STONEY BALONEY by Mike Ricker

There used to be a creepy movie called The Swamp Thing where a slothy creature covered in moss was scaring the shit out of everybody in the nearby town by snatching up hotties to take back to his waterbed. Not to be confused with Oscar the Grouch who shares a similar pelt, only drier. And even though this trash dweller feller prickly postulates in the pursuit of gloom, his articulation is far more advanced than the neanderthal grunts and farts (off-camera, of course!) of the swamp hairball with as much personality as Quasimodo on a full bar of Xanax.

But if moss is a beautiful green plant, why are these characters who live with it so pissed off?

Take Oscar. The dude is a constant buzzkill. I mean it can’t be too encouraging when your main diet is moldy bread heels and banana peels with a trash can lid permanently affixed to your dome. Negativity is what he’s used to. And it’s probably because of a thing called “transmission of collective memory”, which causes you to have fixated tendencies based on the DNA passed down from intense ancestral struggles and such.

Fair enough.

So even though Oscar can be cool sometimes, he’s ultimately a prick because grouches have been pricks for generations and it’s just part of who they are at the core. And he’s also a slob, by the way, which he’s actually proud of. In fact, there’s an episode where his mother stops by for a good bitch sesh and is put off by the niceness of his neighbor who chats happily about his tidy living room.

Welcome to New York City.

And although Oscar probably smelled of chicken wing sauce and coffee grounds, at least he wasn’t wearing ode de crawdad cologne like that fuzzy swamp ass who probably bought it at a whore house on Bourbon Street.

And one last thing about Oscar the Grouch–I’m not sure if that is moss at all. In fact, I saw a meme that said he might be a giant nug of dank weed. This makes me want to start watching Sesame Street again.