distance relationships. Child pornographers see iPhone picture messages as a way to take their hobby out of chat rooms and dungeon-like basements and put it into the mainstream. At the same time, long-distance couples appreciate the innovation for contradictory reasons, pointing out that the update may allay the shame and guilt associated with masturbating to internet porn at least three times per day. Furthermore, the writers of Law and Order: SVU are especially excited to have at least three new episodes in the bag for next season, when the continue to glorify sex crimes for personal profit.

In a related update, the newest version of the Twitter app for the iPhone gives a text notification for updates of selected users. This feature is especially compelling to obsessed young men who incessantly monitor the behavior and movements of ex-girlfriends and other women with whom they will never have sex. With up-to-the-minute location and action updates, they can experience a new sense of immediacy in their physically crippling panic attacks that ensue from finding out that the object of their fascination has a date tonight, or met someone new at a concert.

Another interesting feature in the update is facial scan technology, such as that used in Mission: Impossible. Although the technology was meant as an additional form of security for the hyper-paranoid, it too has been co-opted by sexual predators. Combined with the GPS location capabilities in the existing Loopt locating app, the new Hookt Up app can rate women’s appearance based on body measurements, facial symmetry, and skin quality, and identify where they are gathered. The innovation promises to allow sketchy men to hunt down attractive females with ruthless and terrifying efficiency. Luckily, the app also includes a male rating system as part of its “out of your league” feature, used to prevent hopeless situations from becoming embarrassing for everyone involved.

When asked if the focus on sex comports with Apple’s intentions when developing the iPhone, Apple VP of Marketing Phil Schiller described the evolution of the device as a “happy accident.” Schiller pointed out that all forms of technology have paralleled a Darwinian survival instinct in some way, such that the eventually all come back to sex. “Think about every important innovation in human history, they all had to do with sex,” Schiller said. “The computer became an elaborate delivery mechanism for porn, the printing press evolved into Penthouse, Hustler, and personal ads. Few people know this, but even fire was invented by a cave man who wanted to be able to see his mate’s boobs bouncing while they had sex because it seemed very feral.”

The other features of Apple’s update also adhere to the trend of increasing immediate access to sexual desires. Improved video editing capabilities increase the resolution and lighting of home-made sex tapes, and the refined Exchange support makes it easier to cancel business appointments while waiting outside an open window while trying to catch a glimpse of the girl who lives next door changing clothes. On the other hand, Apple also improved application management, which has no apparent connection to anything sexual.