Opie & Anthony: Just Another Pop Culture Obsession

My current pop culture obsessions as of late have been (1) John Travolta’s sex scandal; (2) the new show Girls; and (3) Opie and Anthony – all of which I can’t seem to get enough of. Somewhere sprinkled in there is an ongoing obsession with Bethenny Frankel and all her awesomness and the Real Housewives franchise, but that is nothing new. (If you’re too good for pop culture, may God bless you.)

Aside from Girls, which deserves its own post that I’ve been writing in my head since I started watching the show, I am a newcomer to the strange perverse goodness that is Opie & Anthony. Having recently bought a new car, for an entire four months I'm the recipient of a free temporary subscription to SiriusXM Radio. Only having had it for 7 days, though, I’m already addicted to it, a problem, since at the end of my free subscription I may be inclined to renew for a paid subscription just as I've done with HBO solely for Girls, and, oh yeah, "the documentaries."  Initially, I was ecstatic that XM had a station devoted entirely to “Old Skool R&B” (i.e., The Groove) and figured that would be the station to consume much of my radio time, until discovering that there are enough channels to turn any relatively focused human being into someone with prescription-grade Attention Deficit Disorder.  Well, THEN I discovered the Opie & Anthony Channel, of course. 

Okay, so it kind of makes me feel a little like a 17-year-old boy, and not at all a better human being for it, but I can’t help it myself – I’m completely entranced by it, good or bad. Just the other day they had an entire show dedicated to local foods, in a non-trendy or annoying food snobby kind of way -- about how great the bread is in Long Island (I had no idea! Now I want to try the bread in a Long Island!) and why they can’t make cheese steaks as good in NYC as they can in Philadelphia and yada yada yada. And then, somehow, they transitioned over into, well, completely crass and brash chitchat about unmentionable topics. And it was all funny and entertaining and freaking awesome.

The only problem is, now I’m having a very mild identity crisis that I may be a 17-year-old- manboy masked as a 20-something-year-old woman. (I really shouldn’t joke about that, but you get what I mean, right?)  This is what guilty pleasures do to us.  They make us feel like super shallow, base, perverse semi-complete versions of ourselves, and yet, there's pretty much no escaping them, unless you have a ton of religious self-control, which I don't have.  My self control has limits, people.  Some days not eating an entire sleeve of Oreos is a big accomplishment.   And while living life as a 17 year old boy is probably not the worst thing in the world, in practice it actually sounds pretty miserable.  Being a 17-year-old girl was bad enough.