by David Cross
Okay, fine: I’m contemptuous and patronizing. But I’m not simply some knee-jerk lefty with a soft-spot for a more equitable distribution of wealth and state-sponsored health care. (Not exactly correct except for the state-sponsored health-care part. Just simply as a practical matter of fiscal responsibility. I don’t want no A.I.D.S. babies bringing me down!) For instance, I am not opposed to the death penalty for certain crimes. In fact, not only am I not opposed to it, but I heartily condone it for certain specific situations. I have heard many compelling arguments against it, but I have not been swayed. I’m talking strictly about the idea of state-sponsored death as a moral issue. Hey, look, I don’t want the governor of Mississippi * deciding on the fate of my life during an election year any more than you would, but I think if you fuck a child to death, you should die. Done deal. No debates about your shitty upbringing or drug-induced devil state, please, I’m late for dinner.
The guilty don’t have to die in any horrific way. It can be peaceful. This isn’t about something as intangible, and ultimately unsatisfying, as “revenge.” Just… that’s it. You take a life, you give up your right to live. Why can’t that be agreed upon by everyone? Even lefty hippies. That seems fair. That’s one of those little things on the plus side of being an Athiest, no conflicting rules within your prescribed religion in which you have to pick, and then justify, a side. As I mentioned earlier, I know that there are often very good arguments against capital punishment. The most undeniable being the mountains of innocents put to death based on the rash judgments of the ignorant who are ruled by their emotions, or worse, the corrupt. But seriously, you kill two elderly people for some crack money, you die. I don’t care if you sober up and realize you’ve done a naughty thing.
I also believe immigration is a legitimate issue and that handing out fliers to remind everyone that immigrants built this country doesn’t matter. While it’s true, and a nice thing to remember, it is of zero relevance today. I believe that the Koran is a violent tome whose teachings go against everything this country stands for and people who subscribe to it are suspect. We’ve already got enough crazy lunatic religious zealots in this country, so let’s not add so many of their sworn enemies that I have to live in fear of the coming crusades pouring down Fifth Avenue just when there’s the big annual sale at Barney’s.
Let’s see. What else can I tell you to put a wedge between me and annoying lefties? Oh, how about this?
Woodstock
I AM WELL ON RECORD STATING MY DISDAIN AND CONTEMPT FOR hippies ( idrinkforareason.com/austinhippieriff). Any new-age, gytronics-Pilated Stevie Nicks wannabe armed with enough Dr. Bronner’s soap and a bushel of sage can, and will, tell you in five “Oh wow, man’s” or less what’s wrong with the world/America. But they will consistently be erroneous because they will have left themselves out of the equation, and they are very much a part of what’s wrong in America.
But how can they be part of what’s wrong with America? They leave most of us alone and don’t impose their illogic on others. Yes? They are a simple and passive breed of drum-circling do-gooders. Right? Right?! Mmm, not really. Just as they might correctly consider all outdoor advertising (billboards, advertecture, etc.) to be eye-rape (or whatever half-assed cutesy name they might call that), I consider all of their riot of colors and stupid bumper stickers to be eye-rape as well. And the kind of eye-rape that leaves you with an advanced case of eye-AIDS to boot.
I’ve always hated bumper stickers as a way to communicate. They’re fine if you want to show your support for the Steelers or trumpet your child’s academic prowess. It’s the bumper stickers that espouse ideology or a political point that I can’t stand. There’s a smugness and cool detachment to them that I don’t care for. As well, they are usually completely ineffective. As far as I know, neither Tibet or Mumia or Leonard Peltier is free. Kids still use drugs, war still wages across the world, and we still proudly trade our children’s blood for oil.
I would like to force them to “Practice the Random Acts of Kindness” they feel are so important on unsuspecting and uninterested fellow passengers and see what those people think. Will they change their attitude once they see that no one really wants to learn the zither or know how to make a compress out of cow dung and boysenberries to help get rid of crow’s feet? There are numerous epicenters of this kind of community across America, and I’ve been to many of them. But there is one that stands a bit taller and sillier than the rest. No, not Boulder or Taos or Marin or Eugene or Burlington. It’s Woodstock, NY. There is a shop there—let’s call it “The Lavender Buffoon” * —that features a pet psychic. A pet psychic, you say? “But that’s ridiculous. Just being a psychic is ridiculous already.” Yes, they’ve taken perhaps the oldest and scammiest of the scams and kicked it up a level. And there are enough deluded idiots up there to financially support it.
There are few greater proponents of absolute, improvable hucksterism than psychics. And I am including anyone involved in religion. The ability to convince intellectually weak suckers that not only can I tell you what tidings or warnings your long-dead uncle wishes to impart, but I can also tell you if your fish is feeling melancholy, or if your black Lab, “Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States,” really wants to go back and visit the apartment you used to have in the city. Just for this alone we should do something about these useless people. Maybe tax them more. Create a “well-meaning, but actually harmful” tax so that when they advocate drinking and bathing in your own urine, they also pay into a universal health-care system to offset the damage brought on by drinking and bathing in one’s own urine.
How am I supposed to take you people seriously? Which, ironically, is the single most important thing to you. You so desperately want to be taken seriously, not dismissed with a lethargic wave of the hand, but to have your ideas considered and one day in the future implemented (for that’s when your utterly unrealistic, juvenile, Marxism for Dummies utopia will come true). You really believe in Magick? Really? You believe that burning or ingesting the right combination and exact measurements of fungus and herbs will draw a lover forth? I will give a pass to my friends and loved ones who believe (sorta) in Jesus and/or God and all of that nonsense because they’ve been brainwashed since birth. But Magick?! That’s something you have to, as an adult, think about, consider the real possibilities of, and ultimately accept. As a thinking, rational, educated grown-up. There’s no brainwashing involved. Half of this planet doesn’t and hasn’t celebrated “Magick Day” for the last two thousand years. There’s no universal culture surrounding it. You were never taught that if you didn’t believe in Magick that you would burn in hell for all of “eternity.” No, you’re just desperate for something to attach yourself to that will give you some form of (to you, at least) unique identity. Never mind that if you move to a place where everyone thinks like yourself you’ve pretty much drained the “unique” factor from it. Oh hippies, when will you ever learn?
I would like to preface this next piece by stating that this was originally written over three years ago when the following was new, raw, and pertinent. Since I experienced all of this though, I am happy to say that I have met the real love of my life (seriously, for reals this time) and am happier than I could ever or have ever imagined. She’s a combination of Glinda the Good Witch; Dorothy Parker; a young, alive Natalie Wood; and Sacagawea at her hottest all rolled into one perfect woman. Also I never posted this anywhere. I just wrote it for me. And now, you.
Breaking Up
MAN, AM I SHITTY AT BREAKING UP WITH SOMEONE. BOTH THE doing and receiving. I mean we all know that there are some people out there who are basically impervious to this kind of pain. (And I speak in the present tense, because the—what I thought was—love of my life just broke up with me and moved out of our apartment six days ago. It all happened rather quickly. I mean, of course she had been wrestling with it for a while, but I didn’t have the benefit of being privy to all of her private thoughts. It’s only now I wish that s
he had had a diary that I could’ve found and lost her trust by reading and finding out how she felt. A real diary, I mean, not some online attempt at making yourself matter to strangers through unsolicited opinions and slander.) What was I saying? Oh yes, how do they do it? The ones that either cause the pain or have their lives irrevocably altered yet are out at Jigglers three days later doing chocolate cake shots with that girl who works in the shipping department and then fucking her, while unknown to both of them, her five-year-old kid silently watches from the hallway? It takes me a month at least to be able to even get it up after something like this. Maybe I need to read more men’s magazines (“fish in the ocean” and “This is Denise, who says that the best guy to go out with is a guy on the rebound, ’cause they’re the easiest to manipulate”), but I’m usually a big pile of near catatonic whimpering for at least the first week. Actually, I should amend that. I always seem to have an almost admirable stoic and serene acceptance of the inevitable as well as a truly honest attempt to reach out and help the very person that is not just breaking my heart but adding another layer of solid injury, distrust, and cynicism to the rock-hard crystalline sheath that forever protects my once innocent, healthy heart.
I want to be him… or her, either way. Just not me, I guess. Oh. There’s another bad part of getting dumped. (Which somehow doesn’t seem an appropriate word for three and a half years with relatively no problems and cohabitation. Dumped seems like it should only apply to relationships lasting a year or less. After that the word should be something like killed or temporarily deaded.) Suddenly the ubiquitous empty greeting of “Hey, how’s it going? How are you?” becomes the most loaded question since “Are you now or have you ever been a communist?” The simple answer is never very simply put. “Oh, I’ve been better.” “Why, what’s wrong?” “Well, my girlfriend left me and . . .” Cut to three minutes later, and your friends are shifting uncomfortably trying to get away while you talk about how you just bought her a $400 coat and asking “What’s the matter with me?”
And you want to call but you can’t (the inner dialogue is the worst) because you will be perceived as annoying. So then you think, “Well, that’s unfair to her. I shouldn’t keep calling even though that’s the only thing that makes me temporarily feel better.” Why am I being so fucking nice and cool about this? I should be sending dead rats with torn pictures of us in its dead rat asshole. No, no. As satisfying as that would be, I’ll look like the biggest asshole on the planet, and everyone except for people like Neil Strauss will lose what little sympathy they had for me. Neil Strauss, of course, would consider me a hero.
I become a mess of a human being, both physically and spiritually. I don’t sleep for three days, then I sleep for a week. I can’t read, I don’t eat, and I have to take psylium husk just so I can take a shit that doesn’t look like a Fallujahan checkpoint. But then, one day, about two weeks in, mysteriously (but not really, because it happens like clockwork every time), I bounce back. Brighter and better than ever! Suddenly I am filled with the energy of a JV squad on their first trip to Hooters. I become a mix of Steve McQueen and Hank Williams Jr., and I will literally fuck anything that moves and is also a girl. Haha! Now I’m in the revenge phase! The predictable and temporary two weeks where I’m going to improve myself and make her jealous. I am going to be the ultimate perfect guy filled with secret talents that you’ll never get to the bottom of in this lifetime. I’m gonna learn French. And I’m gonna go to cooking school. I’m going to become a certified daredevil, too. Maybe I’ll go to one of those pussy-eating classes that extremely ugly feminists featured on HBO’s Real Sex 23 run out of their Topanga Canyon house. That’ll show her.
Next time I see her and she asks how I’m doing, I can say, “Pretty good. C’est plu pas ne (etc.). Oh, that means I’m doing well, thank you. Hmmm? Oh, it’s French. I totally speak French now. It’s too bad you left me or I’d make you some double-cut lamb shank with a béchamel sauce and Madeira reduction with a side of . . .” Ahhh, it doesn’t matter. Nothing you do will matter. You could work out, get six-pack abs, get all your teeth fixed and whitened, be nominated for a humanitarian award for your work in the Congo with Doctors Without Borders, show off your bullet-hole scar that you received whilst working for them, and win the lottery on your one day off, but no. It’s over. So now you deal with the pathetic knowledge that nothing will be the same as it was an hour ago. You will both be varying kinds of weird around each other forever. Forever. Forever ever. Now the unspoken as well as the ill-timed and urgent things unfortunately spoken aloud will float around just above your head. It’s like a gauze veil that you can see through but still blurs your vision.
There is the forced and hyper “Hey, I’m over it!” phase that, even if you know it’s coming, still has the ability to kick you in the ass. It starts with the brain trying to trick the heart and ends with your heart getting super-pissed that the brain even dared to bring it and then kicks your ass twice as hard as it did the first time. You convince yourself that you’re okay, even though you have been sharpening your sitting-and-staring-at-inanimate-objects skills to the point where you can peel paint with your mind!!
And guess what? You’ll do it more than once, too. Maybe a half dozen times. “Hey! I’m totally over it! Awesome!” You call your friends and they’re truly excited that finally you’re your old self again and you wanna hang and you make plans to meet up and go to Lit, and then the next thing you know, you’re in the grocery store staring at the apples and crying.
Time out! The following just happened for real: I just ran into my ex on the street in front of my building. (Let me point out quickly that in a remarkable show of consideration and understanding of what I may be going through, she thoughtfully moved a mere six blocks away.) As fate would have it I ran into her while hung over and carrying a load of dry-cleaning. We had some more tremendously awkward chit-chat about nothing (I am about as important as an issue of Us Weekly to her) and then had yet another in what will be a never-ending series of awkward exits. “Well, I guess I should get going. This stuff isn’t gonna dry-clean itself!”
“Oh, brother,” I muttered to myself as I turned away. Sometimes you just feel like Charlie Brown but a real one, not a two-dimensional black-and-white line drawing. Such is the totality of the rejection of everything that is “you.” It’s all part of it, though. The natural healing process that seems to take forever while experiencing but is summed up by a dismissive “Yeah, that was a fucked-up time for me” once it’s finally over and done with.
Here is something that should help you, although it never works nearly as much as it should: First and foremost is the knowledge that everyone (and I mean everyone, even Hugh Hefner) goes through this. Your personal hell of betrayal and recrimination has been shared by everyone from Onan to Mohammad to Helen Keller and Sienna Miller. You are not alone, but of course, you are. You could get one hundred freshly dumped people in a room and after just a couple minutes of commiserating they would retreat into their overactive imaginations and fester there.
All the happy, colorful misremembered but authentic images of the two of you. The happy couple from a month ago… all lies. The over-romanticized stained-glass tableaus of you and her (or him) from the first time you met, kissed, shared Valentine’s Day, told each other you loved them. There you are! The innocent pie-eyed lamb being circled, considered, and sized up for the slaughter by a cunning wolf. A soulless, evil, heartless Nazi monster cunt of a wolf.
Which brings me to Valentine’s Day.
A Non-Sponsored Look at Holidays in America
VALENTINE’S DAY
I’VE BEEN ON EVERY END OF VALENTINE’S DAY—IN LOVE, IN UNREquited love, in hate, happily solo, depressingly solo, and drunk, high and wired up with my dick hanging out in a closet at some strange coke den in Chelsea. And collecting the cumulative experiences into one well-rounded observation, I conclude that Valentine’s Day seems to be a bit cruel if not entirely unnecessary. Not the idea itself but the ide
a put into practice. When you add up the numbers, the odds are very, very good that most people will feel some degree of shitty on February 14. And knowing that Valentine’s Day means hundreds of millions of dollars for the greeting card, florist, restaurant, condom, porn, and eating-an-entire-bag-of-Dorito’s-in-one-sitting industries doesn’t make it feel any less shitty. Valentine’s Day is only enjoyable if you’re in a solid, good relationship, which applies to how many of us? Twenty-five percent, maybe? Maybe. For everyone else, it sucks (idrink forareason.com/valentines). It’s a constant reminder (starting with whatever lead time the aforementioned businesses decide is needed for a “killer V-Day,” blowing the previous sales record out of the water. High five, Stevens! Your idea to make chocolate-covered roses with butter-toffee-flavored condoms for thorns—brilliant!) of how miserable you are even though two weeks ago you didn’t seem really all that miserable or preoccupied. You didn’t really think about it that much. But now! Loser!!! At best, Valentine’s Day is a nice opportunity to take time out of your tiring and unadventurous schedule to appreciate your partner. So what if it’s obligatory? You still get a nice meal, get to remember what you love about each other, and fuck. Unfortunately for the most of us, there is a much greater chance of it being an awkward night teetering on the cusp of derailment with merely the twitter of a butterfly’s fart. Perhaps you have just had a huge fight over something trivial that got blown way out of proportion and turned into something else altogether? * Are you on your third date, so you don’t know how much gravity to assign this Valentine’s Day date? Ignore it? Bring her a card? Bring a card and flowers? What? Thinking of breaking up? Just received your mail-order bride who doesn’t understand your crazy American custom and won’t leave the train station? Were you just caught masturbating by your partner? Just discover you have breast cancer? I could go on and on.
