Welcome Douchebags!

Douchebags are everywhere.

In fact, it’s highly likely that you are one. I’m one. I’m a little more repentant about it than I used to be, but let’s face it, that’s what I am. Under a liberal enough definition, pretty much everybody is a douchebag. Douchebags are people who are concerned primarily with themselves. If your age is two digits and starts with a number 1 or 2, you have very nearly a 100% chance of being a douchebag. That percentage drops as you age, but never to zero. You can be a douchebag for the rest of your life. I’ve seen it. Even if you’re a non-douchebag, you’re going to have your moments. I’d wager to say that even Mother Theresa had douchbag days. Maybe just like a douchebag minute or two every once in a while when the orphanage ran out of blankets. But still. Mother Theresa? Huge douchebag. At least once, probably.

So what? So we’re all douchebags? If it’s universal, what difference does it make? Well, none. But: if you’re going to be a douchebag (and rest assured, you are) there are ways to go about it that aren’t quite as douchebaggy as they could be. Or there are ways to go about it that are douchebaggy to the max, which has its own sort of divine, self-defeating beauty (kind of like Gene Simmons). It's also possible to try so hard not to be a douchebag that you end up accidentally being kind of a douchebag (kind of like Terry Gross). Sometimes the best way to not be a douchebag is to learn how to be a total douchebag, try it and find out the hard way that it’s not really for you. It’s like your Dad forcing you to smoke an entire carton of cigarettes after he caught you behind the garage awkwardly not inhaling one of Doug Duncan’s Salems back in the seventh grade. Either you never touch another cigarette for the rest of your life or you find out you love smoking, which, let’s face it, if you were hanging around Doug Duncan, was going to happen anyway. Might as well cut to the chase.

“Cut to the chase” is more or less the mantra of the effective douchebag, by the way. Actually, “effective” is the mantra of the douchebag, and “cut to the chase” is a colloquial way of saying that. People tend not to mind when you’re a douchebag if you’re at least effective about it. That means you know what you want to accomplish, and then you accomplish it as effectively as possible without screwing everything up for everybody else. If you pull it off with enough style, nobody will be mad at you. Well, maybe a few people will be mad at you, but those people are pussies. By and large, though, if you pull something off with perfect douchebag style, people will be more impressed than anything.

I’m speaking in generalities here. I realize that. But let’s say that you want to accomplish a threesome. There are ways to do it that are effective enough to make the “ew yuck, you’re a dude who wants to have a threesome more than he wants to do anything else right now” factor disappear, or at least augment those “yucky” knee-jerks into more of an “oh, you crazy rascal!” kind of thing. I’ll add a guide to threesomes later, just so you know, but trust me, there are ways. I have theories.

And of course I’m not just going to be talking about threesomes and sex things here. There are all manner of things to be discussed. Stuff like how to have fun for a weekend in New York without spending money, how to talk to a cop, and how to fight a bike messenger at a party. Most of them are completely idle fantasies and crackpot theories that will never go into practice, but you never know. You might need these guides. At the very least you can read them for like 20 minutes instead of doing actual work at your shitty job that you hate. I will probably also later write a guide to shitty jobs that you hate.

For now, I just want to get out some sort of organizing mission statement in the form of a rambling blog post. Life is a hustle, more or less. There’s the “taking care of the stuff you need to take care of to survive” hustle, the “learning from your mistakes” hustle, and the “being happy” hustle. They’re all hustles, more or less. That’s the way things are. I won’t get into all the pseudo-intellectual “commodification of desire in the modern age” philosophical claptrap that backs this up. You’re either being hustled or you’re hustling at any given time in any of the above-mentioned areas. Of course there’s also the “why bother trying so hard?” angle to things, but that doesn’t work too well for douchebags. Douchebags can cause too much collateral damage to be all loosey goosey like that. Good ones do, at least.

So, welcome douchebag!

Your guide to life is finally here.