Garbage Pail Kids, brought back into the forefront (momentarily)

Most New Jersey lifers associate the Jersey Shore with meathead/guido-filled clubs such as Temps or Merge; others dream of eating sloppy cheesesteaks while walking the boardwalks with family. Oh, please don't associate the Jersey Shore with that loser Tommy Cheeseballs from MTV's True Life special, out-of-staters. Yes, most of the dudes down there in the summer are as lame as your boy Tommy, but that doesn't mean its a bad place. He's about as piss-poor a tourism advocate as a Cancer-Grabbing Crane Machine in an arcade. I, on the other hand, distinctly recall the days of exiting my grandfather's oceanside trailer with my brother to hit the local convenience store, where packs of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards awaited us, in bulk. My parents, the supportive types that they've forever been, shelled over bills voluntarily, and without argument, even though they were fully aware that my bro and I were about to purchase little pieces of tree-carcus designed with pics of kids in nasty predicament, the likes of "Disgusting Justin" or "Intense Payne." Such juvenile absurdity made us happy, though, which was the important part.



Over some Indian cuisine last night amongst friends, the topic of Garbage Pail Kids came up. Courtesy of yours truly, naturally. Turned out that three out of our four-head dinner party had collected these as kids, a higher ratio than I was anticipating. Seeing a green light, I went on to tell the sadly-true story of one particular Garbage Pail Kid, the name of which escapes me at the moment, but whose image is still stained onto my brain. It was of this little kid being sucked into the drain at the foot of his bathtub, and it looked more horrifying than any scare film I've ever watched. I was somewhere in between eight and eleven years old at the time, so my pussy-footed ways were excusable, but fuck was I petrified to take a bath after first seeing that card. Feet never touched the bath drain ever since, even to this day. Any time my big-toe inches near the drain, visions of a vacuum-like force pulling my body in surface mentally, bringing to mind that scene from the Creepshow 2 (best of all within that overall-meh flick) installment "The Raft," when the jock-y dude Deke is pulled underneath the raft, his left leg violently snapping upward, by that oil-slick monster. Not a good mental look.



Less than 24 hours after our dinnertime chat, coincidentally, Topless Robot (the best nerd site on the 'Net) has posted a list of the 13 best Garbage Pail Kids of all time. Debatable and lacking that bathtub-set one, it's still great to see others paying as much close-eye to the wonderfully-sick children's card series. The least you could do is visit Topless Robot and see for yourselves, then:

Full List: Topless Robot's "13 Greatest Garbage Pail Kids"