Last night I was looking for the smoking section at the VMAs (there isn't one) and I stopped midway on the stairs from the lobby to the downstairs bathrooms. Behind a curtained-off area below, I could see below me all the web photo editors, speed-searching through incoming red carpet photographs. It was a hideous vision of the future, I tell you. A guy came up behind me. "Meditating?" he asked. (That was weird.) I was like, no, look at this digital sweatshop!

And he was like, oof, yeah, that is ugly. It was like a bunch of robots were doing millions of remote retina scans on C-list music celebrities.

His name was Bill. Bill and I stood there on the stairs for a while and watched the young girls go by with their chests out. Really, that is one low-cut audience, and that trend is embraced across race, ethnicity and New Jersey county of origin.

"It's like Matthew McConaughey said in 'Dazed and Confused.' I stay the same age and they get younger and younger. How old do you think I am?" Bill asked.

I was like, "Hmm, 32?"

"I'm 28," he said. He was on his fourth Jack and Coke. The girls were awfully young though, and even if 28 is actually what I consider young, I guess it's important to remember that there are gradations in all things.

Eventually we went inside, bypassing the hordes and hordes of free sushi (no thanks!) to find our seats. The warmup comedian, in his three-minute pre-show set, announced that there were "no ugly people allowed up in this bitch." I thought that was an unacceptably dull level of verbal expression! So perhaps I was already in a ruffled and mildly grim mood when the High Impact Kanye Vehicle hit the stage twenty minutes in to the show, and now I will be hiding under my desk all day since I was possessed sometime around 2 a.m. to come out as Team Kanye.

But at least I can still say that I like that Gaga dude. So did the gays next to me. (Um, unlike all those other gays who don't?) But pretty much the video depiction of them above was what you got from that audience. Mainly, it was a lot of people in a really big room bitching about Kanye on Twitter.