Habemus Sheen

The world waits with bated breath for Charlie Sheen's first tweet, much in the way, as a commentator pointed out, that we await that first hint of white smoke that announces the consecration of a new Pope.

I mean, Holy Smokes. We haven't seen this particular brand of willing self-immolation in years. This isn't a Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan meltdown, to which we were privy only because hordes of paparazzi make their living from following them.

No, this is a whole new flavor, mostly because Charlie Sheen, in an effort to show he's not completely insane, has paraded from morning show to talk show to interview show peddling his complete insanity.

Imagine that your friend is drunk. And he wants to drive. He insists he is fit to drive, even though you just saw him fall into the pool, get out, and walk straight into a closed sliding door. And nobody stops him. So of course he hits the back wall when he tries to back up, then drives across the lawn, cuts across the street, and crashes into a lamp post at 10 mph. And he's still trying to put the car into reverse when the cops show up.

That's Charlie Sheen right now. His publicist has quit, no doubt exhausted from the futile proposition of trying to beat some sense into someone whose quotes are easily confused with Ron Burgundy's.

And you can't blame the publicist. When your client starts sounding off about "Tiger Blood," "fire-breathing fists," and "Vatican assassin warlocks," you might as well pack up your balls and leave. What else can you do? If you were a contractor and your client kept burning down the house every two hours, you'd quit too.

If anything good comes of this, it would be that we might near the end of the hammy, unoriginal, lowest-common-denominator, deeply unfunny Two and a Half Men. Normally, I have no problem with awful shows -- I simply don't watch them. Live and let live.

But the fact that this piece of garbage is consistently touted as the most popular sitcom in the land is depressing in about a million different ways. And if we can wipe that awful blight from the American picture, we would all be much better off.

So maybe, just maybe, Charlie Sheen knows this. And he's our man on the inside, working to destroy the beast from within. I wonder how this will go.



Crap.