Hey Guys.

I'm here now.

And here.

Guide to Being A Big Fat Miserable Sack of Shit

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

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

Your face will get fat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there's pluses and minuses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guide to Boners.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guide to Potbelly’s Hate Crimes and Immeasurable Shame

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

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

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

What did I say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guide to Taking Care of Yourself

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

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

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

“Could be worse.”

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guide to Comedy

You know what’s funny?

No, you don’t.

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

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

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

1.

Shit.

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

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

1. Making other people feel bad on purpose.

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

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

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

2. Other people hurting themselves.

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

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

3. Trying really hard to be funny.

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

4. Not trying hard enough to be funny.

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

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

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

5. “Edgy” comedy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and also: I love boobs.

Guide to Mindreading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So suck it up.

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

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