The Douchebag's Guide to Life

Guide to Being A Big Fat Miserable Sack of Shit

2010-11-10T21:20:00.006-06:00

Guess what goes first when you get older? Your gut. You'll notice it before you notice anything else like your back hurting or your skin getting way drier than it was last winter or the fact that you sometimes want to sleep more than you want to fuck. It starts off casually and understandably enough. Like "I don't want to eat Cheetos and strawberry ice cream for lunch. Because of what will happen to my body, specifically my digestive processes, that's a bad idea." Maybe that particular meal never sounded like a good idea to you, but you get my drift. Substitute the Cheetos and strawberry ice cream equivalent for you.

Regardless, around age 29-30, you'll start noticing other weird gut-related changes. You'll find yourself getting morbidly curious about your own bowel movements. What they're like, what might be causing their awful or satisfactory nature, that kind of thing. You will come to think about these questions as an interested party rather than an "oh well" young experientialist. Your level of devotion to your own shitting patterns will be akin to studying for a professional test: Certified Connoisseur of Pooping. This is real. It really will happen.

Your face will get fat.

By the way, I'm not saying this as if everybody in the world will experience it. I'm telling a young, bored me. With "you" and your metabolism and your lifestyle and general worldview: these things will happen, me. They will happen.

And sooner or later you (me) will start to feel like a big, bloated, gross pig. You will often forsake booze and/or sex for the comfort of a hamburger. Use that as an analogy. It will appear a bunch of times. It will sneak up on you. Sometimes you won't even know what you're doing until you think about it mid-sandwich.

And do you want to know why? Because you're a chickenshit loser who hates his life. Or else you're in a weird phase where you're proving to yourself how bad things can really get when you give in to a challenge-free life of easy choices.

Is this over your head? Sorry, young me. I don't want to scare you.

Here's a good analogy for where you're headed: next time you go to the DMV, notice the people who work there. They are fat and miserable slow-moving bastards who take more enjoyment in your pain than they do in the pleasure of competently fulfilling their necessary work-related tasks. And do you know why they're like that? Because they work at the DMV.

Nobody wants to work at a DMV. But there are worse places to work. There's a state employee pension, good benefits, and enough workplace protocol to ensure lifetime employment unless you just stop showing up to work or kill somebody on company time. For workaday schlubs like you and me, the DMV is as close as we'll ever come to a Supreme Court appointment. At a lofty $37,000 a year. You'll notice a lot of married women working at the DMV for necessary supplemental household income.

Is that depressing? Yeah. That's kind of the idea. Either you work your ass off to make your dreams a reality or you end up eating Cheetos and strawberry ice cream (just this once times a million) while you're on your lunch break from the DMV. I'm not judging. It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. And of course also: those big ladies at the DMV are probably delightful people the second they clock out for the day. And I mean real-world-mother-of-a-family delightful on a level that douchebags like you and I are likely incapable of even dreaming about. Yet.

So there's pluses and minuses.

Kids are a terrible nuisance to my understanding of the world. I kind of want one just to see what it's like to not care about myself as much. This is probably the primary/worst/best reason to have kids, for all I know. And in a weird way, having kids allows you to be more selfish. In a "I just want to eat Cheetos and strawberry ice cream for lunch while I'm on break from the DMV, just this once, and I don't want to hear your shit about it, little man, because I've got three kids at home that I'm responsible for and I work my ass off there, and since life is hard I also work at the DMV and anyway it's none of your business and this is all I want and I have the money for it and you can't stop me" way.

Then when your kids grow up, in that period between potentially-giving-a-shit-about-other-people and my-own-neck-is-getting-fat, let's arbitrarily say ages 24-28, those little shits (if you raised them right) will actually have the nerve to get mad at you for not taking better care of yourself. As if that was ever the plan.

Do you want the good news? Fuck you. There is no good news. We're all gonna die. The sooner you get right with that ineluctable fact, the better. Instead of the good news we get the silver lining that nobody really gives a shit if you bloat out a little in your 30's and have to move up a tee shirt size. I'm a large now for the first time since I was into hip hop and hardcore. Do I feel good about it? No. But I feel good about not having a choice. What else am I gonna do? Join a gym and start wailing on my own body as if I hated myself in order to look a little less round? No way. I'd rather choose the "eat buffalo chicken anything and then get to bed at a reasonable hour" method of hating myself. But that's just me. And I'm applying for a job at the DMV.

Wait. Did I just chart a life-based timeline of American obesity?

Probably not. There's the "menace" of childhood obesity to consider. But maybe it still works. Just slide everything up a few years. Guts go early these days.

Speaking of going. I just heard the microwave beep. My cheeseburger burrito is ready and I need to blast out a bunch of shit out of my asshole. I would call it a 9 urgency, 4 relevance event.

Guide to Confusing Musical Developments.

2010-01-20T14:56:00.002-06:00

So I read today in pitchfork that the "Contra" album by Vampire Weekend is now the number one selling album in the country.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, other than nonplussed and strangely vindicated.

Not "vindicated" because I actually like the album. I have heard maybe two tracks off of it, and as far as I can tell it falls into the recent "involuntary music" trend, where I'll be walking around and living my life and then a song will come on the radio when I'm in the car with my girlfriend and I will ask "what is this?" and she will tell me that it's Vampire Weekend or Grizzly Bear or Phoenix or Peter, Bjorn, and John, and I will react by excreting some kind of nondescript "harumph" sound, and go back to living my life with as much direct impact from the information as I would experience from having just been told "here you go" by a coat room attendant or "have a good one" by the UPS guy. It's the kind of music for which a free download is not even particularly exciting because you never need to listen to it. It's in that rarefied musical quantum state where something is so mediocre it actually ceases to exist while it happens. But that's just my opinion. According to Billboard, I guess I don't have the same tastes as everybody else (unless I actually do, and I'm just thinking about it more than I need to). In fact, I'd say I feel vindicated by the popular dollar vote that this is in fact an aggressively mediocre album, so much so that it's inherently unnecessary. Usually when a bunch of people buy something, it's unnecessary. And when I'm not one of the buyers, I like it when that happens. Because I feel like I didn't need it and then have that decision confirmed through contrary popular opinion, I take it as one in a diminishing series of signs that I'm not crazy.

But that's not what's troubling me. What's troubling me is how little I feel at this moment. I used to care about "independent" music. The report from Billboard mentions that this is the first "independent" number one album since the last Pearl Jam album (that they distributed independently). How's that for splitting hairs? Pearl Jam is an "indie" band like I'm an athlete. It works. I've played basketball before. I can remember a time when independently-minded people rooted for other independently-minded people to succeed while doing independently-minded things, and we all got together and wore thrift store clothes and called ourselves "indie rockers" and bitched and moaned about gentrification like it wasn't us. Now everything is different except for the "call ourselves indie rockers" part.

In a way that's good, because the smugness was unbearable. That doesn't mean I've let go of my own smugness. I'm being pretty emeffing smug right now, in case you noticed, but I also don't leave the house very much these days, and if I do, it's not to go hang out for hours standing up in some crowded shithole full of other "indie rockers." It makes my back sore and it's boring. Not worth it. And when I do inhabit the same space as an "indie rocker," like in a record store or a clothing store or a book store or a food store or something (we only spend money these days), I usually just try to crack jokes until I feel like I've gotten enough of a laugh to be able to leave without feeling humiliated for having wasted my own precious doing-nothing-around-the-house time. I'm insecure that way. And also: I have a girlfriend who does a pretty good job of telling me what to do with my non-doing-nothing-around-the-house time, usually some family thing I'm supposed to enjoy that we have to drive to while I decide whether I'd rather listen to complaints about family stuff or Vampire Weekend on the radio. It's 50-50, but luckily the decision usually gets made for me. Anyhow, nowadays I can have a pretty decent conversation about music with just about anyone, and it's either a sign of maturity or the coming apocalypse that I can get just as much out of it if we're talking about The Dave Matthews Band instead of Xerobot.

There's not really much to say on the subject of Xerobot. Weird obscure synthpunk shitwave band from mid-90's Wisconsin, Devo meets Mars. I neither love them nor don't. The end. Dave Matthews Band: intolerable to listen to, but at least they dumped their own feces down the collars of two thirds of an open-deck architectural boat tour, the combination of which is accidentally more punk rock than 97% of actual punk rock bands. Which would you rather talk about?

But another thing is weird to me about Vampire Weekend taking the top spot in album sales. The figure 124,000 seemed weird to me, so I looked up the sales figures on Billboard for other releases. I guess it's pretty low. Then I looked at the weekend box office for "Avatar," did some quick calculations and figured that about 40 times as many people watched "Avatar" as bought "Contra" this week. No surprise there. Then I looked up the sales figures for digitally downloaded albums, and saw that Ke$ha has the current top spot on the strength of her discounted $6.99 a-download album "Animal." Then I briefly considered listening to some Ke$ha, got a headache, and closed all of the tabs in my browser that had anything related to music in them. Not worth it.

I'd like to make some kind of a point here about the waning cultural importance of music and how the assholes-that-be who would seek to ruin everything for the sake of the buck have finally succeeded to the point where nobody even cares or listens anymore, or about how bands that I actually like are probably going to be more culturally significant among the "indie" scene in the coming decade because we're out of other choices, or about how Pitchfork "no longer speaks for or to anybody I respect" (still--I know, what a total non-story) or something dramatic like that because I "can't believe" they gave "Contra" an 8.6, or about how maybe the only people who are still big enough suckers to pay for an actual physical artifact with music in it are a bunch of late-to-the party pseudo-hipster bearded North Face babyman wine/liquor sales reps with Volkswagens and those three-wheeled strollers you're supposed to use to go running with your fashionbaby (don't judge, they got a good deal on it from Overstock.com).

Oh, and also I'd say something about vinyl and how much I love it even though it's a pain in the ass (and I love it because I'm also a pain in the ass, so I can relate to it, except I also think it's a total pain in the ass and I have no idea in the world why I recently thought it'd be a good idea to get a used copy of that Stephen Prina album except because I'm a sucker and a babyman in my own contrarian "isn't it cool that I have things on vinyl, even if I don't really like them myself" way--oh well, maybe I'll learn from it).

But... I don't want to make a point anymore. I'm too tired, and I feel nothing. We live in strange times. The end.

Guide to the Washington Redskins Football Team as of Whenever I Posted This

2010-01-18T16:18:00.002-06:00

My thoughts on the state of the Washington Redskins professional American football team have been sliding into a miasmatic meditation on the value of democracy in management. It is a somewhat boring line of thought, but somehow I feel it’s an incredibly important one.

Former New Orleans Saints head coach Jim Haslett has just been hired as the new defensive coordinator for the Washington Redskins professional American football team. I can’t say I have an opinion one way or another about his skills with defensive game planning and strategy, other than the fact that he’s announced that the team will switch to a 3-4 formation for their base defensive front, which I consider to be a good idea considering the relative strengths of their current defensive personnel. I do have a very high regard for his legendary work ethic, which I only know about because of his quote-trading dust-up with former Redskins coach Steve Spurrier. Apparently Haslett used to come to work at 4:30 every morning. And Steve Spurrier didn’t.

Newly hired Redskins coach Mike Shanahan also has a similar track record of a workaholic/perfectionist’s attention to detail.

All of which leads me to feel somewhat confident about the future of the Washington Redskins professional American football team in the same way that I feel confident about Barack Obama’s stewardship of the country. Which is to say: I view it as an instantaneous improvement over the previous regime, based on nothing more than a public acknowledgment that attention to detail is important. I don’t want to go political here, so let me say that this opinion of Obama as improvement over Bush is based largely on a 10/19/05 speech given by former Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson in reference to the foreign policy decision-making process in the Bush White House. Which I realize is a political thing.

But: the gist I got out of that speech, in which Wilkerson labels a policy-stting alliance between Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld as a “cabal,” is remnants of a non-politicized criticism of the Bush White House as an administrative entity. My father works at a fairly high-ranking government position. He’s about as far as one can get in the government without being either a member of the military or a political appointment. He’s not “connected” to anything more scintillating than, say (not really, but I don't want a blog post to bite him in the ass), the policy structure of our nation’s Institute of Standards and Technology, but he does feel the ebb and flow of organizational acumen within our nation’s bureaucracy. The government is a huge operation, and regardless of political viewpoints, some bosses are more effective than others at running it. A shitty Democrat-run administration is just as shitty as a shitty Republican-run administration in the minute ways that make the difference between and efficient work environment and an inefficient one. Government workers often (always) have their hands tied by policy, but their input into the creation of that policy, and the day-to-day administration of their efforts to enact it are open to huge swings in value according to leadership in a way that has very little to do with where that leadership lands ideologically on the political spectrum. The bigger concern is whether current leadership got their job from political backstabbing and behind-the-scenes glad-handing or because they have arrived at their current post through something resembling a meritocracy.

This is the aspect of Wilkerson’s speech that sticks with me the most. It’s not that Cheney and Rumsfeld were evil war-bent hellhounds (moot), it’s that they were bad bosses who used fear, backchannels, and intimidation to support their own assumptions and decisions rather than listening to people who disagreed with them and incorporating those opinions into contingencies. And this guy Larry Wilkerson disagreed with them on several points, and even though they were not his direct chain-of-command bosses, they superceded him and his work within the organizational structure of the White House and as a result he felt like all of his hard work was useless. Regardless of whether his opinions of Iraq War/Dimplomacy strategy were ultimately correct, this much is a fact: he was superceded, and he felt frustrated and angry about it. The Bush administration was, in effect, a shitty boss.

I think the administrative track record of the Bush administration (9/11, Iraq, response to Hurricane Katrina, complete meltdown of the economy) backs this claim up. The difference, between 2000 and 2008, in the American government’s standing, both in the world and with its people, is remarkable. There are a lot of reasons why, but I keep being caught up in this one: they were shitty bosses to work for. Bad things happen when you’re working for a shitty boss who doesn’t listen. You stop paying attention to detail. You care less. You start looking for other jobs. It’s not your fault, really. If you already tried your best and it didn’t make any difference, and worse, your best effort was repeatedly mocked and publicly dismissed to the point where future honest efforts could only be expected to be met with ridicule and humiliation, why would you bother trying your best? You either quit or you sit there, not doing your best, until everything eventually falls apart and you at least have a shot at a tell-all book deal. If you stay, the worst that could happen is you’ll be released from your commitment, and the best that could happen is the shitty boss would fail and be fired. Or, alternatively in the worst-worst case scenario, not only will the shitty boss be fired, he’ll take the entire world with him, a la Joseph Cassano, former head of A.I.G.’s Financial Products unit.

But we’re talking about football here, and thankfully, the stakes are lower.

In the years since Dan Snyder has taken ownership of the Washington Redskins, the team has all the hallmarks of an organization with a shitty boss. His employees get paid more money and try less hard with less success than they would in other places. The wrong people are being listened to, and both hard work and talent, both on the field and off, often goes unrecognized and unrewarded. There has been constant public turmoil, a track record of negative outbursts in the media, a high turnover rate among employees, a reliance on distracting sensationalism in public relations output, public adherence to censorship-based policy for dealing with customers, lawsuits, scandal, tragedy, betrayal, you name it, and all have resulted in disappointing returns. In other words, from an organizational standpoint, the Washington Redskins show no outward sign of being any different from the Bush White House or the AIG Financial Products unit.

And now here come these two men, Mike Shanahan and Jim Haslett, who, say what you will, at least have a track record of hard work and attention to detail. It’s been sorely lacking from the organization recently.

But this raises two questions:

What happens to that hard work and attention to detail if it runs up against an owner in Dan Synder who is the ultimate shitty boss?

There’s a possibility that Snyder’s right hand man of the last decade, former “Executive President of Football Operations” Vinny Cerrato, was the primary shitty boss, sort of a Joseph Cassano (President of AIG’s Financial Products unit) to Dan Snyder’s Hank Greenberg (former CEO of AIG, accused of meddlesome behavior within the company and censured by the company’s board of directors in the wake of ethics accusations), but if so, there are legitimate questions of judgment involved in Cerrato’s longevity. What kind of leadership would allow such a shitty boss to remain in power for an entire decade?

If Snyder is the ultimate shitty boss within the Redskins organization, and the organization displays more than enough shitty behavior which has nothing to do with duties one would typically associate with an “Executive President of Football Operations” for this to be the case, then the Shanahan and Haslett hires will ultimately fail under the weight of an impossibly top-heavy management structure. But he will be paid very well first, at least.

Are Shanahan and/or Haslett shitty bosses themselves?

The above-linked profile of Shanahan, and this 2001 profile of Haslett suggest that neither man is overly concerned with democracy or incorporating dissent within their own ranks. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Football is a violent and complicated game in which 11 players must work in unison over both the short (plays) and long term (game) to accomplish a shared objective. There is little room for dissent come game day. And certain kinds of dissent, for instance public dissent among players or public dissent between a player and his coach, are absolutely detrimental to a team’s ability to unify on the field of play.

But there is room for healthy dissent among a coaching staff and between the coaching staff and front office or scouting department. Now stretching the definition of the word "dissent" a little, I'm reminded of the case of the 2008 Miami Dolphins, who after floundering came up with a somewhat radical solution in the Wildcat formation. This was not "dissent" in the classical sense so much as a coach asking one of his lieutenants to help come up with a radical solution to a problem, but it's the kind of administerial flourish that you'd not often see in either the Dan Snyder Redskins organization nor the Bush White House, i.e. "assuming we are underdogs without much chance of winning a game, what game-planning wrinkles can we come up with that will maximize the strengths of our current personnel?"

The phrase "assuming we are underdogs" is an interesting one. Professional sports management has become somewhat of a spectator sport in the post-Moneyball era, with fans more exposed to the inner workings and thought processes of management than at any point in the history of professional sports. And too often the Redskins are behaving like the deep-pocketed Yankees circa 2003 rather than the lean, smart Billy Beane-managed Oakland A's. In a sport such as football, which has a salary cap (for now) and widespread revenue sharing, an eye towards organizational efficiencies inspired by a "we're an underdog" assumption is a philosophy which blurs the line between prudence and necessity.

But regardless of the apparent lack of implementation of that philosophy (and this is arguable, I'm sure good ideas got passed back and forth all the time among even Jim Zorn's coaching staff, just not any as radical as the Wildcat) among the Redskins organization, there has been no indication that the managerial structure could tolerate such an approach. The franchise seems more prone to fire a coach who fields a 3-5 team than allow that coach to experiment with strange "new" formations. Case in point: the Redskins recently announced a shift to a 3-4 defensive formation, which has been around since the 1940's, and are the second to last professional team to have tried it. Clearly, they are deficient in "outside the box" thinking on a macro, structural level.

But what structure will work? The relative lack of success in recent years of Head Coach/General Manager uberleaders in professional sports is fairly well documented, but the question of where real authority lies in a functional GM-Coach relationship is generally case-specific and also not usually publicized. There may be a short list of certain operational agreements which are common for all successful teams, but the actual implementation of those ideals does not follow a set pattern. It’s all case-by-case and personality based. Otherwise it would be easy to maintain a record of success over the long-term: just follow the blueprint. As far as front offices go, it seems to me that there’s a kind of reverse Anna Karenina Principle in effect, where successful teams are successful in different ways, but unsuccessful teams share the same issue in their front office structure: people don’t listen to each other (for various reasons).

Well as a Redskins fan, I feel I have reason for concern about the incoming coaching staff along these lines. They might be shitty bosses. They have a history of being somewhat shitty bosses, at least insofar as administering while engaging dissenters and securing proper channels for dissent. Shanahan is known for being a my-way-or-the-highway guy, which in the current Redskins leadership vacuum is sorely needed in the short term. But as far as restoring the franchise to its once-glorious perennial-contender status, I feel like something has to give, likely in both ownership and management’s style of operation, for anybody with a vested rooting interest in the burgundy and gold to be excited about a long-term franchise turnaround.

All of which is an extremely longwinded way of saying “it’s too early to tell,” which is the prevailing sentiment anyway, but I’m not optimistic.

I guess it all comes down to the difference between a bird in the hand and several in the bush. I’m glad Shanahan is running things. I’m glad Obama is running things. Will I have issues along the way with what either of those gentlemen either do or don’t do? Certainly. But in both cases I feel confident that difficult decisions are now being made only after lengthy deliberation, rather than a hasty decision and a lengthy period of justification and spin. And regardless of whether I agree with the decisions being made, I think it should be fairly unanimous among people who are fans of both the Redskins and/or America that this is a step in the right direction. And remember: disagreeing with this sentiment is the same thing as saying “I wish we could have a 3^rd Bush term. He was doing just fine.”

Guide to the Washington Redskins as of 1:00pm EST, 1/5/10

2010-01-05T12:08:00.000-06:00

Ok guys. To review: I'm a huge fan of the Washington Redskins professional American football team. I want them to be successful because their success creates a positive connection between me, my family, and the region I grew up in.

So: the Washington Redskins professional American football team just fired their head coach Jim Zorn after everybody in the world knew that they were going to fire their head coach Jim Zorn, because the team wasn't good this year and he was at least one reason why. This happened yesterday at like 4 in the morning.

Since then I have been scouring all the news reports about this event, not because I'm particularly interested in the event of the firing itself--I was one of the people who knew that the Washington Redskins professional American football team were probably going to fire their head coach Jim Zorn--but because I am looking for clues about what is going to happen to the Washington Redskins professional American football team. Why am I looking for those clues? I don't know. I guess, partially, to be well-informed in future discussions I might have with other football fans about the Washington Redskins professional American football team.

But another reason I'm looking for clues about possible future actions within the Washington Redskins professional American football team organization is that I find it necessary, as a fan, to set reasonable expectations for myself about the future success of the Washington Redskins professional American football team. This organization has a recent history of setting high expectations through player acquisitions and public relations-related bragging about how bright and successful the future will likely be.

I understand that much of this public relations strategy is gamesmanship by the owner of the Washington Redskins professional American football team. Because the Washington Redskins professional American football team is also a money-making enterprise, and fans such as myself, my family, and a majority of the people from my home region, will be more likely to spend money on tickets and merchandise, and more likely to watch television broadcasts of the team's games, if they operate as fans under the assumption that a successful on-field outcome is likely. So it's in the Washington Redskins professional American football team's best financial interest to always project an image of competence and high expectations for success, even if that image bears little resemblance to what my own football-watching eyeballs tell me about the cohesion and football-playing ability of the Washington Redskins professional American football team.

This is why it is so important to me, as a fan, to try and get clues about what the Washington Redskins professional American football team might be planning as a course for their future. Because I feel I would be better at setting my own expectation level for the performance of the Washington Redskins professional American football team that the team's image-conscious and profit-driven ownership would be. And in recent years, the team's image-conscious and profit-driven ownership has set the bar for expectations unreasonably high, and it has led, through the accumulating years, to a profound, almost desperate malaise. I am having a hard time enjoying the Washington Redskins professional American football team, and I want to enjoy the Washington Redskins professional American football team.

Why? First of all, because I enjoy the game of American football. I find its intricate balance of strategy and execution of strategy between two diametrically opposed forces (offense and defense) to be, when played at its highest caliber, a near-transcendent expression of human achievement. This is not an exaggeration. A professional American football game between two equally matched, high-quality opponents is one of my favorite things in the world to witness, and it can be expected to happen at least once if not multiple times each football season. And the feeling of enjoyment which comes from watching such a contest is ample reward for a season's worth of diligent watching.

And, for personal reasons that have to do with the area of the country where I grew up, the Washington Redskins professional American football team is my favorite team, and if I get a chance to watch the Washington Redskins professional American football team hold up their end of a contest between two equally matched, high-quality opponents, and even, if I'm lucky, win victory in that contest through more skill than luck, then I feel doubly rewarded.

But the recent history of the Washington Redskins professional American football team, one of high expectations set through the public relations effort of current ownership, and a continual paucity of on-field achievement by the football team in comparison to those expectations, has led to an accumulated disappointment. This disappointment, growing as is does each year, has now set a pattern of expectations. I now no longer have faith in the ability of the Washington Redskins professional American football team's ownership to reverse the trend of setting high expectations and then continually failing to meet them. I am beginning to feel less than a lack of faith in the Washington Redskins professional American football team. I feel faith instead in their ability to disappoint me. All of which is leading me down a path of indifference.

Which I feel is a shame, because I have very fond memories from my childhood of the Washington Redskins professional American football team. To create an analogy, it's a little like finding out that your favorite childhood toy was in fact a callous moneygrab on the part of the toy's manufacturers, and not some wonderful, innocent joyful experience. Only instead of a Voltron figure, it's a shared experience between an entire region of people, unifying many across vast socioeconomic and racial spectra.

So I am looking for clues, after the recent firing of the Washington Redskins professional American football team's head coach Jim Zorn, that the Washington Redskins professional American football team will reverse this trend of disappointment. I am looking for a glimmer of hope that the dominant practices of the last several years within the Washington Redskins professional American football team will be nullified, and a new, more successful approach will take hold. One which will set reasonable, reality-based expectations for fans like me, and then, perhaps, exceed those expectations. And maybe, through this reversal, I will be able to participate as a witness to that most coveted goal of my fandom, a good, maybe even great, professional American football game between the Washington Redskins professional American football team and another, equally-matched, high-quality opponent. I am not even asking for a Redskins victory in such a contest, nor am I asking for the game to have some arbitrary set of professional American football-related consequences, such as "playoffs" or "Super Bowl." I only wish to see the Washington Redskins professional American football team play good football. One entire game worth of good football. That is my only expectation, and I think it is reasonable. It has been met, occasionally and to varying degrees, in the not too distant past. I would like the chances for its realization to increase.

So I am looking for clues about whether or not I should expect a reversal from the current "I have faith that good football will not occur" state and a possible future "I have faith that good football might reasonably occur" state, as far as the Washington Redskins professional American football team goes.

Now, without going into too much detail about my opinion of what actions are most likely to lead to an increased likeliness of success for a professional American football team (they are debatable and I am not an expert) I can say with certainty that a pattern of certain actions within the recent management of the Washington Redskins professional American football team are not in dispute. Recently, the Washington Redskins professional American football team has done the following with a high degree of regularity: 1. turned over coaching staffs within a maximum of three years, first hiring with an announced high expectation of immediate on-field success, then firing or accepting a resignation when that expectation is not met, 2. placing a higher value on older, established players acquired at a relatively large expense through free agency than younger, unestablished players acquired at a relatively lesser expense through the amateur draft, 3. announcing, through various public relations channels, a desire to improve immediately through coaching changes and free agent player acquisitions, rather than ever overtly expressing a desire to forgo immediate success (a process often referred to in sports as "rebuilding") in order to create a sustainable operational stability which will lead, through careful planning, to a higher chance of success over the long term. These recent behavioral patterns are not in dispute by anybody.

Whether or not these three recent trends have any bearing on on-field success for the Washington Redskins professional American football team is a question up for debate. Just because they have not recently does not mean that they can't ever. One might (and I do) suspect that these operational trends might have a correlation to the feeling of disappointment experienced by myself and many other fans of the Washington Redskins professional American football team, but correlation is not causal. Without delving too far into my opinion of what should be done by the Washington Redskins professional American football team, I feel that other, more successful professional American football teams have recently followed the exact opposites of the three above-stated behavioral patterns. And that reversing one, or two, or possibly all of these trends might be a good idea, and certainly could not hurt much.

So I am hopefully looking for some signs that the Washington Redskins professional American football team will reverse those recent trends. And it has not been easy, because the profit-driven nature of the organization precludes honesty and openness in their relationship to the sporting press. And, in the midst of a coaching chance which even I, who would like fewer coaching changes within the Washington Redskins professional American football team, will admit is necessary, it is difficult to know whether the current transformation from old coaching tenure to new coaching tenure will represent a shift in underlying philosophy or just more of the same, a reset of the old pattern. The recent resignation of football executive Vinny Cerrato, who has been one of few constants within the Washington Redskins professional American football team for the last ten years, is cause for some hope. That represents a reversal of at least one larger trend, if only the trend of Vinny Cerrato working for the Washington Redskins professional American football team. There is some indication that some of these potentially-destructive practices might be done away with, although I'm skeptical. And I'm monitoring the situation with a great deal of interest, because I don't want to be suckered, yet again, into setting false expectations for success. So far it's been more encouraging than not.

But: today I have found cause for alarm in the form of a quote by recently-hired new General Manager Bruce Allen, published in the Washington Post: "I believe that we have to do everything today to get better," said Allen, the son of legendary Redskins coach George Allen, who was hired as general manager on Dec. 17. "What that gets us in number of wins this year, I can't make that promise. I do know one thing, that the organization's going to do everything it can to be successful immediately."

And the alarm is caused by the insistence on "today" and "immediately." I have a feeling that this does not bode well, and I wanted to share that feeling with you. It looks, based solely on conjecture flowing from this one quote, that the basic underlying principle behind the three recent behavioral patterns displayed by the management of the Washington Redskins professional American football team, that of impatience, has not been reversed. It has been ratified. Which I feel reasonably sure will ultimately lead to more mediocrity and disappointment, rather than a reversal of recent trends in that direction. And that sucks.

Thanks for listening.

Guide to Boners.

2009-09-10T15:18:00.001-05:00

Boners have an interesting journey in the timeline of a man’s life. At first they are curiosities, then they are an exciting discovery, then a constant menace, then a constant confirmation of primacy, then a fun treat, then a cause for celebration, then a totally ignorable non-event.

I say this as a person in the “fun treat” phase. I don’t know what happens later. I don’t know if I have boner pills in my future. I kind of don’t ever want to deal with boner pills. Chronic impotence would be a problem, but so would having your head crushed by suddenly collapsed scaffolding, and there aren’t drugs for that. Not technically. Oh, I’m sorry, “Erectile Dysfunction.” The term “impotence” implies that the lack of a boner makes one an ineffective person, when in fact a man and his flaccid dong can still water ski and kick your ass at tennis and even make million dollar deals before breakfast from the comfort of his custom Bentley with “RNMAKER” license plate, and don’t you forget it, you little pissant. Anyway, I figure sporadic impotence could be a pleasant escape from responsibility. Kind of a, “Sorry babe, it looks like you have no choice but to leave me alone for once.” Maybe I’m less horny than most guys, though.

I’ve always suspected this to be the case, but maybe that’s for cultural, social, and psychological reasons. I don’t want to trumpet myself as some sort of harbinger of a new age of male sexuality, but it seems like the old straw is that dudes are supposed to feel like they’re the horniest guy on the planet, and that they, surely, are the only one on Earth with these shameful urges of fornication and occasional butt fornication. And among male company one is supposed to assert one’s sexuality as proof of one’s status and ability. At least that’s how it goes in 80’s movies with peering over sunglasses and “hotchie mama” jazz hands.

I’ve been all jumbled up recently after a trip to a strip club in which I was mostly very bored, although I was also titillated, horrified, amused, and depressed. Aside from the obvious plusses (i.e. I am looking at boobs right now) and obvious minuses (i.e. I’m not sure who is doing it to whom, but somebody is being exploited here) they’re rarely the type of place you’d want to hang out in. There are never any windows. Every person there either wants your money or wants to spend their money, all while talking to you as little and as disingenuously as possible. The whole goal of the place is for reasonably attractive and apparently sexually aggressive naked simulacra women to take as much of your money as possible without technically fucking you, under the assumption that you would pay money for somebody to simulate conditions under which that you’re so extremely fuckable that writhing around naked in front of you is an appropriate response to your presence. Which is really not such a bad impulse to act on, it’s just a little indulgent and willfully ignorant. Again, there are obvious benefits to these places that amount to “I am looking at boobs right now and having fun,” but for a guy like me, it takes a lot of booze to ignore all the more navel-gazey aspects of it, especially as time progresses and you realize that boobs are monotonously booblike. Still, a lot of booze is doable. I like booze.

Side note: those all-nude clubs that have no booze are a terrible idea. A strip club is no place to sober up.

So I’m generally very anti-strip club, although they do have a certain go-for-broke charm where if you can wrangle up some cocaine and get yourself revved up to 100% party hedonist mode, they become one in a pastiche of logical settings for a blurry night. The ideal context for a strip club is “let’s get totally fucked up and see what happens and whoops we’re at a strip club on our way to get pancakes” more than “let’s get totally fucked up and go to a strip club and see what happens.” What happens at a strip club is you see boobs but you don’t have sex and you end up spending all of your pancake money.

Anyhow, I got a boner or two at this strip club, and they were weird boners. Boners of defeat, let’s say. I wanted to think I was stronger than that. But at this point in my life even a boner of defeat is still kind of a fun treat, because I can tell it to go away and it will listen. I’m just like “noted” and then move on with my life. Which I’m glad I can do, because if I just did what my boner thought was right, I’d have stripper AIDS. Maybe not. The point is this: boners are tasteless. If that stripper at that strip club that made me have a boner was a real person from real life, I would think “man, this person has a ton of tattoos and a tongue piercing and is so shamelessly aggressive I have an urge to call her mom and ask what happened; maybe the potential for a disease-ridden blowjob in the parking lot is not worth allowing this person into my life” and I would be one hundred percent right because at a certain point crazy overtakes sexy.

That’s extremely unfair and I know that. This is a person I’m talking about, and a person is more than just a set of professional, aesthetic, and psychological stereotypes. In a perfect world, this person who gave me a boner would be an immersionist sociologist in the new feminist mold who is out to test the limits of feminine sexual identity in the new millennium, and that potential disease-ridden parking lot blowjob would not exist except as a depraved thought experiment, and also it would not be disease-ridden, and also it would exist, and also it would happen only because she could tell I’m (specifically: me) smart enough to handle it as a social commentary rather than some crazy slut going down on me. See? This is what my fantasies look like, and that’s also what strippers do for a living: make fantasies seem possible. The problem is it’s pretty reductive, no matter which way you slice it.

Anyhow: the phrase “crazy overtakes sexy” says more about me in the above scenario, because I’m putting all of my shit on this poor person who probably just wants to get home in time to make lunch for her kid to take to school. I don’t know her side of the story. She has no side. Her side is my side. I’m making it up. In a way, I gave myself a boner. Which is totally weird and I don’t want to think about it, fun treat or not. Right now I’m giving myself an innie boner from thinking about all of this shit. I can’t tell if innie boners are cause for celebration or not. Maybe a little.

Guide to Potbelly’s Hate Crimes and Immeasurable Shame

2009-06-19T16:34:00.003-05:00

If I could choose to have one social skill among many that I don’t have, it would be the magical ability to shut the hell up before I say something stupid. I call it a magical ability because it is elusive and invisible to me. Given enough time, I will eventually say something profoundly stupid. I do not default to polite or courteous or quiet or even benignly distant. My interactions with the world lead me invariably down the primrose path to saying the most mind-numbingly stupid thing I could possibly say in a situation.

Maybe this is true for everybody, or maybe the degree to which it’s true for me is within reasonable limits, and it just feels like a defining struggle in my life because I place too much importance on not appearing stupid. There’s merit to that line of thought. But: people who know me will agree with me when I say that I have an above-average tendency to say very stupid things when it would have been just as easy for me to keep my mouth shut. It gets me in trouble with the world in ways I don't even fully comprehend.

So. I may be exaggerating my own importance here, but I have reason to believe that as a result of a recent me-saying-something-stupid-instead-of-not-saying-anything misunderstanding I am now considered in some very small circles to be the biggest racist pervert in the history of this one Potbelly’s sandwich shop that’s inside of the building I work at. So that’s what I’m dealing with today and any day from now on that I’m hungry for a sandwich.

What did I say?

Well, Potbelly’s introduced a new line of sandwich products recently called “Bigs.” “Bigs” are big sandwiches. By way of promotion the manager of my local Potbelly’s encouraged employees to decorate themselves with the paper bags that say “BIGS” on them. So a lot of them did. They wore little signs that said “BIGS” on them. On their aprons. In the chest area. Which created, in my mind, an accidental double entendre in reference to the chests of female employees that I found charmingly inappropriate.

So far I haven’t done anything wrong. That’s a totally benign passing thought unless you open your mouth like the biggest idiot on the planet and actually mention this to a Potbelly’s employee. Guess what I did.

And I mentioned “racist.” The Potbelly’s employee I stupidly opened my mouth to on this subject is a young black woman, and I think there are at least racial undertones anytime a white dude says or does anything disrespectful to or in front of a black woman. Is that thought, in itself, racist, in the classic condescension of white liberal America way? Probably. I’m probably a racist. Hey, racism is a toughie. The only way to avoid it is to be equally nice to everybody. Unfortunately I can’t do that, because I’m too big of an idiot and a self-absorbed asshole. The best I can hope for is that I’m not being too biased about when and to whom I put my foot in my mouth, and I think I’m maybe ok in that category. Who knows. All I can ask for is forgiveness.

I mean, it said “BIGS” right there on the chest. What am I supposed to do, quietly chuckle about it through my nose? YES. THAT IS WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO.

I should probably back up at this point. I realize that I’m sounding like the biggest loser on the face of the planet right now. I’ve run out of patience for myself at this point. First of all: who cares, and second: that’s not even that bad. I’m being hypersensitive for no reason other than to make myself feel bad in the hopes that self-imposed guilt will help to stop me from acting like an idiot in public. Which it probably won’t. And in the meantime I’m slinking around with my tail between my legs like some kind of snakebitten sex offender because I said something a little bit weird in a Potbelly’s once. It’s just Potbelly’s.

But this Potbelly’s, I swear, seems different. I honestly believe I would enjoy working there. The employees seem to get along great. It just has good vibes. There’s no other way to describe it. And I ruined it by opening my stupid asshole mouth about somebody’s “BIGS.”

The thing I actually said was not that bad, really. I don’t know a direct quote but it was more in the vein of “I find those ‘BIGS’ signs to be charmingly inappropriate in a way I'm not sure you'd considered” than “HA HA, YOUR CHEST SAYS ‘BIGS’ ON IT. FYI, I AM TALKING ABOUT YOUR TITS RIGHT NOW.” Maybe that’s a very fine line, but this is my entire sense of dignity I’m talking about here, I feel like I should be able to draw a fine line or two if it keeps me from blowing my brains out. I already feel bad enough about this.

So I ruined forever what was a perpetually pleasant Potbelly’s sandwich buying experience. One that included polite but detached joking and small talk about what book I’m reading or what kind of music the Potbelly’s guys are into. It doesn’t matter if I ruined that experience forever because I actually was offensive, or because I said something borderline offensive and the Potbelly’s employees, who I’m pretty sure are younger people and therefore more likely to be persistently upset by a perceived slight, got offended, or because I am hyper sensitive myself, or because of a combination of all of these. The point is: I could have just as easily kept my mouth shut. And I didn’t. I had every opportunity to think “talking about this is inappropriate” but I didn’t.

And you know why I didn’t? This is another source of shame. I didn’t because I temporarily forgot the cardinal rule of the service industry. “It’s not a real relationship.” God, that is like the oldest one in the book, and I broke it. I thought that joking about one thing like two weeks ago meant that I could joke about “BIGS” later. That’s not true. It’s not real joking if one of the people involved in the joke is under some kind of economic pressure to smile and laugh at it.

How do I know this isn’t all in my head? I don’t. Not really. I probably just shifted from an “oh, that guy” customer to an “oh, THAT guy” customer. People at that Potbelly’s have not been smiling at me recently. Maybe it’s not even about me. Then today when I was walking down the stairs after eating my sandwich, the one Potbelly’s person who I’ve seen go the furthest in the direction of “sassy” with customers was, I think, making a face at me, then turned quickly to my foot-in-mouth victim as if to say “that’s the guy?”

I’m probably imagining this whole thing. But I still feel bad. The fact is, instead of a fun zone, Potbelly’s is a shame zone for me. Because of me being an idiot. Again. And it’s not even that egregious. I have other shame zones that are so shameful I know I will never speak of them again in my life, and when the thought of that thing I said or did one time to one person crosses my mind, it triggers some kind of an emotional response that makes me feel like I’m swallowing a hot coal. I think that’s normal, though. I only really have to worry if I cease to feel that.

Anyhow, my Potbelly’s is a bummer now, either because I have a pathological inability to just stay pleasant and polite, or because I have a pathological inability to stay pleasant and polite and a pathological inability to forgive myself for it. I’ve got to either stop being insecure or stop being a jerk. And preferably stop being both.

Mostly I think I should just suck it up and go to Chipotle for a week. I read much less into my interactions Chipotle. The way the Chipotle guys ask if I want black beans or pinto beans before speeding me long the assembly line is comforting. Apparently that’s the only level of service-based interaction I can be expected to handle. Because I am an idiot.

Guide to Taking Care of Yourself

2009-05-26T13:53:00.000-05:00

“Look at you. You’re a goddamned mess.”

Aside from being an always at least somewhat accurate and pleasurably exaggerated self-deprecating way to greet your bathroom mirror-image in the morning, this mantra harbors a basic, depressing truth about human life. You and your daily foibles are on the losing end of a constant struggle against entropy, and the whole universe is against you at all times, and you have a zero percent chance of survival. True or not, this is not the most helpful way to say hello to yourself in the morning, or ever, really.

I suggest something lighter and equally as true, such as:

“Could be worse.”

Or:

“Looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

Or else you could just stop being all cutesy with yourself in the mirror. What are you, a movie? No you are not. Maybe one of the reasons you’re such a mess lately is you’ve been watching yourself like you’re a movie. You should do something. First person camera style.

Last night I put a towel on the floor on my kitchen in front of the refrigerator, opened the freezer, removed its contents, and whacked away at the condensed ice cave in there with a spatula for the better part of an hour until it looked like a freezer again rather than an Eskimo roommate’s secret bagel stash from a parallel dimension. I’m hoping this level of action in opposition to entropy is a sign of things to come in my life. Probably not. Right now, ice is forming on the walls of my freezer. I’m guessing this expansion will occur at a faster rate than I will be able to rejuvenate motivation to remove it, and the ice will continue to grow unchecked until it claims a banana or two in about eight months and I’m once again forced into action.

When I’m in a bad place in my life, and I think I am right now, I tend to think of the world as a cyclical series of tasks one must complete. These tasks offer the benefit of a temporary illusory feeling of completion. You do laundry and all of your clothes are clean, and you are completely done with laundry. But this is not the case. Now your task is to wear those clothes in a succession of your choosing until they are all dirty and you must clean them again. The task of dirtying your clothes will eventually be as complete as the task of cleaning them, with unfortunately less satisfaction. It would be better, maybe to say to yourself, “Well, I’ve done it, I’ve made all of my clothes dirty. Every single article of my clothing is now dirty. Job well done, me. Now my reward is to clean them again. Oh goody.” And you could really feel that way instead of the other way around. But that doesn’t work. People like to wear clothes. People hate to wash clothes. It’s the order of things.

It is nice to switch things around every once in a while, just to show the universe that you’re in on its little joke. “Yogurt cup in the sink, throw away the spoon” is a classic example of your subconscious brain trying to tell you something about how sick it is of doing dishes while the rest of you is busy looking at a dog through the kitchen window. You will eventually get that spoon out of the garbage, but for a while there you consider leaving it as a signal that you’re hip to the natural order of things. Your subconscious brain has a point. So does your conscious brain when it says, “Hey buddy, take a load off: check out that dog.”

In the meantime, while your more pure self is in charge, spoon goes in the garbage. “If a little thing like eating a cup of yogurt is going to make it need a washing, I’d rather not have to deal with it again in my lifetime. Spoons should be less of a nuisance than that. This spoon is worse than my elderly Grandmother’s continual insistence on not being a burden. You are a burden, and I’m sick of pretending you’re not. You’d be easier to deal with if you just said ‘I’m a burden, but hey, so is everyone, so no biggie.’” Spoon. You are talking to the spoon now. And now you are looking at that dog for another little while before getting the spoon out of the garbage and then dealing with the rest of your Sisyphusian life.

I’m convinced a situation like this is what prompted that one genius to invent Gogurt. It was a moment of quiet reflection by the kitchen window inspired by a yogurt-eased distraction from the day’s cares while looking at a dog and a subsequent tumble into an ideological pit of doom once he threw the spoon in the garbage by accident.

Somehow I’m certain that Gogurt was invented by a he.

Actually, scratch that, I’m not certain, but it seems like a reasonable assumption based on the cleaning product advertisements and psychology books I’ve seen about how women are more adept than men at enjoying processes rather than just their results. And I’ve tried countless times to satisfy a woman sexually, and I’m almost completely convinced that it can’t be done. I’m looking for a result: i.e. ejaculating and therefore ending the sex event, and she’s looking to enjoy the process: i.e. bugging me for more sex once I’ve ejaculated and have now fallen asleep as if she cannot understand that the event is over and the result is satisfactory. Even on occasions when I’ve expended Herculean efforts to forgo that well-earned sleep and concentrated on the process so fully and effectively that she has no choice but to tell me to stop having sex with her, the end result of such an event, in the long run, is raised expectations for future such efforts.

But this is how life, even sex, becomes a chore. If you focus on the results at the exclusion of the process, you’re in trouble. And that’s why you have to stop watching your life like a movie and do something in it, even if it’s small and useless. There is something immensely satisfying about whacking a big hunk of ice off of the ceiling of your freezer using a spatula. If you can’t enjoy that, you are crazy and it’s time to get help.

That’s the good news about the never-ending series of tasks that are your miserable life: most of them offer a modest amount of ritualized enjoyment if you break them down into their most basic component parts. And if that doesn’t work, you can also get super duper baked and play some loud music while you’re doing whatever it is that needs to be done. That way instead of mind-numbing manual labor, you’ve got a mind-enhancing thing to do with your hands and body while your mind has already been artificially numbed by cannabis and the Talking Heads. And aside from the result of your girlfriend finally feeling safe in your bathroom, which might further result in her letting you sleep that night after you blast your jazz, you might also enjoy the process, too. Oh goody. Just what you need right now. It’s true. Look at yourself. You’re a goddamned mess.

Guide to Comedy

2009-05-05T15:40:00.001-05:00

You know what’s funny?

No, you don’t.

Neither do I, though. In fact, nobody knows for sure. “You know what’s funny?” is a question that has plagued mankind as long as there have been skinny geeks who have all the Mr. Show DVDs. I know a guy who got a B.A. in comedy at one of those wacky choose-your-own adventure liberal arts colleges that cost too much given the fact that their whole mission statement is basically “alright, you got us, we’re useless.” He is surprisingly funny. But even he doesn’t know what’s funny any more than anybody else does, and he fucking majored in it.

The closest comedians get to agreeing about what’s funny is the maxim “it’s whatever makes people laugh.” Which is a little like saying that great television is “whatever people watch.” On the one hand: sure, on the other: bullshit. There’s got to be more to it than that, but I’ll be damned if I (or anybody) knows what it is.

It’s easier to come up with a list of stuff that’s not funny, and try to avoid it if you’re trying to be funny. So here’s a list of things that aren’t funny:

1.

Shit.

That doesn’t work either. Pretty much everything can be funny. Funny is all about context. Let me put on my professor’s cap from the University of “We’re Useless” for a minute. Certain things aren’t funny to some people, and it’s all subjective.

Here’s a list of things I don’t think are funny:

1. Making other people feel bad on purpose.

This is tricky because I’m such a jerk and I’m good at being a jerk. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they admire my “asshole humor.” Which I guess is another way of saying, “Man, I think you’re an asshole. But at least you’re kind of good at it, so I don’t mind as much as I would if you were just a regular asshole who wasn’t also funny.”

But I try not to make other people feel bad on purpose. I try to be more like, “Hey, I’m not so great myself, here, but look at this weird thing you did: let’s stop and laugh at that for a little while because it needs to be laughed at,” than, “You’re fat, HAW HAW HAW!” Maybe that’s a distinction that doesn’t actually exist. Maybe the “you’re fat, HAW HAW HAW” guys think they’re being subtle or, more likely, that they’re good buddies with the whole world and that buys them a chance to act however they want. I feel that way sometimes too.

Anyhow, if you’re going to be kind of jerky when you make a joke, it’s important to pick your targets wisely. Maybe somebody’s not really your friend and they’re just tolerating you and your asshole behavior because it’s easier to avoid you than to tell you off. You see what “asshole humor” can do to you? It can make you paranoid about whether or not you have any friends. That’s no fun.

2. Other people hurting themselves.

This is just me being squeamish. Like if some dude makes a serious face plant off of a trampoline in a YouTube video, or something. I don’t like that. If I was there in person and I saw it I would not laugh. I would go “ouch” in my brain and suck in wind through my teeth because I instantaneously pretended that it happened to me. I do dumb stuff all the time, and my worst fear is cracking my skull or breaking my arm in a super gross way, like with the bone out, while doing something dumb like aiming for the pool from the trampoline. Just thinking about it is making my esophagus sweat.

But there are things like this that are funny. Like when somebody doesn’t really hurt themselves too bad and they just look dumb, that’s funny. Like flailing wildly in order to avoid falling but then finally falling, like a little bit. Or anything with the balls is hilarious, except anything that would require ball-based hospitalization. Bonus points for YouTubes and America’s Funniest Home Videos where some dude gets whacked in the balls by something, overreacts for comedy purposes, and then gets whacked again right away. The double barrel balls whack is just about the funniest. Because the dude will be fine. He just had his balls whacked. Twice. It hurts but it’s not going to kill him.

3. Trying really hard to be funny.

Oh brother. Nothing in the world is worse. I should know, I’ve been trying too hard to be funny for almost my entire life. It doesn’t usually work, until you pull a self-aware switcheroo where you do all this goofy stuff and nobody laughs, and then you get flustered and do a lot more of it and really really nobody laughs, and you say “I’m sorry, I am an idiot.” People need to know that you know you’re acting like an idiot, otherwise it’s not ok to laugh at you because you’re a crazy person and it’s not fun to laugh at crazy people. It’s more sad than anything. So you have to be a human being first and funny second. Otherwise it’s unsettling.

4. Not trying hard enough to be funny.

This is bad too. Mostly it’s in the context of some kind of comedy show, though, where people are supposed to be funny. Like they’re like “Hey, here’s the first thing I thought of on the toilet this morning, I call it ‘What if aliens loved boobs,’ and I am sure you will find it hilarious.” Actually, that does sound funny. Those aliens would be like, “We come in peace from a distant planet. Take us to your leader. Oh, and also: we love boobs.” If you cannot come up with something funnier than aliens who love boobs, you’re not trying hard enough. That’s the most basic amount of funny you can be. Maybe they’re not even aliens. Maybe they’re just dudes dressed as aliens trying to trick people into showing them some boobs. That’s funny. Like if they got busted and had to keep pretending to be aliens who just happen to also love boobs instead of dudes dressed as aliens who think that will help them to see boobs, that would be funny.

Sometimes people in a comedy show don’t try hard enough to be funny. Sometimes they’re trying to do something else first, like “look awesome in front of an audience” or “work out the issues I have with my parents who didn’t give me attention” and then “funny” is just an accidental bonus on top of that every once in a while. If you’re on stage for some kind of a thing that’s supposed to be funny, you should try to be funny first and then other things later by accident. Actually, according to item three on this list, it should go: human being first, funny a close second, and then a distant, invisible third is whatever therapeutic kicks you’re getting out of performing for people due to your chronic personality disorder problems caused by your weird childhood that rendered you so warped and self-centered that you’re now crying out for attention in this public manner.

Otherwise I, the consumer, am going to be pissed about the money and time I spent to help you, the performer, work on your problems, instead of glad I came to be entertained by this great funny person. And also I don’t really care if it’s a human being up there. It’s clearly not a human being up there if they’re willing to do that to themselves. I’ll just be glad if they were funny. And then I will go on with my life not caring about that person. Which is normal.

5. “Edgy” comedy.

You know what sucks? When some dude you work with is like, “Women are only good for one thing, right?” And then he jabs your ribs like you’re supposed to agree with him. Call me a prude, but unless I know you’re joking, that’s not a funny joke. If I do know you’re joking, it is a medium funny joke. It is even funnier if I respond to this joke by saying, “I know, especially my Grandmother, right?” And you ribjab back. Because my Grandmother really is good for just about one thing. Talking about how she loves me and how she is going to die soon. Actually that is two things. Even my grandmother is good for more than one thing, and that bitch hasn’t cooked a good meal in five years.

I assume you know I’m joking, right? She is not a bitch and I love her and I don’t care if she cooks a good meal or not. I can’t run her down here. She’s going to die soon. She told me herself.

You’ve got to be careful with “edgy” humor. The reason people are offended by “edgy” humor is not because you said the words “shit” or “fuck” or “shitfucking.” It’s because by saying them you assume that the people listening to you say them would also say them, and that they would also find whatever it is you’re saying about an abortion to be funny. Abortions are not particularly funny. Neither is shitfucking. (Except it is a little).

Actually, that’s what made me say, with my professor hat from the University of “My Parents Still Think Higher Education Isn’t A Scam Because They’re From Another Time, So They Paid 80 Grand For Me To Major In Comedy,” that funny is all about context. “Abortion” is neither funny nor not funny. Comedy is putting the context together for which “abortion” will be funny. Asking for an abortion for Christmas is very not funny if you’re a pregnant junkie teenager who actually needs an abortion for Christmas because you were raped by your Dad. Asking for an abortion for Christmas is kind of funny if you’re a man, and things that are only kind of funny are actually the least funny. Asking for an abortion for Christmas is hilarious if you’re a regular married woman who’s eight and a half months pregnant and your back just really hurts.

Or maybe it’s also funny if a five year old girl asks her Dad for an abortion for Christmas because her asshole uncle told her to, and he’s silently laughing into his whiskey in the kitchen, and he’s me in however many years it takes for one of my brothers to have a five year old daughter. This is maybe the exception to item one on the above list, and there are a ton of exceptions and nothing is either inherently funny or not funny and it’s all about context. But I will say this: if one of my brothers ever has a kid, I will be in the kitchen telling her to say a few things. Consider yourselves forewarned.

I don’t know what’s funny, but I know that would be funny. To me.

Oh, and also: I love boobs.

Guide to Mindreading

2009-04-10T11:33:00.003-05:00

It’s difficult not to have misogynist thoughts when one woman is bothering you. Or even specific isolated incidences of being bothered in a specific way by every woman you’ve ever come in close contact with. And when those incidences have their significance buoyed through commiserating with every guy you’ve ever met talking about every woman they’ve ever met, it gets very difficult indeed to curb one’s misogynist impulses. Generalizing is an easy and therefore lazy pastime, and we men are nothing if not lazy. But: give us credit, us men, we usually end our bitching and moaning with the catchall “but I’m no picnic either.”

It’s true. We’re not picnics. Not a one of us human beings. The end amen hallelujah.

And of course we have to come crawling back, because what else are we going to do? Just play video games at Matt’s house for the rest of eternity? That would be even more pointless than trying to guess why our girlfriends are currently angry. It could goddamned be anything. Probably this time it’s because we’d rather be playing video games at Matt’s house than sitting around with our girlfriends trying to apologize for any number of things that they might be angry about, which will only make them more angry because:

A. We’re so thickheaded we DON’T EVEN KNOW what they’re angry about, and;

B. They’re also angry about all the things we’re guessing wrong about too, only they’re not even thinking of those other things right now, but now that you mention those things in the form of an apology, they’re angry about those other things too, so thanks for reminding them of these other great reasons to be angry.

I clearly have no idea how it works in the womanbrain, but it seems to me, having been through plenty of times like these, that sometimes women enjoy being angry. It’s like how they sometimes eat their food slowly and then talk about the food instead of just eating until they’re not hungry, or like how they want an elaborate thirty minute foreplay routine before sex. I’m generalizing here. But maybe there’s something to it. I don’t know. All I know is what I’ve been through, and in my experience, women seem to enjoy being angry at me. I give them plenty of reasons, believe me. I’m no picnic.

At least we know they are angry. We should get credit for that. If you’re not talking or making eye contact during dinner, then you are angry. We know that much. We never get credit for that, because OF COURSE I’M ANGRY, and the real problem is we don’t always put the “will this possibly make her angry” filter in front of everything we say or do, but we feel like we should get credit for even knowing when they’re angry. We’re usually not good at knowing how other people feel unless they tell us verbally, us men (and I’m generalizing, but women are no picnic either), so the fact that we even know you’re angry at something should be a source of some kind of… I don’t know, acknowledgement. Just because it would be perfectly acceptable to us to just continue on our merry way not giving a shit. So: good work, us. We know she’s angry.

But WHY? Why, this time, is she angry? And, more importantly, what the fuck are we supposed to do about it?

Well, guessing is probably a bad idea, for reasons already stated. Blanket apologies are often taken as condescending and therefore are fruitless. Snide remarks, like “I apologize for whatever the fuck it is I’m supposed to be sorry for,” only escalate things.

By the way, if you could read a man’s thoughts they would take on one of three general tones:

1. Passing thoughts of various degrees of importance that have nothing to do with other people, such as work-related thoughts about how to reorganize that one spreadsheet, or the lyrics to “Mr. Postman” and what they really mean, or “I wonder what I’d look like in a beard,” or “Burritos are great because it’s like a meal where you also eat the plate. Like the tortilla is a special sleeping bag-style plate instead of a regular mattress-style plate and all the food is snugly wrapped in it. That’s probably how bears feel about eating people in sleeping bags. Or not bears. Lions, maybe. Rabid lions.”

2. Blowjobs. How to get them, how good they feel, what we’d do for one right now, etc.

3. Please please please don’t let this be a big fight. Please please please please just let this rest. Oh God. This is going to be bad. This is going to be a huge bummer. This is a huge bummer already, but it’s probably going to be even worse. Oh God. What do I do? Man, she is angry. What did I say? What was it? Oh, don’t worry about that. You’ll just make it worse. She’ll tell me. She’s just waiting to tell me. She wants me to suffer first. Well, fuck her. I don’t feel like suffering. If she feels like being angry, that’s on her. I’m going to enjoy myself until it’s time to have this big argument. Yeah, might as well. This is nice wine. Check in with her. Maybe I can save this. “Isn’t this nice wine?” Oh man. It’s going to be a big one. I wish this could just be nice right now like how it is sometimes with holding hands and walking and joking around like pals. But nope. It’s not going to be like that. Not tonight. Great. I could be at Matt’s house playing video games right now, and instead I’m here waiting for my spanking. I’m sitting here volunteering for spanking duty right now. Like a sucker. Fuck this. I wish I had a time machine to go back fifteen minutes and tell myself to shut the fuck up with whatever it was that I was about to say. You know what? A time machine wouldn’t even help me. It’s always going to be something. She just wants to be angry. Man. There is nothing I can do. Not even a time machine would help me. This is so… sucky. I wish I had known it was going to be like this tonight. I’ve got to start figuring out the advanced warning signs of when it’s going to be like this. Are there any? I don’t think there are, but maybe I’m just too stupid to figure them out. I’m definitely too stupid to stop myself from saying stuff that makes her angry, it makes sense that I’m too stupid to figure out when a huge fight is brewing. Maybe it’s the third time she says “whatever you want” when I ask her if she wants to eat somewhere. I don’t care where we eat. I’ll eat anything. I’ve told her that. If it really was up to me, “whatever I want,” we’d already be eating at the first place I suggested. Fuck her for being such a picky eater. Yeah, I should just call it off if there’s any kind of restaurant decision being made. But then what am I supposed to do? Say, “I can see where this is going, I’m going to go play video games at Matt’s house?” That wouldn’t work either. And sometimes I do just want to have a nice dinner with my girlfriend. I mean, that’s a pretty basic maneuver, I can’t just cut that out of our regimen. Man, I’m fucked. This is definitely going to be a big fight. Just agree with her when it happens. Just agree and it will end sooner. And then you can tell her about your side… later? Yeah, maybe. Sometime when it’s calm and nobody’s angry you can tell her how you feel. Fingers crossed that such a time will happen. Soon. Ever. I’d settle for “ever.” Compliment her on her hair or something. Here comes the waiter.

Dudes, and I’m generalizing about how much we’re not a picnic, have one of three of those thoughts at any given time. It’s off in our own world, trying to figure out what we can do to make our world better through things like blowjobs, and trying to react to our world as it is. We’re pretty simple. All we need is a little time to ourselves to help us come up with our burrito theories, a blowjob every once in a while, and for women to tell us exactly what to do with our lives. Simple.

But the question still is, “What the fuck are you supposed to do?” Well it’s a bad question because there’s nothing you really can do. The only thing you can do is ask her if she’s angry and if so would she want to talk about it, and if she says no, then you’ve done all you can in that moment. You just have to sit there and chew your food. And try not to worry too much. And keep in mind that you do this all the time, too. Like when you know that you’re angry so you don’t want to talk about whatever it is until later when you’re not angry because you know you’re angry and you know if you did talk about it now it’d come out in the form of irrational defensive yelling that you feel a need to indulge in because you’re currently angry and hurt. She’s doing that right now. Give her credit. It’s not your job to read her mind anymore. Your job is to read her mind BEFORE you say whatever dumbshit thing it was that you said that made her angry in the first place. Get it right, Einstein.

And how do you do that? You don’t. You can’t. Not all the time. Except sometimes you do. And you will never get credit for the times you don’t say something stupid. Because if you did, it would be the same as saying the stupid thing that you stopped yourself from saying. Nope. Sorry, pal. You’re a dude, and I’m generalizing here, and your lot in life is to get hammered for the stupid things you say without ever getting one ounce of recognition for all the effort you’ve put into not saying all the stupid things you thought of saying but didn’t say. And that’s just it. If you’re not cool with that, you should just go to Matt’s house and play video games until you get your head out of your ass.

And maybe you’ve got a point about how you don’t feel like you’re ever forgiven for saying something stupid, but she’s probably biting her tongue as often as you do. Probably even more often. You say a lot of really really stupid shit. No matter how much of it you stop yourself from saying, a lot of it slips out. And who knows how much she’s letting slide. Probably a lot.

Maybe you’ve also got a point about how it always seems like bad timing where you’re out trying to have a nice dinner or something and then all of a sudden it’s like you’re in “mad at you” jail. But maybe you’re just such a thickheaded boor that this is the only thing that gets through to you. Did you ever think of that? Maybe these ugly little scenes are the best way of reminding you that your girlfriend’s happiness is directly related to your own ability to be happy in any given situation, and if you can’t consider her feelings, at least you should be able to consider your own and do what she asks of you out of a sense of self-preservation. Especially if that’s the only motivation you’re capable of understanding, you selfish prick. You really are a selfish prick. But: and I might be generalizing here, but every human being on the face of the planet is essentially a selfish prick, and that’s why every human being on the face of the planet is essentially not a picnic.

So suck it up.

Or else don’t. Call Matt. You might as well be honest if that’s what you really want to do with your time. Except Matt has his own girlfriend. He can’t play video games all the time, either. Of course he wants to, but he can’t. His life is not a picnic.

Actually, maybe you should go on a picnic with your girlfriend. That’s probably what she’s trying to tell you. By not being one.

Guide to Lying

2009-03-23T12:55:00.003-05:00

Everybody lies. Sorry, but it’s true. I don’t care if you’re Johnny Upright, and you’re one hundred percent honest all the time or else you don’t even say anything. At some point somebody is going to force you to lie to them.

They will say, with their eyes, “I am a sad person and I’m taking this bullshit thing very seriously. Please please tell me you agree with me on this. I need you to agree with me on this for some reason. I know deep in my heart whatever I need you to say is not true. I just need you to help me lie to myself about it so I can move on with my crazy delusional life. Just lie to me about this one thing and I will leave you alone, I promise. Even just a side lie, where I ask you what you honestly think and you say, ‘It’s not really my thing;’ can you muster that? At least just feign ignorance, for my sake. Just a tiny lie. I’ve had a rough couple of months/years/entire life and I need to hear a lie or two right now. That’s not so hard, is it?” Of course they’re saying all of this with their eyes. What they’re saying with their mouths is something along the lines of, “isn’t [some thing] just… the best?”

Of course you’re gonna break down and lie in that situation. There are degrees of lying, and the utility of telling somebody you barely know that you like their pencil drawing of a fetus in order to end the conversation and more quickly not have to talk to them ever again is just too high to ignore. But: it’s still a lie. Forced or not. And lying is trouble.

Technically the better thing to do is say that you don’t like it, in fact you very much don’t like it, and you can’t figure out why they did it, and more importantly you can’t figure out why they would do such a thing if a stranger’s opinion about it is going to be so important later that they’d want to pressure that stranger into lying about it. And, oddly, isn’t a publicly displayed pencil drawing of a fetus supposed to be kind of a “fuck you?” Am I even supposed to like it? Honestly, I don’t like it as either a thing or as a “fuck you.” It’s an incredibly clumsy “fuck you.” I’m not impressed by it in any way. Let me be clear about this: whichever response will mean less conversation with you about art, or really anything, that’s what I’m looking to give you. This fetus drawing is fantastically mediocre. It provokes no particular response, other than a desire to laugh at it briefly through my nose and then move on forever. I cannot believe I have thought about it for this long. Goodbye.

Technically that’s better. Because that’s honest.

But in a way the more honest thing to do is to say “it’s really good,” and then avoid eye contact and get the Hell out of there. Because that’s at least emotionally honest. That’s a between-the-lines way of saying, “Hey, I’m a nice guy and I don’t want to get into it with you about this pencil-drawing fetus. I just want to go to dinner and laugh about it with my girlfriend for like 4 seconds until we start talking about something else.”

The real lie going on there is the original lie. The lie of the artist to himself about whether or not he’s pulling it off with this pencil-drawing-of-a-fetus stuff.

Art is weird. It’s almost completely subjective to say what’s good and what’s not. You can describe some qualities that most people would objectively consider to be general qualities of good art. “Provocative” is one of those qualities. But of course “provocative” is just a word. It gets used so much in so many different ways that it doesn’t really describe anything until you add more words to it. And you’ve got a lot of weird people doing art, some of whom won’t understand that making something that’s “provocative” isn’t the same thing as making good art, because you can’t make good anything if that thing only has one value and that value is as flimsy as “provocative.” Some of these people don’t even understand what they’re “provoking” when they’re being intentionally “provocative.” They’re probably not aiming for strong, resolute, and immediate indifference as a provoked response. But they don’t understand that, some of these weird people who would have you think they “do art.”

And one of those people is currently standing next to a pencil drawing of a fetus, glaring at you like they know something you don’t when in fact it’s the other way around. You know their fetus drawing isn’t good by any measure. And to that end, you also know that irony can only get you so far before you have to get out and walk. Like out of the gallery and, thankfully, on to the next thing in your life that’s not a pencil drawing of a fetus.

Of course if you’re 19, you might not know that about irony yet. You might laugh in that guy’s face about his fetus drawing and tell him that you love it, and then realize that you hurt his feelings a little by assuming he’s in on the joke, and then laugh at the fact that he was serious, and then go over to the wine table and steal a bottle of Trader Joe’s Merlot, and then continue your party of a life through a never ending series of laughing at things you think are dumb and doing stupid shit until you realize life is pretty long and at the end of it, one day, you’re going to die. And then, usually somewhere around age 24-26, you’ll know that irony can only get you so far before you have to get out and walk. Sometimes, though, it gets you pretty far. It’s not totally worthless, thank God.

Anyhow, lying is trouble. But if you’re going to use the above example, the worst lie you can tell is a lie to yourself that you believe. Lies of this nature include, “Yeah man, people don’t know how to handle my fetus drawing art, I’m great.” And, “Oh man, I’m so great I get to laugh at the fetus drawing guy’s face because I did a few things that are better than a fetus drawing.” Neither one of those self-lies really hurt anybody but the person they’re an issue for, but unless that person tries to get rid of them, they’re just going to stay there and reverberate through the years until they grow into the lie-based assumptions for genuine neuroses. In both of these cases we’d be talking about narcissism. But there are other common self-lies that turn into other things, like how “I know what I’m doing” can turn into OCD after a while, or “I can do anything I want” can turn into a dude who does anything he wants, like hard drugs and homemade porn even though he’s got kids. You’ve got to nip those self-lies in the bud.

I’ve got a few. There’s “I’m interesting.” “I’m special.” “I’m talented at some things.” “I’m smart.” “I’m funny.” “I know what I’m doing.” “I can do anything I want.” “I deserve to be happy.” “I can just do whatever’s easiest and skate by on that.” “I’m meant for better things than sitting in an office all day and/or ever doing the dishes when I’m home.” “I can laugh at that guy’s fetus drawing because I’ve done things that are objectively better than a fetus drawing.” “I could probably pull off a fetus drawing.” “I kind of want to make a t-shirt that says ‘I heart fetus drawings.’”

Most of those I know I’ve got to nip in the bud, because if I don’t it will eventually be a mountain of trouble collapsing on you instead of a kind of pain in the ass thing you should probably deal with. It’s kind of like smoking. Oh yeah, “I can smoke without ever dying because of it.” That’s a good self-lie. And it’s a good demonstration of what self-lies do. It’s like smoking all your life and then when you get cancer being like, “Oshitoshitoshit! I quit! I’m out!” Not happening, Jack. Not happening. That cancer was coming for you for your whole life. You started it. And you failed to stop it in time.

Take the “I can just do whatever’s easiest and skate by on that lie” I tell myself. You know where that ends up? That ends up at a reception desk for a company that brokers the sale of self-storage properties, and convincing yourself you actually like being there. It’s voluntarily hanging out with a bunch of dudes who want nothing in the world more than to make some deals happen in the self-storage industry because to them it is an exciting and complex marketplace full of unique challenges. Did you know that self-storage is a retail business model within an industrial zoning plan? You will. Eventually you will if you just do whatever’s easiest. And you’ll find that doing whatever’s easiest eventually leads you to the hardest fucking thing you’ve ever done in your life, which is feigning interest in the self-storage industry.

Maybe it turns out to be so easy that you are tempted to take classes that will make you know more about the self-storage industry so that you can continue to take even more money from doing things with it. Maybe you will also put a down payment on a condo and move into it with your girlfriend. And you’ll write articles for self-storage industry trade magazines and convince yourself that it’s somehow creatively fulfilling to you. And you’ll raise a family, and you will enjoy that family, and you will feed that family by making a bunch of deals in the self storage industry, and it will all be incredibly easy until one day you realize that what you really want to do is anything else, and you have some ridiculous midlife crisis that involves going to tantric sex workshops with some spaced out idiot half-your-age yoga instructor with a Daddy complex. Which is not the real you either, so much as an overreaction to a lifetime of self-storage dealmaking.

Not that self-storage is an inherently bad way to make a living. It’s just not for everyone. Oddly enough, “it’s not for everyone” does not seem to be a prevalent assumption among practitioners in the self-storage industry. They’re more the type of crowd that’s like, “Of course you’d want to make a killing in self-storage, isn’t that what everybody wants?” That’s one of the things that makes it so easy. They’re just shy of chanting “join us” like Sirens on the rocks. Hideous, hideous Sirens. That want you to lie to yourself about everything.

Yes, self-lies are the worst kind of lie there is. I don’t want to get all Randian about it, but let’s look out for those. They’re the kind of lies that you can lose control over pretty easily. So be on the lookout for them. Also be on the lookout for dudes who want you to tell them how much you like their fetus drawing. It’s not technically lying if you get the fuck out of there before they can get a word in. Sprinting in the opposite direction is an acceptable honest reaction.

Guide to Figuring Out Everything That Is Wrong With You on Wikipedia

2009-03-20T16:12:00.002-05:00

So slate.com has a piece on Narcissistic Personality Disorder this week, and reading it has thrown me down a wormhole of self-doubt. The good news is the fact that I can even feel self-doubt excludes me from the rolls of the clinically narcissistic. The bad news is the more links you follow on Wikipedia about personality disorder, the more likely you are to find out that you’re nothing but a diagnosable series of symptoms with very direct causes and very predictable effects. The whole rubric of your life and, indeed, all of human experience, is reductive to a linked series of community-edited theorems of varying credibility.

I hate Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, it turns out that I have qualities that could reasonably qualify me, on a bad day, for five out of a possible ten diagnosable personality disorders. Basically the ones where you don’t like or understand people or the bullshit rules they make and follow. I’m not too worried about myself falling prey to the disorders where you make too many rules and/or are afraid of everything all the time.

Mostly I’m worried that my whole life is based on one of these “fixed fantasies” that they’re talking about on Wikipedia, which is probably accurate. I don’t know. I mean, I put up a pretty strong front here, but who knows? I don’t really buy it. Plus, part of these personality disorders is you can’t qualify for them if it’s a result of being drunk, and I think that’s why I get drunk so often. I’d rather qualify for alcoholism if it means the fact that I got really shitfaced and molested some dude’s balls as a joke that one time is not anything to worry too much about. I don’t typically ballmolest sober. And I get more of a comedy kick out of it than a sexual kick anyway. I’m not to blame here. That much I’m certain of.

Oh shit.

I just slid back into Narcissism again. This thing is a real tightrope walk. Wikipedia won’t even let you be a little bit weird. I tried to look up “a little bit weird” in Wikipedia and nothing came up. Fuck you, Wikipedia. I’m just a little bit weird. I forgive myself for it, and I try to rein it in. I’m a normal redblooded American weird dude who is probably not even all that weird.

Also: who is Wikipedia to tell me I’m Narcissistic or Histrionic or anything else? Wikipedia is a bunch of people who get a kick out of writing down what they know into a viewable database and then obsessively policing that database. I hereby diagnose Wikipedia with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, which Wikipedia, I assume, is correct in distinguishing from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is the one where you count everybody’s syllables or you have to touch things five times or you’re super afraid of germs and have to shower for 2 hours a day and scrub until you bleed because you “did it wrong” the first time.

Point is, Wikipedia itself is borderline batshit crazy, so I’m not going to rely on it for information as to whether or not I’m batshit crazy. I refuse to accept that. I’m not batshit crazy. I’m just regular crazy, hold the batshit.

I guess I could go on further refuting the Slate article by asserting that Narcissism is an appropriate response to the meteoric rise in our culture of the primacy of the individual spurred by exponential increases in the illusion of choice (the old “500 channels and nothing on” saw) and increasingly targeted demographic research which seeks to flatter every individual consumer as a master of their own specific subset of preferences. But that would be Narcissistic. Actually, that would be normal, because everybody’s a baby these days. This is just my blog.

Guide to Skinny Jeans.

2009-03-09T16:28:00.004-05:00

Skinny jeans are idiotic. So are big jeans, though. Also idiotic: low-rise jeans. And: high-waisted jeans. Plus: boot-cut. And: straight-leg. And also: tapered. Also pretty bad: pleated, creased, acid-washed, pre-stressed, torn, old, new, dark blue, light blue, non-blue, and perfect. All jeans are pretty dumb, except for that one pair of your Dad’s that you wore every day of 11^th grade. Right? Those were the best, and all others before and since are imitators. I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page as far as jeans go.

But: I can understand the need for skinny jeans. I can.

I developed a very simple and still unbreakable men’s fashion theory in my early 20’s giveashits. It states: the best way to look is like a male equivalent of the kind of girl you’d most want to have sex with.

Say what you will, but it is ironclad. You figure out who your targets are, and then you look like them and it encourages them to talk and/or be comfortable around you. So if you like super put-together ladies, you’ve got to wear nice suits. If you like sarcastic tomboys who like smoking weed, wear a lot of ironic/vintage stuff. If you want an art-damaged fashion maven who knows where all the best parties are, wear clothes that were prominent 15-18 years ago (I’m thinking this means jackets with an elastic waist cinch-due everywhere in 2014) and get some kind of extremely unemployable hairdo. If you want a tough girl who’s a total softie on the inside, get a neck tattoo. If you want one of those beerdrinking dependable semioutdoorsy women who never changes, wear a Michigan State sweatshirt, peacoat, corduroys, and chucks and call it a decade (also: you should have some kind of a retrieving dog).

And then when the girl equivalent of what you look like will be more apt to talk to you, whether you have your shit together enough to talk to her or not. That’s a whole different issue. But at least you can meet her halfway with your clothing signals. It makes your job easier.

Anyway: the rule is ironclad. Your clothes say who you want to have sex with.

And I think skinny jeans are stupid because I have no interest in having sex with 19 year old skate punks or self-important Vice Magazine art opening divas in garish costume jewelry. Maybe that’s harsh. I have some interest in having sex with those types. Let’s be honest. But not so much that I want to go overboard and look like them. I don’t have the time or the money for that. Actually: that’s why I don’t really want to have sex with them all that much. I don’t have the time or the money for that. And also: they’re usually boring. To me. I find them to be that way. Most times.

Anyhow, I’m not mad at you if you’re so into this one type of lady that you don’t mind prancing around like Count Peter Pan of Faggotton in your skinny jeans. We all do stupid shit to get laid sometimes. The fact that I consider skinny jeans to be “stupid shit” shouldn’t stop you from wearing them if you’re really looking to get busy over at the International Academy of Art and Design. It’s not your fault you’re not a grown up yet.

Skinny jeans are what made me realize I’ve become a grown up in the thingwearing category. I needed a pair of pants recently, and I went into American Apparel and tried on a pair of their tiny little jeans. Looking down at myself in the stretch-denim sausage casings they call pants, I said, “Nope. This is where I get off of this crazy rollercoaster. If this is looking good, I want to look bad. Get me out of this overpriced Pedophile’s Wetdream Store. I’d rather shop at the Docker’s Outlet. At least they’re honest about their aspirations over there. I’m no longer interested in paying this much money for in-joke clothes that make fun of the idea of wearing clothes.” And then I went to The Gap Outlet and bought some cheap jeans that I’m comfortable in even though they’re probably “so 2005.” 2005 was a decent enough year. I don’t mind being frozen there if it means having enough room between my legs and my pants to be able to wear underwear in July.

But that just indicates that my taste in women is changing. Now I’m more into the type of girl who looks nice but doesn’t give too much of a fuck about me noticing her. That’s why I got rid of all my dayglo sweaters and vintage tracksuit jackets, and why all my collared shirts have buttons on the collar now, and why I wear those collared shirts because I like them and not because I have to, and why I don’t buy sneakers anymore unless they’re a color that occurs in nature. I just don’t have the mustard for skinny jeans and high tops and t-shirts with some kind of word-design on them that I know are going to look stupid in two months when the new trend is something else. Sorry. It’s the clothing equivalent of sipping the expensive stuff instead of guzzling the cheap stuff.

But if that’s not you, by all means wear your skinny jeans. Something skinny-jeans like is coming for you, though. I just want to get you ready for it. In 2013 there will be a new thing that you’ll think is just too far to go, like, I don’t know, jackets with side zippers or something. And you’ll find yourself in some dressing room thinking about whether or not you’re actually going to spend $150 on this fucking thing, and you’ll look in the mirror and decide that, no, you are not going to buy this fucking thing. Not for $150 and probably not even for free. Nor will you buy anything else like it that ever comes along. Because it will no longer be worth it to you to send the “I’m not sure what I want, but this looks good” signal to potential mates. It’s part of being a grown up.

That’s what your Dad did, and that’s why you loved his jeans so much in the 11^th grade. They were a little oasis of don’tgiveafuck in a desert of 11^th grade needingitbad.

Guide to Sexual Demands.

2009-03-04T11:59:00.003-06:00

Guys can get pretty greedy. Greedy is maybe not the word. Greed itself is a symptom of some other guy thing that guys can get a lot of. Juvenile, maybe. Petulant. Something like that. Guys can get pretty self-indulgent. I guess girls can, too, in their different way.

One of the ways guys can get most… like that… is with sex. I hate it when people reduce some kind of a point they’re making about gender differences to some cock-eyed basis in evolution, but: there’s a basis for this in evolution.

It’s caveman times. Cavedudes want sex. Cavegirls want to prevent sex from happening unless it’s from a caveguy who is likely to help with the resultant cavekids. The cavewomen sit around and say “I want a sensitive caveman who will help with the cavekids and not just bother me for sex all the time, and also he is not afraid to cry or watch ‘The Notebook’ with me.” And sometimes they get one. And sometimes a stronger, less sensitive caveman comes along and hits the sensitive caveman on the head with a rock. Sometimes that gets the cavewoman all turned on because by now she’s bored of hearing about the sensitive caveman’s neurotic struggles with his own expectations all the time. So she has sex with the stronger, meaner caveman.

After the pregnant cavegirl has a cavebaby, the strong mean caveman gets mad because the cavegirl doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore because she’s got this new cavebaby to take care of. But there's really nothing he can do about it except for rape and that's not because A. it's not as much fun as notrape sex, and B. the cavewoman might get mad and hit him in the head with a rock in his sleep. So he either turns into a sensitive cavedude and stays or he leaves and hits some other sensitive cavedude on the head with a rock. If he leaves, the cavegirl is more or less fine with that because they’re better off not having kids with a dude who’s gonna be a leaver anyway, but not having a cavedude around makes life harder because cavedudes are pretty good at killing mastodons and fixing the hot water heater. So in order to calm down their strong, mean cavedudes and make them stick around and kill mastodons and fix the hot water heater, the caveladies capitulate and invent blowjobs. And that takes us to present day.

The idea that people invented blowjobs in the 50’s is astounding to me. No way. Cavemen and cavewomen invented blowjobs as a last-ditch form of mediation to prevent cavedudes from leaving cavegirls and cavebabies right before winter hit. Dudes have been annoyingly pressing their sexual agenda ever since. I don’t know this, I’m just guessing like anybody else. But: historically, and as a result of millions of years of evolution, dudes are whiney little bitches when it comes to sex. Based on no facts. Based on me just saying it.

Of course you don’t have to be a whiney little bitch when it comes to your sexual needs. You can just repress them one hundred percent forever since childhood until your sexual needs turn into some kind of a weird diaper-wearing thing. Or you can be a rapist. Let me be clear: I don’t advocate either one of these scenarios. I actually advocate being a whiney little bitch about your sexual needs. It’s better than the alternatives.

Once you realize you've got no choice but to be a whiney little bitch about things (i.e. talking them out instead of just running around with a boner and some "really great" sex ideas), you've got to learn how to express and address your sexual needs honestly without being passive aggressive. Like you’ll say, “Hey, cavelady, I think you’re great and all, but I will tell you right now that I’m going to need at least monthly bj’s and some minimal degree of playfulness or else this is eventually not going to work. In exchange I will gladly do whatever it is you want me to do, including just leaving you alone whenever you want.” If you just say the first part, you’re being a dickhead. If you just say the second part, it’s implied that you’re some closeted diaper-wearer who just wants to be dominated, which is fine, but you should probably mention that too, like "I will gladly do whatever it is you want me to do, including just leaving you alone whenever you want, because that's what I get off on. Also: please please please ask me to hold your purse in public.”

You've got to say what you need (sexual and otherwise) and assure that you're going to make sure to meet her needs (sexual and otherwise), and you've got to really mean both of those things. And then you follow through. That's how you earn whatever it is you’re demanding. In general terms. It's a pain in the ass but it's better than sitting around with a huge boner hoping she'll read your mind about what incredibly specific thing (hints: peanut butter, spatula, ceiling fan) you want done to it, and then getting all pissy when it doesn't happen exactly right.

But that's the tricky part. Sometimes you don't know you want something until it pops in there. Like, “Tonight is the night I really really want to fuck over by the kitchen sink for some reason, and I’ve just been thinking about it a ton, and that’s what I want to do tonight. A lot. I am just feeling super kitchen sinky right now. Maybe this idea also involves an apron. I’m not sure yet. I just want to try something with the kitchen sink. Right now. Tonight.”

That’s bullshit, of course. There’s no way in hell you’re going to get kitchen sink sex the second the thought pops into your head. Unless you have talked and talked and talked about how important it is to you to be in an "extremely accepting of my immediate sexual urges without exception or any need for discussion" relationship, which I'm not sure exists. What are you, a baby? It can wait.

Just try and spring that kitchen sink scenario on somebody unannounced and see what happens. Nothing good. No, what you get is a, “What? Leave me alone, dude. I have my own sexual fantasy and it’s you listening to my description of what happened to me today at work and then inferring from that information that I’m not in the mood for impromptu fucking on or near the kitchen sick. And I’m damn sure not wearing an apron.”

So you kind of have to leave those urges on the caveroom floor sometimes. Which sucks, because it’s disappointing when you feel like you’ve done a really good job with killing mastodons and fixing the hot water heater recently, and really you just want this one thing and it doesn’t seem like too much to ask, especially considering it’s supposed to be fun. But: she's pretty much constantly denying her urges to slap your entire face off over the dumb things you say and your constant unrepentant farting, so it balances out.

That nagging disappointment is shitty, but it's the result of your failure to mention that this is the type of thing you need. Not in a “we’ve got to have sex on or near the kitchen sink once a week or else I’m out of here” kind of a way, unless you’re so super into kitchen sink sex that you really feel that way, but you have to be like, “I need spontaneity and maybe a little bit of weirdness, for example: sex on or near the kitchen sink, perhaps with an apron being involved, sex in the vestibule while we’re still wearing our coats, that type of thing, etc.”

A good time to mention these things is right after you’ve just had sex, and then that way you won’t be too forceful about how much you’d like it because your penis is incapable of bossing you around for those 20 minutes, and she’ll be receptive to the idea because women usually get really horny after sex because they are relentless and because that’s when they think the real intimacy happens (we think intimacy happens in the “I will agree to wear this stupid fucking apron and have uncomfortable sex on or near the kitchen sink” portion of the evening).

But even if you’re a super adulty communicator about it and you set up all kinds of parameters of trust and you talk the thing half to death before you even get a chance to try it, there’s no guarantee that she’ll go for it. There could be a lengthy debate about how that’s degrading and misogynistic. That debate is good. That’s a lot better than “No way, end of discussion.” Have the debate. Talk about why that idea turns you on. Cite Wikipedia or something. Most of all, assure the person that you really care about them and you wouldn’t mention this fantasy to them in the first place if you didn’t trust them completely. That’s a good one to use, the trust card. It’s good to use because it’s true.

If it’s not true and you don’t really give a shit about this person, and you just want to fuck them over a sink because you actually are a misogynist who wants to degrade random women, you should probably check yourself into some therapy and deal with that. And also you should cut this one loose and go find a woman who wants to be actually degraded instead of fake pretend fantasy degraded. They exist, and they're super weird (but also kind of great for a while until you realize that's not actually what you want).

In either case, you should definitely go back to the drawing board and think about why you like this fantasy so much. Just in general. Even if she’s totally into it. It’s good to know why you’re into this specific thing.

If she’s not feelin’ it after a long adulty discussion over it, then you have to decide if that’s a big deal or not. It probably is. I’m just saying, once you drop one of these things, it’s not going to stop. You will have to drop others. If that’s ok with you, by all means continue on the course you’re on, which is begging and pleading for a blowjob and kissing ass and crossing your fingers that she’ll get your subliminal mental signals. Don’t get me wrong, a little of that is fine, even necessary, but keep in mind there’s no guarantee that there won’t be a stronger, meaner caveman out there with a rock who will totally undo all the work you did. So it’s best to bend without breaking. Or at least, in any case, it’s best to be honest about them if you have certain blowjob/kitchensex requirements.

You might get on your own back a little bit like, “What have I done to deserve these blowjobs and kitchen fuckings? It’s not like I’m rich or famous or something.” But if you genuinely need a certain amount of blowjobs and kitchenfucks to be happy, then you deserve them because everybody deserves to be happy. That’s really the whole thing behind being a douchebag. Everybody deserves to be happy. Helping other people and being honest with other people makes you happy, and so does helping yourself and being honest with yourself. Kum Bah Yah, M’Lord. Amen.

Now could you please just put on the stupid apron and at least pretend to be into this? PLEASE? I don’t want to have to leave the cavebabies, but I will. I swear to God, I will.

Guide to Couples Doing Couple Things

2009-03-02T13:13:00.001-06:00

People get twice as stupid when you put them together and send them out into the world.

I have no information to back this up, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. That’s why huge mobs of people are so stupid. They’ve had their intelligence halved by a factor of however many people there are and now they’re dumb enough to stand in the rain in order to see a big screen version of Kanye West singing his robot songs (the real Kanye West is too far away to see). One person is usually smart enough to know that it’s better to sit somewhere that’s not raining and not watch anything that involves Kanye West.

So couples out doing couple things maybe aren’t all that stupid in the scheme of things, but they certainly are half as stupid as just a dude.

Think about how you do things when you’re alone. Let’s say you’re going for a walk. You walk and you stop to look at things that you find interesting, and you see a street you’ve never been down before and you choose to take a turn and go down it, and then maybe you get hungry and decide to go get something to eat, and then you get tired and go home. All of those decisions just happened in your brain. You didn’t have to run them by this whole other person. When you’re walking alone, it’s easy.

When you’re with somebody else it’s, “hey doyouwanna go forawalk? Hey lookatthat. Nevermind. I thoughtit wasabird butit’snot. What? Yeah, yeah that ad on thebus does lookphotoshopped. Ohyeah totally. Jennifer Anniston is way tooskinny. Hey you wanna go downthisway? I dunno, just never been downthatway. No? Okcool, yeah I’m hungrytoo. Whaddya want? Sultan’s? No? Sushi? You want sushi? Ok, I guess we can get sushi. Hey can I just go into this comicbookstore real quick? I’ll be real quick. I promise I’ll be real quick. I will take as little time as I possibly can hanging out in this comicbookstore even though I really just want to hang out in this comicbookstore for like an hour. Uh… yeah. No. No thanks. I mean, why don’t you go over to the shoestore and I’ll stay here in this comicbookstore, and then when one of us is done, we’ll go get the other one because I want to hang out in the shoestore about as much as you want to hang out in the comicbookstore, which is to say zero minutes ever.”

You get half as much done, it takes twice as much work, and you were only really happy when you finally get left alone in the comic book store. And it’s a walk. You had no goals for this walk. And yet all of your walk-based interesting thingdoing opportunities have been thwarted. All except one: to spend time with this person. So in that way, it’s a successful walk. It’s even more successful if by the end of it you’re not feeling totally bitchy about how you didn’t get to walk down that one street or how you paid like 15 bucks for sushi instead of a 4 dollar falafel at Sultan’s and you ended up hanging out at the shoestore for like 30 minutes because the comicbookstore really didn’t take you that long because you blew your potential comicbookstore budget on sushi you didn’t really want even though it was pretty good. And she’s probably too tired and dehydrated from all that shoe shopping and Miso soup to have sex with you. But still: quality time.

If it sounds like I’m resentful of this, I’m not. Sushi and a little shoe shopping is a fine way to spend a day. Especially if it’s with somebody you like being around. So it’s actually a positive. A huge positive. And also: you're so precious that you have to get what you want all the time? Really? You can just go for a self-walk later when you feel like walking down a new street to get to Sultan's and then read some comic books without a girlfriend in sight (there's a defacto "no girlfriends allowed" policy at the comicbookstore). A couplewalk is great too for different reasons. There was probably some good joking and goofaroonie time in there, some nice affection, and even if she is exhausted from the shoe shopping, at the end of your walk you still have a better chance of having sex than you would have if you were just out walking alone. That’s a nice day.

But: stupid. Right? I mean look at the amount of discussion you have to partake in just to walk around casually and eat sushi and look at shoes in some place that’s playing downtempo house. Look at the number of opinions you’re sharing, and notice how little you care about those opinions. Watch in horror as the simple problem of “I’m hungry” turns into what seems to you to be a logistical nightmare. Observe yourself groping for discussion topics over sushi instead of just reading a newspaper. See how careful you are to take her feelings into account when working your way around such existential quandaries as “should we get ice cream,” when she probably doesn’t give a shit either (except she sometimes does seem to get really emotional about ice cream—so you can’t be too careful, maybe it really is the powderkeg you think it is). Yes, it’s true: you’re behaving like a stupid person. And so is she, probably. Because: there are two of you.

Take this and multiply whenever there’s a couple-y gathering. Double dates are fine, but once you add that third couple in, it turns into a freeforall. I think there’s some mathematical rule that says three or more of any one gender in one place makes it hard for members of the other gender to enjoy themselves. That’s why you sit around for an awkward half hour as the girlfriends talk to each other with increasing fervor, and the dudes gradually get fewer words in edgewise due to not caring about what’s being discussed enough to want to, until some dude mentions he’s got a sports thing to show you and you and the other dudes, and you get out of there and talk about the sports thing or else just stand around the grill drinking beers and goofing around while the ladies excitedly talk about Michelle Obama, and you’re like “how’d I end up in 1958?”

That’s what couple-y gatherings always feel like to me. It’s like some agreed upon level of banality which gradually relaxes away enough to allow for gender stereotypes to affirm themselves, and the whole pattern resets itself and the banality becomes gender-based until you run out of dude things to talk about, and then you wait out the rest of it by moving from the cooler to the buffet to the bathroom to the couch to wherever your girlfriend is, and along the way you get to drink beer and eat somebody’s homemade cole slaw that your girlfriend wants the recipe to. And then in the card ride home you have to agree to the rundown of who’s doing what and who’s got a lot of nerve, and you agree that you should probably try something like that yoga class that Wendy and Steve are doing (fuck off, Steve, I can’t believe you caved on that yoga thing, now I’ve got to do it). Call me Johnny Nofun, but I’d rather stay home and watch History channel. Except it’s good to get out of the house every once in a while, if only to reaffirm why you never feel like leaving it in the first place.

Oh: also there’s babies. It’s always spooky when your girlfriend is excited about babies.

Again, I’m sounding more harsh than I want to about this. Couple-y gatherings (as opposed to just a regular “party”—which is always more fun because nobody’s trying to be too adult about things and it’s ok to puke) are good because they show you what being in a relationship essentially means as far as your interactions with the world at large. You’re essentially saying to the rest of the world, “I’m good. I’ve got this person to hang out with. So, you know, that’s what I’m up to these days.” Right? And good for you, by the way. You’ve found the person you like hanging out with so much you don’t mind being stupid about where to eat or standing around a grill awkwardly discussing sports with some dudes you don’t know all that well. I think it’s a good thing. Congratulations.

If you're single and things get couple-y, then you should shove as much food and booze into your mouth as you possibly can without seeming like you're being a dickhead about it, and get out of there. You've got other, better things to do with your time than share banalities while holding a baby, like reading comicbooks alone and partying until you puke. Hell, even if you've got a girlfriend you can still take yourself out for a self-date and do those things if you want. They're always available. Make sure you do that stuff enough that you're actually relieved when it's time to be adult-y "just two microbrews and a conversation about the stimulus package" about social gatherings. They're designed to be painless. The avoidance of pain is the main motivating factor of a healthy(?) relationship. I don't know this for a fact, but I feel its truth whenever I find myself complimenting a stranger on their endive hors d'oeuvres.

Guide to Bullshit Theories About How To Do Things That Can Get You Killed (pt. 1).

2009-02-17T15:50:00.003-06:00

Part 1: Guide to Riding a Bike in The City.

Anybody with a passing familiarity with me and my life knows I’m a huge proponent of being stubborn, pigheaded, and wrong as often as possible. I love it. It makes my life so easy.

Do you want your life to be easy? All you have to do is constantly interrupt everybody who speaks to you and relate either a boring irrelevant anecdote that takes too long or a totally uninformed half-cocked opinion about something. Keep this up for long enough and eventually people will leave you alone. Easy.

I was reading about Ronald Reagan today, and that’s pretty much what he did, and now everybody’s in agreement that he was some kind of genius. I don’t know a bunch about the guy, but based on my aforementioned proclivity for ignorant defiance of good sense, I will tell you all about my opinions of him anyway. I think he was not a genius. But I do think he was America’s greatest Presidential douchebag. He really did very little that he didn’t feel like doing. That whole grandfatherly “I can’t hear your probative questions about urban decay and the widening class gap because I’m an old man and I’m standing near a helicopter” act he ran with the press? That was great douchebag stuff. That’s as great of a trick as pretending you left your wallet in the car to either A. ensure that you’ll get a couple of free drinks out of your boss, or B. escape from having a few drinks with your boss, depending on what you’d prefer. It’s the same scam, but when you’re President you get to use a real helicopter instead of a pretend wallet.

This is not, coming from me, damning praise. It’s just regular praise. He gets credit both for doing the things he did (great warrior who put America’s defense first, assuring that the American economy is based on the principles of free market) AND doing the opposite of the things he did (reducing the size of government--even though he increased defense spending a bajillion times, created a huge budget deficit, bailed out Chrysler, was forced to spend billions to correct the problems spurred on by the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry that he deregulated). What a fantastic douchebag. That dude was Teflon.

You see?

I just told you about Ronald Reagan for two whole paragraphs, and really the only basis I had for my opinions were a couple of articles in Slate.com and Vanity Fair that I read today, plus a few other pieces of flotsam I have floating around in my brain, probably from my childhood, which heavily involved my mother screaming about Republicans.

You’re probably not even reading anymore, which is great for me because I need internet computer friends even less than I need regular friends (which is to say some, sometimes). You see how easy my life is? People tend to leave me alone because I am annoying and I say things about Reagan that are probably wrong. And what’s worse, I don’t even care that I’m wrong. I even kind of like it. How do you deal with a person like that?

And my opinions about Reagan are almost totally off the cuff. Imagine how idiotic I could sound if I really thought about what I was saying. I could invent crackpot theories about a couple of specific real-life situations that sound convincing while being totally wrong and even dangerous. In fact, I already have. I bet you can’t wait to hear about them, either. I’ll buy you a drink. Nevermind your wallet. Your wallet can wait.

Guide to Riding a Bike in The City.

If, like me, you live in a city and are a broke loser who insists on keeping his options for future failure open by never fully committing to anything, jobwise or anythingelsewise, you’ve probably realized by now that a bicycle is the best way to get around. It’s pretty much free except for occasional incredibly inconvenient but cheap maintenance, you never have to look for parking, and you don’t have to waste extra money on a gym membership if it’s your only means of conveyance. Often it’s the fastest way to get somewhere, too, depending on how good you are at planning your day and/or how sweaty you’d prefer to be when you arrive.

Oh, I should mention that this Guide does not apply to Los Angeles. But if you live in Los Angeles, you’re probably not reading this because you can’t read.

(Don’t tell anybody in Los Angeles I that I said they can’t read. On the off chance they ask about it, just tell them I’m still talking about Ronald Reagan and that my ideas so far are not “pitchable” or “zazzy” enough. This will work because everybody in Los Angeles is involved in the entertainment industry. Close one, everybody.)

((I’m kidding. Of course Los Angeles residents can read. That was just another of my wrongheaded theories come to life. Another quick one: Leprosy is no big deal.))

Back to bike riding:

People worry about how safe it is to ride your bike around in a city. They’re right to. It is unsafe. No amount of safety gear or precautionary maneuvering can possibly save you from meeting your imminent demise. If you ride a bike in the city, you will be crushed by a bread truck. Immediately. Within minutes. I recommend not doing it ever.

This is not true, but being a city bike rider I prefer to weed out any potential weenies out there who don’t do anything but get in my way. As far as riding your bike goes, how safe you are is in direct proportion to how much you’re probably in my way. Evidence of such safety-seeking and hence inconvenient behavior include: excessive reflective tape, visible coloring on clothing and accessories, sufficient lighting, upright bicycles that allow for correct posture, rearview mirrors on handlebars or helmets, helmets, stopping for any reason (even a good one), slowing down while negotiating hairpin turns, and not charging blindly at full speed into vanishing narrow spaces between merging dump trucks. These are all a huge pain in my ass.

Of course I have a theory to justify the monumental amount of disappointment I feel whenever these safe behaviors are observed. It is a stupid theory and it could very well get me killed one day. I suggest you follow it.

Here goes:

1. Your number one bike-riding-in-the-city danger is invisibility. You can correct this by wearing a gigantic fluorescent green parka and stopping at every stop sign and jingling a little bike bell like some jolly sidekick from a creepy 70’s children’s show, which is dangerous because it will make motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians want to hit you. Or you can embrace your invisibility and just behave accordingly.

Just ride like nobody can see you. When you roll through a stop sign, swerve behind the car to your right that has the right of way. And if you're in a position where you need somebody to see you, do something highly visible and aggressive, like swerve in front of them in an obvious way that makes them freak out a little bit. It’s actually more safe than cautiously puttering your way down the bike lane in a hazmat suit, because people will be more likely to get into accidents while they’re distantly distracted by something imperceptibly annoying in their peripheral vision (such as you in a hazmat suit) than they will be when they’re stopping short and yelling, “WHOA DUDE LOOK AT THIS FAST-RIDING BADASS WHO CAME FROM SEEMINGLY OUT OF NOWHERE AND CUT ME OFF SO HE COULD SWERVE AROUND THIS CONSTRUCTION CREW AND TURN RIGHT WHILE DIPPING UNDER THE BACKHOE AT 30 MPH!”

The second option seems more dangerous, but at least it involves a motorist who's hitting the brakes. I guess the point here is: it's better to deal with a guy who sees you than a guy who doesn’t, regardless of where they’re coming from or where they’re going. That means don’t worry about swerving into oncoming traffic if that oncoming traffic sees you and is worried about the possibility of you swerving into it. When in doubt, make them see you.

2. Lodged in the subtext here is a secret to bike riding invisibility: the faster you’re going, the less visible you’ll be until you're right in front of somebody's face. This is fine, since you're assuming that nobody can see you anyway. So if you want to get where you’re going in a timely manner, you might as well go fast and deal with being be a little more invisible. You can only go the supersafe route if you’re planning on riding like a la-di-dah millionaire with nowhere pressing to be or a weekend bikeriding tourist who just thinks it’s nice outside. And that’s not going to work if you’re supposed to be at dude’s house in like ten minutes or else you won’t get that free weed he promised, and then after that you’ve got to go pick up a teapot for your girlfriends’ parents, and you don’t want to be late or else you’ll have to lie to your girlfriend about the teapot being on backorder (she will see through this obvious lie) instead of just having the free weed and the teapot being on time.

3. Pretend everybody is a jerk that wants to do the wrong thing all the time. It’s a little bit tricky to picture, but when you’re out riding, pretend that every car on the road can’t wait to come senselessly careening towards you to end your life like there’s a billion dollar prize on your head. If this situation sounds daunting to you rather than a fun hypothetical that you’d enjoy pretending that you’re escaping from every time you go to the grocery store, then maybe city bike riding isn’t for you.

You should be as aware as humanly possible of what could happen. After a while you’ll start to trust things a little more, because cars have a kind of hidden body language where you know they’re going to turn even if there’s no turn signal or brake lights, and you’ll be like, “That dude wants to spill my face skin all over his hood in about two seconds,” and you’ll avoid that. For a while you’re going to be wrong a lot about whether or not a dude wants to spill your face skin, but it’s a good way to think.

4. There are two kinds of rules: the fake ones from the book about “No Turn On Red” and “don’t cut through that gas station” and “yield to pedestrians in crosswalk,” and there’s the real ones from “the street” and from common sense inside of yourself, like “Always Turn On Red, Right Or Left Or Even Straight If Nobody’s Coming,” and “cut through that gas station, onto the sidewalk for ten feet, and around the back of the Meineke into the alley if it gets you there faster, who gives a fuck?” and “you can slap a pedestrian in the face as you ride by if he’s being a drunk idiot.”

People who complain about how nobody pays attention to the book rules are pansies who don’t know how to have fun. And ten bucks says they’re driving over the speed limit, so they’re also hypocrites. You’re on a bike. It’s your job to look out for yourself. The cops aren’t out there protecting you, and if you’re the one out of line, they probably aren’t even going to pull you over. If they do it’s fine because you can still ride a bike even without a license. Don’t tell them that, though. Be respectful. Also don’t mention how drunk you are.

5. It’s ok to be a little drunk and/or high and/or listen to your iPod. Not when you’re downtown in the middle of rush hour, but in general, it’s ok because you’re not going to kill anybody but yourself. Stick to side streets. And go for a train or bus/bike combo or couch crash scenario if you’re too far gone. For me, too far gone means either “already puked” or “it’s too far and I just don’t feel like it.” I’m getting less heroic as I get older, and it’s not a bad thing. The more you ride your bike, the more you can save up for emergency cab rides.

Could following these rules end your life? Yes. Yes it could. But: so could crossing the street. You never know. And alsobut: these are just theories and guidelines I’ve come up with for myself. They are probably dangerous and they are probably wrong, and I'm fine with that, and I’m just getting warmed up. "Sometimes it's a good idea to pedal really fast into oncoming traffic" is not even the most dangerous general-life theory I have. I’ll go over that one in Part 2, but for now let’s get some more quick idiot theories out of the way:

- It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, just put your regular sized toothpaste in your pocket and walk through airport security anyway. Even if they stop you for it, they probably won’t strip search you, and once they check it to see that it’s toothpaste, you’ll probably get to keep it. That “3.2oz or less” rule is to keep them from “having to check each individual substance.” Really it’s a conspiracy by the toiletries industry. Gillette is in bed with the TSA, and they bought that provision into the Patriot Act to force everybody to buy tiny cans of shaving cream. It’s not a security risk. Nobody’s going to make a shaving cream bomb in the bathroom during a flight, and if they do, it’s going to be another “Let’s Roll” situation (except without the secret F-14s gunning you down) before they even make it to the cockpit. Don’t fall for it. Put the toothpaste in your pocket. You won’t get caught. And if you do, who cares if you’re holding up the line? You don’t. You’re at the front of it already.

- If you don’t have much money for food and you’re in a hurry, go to Subway and get a sandwich with as many condiments on it as possible. It’s like extra nutrients for free.

- Do not worry about that parking ticket you got on an out-of-state rental car two weeks before leaving the country for a six month span. It will not bite you in the ass.

…Part 2 soon.

Guide to Having Sex on Everybody’s Coats.

2009-02-16T16:51:00.000-06:00

College is a very stupid time for a human being to be alive. A very stupid time. This is why people always bore you with “college” stories. This is why I always bore you with college stories. College kids are stupid. You make stupid choices and everything seems like it’s important at the time when it’s happening, so it seems like it’s a good story when it’s really not a good story.

Like, “One time me and my buddies got really bored and we drove out into a hayfield with a pony keg and started this huge bonfire, but this guy got mad and shot at us with a shotgun, and we had to sleep in the woods because our one buddy freaked out and left us out there, but really it wasn’t even a farmer, it was just this one dude’s buddy and the two of them just stole our beer for a party they were having.”

Maybe that’s a good story, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. Nobody really comes out ahead in it. I do know that. You’re either bragging about being duped, or you’re bragging about how you duped somebody, and either way you’re bragging about how important beer was to you and how funny it is to steal the car of and/or have your car stolen by somebody you kind of know. It’s really a lose lose lose lose scenario. Full of stupidity.

I have college stories of my own, and they suck just as much as that one, and they’re full of just as much of the central controlling theme in all college stories as that one in the hayfield I just made up (it probably really happened like 470 times), namely: we were young and stupid and we did something stupid that we wouldn’t do now, but wasn’t it great that we were that young and that stupid at one point in our lives?

Well, yes and no. Yes it’s great to be young and stupid. No, it’s not great that you’re not that stupid anymore. You can and should be just as stupid now as you were in college. I am. I do stupid things all the time. Yesterday I played Dynasty Warriors 6 for ten straight hours. It was very stupid. By the time I was done, my eyeballs felt like they’d been licked by a dehydrated house cat, and I was seeing little life meters above strangers’ heads. But that’s not adequate to report to anybody as if it’s a story. It’s just a stupid thing I did.

It’s not even the stupidest thing I’ve done in the last 48 hours, either. That would have to be not doing laundry. I have continued to not do laundry for a very long time now, and it’s stupid. I’m down to the comparative-smelling phase of getting myself dressed in the morning. Why didn’t I do laundry? Because I had ten consecutive hours of Dynasty Warriors 6 to play. That’s why.

One time in college I had sex in the coat room of a party on top of everybody’s coats.

I had no idea it was going to be sex until it was sex, though. So it’s not like I walked into the coat room and said, “Hey baby, let’s do it on these coats.” But after a little while of making out that’s exactly what ended up happening on those coats. When you’re in college, that’s how sex works sometimes. If you’re good at making out, sometimes it just turns into sex kind of by accident. Kissing and having sex are two points on the same continuum, and nobody’s discovered the rules of where one should turn into another because everybody’s only had sex like 4 times ever. So it’s possible and even vaguely likely that you could accidentally have sex on everybody’s coats.

At one point we had to stop and stay perfectly still as somebody searched around for their coat in the dark. I’m not sure if that person noticed that there were two people having sex on their coat. Then when that one person left, we continued to have sex on the coats.

I realize that this is a gross thing to do to somebody’s coat. I would not particularly want strange people I don’t know to have sex on my coat. Probably. I would have to see the people with my own eyes first. I definitely wouldn’t want to discover any kind of sex-related stain on my coat without knowing where it came from. It’s hard to say how I’d react to it, though. I have no moral high ground here. I’ve had sex on peoples’ coats. Once you do that, the cat is kind of out of the bag as far as hypothetical reactions to a person having sex on your coat. Mostly I think it’s permissible as “a stupid thing that happened in college,” whether you’re talking about having sex on coats or having coats under sex.

And technically it was the coats that were intruding. They were on her bed.

I know one thing for sure about my hypothetical reaction to a couple of people having sex on my coat: it would involve astonishment. That’s because since having sex on the coatroom bed that one time in college I have never ever put my coat on a bed at a party. You just never know what’s going to happen. I prefer to put my coat somewhere I can be reasonably sure it won’t be sexed-upon. Like hanging in a closet or under the bed or up on top of the photo booth or wedged behind the refrigerator. The more obscure and unsex-like place I can put my coat when I’m at a party, the happier I am.

There are other practical reasons for obscure party coat placement besides avoiding other people’s sexual discharges. For one, if you spend 20 second wedging your coat behind the fridge, chances are good that no matter what happens at the party, you’ll remember where you put your coat. You won’t have to search for it. Behind the fridge is not especially valuable coat real estate. It won’t shift or get lost in a sea of other coats. Nobody’s going to walk off with it by accident because it looks like their coat. It’s just going to be there behind the fridge where you lodged it when you came in.

I also believe that this strategy is a good theft deterrent. I just feel in my bones that my coat won’t get stolen or broken into if it’s behind the fridge. You’d have to really be casing me to even know it’s back there. And if you wanted to rifle through it, you’d really have to draw a lot of attention to yourself. So later if I get my coat out from behind the fridge and my iPod’s missing, I can say, “Did anybody see a guy pulling this coat out from behind the fridge and rifling through it and stealing my iPod and then shoving it back behind the fridge in the exact position I left it in?” And then I’d probably find out about that dude and go do… something.

Another great thing about shoving your coat behind a fridge is it draws attention to you when you’re just entering the party. It’s a great icebreaker. If somebody asks why you are shoving your coat behind the fridge, you can say something funny, like, “safety first,” or “I don’t want anybody to have sex on it.” And then you’re the party weirdo, which is fine because having a party weirdo around at least gives everybody something to talk about, like asking, “Who’s the guy drinking whiskey out of an old jelly jar?” And responding with, “I don’t know; I saw him shove his coat behind the fridge earlier. He told me not to have sex on it.” That guy is always good for a party, and the party is always good to that guy. Parties are about building up mystery points until you get people daring other people to talk to you. It’s way easier to shove your coat behind a fridge than it is to walk up to a stranger and just say hello out of the blue.

The weirdguy effect is also cumulative, like a week later when people ask you what that stain or weird burn mark is on your coat, you can answer, “Oh, I shoved it behind the fridge at a party last week.” Potential girlfriends love this, because you’re like a project they can work on. They can imagine showing you all about how to put your coat on a hanger in a closet.

And that’s great because you can imagine telling them, “But what if this happens?”

And then you put your coat on the ground and start making out on top of it.

Who knows what’s going to happen then. Maybe sex. You can’t plan for these things.

Guide to Knowing You’re Not Gay.

2009-02-13T16:26:00.002-06:00

There’s only one way to know for sure that you’re not gay, and that’s to do something kind of gay and then hate it. Have I done something kind of gay? Yes. I have. And I’m not gay. I’m certain that I’m not gay.

My upbringing was a little weird in terms of gay things. I didn’t have two moms or two dads or anything. I had one of each. And they’re still together. I guess that qualifies as weird these days. Even weirder, I was brought up to not think it’s at all a bad or strange thing to be gay. To the contrary, I was in an environment at the height of the political correctness movement that actively encouraged gayness through the condescension of “universal tolerance and acceptance.”

For a while there it was somewhat chic to accept the hell out of anybody. Actually, it still is in some circles. This is mostly in “liberal America,” where Teva-footed middle-aged white academic types add a competitive air to their sense of liberated openmindedness by embracing ever more obscure pet causes. Save the pigmy hippo. End animal husbandry. Fight against third world tooth decay. These people traipse around passionately discussing the dangers of 19th century imperial colonialism while at the same time enrolling in African dance lessons and leading a class on “Eastern sexual spirituality” at the local Baha’i temple. It is a world largely free of self-awareness and irony. And of course I’m generalizing.

But to me it seemed, during my pre-and-during adolescence, that it was “cool” to a certain population to befriend and more importantly advertise one’s friendship (and hence kinship and total I-can-totally-identify-with-this-entire-subdivision-of-human-population level understanding) with the most marginalized, oppressed, and underrepresented minority groups possible. And like a Tony Hawk skateboarding video game, you got bonus points for combinations. If you were able to convince your other white liberal American buddies that you were actually friends with a transgendered albino Eskimo with sickle cell anemia, you won. You just won the whole thing. That was the general atmosphere.

For me at least. I’m talking about the early to mid 90’s, here. It was a very, very idiotically naïve time for American liberalism. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me. I was in middle school at the time. In middle school one’s greatest sociological impulse is to stick out as little as possible so as to not expose oneself to ridicule. So it’s kind of a healthy but nonetheless cringeworthy anathema to go around bragging about how different you and your friends are. It helped me at the same time as it made me want to run for dear life to the safety of a regionally-approved Starter jacket and a pair of baggy “Used Jeans.” But I wasn’t rich or mean enough to ever be a cool kid. So I just had to sit around in the margins quietly noticing ironic inconsistencies in my general environment’s philosophies. But maybe I was also helped by the “we love everybody, even especially the weirdest people, Kum Ba Yah,” mantra to not feel so bad that I had neither the money nor the requisite meanness to ever be a “cool kid.”

Helpfulness aside, you can’t treat the whole world like it’s got the battered, queasy ego of a 13 year old kid. The world is more complicated than that, and unlike with a 13 year old kid, you don’t actually know any better than he does what’s best for him. I’m not sure if “American liberalism” is past this yet, or whatever, and I don’t really care. I pretty much quit that scene around the time I finally got a driver’s license. I’m an Epicurean now, which is shorthand for "don't involve me, I'm trying to get laid."

Anyway, I was raised to not bat an eye at gay stuff. Not a single eye bat. In fact, I marched in a huge gay rights rally in Washington DC with my Mom, my Dad, and my two little brothers. I was 15 at the time. As far as I know, none of us are gay. It was just something we did because it was 1995 and I have a gay uncle and it seemed important enough for some reason that we all did it. Didn’t bat an eye. I even got a good amount of 15-year-old wood at the sight of several exposed butch lesbian boobs. Butch lesbians often exposed their boobs at gay right rallies in 1995. I don’t know why. Probably because it seemed like a good enough excuse. I’m sure other stuff happened there too, but that’s mainly what I remember from my time as a 15 year old gay right activist in 1995. The boobs. And the inappropriateness of enjoying the boobs so much.

I was more ashamed of my 15-year-old exposed butch lesbian boob-based boners than those lesbians were of the fact that their exposed breasts were basically encouraging them. Had I confronted one of them with my dilemma, those kindly lesbians probably would have said, “that’s ok, little guy, as long as you don’t ever rape anybody, it’s ok to want to ogle my exposed butch lesbo boobs. That’s kind of what they’re for at this point, it’s a deliberate piece of spectacle that you ogle until it seems like not a big deal and then you’re supposed to adjust to a more equal footing where exposed boobs don’t matter so much. Get it?” Because they were probably liberals, too. All I knew at the time is I’d have a lot to answer for at a gigantic gay rights rally if I got busted for staring at boobs. I kept firm eye contact with the ground, and inwardly chanted, “Boner go away, boner go away!” Even while my outer voice was chanting, “Out of the closet and into the streets!” Or something like that.

This was not even the extent of my political background. Years earlier at the age of 11 I attended an abortion right rally with my mother, and in a huge throng of women milling around the national mall, I proudly chanted, “U.S. out of my uterus!”

It was a confusing way to grow up at times.

But the important thing to get out of it for the purposes of “knowing I’m not gay,” was the idea that being gay was not such a daunting thing. I have a higher threshold for gay things than most straight people, and it’s based on an unshakable belief that gay stuff actually increases one’s chances of seeing a boob. Experience has borne this out a thousand times.

It seems counterintuitive at first, but it’s really not. For instance, the next time this theory came about was in college.

I went to a small liberal arts school in a major metropolitan area with a BFA program in musical theater. Estimates of the gay population of my college while I attended there have ranged as high as 65%. And I saw a lot of boobs in college. Real life boobs. I found that if one allows other people to think you might be gay, then you end up being invited to a lot of crazy gay parties. And you get handed a lot of free drinks and free drugs. And gay dudes who have crushes on you will keep you around by convincing their fag hag friends to show you their boobs. This is something I learned at the tender age of 17. Man, what a great lesson.

You know what else is great when you’re 17? Playing spin the bottle in a room full of people who seem by accounts likely to have some kind of sex later. Sometimes to jumpstart this scenario, you have to makeout with a dude, just to show a degree of comfortable equanimity, even if it’s totally fake. But if you’ve got memories of shouting “U.S. out of my uterus” and imaginary lesbians cooing nurturing words of confidence in your ear, you don’t mind that too much. It’s just like acting. Nevermind that you don’t actually like it. There are boobs in play.

Of course you soon learn that while gay stuff is a great tool for seeing boobs, it doesn’t do a ton for your prospects of meaningful tactile interaction with those boobs. Once the women attached to those boobs learn the extent of your interest in their boobs, they become inversely interested in allowing you further boob access. It’s a pretty hard switch. And it’s understandable. The whole “wait, you’re just here for my boobs?” thing is a fairly severe breach of trust, after all. You were kind of looking at boobs under false pretenses, there.

Still, I will always have fond memories of my pretending-I-might-be-gay-in-order-to-see-boobs period. I’m still fully capable of flirting with a dude. I interviewed for a job at a high end custom-design carpet and interior design dealer recently, and I all but dropped my pencil and bent over at the waist to pick it up. I wanted that job. It was all gay dudes in that office. Occasionally I’ll backslide into bouts of “gay chicken,” where as a gag I’ll display my comfort level with all things gay in order to freak people out.

Does this make me gay? No. It does not. I know that for a fact. Why? Because of the one time something crossed a line. (By the way, this is overdramatic. Nothing serious happened.)

Later in my college career, after having been through the whole “pretend you’re gay or at least hint that you may be gay, and then reap the boob-looking rewards” to “wait, if you ever want to have sex with a girl without also having sex with a dude at the same time, you should try another more honesty-based tactic” transition, I started hanging with a somewhat older crowd. I lived off campus, and I was tired of the typical stupid underclassmen stuff. I wanted more of a typical stupid recent college graduates who are 23 or 24 type of thing.

So there was this one dude who I thought was a cool guy. Then later we were at a party. And there was dancing. And he started dancing with me. And I thought “oh, this cool guy that I think is funny is dancing with me, good one, cool guy.” Do I started dancing with him. Just your typical Beyonce-style joke dancing. Or so I thought. And then…

Boner on my leg.

Now I don’t know if everybody reading this has experienced it, but there is pretty much no sensation in the world more uncomfortable than an unwanted, unasked-for boner rubbing against you. I honestly had no clue that this dude was even into dudes. Something happens between college and real life for gays, and it’s their own transition between “holy shit I’m allowed to be gay and my parents aren’t around, I’m going to be the gayest dude ever!” and “I’m just a dude who happens to be gay, no need to go overboard with it. I get it: I’m gay.” So my gaydar wasn’t even budging with this guy. I was used to aggressive underclassmen gays who’d signal their sexual preferences by grabbing your crotch and propositioning you. This dude was a little more subtle.

Anyhow, that’s how I found out this one guy was gay. His boner on the back of my thigh.

That’s also how I found out for sure that I’m not gay. Because almost 8 years later, I can still feel a hot pain in the exact spot on my thigh where that unwanted boner was rubbed. It’s like shrapnel.

I’m not sure what happened next on that dance floor. I think I awkwardly finished dancing to the song, further away from the guy and oddly limping from palpable bonersting like my right hamstring had been cut in half by an arrow, then I went and sat down and apologized to the dude for not being gay. It really wasn’t all his fault. I’m a charming young man with a near-painfully accepting background. I’ve chanted political slogans relating to my uterus. In public. And I genuinely believe the U.S. has no business in my uterus. I’m kind of gay. I get it. Just please don’t rub your boners on my thigh, world. Because I’m not actually gay. I promise in return not to lead you on anymore. Even if you all of your friends have perfect amazing college girl boobs.

I’m kind of over boobs now too, though. Trust me. I’m over boobs. (Here’s where I furtively glance at your boobs).

Boner go away.

Boner go away!

Guide to Quoting Movies Socially

2009-02-12T12:57:00.000-06:00

1. The Bad Habit.

It’s a bad habit. You could better spend your time talking in adult tones about real life things, or if you’re with your buds, you could do some original jamming-on-real-life-thing riffs that nobody wrote, directed, or produced.

Quoting movies is a bad idea like ironic t-shirts are a bad idea. Sure, they give everybody an idea of your sense of humor, and maybe you get some smiles and laughs out of it, but at the end of day you’re no closer to anybody than when you started. They both have a distancing effect. And also there’s a precious oneupsmanship about the whole thing that’s kind of yucky, like “hey, look what obscure trivial thing I remember about Punky Brewster, aren’t I great?” People who quote movies and wear ironic t-shirts are imminently punchable.

But that said, once you’ve reached a point with people that you don’t care about that stuff, you’re fine. Just know that it’s a bad habit before moving on, like smoking.

2. Girls with girls and guys with guys.

Quoting movies socially is one of the great gender barriers that still exists. If you’ve ever ripped off a quick reference to The Jerk and whatever girl you’re with gives you the “what’s wrong with you?” face while you’re there mugging with the post-quote “hey, The Jerk, right?” face, then you know the burn of busting out movie quotes across gender lines.

I don’t know if girls quote girl movies together in their all-girl friend groups, but I’m willing to bet that they do. That’s probably what they do when they go to the bathroom together; they rifle through every single line of dialogue from The Legend of Billie Jean and then come back to the table glowing like they just shared a hilarious secret in order to fuck with your stupid boy head. Actually, now that I think about it, this could be the most positive thing to come from Juno. It’s the girl quote movie.

But girls are smart about social things so they don’t just say “fair’s fair!” and then get that look on their face like, “Come on! The Legend of Billie Jean!” like how boys do. They’ll maybe let it slip if there are more than three other girls there and they’ve been hanging out together before you got there, but if they do that it’s just to get a laugh out of the other girls who are there, which for sure means that they don’t want to have sex with you and they’d rather you leave them alone so they can have girl’s night out and continue to quote Juno in peace. You have to know when you’re being punked.

Girls only do cross-gender movie quotes if they want your penis to wither, or maybe sometimes if they’re that “just one of the guys” type of girl who makes you kind of sad because if she had a little more self-respect she’d be hanging out with other girls instead of you and your loser friends eating Doritos and quoting Caddyshack on Friday night.

So take your cue from girls, who are smarter than dudes about this type of thing. Quoting movies across gender lines means nobody is getting laid. Which is fine, but if you want to leave that possibility open for yourself, then don’t quote movies around the opposite sex.

I don not know how gay people do this. I don’t think they have a problem with anything other than the government.

3. Know when to say when.

Even if you just watched a movie together and you and your friends loved it to death and all you want to do is go play darts together and quote Borat all night long, then fight the urge. First of all: getting laid is totally out the window because you’re now a circle of dudes playing darts and yelling “den one day he break out of his cage, and he GET dis” whenever there’s a score change. Actually, that sounds like fun and that’s fine. Don’t fight that urge.

But still, there will come a time when overquoting becomes unfun and turns both the night and the movie you loved into kind of a drag. Like when that one dude who sort of tagged along keeps saying “we support your war of terror” while the dart game has dragged into a bullseye-off and people are looking at their cell phones and thinking about where they have to be tomorrow before they decide whether or not to get another beer, and people are seriously thinking about leaving even though it’s not even midnight. And you can’t really blame them for it.

I’m just sayin’. You don’t want to be an overquoter. Err on the side of conservatism.

4. Who cares?

And if you just saw a movie and you can’t get it out of your head and the quotes just keep falling out of your mouth and you can’t stop it, then don’t worry. Just go into the “who cares” zone and have a good time. The funny thing about fun is that there’s a lot of different kinds of it, and sometimes whatever you’re doing is fun to you even though (and sometimes because) it’s not funny to other people. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re always objectively a drag to be around, although with movie quotes, it’s definitely a bad habit.

So if that’s just what you’re up to that night, go on quoting Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and either bore the crap out of everybody or pal around with a bunch of other idiots who also want to do that.

Or both.

I don’t know.

Guide to Gleefully Squandering Your Potential.

2009-02-11T13:18:00.002-06:00

If you’re anything like me, you’ve only ever had people blow a bunch of smoke up your ass about your potential. As far as life-defining struggles go, it’s a good one to have. There are plenty of kids out there who only ever had Mr. Rogers tell them they were special. And that’s just some slow-talking guy on TV who gets boring and weird once you turn like five years old. By then you’re just hoping that Purple Panda shows up in the Land of Make Believe or there’s an “opera” episode or picture picture shows something that’s actually awesome like a lollipop factory instead of something boring that you don’t care about like a soap factory, and everything else is making you super impatient, like how long it’s taking this guy to feed his fish. My point is: Mr. Rogers is a good man, but he’s not enough to convince you that you’re special. It takes a village to do that.

Mr. Rogers does have a point. Yes, you’re actually special from a scientific standpoint. Your arms and legs are different sizes and shapes than any other human being alive. And if you’re a kid in danger of growing up into a world where not thinking you have any potential at all will lead you to be dead or in jail before your 21st birthday, it’s good to hear from somebody somewhere that you’re special and you can do things in this world with your life that nobody else but you can do. I’ll happily tell you that. But you probably don’t have access to a blog and I don’t know where you live. And if it’s in the slums of Rio, I probably can’t make it there. But you’re special. Like for real. You can do anything you set your mind to, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Keep shining. (Or maybe just try not to rape anybody).

Everybody else who’s not an orphan running around in the street child gang in the slums of Rio: you are not special. At all. That’s bullshit. You’re just a dude doing regular dude things. Stop following your dreams. Your dreams are bullshit. Stop pretending that you can claim some kind of ownership over the things you enjoy. You’re not a good graphic designer. Your graphic designs suck. That book you’re working on is a waste of time that nobody will ever want to read. Your YouTube movies are not funny. They’re choppily edited and sophomoric. That art installation is poorly conceived. It does not make me stop to think about anything. It’s apparent that you just got baked and slapped a bunch of shit together and called it art. Your opinions about everything you have an opinion about are boring and uninformed. And I cannot stress this enough: nobody in the world actually wants to see your improv group. Nobody. In the world. Even if you’re great. Even if you’re fantastic at anything you’re doing, all of this is true. And I say all of this to you as a guy who’s following his own stupid dreams and having his own stupid opinions about those dreams. This is all coming from an unspecial person who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about and is lost and confused and clearly more than a little neurotic.

Does that feel better? It feels better to me.

I had a couple of parents who always went all the way up my butt whenever I brought home a B or, God forbid, a C from school. From a very early age I was told how special I was, how talented, and how smart, and I had very high expectations constantly impressed upon me. I was supposed to get straight A's because I could fairly easily have gotten sraight A's. B's and C's were unaccaptable.

This logic haunts me now too, somewhat. The fact that age 29 I am a receptionist at a small company that sells self storage properties in Elgin, IL is pretty much totally unacceptable. My parents might have actually exploded if you’d told them this in 1994. It’s more or less the 29 year old equivalent of never doing my homework and doing well enough on smarts and charm that I can get away with a B or a C, and that’s fine with me because really all I want to do is play touch football with a permanent QB and I don’t give a damn about A’s. If you told 1994 my parents about my current life the only thing that could potentially calm down 1994 my parents, after reviving my Mom, would be if you made sure to mention that I’d be happy, that I’d have a great girlfriend and a community of supportive friends and acquaintances, and I’d be able to do whatever I enjoy in my free time, whether it’s bike jumps or getting baked and watching Voltron or doing creative things like plays and artsy things and comedy stuff. They might look askance at the Voltron thing, but that’s immaterial. The important thing is: Voltron is totally amazing when you’re baked. Totally amazing.

Also I think there’s a point in there about being happy with what you have and not listening to the voices inside of you who’d tell you that you’re somehow worthless because you don’t have more.

But let’s ignore that and concentrate on Voltron for a minute.

Would you believe it if I told you that the special forces team of space crusaders from the galactic alliance of the good planets do not actually form the titular robot until the 4th episode? Even though the title sequence explains how they form the titular robot? Would you believe that? I didn’t when I saw it. (also: I love the phrase "titular robot") The narrative structure of the first four Voltron cartoons must be totally unique in the history of all human literature. It actually moves backwards. There are large sections of it that are best described as “exposition of exposition.” Nobody explains things that have already happened like the Voltron force. If you watch Voltron baked, this narrative structure will make you laugh until your whole body hurts.

This is as good a way to spend the limited amount of time you’ve been given on this Earth as any. If you enjoy laughing at the regressive narrative structure of a cut-rate Japanese cartoon designed for the sole purpose of selling a toy that combines five robot lions into one big robot man, that is.

I don’t feel guilty at all for enjoying and pursuing this activity. Maybe that’s selfish of me and I should technically be spending my time giving pep talks and vocational training to gangs of street kids in the ghettos of Rio, but baked Voltron is more fun. It is not a waste of my potential at all, either. You know what’s fun to people who really are geniuses? Figuring out the universe’s size and rate of expansion based on the complicated algorithms of a distant galaxy’s “red shift.” I could barely write that sentence without falling asleep, but that’s what real geniuses enjoy doing. I’m not a genius, despite the fact that my parents insisted I was in 1990 to the point where I had to go to math camp for a whole summer. Math camp. I was ten. That’s what I did with my summer. If that’s what geniuses do, I want no part of it. I’d rather just get baked and watch Voltron and have that be my potential instead of anything that involves math camp, thank you very much 1990 my parents.

One of the best things that ever happened in my life, in retrospect, was when my Mom and Dad took me to a shrink once when I was in junior high school to figure out why I was underachieving. I remember it being super duper awkward, but more importantly I remember the shrink telling my Mom, who was incensed over my low-effort B’s and C’s, to “back off.” Back off. One of the greatest days of my life. We never saw that dude again.

Of course I’ve got all the neuroses that come from a lifetime of having your parents up your butt, but it’s not like you can ever escape neuroses. You’re going to be weird in some way. I’m just glad that my weirdness comes from being a little too hard on myself instead of from feeling like I can’t tell anybody in the world that I just want to have sex with a big fat hairy dude in pantyhose and a house dress. I don’t. But if I did, I damn sure would. I have no shame-based upbringing stopping me from enjoying all the fat hairy dude panyhose housedress sex I could possibly want. Maybe that's why I want none. I don't know.

But you get the idea. You could go a lot less wrong than being all the way up your own ass about your potential. It’s actually a good thing. And you have to tools to combat it, by saying “back off” to yourself whenever you start to lose sleep over the fact that you’re 29 and you haven’t replaced the overhead bathroom light bulb yet even though it’s been 4 days. Just say “back off.” You don’t have to be a genius, here. You can use the vanity mirror lights and pick up that overhead light bulb when it’s convenient and you have the money.

Another thing: where the fuck do I get off dispensing all this advice, right? My parents told me I was a smart kid for my entire life and I at least partially believe them, that’s where I get off. This means that my central inner conflict is an egomaniacal waste of everybody’s time. I move forward with the assumptions, passed down to me by my oversupportive parents, that I’m talented, that I’m smart, and that I’m special, and, further, these are not only virtuous qualities to have in general, but they're specifically virtues that I undoubtedly possess, and this qualifies me to pontificate about the world at large to anybody within earshot. Whatever I'm saying or doing must be interesting. Aren’t I great, in other words.

No, I am not. I’m just not. Those assumptions are all bullshit. Even if they're all true, which is debatable, they don’t make me any happier or any more interesting or any more anything than anybody else on the face of the earth. Or at least I like to tell myself that. And it's nobody's business if I do.

Even this self-awareness is tiresome. “Creative types” everywhere can follow their stupid, unspecial dreams as much as they want, but the fact remains that nobody wants to hear about an existential crisis. People have their own existential crises to take care of, and some of them are a little more of the “how am I going to feed my kids this week” kind than your average stupid “how come it’s hard to get my shit together even though I’m so smart?” Especially since the answer is clearly, “because you’re just looking out for yourself, and you don’t feel like you really need an overhead bathroom light all that much, which is totally fine, duh.”

Good point about me, me. I'm not special. I should really just stop writing now. For good.

Whoa. Back off, me. I enjoy writing. That’s the only reason I’m doing it. Back off. Also: I am special. There's a dead guy on TV that still wants me to be his neighbor. So at least I have that.

Man.

Now I want to see what the Voltron team is up to. I still can’t believe Sven died (except I can because in the closing credits the Princess is on his lion and he always talked funny so he’s expendable, but still it was surprising when his blood was running down that sword because it’s like, “Whoa dude, kids show!” And you can tell in Japan it was even more bloody, which would probably be way more awesome. Also: what the fuck is up with the rest of the Voltron force? They didn’t even have a funeral for the guy or change their behavior even one little bit. They were just worried over whether or not the Princess can drive the blue lion. Bullshit. Of course she can drive the blue lion, those things are totally useless against row beasts anyway, and once Voltron forms, how hard could it be to control a leg? It’s a knee and a hip and that’s it. Plus rocketfeet, I guess. But still! It’s not like those other guys had special training to learn how to pilot the lions. They just stumbled into the castle and got their lion starter keys and just went right to it. The Princess lives in that castle, you’re telling me she didn’t take a lion or two out for a spin once in a while? Bullshit. Anyway, I guess if you’re on the Voltron force and you talk funny and your name is Sven, it’s no big deal when you die. It’s a just a shame he died because Pidge is ten times more annoying. I can’t even tell if Pidge is a dude or not. All I know is maybe Pidge can talk to mice. Maybe.)

Guide to Actually Being in a Relationship.

2009-02-10T13:08:00.001-06:00

1. The Art of Compromise.

If you’re in a relationship with somebody, you have to make a few compromises. You also have to figure out which ones to make and which ones not to make. While you’re making them. And there’s no set of rules anywhere, and it’s confusing, and if you talk to other people about it they’ll get really bored and pretend to listen to you until it’s their turn to tell you all about their problems.

The trick with relationships is to make sure things in the early going are not going to ruin things later. Like if you’re dating somebody for a month and it’s going well and they ask you for a key to your apartment because your buzzer’s broken and you don’t always get cell reception at your house unless you lean halfway out of the bay window, and your first thought is, “Wait, a key to my place, so you can just stop by without checking first? Isn’t that a pretty big step? I can’t even remember your brother’s name yet. Slow down there, Seabiscuit.” Then don’t give her that key. You’re just going to have to take it back in another couple of months after you look down at your lavender v-neck sweater she bought you “for no reason” and realize that you haven’t put your foot down once in the last three months and you basically only have half of one ball left.

The whole “men are afraid of commitment” thing is pretty overblown, but there are some merits to it. Like if that’s what women think, then great, we can just say, “I’m afraid of commitment,” and they sort of understand that they need to back off a little. But men aren’t afraid of commitment. We’re just afraid of women changing us faster than we want to change ourselves. And we’re afraid of doing it all for the wrong woman. Plus we probably also want to have sex with some other people before we die. We don’t know yet. Other than that, though, we have no problem with commitment. Bring it on.

Anyway, you need to be careful in those first few months, because that’s when you’re all lovey dovey and stupid and going on picnics and romantic stuff like that, and you’ll be tempted to make a few overreaching compromises in the interest of keeping the puppy love afloat. Then later when that wears off, you’ll be like, “Wait, we live together? HOLY SHIT.”

So avoid that. Take things slow. Be realistic and honest with each other. You don’t have to share every little doubt you have about things with her, but you should at least be able to say things like “I just want to take things slow and really be realistic and honest with each other so this doesn’t snowball into something bigger than we both want.”

Something like that. I don’t know. Who knows how women think. But you say things like that, and at least there’s some sort of reasonable expectation that maybe you don’t want to spend an entire day playing Chinese checkers with her Grandma. At least not until after she’s seen you puke and dealt with it. That’s a reasonable compromise. Like maybe Chinese checkers with Grandma is a nice thirtieth date, rather than a perfect twelfth date.

If you’re with somebody you actually want to be with, you are eventually going to spend an entire day playing Chinese checkers with her Grandma. It’s a good test. If you can’t see yourself playing Chinese checkers with your girlfriend and her Grandma, then it’s time to end things. That’s the type of thing that only real couples do. But you can’t just rush into it all willy nilly, or else it’s going to be super weird. You have to earn Chinese checkers. You have to grow into it naturally to get to the point where it’s time to spend the day playing Chinese checkers with Grandma, and when you leave the house you’re actually kind of excited about it. You can’t just do all the little things like that that are symptoms of a good relationship and then assume you have a good relationship. You have to have a solid relationship first. Then the symptoms will just be there. Otherwise it’s candy for dinner.

These are the kinds of things you can say out loud in a relationship if you’re feeling railroaded into playing Chinese checkers too soon. You will sound like a fucking idiot when you say them, because dudes always sound like fucking idiots when they talk about their relationships, and women are smarter at this sort of thing, so they’ll talk you into a weird talking trap, or else they’ll be like “oh,” and then not say anything and you’ll feel the need to explain it again, so that this time they “really understand what I’m talking about,” which will make you sound even more stupid. But still it’s worth it to try.

I know you’d prefer to just play X-box until it’s time for dinner, but if you bust out a little relationshipspeak every once in a while, and it’s a straight shooter kind of talk, then she’ll be encouraged to do the same. That way you’ll work through the little problems more easily before they become big problems that nobody’s talked about for months and when somebody finally mentions something it’s like a dam bursting. A giant unfair dam full of shit where all of a sudden you’re accused of being a pervert because she caught you glancing at her sister’s rack once when she was leaning over, and now you’re basically a rapist (and God knows if they planned that whole cleavage-peek stunt as some sort of secret sister test—wouldn’t put it past them, that sweater was pretty egregious), and now you’re on the defensive instead of trying to assert your perfectly reasonable desire not to go to this one year old’s birthday party on your day off. Talking about the state of your relationship is a preferable alternative to this, although you can never completely avoid these kinds of things.

The stuff you shouldn’t say in these relationship talks is the secret stuff that couldn’t possibly be anything but insulting. Stuff like, “I’m just not sure yours is the last vagina I ever want to engage in some kind of touching scenario.” Of course you’re not sure. Just keep that to yourself. Women are not going to get behind the “hesitancy to get involved in mutually exclusive genital touching” sentiment anyway. It’s not like they’re downloading dicktouching movies off of the internet. Think of how rarely they touch your penis, which as far as you’re concerned is basically never if they can help it.

They are thinking other girl doubts, though, like, “I hope he figures out how to work my body soon because I can’t fake orgasms for the rest of my life.” And you don’t know they’re doing that, but you’re pretty glad they’re keeping those things quiet. Women have an elusive grace about keeping important things quiet. That’s part of why they talk about stuff like sweater colors all the time. It’s like therapy for never expressing themselves. If they said what they really felt all the time, you’d be scared to leave your house, much less talk to one of them. They know this. Pretty much every waking hour of a woman’s life is a giant compromise. That’s what I think, anyway. That’s why they get so mad at you for not feeling like doing something. Because they always do stuff for you that they don’t feel like doing, and they never make a big fuss about it like you do, and it’s your fault for not knowing that even though there’s no way for you to know that without them telling you except for some very nonspecific body language that could just as easily mean “I’m constipated” as “I don’t want to watch ‘Strange Brew’ because I’m a female and it’s not funny to me.” Anyway, your girlfriend has her doubts about you and the relationship, and as much as it would make your life easier if she’d just tell you she doesn’t want to watch “Strange Brew,” you don’t want to know everything she’s thinking all the time.

A good rule for relationship doubts is don’t say anything during a relationship talk unless you could imagine the other person saying, “That’s a valid point,” at the end of it. This means you think about it for an average of 10 days before you even mention anything, just to make sure it’s going to come out right. Edit it down to a concise Powerpoint presentation in your mind. And then release it calmly during a non-fight time, perhaps over dinner that you’re paying for at a moderately priced restaurant you both enjoy. My girlfriend and I have a “relationship talk” restaurant. It’s a reasonable neutral-field place. Even though it’s got a vegetarian menu that I don’t like all that much, I don’t make a fuss over it.

If during these talks you feel like you’re making a valid point and it’s getting ignored or swept under the rug, and that keeps happening, then it’s time to have a more serious relationship talk about unfun things you hear about on Dr. Phil. Things like “boundaries” and “listening.” There’s a chance that this serious relationship talk will take a turn for the worse and turn into a breakup without your even planning it, but that’s ok. Long term, that’s ok. You should break up anyway if there isn’t enough “listening” or “boundaries.”

A secret girl trick they often use is whenever you talk about stuff like not being ready for Chinese checkers, they do this thing where they’re like, “Whatever, you’re overreacting, it’s no big deal if you don’t want to play Chinese checkers with my Grandma, don’t be ridiculous.” And you’re like, “Ok, sorry, I just want to make sure we’re on the same page. I’m gonna go watch football at Pete’s house.” But then later they continue on doing things the same way they’d been doing them before, which still sucks. In the short term, it feels like you “won the argument,” but it’s a pyrrhic victory because there’s no behavioral change afterwards, it was just a stupid fight about the Chinese checkers and nothing else. You were trying to really work on the relationship, and they ended things by making you feel like the immature one. So you think, “Yeah, I’m the immature one. Next time I’m not even going to fight against whatever it is.” And things keep going that way even though you’re not happy with them. That trick is bad news.

The reason why it’s bad news is, of course, because they’re right. They fucking own you right now. And maybe you don’t want to be owned yet. Eventually you will, but not yet. If that Jedi mind trick thing keeps happening, though, and you keep being like “waitaminute!” about it, then you’ve got to have a serious talk. Because that’s not a relationship. That’s two people kickboxing. With their miiiiinnnds. If that keeps happening and you’re like, “Well, I guess I don’t mind it.” Then you’ve hit the jackpot. Not minding it is the secret to happiness in a relationship.

If you’re stuck trying to figure out what to fight for and what not to, there are some universal compromises that you absolutely should make.

Here are a few of them:

- Taking her out for a nice meal where you get dressed up nice and pay for everything and then when you get home your apartment is cleaner than usual and you have sex, including foreplay, more gently than usual without going to sleep immediately after you’re done even though you’ve had two bottles of wine and some really heavy French food. Maybe there is also some kind of massage or “sensual oil” involved. How you do it is not as important as showing an effort. You have to do this every once in a while or else there’ll be some little sensitive dude lothario on a future girls night out who’ll get her thinking about how much better she could have it. Instead, you want your girlfriend to laugh in his little sensitive dude lothario face.

- Flowers every once in a while. This one is tricky because you have to keep it up or else she’ll think, “He just fucked somebody else.” Send them when she’s sick or after a fight. Maybe you can pull off a “just because,” thing, but only do it if it’s a really pretty spring day and you actually thought it’d be fun to. Any girl who tells you she doesn’t like flowers is a big time liar who wants flowers. Come on. They’re flowers.

- Canceling plans to hang out with her while she’s sick. You don’t have to always do this, because if your girlfriend is cool she’ll feel guilty, and you won’t always want her around in the vice versa situation, but you do have to do it more often than you don’t. At least offer. And then if she’s like, “No, no, I don’t want to ruin your evening, I’m just going to watch a movie and get some sleep,” you can do a thing where you show up and surprise her with some chicken broth and you’ll be a hero forever. Or maybe you’ll finally catch her fucking that little sensitive dude lothario she met while you were doing the pop culture bar trivia tournament.

- Rides to the airport and airport pickups.

- Emergency showup responsibility. This can be anything, like a “I cut myself trying to make a bagelwich, I need you to take me to the hospital” thing. Even an “I’m drunk with the girls and we were talking about you and I want yoooou to come heeeeere so I can kiss your faaaaaice” thing where you’re like, “Oh great, I’m in for a fifteen dollar cab ride and a toothy drunken blowjob, and for once I’m in my pajamas and comfortable at home.” You still have to go, though, because that’s emergency showup responsibility. Basically, you have to be dependable, and you have to return phone calls. Otherwise, what’s the point for her? This is the thing that buys you blowjobs. Like good, sober ones in the future. They only happen after you prove yourself a few times.

- Doing a girl thing every once in a while. Like watching “Say Anything” instead of “Evil Dead,” or going to a place where things are pretty, like, I don’t know, a pony show or a doll convention or something. You’ll know it, because she’ll mention it and you’ll think, “A figure skating showcase? Am I gay and somebody didn’t tell me?” But then you’ll go and you’ll be at least moderately pleasant about it, with only a few jokes so she at least sees the ridiculous side of it. If you’re a real sour pill about this type of thing, you’re going to be in the collective doghouse of the official girl tribune of public opinion. And that’s no good. You have to stay on her friends’ good side too, because if you ever win an argument or get some leniency for a fuckup, it’s going to be because your girlfriend’s friends convinced her she’s being too hard on you. They will do this by saying, “He went to that figure skating showcase and that pony show and that doll convention with you, give the guy a break. My boyfriend won’t even eat me out.”

2. Doldrums.

Let’s face it. Life has its ups and downs. So does a relationship. You’re eventually going to get pretty bored with it.

Sometime after you’ve been together for over a year, there will be a fifth consecutive night of deciding what to eat for dinner. It will be a tiresome conversation with opening bids and predictable counteroffers, and at the end you’ll settle on the same thing you always get and then you’ll watch Law and Order together without speaking once, and either you or she will suggest having sex that night, and the other person will just say, “No thanks,” and really mean it, and you’ll both get ready for bed in the same way you always do, and you’ll look over at this person you’ve been spending all your time with and think, “Man, am I tired of those fucking cloud pajama bottoms.”

Then you’ll look down at your own self, bulging a little around the middle from beer and Rueben sandwiches, and you’ll think, “What the hell is happening to me, here? I used to be a lean machine. I used to run around shouting prophetically from the rooftops, drinking until dawn, and discussing really important stuff with really interesting people in really great weird places I didn’t know existed until I found myself suddenly there. I used to have a fun life. Now I’m a big fat nobody. I’m a turd wrapped in a blanket of worldly comforts, tucked away in a dusty corner somewhere so I can quietly die. And I’m 26 years old and I’m thinking this way. Fuck. I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s all her fault.”

And you’ll want to say all this, but your girlfriend will have a big day tomorrow and she’ll ask you to leave the room if you’re going to keep her up. And she’ll have a point. Why should you bother her with all this dumb woe-is-me crap?

Well, the good news is you can’t think that way unless you’re with somebody you actually want to be with for the foreseeable future. You might panic and think you’re hearing your mind’s last whimpering death rattle of independence and assume the only cure is to fool around on your girlfriend. Sure, you could indulge that and go off and flirt with a bunch of barflies, but what’s the point? You’ve come this far. It’s not like those bar-rats are going to have any more exciting pajama bottoms. Not after eight months they’re not.

The real problem here is you’re letting yourself settle into a routine. Your girlfriend is probably thinking a bunch of the same stuff. There’s a chance she’s also thinking “I’m so glad I’ve got this dude around to watch Law and Order with, even if we don’t say a word to each other the whole time.” And she’s got a point there. That’s a pretty great situation. Anyway, how do you bust out of the doldrums?

Well, you do something outside of the relationship that’s a surprise. Not fucking somebody else. More like learning how to operate a sailboat. Or working on a creative project of some kind, or taking kung fu lessons. Something like that where you’re doing something for yourself just because you want to and it has nothing to do with her.

People are lonely. That’s just a fact of life. So much so that when you find somebody to spend your time with, you get to this place where you think, “Well, I’m done. I’m not lonely anymore.” And you do that slap your hands together thing and settle in for a well earned fifth consecutive night of chicken hot pepper noodle from Penny’s and that one SVU episode with the crazy alcoholic woman.

But finding somebody else is not all the work you’ve got to do. Not by a long shot. So you’ve got to get out there and do something with yourself. And maybe buy your girlfriend a new pair of pajama bottoms while you’re at it. It’s a good gift. Girlfriends always like them. Plus, that way you’ll have something less annoying than the cloud pants to look at.

The good news about the doldrums is they teach you that being with somebody isn’t the end of anything. You can still shout prophetically from rooftops in weird places. You just have this girlfriend to do it with now. And if she’s got a big day tomorrow, you can still go out there and get it done on your own. You just have to say no to anything that involves one of your erogenous zones touching one of another person’s erogenous zones. If you can’t, then it’s time to have a talk instead of stewing in the next room.

3. Rules.

There are some good timeline rules that are hard and fast and don’t ever need to be broken.

1 month TOPS (like tops tops TOPS): Sex happens. Like intercourse sex, which is the kind that really counts in terms of relationships. Like “everything is different after you have sex” sex. Which I know is dumb, but girls think that way because they always have to worry about being raped and you don’t.

3-6 months: Serious talk about sex and birth control, including STD testing. You will both want this because condoms are fucking terrible.

After the sex talk: Meet the parents. You shouldn’t have to meet the parents until after the sex talk where you’re done with condoms, but sometimes they’re just going to be there. If you’re dating a person who’s got her parents around all the time, push the sex talk up sooner. The first parents meeting should be awkward because of sex stuff, because that’s funny.

Not before 6 months ever: Key exchange. Some minor one or two day stuff is ok, but keep it in check.

Never before a year: Living together. It doesn’t matter how much you like each other or how much time you spend together already or how shitty one of your leases is, you should wait for a while until you live together, because that’s a big fucking tamale if you end up splitting.

Not until you’ve lived together at least a year: Getting married. You don’t even really have to get married ever anymore. But it’s a nice gesture. Think of it as a “nice gesture.” It’s also a thing you have to do if there’s a baby situation.

4. Advanced stuff.

Everybody knows somebody whose parents have this ridiculous story about how they saw each other everyday from across a train platform, and then one day their Dad had to go the other way to bail his kid brother out of jail, and he accidentally brushed against Mom’s backside, and she was mad at him but they hit it off and they got married three weeks later. Even that asshole friend of yours whose parents met like that and are still together (that friend of yours is fucked for life, by the way) would tell you that for the first year of their marriage they wanted to kill each other. To the point where they actually almost ended up killing each other a couple of times. With a knife.

That first year of marriage is supposed to be tough. It’s supposed to be like the first year after you graduate or the first year after your Dad dies or the first year you have no legs. Except, you know, probably less hard than that. I wouldn’t know, but if that’s true, then I’m willing to wait on it until after I graduate and my Dad dies and I’ve lost my legs.

Once you get to the point where you think of your relationship as a separate entity, like there’s you, there’s your girlfriend, and there’s your relationship, and they’re each as weird and complicated and as important as a person can be to another person, that’s when you’re ready to think about getting married. That’s what people who’ve been married a long time talk about. They talk that way about things. It’s like their life is an episode of Dr. Phil, but nobody can ever change the channel.

That’s why you hardly ever see your married friends anymore. It’s like changing the channel when Dr. Phil is on.

Anyway, if you can’t pull off that much caring about shit, and you can’t handle a lifetime of letting things go even when you know for a fact that you’re right this time and your life would probably be considerably easier for the next two days if she’d just listen to you about this one fucking thing, then you shouldn’t be getting married yet. Maybe not to this person, if that’s all they want from you. Maybe not ever. Or maybe you should just get over yourself and fucking go for it for once in your life. If you turn out to be totally wrong about your own ability to deal with shit, it’s not like ugly heart-rending divorces are totally unheard of.

I say once you get to 5 years and 30+ years old you’re going to have to shit or get off the pot. It’s fine if you want to wait until the last possible second, too. Like if it’s really 6 years because the last one was a yearlong engagement. That’s fine. You might have spent an extra year on the pot, but at least you were really busy shitting.

There’s a pretty good chance that if you‘ve gotten to 5 years, you’ve been through some sort of highly painful little event that sometimes ends relationships. Good. It’s not like those are going away forever. You should probably have one serious gutcheck moment under your belt before you tie the knot. I’m not saying you have to go out and cheat and then talk to your girlfriend about it. It’s good enough to go out and really really consider cheating, like consider it a whole lot, and then come home and be like “I really really considered cheating on you tonight a whole lot,” and have a kind of hurtful adult talk about what it means to the two of you to be together.

You’ve got to get through a situation like that, I think. It’s the sort of thing you can only do if you don’t give a shit enough to say it, but you also still give a shit enough to say it. I think that’s the territory where you’re supposed to live if you’re gonna pull off the whole forever thing. Not everyday, but you’ve got to have been there a few times.

Yuck. This is not douchebag stuff, though. I mean it’s douchebaggy, but it’s not the sort of thing a true douchebag would pull. Lowercase d douchebags stay a million miles from this sort of thing. Bigtime hurt talks are for capitol D Douchebags.

But it’s good to know what you’re headed for if ever “work” seems like a good idea. You know, just by accident.

Guide to Post-Breakup Communication.

2009-02-03T15:00:00.000-06:00

Don't until later.

If you're thinking "it'll be fine, I just want to talk to them and see what they're up to," then that's your brain's way of saying "you still have feelings for them and you can't let go and this conversation is going to be a total drag for one or more people no matter what."

If you're thinking "I wish they would stop calling me, but we've been through so much together I shouldn't just ignore them," then that's your brain's way of saying "you shouldn't have broken up with this person if you were going to get all chickenshit about the possibility that they might not like you so much after the break up. That's what break ups are. Don't be a puss."

Follow through is important for both parties, otherwise it's not really a break up. Then it's some other sad category of thing that sucks for everybody involved.

Run-ins.

Unplanned run-ins should be the only acceptable form of post-breakup communication until at least a year after the break up. (After a year you can start texting them about your yard sale and stuff like that). A year is enough time for almost anybody to be able to think at least somewhat rationally about who they were and what's changed since a year ago. This year becomes "forever" in cases of extreme cheater-style breakups. (Like real-deal-Jerry-Springer-caught-in-the-act-with-your-Dad rather than "I think we should see other people" or "I met somebody I have feelings for that I haven't acted on yet but I want to"--those are pretty much industry standard).

There are two types of run-ins. Run-ins that lead to sex and run-ins that don't.

Run-ins that lead to sex:

These are ok in general because at least you're getting sex out of the deal. I mean, all that old baggage comes roaring back and then you end up with one of the worst "should I even call, and if so, when?" dilemmas of all time, but at least you got sex out of the deal.

I say the rule book is completely thrown out on this one.

Generally if you have sex again after a breakup it means that you still want to at least have sex with the person, and you're probably headed for a one to two month sex-only backslide. Which can be fun. And then when it starts becoming apparent that all the old problems are still there you can rebreak up and begin the whole process anew, but with less pain than the first break up because it'll just be breaking up from a sex-only backslide instead of full on wuv. If you just ended up having sex with the person because you were incredibly drunk and you know it's a mistake like right away, then you don't have to call them after, although by now you should have the balls to tell them that to their face. You already broke up, remember?

Run-ins that don't lead to sex:

There's nothing worse than forced ignoring of somebody who's in the room. It's childish. Even worse is the crazed storm-out. Act like a grown up and nod or wave, then if you're really having a hard time controlling your feelings about being in the same place, quietly gather your belongings and leave in a "I was leaving anyway" manner after like fifteen minutes, with another wave and one of those lip smiles that aren't really smiles. This works for either a not very crowded or a medium crowded setting. If it's like a big party or a crowded bar, then either pull the "hey, it's a public place, I've got as much right to be here as him!" thing or pull a quiet runner.

The thing you don't want to do is get all belligerent and walk up to the person while they're hanging out with their Dad and say something stupid. (This has happened to me.)

In the case of an extreme cheater-style breakup, all bets are off in terms of storm-outs and crazy behavior, and you can totally get a posse together to kick their ass and stuff. That actually makes the night more fun for everybody.

Remember: after a breakup you're going to need your friends a lot. You can take a certain amount of comfort from having a shoulder to cry on, and you can get ridiculously drunk and rant and rave a couple of times, but you should always try to have a sense of humor about it and not be a total bummer. If you really feel like you're going to break down, do it on your own until you don't feel so bad about it, even if it means taking a cab home with runny mascara at like 11:00. You will need your friends a lot, and it's hard to be a really good friend to somebody who's a total mess all the time. It gets pretty old after a while. Pick your battles. Remember, you need them for fun. That's why they're called "friends" and not "therapists."

New boy/girlfriends.

If in the course of a run-in (and remember that the best course of action is a wave or a nod, and approaching to exchange pleasantries is bad form unless it'd be more awkward not to) you're confronted with a new boyfriend or girlfriend, then you should act as gracious as possible, even if it means your heart is having a seizure and your neck is growing a rage-filled boil. And then you can leave quickly. Politely decline all invitations to "sit" and "join-in." Those are just bad form anyway.

Then this is a "get out of jail free" card that you can use to get totally wasted and/or have a breakdown with your friends where you start out the night ranting and raving about how stupid your ex is and how ugly/fat/stupid their new attachment is, and you end the night throwing old fruit off the freeway overpass and almost getting arrested. Remember: if at all possible, channel your rage into a constructively memorable party night with your buds. But if it's a full scale breakdown with crying in the alley, that's ok too. New girl/boyfriends are spooky like that.

Guide to Reissues of Obscure Regional Soul and Power Pop From the 60’s and 70’s.

2009-02-02T16:47:00.000-06:00

Everybody’s got a habit. One of mine is listening to music. Everybody likes music, but not everybody feels involved enough in the process to consider listening to it a “hobby.” I consider it a hobby. Just a hobby. If I was more passionate about it, to the point where I could point to listening to music as being the one thing I love the most in the world, listening to music would probably be at least somewhat of a profession for me. I’d probably DJ. Or be in a band. Or write record reviews for the local dying weekly. But I don’t care that much, and if and when I do, I mostly choose to remain private about it. I also don’t have the time, money, or energy to be chronically obsessed with all things music, although I’ve always had a healthy amount of admiration for people who do. So it’s a hobby. Not a lifestyle.

Maybe there’s a lesson there about not being ruled by your interests. Maybe not. I’m not going to try to shoehorn one in if I don’t have to.

Occasionally, though, something about music spurs enough thought that it turns into a real life thing for me and not just a music-listening thing. Witness the Numero Group.

The Numero Group is a Chicago-based label that reissues regional soul, folk, and power pop/rock from all but totally extinct sources, usually defunct record labels from places you don’t typically think of when you think of a “vibrant local music scene.” Places like Columbus, Ohio, or East St. Louis, Illinois, or Dimona, Israel. Sometimes their releases are from the far fringes of well-known musical melting pots like Chicago and New York. Always they’re immaculately packaged and tell an interesting story of how these songs (usually at least decent songs, depending on one’s personal taste) were created, forgotten, and ultimately resurrected.

The stories are fairly uniform. There’s always some combination of poor funding, poor marketing, poor timing, some degree of self-defeating Axl Rose-esque megalomania, complete lack of business acumen, and/or complete lack of commercial viability in terms of the artists’ creative vision. Picture reasons for a small business to fail, and you have the basic story. It’s rags to rags to rags. Told lovingly within each Numero Group release.

But what about the songs?

They’re good. Sometimes they’re merely decent. Pretty much always the songs suffer from a variety apparent fatal flaws. Usually there’s something to it that shows why it’s been forgotten. Maybe it’s a weird flute too high in the mix, or a series of offkey notes, or a terribly written, not-at-all catchy hook, or the fact that a particular track outstays its welcome after 20 seconds but goes on for six minutes, or is a clear ripoff of a Jimi Hendrix riff, or has a ramshackle quality that I with my highly developed and somewhat irony-laden post-Velvet Underground ear for chaos appreciate now more than any local Midwest R&B DJ could be expected to in 1972, or it’s an elaborately written tune about a weirdly specific subject, or it’s by a group whose name accidentally endorses genocide, or maybe it’s just a straight-ahead, repetitive, and/or wandering mediocre pop song from its era without any particular payoff. Sometimes, depending on the consistency of the release, the only apparent fatal flaw in one of the songs is that there were recorded in Belize City, Belize in the early 70’s, and the recording is just too obscure to have found an audience wider than that particular seasonal flood-dominated British colonial market and the few émigrés from it who were lucky enough to find themselves in New York City with enough disposable income to buy an LP.

I have developed a love/hate relationship with the Numero Group over these releases.

On the one hand, I appreciate all the work and I admire their stick-to-it-iveness and taste. Much in the same way I admire the one guy with the self-trimmed beard at the used record store who’s laughing about this one thing Question Mark said to him at a wedding last year. This admiration is a mixture of, “Thank God for genuine eccentrics like you, who, in their natural habitat, have occasion to make everybody else’s life more interesting by relating anecdotes about obscure garage band leaders who genuinely believe they’re from another planet,” and, wistfully, “There but for the grace of God go I.” It’s kind of the same admiration us barely sane types have for people that are full on over the edge crazy and somehow still making it work.

Plus, you know, it’s awfully nice of these kind gents to go off into the dustbins of the world and put together these excruciatingly well-documented re-releases of this charmingly flawed music from the nowhere regions of popular music’s consciousness. Especially since nobody asked them to, and they’re really under no compunction to share their results with the rest of us. But, you know, nobody asked them to. They’d have done it regardless. They’re weird like that. And God bless them for it.

On the other hand, the releases themselves, and the music that’s on them, rely a little too heavily on this context. It’s “look at this thing we found, aren’t we clever,” or more specifically, “you should check this out, it’s a soul band that formed out of this weird collective on the South Side that was part brothel and part cult, and they all wore these funny hats, and they only made five copies of this ever, and the other two that still exist are unplayable.” And you’re like “that’s cool, I guess,” and you try to get away from the dude, and he’s like “but wait, it’s really good, listen,” and you’re like, “ok,” but you look at your watch, and then he plays it and he’s freaking out about how great it is but to you it sounds like five people moaning in a basement with a shitty drummer, because it’s five people moaning in a basement with a shitty drummer, and really the only reason anybody would like it is it’s weird and cute, like, “nice try, you moaning basement cult whores.” And “nice try” is either ironic or whimsical or totally honest, but it’s still there.

You kind of want to get out of there, because the whole thing makes you uncomfortable. First it’s offputting that somebody could be so obsessive about something to ignore all social cues that tell them to keep it to themselves. Then there’s the whole bragging about obscurity thing. Then there’s the whole “flattery of gained trust” thing where you’re supposed to feel grateful that he’s playing this thing for you because he thinks you’ll appreciate it as much as he does. Then there’s this whole sad image of the cult whores moaning in a basement 30 years ago, coupled with the perverse enjoyment this guy’s getting out of playing it for you now. And then there’s your complicity. Because, admit it, you were curious.

It’s like the queasy alliance between exhibitionists and voyeurs. Kind of. You’d think it’d be a match made in heaven, until you realize that the exhibitionist has the virgin/whore fantasy of making regular people into voyeurs due to the undeniably alluring nature of what they’re exhibiting (or else, on the opposite end of the spectrum, they just want to freak everybody out), and it’s a bit of a downer when the person’s just really into the process of being a voyeur in a way that has nothing to do with what you’re exhibiting. It makes the exhibitor a little less special. Same with the voyeur, who wants to discover something he’s not supposed to on his own. Both are perverts, but when they meet both are going, “Ugh, I can’t quite get off to this because you’re clearly getting off to this and that’s grossing me out.”

Well that’s essentially the interaction you’re signing up for every time you spend money on a Numero Group release. Even if the music’s unbelievably great, and it is sometimes but more often isn’t, there’s still a twinge of “Ugh, you’re really getting off to this.”

Left out in the cold are those moaning cult whores in the basement. They’re just the medium, not the message of this exhibitionist/voyeur transaction. No matter how well-researched or well-compensated they might be for their contributions, which is a matter open for some debate (but not a particularly interesting one).

So why am I even bothering to write about this? Cultural imperialism is a pretty well-documented phenomenon, and so is crusty weird dudes who like obscure records. Where do I fit in?

Well, I’m kind of an aspirational eccentric. I’m not fully crazy about all this stuff. At least that’s what I tell myself. So I kind of pretend to be by telling people things like “listening to music is a hobby of mine.” It’s just music. I know that. And I’m going to die one day, whether I have a promo copy of The Beau Brummel’s out-of-print “Bradley’s Barn” album or not. I don’t know what in the hell I expect ownership of such an artifact is supposed to do for me. Elevate me into some more righteously boastful class of music fanatics? It’s a nice record. Really nice. I like listening to it. I think that’s all I’m supposed to get out of it. But it’s hard to fight the urge of entitlement that comes with owning something slightly rare like that. I have to admit, I get a kick out of it. And in the case of this copy of “Bradley’s Barn,” it’s not a vicarious kick, like the Numero Group releases are. I found a copy of it. I bought a copy of it. It’s not a reissue that some opportunistic label put out. It’s an old realdeal copy of the record that opportunistic me suckered myself into purchasing from a store that opportunistically bought it from probably like a dude or something.

But who gives a shit?

Right. Who gives a shit. Other than me, I expect maybe there are some self-trimmed beardwearers out there who’d be moderately impressed. My record collection is slowly filling out. And I’m doing it for my inner music freak. I guess. I don’t know. I can’t imagine anybody who would admit to giving a shit about who-has-what is a person who’s priorities are in proper order. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking obscure pop music or wooden yachts.

That’s why I’ve got a bee so far in my bonnet about these Numero Group guys. Through their devotion to a highly specialized and arguably noble labor of love, they’re making me feel like a real grade-A asshole. They point out what I don’t like about myself. I don’t even care that I don’t like the music they put out all that much. I mean, I like it all well enough, but I rarely love a whole release of theirs from start to finish. It’s usually 2-5 tracks per release. Sometimes I enjoy as few as zero. Rarely it’s all but a couple.

But I can’t stop myself. That’s the problem. I recently talked myself into the conundrum of media, and about how mp3’s are the regenerative next great singles medium, where every track is torn asunder from its intended sequencing and judged on its own merits alone. I said “well, maybe I should just be downloading the ones I like and not bother with the whole package. Except they don’t let you do that because they’re geniuses. There has to be another solution. I keep getting stuff with all this obscure-for-good-reason chaff they keep shoveling out. It’s a lot of effort and money in exchange for a couple of fantastic tracks per release. I feel like I, the music fan, am being taken for a ride, which is a tradition as old as recorded music.

I should say that of the few tracks off of each Numero Group release that I do like, I really really really like them. This is how I get with music. I find one thing that I like, a song, a moment in a song, and then I delve so deeply into it I can’t get out for months. It’s a lot like a chemical dependency, except I’m talking about obscure XTC deep tracks instead of a coke binge. Just so you know that all of this quandary-over-the-delivery medium crap isn’t always in my head, or that I’m not getting anything out of this music. Quite the contrary. I love it enough to care about it. Hence the love/hate relationship with these fuckers.

Certain Numero Group standouts are so fantastic as to almost make up for the whole plunge into self-doubt over why I’m sometimes neurotic, antisocial, and fetishistic about music. For a little while there listening to my favorites of the collection, whether they’re dramatic psychedelic soul flourishes under a child’s crying over his lost mama, or a gospel group’s drummer going totally apeshit over Jesus, it’s almost to forget the whole sordid process by which these songs came to my ear, not to mention everything else that’s bugging me that day. And that’s why I can’t stop, because that’s the feeling all music fans are listening for.

The problem is loving the good stuff that much makes me feel entitled to my disappointment in the stuff that doesn’t measure up. It’s a real lesson in involvement. So I talked myself into the mp3 format internal discussion. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t enjoying the full backlog of lesser Numero tracks I have. Maybe they just don’t work as well filtered into a shuffling iPod as they might on a turntable, where their esoteric nature is more vital. Is what I was telling myself. So I bought a vinyl subscription to their 2009 releases for a hundred dollars. Of course I did.

I’m holding out hope that this won’t be a totally awful decision. One of the things about mp3’s is they’re so easily compilable. They add up exponentially, until you have more music than you could possibly really listen to, and then the whole goal becomes having the music rather than just listening to it. Vinyl is a step further in that direction because of the elaborate and immediately physical processes involved in playing an LP. It’s almost ritualistic. So I’m getting more and more chronic, I guess. Maybe that’s a good thing. I do have that part of me that wants to be a chronic weirdo who used to roadie for Sonic Youth and who won’t shut up about some Phillipino pop girl group he’s somewhat creepily really into these days. I guess that dude is having his way with me recently.

Part of my problem is I have a rickety belief system ruled more or less by a rigidly constructed belief system imposed by that inner weirdo. One total foolhearty belief is: you can read but not listen before you buy. The idea here is that if I know what I’m talking about (I want to believe I do, but I don’t), I will purchase great music sight unseen based on what I’ve heard and what my suspicions are. It’s a total drag a lot of the time because I’m constantly wrong, but when I get something good, I feel like it’s all based on my intuitive beardedguy smarts, and it’s rewarding on both a “hey this is really great” level and a “aren’t I so smart” level. This is only possible for somebody with endless patience for music. I listen to a lot of mediocre bullshit. A LOT. And I’m prone to exaggerating the rewards. So I guess I can’t really blame the Numero guys for taking me for a little ride every once in a while. I’ll take myself on the same ride whether they’re involved or not, and it’s not like they asked me to go along with them.

I guess that’s what I mean when I say “listening to music is a hobby of mine.” Nobody has that as a hobby. Music’s on, you listen to it. That’s called normal human being. No, I guess my hobby, shameful as it is to admit, is having music to the degree that I get to pretend that I’m a part of it. The plain, painful truth is: for somebody who considers listening to music a hobby, I really don’t listen to music all that much more than anybody else. I just work a little harder to get it.

Fine and dandy. I’m a fetishist, I guess. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I honestly though I was past this. But it looks like I’ve got kryptonite, and kryptonite, thy name is Numero Group. I wish I could quit you.

p.s. If you’re still reading, I’m shocked. Just totally shocked. I promise a real Guide about non-nerd things tomorrow.

Guide to Kid Logic.

2009-01-30T16:11:00.000-06:00

Kids are weird. One of the weirdest things about them is that they’re not capable of expressing their thought processes in a convincing manner. Or they’re scared to. So if you ask them why they did something they say “no reason” instead of “because I thought that if I jumped off the swing set onto the big wheel I would get a monster push and go super fast and that would be fun, and it made sense that if I pulled that off it would be even cooler if I had my two favorite color Crayons up each nostril, and I’m not sure how hurt I am, but the real reason I’m upset is because one Crayons broke and one got lost, and those are my two very favorite colors.”

Kids are up their own butts all the time.

It makes sense. They don’t know anything. They just have to go on what they’re told. They don’t know things like “there’s such a thing as two true ideas that are opposites” or “knowing one thing about somebody doesn’t mean you know everything about them,” or “not everybody feels the same way you do about this,” or “there are several mechanisms at work which produce a result, and life is more than a series of events that drop from out of the sky.” They also don’t know that if an adult laughs at you for saying what was going through your head about the big wheel thing, it doesn’t mean you have to be afraid of telling them stuff like that. They’re not laughing at you, they’re just surprised that you’re thinking that way because they don’t. Kids get fixated on every tiny little piece of knowledge they have, because it’s all they know about a given subject. All they know is “if you tell somebody what you were thinking, they will either laugh at you or be mad, and it will be embarrassing, so it’s better not to.” In a way, kids are smart this way. They have a survivalist approach to epistemology.

Writing about pee seat Russian roulette made me remember how I peed in my pants once on the way home from the Ice Capades. This was sometime between first and third grade. I had seen commercials for the Ice Capades, and as far as I was concerned, the Ice Capades were the single awesomest event one could possibly witness in one’s lifetime, with the possible exception of that one time I saw an ad for the robot dinosaur that eats trucks.

I sensed from what little I knew about my family that I had no chance of ever attending a performance by Truckasaurus. I don’t know if this was intuitive or if I just felt like a robot dinosaur who eats trucks was so unbelievably awesome that it couldn’t possibly exist. I don’t think I even mentioned my fascination with it. Partially because the idea of a robot dinosaur who eats trucks was so monumentally important to me, and the merits of witnessing this spectacle were so clearly self-evident to anybody with half a brain by my thinking, I was sure my Dad would have already known about this and decided against it. I held out a silent hope until we both saw the commercial together, at which point I looked at him hopefully, and he disdainfully burped out some Old Milwaukee’s Best, and I never ventured too far down that line of thought again. A robot dinosaur who eats trucks was too much to ask for. You don’t tempt fate by asking for things like Truckasaurus. It would have been like the party before everything goes horribly horribly wrong in “Beloved.”

The Ice Capades were a reasonably distanced second place to Truckasaurus. They seemed tame-to-parents enough that I even mentioned wanting to go. I was told no, and I knew better to pursue it further, but then there came a day in elementary school when somebody suggested a field trip to the Ice Capades at a group rate. Here was an adult in a position of authority suggesting a trip to the Ice Capades. This was one of those golden kid events that drops out of the sky without any reason, and improves your life instantaneously, like the time my parents got me out of bed to go watch TV because there was a “special” and Big Bird got locked in a museum overnight with some Egyptian kid who’s parents were constellations. It was awesome. I went to bed every night for a year or two hoping there’d be a “special” again that night. I didn’t know how a “special” happened, but I wanted to go down stairs and watch TV. Every night I would ask “is there a special?” Always it was no. Until like a year later Big Bird went to China. By the time he went to Japan I was kind of over Big Bird, though.

Still, Ice Capades fell out of the sky by some kind of divine decree in much the same manner as these “specials.” And my parents paid the group discount price. I could not have been more excited.

Then we got out to the Cap Center, and our seats were super far away and it was impossible to tell what was going on, and I don’t remember a single detail except for some weird spinning people in gigantic costumes gliding across blue-lit ice. I don’t even remember the theme. For some reason I’m thinking I saw Snoopy, but I can’t confirm that. All I know is it was not particularly awesome.

And also I had to pee super duper bad the whole time. We were late getting to our seats. I think maybe the show had already begun. And I had to pee. And not only would I have had to not watch the Ice Capades in order to go, I would have had to speak up, hence interrupting the Ice Capades for everybody else, and ask an adult to take me to the bathroom. So: everybody would know I had to pee, everybody would know I needed assistance, everybody would have to shuffle out of their seats and peel their eyes away from the motherfucking ICE CAPADES for, like, a whole minute, AND an adult chaperone I barely knew would have to leave with me while I peed, and that chaperone would also miss the Ice Capades for as long as that took. No way. There was just no way. I had to sit there as my bladder slowly turned into a knife inside of my little body until the Ice Capades were done. No wonder I don’t remember anything. I was being tortured. By myself. And my own kid logic.

And then, when the show was over, it was too crowded to be able to pee. We had this link hands stay in line thing going, and I didn’t want to screw it up. I was hoping to be saved by the same unknowable force that caused the chance to go to the Ice Capades or the chance to stay up and watch Big Bird be locked in a museum with some weird Egyptian kid. No dice. Nobody heard my silent prayers, and I was not invited to relieve myself before getting on the bus.

So I peed myself on the bus. And cried about the whole miserable state of affairs. My teacher comforted me with understanding platitudes about how it’s ok to pee on yourself, but she totally missed the point. I know it’s ok to pee on yourself. What’s not ok is that I missed the Ice Capades. And it was for everybody else’s benefit. And nobody was congratulating or thanking me for my selflessness, nor was anybody impressed by my ability to keep quiet and hold it in as long as I did. I could have ruined the Ice Capades for everybody in favor of enjoying it myself, and instead I was wet on a bus full of my sleeping classmates. The adults didn’t know I had already done the most difficult and noble thing I’d ever done in my life to that point. They were just consoling me about the fact that I peed. The pee was an inconsequential result of incredible personal sacrifice and what seemed to me to be hours of careful deliberation. Didn’t they understand that?

Of course they didn’t. Adults are idiots.

I realized all of this recently when I was in front of my apartment smoking a cigarette. There’s a nice family that lives across the street from me, with a daughter about as old as I was when the Ice Capades taught me one of the earliest of many lessons about the benefits and pitfalls of self-reliance. I occurred to me as I was out there in the freezing cold huffing and puffing on a little stick that I know for a fact will kill eventually kill me if I don’t stop huffing and puffing on these stupid little sticks that don’t do anything but momentarily make me stop wanting to huff and puff on a stupid little stick. A whole melodrama unfolded in my brain concerning this tiny person.

She asks her parents about smoking and what it is, and they say, “Oh that? That’s just a dirty habit.” And that’s it for me. Total judgment forever from that kid. Dirty habit. Dirty man. I am a dirty man. And that’s totally true. I am a dirty man. I smoke cigarettes. Why defend myself or ruin some poor kid’s day trying to teach them about nuance about how a good person can do a dirty thing and it doesn’t make them a dirty or bad person? That’s naïve. The kid would be right. She’s got me pegged. I’m a dirty man. I have dust bunnies in my bathroom and I don’t clean them right away. She’s right. It was such a simple and honest realization, that I almost said out loud “I am a dirty man.” But that’s a bad thing to say out loud when you’re out on your stoop in a neighborhood that has kids in it. I don’t mean it that way.

So I’ve decided to quit smoking and also try to cut down on the drinking and also try to clean my apartment once in a fucking while. I’m also making an effort not to eat the one hundred percent worst thing for me on the menu when I’m somewhere. It’s lasted three days so far. And it feels pretty good. My brain already works better now than it did three days ago when it was all cobwebby and drunk. It’s interesting. That damn kid with the words I put in her mouth that she never said and probably never even thought was right, in her own kid logic that deals with absolutes.

You can learn a lot from kids and their weird logic. There’s no room for bullshit. Of course you have to consider the source of who’s telling them the things they’re dealing with in absolutes, but the basic structure is there. I do a dirty thing. I am a dirty man. Stay away from the dirty man. Don’t trust the dirty man. Works for me. I’m going to keep using this logic on myself, because I find it strangely motivating. Of course. It’s so simple. I’m a dirty man. Don’t be a dirty man, me. Stop doing dirty things. It’s the single most perfect mode of self-examination.

What do the kids think? It works.

Adults have an external world that is rich in complexity. Children have an internal world that is rich in complexity. Teenagers are assholes because they only have a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms at work in their tiny little external worlds that have only like 20 people in them, and they think those systems are sufficiently complex to hold all the knowledge they’ll ever need. As if the fate of the world depends on whether or not Evan Bradley has had sex with Emily Durbin, and their insights into the matter carry a great deal of validity with the world at large.

And douchebags are somewhere in the middle of all of this. They know their internal stuff well enough to know what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bullshit thing to do in the external world, and they more or less just go by that.

It’s good to think about yourself the way a kid would, though. They might be scared to death of something dumb and fantastical, like what if lightning goes into the ground and then stays there waiting to shock you for a half an hour (because they only half understood some of the information their Dad was talking about that one time), but they’re right about you. You’re a dirty man.

Guide to Road Rage.

2009-01-29T12:16:00.000-06:00

Cars are custom made for screaming obscenities in private. First of all, they’re cars, so their operation involves interaction with other people in cars who are also running late and screaming obscenities. Second of all, they’re little soundproof cocoons, and even if other people can see that you’re screaming, “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”, at least they and their stupid children can’t hear it. Their stupid fucking children. Go to hell, you stupid fucking children! You hear me? I want you and your little OshKosh B’Goshes to burn in Hell for all eternity! I wish that on you! Fuckers! YOU DON’T KNOW HOW GOOD YOU HAVE IT! I WISH TO GOD ALL I HAD TO DO WAS CHILL OUT IN THE BACK OF A BRAND NEW VOLKSWAGEN ROUTAN AND WATCH “MADAGASCAR 2” WHILE MY ASSHOLE OF A MOM BLOCKS TWO LANES!!!! YOUR MOM IS AN ASSHOLE. READ MY LIPS, YOU LITTLE IDIOTS. YOUR MOM IS AN ASSHOLE. I’M THE ONE PERSON IN YOUR LIFE WHO WILL EVER TELL YOU THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS.

It’s tempting. I read somewhere that the car becomes your personal space when you’re in it, so that if somebody’s on your ass, it feels like they’re on your ass, when in fact they’re a good 12 feet from your actual ass. And you say “This guy’s on my ass!” Instead of the more factually correct, “This guy is driving his car more closely than I am comfortable with to my car’s ass, otherwise known as the rear bumper, since cars don’t have asses!”

I understand this phenomenon. I really do. On a scientific level, I understand what’s happening. More importantly, I know that driving a car is an often very inefficient way to get around in a city. I know about traffic. I know that any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot.

Did you know that? That any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot? People seem like they don’t know that sometimes. Often when they’re impatient due to the fact that the road they’re on is currently a parking lot due to heavy traffic volume. People scream, “Why don’t all these people just GO?!!?!” As if there is some sort of human deficiency preventing everybody from simultaneously arriving at their destination. They envision 6 million cars sliding into their parking spaces at once like some gigantic vehicular ballet, and are newly disappointed whenever this majestic and wondrous impossibility fails to occur. And they blame this scarcity of occurrence on, essentially, every other living person on the face of the Earth, because they know for a fact that they’re doing their individual part to glide effortlessly into their parking space.

But people don’t really mean it when they ask, “Why don’t all these people just GO??!?” It’s a rhetorical question. Try saying, “Because any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot,” to a person who has just asked that rhetorical question, and you will soon find a pair of hands tightly wrapped around your neck. They didn’t ask this question because they want to know about the relatively simple physics of fluid mechanics, interesting though they may be. They are just disappointed at how slowly their lane is moving, and would rather yell a pointless question than set their own head on fire out of frustration.

I can’t tell if yelling things you don’t mean such as stupid questions about simple physics or eternal curses on innocent 4 year olds is a good impulse or a bad impulse. It’s good in that it allows you to express a little anger in a harmless verbal way rather than a not so harmless, “I’m just going to drive on the sidewalk, and if they take me to jail I’ll be glad. Either way, I refuse to explain myself to Paula again. She’ thinks she’s queen of the world just because she wakes up at 4:30 in order to get to this stupid job.” Whether you’re right about Paula or not (you’re right about Paula), it’s a bad idea to drive on the sidewalk. But yelling is also bad because it gives you permission to be as frustrated as you want to be. It’s like, “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK! That’s it. Just this once, I’m driving on the sidewalk.”

And then you also end up saying some things you can’t believe came out of your mouth. Even if you’re just screaming about the traffic in your soundproof bubble of a car, you shouldn’t say some things out loud. Some things are just bad thoughts. And the psychology of the car turning into you when you get inside means that speaking your thoughts seems just like thinking them. But it’s still a little worse.

I said some things I regret having spoken out loud this morning. I regret thinking them too, but I regret screaming them like a baby in a car even more, because that means I let those bad thoughts be real enough to send actual motor signals to the actual muscles of my diaphragm and larynx. And that makes me a little worse of a dude than I was when I got up this morning.

To be fair, I was pretty late to work this morning and I had to drive because I was finally picking up my girlfriend’s car that I wrecked, and I had to pay for it, and she wanted it today, and the only good time to get it was before work, and the place was of course out by the airport, and of course morning traffic from the airport is bad. Of course all of this. But I’ve also had some issues with the train, and been late a couple of times in the last month, and had to profusely apologize about it, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with it again.

Two things:

1. Boo hoo hoo me. Right? Boo hoo hoo. People are starving and a bunch of Ukranians in 1941 had to choose between Hitler and Stalin, and I’m stressed out about being late to work? There’s record unemployment out there, and it’s getting worse than anybody thought. So yeah, I’m stressed about being late to work, but at least I have a work to be late to. Many others are totally fucked in that regard right now.

2. I yelled some pretty hateful words about my girlfriend this morning while I was sitting in traffic in her parents’ car on the way back from the insurance place. I wish I had not said those things. They are not true. At least not a hundred percent.

Of course when I finally got into work it wasn’t that bad. Nobody even said anything to me. Not even Paula. I thought she was going to totally ride my ass. But I called first and the boss guys are too tired from this convention to give a shit right now, and I think Paula just doesn’t want to get yelled at for not yelling at me. She doesn’t really care, as long as she doesn’t have to hear about it. Score one for Paula.

And on the screaming things at my girlfriend who wasn’t there front, in retrospect, I’m fine with it. She screamed some pretty awful things into my voicemail right after I got in that wreck with her car. So in a way, I’m the good guy here because I was just screaming things in a car alone instead of on a recording that could be used against me later for guilt points. Unless she kept a tap recorder going, I’m in the clear. And the whole car situation’s done now. She’s got it back. All I have to do is slave away for the rest of my life trying to pay off the bill. That’ll be easy now that I no longer have a reason to be late to work.

I don’t enjoy being late to work. I should get credit for that. I hate it. I wish there was some kind of “how much did you hate being late/how hard did you try to be on time” breathalyzer test, so you could just blow into a thing, and if you set off the alarm they apologize to you instead of the other way around. That would be ideal.

But that doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t really need to. Because like it (yes, in the case of this morning when I came in late and nobody said anything) or not (no, in the case of my girlfriend unsuccessfully reading my mind about wanting to go as soon as possible and therefore engaging in some unnecessary small talk with the insurance counter person that I’m convinced made me 20 minutes later than I would have been), the world doesn’t revolve around you. People rarely even notice you exist. Especially when you’re in the car. Then you’re just one of “those people” who is once again fucking up the still unfulfilled fantasy of gliding to work in a fast, efficient manner (it only marginally came true on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day).

But it’s generally good that nobody gives a shit about you. It’s just hard not to take things personally when you’re in this sealed little bubble that can travel up to 110 miles per hour without anybody being able to talk to you, and in order to hurt you in any way they’re going to have to really do something crazy like run into you on purpose or something. You just feel so safe and comfortable in there with your own thoughts and music. It’s a little like being up your own ass. Of course your raging id will rear its ugly head. You’re basically in your own personal womb. Hence the boo hoo hoo stuff.

But of course you’re not a baby and it’s not a womb. And it’s not the end of the world if you’re late for work because you wrecked your girlfriend’s car because some Syrian guy doesn’t know how to drive when it’s icy and skidded into your lane in his old rear-wheel-drive Datsun because the whole wide world revolves around you and some omnipotent figure cares about whether or not you’re on time to work and there’s some sort of lesson he’s trying to teach you that involves misplaced white hot fury over the fucking Odwella juice truck. Nope. That’s not what is happening. So maybe cut that asshole of a mom and her two Madagascar-watching kids a break.

Who knows, maybe they’re also having the worst morning ever. Even if they’re not and they’re just slightly more inconsiderate in terms of car driving habits than you are, from a scientific standpoint they’re realistically only one six millionth of the reason for your delay. That’s how traffic works. Any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot. Did you know that?

Please stop strangling me.

Guide to Settling Down.

2009-01-28T13:43:00.000-06:00

What is it? I mean, whenever somebody says “settling down,” you get the idea of like buying a house or condo and getting married to somebody and having a couple of kids. It’s like this specific thing you’ve got in mind like that weird imaginary house from Little Shop of Horrors where Rick Moranis is smiling his ass off. Or when you go and visit your parents in the suburbs and think “this isn’t so bad.”

Actually, it’s more like the parents in the suburbs thing. Settling down means that you’re going to stop giving a shit about who said what and what people are wearing, and you’re going to stop fighting so hard for your life to be some kind of undefined iconoclastic voyage to greatness, and you’re just going to play the hand you’ve been dealt and stop trying to constantly upgrade from the bird in your hand to the birds in the bushes.

Whenever I ask my Dad for any pearls of wisdom (usually this is after like five beers), he first leads with his “now that I’m older I’m starting to see that the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about” gag, which is classic Dad funny, which is to say not funny even a little bit, and then he tell me “it gets easier, but not as much easier as you’d think, and what makes everything easier is you lose the energy and will to fight against everything.”

So I guess that’s what settling down is. Sort of a divine laziness or virtuous resignation.

The fact is, it’s easy to get caught up in shit. But instead of letting it freak you out, it’s good to always take a step back and ask yourself if all this ridiculous shit you’re caught up in is helping you long term. Like say you kind of like your job except for this one lady who’s a “total bitch.” What do you do? Quit and get a new job? Try to get that “total bitch” lady fired for something? Hold on and stand pat for as long as it takes because even though there’s a total bitch lady making your life way less fun, you know it can’t last forever, and you’re learning things about how to live your life while there’s a “total bitch” that you work with?

Well, yeah. That last one is the settling down option. It’s an underrated option, really. Also you can always fart in her office whenever she’s in the bathroom if it gets really bad. You don’t have to totally grow up. And also, maybe, get to know her a little. Maybe she’s just a “total bitch” because she hates her job as much as you do. You probably have a lot in common, in that you are also a total bitch.

Settling down at work is exactly the same thing as settling down in a relationship. Exactly. Let’s say sex is money, affection is the satisfaction of a job well done, and the emotional support you get from knowing somebody’s there for you is your ability to buy things and do stuff you like with the money you get. Let’s also say that putting up with Carla is putting up with Carla. Settling down is the same thing no matter what facet of your life we’re talking about.

There are reasons why settling down is hard in any area of your life. I’m going to take the scenic route on this. Bear with me.

I think there was some sort of recent scientific study that said all kinds of stuff is wrong with modern life. I forget. But the gist I hazily remember from whatever thing I read on the internet or in a magazine at the airport newsstand is: people all have anxiety orders and depression which may or may not technically exist way more now (in the era of diagnosing the fuck out of people) than they ever have. And there are all these theories about why all the anxiety and depression, like some people think we’re eating “panic meat” because the slaughterhouses are not particularly concerned with not freaking out the cows and chickens, and right before they die they are afraid as hell, and that fills them with fear hormones, and that’s what you’re eating when you chomp into an Angry Whopper with Chicken Fries, and that’s why you act like an asshole and lay on the horn for five minutes when somebody ahead of you doesn’t immediately go when the light turns green. I think that’s a pretty ridiculous but not entirely implausible theory. There are others.

Of course there’s no way of proving that people are more nervous and neurotic now than they’ve ever been, but anecdotally, people sure do seem pretty freaked out all the time. I see people screaming at each other over parking spaces and ID badge requirements almost every day. I myself get frantic and desperate whenever I’m inconvenienced for more than one second by an inexperienced traveler in the airport security line. You have to take off your hat and your shoes and your jacket. And your belt wouldn’t hurt either, guy. These phrases run through my head, mixed with curse words and the latent assumption that HE is doing this TO ME. ON PURPOSE.

I find myself getting furious over things like this, and it’s all because I don’t want to wait in this line that’s essentially a pre-line for the right to sit down and do nothing while waiting for the plane to leave. But for some reason I need those 5 seconds more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life. And that’s me. I think of myself as being maybe only a little more high strung than normal. Like I can tell myself I’m being a moron in those situations and it calms me down and I don’t usually do anything about my feelings of desperation, not even a verbal “come ON.” But even if I’m outwardly calm, lines stress me out because they’re generally for things that aren’t even worth doing.

I’ve heard that my one Grandfather who I never met notoriously hated lines and would avoid them and their related activities on a near psychotic level. I inherited this gene. Generally speaking, I would rather wait in the car for the entirety of my adult life. I don’t know if things are worse now than they were then, like maybe there are more and longer lines now because there are more people and everybody’s more worried about a terrorist than they used to be. But still. I get crazy when I’m in line. But that’s just me. And I’m one of millions.

So there’s no debating that neurotic anxiety and depression do seem fairly rampant.

There’s some general philosophy-type pondering of why there’s this “modern” phenomenon of ubiquitous anxiety. I’ve read this type of pondering in magazine articles and internet things. A lot of the ponderances point towards the flooding of every marketplace with an overabundance of similar options as a culprit for why everybody’s kind of on edge. I think this makes a lot of sense. Like in that deleted scene on the Borat DVD where he’s at a Winn Dixie and he asks the guy if all of the bags of cheese are cheese and the only reason it didn’t make it into the movie is because Sacha Baron Cohen totally cracks during it, which is a shame because it would have been the most amazing part of the movie. But if you haven’t seen it, there’s basically like 50 different varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese available for sale at the Winn Dixie.

Right. So. What does this have to do with settling down and why it’s hard?

I won’t get too far into “modes of alienation” and the “corporate oligopoly’s divide-and-conquer strategy for maximizing profits” or all that, because that would turn me into the most boring guy at the bar. Let me say that if everybody’s neurotic all the time, it makes sense that it’d be more difficult to find somebody whose self-obsessed neuroses match up well enough with yours for the both of you to ever want to be in the same room. And also you’re in an environment where you’re more or less used to being bombarded with choices all the time, so you’re never quite sure that your neuroses couldn’t match better with somebody else’s in another situation.

Let me return to the Borat shredded cheese scenario for a moment. Basically, if you replace “varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese” with “nice smart pretty women with vaginas” and “available for sale at the Winn Dixie” with “that a regular dude will be able to put his penis into during the course of his lifetime,” then yeah, there’s basically like 50 different varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese available for sale at the Winn Dixie. That’s what you’re dealing with in 2009.

It’s really hard for a dude to settle down because you can put your 50-gig LifeTouch iPenis on shuffle these days and just jam out until you’re well into your 50’s. You do not have to settle down. Ever.

Until you sort of redefine the term “settling down” for your purposes. Instead of thinking of it as something daunting that you have to do all at once, like moving into Rick Moranis’s house, just think of it as a gradual process of maturity that will happen naturally with subtle guidance from your brain. Who’s to say Rick Moranis isn’t renting that dream house? I mean, how’s he going to afford a mortgage on a Little Shop of Horrors clerk’s pay? And it’s not all that great. It’s clearly on a Hollywood soundstage, and that’s no kind of neighborhood to raise kids in. Look what happened to the girl from Diff’rent Strokes. Rick Moranis has it all wrong in that movie.

If you want to romanticize the whole idea of “settling down” into this ridiculous thing that you’ll never be able to do in order to justify your current selfish behavior, or if you want to make a martyr of yourself for never being able to successfully “settle down” under these guidelines in order to justify being like “fuck it” instead of trying to grow up a little, then you’ll have nobody but yourself to blame when your iPenis runs out of batteries and your warranty is over and you look in the mirror and realize your face looks like a gigantic albino prune and you’ve got to still be alive for probably another 30 years so you can be the mayor of Bummerville.

Settling down really isn’t that hard or that complicated. You’re doing it already. You’re doing it. Your body won’t let you do all the stupid shit you used to do. You can still rev it up once in a while, but it takes longer to recover, and you’re always less sure that you want to do it the next time. Conditions have to be pretty goddamned favorable these days to keep you up partying past 4. It used to happen on a Wednesday just for the hell of it. Now it’s gotta be a special occasion. So you’re settling down. Good job. It’s nothing to fight against. Not with your diminished liver. Settle down.

Apparently, from the articles I dimly remember reading that one time, “settling down” in the Rick Moranis sense used to be way fucking easier. Like settling down wasn’t even really an option because there was no such thing as reliable birth control and you’d just knock somebody up and then have a real live shotgun wedding with somebody’s Dad standing there with a shotgun and then when it was over you went to work for your father in law at the ice plant and the whole rest of your life was laid out for you and you’d have no time to deal with an existential crisis. You’d be too busy with bills and being a functional alcoholic and sending your two kids to state college so they’ll be better off than you and then buying a retirement condo in some shitty place like Panama City, Florida. And you were fine with it because one time in Korean you saw a guy’s face get blown off and mowing the lawn for the rest of your life sounds like the best possible way to spend your time.

Now everything is “complicated,” but not actually complicated, just complicated in a “50 different varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese available for sale at the Winn Dixie” kind of a way. In other words, all your perceived troubles are self-created and all you need is to knock somebody up and then get a job at the ice plant (or modern ice plant equivalent) and you can say goodbye to your will to fight against everything all the time.

It seems like there’s been a rash of babies like this recently. I’m not saying babies make you grow up or anything, like you should run out and put a baby in somebody just so you don’t have to worry about your crossroads-like late 20’s crisis, but if you’ve got somebody in your life that doesn’t always drive you crazy and you knock her up, you could do a lot worse than to marry her and settle down and work your ass off for the kid’s benefit. Right? There are a lot of people I know who’ve done this recently, and most of them are doing fine. Ish. In theory. Actually, they’re struggling just as much as ever. But at least they’re not worrying about this stupid “settling down” crap.

You could do worse than a shotgun wedding. It’s sure a lot easier to figure out than it is to be standing in the pre-bagged shredded cheese aisle at the Winn Dixie staring out into space with “pre-bagged shredded cheese” on your laundry list and a tick developing in your eyebrow because you’ve convinced yourself that the stakes are really really high (because you’re worth it? I don’t know), and you’re sitting there hoping that a bag of shredded cheese will just leap into your shopping cart, but you’re also kind of worried about that because one time you accidentally bought a bag of cheese that just leapt into your cart and then later when you tried it the accidental bag of cheese ruined your tacos. And also there are no price tags. And the cheese bags are women.

So in this analogy you’ve got no choice but to just pick a bag of cheese and cross your fingers. Then you take it home and put it on your tacos, and if you don’t like it, you’re going to have to either throw out the cheese that you bought for however much, or teach yourself to love the flavor of those tacos with the weird cheese on them. After a while you’re going to get really fucking tired of going to the Winn Dixie to try a new variety of pre-bagged shredded cheese for your tacos. You just stick with one, and you go and get it and you get the hell out of there, and you’re glad you can rely on that one specific kind of pre-bagged shredded cheese.

I’m going to stick to this analogy because tacos are great.

Then if you find your ideal pre-bagged shredded cheese, you go to the CostCo and get a ten pound bag of it and then, lucky you, never worry about what cheese you’re putting on your tacos ever again. Like you might see some pretty fancy expensive cheese later at a taco restaurant, but you’ll feel like a huge dickhead for trying it because you’ve got fucking ten pounds of pre-bagged shredded cheese at home that you’ve already paid for, and you know for a fact that it’s good.

That’s basically how it works, right?

Anyway. Settle down. You are already. You might as well continue with it because nothing is ever going to be easy and then one day you’re going to die. That and the hokey pokey are what it's all about.

Guide to Being Hungover at Work.

2009-01-27T12:29:00.000-06:00

Being hungover at work tells you a few things about yourself. It speaks volumes about you and the fact that you’re hungover, you and the fact that you’re at work, you and the fact that you didn’t use one to stop the other. In a way it’s kind of a modern display of everyday heroism, that you have both partying and getting the job done as simultaneous priorities. It’s also a modern display of everyday dipshitism, because you almost barfed on a city bus this morning in front of a bunch of strangers who probably wouldn’t have wanted to see that.

Man, that bus ride was rough. You really were just about going to barf. You even got a few gags in there and the start of the warm droolies. That would have been a nightmare. All those people. You could maybe have pleaded severe motion sickness the way that bus driver was sadistically stopping and starting as if he was specifically targeting you and your queasy stomach, but you don’t ever want to barf on a crowded city bus if you can help it. Even if it was really caused by honest, innocent motion sickness and not stupid, complicit-in-your-own-demise you and the copious amounts of whiskey you slurped down last night. Either way, you can’t barf on a bus. Think of the times you’ve been on a city bus that smelled like barf, and remind yourself of how unpleasant that is. Multiply that by a factor of you barfing into your backpack six inches from some Polish cleaning lady’s face, and you’ve got an idea of how bad that would have been.

You’ve got to get off the bus if you’re going to barf. It doesn’t matter how late you’re running. Rules like this are important to follow, otherwise everybody would just barf willy nilly all over the place, and every single bus would be full of barfstink. And busses are bad enough already when they don’t stink like barf.

You know what’s the worst? When the bus smells like pee and you can’t tell which one is the pee seat and you don’t want to sniff your seat really hard before you sit down because if it’s the pee seat you’ll be sniffing really close to somebody’s pee, and you also don’t want to ask everybody in the bus if they know which one is the pee seat, like a big announcement of “Alright everybody, it smells like pee. Which one of these seats is the pee seat?! I don’t mind smelling pee for a few stops, I just don’t want to sit in it!” You don’t want to do that because what if the pee-er is still on the bus and he’s still in the pee seat and he’s got a knife and he’s resolved to kill the first person who mentions the pee seat? Peeing on the bus is crazy enough already. The leap in logic to the knife murderer scenario is not too big of a stretch.

So you just try to use your eyeballs for the pee seat, but it’s impossible to see semi-evaporated pee on one of those Scotch-guard bus seats. Plus they’re all already stained with some teenager's sandwich grease from 2005, so you can't tell from a quick visual if there's pee or just an old sandwich grease stain. And people are spread evenly throughout the bus. Why? Do they not even care about being in or near the pee seat? What is up with the people who live or do business near Lawrence? Are they all immune to pee? Unbelievable. There are absolutely no recognizable outward signs about which one of these things is the pee seat. All open seats are equal candidates for pee seat. So you just have to play pee seat Russian roulette and hope for the best.

God, that is the worst. If I ever peed in a seat on a bus, I would write a note that says, “Caution: Pee Seat.” Or, “In case you’re wondering from the smell, this is it. This is the seat I peed in.” Maybe even, “Obviously I hadn’t planned on the chain of events that led me to pee on this seat, and I’m very sorry it happened.” Or at least I’d leave an empty Funions bag on the seat or something so somebody would move the Funions bag and see and smell the pee and be like, “oh, pee seat.”

Even if I witnessed somebody else peeing in a seat I would write a note. “Don’t sit here unless you want pee on your butt." Or "Some weird fat guy with a beard peed here.” Maybe even "Pee Seat: 2:26am 1/27/09." You have to look out for your fellow humans and try not to let them sit in pee. It’s the least you can do. Or the driver. Where was the driver? Couldn’t somebody have mentioned “hey, that man is currently peeing?” Doesn’t the driver have some “pee seat” warning tape for emergency situations like this? What the hell? There’s no excuse for not knowing which one is the pee seat. It’s a complete breakdown of civilization. Now that I think about it.

And barfing on a crowded morning rush hour bus would be worse than not knowing which one is the pee seat. Your odds with pee seat are pretty good, after all. You have one hundred percent sure thing odds of being grossed out and horrified by the sight and smell of some dude horking last night's whiskey right there on the early bus. You're still not awake enough yet to consider this bus ride technically part of your day. Witnessing a barf would be positively indecent at this delicate hour.

Sure, maybe somebody barfs if it's late at night. That's the risk you run. People get drunk and barf and pee at night. That's fair game. In fact, you should probably have barfed on the bus last night instead of now. Would have made more sense. But witnessing a barf on your crowded morning busride you take to the job you don't enjoy? That's tantamount to somebody breaking into your house and shitting on your dinner plates and then setting the table for a romantic dinner for two while you sleep, so when you wake up there's a suprise romantic shitmeal on your kitchen table and the window's open. That's how bad of a violation it would be to have to see and smell some dude's barf on the bus during your morning commute. It'd be enough to ruin your whole day, and depending on what you're going through it might quite possibly plunge you into delusional city-fury madness for good. And we've already got enough of those guys running around peeing in busses.

So to avoid the end of days, you’ve got to do everything in your power to avoid barfing (or peeing without proper notification) on a bus. No matter how hungover you are. It’s the only thing protecting us all from total chaos.

But you didn’t barf this morning. You almost barfed, but you didn’t barf. Great job, dipshit.

Now you’re hungover at work. Work. This job you have. You’re lucky to have it, and this is how you treat it? Like a convalescent home? Like some kind of health resort where you can sit on your ass all day and drink Alka Seltzer and free ginger ale from the break room? Yes. Damn right. That’s how you’re treating it. Today at least.

This is a tough thing to pull of if you actually have something important to do, but let’s face it, you don’t have something important to do. Maybe it’s important to somebody else who’s not you, but it’s not important to you. So it’s not important. It wasn’t important enough to stop you from pouring that fifth Jameson last night. So it’s not important. Unless: it’s not important to you, but you’d probably get fired for not doing it today. Or if not fired, chastised enough and disappoint-your-bossed enough to make your work life into an unnecessarily-minute-levels-of-critique festival for a long, long time. So it’s a tough thing to pull off, mostly because you have to pull it off. There are some stakes. They’re a pain in the ass that you don’t need, but they’re stakes. Unless you don’t do anything all day anyway, and the boss is out of town this week, and you can get away with an in-service day off where you don’t have to burn a sick day but you go to work and do basically the same thing you’d do at home with a sick day, minus the sleeping and plus a collared shirt. And instead of watching a Bonanza rerun on TV, you’ve got to YouTube it. But otherwise it’s the same. In-service days off are the best. So are regular days off, though. More.

At lunchtime you are going to get pizza. Plain cheese pizza. Just really plain. But warm. Warm and bready. That’s going to be great. You might even have enough gas in the tank after that to get to work on some of this stuff you’re supposed to do before your boss gets back. Just the super easy stuff, maybe. But still.

Just make sure that pizza is super plain and doesn’t bother your stomach any. Maybe if you’re still kind of raw at quittin’ time, make yourself puke before you leave. You don’t want to do it on a bus. And you should pee too. Even if you don’t have to. As my Mom used to say before car trips, “just to make sure.” You do not want to barf or pee on a bus. Ever. That’s a person who’s relying on the kindness of strangers to get him though his day. That’s not a man who can handle his whiskey. That’s not any kind of a man. Or woman if you’re a woman. You have to be the kind of man who will drink all night and work all day and do it again the next day. Except you’re a receptionist, and your version of working all day is answering like twelve phone calls. But still. Be a man. Dipshit.

Guide to Winter.

2009-01-26T13:29:00.001-06:00

Winter in Chicago is pretty tough. I mean it’s not a huge big deal, but you do tend to have a hard time getting through it. It just takes a lot out of you. It’s kind of like if you don’t exercise for three months and all of a sudden you run short on breath just from climbing five stairs and you’re like “(huff) What am I, (puff) like, (huff) a hundred (puff)? I feel like (huff) I’m on (puff) another planet (huff), where the gravity is (puff), like (huff), two times as much (puff) gravity (huff) as normal (puff). I’m exhausted (huff) from those five steps (puff) like I was a 400 pound guy right now (huff).” But it’s that feeling for your whole life. You’re like “I can’t believe I have to walk a half block to drop off my Netflix before I get another DVD. Really? I give up. I’ll just watch ‘Capote’ again.”

I usually combine cozy domesticity with a nice, even liquor-based stupor to make me feel good about myself. And I don’t worry about the fact that I can no longer climb stairs. Who cares about that right now? Stairs are only for getting to places other than home. No thanks. And “Capote” is a pretty decent flick. I could probably watch it four times.

It’s good to give up a little. Just a little. It’s also good to fight your way from a negative-degree windchill to go to the grocery store and buy soup for yourself, which is more than enough effort to feel good about staying in. You’ve earned it. It’s kind of like an antisocial version of partying really hard because you just did something great. Except it involves 12 hours of nature shows while you’re still in your PJ’s because you cleaned your coffee table instead of dancing naked to Billy Idol with a Mayan woman at 4am in some anonymous rich dude’s house because you sold your screenplay. But the same idea drives it. Go nuts. You’ve earned it.

This winter I’m really into two things: used records and World War II documentaries. You put on a World War II documentary until you’re too whiskeydrunk to read the subtitles, and then you switch to used records and pot, and then you go to bed at 9pm. Repeat until April. That’s more or less the program I’m on if I can help it. Everything else is kind of an inconvenience, even if I’m really enjoying myself.

That might sound to you like “seasonal depression.” But it’s really more like “just how I’m living right now, get off my back.” I’m fine. I feel fine. Of course I can barely do anything, and the idea of buying razors, batteries, and toothpaste later today feels oddly quixotic and unnecessarily difficult, like I’m wistfully hoping against all odds that those items will improve my life even though I know they will in a very real and immediate way in terms of my face, teeth, and remote control. But I feel fine. I know I’ll rise to the occasion and purchase those things. That’s what I do. I rise to the occasion. And then I will celebrate my toothpaste, battery, and razor-buying triumph by watching both Teen Wolfs and ordering some Jimmy John’s for delivery even though it’s only 5 blocks away. That’s just what I will do. I feel great about it already.

This is why the World War II documentaries come in handy. I was watching a documentary about the eastern front last night and holy shit. Just holy, holy shit. I will not be complaining about anything again ever for the rest of my life, thank you. Not even taking 20 minutes out of my busy documentary-watching schedule to get toothpaste.

The toughest choice I have to face on any given day is what subway line I should take to get to work. Those people in the Ukraine in 1941 had to choose between Hitler and Stalin.

Let’s run down some of the pros and cons of each guy…

Hitler.

Pro: Might kill you through planned starvation rather than a bullet.

Con: Will kill you.

Stalin.

Pro: Will only kill you if you don’t fight to the death.

Con: Will probably kill you anyway.

...And let’s get to the pros and cons of the trains I could take to work…

Blue Line.

Pro: Will get me to work.

Con: Might be late.

Brown Line.

Pro: Will get me to work.

Con: Might be late.

I should also mention that if I’m late to work more than 20 minutes as a result of either the Blue Line or the Brown Line, the penalty will be less severe than a year in the Gulag, by a factor of one year and no Gulag, minus one sheepish apology to Linda. I also have more than a 5% chance of surviving being late to work. It’s probably more like a 15% chance.

I’m glad I watched this documentary last night, because I was having a shitty week. I was just stressed out about a bunch of stuff. Guess what? All that stuff I was stressed out about would be a tremendous luxury to anybody living in the Ukraine in 1942. They would love to have to get all the publications together before the expo. They would love it. They would wear their knuckles to the bone sharpening their spoon against a rock in order to use it to stab somebody for the privilege of getting all the publications together before the expo. They would do this with a complete lack of emotion, later to be shrugged off in a documentary interview while the subtitles read, “What was I to do, it was a war. It was a war.” And this is even if they knew in advance that Luke would ask them at the last possible minute if they can do this pamphlet in a darker blue, like he did to me. Which was a real pain. It’s not like he didn’t have a proof in his hand two weeks ago. So inconsiderate.

And then while you’re thinking about how difficult your life isn’t, and how grateful you are not to be marching 500 miles through the snow with rags on your feet, you get to listen to the dulcet tones of Billy Joel’s “52nd Street” that you bought at a yard sale for 75 cents. So now not only are you not starving to death, you’re also celebrating because you managed against all odds to procure yourself a frozen Stauffer’s personal pizza from the corner gas station right down the street from your house. Don’t feel guilty about those Germans and Russians. You have struggles of your own to go through. Go to town. You’ve got a tab at Zanzibar, my friend.

Winter can actually be great if you look at it the right way. You really get some time to yourself, which is always good. Even if it’s too much time and you have to watch World War II movies to pull yourself momentarily out of your own butt, it’s still pretty good. At least you’re not actively making anybody else miserable, right? Unless you are. And then it’s their fault for not steering clear of you. You’ve got a lot on your mind.

You also at least feel like you’re getting a lot done. Even if you’re not. You can just do a regular amount of living, and it’ll seem really productive because it takes more effort to do everything.

It’s also good for friendships because nobody else is doing anything either, and instead of having a long and weirdly competitive conversation about “what are you up to these days?” you can just admit to doing nothing and then talk about Russian history for like half an hour, which you will do even if it’s boring because you got out of your house enough to get to this bar and you’ll be damned if you’re leaving again without whiskeyfying your face into the can’t-freeze-it zone. Maybe I’m a closet chronic depressive, but I find half hour goofaroonie-filled talks about Russian History with a casual acquaintance to be ten times more enjoyable than the old “what are you doing” line where they talk for a long while about all the great things they’re doing before asking you what you’re up to and you tell them “I’ve been watching World War II documentaries and listening to a lot of Billy Joel records. Old, dusty Billy Joel records. (long pause) So that’s what I’m up to. (swig of whiskey).” For the sake of conversation, it’s better when both people are doing a ton of awesome shit or both people are doing nothing. You’ve got to be on the same page.

Luckily, Chicago winter has the same effect on almost everybody. Nobody can get out of bed, and everybody’s retreating into whatever bizarre fascination they’ve got going. If pursued, they will admit to you that they’ve been wearing the same pair of long johns under their clothes for 10 straight days. This is the Chicago winter equivalent of a cross dresser secretly wearing women’s underwear, but instead of panties it’s sweatpants. Long johns are essentially sweatpants that can keep a secret. People will agree with you about this if you venture outside of your apartment long enough to talk to them. They are in a zombie-like daze that makes them comfortable with telling their personal hygiene details to a complete stranger. It turns every night out into one of those post-breakup sadfests where you hang out at the VFW hall and get an earful of everybody’s totally insane-sounding life story. Those can be great.

Take comfort in that, Chicagoans and winterers everywhere. It’s bad for everybody right now. Even all the people who live in Los Angeles and are strangely desperate to tell you about how much they enjoy it so you’ll feel the need to move there, as if they’re trying to lessen their own eternal torture by bringing more souls to the devil. They’re probably going through the same thing right now. L.A. is a lot like winter all the time, just because it takes forever to get anywhere and you can never find parking so nothing’s worth doing. It’s just warm, too. So what? There’s worse things than being cold. When it’s finally Spring, you’ll be able to have one of those days where you float effortlessly from one place to another, running into old friends the whole way, and they’ll be stuck trying to back out of the In N’ Out Burger parking lot.

And you’re not dying as the result of some kind of a war atrocity, either. And you have easy access to liquor. And “It’s Only Rock And Roll To Me.” And even though you just ran out of a roll of toilet paper, and that seems for a second like an end-of-the-world level crisis, you have another roll under the sink. It’s astonishing how something like owning a roll of toilet paper can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat like that, taking you through a full range of emotions in the blink of an eye for something so trivial. And later I’ll have toothpaste, batteries, and razors and I’ll feel the same way. It’s great. What a ride. Winter. I love it.

Guide to Not Being a Douchebag-for-Life.

2009-01-22T11:37:00.000-06:00

You don’t want to be a douchebag for your entire life. It’s possible. I’ve met a few old guys out there who’ve gotten drunk in whatever bar I’ve happened to be in and felt like talking to me. Some of them are douchebags-for-life type guys. It’s unsettling to hear an older guy, like in his 50’s or 60’s, use the phrase, “So right now I’m fucking this fat bitch I met on the internet,” and then watch as they carelessly throw back the rest of beer number nine. It’s like looking in a funhouse mirror of yourself if you kept up this whole douchebag thing for another 40 years.

You’ve got to avoid that. You should be afraid. Very afraid.

Luckily, there are ways to avoid it.

Way #1:

Do a lot of crazy shit now while you’re young. A lot of these douchebags-for-life type of dudes really bought into the whole “duty of marriage” thing at a pretty young age, and they’re from a time when there was real pressure for that.

Like they’ll tell you about the great sex they had with their high school girlfriend before they met their wife, and you’ll think, “there’s no such thing as ‘great sex with your high school girlfriend,’ because when you’re in high school you don’t even know which way your penis bends yet, and high school sex is like a trial by fire where you learn a couple of ways it doesn’t bend. That’s not great sex, that’s a sexlab, and if you have more sex later, you realize how not very good that sex was. That was novelty sex.”

You’ll be right. “Great sex with my high school girlfriend” is not an impressive track record of wild oats sown before you get married. Things are different now, anyway. Like the guy will be telling you about all this and you’ll want to say, “Old man, you have no idea what things are like now.”

But he probably:

A. has a good idea of what things are like now because he’s “fucking this fat bitch he met off the internet” and that’s at least kind of how it’s like now for sad assholes like him, and…

B. Knows things weren’t all that different when he was younger. There just wasn’t free porn on the internet. Back then you had to use you lunch money to buy nude lady playing cards from that one weird kid who had a moustache in the fifth grade. But the effect was more or less the same.

Nevermind your kneejerk of “this guy is out of touch.” You should listen to the guy because he’s older than you and he’s on a roll, and at the very least, even if he’s just a rambling, drunken mess he’s telling you, between the lines, “Don’t get married until you’re so ragged out tired of running around like a douchbag that you just want a permanent rest from all of it, otherwise you’ll be a 60 year old dude in a bar telling a 27 year old about your high school girlfriend as if he should be impressed.”

You should be doing a lot of crazy shit now, if for no other reason than because when you’re an old man you’ll want your stories to actually be interesting. And not that fake kind of interesting where the people who are listening are like, “I can’t believe this old dude said the f word.” That’s a gimme for old guys, and it wears off pretty quick. It’s also pretty sad to get into a story-off with a bunch of youngsters when you’re an old dude, because that’s an insecure thing to do. Story-offs are for peers. No, you want to have the kind of stories that people want to listen to not just because they’re a good story, but also because they have some semblance of a point. Within the story, not that phantom point of, “Don’t be like me. Don’t end up an old dude with three alimonies and a 40 foot sailboat trying desperately to show off.” Otherwise your twilight years will be one long snoozefest for everybody around you.

Do a lot of crazy shit. I mean real deal crazy shit. Not fake crazy shit where the end of the story is, “I puked all day the next day.” Please. Real crazy shit doers have a word for “I puked all day the next day” stories. They’re called “Wednesday.” You can’t brag about how much you drank in the story. The story can’t be about that. It’s about what you did and what you learned along the way. That’s what makes it satisfying.

You don’t want to tell a story if it could be synopsized into “One time I got really drunk and fucked a tree.” If you say that out loud to anybody, they’re going to back away slowly without taking their eyes off of you. I’ve heard that one. That was the whole story. From some weird dude who got drunk and fucked a tree. It was one of those things where you’re hanging out with a kind of weird group, and there’s one superweird dude who doesn’t say anything all night, and then out of nowhere he pipes up with his tree fucking story, and you’re like “Jesus. I didn’t realize I was hanging out with a serial killer. My bad.” I wanted to turn him into the police just in case to see if there’d been any unsolved ritualistic murders recently.

So yeah, that’s a bad story, and poorly told. Fucking a tree is not an end, it’s a jumping off point for something special that will happen later that night, like calling off a blowjob because your penis was covered in scratches from fucking the tree. That’s a good story. And it’s a good story because you had the balls to get yourself back in shape to go back to the party after your friends dared you to fuck a tree and you somehow made that work. You can’t just be some weirdo who voluntarily fucks trees for no reason while he’s alone and then brags about it later.

Although, that guy will never be a douchebag-for-life. He’ll be the kind of guy you don’t quite trust at the old folks home when he insists it was an confounding accident how his old man balls just fell out of his robe just now while you were there visiting your girlfriend’s grandmother. But that’s different from a douchebag, and it’s a road that treefucking story dude was probably headed down anyway, regardless of whether or not he fucked a tree one time. So I guess it’s fine if you fuck a tree now and again if you’re so inclined. Maybe it’s a good idea for you to blow off a little of that crazy, treefucking steam. Just don’t ever tell that story while there are girls around.

The craziness of it is good, the story is bad. I’m pro-treefucking. Not in a run-out-and-try-it kind of a way, just as a “well, hats off to you, that really is a pretty crazy thing to do” salute to the weirdos of the world kind of a thing. My larger point about avoiding being a douchebag-for-life is, even if it’s fucking a tree, you have to do stuff like that. You have to do real, meaningfully crazy things in your life. Now. Treefucking counts. And then later you’ll never turn into that old douchebag-for-life at the bar, because you’ll have done so many crazy things in your life you’ll actually be grateful for a quiet night in instead of being Johnny TellYouAboutTheWorld at the local watering hole.

Way #2

Don’t get rich.

You have to be rich to be a true douchebag for the rest of your life. Otherwise you’ll never be able to afford the true old douchebag lifestyle. They have to do a lot of traveling, and they have to spend a shitload of money on that “fat bitch they met on the internet” because otherwise nobody’s going to want to fuck them. Could you imagine wanting to get laid so bad at age 59 that you’re willing to turn your back on a 20-plus year marriage and three kids? No. You can’t. You shouldn’t. Not unless you’re rich enough to go through another divorce. That’s one thing these old douchebags have in common.

It’s a part of their stories, too. Like they’ll tell you about a time they got shitfaced drunk with the commissioner of baseball and took a charter plane to Montana to go fly fishing but forgot to bring a hat and the next day they had second degree burns on their bald scalps, and so the point of the story is they never go out in the sun anymore. And also the subpoint of that story is, “I’m a rich old boring douchebag.”

Way #1 takes care of the boring part, and Way #2 takes care of the rich part. The only way the ridiculous “always follow your dreams” maxim from high school graduation makes any sense is if you try your best when you’re young to figure out what you love and then try your best to do it for a living instead of going for the easy bucks you can always get for being competent, then you won’t turn into an old douchebag who feels the need to misbehave as soon as he retires.

Seriously, if you spent an entire lifetime doing work that imbued you with a sense of meaning and purpose in your life, would you be out in the hotel/resort bar telling useless stories about you and the commissioner of baseball and fly fishing? No. You’d be in the dive bar telling heartbreakingly beautiful stories about how you took in one of your parolee’s kids because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and it made your life seem a little more worth it because you’ll always know that even though you can’t change people unless they want to change themselves, you at least know that you really did help one person who wouldn’t have been able to help herself, and, looking back, that’s good enough for you.

That’s the kind of story you can only tell if you’ve spent a life not giving a fuck about money. Or at least knowing that it’s not the most important thing out there.

If you spend your whole life doing things for money, what happens is one day you look at yourself, and you’re all wrinkled, and you think, “I put myself in a cage, and I don’t care about any of this shit. It’s time to buy a toupee and go on a coke binge.” And then you run out and fuck somebody you met on the internet who’s maybe a little large and just wants your money anyway so the jokes on you, and you and the internet girl go on bungee jumping adventures in Costa Rica and you bore everybody on your tour bus to death with your baseball commissioner story.

Of course, you have to be somewhat careful that you don’t fall into the opposite trap where you really get into the whole “starving artist” thing and end up never getting married and living on a couch somewhere on somebody’s enclosed porch with crumbs in your beard and a mangy alleycat as your best friend. That’s no way to go, either. The “follow your dreams” thing can be a crock of shit if you take it too seriously. Who do you think you are, Martin Luther King? Your dreams aren’t THAT important.

But, you know, err on the side of following your dreams instead of going the “just get rich at the expense of any moderate sense of self, and then roll around luxuriously in my own shit like a self-contented pig for the rest of my life” route.

Way #3

Stop being a douchebag.

So we’ve tackled “rich” and “boring.” The next thing you’ve got to work on is “douchebag” if you don’t want to end up a rich, boring old douchebag. You don’t have a choice on old. That’s going to happen whether you like it or not.

Not being a douchebag with age is a very natural process if you’re doing things right. If you’re really going wild the way you should according to Way #1, you’ll be too tired by the time you reach 50 to be any kind of reasonably outrageous douchebag. That’s just the natural petering out of douchebag momentum, and it happens even to douchebags-for-life, which is scary because when you meet these old dudes and they start uncorking their wordholes and you think “my God what a douchebag,” you get to think how much worse they probably used to be when they were your age. You’d probably want to shoot them out of a cannon into a always-running-blender factory if you met one of them while they were in their “still young enough to be cocky” phase.

The real trick to stopping being a douchebag is doing as much crazy shit as you can while you’re still in the mood for it, then settling down, and then appreciatively getting involved with some people you care about more than you care about yourself. For most people this is a marriage and kids, but some people are immune. You’ve got to take care of Way #1 and Way #2 first. Otherwise you’ll never be in the right frame of mind to care about anything more than yourself, because your whole life will seem like a series of events that conspired to make you a hapless victim of circumstance. Instead of the real story, which is you were too chickenshit to stand up for yourself, fuck a tree, and pursue your passion for concert trombone, and now you think you owe it to yourself to fuck your wife over and do some bungee jumping in Costa Rica.

But if that’s your story, I guess it could be worse, right? I mean at least your whole life doesn’t revolve around tricking the nurses into touching your old, withered pee pee. Treefucker.

Guide to Huge Crowds of People.

2009-01-20T09:58:00.000-06:00

Avoid them. You hear me, DC residents? Stay inside. Do not go to the inauguration. Do you know what you’ll be seeing at the inauguration? A tiny, eloquent little dot speaking about the challenges America faces today and how we can’t do it alone. If you’re lucky, you will see a projection screen. On this projection screen will be the same image you could see if you were sitting comfortably at home: Barack Obama talking about the challenges facing America and how we can’t do it alone.

If you miss out on being in the crowd, you’ll miss the elation of thousands of strangers straining to hear him speak about the challenges facing America and about how we can’t do it alone. You’ll miss tears rolling down everybody’s faces and massive throngs of people believing in hope and peace and prosperity and service and goodwill between Americans. You’ll miss a great outpouring of joy. I live in Chicago. I missed the great outpouring of joy when he made his acceptance speech. I was busy sitting comfortably at home, watching that same acceptance speech about the challenges facing America, and how we can’t do it alone. And I outpoured a small, private amount of my own joy.

The outpouring of small, private amounts of one’s own joy are just as good.

Happy inauguration, everybody. Tape a ziplock bag of whiskey to your legs.

Guide to Barfing Out Of Your Mom’s Prius.

2009-01-19T15:00:00.000-06:00

When you’re 28, you can’t party like you used to when you were 22.

A major reason why you can’t is because you’re now too smart to want to, and instead of guzzling grain alcohol until the party turns into a "do we need to go to the hospital" debate (answer: yes, because A. safety first, and B. it's funny), you sip some nice bourbon from a flask you brought until all the 22 year-old dudes pass out like flies around you, and then you calmly go home with one or more of their girlfriends. Or else you just leave, because who wants to hang out with a bunch of 22 year-olds who are chugging grain alcohol and barfing their lungs out? That’s not your kind of party.

But also if for some reason you’re 28 and stuck in all-22 world without a flask, you might be tempted to try to party like you did when you were 22, and you physically won’t be able to do it.

Let’s say it’s one of your asshole brother's college graduation, and they party in a different (not harder) way than you did when you were 22 because they’re on the Frisbee team at a gigantic state school that’s surrounded by those astounding drive-thru beerbuying places. Your college experience was more urban, and it involved more of a weird drug/bizarre behavior kind of experimental thing where you’re 17 years old and all of a sudden your head’s in some gigantic black drag queen’s dress on the dancefloor of some weird party you don’t know how to get home from. Not that Frisbee teams and state schools are better or worse, they’re just different.

Well, guess what? You’re not going to be able to handle the state school Frisbee team’s rigorous party program. And you really shouldn’t try it. Except sometimes you have to try something you’re not capable of in order to know not to try it again in the future. That is if you don’t die from whatever it is. You probably won’t die from partying like a 22 year-old with your asshole brother’s Frisbee friends. You’ll just feel old. And also near-fatally hungover. Which will also make you feel old because you’re too old to be that hungover. You like your days too much.

But this isn’t about partying. If you’re 28 and you get stuck in a night of pretending to be 22 for sibling rivalry dickmeasuring purposes, the real danger you’re running is barfing out of your mom’s Prius the next day. Pink stuff. On the highway. Because you couldn’t make it to the exit. Because you were fine until your mom and dad stopped at McDonald’s, and now the car is filling with that McDonald’s smell, and you’re trying to breathe shallow through your mouth, but inhaling McDonald’s is the opposite of what you need right now.

Puking is funny. There’s a level of drunk you can get that will absolutely cause puking before your body can feel better, and it doesn’t matter if you puke on the night of the drinking or the morning after or if you do everything in your power to keep it down until later in the afternoon, but end up puking anyway at like 3:30. It’s coming anyway, and you know it when you feel it. If you know you’re heading into a two hour Prius ride later, get it done early in the hotel before you leave so you can head directly into the “sleeping after you puked until your head doesn’t hurt” phase of the hangover.

I used to not have to worry about any of this when I was 22, but that’s how my hangovers work now. I can no longer be a hero about keeping a hold on my cookies. This is a fact I have to face but don’t want to. I can remember lustrous, wonderful times from my past where I’d look myself in the eye in the bathroom mirror and say, “Don’t you dare puke,” and my body would listen because it knew it might get laid if it did.

By now I have chosen sleep over getting laid often enough that my body’s no longer buying it. It’s sad. But after a while it gets like that. You no longer have that rush of, “Ohmigosh I’m having sex right now! Not so long ago I thought this would never happen to me! And now look at me! Sex!” I miss that rush a little, but sex is still good. It’s just that a good night’s sleep is sometimes better than sex now, which is great, and then there’s always the morning. For sex. Sometimes that’s a better way to do it because in the morning you have to hurry so you won’t be late for work.

AAAAANYHOO.

The real funny thing about barfing out of your mom’s Prius because you’re 28 and you tried to party like a 22 year old is that you’ve finally arrived on the scene as a co-adult with both of your parents. Because what is she going to do, ground you? No. You’re 28. You have your own place and you don’t even ask her for money anymore. In fact, you’d be more embarrassed about asking for money than you would be about barfing out of her new Prius. You’ll clean it up. No problem. You’re a little embarrassed, but no more than you would be after barfing out of your buddy’s car. The embarrassment is all internal “I’m too old to be barfing out of a moving vehicle” stuff. And you were at least adult enough to put your head all the way out of the window while you barfed so none got inside. Just maybe a little on your fingers that you have to wipe off with your dad’s McDonald’s napkins, which is fine because it was his fucking greasy Hot Apple Pie vapor that got you in this mess to begin with.

Your dad will laugh at you. This is fine. Your dad has been laughing at you like a co-adult (or at least a co-fratboy) for a while now, starting with that one time when you were 19 and he got drunk (and you were surprised that he allowed you to see him drunk, because it used to be a secret that you didn’t know about—also because he can handle his booze pretty good), and he then kicked you in the balls like how you and your asshole brothers used to kick each other in the balls, and you were like, “I literally cannot believe that my own father just kicked me in the balls just now. It is blowing my mind. Also: he nailed me good and my balls hurt, like, way a lot. It's like I can't believe how much my balls hurt, but I even more can't believe how they got that way.”

Remember how much he laughed and laughed? Eventually you laughed and laughed too because you saw the situation for what it was, a drunk father kicking his son in the balls as a joke and then laughing at the confused look on the son’s face as he tried in vain to comprehend what just happened while also suffering from the pain of a killer nutshot. That must have been the funniest face I’ve ever made. He was also laughing because he knew I don’t have it in me to kick my old man in the balls. So he could laugh freely without fear of retaliation.

Man, my dad is a dickhole. But he’s a funny dickhole, and sometimes funny wins. Often, in fact. And the more important thing to consider is how your dad finally feels free enough around you to be his regular drunken funny dickhole self without worrying about being a baddad developmental problem-creating feeling hurter. It was a weird endorsement of trust and pride. And if you have your feelings hurt by a dadstlye ballkick when you’re 19, you need to grow up, Nancy. You’re fine. Your nuts just got kicked into adulthood. Act accordingly.

Moms are a little different, though. While dads are quietly biding their time until kicking you in the balls is more funny than it is abusive, moms never quite get there. Or they don’t always get there. Sometimes they have flashes. But they’re women. They don’t think kicking people in the balls is all that funny. Which is a shame, because I would set a new world record for laughter if my mom somehow, someway on purpose kicked one of my brothers in the balls. Oh man. And I videotaped it? That would be so funny I would retire from life and just live in a cave on a hill eating berries and bark and laugh for the rest of my life, stopping into town only long enough to charge the batteries for my portable “constant loop of my mom kicking my brother in the balls” eyeball goggles that I’d invent to make sure it’s the only thing I’ll ever see again until I died. I don't even want to think of it anymore. It is my Shangri-La, doomed to haunt me forever.

But I don't have to worry about it ever happening because I think there’s something about the process of childbirth that makes moms worry about you forever. As they get older, they get better about not letting you know how worried they are. They instead replace all the worrying and nagging with an unstoppable torrent of banal life details, like how she ran into Todd Jenkins’s mom at Sam’s Club and she was buying a huge jar of pickles and she says Todd is living in Towson and he owns his own vinyl siding business, which is kind of ironic because of that big addition they put on their house, remember, with the Jacuzzi? Anyway, he’s married to a nice girl and they just had a daughter named Carlie. I’ll email you a picture if I can figure out how to work it.

What your mom is really telling you when she’s jabbering about Todd Jenkins is “I’m very concerned about your diet. Please, for the love of God, assure me you’re taking a daily multi-vitamin. I don’t want to have to ask you this. Just volunteer it. Listen to me right now. I’m talking about bulk-sized pickles. I feel ridiculous. Just please tell me you’re flossing regularly and I’ll stop. Please. I'm like a crazy person with this Todd Jenkins news.”

Nope. Your Mom will never stop worrying. But if you’re old enough, you can absolutely barf out of her Prius, and her only recourse is a nervous “oh you boys” eye roll that implies “Ok, tough guy, but I had better not be hearing about how you drove drunk and killed somebody. That would destroy me forever.” And she’s kind of got a point. There’s a reason you’ll never allow her to know about some of the stupider things you’ve done. It’s a very fucking good thing that she doesn’t know how to operate or view a blog. Fingers crossed. Sohard.

So: when you’re 28, unless you want to barf out of your mom’s Prius (which isn’t really the worst thing in the world, just maybe a little bit of an ego sting for not handling your cheap, Frisbee-team-style-guzzled booze) maybe take it easy on the vodka flipcup. Pretend you’re too mature for it or something, and when somebody calls you a pussy, agree that you are a pussy. You indeed are a 28 year old pussy. And you need a good night’s sleep for tomorrow’s Prius ride.

Guide To “Picking Up Women.”

2009-01-16T13:44:00.000-06:00

“Picking Up Women” as both a term and a way of life is pretty fucking gross.

Generally the best way to “pick up women” is for both of you to be drunk somewhere and to feel like you don’t have anything to lose. This is why you don’t want to be the sort of dude who “picks up women.” The type of women who hang out in bars and talk to losers like you when they’re drunk and feel like they have nothing to lose are usually the dregs of woman society. They could do better. You could do better. But not tonight.

So if you’re in a bad place in your life and you feel like becoming a walking, talking Willie Nelson song, then by all means “pick up women.” I’m not just saying this lightly. Don’t think I haven’t been there too. Otherwise the best way to “pick up women” is to talk to everybody the same way and then keep talking to the people you tend to enjoy talking to. Some of them will be women.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. I mean, you have to at least know when you’re flirting and when you should be flirting and when they’re flirting and when you should stop flirting and forget about the whole thing. Otherwise you’re going to end up being a real sad sack dude who reads books about “How to Pick Up Women” and goes on reality television shows for sad sack dudes who learn how to pick up women from a guy who dresses like a video game character from something with the words “Snowboarding” and “Xtreme” in the title.

Talking to a woman.

Sadly, talking to women is an unavoidable part of the process of having sex with one of them. You don’t have a choice.

It’s fairly easy and straightforward in bars where both of you might be drunk and feeling like you have nothing to lose. Basically, if you see a woman at a bar and you think she’s cute and therefore find that you enjoy looking at her, then you can go talk to her after you make eye contact with her three times. This is not three times of you staring at her and her looking back to check if that creepy guy is still staring at her. This is three separate eye contact instances in between which you’re looking somewhere else and maybe doing a thing too. Then you’re allowed to go talk to her without feeling like you’re being a weirdo. Maybe on the third eye contact you can do like a self-aware wave type of thing where you roll you eyes like “eye contact from across the bar, right?” Think of yourself as the male lead in an Amy Grant video. Be ironic with it if you think she’s the type to enjoy that. If she smiles you can go talk to her. That’s if she’s all the way over there.

It’s much easier if she’s right next to you talking to another person who you don’t know, and you’re there too. Then you slide in a one-liner while there’s a lull in the conversation she’s having, something like a flat, sarcastic, “I think he’s delicious” if, say, they’re talking about Jude Law or something.

Then you’re off and running in the direction of a Willie Nelson song. You keep it light and civil without being pushy about “sealing the deal” right there, and if things go well for both you and the woman you’re talking to, you can exchange information and then set up a date with them later.

If you’re doing this while you’re drunk and she’s drunk too, then you might end up having sex later, which will be awesome. But then you’ll also wake up next to a stranger and realize that you have to be at work five minutes ago, and you’ll feel guilty for not wanting to ever call her again because she’s out there having sex with strangers like you and that means she’s probably crazy. Maybe you’ll even feel so guilty about it that you will call her again and slide down the slippery slope of calling her when you don’t want to just to be nice until you find yourself dressing up like baby new year in her insane family’s mandatory Christmas pageant and you look in the mirror and realize you’re in one of the worst relationships in the history of the world. I mean, yeah, one night stands are fun in that tingly little “Holy shit, I’m in a cab on the way to having sex at somebody’s house right now and I’m dazed and drunk and I can’t believe this is happening” kind of a way, but they get a lot worse after that. Unless you can pull it off at like noon on a day when you both have other plans later. Then it’s perfect.

But the perfect one night stand has maybe a one in thirty chance of happening, so it’s best to stick to the information exchange thing. That way the next time you talk to her you’ll be sober and hence more capable of judging whether or not she’s the type of person who might want you to dress up like a baby in front of her family. It’s just the smart play.

Some rules for what type of thing should be happening during the talking portion of the night’s events:

A. Don’t push it. From the initial one liner you’ve slid in there at the beginning, you will have to wait and take your silences when they come. You don’t treat that one thing you said like it’s opening the floodgates for a raging torrent of anecdotes. Maybe she was just giggling at you to be polite. You don’t know yet. It’s better not to talk at all unless you’ve got something cute to say. Avoid long stories or “aren’t I smart for knowing this?” fun facts. Start with just a pleasant but halting stream of light patter, and let it slowly build to a massive river of “what your father taught you to believe about God” at 1:15am after nine beers. Or don’t. That way you won’t sound like you’re like one of those guys who works at the cell phone store but you’re selling yourself instead of cell phone plans. You are not selling yourself. You are a human being talking to another human being. Relax. This is also a great approach because talking to her could end up being a drag for you and you might want to call it off.

B. Pay equal attention to the people around her and keep everybody involved. In nine out of ten romantic comedies the best friend is actually the better catch. They’re funnier, they’re often a lot cuter, and they have a wry, interesting take on the world that’s perfect for keeping things in perspective when Sarah Jessica Parker is getting totally stressed about some dumb boy thing. Talk to them too. It’s smart and it’s also what regular friendly human beings do. Don’t worry about sending a signal that you’re only going for one of them. At least not right away. If either one of them is interested at all, they’ll make a decision about it while you’re in the bathroom, and then you can just go based on that, because that’s a sacred decision and it’s not going to reverse itself. You’re just some dude at a bar and you’re not worth a lost friend. If they’re not interested, they’ll be gone by the time you get back. In the meantime, keep an open mind. See the Guide to Threesomes for an explanation of just exactly how open your mind should be.

C. Keep it positive. Sometimes the best friend is not cute or funny. Sometimes they’re a gross pig who the woman you think is cute keeps around to make herself feel better because she has low self-esteem or because the gross pig is usually fun but she just had her wallet stolen or maybe just because they’re cousins and Cousin Grosspig is in town this weekend. If this is the case and this gross pig person is really antagonizing you for some unknowable reason, then you still have to keep things positive no matter how much you’ll want to tell her off. Keep it positive and then leave. That way Cousin Grosspig is the bad guy instead of you. You don’t want to be there anyway, because if the cute one wants Cousin Grosspig around for self-esteem reasons, there are going to be problems down the line anyway.

D. Don’t worry about dudes. Yeah, it’s not like you’re going to get some dude’s girlfriend’s number after flirting with her all night under his nose, but remember, it’s not all about that. The dude could be an awesome dude too who you’d be happy to end up being friends with. You don’t know. Idly talking to a dude/girl combo at a bar is like practice for being a regular friendly human being who has no particular sexual objectives. That’s the best way to act anyway. And then also there’s a chance the dude is her super fun gay dude friend or a super unfun date. You don’t know. You don’t care. You’re just being friendly. Keep it in that territory to avoid being punched. Remember about keeping it positive.

And that’s basically how you talk to a woman at a bar or a party or a social setting that includes talking to strangers as a standard operating procedure. It’s really not all that hard. And it’s nothing like they do in the movies where there’s a bunch of dudes shouting “WE are gonna GET! YOU! LAAAAIIID!” And they’re jostling their one nerdy dude friend, and then he nerdy sees a sexy blonde from across the room and cinematically musters the courage to go over there and talk to her with hilarious consequences of some kind. It’s just more like people talking to each other.

You might also be tempted to talk to a woman in other contexts. Like you’ll see a very cute woman on the bus or at the grocery store or waiting on you at a table in the restaurant that she works at.

Guess what? There’s a reason you always chicken out in situations like that. That’s your brain telling your stupid talky face not to get pepper sprayed. And the part of you that’s thinking, “Every great couple has a cute story about how they met,” is also a stupid part of you. That’s the part of you that watches chick flics and cries into pillows when you’re mad because everything’s unfair because you’re a poet trapped in a legal clerk’s body. That part of you needs to grow up.

There’s no good way to talk to a woman if the only honest thing you can think of to say at first is, “I don’t usually do this, but…” The only people who “usually do this” are crazy-for-life Charles Manson types who are looking for a woman who’ll stand by their side when their hold on reality slips and they start preaching about truth in a cave full of bats that they have to hide in because it keeps the voices out and also they killed some people. They’re looking for the Sissy Spacek to their Martin Sheen. Those guys don’t care about decorum in the laundromat. But even when they are that nuts those guys still at least have the good sense to start their conversations with “I don’t usually do this, but…”

Women know these things. That’s why you don’t just waltz up and tell them how pretty they look while they’re smelling perfume samples. They will think you’re crazy. It doesn’t matter if they’re right or not, they will think you’re crazy. And talking to a woman in line at a Pep Boys about how pretty she is will only go well for you is she likes the idea that you’re crazy. In other words, if she’s crazy. It’s like that scene in Tootsie where real Dustin Hoffman tries to use the “everything I told fake lady Dustin Hoffman I want a man to say to me” tactic. It doesn’t work.

You do the same thing you’d do at a bar, slide in a one-liner or two, maybe get some smiles in return, but getting to the point where you’ve talked to each other enough to feel comfortable exchanging information is impossible to accomplish in the amount of time it takes for the driver to be done operating the hydraulic wheelchair-stairs-and-front-end-lowrider thing on the bus. You might get it done on like a long flight or waiting in the hallway outside of your parole hearing, but in general it’s best not to try it unless you’re going for some kind of world’s record of how sad you can be. It will only work if she’s reading a book called “I Have Super Low Self-Esteem Right Now and I’m Basically Going To Kill Myself Unless Some Dude Talks To Me In This Chipotle, Any Dude, Really, It Doesn’t Matter Who, Even If He’s Already Been In Jail For Sexual Assault, I Will Go Out With Him, I’m That Stupid Right Now.” Are you really aiming that low? You’re going to trick that person into having sex with you? Who are you?

And of course it’s not about that or exchanging information or “scoring” or any of that. It’s about just being a regular friendly human being.

Except there are a couple of classic talking fuckups to consider. And really, just consider them. You can talk any way you want to. I don’t care. But there are some classic talking fuckups.

They include:

A. Talking about sex and/or bodily functions. You can try it, but women who will comfortably talk to you about sex have generally already decided that they’re not going to have sex with you. Maybe you can still convince them to have sex with you after that, but it’s a seriously uphill battle and it’s probably not going to be very good sex because they either think of you as their little brother or their fun gay friend or they’re cockteases who’d much much much prefer have your gape-jawed attention as they tell you about how much they love to suck a dick than ever ever ever suck a dick, especially yours. If somebody’s attracted to you, talking about sex with you will make them nervous, and you should be nervous about it too, if only just to show that you’re nervous about it, because you should be, because this is a stranger. It’s cool. Sex is more fun when you don’t intellectualize it anyway.

B. Boy stuff. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that most women don’t want to hear your four hour treatise on Battlestar Gallactica and how it’s the perfect metaphor for modern life. They don’t want to hear your four hour treatise on anything. Not even if it’s about girl stuff like cute shoes or something. People who have four hour treatises are terrible listeners. And they’re always talking about boy stuff, even if they’re not talking about boy stuff. They’re talking like boys. Like how boys talk to boys. Booooring.

C. Being louder than necessary. You don’t need to sell your jokes with extra volume. Either they’re funny or they’re not. Loud is funny when you’re wasted and making an ass out of yourself with a couple of good friends, but it’s bad news for conversations. Especially with women. Loudness and interruptions are a turnoff for women, because dudes are always being louder than them and interrupting them with their loud, unfunny jokes all the time and it’s a drag. There’s a reason why they all want a “strong silent type.” If you feel like you have to be loud to get somebody’s attention, that’s because they don’t want to give you their attention, and instead of being a child about it, you should get the hell out of there so everybody can have a good time without you. Otherwise you’re just going to spend the whole rest of the night feeling like a leech.

D. Meanness. Don’t be mean to anybody or about anybody. A certain amount of negativity is ok, you don’t have to like everything, but you don’t want to be mean about anything, ever. Girls won’t like you if you’re cruel. In fact, most good, fun people won’t like you if you’re cruel. If they do, it’s because they’re either also cruel or they’re badly damaged by some sort of “I need people to be cruel to me” scenario.

E. Friend zone. You can get a woman to listen to what you’re saying if you compliment her handbag and then continue to talk about handbags knowledgably. Women like to talk about handbags every once in a while. With their friends. That’s fine if you actually know about handbags, but, you know, maybe don’t bust all that out right away. I’m not saying feign ignorance, just maybe try to steer things elsewhere. Like talk about handbags how a dude would. Borrow her handbag and ask her if it matches your shoes or your eyes and make a joke about it. I don’t know. Be an authority on dude stuff instead of girl stuff, but be interested in girl stuff from a dude’s perspective instead of a girl’s perspective. Just remember, you’re not just representing yourself out there. You’re representing all of us. Be a man.

So those are some classic conversational fuckups, and they’re really more about how to behave around strangers than they are about how to “talk to women.”

Flirting.

So you know all those old ridiculous tricks that “How to Pick Up Women” (fucking gross) guides tell you? You know, things like “mimic her body language,” and “compliment her appearance” and “check to make sure her pupils dilate when she talks to you, that means she’s attracted to you?”

Well those are all bullshit.

Actually, they’re not 100% bullshit, but they are bullshit things to be doing when you’re talking to somebody you think is cute. Those two tricks are things that happen naturally when two people who like each other are talking and listening to each other with ease. So basically, all those video game character dudes who can “pick up any woman” are fucking assholes who have figured out how to accurately pretend that they’re really engaged in what women are saying when they talk.

Why? Well, yeah, to get laid, but also because they’re egotistical fuckheads who aren’t good at sports and have some sort of grand delusion that what they’re doing is a part of “how the world works, bro.” Like they’re some sort of powerbroker but for people’s emotions.

What they’re leaving out is that their tricks only work on trashy girls with no self esteem who will make your life worse than it already was if you choose to get involved in them because they can’t sense that you’re bullshitting them and maybe even they can but they don’t care because they just want a shortcut to intimacy without all the mutual respect and vulnerability baggage. Basically they’re the same as the pickup artist dude, except they’re trying to snuggle instead of fuck, which is just as sad.

Anyway, the real way to “pick up women” isn’t to do all the little symptomatic things that scientifically indicate that you give a shit, it’s to actually give a shit. Then that way you’ll be doing all the tricky little things without being a manipulative weirdo who doesn’t have any real friends.

So what you do is if you find yourself talking to a woman and you’re being you, or a reasonable facsimile thereof who’s maybe choosing not to talk forever about how dumb Megatron looked in the Transformers movie (I mean, yeah, be yourself, but talking about “cool robots” to a girl is basically the same thing as farting really loud), and you find that, hey, maybe this is going well, then you know you’ve been flirting the real live human being way where you actually give a shit, and you keep doing that.

It’s not rocket science.

You talk to her in a way that allows her to speak and then you speak and you listen to each other and make observations based on the information you’ve been listening to and you’re maybe making little jokes when you think of them and so is she and you’re both laughing and enjoying yourselves. That’s all flirting is. It’s two people enjoying themselves.

If it feels difficult for some reason that’s because somebody isn’t enjoying themselves. Then you’re not flirting. Then you’re hitting on somebody who doesn’t want to hear it by using a “classic divide and conquer wingman technique” or some other bullshit thing you read in a book somewhere. Or else you’ve got a sad, lonely female pickup artist type on your hands and she’s flirting with you and you aren’t really into it. Either way, cut and run on one of these scenarios.

Otherwise, if things seem like they’re going well, it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind little things like “no cool robots right away” or “complaining is a turnoff,” but in general you’re going to be fine if you’re really enjoying yourself. If you’re really enjoying yourself and there’s a lull and you don’t know what to say, you can either say nothing or say, “I’m really enjoying myself.” It’s easy and it works great.

“Sealing the Deal” (WAY fucking gross).

So the idea of “sealing the deal” is really the worse thing that those idiot guys who talk about this sort of thing tell you how to do. It’s basically the art of deciding when and how to say “let’s go have sex on your ratty bare twin mattress.” I say ratty bare twin mattress because that’s about what you’re going to be looking at if you end up going to somebody’s house to have sex with them after having met them a few hours ago. They are not going to have a nice bed.

Chances are you don’t either if you’re low enough to go around “hunting for poon” (loud gag). You’re probably in the ninth level of “fuck it” and your socks and underwear are spread all over the place and you’ve got an empty can of Coors in your shower. So when you “seal the deal” it pretty much means you’re going to go fuck a stranger on a dirty mattress.

But “sealing the deal” does have some practical applications beyond “picking up girls,” like sometimes you have to “seal the deal” when you’re at the end of date number three and it’s important to let her know you’re into her enough to want to “seal” a “deal.” So it’s worth talking about. It’s also worth knowing in case you’re in a bad place in your life and you need to bone a stranger on a ratty bare twin mattress in order to snap yourself out of whatever funk you’re in.

The classic deal seal is when you’ve been flirting and laughing somewhere intensely enough that you haven’t even spoken to anybody else for at least an hour, and you’ve each gone to the bathroom at least once. So you’ve each had a chance to look and see what time it is. This is probably at a bar. Then there’s this perfect time when you’ve either laughed at something pretty hard or said something thoughtful and there’s a lull, but not a bad lull, more like a pregnant pause, and you ask “you wanna get out of here?”

The answer is usually yes because bars always close eventually anyway, and sometimes the answer is, “Yeah, I can’t believe how late it got. I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.” But that’s still a yes to the “get out of here” question, so you’re still in good shape.

There’s also a “no,” which is weird, because what are they going to do, stay? It’s a bar. The other version of “no” is “and go where?” This is tricky. This is the girl saying, “Whoa there guy, I’m on the fence with you, and you’re going to have to say something carefully fucking worded right now, or else there’s no ‘deal’ to be ‘sealed.’”

Just know that “and go where?” is a flirty move. It’s a classic “hey, I might have sex with you, but I’m not cheap, you’re going to have to earn it” statement. Right up there with an “I don’t’ usually do this” or a “we’re not having sex” as she opens her apartment door. So don’t’ freak out about the “and go where?” It doesn’t mean “no way,” it means “I’m willing you meet you halfway if you give me some assurances.”

So you answer the “and go where?” with another place. Just answer it. And don’t answer it with “your place” or “my place.” Answer it with something funny like “I would like to buy you a taco at the all night taco place.” And then you either end up at the all night taco place or you don’t, but at least your first offer wasn’t sex. She might counter with a “that place is gross,” but the good news is now you’re negotiating. You can do a quick funny “in that case I would like to take you to my house and make you a taco from scratch.” And she’ll be like, “I don’t really like tacos,” and you can say, “Good, because I don’t have any taco stuff at my house anyway.” And then you’ve been funny and things are probably going to work out. But you don’t want to push things. Sometimes “and go where?” really means “we’re done for the night,” just like sometimes “we’re not having sex” means “we’re not having sex.”

Anyway, you have to ask the “get out of here” question after the right pause and with the right amount of hopeful suggestiveness. You’ll probably know the right pause, because it will be one of those “look at my drink/watch/friends” pauses where there’s this unasked question of what happens now in the air. And the “You wanna get out of here?” should sound like you’re asking, “I know this is kind of forward, but do you wanna get out of here?” But without the first part. It should sound a little bit like an apology, but be forward enough to get your point across.

Then when you collect your things and say goodbyes and tumble out into the street, you’ve got options. You can go with “quick hail a cab” if there’s one right there, and then you’re both in the cab and you tell the cab driver to go to your house, and then there can be further negotiations in the cab and probably also kissing and handholding. Or you can do a “grab and kiss” where they’re looking around on the sidewalk with the “what is there to do in this neighborhood right now?” face and you turn them around into kissing you and it’s nice. Or you can do the Woody Allen, where you tell them all your thought processes about how you’d really like to go home with them but you can understand if that’s a little too much for the night, and hopefully they’ll think that’s cute instead of annoying (I don’t like the Woody Allen, because I would find it annoying).

Don’t get too upset or feel like you absolutely have to seal the deal right there and then unless you just got evicted and you really have to or else you’ll be sleeping in the park. Otherwise you can be content with a grab and kiss and then putting her in a cab and going your separate way. That’s good too. That earns you mystery points for next time where she’ll be thinking about you. If you’re savvy, you can leave it at that and not exchange information and then you can track her down with google or facebook or something, which instead of being stalkery and weird will be flattering because it means you were also thinking of her. You only want to do that if she leans in and enjoys the kiss, though. If she smacks you in the face or does the old “here’s my cheek,” then you are in fact a weird stalker and you have to go back to the drawing board. Call your Mom tomorrow. But otherwise it’s a good move to let things simmer and then come back to them in the form of a date.

So that’s the classic “seal the deal.” I know the “you wanna get out of here?” seems a little stale, but it works. Girls like sex too. You don’t have to go overkill with fancy notes on bar napkins and crazy spy subterfuges. Some clichés are clichés for a reason. They’re shorthand for more blunt things and can be more easily refused or accepted. Don’t make this any harder on yourself than it has to be.

In conclusion.

So now you know how to “pick up chicks.” The biggest obstacle that those sad dudes who “don’t know how to talk to women” face is that they don’t realize that women aren’t all that scary. They’re people. They have some of the same insecurities as you do. They like sex. You can relax. Don’t think of yourself as “talking to a woman” if you find yourself talking to a woman. You don’t have to do anything different, really. Just maybe don’t tell her all about your porn collection.

And if you find that you don’t enjoy her company, you don’t have to talk to her just because she seems nice enough and she’s clearly interested in you. That’s ridiculous. That’s how stupid regular dudes end up getting drugged and robbed by a con artist in the movies. Don’t be an easy mark. Getting laid isn’t that important.

The most important thing is to be open to the possibility. Like if you find yourself talking to somebody and enjoying it, most of the time sad lonely dudes will psyche themselves out instead of rolling with it. Don’t psyche yourself out. You’re talking to a woman, and it’s going well. No biggie. Don’t worry about “sealing the deal” or “picking her up” or anything, but just realize that this is the sort of thing that’s happening, and act according to your instincts.

It’s not all that hard. Everybody’s lonely. Not just you, shithead.

Guide to Being Grumpy as Hell For No Reason.

2009-01-15T14:38:00.000-06:00

I don’t believe in Hell. That’s just how I was raised. I was a Unitarian. They don’t believe in Hell. They believe almost nothing really, other than all people are good and that people in a position of privilege should always always always be pains in the asses and try their damndest to fix everything for everybody because they’re so smart and they know what’s best. That’s more or less it for that whole belief system. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is the still-childishly-bucking-against-my-upbringing version. What are they gonna do? Condemn me to Hell? They can’t. They don’t believe in it. That’s why it’s so great to make fun of Unitarians. They have to forgive you for it right away, and their only recourse is passive aggressively not inviting you over for their annual “foods of the world” party where they get together and brag about how much they know about other cultures. And I don’t want to go to that anyway. Stupid Unitarians. Except: thanks for the whole “no Hell for me” thing, guys. It’s been great so far.

So I don’t have to believe in Hell. But I love thinking about Hell. I think I’ve figured out exactly what it’s like. For Americans. American Hell is an endless string of inconveniences piled on top of each other. Like even the inconveniences are incredibly, mind-blowingly inconvenient.

Here’s a typical day in American Hell: you have to wake up early (even though it's your day off) so you can pick up your Grandmother to drive across the state to get to your niece’s one year birthday party that you don’t even want to go to, and you have to pick up the cake, but when you get there the bakery section of the grocery store isn’t open yet, and nobody will help you even though the cake is sitting right there across the counter and you can see it, so you storm out and you call around to find a bakery that’s open, but the only one you can find is one of those vegan bakeries with the fruit-sweetened cake that’s just about the least fun thing for a one year old to eat, not to mention a choking hazard from all the crumbly apricot hunks, so you decide to go back to the grocery store with the bakery section that’s still closed to buy a pre-made grocery store cake and put the frosting on it yourself in the car on the way, but when you get to the check out counter, you realize you left your wallet at the vegan bakery… and it keeps going like this with flat tires and long bank lines because all the ATM’s are out of order, and you never get to the one-year-old niece’s birthday party that you didn’t even want to go to anyway because now you have a thousand other problems to deal with, because by the time you finally get there to pick up your Grandmother, she’s fallen in a non-injurious way, but it’s still serious-seeming enough that you have to take her to the emergency room where the vending machine will eat your last dollar instead of giving you the PayDay you don’t even want but you’re starving and it’s the only thing left and now you can’t eat it, and nobody you run into is helpful or even courteous because they’re all in the middle of their own Hell.

It’s as exhausting to live as it is to try and read that entire sentence. You don’t get a rest. You don’t get a period. You just have to keep going forever, and so does everybody else and it’s like a world where every living person is stuck in a stress dream they can’t wake up from. That’s American Hell.

And the funny thing about it is, Real America can turn into American Hell really fucking easily. Supremely fucking easily. That’s why all we Americans want to do is shove an “Angry Whopper” in our faces and watch American Idol. We’re scared of hell, and we know if we make a choice, even if it’s a bad one, we will at least not have to deal with anything more annoying than Ryan Seacrest for an hour. Which is a little like saying “our feelings will hurt less if we shoot ourselves in the leg,” but that’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter that we’re choosing Ryan Seacrest. The important thing is we’ve chosen, we’ve exerted what seems very much like control, and now our lives seem orderly for one hour that day. Is that so much to fucking ask, world? You get the point. America.

I’ve been stuck in American Hell a bit more than usual for a couple of months now. I’ve just had a bad luck run of logistical bullshit I don’t want to deal with but have to. I’ll spare you the bitch-and-moan details, but read the Guide to Totaling Your Girlfriend’s Brand New Car if you’re interested in knowing what I might have done differently. If I’d only taken my own advice, I’d be living in Mexico right now with a new family. I’m kind of morbidly curious about what Mexican Hell is like. It probably involves less anxiety over stupid shit and more anxiety over an “I can’t tell if I’d rather die of exposure or starvation”-type quandary.

Anyway, dealing with a pile of American Hell inconveniences can make you grouchy. All day. For no reason. I almost snapped at a girl in line at Potbelly’s the other day because she couldn’t hear my cold-addled mumble of “no mustard, no pickles, no oil,” and I had to repeat myself. How much of a baby am I? I almost lost it because I had to repeat myself at Potbelly’s. You know, Potbelly's, the incredibly conveniently located in my office building sandwich place where they make delicious sandwiches just about right away for not much money. Like my time is that valuable that I can’t repeat a phrase more than once. I had big plans for that particular 4 seconds. What an asshole I almost was. Potbelly’s order making has nothing to do with my massively overdue gas bill or my girlfriend’s rental car I’m paying for. They are separate. You have to be polite, even when you’re grouchy.

And you have to have a sense of humor about yourself, because no matter how much your life resembles American Hell, at least it’s not Mexican Hell or Guatemalan Hell, which is probably just August in Guatemala. That’s the tricky thing about American Hell. You don’t often pause for thankful reflection when you’re on your knees with a jerry-rigged paperclip device trying to jimmy your Visa card out from under the counter at some out-of-town Jiffy Lube, regardless of whether or not the way you simultaneously dropped it and kicked it so it skidded under there was an unbelievable million to one shot that could never be duplicated. But you should. That’s the prefect time for it. You should be thankful that your Visa isn’t the only meal you’ll have for a week and the Jiffy Lube guys aren’t Nazis. You’re on your knees already. That’s a great place for a silent prayer of thanks. Or at least you could start laughing uncontrollably when the obese Jiffy Lube owner/manager waddles up, asks what’s going on, assesses the situation and after a perfectly timed pregnant pause unhelpfully announces, “Well, at’s the dangdest thing I ever saw.”

If things get too stressful: remember it probably won’t make anything all that much worse if you’re 25 minutes late instead of 23. You’re going to get yelled at anyway. And you’ve always got time for a quick dance party in the handicap bathroom stall. Al you can do is your best, and if your best isn’t good enough, because sometimes it won’t be, you might as well not get too wound up about whatever’s happening. When you get too wound up, you just end up screaming at a Potbelly’s person or knocking over an old lady who’s not walking fast enough for you to get to the bank 20 seconds faster than you otherwise would. Relax. You can be inconvenienced. It’s ok. Cool yourself off with a nice dance party in the bank’s handicap bathroom stall. You have David Banner’s masterpiece “Like a Pimp” in your iPod. Brush your shoulders off, homie.

Life is not always like that part at the end of act two of a comedy movie where the hero’s like “how could things GET any worse,” and a dog pees on his leg. Except sometimes it is. The weird thing is, why doesn’t that guy in that movie ever start laughing hysterically? That’s what I would do if a dog walked up to me and peed on my leg while I waited for a bus in a thunderstorm right after I just got in a big fight about how “I don’t need any more of your help” with my annoying but somehow wise new friend that I met while I was trying to get across the country to stop a wedding. I would laugh like a jackass. Because that’s funny. Maybe I would fight an urge to kick the dog and then the dog would grab my pant leg and I’d fall in the mud just as the bus rode past and splashed more mud all over me. Then I’d start laughing. Hold on, let me go make a change to my formulaic screenplay. It’s called “American Hell,” and I’m trying to get Jack McBrayer involved.

If laughing hysterically or pausing to become even more late or dancing to David Banner in the bathroom stall don't help you out, read a book about holocaust survivors. Remember that analogy I made about the Visa card and the Jiffy Lube Nazis? That was easy for me to make, because I just read "Maus." I have it on the brain. Thank God, right? The God I don't believe in because I'm a Unitarian and I don't have to (except sometimes I do, just in case).

I don’t even know how to wrap this up now. I was going to have some kind of witty conclusion about having a sense of humor and being polite when things are awful, but I’ve got to find out how to reformat this letter in a way that seems kind of illegal to me, and I have to call the rental car place to see if I can drop it off Saturday instead of today because it’s stuck in the snow and it’s out of gas anyway, and I have to see if my roommate can track down our gas bill account number so I can at least pay a portion of the stupid thing, and I swear to God I will punch Alice right in the crotch if she gives me any more suggestions about how I can avoid being late to work tomorrow. Ah ha ha.

Guide to Getting Drunk and Staying Drunk.

2009-01-14T12:34:00.001-06:00

1. Shoosh.

I'm a good person to write this guide. I've been drunk for about 6 straight months. Luckily I've now officially run out of money and I can't do that anymore. It's either run lean and mean or break down for good. I'm excited about it. This morning I had shredded wheat for breakfast. Does that sound like a guy who's not living his life the right way? I didn't think so.

My point is this:

Why? Why do you want to get drunk and stay drunk? What good will it do? How long do you want to stay drunk? Like a day? Your entire adult life? It's a slippery slope.

But let's say it's one of those special occasions where you just want to blow it out for whatever reason.

And also, a guide's a guide.

2. Easy does it.

If you're really going on a marathon bender, then treat it like a marathon. That means not doing four shots of whiskey right away. Shots of whiskey give you the warm droolies anyway. Whiskey's a sippin' drink.

You're aiming for being the type of person who can slowly sip on a mint julep. If you can't slowly sip on anything because you're a guzzler, like me, then get yourself something low weight to guzzle. Light beer gets a deservedly bad rep, but you can use it. You're the one who wanted to know how to get drunk and stay drunk. And the answer is "slowly." So no showing off.

You can do an initial liquor blast to kick things off, but then you've got to either switch to beer or get really slow about things.

When I was in college, I went on a booze run with my friend Janaka to an old drunkie liquor store in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. We bought a couple of cases of beer and I think maybe a jug of Gallo Rossi (that was our drink), and during checkout Janaka grabbed a pint flask of Beam as an impulse buy, and held up the line. He apologized, to which the counter lady, a well-worn lady of indeterminate age with nicotine stains on her lips, replied "That's ok, you gotta back it out without blowin' it up."

I don't know what that means, but it's true.

You gotta back it out without blowin' it up.

I think that means that if you're really going to be drinking, like for real, you will do well to envision the end of your night when you start things off. Give yourself something to shoot for. Like "I'm going to be ridiculously drunk, but I'm not going to puke, and I'm going to make it all the way to last call even though it's noon now."

Drink to win. Drink through the ball. Whatever sports thing works here.

3. Ebbs and flows.

So the key to getting drunk and staying drunk is balancing on your drunk plateau. You know that kind of drunk where you're like "I'm exactly drunk" but not like "Oh man, I'm really drunk" yet? Well you need to get there and live there.

The first secret to this is the slow thing. If you take it slow to start, then you'll get to your plateau naturally and evenly, and you'll have an easier time staying there. If you guzzle some tequila, you might overshoot your plateau and you won't even know it until the tequila catches up to you. And by then it's too late, my friend.

The way drinking works, and I learned this from a chart they gave me in driver's ed about blood alcohol content, is that for a regular sized dude, your liver burns off about a drink an hour. For girls it's like 75% of a drink. So the math on that is roughly:

Initial drinking to plateau (3-5 drinks over the course of one or two hours) + Continued slow drinking (1-2 drinks an hour) = Drunk all day

I mean, you're not going to be looking at your watch or treating it like a science experiment, because you're drunk and that's not how drunk people are. It's more like a gut instinct thing. The best advice I can give is to be in touch with your drunk.

Know when it's on the top heavy side of the plateau, and slow things down. Eat something. Drink some water. Do something with your hands that you can't hold a beer for, like video games or auto racing. Something. Those are your ebbs.

And your flows are pretty easy to figure out. That's when booze is flowing into your mouth. You can get a little top heavy on the flows if you know there's an ebb coming where you won't be drinking for an hour and a half, like if you're going to the movies or your brother's college graduation or something.

4. Getting cocky.

There is going to be a point in all of this where you start to get cocky. It's usually around hour 8 of being drunk. You've done everything right up to this point, and you've been on a pretty even keel on your drunk plateau all day, and if you packed it in now, you'd acutally be pretty good the next day. You know, hungover, but not like atomic hungover where your head feels like it's packed with its own sweat to like a thousand psi and your stomach is rancid and turny and you feel like you’re going to shit out the tequila worm man from Poltergeist II. But instead of avoiding that, you're going to get cocky.

Let's be honest here.

You've been drinking for 8 hours, which is already cocky. That's a full work day of drinking. If you're going to keep drinking, then your brain does a thing where it's like, "Well, my full day of drinking is done. I really put in a good day's work. It's Miller time!" And you figure, what the hey, let's throw away all the rules about going slowly, no shots and stuff, because you've been drinking for 8 hours according to the rules and for some reason that makes you indestructible. And also you're drunk and you've been that way for 8 hours, so your judgment is pretty bad.

So you get cocky.

There's nothing I can say to you in a guide that you're reading now, while you're sober (or at least sober enough to read) that will stop you from getting cocky. It is either going to happen or it isn't. Just at least consider drinking some water or eating like a taco here or there. That's all I'm saying. To myself.

Oh, while we're talking about getting cocky, this is an excellent time to address...

5. Drugs.

I've been reading up on this and apparently in the 60's, booze was considered to be an "establishment trip" and people were more about getting high as kites in as many weird ways as possible. That's why everybody called them "fucking hippies."

Everybody knows that booze is the base god of all getting fucked up. It's the Zeus of the whole mythology.

Pot definitely has its merits, but I look at pot-based adventures as being more sedentary and antisocial in nature. Maybe that's just how I handle my weed, shutting down, but I'd say that's a fair generalization. Like you don't need a guide to getting high all day. You just fucking do it and then you're high all day and you watch Finding Nemo and eat one of those microwaveable gas station cheeseburgers, and then you fold your socks for an hour. Who cares? You're high.

Anyway, back to booze. And how it's going to work with drugs.

You're likely to get involved with drugs in the "getting cocky" phase of your bender. It's dangerous, because in the getting cocky phase, you generally do more than you should because you're cocky.

I actually think pot is a good idea here, because it settles you down a little and pushes you toward your bed a little faster. So absolutely, big shot, smoke that weed like you were Snoop himself. You'll be in a cab pretty soon after you have the, “Oh shit, I’m very high now. All I want to do now is go home and listen to a bunch of Black Sabbath records at the wrong rpm for like 20 minutes until I realize what I’m doing wrong and decide it’s best if I just go to bed” realization.

Coke is super dangerous territory if you've been drinking for 8 hours already. Like you'll do a bump and then that'll feel like it just took away two drinks and you'll be good to go for another forty five or so. I think that's actually why they call it a "bump." Cocaine has the potential to turn your planned 14 hour bender into a 17 or 18 hour bender. With coke. And all those drinks that "went away" when you did bumps are not really "away," but they're tucked into your system waiting to kill you tomorrow. So look forward to that, hot shot.

Luckily, if you've been drinking for 8 hours already, you're probably pretty close to running out of money anyway, and it's pretty fucking unlikely that anybody you're with will have successfully been holding coke for 8 hours of drinking without breaking it out already. But this is basically the same drill with any sort of speed-based thing you could do here. Stay away unless you're ready to be "fucking take over the world!" cocky about because it’s an occasion for celebration akin to getting a MacArthur genius grant or something.

Hallucinogens (we'll put ecstacy here too): What? Are you kidding me? You've been drinking for 8 hours. It's going to be bedtime in like a maximum of 6 hours. You're trashed. Taking something that would make you hallucinate now is called "wasting your money" because you wouldn't remember it anyway. I mean, that's the logic. But actually if you know how to and you're really interested in scoring something legitimately trippy after drinking for 8 hours, then you're kind of my hero. That's some next-level shit and you're probably going to be going for another two days anyway, so go for it.

Pills: Stay the fuck away from pills (narcotic pills like Vicodin and such) in the cocky phase. Pills are a starter, not a finisher. Seriously, this is how people die. Don't be a bummer.

6. Oh no.

So at some point pretty soon after your cocky phase, you're going to have an "oh no" where you realize that you're fucked. Here's where the "we're all adults here" rule kicks in.

If you're at the point where you seriously need help, you won't need to ask for it. It'll be pretty obvious to your friends that you're sitting indian style on the floor of the bar going "bluhhhhhnnnnn." You shouldn't be at that point in public unless you're seriously working through some shit, and if you are then your friends will understand. That's ok. Adults need help sometimes. Your job as an adult who's not going "bluhhhhhnnnnn" is to pick your friend up and get him home.

But if you're not that bad, then as soon after the "oh no" as possible, pull a silent runner and get your ass home. There is no decorum here. You're putting yourself into survival mode. It's like when Ed Harris breathed that goo stuff in The Abyss. Your body will remember.

And as your stinking face hits the pillow, you will likely have been going for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-14 hours straight. Congratulations. You've been drunk and stayed drunk for a pretty decent chunk of time, my friend. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, because when you wake up tomorrow those angels are going to fuck you in the ass.

Guide to Being Broke.

2009-01-13T13:35:00.000-06:00

It’s pretty fashionable these days to have no money. Actually, fashionable has nothing to do with it. They were giving out money for free for so long and now they’ve finally come to realize that you can’t base everything off of people spending free money all the time, and now there’s less money and it isn’t free so much anymore, and so everybody acts like they have less of it even though they have the same amount as always, they just don’t have as much extra free money anymore. I don’t know how it works, but that’s what it seems like is happening. People finally got busted for living beyond their means, and now it’s really hard to sell a McMansion because nobody’s too big into pretending they’re rich anymore, and anyway those McMansions are an hour commute away from the city and gas prices are unstable. Again, I don’t know. I’m probably going to rent for the rest of my life because I’m broke all the time.

It might sound like bullshit, but I advocate being broke. I believe that I’ve made my perpetual broke-hood a choice. Really. I believe that. I could live in a nice condo or house and drive a fancy car and make a lot of money. I just choose not to. I’d rather live in a small, dingy shithole and ride a bike. Really. I would rather that. Is what I tell myself. I’m not sure it’s true. I think there’s also a pretty decent chance that I’m just a lazy underachiever and instead of getting off my ass to make some money and/or improve my “station” in life, I’ve decided that it’s better to lie to myself about how I’ve chosen a low-expense debt-free lifestyle that involves very little worry and not much in the way of commitment to any one institution as an employer or financier and how that’s the smart thing to do. It’s probably not the smart thing to do.

But I do know this: times are tough out there, but they’re not much more tough for me now than they already were. Which is more than a lot of people who did the “smart thing” and bought real estate and saved for the future can say. All of a sudden my regular, stupid, crappy life looks pretty good. At least I’m not losing anything. I can’t. I would starve to death.

Being broke all the time involves some amount of skill, and it has its merits.

The skill is all stuff like “knowing the train and bus schedules and loopholes in the system, like where free transfers happen because you can’t always afford the extra 25 cents it takes to switch from a train to a bus,” and “instinctually knowing where free food is and yet having the grace and guile while hungry to eat like a person who isn’t just there for the free food,” and “pretending you forgot to pay rent when really you know your check would bounce anyway until (supposedly) Tuesday, and/or making up excuses for withholding your check based on lease stipulations, like phantom cockroach infestations and fake out-of-the-country business trips that are really to your girlfriend’s house,” and, “always carrying a messenger bag with a change of clothes and enough food for two days in it because it might be more convenient and cheaper to crash at a buddy’s house than to take a cab home,” and such. It’s thrift store shopping for a “vintage look” that really is just dirt cheap clothes (that look like you might have paid a lot of money for them until you get up close and see the coffee stains between the stripes). It’s learning how to get the most food possible at the grocery store with a budget of 25 dollars for the week (hint – look at the “Net Wt.” number on everything and calculate value that way, you’d be surprised how much less on-sale breakfast sausage costs than baloney, and it’s not like baloney’s any healthier or there’s a law against breakfast sausage sandwiches, plus you can use breakfast sausage as a spaghetti sauce ingredient; or look at how much cheaper those dry beans are than the canned ones, and all you have to do is know you’re going to be hungry the next day and soak them; or think of Ramen noodles as “inexpensive chicken seasoning with extra free cardboard noodles you can use in a separate soup or stir fry dish”). You can do a lot with a little to keep yourself from starving. It’s good to plan it that way even if you have $40 until Tuesday instead of the $25 you pay, because that extra $15 in booze money is going to come in real handy.

A boss of mine at work recently told me “Ben, don’t live extravagantly. If you have to choose between a nice apartment that you love but is too expensive and an apartment that’s a little smaller but in your price range, go for the cheaper one.” I almost laughed in his face. What is it with these work guys where they think you’re one of them automatically, like all I want to do with the rest of my life is sell self-storage facilities and brag about my BMW and proffer unwanted financial advice to a guy who’s four years younger than me like I’m the wisest man he’s ever met when he’s the guy who’s doing just fine and I’m the one sweating bullets about this economy because I’m dating some hot little 25 year old whose skin is so sensitive she can only wear pure gold earrings? Dude, I’m not living too extravagantly. I’m skipping the electric bill to pay for the gas bill, and swapping from gas heat to electric space heaters in accordance with whatever bill I just paid for my shitty drafty apartment. I’ve got inextravagant on lockdown. You’re the one who’s in trouble, judging by the scant number of phone calls I’ve been answering recently and the way you’ve been talking to your owner about how unfair it is that businesses are being penalized for the poor life decisions of their employees.

Not that I’ve got a Schadenfreude thing going for this dude. Except I kind of do because he calls me “champ” all the time. And also that injustice of businesses-being-penalized thing is hilarious to me. It’s like he wants all people everywhere to disappear so he can just sell self-storage facilities to nobody in peace. Nevermind that regular people’s ability and desire to buy things is what makes those things valuable. Ordinary people have been getting burned left and right by the poor decision-making skills of the Enrons of the world for, like, centuries now, and you’re on business’s side when they’re stupid enough to stake their future on offering ordinary dudes what essentially amounts to a free house? What are all the ordinary dudes supposed to do when they get free money? Turn it down? No way. The whole reason we’re in this mess is because nobody turns down free money. You get all the money you can while it’s still free, and if somebody’s to blame, it’s the people who were stupid enough to give away the money. And now businesses and the bussinessguy higher-ups with their stock options are suffering as much as the ordinary dudes they employ, for once. You can’t just look out for yourself and expect everybody else not to do the same thing, bosses of the world, even if for the ordinary dude that means getting a free house for five years before the rate adjusts and they’re foreclosed on. Then it’s right back to renting and/or living at Mom’s house like they were doing before, only this time you’ve lost a ton of real money and they’ve lost points on a credit score. Joke’s on you, bosses.

Of course I have no idea what I’m talking about, and I'm fine with that. I do know for a fact that I was reading the fine print on a bag of frozen peas back when times were good. If you think of the current recession as the bookie coming to collect on a bad bet that a bunch of rich people made on the ongoing prosperity of the average American, I’m essentially a profiteer because I sold myself short way before things got out of control. All I have to do is calmly sweep the floor of the convenience store and tell the cops I didn't see anything. That’s the main merit to being broke all the time. Stability. It sounds pretty stupid because it is, but it does make for some pretty funny times when rich guys who call you “champ” every day are pulling their hair out over the market adjustment while at the same time telling you not to live extravagantly. That’s delicious irony.

Hooo boy. I almost blacked out there for a minute. I’m sorry. I got all hopped up on free office coffee and cold medicine on an empty stomach.

Couched in all of my deluded ranting were some dead giveaways of my attitude about credit. It’s a bad attitude. I have a bad attitude about credit. I keep referring to it as “free money.” Because that’s essentially what it is. Whether you’re a person or a company, if you default on credit, the only penalty is you have to declare bankruptcy or work out a deal and then pay off a fraction of the amount you borrowed. And it’s harder to get more credit later, for a while. How is that not free money? And how are the consumers who take on all this credit for houses or whatever else being stupid? As far as credit is concerned, defaulting is actually the most profitable thing you can do. The only thing that makes credit profitable for the creditors is if you keep paying it forever. If you default, they’re up shit’s creek. That’s what we’re watching now. People are defaulting, and the people who gave out the money are up shit’s creek. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that? Because you’re scared of your credit score dropping? So you can’t get more free money down the line? Screw down the line. Credit might not even exist down the line.

So you might think, reading this, that I have a mountain of debt. Nope. Opposite. Pulling off the whole credit default negotiation for profit thing takes resources and attorneys and energy that I don’t have. I’d rather leave it alone. And also I know how bad my attitude is about credit. I don’t even have a credit card. If I did, I’m pretty sure I would incur a mountain of debt. In a heartbeat. I don’t know exactly what I’d spend it on, though. I’m used to living inextravagantly. I even kind of like it. Maybe I’d start up a shitty business like a record store or something that had absolutely no chance of surviving. Maybe I’d just get all my friends drunk for like six months. I don’t know. I won’t do it. I’m too lazy and it would just make me worry all the time. I don’t need that. I’d rather choose to be broke, but honest. And if that kind of honesty means I have to occasionally lie about pretend roaches, then so be it.

Guide to Flaking.

2009-01-12T12:56:00.000-06:00

You can’t do everything everybody wants you to do. That’s just a fact of life. Other facts include: you can’t do everything you want to do, you can’t want to do everything, you can’t always avoid everything you don’t want to do, people will eventually stop inviting you to things if you never show up to anything, you have to clean your bathroom every once in a while. I’ll talk about that bathroom thing later, maybe, but for now let’s deal with the fine art of flaking.

There’s a force inside of everyone that makes them annoying by accident. Call it delusion. Call it optimism. Call it self-concern. Whatever it is, it makes pretty much everybody on the face of the planet annoying. It’s there for a reason. If you didn’t think you were worthy of friendship or at least some form of respect from other people, you’d have a hard time living. And since you have to operate under that assumption in order to not break down crying in the grocery store line while Shanice rings up your boil-in-bag rice, you’re probably going to be wrong sometimes about your worthiness. There are some people you like who don’t like you very much. Or maybe they don’t actively dislike you, they just don’t care that much. That’s fine. They have their own problems. You can still invite them to your birthday party.

Sometimes you’ll be on the receiving end of somebody inviting you to their birthday party, and you will say, “There is no way I am going to that dude’s birthday party,” or “Oh man, I like that dude and I want to go to his birthday party, but not enough to change my existing plans or deal with this weather or go to the neighborhood it’s in, and that’s fine because I wouldn’t be all that mad if he missed mine,” or, “It’s far away and I have a cold but I’m pretty sure that our friendship is tenuous enough that I have to go to this guy’s fucking birthday party even though it’s super inconvenient to get to, because he’s always gone out of his way to go to my shit and I kind of owe him one here, so I’ll go for like two drinks just so he knows all that friend effort he spends on me isn’t wasted, because he’s a good guy and I don’t want him to get discouraged. He’s prone to getting discouraged.” You might also say, “I don’t care about this dude, but this is a good excuse to go play Whirleyball. I’m in.”

(I’ll probably write a guide to birthday parties later, but you should include Whirleyball if at all possible.)

Guilt is not a great lifestyle choice. It’s not especially progressive. But then again, I guess there are benefits to having the same friends who you hang out with even when they piss you off for your entire life. I wouldn’t know. I do know that in general, if you don’t want to go to something, you shouldn’t feel like you have to go unless it’s one of those bigdeal things you have to go to. Things like girlfriend’s birthdays at her family’s house, or a wedding you’re standing for, or a birthday party for somebody who you’d be kind of pissed at if they didn’t show up to your birthday party. Everything else, though, is flakable. You’re not a piece of meat here. You can’t be all things to all people. And the success/failure of a party, or whatever it is, isn’t going to rest solely on your shoulders, no matter how much you’d like to think it does.

Actually, this is a good point. You should try to avoid being anybody’s only fun friend. That’s a burden. Sometimes you fall into it by accident, like if you’re getting over a breakup and you end up being sadbuddies with somebody and then you get unsad before they do and you end up secretly undepressed but still stuck doing sadbuddy things like getting shitfaced drunk at Dan’s Bar for no reason on a Wednesday, playing “Jailbreak” by Thin Lizzy in its entirety off of the jukebox, and hearing the same old story about Madeline again. And when your sadbuddy finally gets around to asking how you are, you’ll notice a flinch of disappointment on their face when you say, “Honestly, I’m doing pretty good these days.” That’s why sadbuddies drift apart. It’s natural. But in general, try to avoid being somebody’s only fun friend. It’ll only help them in the long run. They have their own journey to unsadness, and it’s not your job to hold their hand. It sounds harsh, but it’s not. You can’t make somebody be unsad. You just have to do what you do, and hope for the best. If that means occasionally getting shitfaced at Dan’s Bar whenever you’re in the mood to get shitfaced at Dan’s Bar, and then eventually “whenever you’re in the mood to get shitfaced at Dan’s Bar” becomes “never,” then that’s what you do. People will understand. Even if they don’t, they will.

One thing you can do to prepare people for the idea of you flaking is develop a flakey persona. You will do this by accident. Let’s say your roommate invites you out to their birthday party and you were planning on going but you haven’t slept much recently and you have no money so you got drunk and high at home before going and then realized you were too drunk and high to go out, so you thought you’d go ahead and watch a movie and sober up a bit and then go after the movie, but you fell asleep during the movie. Nobody is going to be mad at you for not coming to their birthday party if they come home and you’re passed out on the E-Z Boy with an empty bag of Doritos on your face while the DVD menu for “The Incredibles” loudly repeats. Like they might be kind of pissed at first, but then when they realize you were just going to be a sleepzombie at the party anyway, they’re like, “Oh, that guy.” And they laugh and make fun of you at other parties for that one time you were asleep on the E-Z Boy with an empty bag of Doritos on your face while the DVD menu for “The Incredibles” loudly repeated. That’s a medium funny story. It’s funny enough to tell people even when you’re not in the room, and I’ve always found that to be a flattering concept, even if it is the result of being an idiot.

You’re shooting for “Oh, that guy.” It’s not perfect, but it’ll work for now. There are several challenges associated with it. One is chemical dependence. It’s pretty easy to achieve “Oh, that guy” status if you’re always drunk. Drunk people do weird and funny things and get away with it more often than sober people. The problem with it, other than the health, financial, interpersonal, and barfingallthetimeological risks involved, is it starts to get very not cute around the second or third time somebody has to cart your mumbley idiot ass home. And it’s totally unacceptable once you turn 30. So you have to use it sparingly until that birthday arrives; let’s say a good rule is you can’t be the “Oh, that guy” drunkie with the same group of friends twice in a row without anybody else getting a turn until you’re 30, at which point you have to at least pretend to have grown up. The good news is by the time you’re 30, you won’t give as much of a shit about what other people think of you, and you just won’t go to their birthday party if you don’t feel like it, or if you do, you’ll drop by for like a half hour and have one good expensive microbrew beer, and to get there you’ll drive your car that you own now because you have money because you’re not drunk all the time. But in the meantime, you can pull an “Oh, that guy” due to excessive imbibement every once in a while. It’s kind of fun.

But “Oh, that guy” goes beyond mere drunkenness. It’ really a lifestyle. The idea is that you might not always show up, but when you do, it’s fun. You might not want to go to every little event people have, but you do want to at least know about them. Otherwise you’ll have the thing where it’s Friday night and feel like tearing it up and you don’t have any plans for once and you have no clue what’s going on, and when you text everybody you get like four lukewarm responses about semifun things they’re doing that you’re kind of not invited to. So there’s some performance pressure there with an “Oh, that guy.” You don’t have to start up colander on the head impromptu pots-and-pans call-and-response drums songwriting (in a fun funny way—always seek to avoid the obnoxious version of colander on the head impromptu pot-and-pan call-and-response drums songwriting where nobody wants to participate and nobody is laughing, and it’s pretty much just you screaming in the kitchen) whenever there’s a thing at somebody’s house, but if you do once (you can only do it once), you’ll be invited to fun things for a while. And nobody will be mad if you don’t show up, because you’re the pots-and-pans guy. They can have almost just as much fun talking about that pots-and-pans time without having to relive it. Not every party needs that much chaos. Most parties can’t even handle it. Parties have a limited elasticity that way.

So you’ve got to balance your routine by also being a good guy to talk to. Regular conversation is an important skill to have. It’s maybe even more important that knowing when it’s great to bust out the pots and pans. Otherwise you’ll never be invited to regular conversation parties because nobody wants you to ruin everything. Regular conversation parties might be boring, but usually they have better food. So there’s a payoff.

Another good idea for your “Oh, that guy” flakey persona is to occasionally show up to things that nobody expects you to be at. It’s a karmic retribution. Every once in a while, you’ll get an invitation for an event so inane you can’t believe somebody took the time to drag your name over to that column of Facebook. If you go, you’ll be rolling with a really weird crew where you scan the room and you’re like “This is a really weird crew. This is probably the first and only time this specific group of people will ever be in the same room.” It’s good to go to one of those every once in a while because they’re like a Christmas sausage and cheese sampler but for awkwardness, and sometimes you’ll discover a new flavor (of dude) you like. Or, say, it’s 3:30am and somebody heard about a party at that one weird college kid’s house and you show up and bring booze and do the pots-and-pans thing because you don’t give a shit. And everybody there is like, “Who’s this guy?” Except a couple of them are like, “Whoa, that dude’s here? That’s the guy who lit his crotch on fire the other night at Madeline’s party. I’m gonna go dare him to eat the rest of the dip.” Congratulations, weirdly unplanned thing show-er upper, you’re an “Oh, that guy.”

Do you see how this is childish? It’s childish. But so is feeling obligated to go to people’s parties and events just because you feel like it’d hurt their feelings if you didn’t. I mean, sometimes that’s a fine and dandy reason to do something, because there are events out there that carry enough significance to make you feel like shit if a certain person doesn’t show up, but you’ve got to pick your battles. If your whole life is ruined by the fact that Minor Acquaintance X, especially a.k.a. “Oh, that guy,” doesn’t show up to your 80’s themed dinner party, you should probably rethink your life a little bit. Maybe it’s worth ruining.

Oh, and there’s this: I know it seems awful, but it’s ok to skip a going away party. You’d only get like 15 minutes to really talk to the person, and if they’re really a good friend you can and should hang out with them at least once one-on-one before they leave anyway. Plus, what are they going to do, not forgive you? No, they’d be happy to see you whenever you visit them in L.A. Going away parties are skippable. But I don’t always recommend it, especially if you’re in the market for “might as well hook up” opportunities or goodtimes with a buddy you’ll miss. Just realize, if you’re going to have trouble making it, that, “Oh yeah, going away parties are skippable.”

Probably the most important aspect of successful flaking is to not get too worked up when people, even people you care about a lot, don’t show up to stuff that you’re doing. Remember: you’re annoying. You think people like you when they don’t really like you. Of course some people don’t like you as much as you’d think. They were trying to have a conversation about Nietzsche with this cute girl they just met when your crazy attention-starved ass started banging on pots and pans and shouting a bunch of nonsense about Christopher Reeves. And this is after you totally ignored their story about Madeline’s parents’ divorce and what it means. Of course they’re not showing up to your birthday party. It’s in Edgewater. You can’t blame them for flaking. Not when you’ve spent your entire 20’s being “Oh, that guy.” They can’t do everything you want them to. And if you have to deal with a super weird crew on your own birthday, that’s fine. You’ll enjoy that, too.

Guide to Clown Sex.

2009-01-09T12:38:00.001-06:00

There are people, very kind people, in this world who will tell you that a thing they like very much to do is dress up like clowns and have sex with somebody who is also dressed as a clown. You can question their motives all you want, call it a sex dare, or an avant-garde off, or “potentially raped by a clown,” or even “just crazy in that very specific way.” But it won’t matter in the end. What matters in the end is that there are people out there in the world who would like nothing more than to dress up like a clown and dress you up like a clown, and then have sex with you. Clown sex.

I’m not going to say that there are a lot of these people. There are very, very few of these people. You might not ever meet one. You probably won’t ever meet one of them. But you might. Worse things have happened.

If you’re really looking to meet this type of person, by the way, it’s likely that you already are this type of person, and you would know better than me about the kinds of forces that combine to create such a creature as yourself. I’d imagine your best bet would be to look in places where people such as yourself gather. The stage door at the circus, perhaps. For everybody else, it will likely be an accident if and when you meet a person who would very much like to dress you up like a clown and then dress up like a clown and then have clown sex with you.

Art school is a good place to start. Just in life. It’s a horrible waste of money (generally, unless it isn’t), and it churns out a mix of total weirdos, lazy uninspired rascals, graphic-designer-by-default careerists, and general New Balance sneaker-wearers of every stripe who would likely be the same people they are now if they had just gone to state school. But art school is a funny place while you’re there between the ages of 19 and 23ish because you’re an idiot and everything’s new. And everybody there is trying weird things that seem interesting and calling them “a project” because they’re pretentious and 22 and whatever it is seems like a fun/funny idea. Basically, art school is school for young people to learn how to come up with funny ideas. Clown sex is a funny idea.

So if you’re lucky enough to meet somebody who’s whizzing through funny ideas of varying effectiveness and one of those ideas is currently to have clown sex with you and you’re similarly whizzing through funny ideas of your own because you’re also in your early 20’s and you’ve got a funny bullshit theory about life that you came up with this one time when you were baked and watching kung fu movies, I say you should go through with the clown sex. You don’t have these opportunities often.

Let’s say you’re hanging out with somebody in a semi-dating mode and they let slip that clown sex is one of their current funny ideas (that they don’t think is funny–that’s an important distinction when we’re talking about funny art school ideas, they’re only funny to the outside world, but to the person who came up with them the funny ideas are deadly serious). Let’s say your initial reaction is, “That sounds like my worst nightmare come to life.” This is a pretty common reaction, so you’re good. Let’s say all of this happens.

What should you do?

You should do everything in your power to ensure that you get to experience clown sex. That’s what you should do. That’s what I did. It may have been just about as uncomfortable for me as I thought it was going to be, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, and I have nothing but the utmost gratitude and respect for the person I met who told me that a thing they like very much to do is dress up like a clown and have sex with somebody who is also dressed as a clown. What a treasure to the world she is. What an interesting opportunity she provides to us lowly scum who aren’t creative enough to come up with an idea as funny as clown sex and then really stick to it. God bless that woman and her amazing ideas about what she’d like to do.

So I advocate seizing the clown sex day. Simply because from the second clown sex happens your life will never be the same. In a good way. For one thing, you can no longer possibly be impressed by anybody’s story about how crazy a party is going to be and how hard they party. And that’s a sort of funny secret thing to have inside of you, when some fratty dude is telling you about how wild things get on a regular basis when the booze starts flowing between he and his friends, you can think in the back of your mind “I had clown sex, dude. And believe me, you won’t brag about being wild as much when you’ve done something so wild it was actually too wild for you and you had to take a long, hard look at yourself in some art loft’s bathroom mirror and say, ‘Self, you’re too wild right now. We’re going to have a serious talk about this. But for now, wipe that sex-smeared clown makeup off your face and get going because you’re supposed to be at work in five minutes.’”

Going too wild for your own good is a fantastic sensation. You get to know your limits. And after it’s over and you’ve got the relevant amount of perspective on what’s happened, you become sort of untouchable, like the party equivalent of that old man in horror movies who quietly lives by himself in the cabin up in the woods and you dismiss him as being crazy and think he’s kind of scary until later that night he comes down in the rain, nonchalantly saves everybody from the lake monster, and quietly goes back to his cabin. That’s what you get to be for the rest of your life (party-wise) if you agree to have clown sex after purposefully losing a bet that you made with the clown sex person about which one of you is better at skee ball. I’m telling you. You want this. Maybe even especially if you don’t really want this.

Maybe clown sex is a metaphor. Maybe it’s just the time I did something that made me realize I couldn’t (and didn’t even want to) do everything. I choose to think not. I choose to think that I’m just talking about dressing like a clown and having sloppy, drunken sex with somebody who is also dressed as a clown and who is purring things you’d never thought you’d hear during sex, like “you’re such a cute clown, you’re such a cute clown,” and really meaning it. I advocate that. That specific experience.

If you’re trying to extend this outward as a parable for life about trying things and finding joy in the unexpected, even in things that terrify you and test your limits, then you’re out of luck. I’m nobody’s super baked kung fu marathon. I just think you should consider fucking a clown at least once in your life. That’s it.