Celebrity Wife Swap: Just let Plaxico Burress watch TV in peace

1. Celebrity Wife Swap featured the families of DJ Paul, founder of Three Six Mafia and legendary hip-hop producer, and Plaxico Burress, NFL wide receiver and noted sweatpants aficionado. I have never watched this show before, and do not need to watch it again. I will never get as much out of any combination of two other celebrity case studies, nor enjoy it more.

2. You should know first that DJ Paul lives in Las Vegas with his fiancée Majda Baltic. In addition to being the man who made the beat for “International Player’s Anthem,” a regional barbecue baron, and an Oscar winner, DJ Paul can also claim to have met his future wife at the Salt Lake City Airport. (On her day off). He named his son Nautica, keeps all his awards in a closet because “when people come to my house they already know who I am,” and stays up until 5 or 6 in the morning every night partying. His exercise regimen appears to little more than riding waterslides with his son.

He and his spouse-to-be appear to be dangerously happy with their life, and also with waterslides.

3. You need to also know that Plaxico Burress is in a plural marriage with his television, and also with Tiffany Glenn Burress, his spouse. Television shows are edited to make cheap, simple truths. I know this. I know that it looks like Plaxico Burress does nothing, but hand his check to his organized, efficient, world-dominating attorney of a wife, and then retreat to the comfort of his basement to watch TV alone in the dark. TV can edit its own very slanted reality out of level reality, and it does it all the time.

But if it is true, that’s OK because based on this single episode of Celebrity Wife Swap no one in the history of humanity has ever been as content as Plaxico Burress is when watching television.

Look at that beatific expression. Life is a bitter, fallow plain of boredom dotted with land mines of misfortune, and Plaxico has found something that makes him happier for hours than you’ll be for more than a few seconds in a calendar year. Later in this episode, per the way this show works, Plaxico will be dragged out to interact with his children, become a fuller, better person, and ... we sort of wished they’d just left him down there. He looks so much happier that way, not being around people who talk and want things from him. Maybe some people don’t need improvement. Maybe some people have already become all they can be, and what that is for Plaxico Burress is watching TV alone in his basement.

4. DJ Paul describes lawyerly, orderly living with the term “Shimmy, shimang, shimmy shimmy chang chang.”

This makes total sense to me. So does this interaction with Mrs. Burress, which while also mostly devoid of words still gets its point across that she is not cut out for Vegas living, and DJ Paul was the child in elementary school who found a way to make a bomb out of mucilage, old milk, a 9-volt battery, and a discarded Weekly Reader.

Despite their differences, DJ Paul and Tiffany agree that his son Nautica should begin to look at colleges in earnest. Tiffany mentions what a great fit Nautica would be for their theater program, while DJ Paul notes its important and admirable proximity to the Vegas Strip. I had the wrong father. We all had the wrong fathers if those fathers are not multiple DJ Paul clones.

5. One good thing distracting us from how sad Plaxico Burress looks when dragged out of his cave-basement: He knows his dinosaurs.

HERBIVOOOOOOOOOOORES. Yay, Plaxico just answered a question. Now please let him go back and eat in the dark in his basement alone. He’s so much happier down there, eating the burnt cookies you made him make for his kids that they wouldn’t eat.