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.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Guide to Road Rage.
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Guide to Settling Down.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Guide to Being Hungover at Work.
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.
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.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Guide to Winter.
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.
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.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Guide to Not Being a Douchebag-for-Life.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Guide to Huge Crowds of People.
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.
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.
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