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.