COLUMN: Katie

Ladies and gentlemen, it's truth time. You might know me as this paper's amiable humor columnist, but there's a dark side to my moon. Truth is, my life is constantly tormented by an indescribable evil -- a soul-consuming blackness that haunts my days and nights like an ever-circling vulture of doom. It is only through the triumph of human willpower and my indefatigable spirit that I somehow find the fortitude to perservere against all odds.

The evil that I speak of is, of course, Tom Cruise.

Always have I hated him, from the moment he slid into frame in his "Risky Business" undies. Who on Earth was this cocky kid with a mouthful of teeth strutting around like he owned Hollywood? Maybe I just despised him because that same scene propelled my absolute least favorite song in the world, Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock & Roll," to the top of the charts.

I wouldn't make the same mistake with Cruise's next star vehicle, "Top Gun." I didn't go see it. In fact, I've never seen it to this day, which I think puts me in the minority of all humans on Earth. But I don't need to see it to envision how annoying he must be in it. And sure enough, it too came with a song -- Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" -- that will clearly be on infinite repeat in my future hell. Now he's in "Rock of Ages," a movie that glamorizes pretty much every song I hated as a teenager. That's how obnoxious Tom cruise is -- even his SOUNDTRACK sucks.

So I've always hated Tom Cruise -- but never did I suspect that this irritating actor was, in fact, my arch-nemesis. Not until he married Katie Holmes, that is. That's when it stopped being annoying and got personal.

For those uninformed, Katie Holmes is the former star of "Dawson's Creek," a well-to-do socialite, a devoted mother, and my eternal soulmate. She just doesn't know it yet.

Ever since I channel-flipped into her smile on an early episode of "Dawson's," I knew I'd found my celebrity crush for life -- and it's a crush I've harbored come hell, high water, or overly-toothy spouses. Being a Katie Holmes fan is not without sacrifice. I'm pretty sure I shattered all my street cred back in the 90's -- there's only so many times you can tell your friends, "Oh, dude, I'd love to hang out... but 'Dawson's Creek' is on" before your masculinity gets called into question. Then there's all the dubious movies I've had to sit through over the years -- she might be my soulmate, but she sure can pick some lousy roles. I bought "First Daughter" on DVD, an act that should merit a date right there.

Then it happened. Just like Lex Luther discovering Kryptonite, the evil Tom Cruise discovered MY weakness. Before I could even curse his rotten name, there he was, jumping on Oprah's couch like a lunatic, pledging his love for my celebrity crush. I watched through clenched teeth as TomKat got married, had a daughter, and looked authentically happy in photo after photo. Eventually, I came to accept that this was my "Empire Strikes Back" -- an awesome fantasy, but in the end Darth Vader chops my hand off and sells my princess into slavery. Eventually, I accepted their (cough) love and even went so far as to find myself a (gasp) real life girlfriend for a while there.

But just as "Empire" birthed a happy ending in "Return of the Jedi," so too do I get a chance at a second act. Last week it was revealed that there IS, in fact, a God -- Katie Holmes has filed for divorce from Tom Cruise and the Evil Empire (legal note: all Evil Empires appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real Evil Empires and/or Churches of Scientology is purely coincidental.) Upon hearing the fateful news last week, I believe that I uttered merely ONE word:

"Dibs."

You hear me, world? I CALLED DIBS. Just like the WNBA, I got next. Ummm, soooo, anybody got any ideas on how a chubby geek from the corn belt can land a top-tier socialite actress on the rebound?

My first thought was simple: the internet. All it took was one public plea from a soldier to Justin Timberlake to get him to go with her to the Marine Ball. And just a while back, some nutty girl with an acoustic guitar wrote a song for Jason Segel and within a week, he was whisking her off as his date to some awards show. So it's NOT impossible.

That said, I don't have a lot going for me. I'm not a brave national hero, nor can I play guitar or sing a cute song. And if it's true that a camera adds fifteen pounds, I think I've done a good enough job at pound-adding as is, so I'm probably better off sticking with a NON-visual method of wooing, thanks much.

I guess my best hope is just to put this column out there in the world and pray that it somehow works its way to Katie. Weirder things have happened. Maybe one of you has a friend who has a friend whose cousin is Katie's masseuse or something. Of course, the BEST way to ensure she sees this column is to somehow get picked up by the Associated Press so that it runs in newspapers all over the country. Strangely, though, it turns out that the AP doesn't usually find open love letters to celebrities written by aging losers to be especially newsworthy. Drat.

So I figure the only real chance to get this column found by AP search engines would be to include absolutely statements so false, damaging, and scandalous that they take notice. Of course, doing so would be tantamount to libel and could get me sued in a heartbeat, so I absolutely wouldn't be able to say things like TOM CRUISE KNOWS WHERE JIMMY HOFFA IS BURIED or make any kind of inferences whatsoever that TOM CRUISE IS SECRETLY AN ESCAPED ALIEN FROM AREA 51.

Instead, I'm just gonna say: Katie Holmes, if you read this, you deserve better than Tommy the Tooth. You deserve an overweight middle-aged newspaper columnist who makes JUST enough spare income to afford "First Daughter" on DVD. C'mon, we have so much in common. You like to smile. I like to leer at your smile. YOUR best friend is Posh Spice. MY best friend is a guy named Jason who sometimes likes spicy food. You're gonna be a guest judge on Project Runway. I recently guest judged national anthem singers for the River Bandits.

So just hop on a plane -- you probably own one or two, right? -- and head on out to Rock Island. Suri can play video games and torment my cats, Posh and Becks can take the guest room when they visit, and I promise you there'll be no paparazzi hiding in the bushes -- seeing as how I don't have any bushes, and even if I did, all it takes is 10 minutes in this midwestern heat for the average New York paparazzi to incinerate. Whaddaya say, Katie? Dinner and a movie? I promise it will NOT be "Rock of Ages."