Written by Duke Clinton, Featured Guest Writer.

L.A.–Tom DeLonge was spotted outside an In-N-Out Burger Tuesday, sporting a nasty beard filled with the spitballs and other excrement hurled at him by angry, unsympathetic passers-by. “Gross! Take a shower, DeLonge! Get over yourself,” shouted one Tammy Horowitz, mother of three, as her mini-van exited the In-N-Out burger parking lot to see the “pathetic” DeLonge pleading for “Spotify clicks” and other record sales for his former band, Angels & Airwaves. “I was a Blink-182 fan,” said Horowitz. “But then Tom had to ruin everything and take his whiny voice on tour.” She added: “Tom’s voice, the annoying way he’d mispronounce simple words like ‘head’ as ‘yed,’ was what spoiled a good thing, and then he decides to take that insufferable screech on tour? What a self-deluded, egotistical ass!”

DeLonge, who quit Blink-181 back in ’05 to pursue Angel & Airwaves, what DeLonge has vainly described as “God’s work,” was likely unhappy to see his former band members Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker achieve success after his departure. Their short-lived 2006 project +44’s debut album, When Your Heart Stops Beating, considered by at least one critic as superior to DeLonge’s Angels & Airwaves release, We Don’t Need to Whisper, was praised as being “fuller, with more guitars and even synth-drum beats. It also includes some of Hoppus’ best lyrics.”

Hoppus’s pained lyrics, which followed the sharp departure of Hoppus’s best friend–the self-satisfying DeLonge–from a band he’d played in since ’95,  were likely what propelled Hoppus and Barker into the future, and what one would presume was the therapy used to get over Tom’s departure. Nonetheless, Hoppus couldn’t “shake inexplicable control” Tom had over him. Hoppus reportedly told musician friend John Mayer that he “still longs for Tom,” that he was “still waiting for him to come back home, to come to back to bed.” He apparently added, through tears: “I still sniff his pillow, crave his scent.”

DeLonge did briefly return to the band, almost assuredly with dollar signs in mind. “Blink was a legacy for a lot of people,” Mayer supposedly told Conan O’Brien at an exclusive party hosted at Charlie Sheen’s house, who asked the guitarist about his friendship with Hoppus, how he perceived the possible Blink reunion. “Tom knows that. He’s here to cash in on it.”

Mayer also supposedly called O’Brien almost immediately after Tom announced unconvincingly announced his reluctant second departure from the band to say, “I told you so.” Mayer added: “Mark is too innocent, too sheltered, too forgiving. He has a blind spot for Tom. But did you hear the new Blink E.P.? It’s recycled Tom, recycled preachy Angel & Airwaves trash.”

And Tom has since fallen on hard times after fans realized, surprisingly so long into the singer’s derivative recording career, that DeLonge is no longer making music that is at all interesting or even good. Hoppus has since realized that the replacement of Tom with Alkaline Trio singer Matt Skiba is like a “tiny squealing baby being taken off my back. All the friends, Mayer, Clapton say the new Blink is ‘righteous, so much better than Blink with Tom.'”

Three-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee guitarist Eric Clapton reportedly told Hoppus, “We didn’t know how to tell you, Mark, that a decade of Blink records was always spoiled by Tom’s oppressively annoying, goody boy-pandering voice.”

DeLonge, who was seen under a bridge where he has set up camp, told a string of reporters that this “whole process has been really eye-opening for me,” likely now paying for the perpetual cycle of betrayals and false hope he has set on his former band members and generations of Blink fans to come.

He added: “You know, ‘A tank of gas is a treasure to me,'” invoking one of Blink’s earliest song’s, “Carousel,” as he strummed Mark’s distinctive bass line on the e-string of his crappy thrift shop acoustic guitar: “I know now that nothing is free.”

Hoppus, who was reached for a comment about his former friend’s transgressions, whether he would take pity upon DeLonge’s homeless state, chuckled in amusement, only having this to say: “Can’t say I miss him around.”

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Duke Clinton, whose virtuosity has been described as “presidential” by Rolling Stone, is a jazz saxophonist whose true identity has become a bit of an enigma in the music community due to his relative secrecy. He has recently joined the ranks of Hillary Clinton in support of her campaign for president.