by Corey Taylor
Not real enough? Okay, vanity is telling someone you love them just to gain some sort of trust because you believe you can change them and make them better. You know something, the more I think about this one, the more I think it is fun. I would love to just blame that shit on fictional characters from some Ryan Reynolds flick, but I have felt the barrel of that gun pushed against the back of my head a few more times than I am happy to admit. When a personality does not even come close to living up to the hype of that person’s internal movie trailer, you should run, not walk, to the nearest exit. Things like that are the reasons why divorce is up, romance is down, and life has a hint of shit in its aftertaste when it comes to love. But every once in a while you get proven wrong, and when you do it feels great.
Back to vanity: Is it me or do vain people look a lot like puppets? They have exaggerated movements, most have funny voices, and they really want you to keep your attention focused in their direction, but only from the neck up. That is just like old episodes of Sesame Street: “A is for Asshole! Ha ha ha!!” Yeah, I crack myself up a lot more than I crack anybody else up, but that is okay. At least I am smart enough to get my own jokes. Vain people will crib quotes from famous folks in an attempt to seem “in” and edgy without having a fucking clue what they are talking about. Half the time they only say things because it could seem sweet through the sound of their voice. Meanwhile, people with half a brain would love to choke all their air out.
Self-importance can really be a pain, but I still say it is neither a sin nor is it deadly. Sure, it is a trait that can be hazardous to your health—people always want to hurt the fuckface at the party—but vain people do not kill people unless they can look good doing it. And those are just too many things for a vainglorious brain to handle at the same time. That would be like teaching an Arabian horse to fire a rocket launcher with its teeth while it stamps out its own age with its hooves. It may work in a National Lampoon movie, but in real life, thank goodness, it is simply not the way it works. Well, shit, I take that back—I guess you could drive off the road when you are primping yourself in your car mirrors, but I doubt the scriptures had that in mind when they meant “deadly.” All they had back then were goat carts, and goat carts did not include side mirrors until 1957.
Sometimes vanity is in the eye of the beholder, and judgments like that make for bad gossip. Assuming someone is full of his or herself is just as bad as being full of yourself. I am sure there are good people out there who have these rumors following them around like paparazzi half the time. So why do people desperately try to tear people down all the time? Envy is a great reason. Jealous saps try to find any weakness in the armor so they can feel a little better than the other does. But does that not require just as much energy as building yourself to a place where you do not care about other people’s statures? The mind boggles. It is like a Republican and a Democrat debating how to fight inflation and recession. One thinks you should dole out free money in tax cuts to people to encourage them to spend it on homegrown products, thereby stimulating the economy. The other one thinks you should instead use the money to start public programs, thereby creating jobs for the unemployed and filtering the money back into the economy. Who is right? Better yet, which way is easier?
I know several vain people in my line of work. I also know people who would have every right to be vain and they are not. I am only human; I have my moments of putting myself on a pedestal. But for the most part, I just try to do the best work I can with the time I have. Those others, those bodies who think the world revolves around them, they will claw halfway to make everyone under them feel like the top is impossible. They will shower themselves in praise and find new ways to reward mediocre results. They will crow on a fence until someone throws a fucking boot at them. They will never stop because if they do, what else do they have?
And there is the truth of it: the fear. It is the fear of being outrun when the bullets are flying. It is the fear of being eaten by a shark before you can reach the shallows. It is the fear of being the constant stranger: never being recognized, reconciled, or rewarded. It makes good cops dirty, thieves wealthy, and sinners worthy. We all worship at the Great Tit, hoping for an extra few seconds of suckle before the pipes run dry, before we get to feel full and happy. We might as well have blood and skin under our fingernails because we have all left our marks on the ones we held back in order to hold our own.
Fear makes us buy stupid shit advertised by paid programming. If these half-hour commercials are good at anything, it is selling us crap at 4 a.m. we never needed. But by appealing to our shoddy sense of self, we are left clamoring for things like the Ab Circle or the Power Juicer. We get conned by paid models who are too busy flexing their muscles to deliver their lines convincingly. And yet they are able to convince us. How the hell does that work? Guys with deeper tans than the soldiers of the French Foreign Legion, guys with British accents, fast-talking guys with keen N’Sync headsets who are prone to violence against prostitutes—all these “qualified” men are really wouldbe actors, shilling paraphernalia based on an infallible concept: Whether buyers know it or not, they hate themselves and it is a matter of time before they realize they don’t need all this cluttered nonsense. From the Bowflex to the Thighmaster, inventive minds have dedicated themselves to making sure that if we do not think there is anything wrong with us, they will let us know. Service with a smile leads to grief with a grimace, all so the particular product that you were made to feel like “you could not live without” can now gather dust within three months.
I have also noticed that vain people with no money act differently than vain people with lots of money. The poor get in fistfights to prove their worth; the rich just marry different celebrities. But pettiness knows no tax bracket or zip code, no borders or boundaries. It could very well be the one “sin” that is communist, libertarian, and capitalist. If you have the right gear and you give great beard, you too can be the darling of the antibourgeoisie. When everybody sucks, so much for the class system. You can paint that shit any shade of Mao red you want—it is the universal qualm. All it takes to set it off is a little subtle push.
It was 2001 and I was playing a show at the L.A. Forum with Slipknot. I was wandering around the backstage area, watching how pompous people can become when they are convinced someone is watching. They were right I guess—somebody was watching. Unfortunately for them, it was me. And slowly but surely I was turning into a disgusted drunken asshole. I was cornered on all sides by braggarts, bimbos, and bastards. They were everywhere I looked. They were everywhere I was not. They were in my space and I did not like it. It was around that point that I found myself in a situation. There was a certain famous rock star trying to hold court at my show. I will not say his name because it would just be one more fucker trying to sue me and I have better things to do with my time. So we will just call him “Len.”
Len was doing his very best to call inordinate amounts of attention to himself at a show he was not playing. I think he believed he was a show in and of himself, you know what I am saying? So there he was, stumbling drunkenly from hallway to hallway, followed by a gaggle of dumb-ass hookers, each one looking more haggard and disastrous than the last. I think he was truly enjoying himself, fluffing his invisible tail feathers up higher and higher until you could not even see around his entourage of pure suck. He seemed to be happy, at least as happy as this particular rascal could be, and Len made it known in the loudest voice he could muster that anyone who had a problem with the way he or “his bitches” were acting, they could say it to his face.
As luck would have it, he was standing right next to me when he was finished.
I asked him if he needed a drink and Len sneered at me, barking out booze orders for himself and his shitty harem. Then he turned around as if he were done with me. But I was not done with him. I turned him around with a calm hand and told him that if he and his rent-a-sluts wanted something to drink, he could make his way to the bar set up in the catering
area. He laughed and said, “I am not going anywhere! Who are you?”
I said, “I am the guy kicking you out of my fucking show.”
With that, four security guards filled in the empty area behind Len. His bimbos did not know what to do, so they left. Len stood there, getting more and more red in the face. He threw his head back and let out every vain cliché you can think of: “Do you know who I am?” “I can do what I want, I am a guest!” “I can have your fucking jobs!” There was more, but I will spare you the stupid details. Suffice it to say, he was angry because people were treating him like a regular person at a rock show. But the facts are that it was not his band playing, so he was a regular person at a rock show. So I had security throw his fucking ass out of my show. They were also instructed not to let him back in, no matter who tried to countermand the order. The moral of the story is watch who you fuck with; you are not always in your territory, even if you think you are.
Len has a good excuse to act like the Sultan of Shit I guess. He was a once A-List, became a B-List, now resides somewhere between D- and F-List celebrityhood, and he felt that because he felt he was in his element, he could get way with it. Then again, it was my own vanity that triggered my anger. So I guess I am just as much a fuckhead as he was. But like I said, it was my show. Right? No? Aw, shit. Honestly, I just wanted to prove a point. I mean I was in L.A., and that place is fraught with frivolous feeling. So to hell with the overabundance of underachievers; this should be a world where those of us with the strength and talent go exactly where we want as fast as our dreams can carry us. The best quote I ever heard was Kevin Smith talking about how people get ahead in L.A.: “In L.A., people just fail upward.” That is painfully accurate and it makes me sick, but I am still here so it cannot always be that way. There is still a contingent of discontents who would rather fight for every crumb than whine for the leftovers. Shit may roll downhill, but when everyone has gas, you can smell it everywhere once it rises.
Metallica are a perfect reason to never give up hope. They are one of the greatest and most consistently creative bands on the planet. Sure, you may not agree with some of the musical choices they have made—even I was scratching my head about “Hero of the Day”—but they had the drive, the intelligence, and the fucking huge balls to do what they wanted with their career. Oh, and one more thing, you would be hard-pressed to find a band that does more for their fans than they do. They are still brilliant, even all these years after I first discovered them in my friend Che Schmitt’s basement, and they still have the fucking balls to say and do what they want.
“Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“When I grow up, I want to be in Metallica!”
“Sure thing. Did you take out the trash?”
What is it about fathers and trash day? I know, you do not have to remind me. I am about six years from that very same conversation with my kids. That is fine with me. I look forward to it.
Irony, as always, surrounds each of the so-called Deadly Sins. As I have said, rage is fairly funny. Envy and greed leave you with nothing, and gluttony leaves you hungry for more. Lust fills us with emptiness, and sloth takes more effort than you could ever imagine. Vanity makes us ugly. It leaves you alone in a multitude. It whispers until all you hear are poison tongues. It will destroy everything you have until you are engulfed in ashes. It will twist your hope into a murder of crows. Then it will peck your eyes out so you can see nothing.
Fuck me, that was heavy. Maybe it is a sin after all. Nope, I’m still not convinced: Just because it makes us act like selfish cowards does not mean we are selfish cowards. We must take responsibility for our actions at some point, or someday soon there will be nothing left to blame. Humans are empty glasses with vast reservoirs of endurance. We can beat anything in our way, as long as someone stands in the way of the mirror to distract us. We are so caught up in ourselves. Between pushing up cleavage and wetting down cowlicks, it is a wonder we have time to wipe ourselves properly. St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. But no cause is lost if there is still one person devoted to it. So Jude might as well be the patron saint of us all.
The devout are vain in thinking they know any better than we do. I mean, let’s face it: We are all mice on the wheel just trying to get a lick from that infernal water bottle. Just because they believe they have the Bat number to the Bat phone wired to God’s palace in Fort Lauderdale, that does not mean they have any more answers than we do. They just pretend they do. Good for them. I hope they get that part in the Wendy’s commercial.
I will always be fascinated and repulsed by this sultry sense of personality. I guess if I were a little bit shallow and a little less hungry, I would not be addicted to KFC. But as terrible as I feel afterward, I love the things I love and that is that. Doing what is right by you is a slippery slope to doing right by others, and that is a point of view the truly self-obsessed cannot abide by. Helping and sharing not because you are on camera but because you want to do something for others is just about as far from the vanity train as you can get. So tell me: What is stopping them? I think if they had one pure stimulus cross their emotional compound, they would be forced to send the guards in with dogs and mace. The ability to drop whatever it is you are doing and chime in for your neighbor is a luxury the sociopaths cannot afford with any credit card in their deck. It takes too much out of them to do something so small, and that makes them small people. And there are small people everywhere.
You would think they would feel bad, but you assume they feel. You would think they would try to correct their course, but you assume they care. This is nothing more than a clock that works and reads backward. Just when you think the alarm will wake most of us up, it lulls you back to sleep. The Beautiful Ones—they hurt you every time, as Prince once sang. Their minds were made up the second somebody gave them negative approval. Things like malice and vindication are not even in their little black books—again, you assume they care. They do not. They are only interested in what steps inside their one-foot by one-foot diameter. In other words, if they are not exclusive, they are not included.
Then again, times and people change, but the world never does. It keeps spinning, no matter who it revolves around in that moment. So my advice is simple: Do not waste your breath until you see the whites of their flags. It takes too much to deal with them, even more to pity them, and exactly $25 more to pay for anything they involve you in. You have enough to worry about. Let the pretty people talk themselves into debt for a change, huh? More has been made out of less, and they are walking, talking, fucking proof. I will wait forty-five minutes for most to figure it out, then I leave it up to them. But it was always up to them. I just let them try to figure it out with someone around—they always do their best work when someone is paying attention. That is vanity, right there: If you are looking, they are heroes. The minute you turn away, you are treated like a hooker on her birthday—you look like shit and you never changed clothes. Trust your instincts, hail Mary, and remember one thing: We all look the same after eight shots of Jack Daniels, even the ones who never changed that much from shot number one.
What time you got, bartender?
chapter 5
Three-Toed Sloth
Sloth. . .
Are you fucking kidding me?
Sloth?
He was the guy from The Goonies with the crooked face and fucked-up chick-lets, right?
Sloth!
I cannot believe I even have to write this fucking chapter, let alone defend it.
Sigh.
Okay, here we go....
Sloth for the layman is laziness, albeit extreme laziness. Some might say it is more complicated than that. But really it is merely being lazy. It is that simple: no weapons, no drugs, no fucking. . . just laying there. It is doing nothing, pure, unadulterated trueblue sweet sassy American nothing. It is the vacuum of the human propensity for innovation, the other end of busy. Sloth is absence in attendance. Sloth is the leech on the heart of ingenuity.
He also loved Chunk and helped stop the Fratellis, which was kind of heartwarming because he was a Fratelli, but he helped the kids get away and held the rock so the kids could escape and. . .
If I were a real man, I would leave you with ten blank pages. Or maybe just type this out using only one finger. I could take pictures of myself doing so as proof. Holy living fuck, that would take me forever. I would have to cancel all kinds of shit, like my fencing and clog dancing classes. I do not think that is an option; I am all-state in clog dancing. But imagine it, me in all my glory, lying prostrate on my bed, curled up in my Spiderman Underoos and my leopard-print Snuggie, aimlessly punching the keys with my index finger, or better yet my middle finger. That is some slothful shit. But because I am a loquacious blowhard, I will rant for a while. I did not earn the nickname Great Big Mouth for nothing, and hey, at least I am not being lazy. So I guess I will put some fucking pants on and get to work.
This is one of those concepts that just straight bother me on both sides of the debate. On one hand, yes, it is not good to be a wistful fuck with no drive and no dreams. If we were all just slovenly pigs, we would have been conquered by aliens or at least by Canada years ago. Alaska would just be another frozen province near the Pacific Ocean. But on the other, what is wrong with doing dick with your time every now and then? Are we expected to be seminal broke-back creatures of industry, trying frantically to grab a deep breath to savor before going back to the grind? And why is it a deadly sin? Why is it such a turnoff to turn off the engines once in a while? Who can you possibly hurt by running on reserve power?
The argument can be made that being lazy does nothing for the people around you and your family by and large. You can also say that the world is a much better place because people get out of their habitual holes. As the saying goes, idle hands are the devil’s playthings. So by virtue of listlessness, diabolical comeuppance can really only come from do-nothingness. Now personally, I could not give a fat fisted lady on pay-per-view if someone chooses to be slothful or not, just as long as my French fries are in the bag when I exit the drive-through. But some take it to a level that requires so much effort that it cannot be considered slothfulness by its very definition. Like Bill Cosby said, “It takes hard work to keep from working.” If Daddy Huxtable said it, that is good enough for me.
