The problem with video games and the internet and Web-connected cell phones and giant TVs with surround sound is not that it makes us violent. It's that it makes us bored with reality. If you're under thirty-five like me, answer this question: How long can you sit on a beach and look at the waves? Three minutes? Ten if you're on Quaaludes. Just a few minutes go by and you start thinking, "God's grandeur? Lame! I've got high def POV porn waiting for me at home. If you want my business, Almighty, you're gonna have to do better than an occasional tuna jumping out of the water. Step up your game!"

I think the reason so many of us are depressed in America is because our lives can't possibly compete with Disney World and Super Mario Land. So what do we do? We come up with absolutely crazy shit to keep ourselves busy and fascinated. Weird-ass tattoos, piercings through every inch of our bodies, bungee jumping, S&M. Recently plastic surgeons have even reported an increase in demand for toe plastic surgery in which women have their toes elongated to give them more "toe cleavage." I think it's just to give them something to do with their useless lives. In all reality, no one gives a shit about your toes. You could have all your toes lopped off and replaced with Happy Meal toys and only one person per month would notice.

We're just bored with reality! Jelly Belly has introduced the following Jelly Bean flavors (not kidding) - garlic, ear wax, pencil shavings, moldy cheese, and baby wipe. Just think about how bored you have to get with regular butter-popcorn-raspberry-cheesecake-flavored Jelly Beans before you decide, "The only thing that would interest me at this point is if these candies tasted like baby wipes ...filled with earwax." Reality is a mediocre movie at best!

And we desensitize kids at such a young age. I was recently at a grocery store and noticed a Spongebob Squarepants...musical...rectal...thermometer. Should I type that again so you can make sure it wasn't your own LSD flashback? A Spongebob Squarepants musical rectal thermometer. The device actually plays music when inserted in...you know.

Picture that. You're a baby. You've been on this odd planet for only a few months, and the colorful thing that has been placed inside your ass sings cartoon theme songs - The rest of your life has nowhere left to go but down. Over the next 80 years, that experience will never be topped in terms of sensory overload. The closest you'll get is when you're 95 and senile and the nurses use the Frank Sinatra musical rectal thermometer on you.

As a side note, how many people are not going to remember that their parents used the Spongebob thermometer, and therefore will find themselves at 30 years old in a therapist's office describing an odd feeling they have that Spongebob Squarepants molested them? The over-under is 50 percent.

I'm just glad they didn't have the technology for singing rectal thermometers when I was little because we didn't have Spongebob. So my singing rectal thermometer would have been made to look like Tootie from The Facts of Life. And that's a whole new level of creepy.

My point is real life can't compete with the fake lives that are sold to us everywhere we look. So we end up with depression or drugs or alcohol or a 14 hour-a-day video game habit. One way or another we try to escape from the boring real world. I myself have found a different way to escape, and I'm going to head off there now. You're welcome to try it yourself. I turn on a high def movie with a lot of explosions in it. I take off all my clothes. Then I pop pencil-shaving-flavored candies in one end and Spongebob in the other end and enjoy!!