finding aquaman will be a lot easier if you can breathe under water
(don't hold your breath)


monday night when i got home from work, i watched the "highlights" from the david blaine special, drowned alive. david blaine, as everyone knows, is the usa renowned illusionist that can count cards with the best of them, "levitate", and pull his teeth out of your dog's butt and throw them into your mouth. incredible stuff. for a week leading up to his live special on monday night, he floated in a big, human-size fish bowl in the same way the poor, pitiful beta fish float around a plastic cup at work waiting for someone to rescue them from their miserable existence.

says one beta: "what are you doing?"
two beta: "i am sitting in this fucking cup. there is no room to swim. my skin is burning."
one beta: "your skin is burning? why?"
two beta: "my own pee is burning it. the humans call it 'ammonia burn', but the long and short of it is my own pee is burning my skin."
one beta: "wow. that sucks."
two beta: "such is the life of a beta. just wait. one more day, you'll feel it too."
one beta: "that sucks."

so, david blaine floats around like a beta fish in a human-size fish bowl, his skin too shriveled to realize that he, too, is suffering from "ammonia burn". he wants to hold his breath for nine minutes. to break a record. what? you didn't know before monday what the world record for holding your breath was? there's a reason for that. about the seven minute mark, you see his body start revolting against his mind. he shakes, shimmies, pees on himself one last time, and then he his rescued. "rescued". which is kind of funny anyway, isn't it? why didn't he just levitate his ass out of the fish bowl? hmm. maybe it is just an illusion. so, anyway, he's rescued and he cries and tells everyone he loves them and pickpockets a homeless man on his way to the hospital, leaving the cruel taste of irony in the homeless man's mouth (along with your dog's teeth) for him to chew on that night.

all of this shit goes down, and i think to myself. this guy is stupid. if he needed to know he wasn't a fish, i could have written him a note. however many million people watched this are stupid. they are the same people that slow traffic down on the northbound side of the interstate when the wreck's on the southbound side. abc is stupid. if they were going to pour this much money and hype into something, why didn't they just build someone else a house?

maybe david blaine was just pushing the envelope of human willpower for all of us. like climbing the highest mountain. or circling the globe in a sailboat. or maybe he's just more rich and more famous for it. but that's ok. we'll know for sure when he's on his next episode of cribs or true hollywood story. we'll watch that shit too.