Hey, that book he wrote where he answered people's questions did pretty well. Maybe he could write an advice column called "Dear Stabby."
You know, at this point the fact is that it just doesn't seem to matter anymore to anyone that O.J. did it. It's no big deal, it's become just another punch line. He plotted it and planned it, worked out all the timing, his escape route, his alibi, and the only unscheduled stumbling blocks he had to improvise around were Kato wanting to go talk to the big clown and Ron Goldman wanting to not die. Like he once did with linebackers that stood between him and the end zone, O.J. got by them. In the words of that NFL films announcer: "On that warm June day a fierce warrior had a mission. That warrior was Orenthal James Simpson, a man possessed, a man who was not to be denied."
He pulled a fancy stutter-step on Kato, then squared his shoulders and ran right over Ron Goldman. Penalty flags were thrown, but upon further review the referees in the black and white striped shirts actually turned out to be referees in black shirts and referees in white shirts.
I freely admit to feeling cheated that O. J. Simpson didn't get life for his crimes. That he probably will never be brought to his arthritic knees. I assuage my anger by reassuring myself that he will never again elicit the respect and admiration of reasonable people. That he'll always be whispered about like some latter-day Hester Prynne wearing an "M" instead of an "A." And that he will always be surrounded by black-slappers, sycophants, ass- kissing golfing buddies, and coke-whores who are looking to thrill-fuck a murderer.
Hey, you know what, folks, I think he did get life ... Yeah, he did ... you're our bitch now, O.J.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The Pursuit of Happiness
For crying out loud, we live in a country where "the pursuit of happiness" is written into the Declaration of Independence. We live in the land of Happy Meals. Happy Meals. You know, there are people living, barely, on this planet for whom a Happy Meal is when they find an extra dung beetle in their bowl of roots and twigs. I mean, c'mon, in a lot of those countries, fast food is a gazelle. So why, in this land if freedom and plenty, are we loaded to the gills with Zoloft? Why do more people miss work yearly due to depression than to any other physical malady? Why are we such alcoholic, sex-and-drug-addicted, bingeing-and-purging, compulsively gambling, ulcer-ridden basket cases?
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but most Americans are sadder than Bob Vila's neighbor trying to sleep in.
I believe that as we grow up, we are actually taught to be unhappy. We are shown what we don't have, we learn that society places value on accumulating material possessions, and we find out that success means winning an award. Happiness and satisfaction go hand in hand and we can never be satisfied because goals have been set for us that are higher than the entire front row at Reggae Sunsplash '98.
And even if you've made your peace with the material world, even if your baseball team is half a game out of first place and your family is healthy, even if you've learned to accept your lot in life and tend to your little garden, how can anybody with a shred of compassion in their soul sit through five minutes' worth of network nightly news without feeling like Sylvia Plath during a screening of Shoah while listening to Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush"?
It's a brutal world. More than ever, tragedy, violence, mayhem, and injustice seem to be the order of the day. It's almost impossible to enjoy with a clear conscience whatever little piece of tranquillity you've carved out for yourself while abject misery and suffering is all over the world like phony on Kathie Lee Gifford.
You know, we have the unrealistic expectation that unless every nanosecond of our life is spent in multiorgasmic joy, we're being ripped off worse than the Von Trapp family in a New York City taxi from JFK into Manhattan.
The quest for happiness is a metaphysical game of three-card monte and we are both sucker and shill. We know we'll never find the red card, but a little voice inside us makes us keep throwing down twenties. Listen up, guys and gals, you may never be any happier than you are right now. You may be richer or better-sexed or more powerful, but you may never be any happier.
Our entire existence is spent yearning for what we don't have, and we're convinced that whatever it is we're missing is the one thing keeping us from perfect bliss, transcendence, nirvana, satori ... whatever term your particular ideological affiliation uses for the state in which life truly resembles a lite beer commercial.
What makes people happy anyway? I've come to the conclusion that most people are only really happy not when something good happens to them, but when something bad doesn't happen to them. Remember how good you felt when your neighbor's house got struck by lightning because he got the new satellite dish?
We could go round and round on this all night, but that would fly in the face of what I've been trying to say all along. Happiness doesn't always require resolution.
But, rather, an in-the-moment, carefree acceptance of the fact that the worst day of being alive is much better than the best day being dead. And personally, I've never been happier than this precise moment because I just found out that an extensive two-week investigation by the federal government revealed no violations of child labor laws in the production of my new line of Dennis Miller active wear. You are gonna love my new sports bra.
Hey, happiness is not settling for less, but just not being miserable with what is. I have always lived by the creed "It's not the approval or accolades or possessions that make you smile, but simply making the left turn even though you were the third car in the intersection."
I myself have learned to love the simple things.
Nothing makes me happier than coming upstairs and finding my wife sound asleep in bed with our two children. Covering them with Grandma's quilt, going downstairs to make sure all the doors are locked, stepping out onto my wood deck to a clear summer night with every star blazing brilliantly through a balmy breeze while I contemplatively run through my head a list of anyone who was ever a cast member of Saturday Night Live and try to figure out how their career is going compared to mine.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Spouses
You know, I read somewhere that Paul McCartney and his wife have never been apart for a single night since they've been married. That's kind of sweet, isn't it? Evidently, that's their approach to marriage—close proximity. But everybody has their own separate tack on how to stay with their spouse for the rest of their life.
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but a great marriage is like a duck. On the surface it looks cool and effortless, but underneath, well, you know, everybody's paddling like hell.
So, why do you do it? Well, there comes a point in everyone's life when they sense the randomness, the utter chaos of the world, and begin to search for an anchor, someone whose presence will serve as a haven of comforting familiarity and, hopefully, regular sex in the tornado-beset trailer park that is our daily existence.
Unfortunately, in a time when even the most steady of us has the attention span of the guy from Shine hooked up to a Jolt Cola IV, preventing spousal familiarity from deteriorating into a rut that makes something look like something else ... sorry the simile well is dry.
I want to qualify this by stating to all the menfolk out there that if you have a spouse as wonderful as the one I have, you should thank your lucky stars. Because between reasonably priced landscaping services, Jiffy-Lube, and sperm banks, men are ... you know, men are pretty much optional nowadays. There are times when men feel only vaguely tolerated in a relationship, and there may be stretches when it seems like the only time you're not in hot water with your wife is when you take a shower after her.
The problem is that we go into marriage knowing about as much as our mates as Mia Farrow did in Rosemary's Baby. Or, for that matter, as much as Mia Farrow did in her actual life.
You know, some people would say that spouses can be separated into two stereotypically different gr
oups. There are the remote-controlling, chore-ducking, boat-buying, beer-bellied, non-conversing, insensitive natural-gas factories called husbands. And then you have the mall-blaz- ing, in-law-inviting, will-you-put-the-goddamn-toilet-seat-down, you-really-don't-remember-what-today-is-do-you, we-never-go-anywhere shoe junkies called wives.
Now, I obviously can't speak for women—I can periodically dress like them, and I will continue to do so, but here are some things that women should know about men that would make being married to them easier:
1. All husbands are losing their hair. Now, there is nothing a wife can do to make her husband feel better about that. So here's how you nip it in the bud, ladies. The first time your husband comes out of the shower pulling his hair back, asking if you think he's going bald, this is what you say: "You know darling, I'm looking at your dick right now, and to be honest, hair loss is the least of your problems."
2. All right, ladies, you know your friend from high school, Howard, who you always use as an example because he actually cleared the table and then put the dishes in the dishwater without even being asked? Howard is gay. Believe me. I met him one night when I was dressed as a woman.
3. Despite what you've been told, men love to cuddle after sex. But why does your head have to block the TV?
4. Don't sit down and watch Australian Rules football with us. You don't want to try to understand Australian Rules football. Nobody understands it. We don't understand it. All right? That's the whole point. When we are watching Australian Rules football, it means we just went into our invisible he-man clubhouse. And you know that the only reason you sit down next to us and pretend you want to watch is that you want to come into our he-man clubhouse and ruin it with your girl cooties. So stay out. All right!
5. Husbands need to be asked to do something three times. The first time we don't even hear you, and the second time we don't think you mean it.
6. Gals, gals, you know that primordial sense of nurturing you get from raising children? Huh? That's the same way we feel about our baseball caps. Okay?
7. Finally, ladies, will you stop, please, stop trying to talk us into a threesome with your best friend. We're just not interested. Okay?! That's not what we're about.
You know the most important thing in a marriage? Huh? You want to know what it is? You must respect your spouse for who he or she is. Don't try to change them. In marriage, what you see is what you get. Sure, maybe one day your husband will love Jane Campion movies and be able to last more than seven minutes inside Bed, Bath, and Beyond without taking a salesclerk hostage with a fucking loufah. And maybe your wife won't wince when you tell the same three stories at a dinner party for the forty-seventh time, and maybe she will make left turns according to your specifications, but don't hold your breath, all right. It's learning to endure your spouse's little flaws, i.e., their maddeningly stubborn refusal to be exactly like you, that builds character.
Your spouse is someone that you can feel comfortable doing absolutely nothing with. Someone whose expectations are always softened by understanding. A completely different person through whose eyes, over time, you see yourself more clearly.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Lying
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here ... actually, that's a lie, I do want to get off on a rant here.
I'm talking about something that everybody does, nobody admits, and when they get caught doing it, they always have a good excuse. No, I'm not talking about laughing hysterically during America's Funniest Home Videos, I'm talking about lying.
Now, despite the bad rap lies get, can you imagine a world without them? I mean, it would be bedlam. The end of family get-togethers as we know them. First dates never even making it to the restaurant. Toupee makers all out of business. Chaos.
And the weird thing is, we even lie to other animals. I mean, come on, who here hasn't faked out a dog by only pretending to throw the tennis ball? You think that's a cute trick, a little game? Uh, it's a big fat lie, and don't think your dog doesn't know it. Oh, sure, he might fall for it the first five or six hundred times, but then he'll catch on.
I think most reasonable people wouldn't deny that some lies are harmless little isolated episodes of convenient untruth. Gentle inaccuracies like: "Hey, a lime- green paisley tie, great!" Or "This mutton sorbet is delicious"; and "Hey, that was really fun. Sure, I'll call."
But lying is so commonplace, we've become hardened to it, and we even expect it. For God's sake, we've just reelected a president who we all know is a complete, bald-faced, unadulterated ... all right, strike unadulterated ... unmitigated bullshit artist. And sadly, what Bill Clinton has done so far in his career is no different from what any politician throughout history has done. You show me an honest politician, and faster than you can say "Dukakian landslide defeat" I'll show you a guy who'll be teaching poli sci at a community college in Light-my-fart, Arkansas.
Our collective mind-set is so mistrustful, we make Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate look like Papa Smurf. With the proliferation of X-Files Web sites and conspiracy theories on everything ranging from Vince Foster's suicide to Susan Lucci's never winning an Emmy, paranoia has become a national cottage industry.
But loath as we are to admit it, you know, we need lies. Lying is the WD-40 on the gears of our lives. Without the regular dissemination of fibs, whoppers, and just plain bullshit, our lives would derail like an Amtrak train under ideal conditions.
Lying is the horns, claws, and teeth that we weren't born with. Once we found out we could hunt animals by trickery, the tool of deception became our sharpest stick and we soon learned to turn it on each other. To this day the ability to lie remains the most well-oiled wrench in our box.
Okay, perhaps it's a bit harsh to call all of us liars. Whatever you prefer. Fact reconstructionist ... Truth manager ... Reality stylist ... Whatever you want.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of our public figures seems incapable of telling the difference between white lies, gray lies, and lies so black, they could suck the light from Las Vegas and still have enough black left over to provide a lifetime supply of turtlenecks to the Yale English department.
And then there's my business. Show business. You look for honesty in show business, you might as well be looking for Parliament Funkadelic albums at Mark Fuhr- man's house. L.A. is to dishonesty what Wisconsin is to cheese. In Hollywood, lying to someone is simply considered to be good manners. It's the town where "Let's do lunch" actually means "You're dead to me, assface."
The truth is that the truth has become more malleable than Stretch Armstrong in a Navajo sweat lodge.
The truth used to be the Holy Grail. The truth used to be the brass ring, the mint-condition Rabe Ruth rookie baseball card with the original stick of gum still intact. But, my friends, you may officially consider the gum to be chewed and stuck under the theater seat.
Remember, the bottom line is this, lying merely for personal gain or benefit is morally and ethically wrong. And I feel I can say that with all integrity and conviction to you, the smartest book purchasers that I have ever written for in my entire life, I love you all.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Art
You know, most older philanthropists end up giving their money to the arts. Or at least they used to, when art was still art. Now, I'm not an art aficionado by any means. Until recently I thought Chagall was once married to Kelly LeBrock.
But I'd like to think that I have an eye for aesthetics, the symbols that stir and inspire—meaning one thing to you and something else entirely to another ... But let's cut to the chase—SHIT IS SHIT, no matter how you frame it.
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but what is art? Art is a combination of feelings and the talent to express those feelings through painting or sculpture or architecture or whatever medium. Who knows? I mean, I may have had some of the same feelings as Michelangelo, the difference being he expressed his w
ith the statue of David and I express mine by talking to M&Ms.
You know, art used to be simple. You saw something pretty, or scary, or holy, and you recreated it using whatever you had lying around. You weren't a "pre-modern minimalist expressionist primitivist," you were a Neanderthal in a cave, drawing a fucking horsey. And when you were done, all the other cave dwellers didn't stand around drinking fermented berry juice and eating mastodon milk cheese and discussing the rhythm and nuance of your composition and the subtle texturing of the dung you used.
Until photography came along in the mid-1800s, artists were essentially little Brownie cameras hanging from a strap around the neck of the privileged elite who wanted their estate and family to be preserved for posterity.
Walk through any museum and what you pretty much see is paintings of rich bastards and their stuff. But once the camera came into existence, it freed artists up to give their impressions rather than record precisely what they saw. And that's when the LeRoy Neiman hit the fan.
Cut to the present-day art world: an incestuous society of toadies, charlatans, and wanna-Kostabis who are more interested in perpetuating the myth of their own talents than actually producing anything that's even remotely aesthetically pleasing.
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