The good old days
Background: Ben as the sexsational Samantha Ross

"You’re fully loaded with cruise control/My four wheels rock with your back seat roll/You’re cheap an’ nasty"

- Whitesnake; Slip of the Tongue

If nothing else, I’ve discovered that hell lurks somewhere between the Ms. Pacman and Asteroids Deluxe machines, roughly in the vicinity of the large retarded man in the Packers jacket muttering obscenities at Burgertime.

It wasn’t always like this. I guess that’s my point.

It’s hard to believe that only two years ago we, much like famed star of TV and direct-to-video box cover sensation Lorenzo Lamas, hobnobbed within our own digital uber-clique, rubbing elbows with Cindy Brady and the Internet elite while wading through a veritably knee-deep cesspool of pussy and cocaine. "I don’t want to alarm you, but either someone stole my feet, or I just can’t find them underneath all of this pussy and cocaine," Ben would often whisper in a conspiratorial slur, his voice barely penetrating the boozy haze of Jagermeister and barbiturates that constantly clouded my brain. It was a wonderful, sexy time to be a couple of depressingly lonely retards, and we were grabbing it by the horns, one horn at a time. Or something.

Predictably, we eventually fell vicitim to our own success, growing soft, white and stinky, while the Internet collapsed around us in a shower of lattes, market shares, and repossessed Seattle condos. Our attempts to spin off the bad candy concept into a series of high-profile girl bands from the Netherlands proved to be both unsuccessful and highly annoying, and before we knew it we were homeless, destitute, and without a web site to call our own. Ben entered a deep depression and disappeared for quite a while; our only correspondence during those long, cold months was this email he sent last spring:

Not your father's Texas Ranger

Date:  April 23, 2003
From:  hacknslash@blackops_231.sn.gov
Subj:  Eyes
====================================================
Visions.  The horrified eyes of my previous
victims come flooding back as Muamba and I
hunker down in the bushes just outside Charlie’s
encampment, 5 clicks south of Denang.  I look
over at Muamba, and in the flickering light of
the mortars that scream just overhead I see not the
face of a man, but a child.  Not because Muamba is
young, but because we had had to kill and skin two
Vietcong children and wear their flesh as
disguises while escaping the city’s perimeter.
Muamba had cried like a baby as I helped him
stretch the young boy’s still-wet epidermis over his
raw African limbs, but now his dark eyes, peering out
from their scabby, slanted boy-sockets, are cold
and  emotionless.  "Remember," I mumble through the
dead lips of my victim, "remember that there are
no innocents in war.  Remember."  And when the next
volley of machine gun fire subsists, I run
screaming into the darkness in search of my next
prey.


- Sgt. Benjamin Slaughter
  Senegal Armed Forces, Black Ops, Division 12

I'm hard at work, post-Internet

So it wasn't until I found myself sitting on a bus bench somewhere just outside Portland, staring past the bottle of water I'd purchased to dilute my monthly parole-mandated urine test to the plastic bag I'd duct-taped to my left foot, that I felt the now-familiar pangs of regret spreading through my chest. Unfortunately, I mistook it for the other now-familiar pangs of a heart attack, and as I slumped forward over my greasy sweatpants, clutching my chest and awaiting the cold, sweet embrace of death, I regretted only one thing: that my vast backlog of Lorenzo Lamas references would forever go untapped. When I tenatively sat back up several minutes later, still very much alive, I vowed that I would no longer put to waste this fabulous yet fragile gift of mortality. I would do one of two things: either get a job and making something of myself, or bring back The Ultimate Bad Candy Web Site.

And so here we are: us with our site, and me sitting pretty with my monthly disability checks that I got by pretending to have Multiple-Sclerosis. Which, surprisingly, only involved falling down a lot.

If I may be so bold as to quote yet another popular 80’s transvestite personality, I'd like to close this atrocity with a line from Dee Snyder:

"We walk the streets/In tattered armies/We got the lion in our heart/ We're not lookin' for trouble/Just for some fun/But we're all ready if you wanna' start"

It's in this spirit of rebellious homosexuality that we gloriously return to the Internet. Also, here's a picture of our old friend Jeff in a gay little fireman's hat.

Welcome back.