Fucking Paparazzi!

When you're as awesome as I am, it's tough to go from place to place without douchebags like this guy following you around everywhere. Seriously man, how much of me do you think you deserve?
Truth be told, this guy wanted nothing to do with me. Really he wanted pictures of the guy standing behind me. But this gave me new respect for Lindsay, Biebs, and Paris. Just kidding, no one takes pictures of Paris anymore unless she pays them to. Here's what happened:

My buddy Pat works down at Grey Line tours with me and Saturday morning he comes in looking like he was up all night and he asks if I've got a hat or a coat. I tell him it's 80 degrees and he should get some coffee before the boss comes in. He tells me he needs it to hide his face from some Daily News photographers that just chased him from his apartment to work. Apparently my friend Pat spent Friday night in jail for "allegedly" being the "Moustache Man".  Now if you are as confused as I was, you can read the story here, or let me give you the Cliff's Notes. NYC is littered with ads, these ads have the enlarged heads of celebrities on them. Because most people are 12 years old inside, these ads end up with dicks drawn on the mouths of everyone from Cameron Diaz and people promoting GED programs to guys reminding you to get your prostate checked. Sometimes people draw little butts pooping on them,  and sometimes stink lines, but mostly dicks. Every so often, though, a true visionary comes along and begins to do the same thing on lots of different posters, like replacing the eyes of the people on the ads, or making the mouths different, and maybe they write "Moustache" in cursive on people in advertisements where an actual moustache would be. When they do, hipsters hail these mystery people as heroes/artists and not as people who don't know how to adequately waste time on a subway platform waiting on the train because they don't have Angry Birds on their iPhone.

So the NYPD caught Pat "allegedly" doing his thing. Nice job officers, yeah don't bother with the aggressive crackhead scaring the shit out of everyone on the E train, ignore the two hobos having a beat off contest at Penn Station, and for God's sake don't bother the heroin addict taking a shit on the platform at 110th St, I mean, when you gotta go...you gotta go, Right? No, let's focus our resources on the guy who defaced the poster of the kids from "The Glee Project". People have to live here, you know?



Anyway, back to where I join the story. Pat's a good guy and he looks generally worried that these photographers are gonna fuck things up for him at work. He's just spent the night in jail where I'm sure unspeakable things happened to him in Gen Pop and now a couple of photographers are piling onto his shitty morning. So I say I'll run interference from our office to Times Square where they wont be able to follow him onto a bus without a ticket. He decides to give it a try.

I was often under the impression that if celebrities wanted to, they could avoid the paparazzi altogether and that being annoyed by these guys was the price you pay for being able to have simulated sex with Julia Roberts onscreen and then actual sex with Julia Roberts and her assistant in your trailer. I thought anyone who took a swing at a photographer was just reacting to not getting their way, but goddamn I was SO wrong. This guy pictured above came on like a drunken brawler. He was snapping 20 pics a second all up in my face. Trying to go around me, through my legs, and over my shoulder all while standing two inches away from me and screaming at Pat right in my ear. I honestly thought this would be kinda fun to see happen, to sort of make a joke of it you know? But after 5 seconds of this I wanted to rip this guy's head off and then take a hundred pictures of it while laughing over his decapitated body triumphantly. I really don't know how a kid like Justin Bieber does it. I know he's got bodyguards and all, but everywhere you go you've got a hundred guys doing what this dude did all while yelling the most inappropriate shit they can think of to get some sort of reaction shot of you.

I think about this a lot. Doing what I do along with a lot of other people reaching for that TV money. How famous do you wan't to be? We all envy a Brad Pitt who can literally afford anything and go anywhere. We talk about how much we'd love to fuck Angelina Jolie and we say we would trade places with him, or Clooney, or DiCaprio. But would you like to go all day with people staring at you like you have an arm growing out of your back. To sit in a restaurant and just know that as soon as you finish a bite of food the guy next to you is gonna ask to take a picture, and then his wife is gonna ask for an autograph, and then the waiter is gonna want a menu signed. I know these things seem like a small price to pay if you only look at each specific instance, but just imagine that unless you are inside your home that your life doesn't belong to you anymore.  So the moral of this story is that if you value your privacy, don't ever become famous.... also stick to playing Angry Birds while waiting for the subway.
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