The longer I'm married, the more I seem to have to care about totally pointless shit. Example: this last Sunday, I'm quietly sitting in the family room, reading the paper. The wife is flipping channels because the kid's taking a morning nap and she's taking the opportunity to chill out. She lands on an episode "Trading Spaces" and hangs out there for a minute.

"This has got to be old... Paige is on it," she said.

I looked up from the paper, knowing damn well that acknowledging that comment was probably going to fuck up my whole afternoon somehow. It sounded innocent, but that’s the kind of thing that leads to the “pointless” bullshit. But between than and gambling with her getting pissed about not answering… gotta roll the dice…

"Huh?"

"Paige. The host. She's not the show anymore."

"Okay?"

"I wonder what happened to her... she just kind of disappeared."

"Sure?"

"You're trying to read, aren't you?"

"Yes."

... "Didn't Dustin used to have a crush on her?"

"Jesus, Katie, I don't know."

"Okay, sorry... I just wondered if he knew what happened to her."

I am now wise enough to know that there was an order there to find out, because it was bound to come up again every goddamn time she saw the show. Ladies and gents… welcome to Pointless Bullshit, population: Fingers O’Reilly. So later, dragged myself away from a perfectly good footbalI game and tracked Dustin on messenger.

foreilly1995: hey man

DGrove: What's up?

foreilly1995: katie wants to know what happened to the chick from trading spaces

DGrove: Did you tell Katie to learn how to use Google?

foreilly1995: she wanted me to ask you. you used to have the hots for her, didn't you?

DGrove: Mmmmm. Yeah. Since she left, I've had to move on to Amy Wynn.

foreilly1995: okay, pretend that I care for a second. what happened to the paige chick?

DGrove: She got fired. I think it was because of some kind of blowback over a striptease show she did for charity at some function. There are picutres, I think.

DGrove: Hey, this one site says there may have been some kind of sex tape scandal. Sweet. I wonder if I can find that.

foreilly1995: good luck with that. you're a loser, by the way.

DGrove: Gosh, glad I could help. Hey, you said you’ve have a full piece for the next update, right?

(Fuck!)

foreilly1995: yeah. working on it tonight.

DGrove: Neat.

And just like that, the pointless bullshit tuned into another fucking project. That’s just awesome. On the bright side, telling you how I got here right now has taken up about half of what I needed to write. Which means it ought to be really damn easy to bust out a few hundred words on… well… shit.

Damn that Paige Davis! Not only did she get her ass fired, but she’s gone an ruined a perfectly good Sunday for me. Fine, I’ll just have to spend the rest of the piece being pissed at her. Fired for doing a striptease, and there might have been a sex tape? I would just ask Dustin if he’s found anything else, but he’s probably already off pleasuring himself with it. So now I get to do a little detective work.

Holy shit, one Google search later, and lookie what I’ve found:

Okay, that doesn’t totally suck. But she got fired for that? Okay, there must’ve been a sex tape. Why the hell not, everyone else has one. Didn’t Pamela and Tommy start that who damn thing? The sex tape craze? Shit, I think everyone’s had one now, so I guess it qualifies as a craze. This country has totally lost its innocence, man. I remember back when only people like the Germans had kinky shit like this going on, and you know what I think ruined us? That fucking Exit to Eden movie. Unsuspecting people seeing Rosie O’Donnell in a leather S&M outfit was too much for our brains to handle. It lowered the bar so much, people had to have just gone “WHOA! If she is gonna do that shit on a move screen, then there is NO reason I can’t video myself in some nice underwear in the privacy of my own home, maybe with some candles in the background. Oh yeah, and I can totally fuck some people, too.”

And of course, Katie just appeared, asking me why I have a picture of Paige Davis on my computer and I’m writing about sex tapes. I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. I’m just going to type this last bit and point to the screen.

“You asked.”