originally i started watching general hospital when i was 18 and living in a lovely group house in bethesda, md. residents: tweedy: the biggest coke dealer in the area. carl: the heavily-armed biker who, when too drunk to turn off his lights at night, shot them out instead. my stepbrother bob: charming sexual abuser and illiterate victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. gac the depressive ("gac" was, seriously, his last name), who weighed 350 pounds and emerged from his room only to go to the bathroom, literally, for years on end. we fed him through the door, but after a few years on end it was 150.

well other than gac, who putting it mildly didn't date, these guys favored strippers. they'd bring them home, make them scream all night - sometimes in a good way, sometimes not - and then leave them in the morning to head to work. (tweedy's cover was auto mechanic; his cash was buried in the woods somewhere.) so there would be strippers - often, you know, 14-year-old strippers, but also 22-year-old strippers  - draped around the living room watching soaps, after they woke up early in the afternoon.

i was a student and often home mid-day. so i hung out with strippers watching soaps, listening to their tales of woe, as created by my housemates. often they seemed to resent the fact that that they had been passed from carl to bob to tweedy or perhaps the other way round. and yet...there they were and after their shift that evening they'd be back, perhaps with a friend. well there was coke, booze, and extremely bad boys. still i didn't think they were really getting what they wanted or acting rationally. they kept telling me so, actually. i didn't have sex with them, which i did and did not think was a good thing. at any rate, i didn't press the point, but sadly neither did they. i was like their mascot.

tell me this wouldn't be a good stoner comedy, set in 1976.