The glass is not always half empty. Sometimes it falls and shatters.
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A Memorably Disheartening Exchange
“How’d you like Germany?”
“Loved it, man. We had the best cheeseburgers at the base food court that I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
There is a reason the young are oblivious to so much of reality. If they knew how badly stacked the deck of opportunity and success is against them, they would likely lose heart and drop by the wayside and an entire generation would wither and die away without ever having made its own contributions to posterity. Some may reflect that the media serves the nation beneficially by falsifying for the young the features of a cold hard world, but I do not feel that way. I would respect the media if they rather taught the up and coming ranks of citizens to deal forthrightly and successfully with stress-inducing adversity instead of encouraging them to narcotize themselves against the pain or throw their hands up and mewl about their frustrations.
The abnormal are better off in America than anywhere else, though paradoxically they do not find their freedom satisfying unless they use it to excoriate the normals who guarantee their liberty and are way too busy being productively self-reliant to give a good God damn about heir scorn.
When I meet a person with two-colored eyes, I am strongly tempted to say, “Klaatu barada nikto!” The fictive phrase cannot be translated, but its employment is for the purpose of stopping the destruction of the world.
The next thing Obama will blame Bush for will be himself. Listen: “If the previous administration hadn’t made such a bloody mess of things, the public’s expectations for me would never have been so extravagantly optimistic.”
Rednecks are Nature’s nobility, but no one knows it, not even most of them, for the world turned upside down during their long, epic, arduous journey from northern Anglia into lowland Scotland, thence to northern Ireland, and from there over the blue Atlantic to Western Pennsylvania, into and down the Appalachians and all across the Southern coastal plains to east Texas. Their endurance and travail endowed a young nation with some of the abiding traits and values that in turn fertilized the lives and fortunes of successor immigrants who, when they think of rednecks at all today, think of them as jokes. You know what the rednecks think about that? They remember that Moses wasn’t allowed to cross the river Jordon, either, but that the Jews would never have reached Israel without him, and they damn sure wouldn’t have settled it without the leadership in battle of that other Biblical redneck, Joshua.
You would be doing politicians a disservice if you imagined that they spend their private time every night gloating over the number of people they screwed during the day. They are too busy trying to determine whom they’re going to screw tomorrow.
When Valdimir Putin awoke one morning he screwed a silencer into his Makarov 9mm and crawled through each room of his dacha on his hands and knees shooting out the mirrors. Part of him needed to spy on himself, but another part couldn’t bear the thought of him doing that. The other part won. Gogol smiled.
America’s shrillest and most vicious critics on the left, employing our freedoms to destroy our freedoms, are our civic nagging wives, a distinct gender endowed with the vocal properties of Fran Drescher. Man are they going to go into shock one day when the rest of us have had enough of their infuriating crap. But divorce is too good for these bitches. They ought to know better than to make polite replies impossible, and they should realize that they inhabit a human flood plain. According to the dictionary a flood plain is “naturally subject to flooding.” All it takes is a sufficiently prolonged downpour.
Mentalities
Conditioned by Pop Culture [aka Advice for the Lifelorn]: TV. “Basically you want to watch shows that are iconic and/or water cooler talk. Like 30 Rock, Ugly Betty and Gossip Girl. Watch the good stuff — Comedy Central, AMC (Breaking Bad), FX, SciFi, Shear Genius.” Beyond TV: “Read Entertainment Weekly, it’s great, great reading and will be a good guide to the best movies, the best books and the best shows to see.” In General: “Revel in adult autonomy without leaving kindergarten!”
Conditioned by New Age Blatherbloat: “You need to burn Heather Trace candles in here, Greta. They will expand and distill the room’s vicAraXArA. I actually enjoy the aroma from Baby Fingers, but it dissipates in the upper sinus cavities and never penetrates to the brain stem. Listen, when you make the change, you have to hire Bhagwan Shri to preside. Even before that, sign up for an Opening of the Doors acupuncture treatment with Har Fang. And a little more focus on yoga wouldn’t hurt you, either. “
Conditioned by Would-Be Insider Politics: “Romney will make it through some of the primaries but as soon as it looks like he’s coming on strong, the MSM’s going to crank up all that anti-Mormon bullshit again. Look at what they did to Lieberman. When he was running for vice president they praised him as ‘a man of faith’ who never worked past sundown on Friday, in order to observe Shabbat, but when he crossed the Democratic leadership he became “overzealous” and a Zionist who “sides with Israel on the occupation of Palestine.”
Conditioned by Would-Be Insider Celebrity Lore: “Simon Cowell gets to go to everything free. And they give him all his sweaters. Carey Underwood says he’s got BO.”
Conditioned by Know-It-All-ism: “My Looking at Movies instructor said A Clockwork Orange is a great movie. Are you going to contradict the University of Akron? The work is sui generous. It is particularly precious because the Seventies didn’t produce many imaginative productions? You’re giving me Chinatown, MASH, Little Big Man, Brewster McCloud, Myra Breckinridge? No, that won’t pass the laughter test. Those moves don’t count. They weren’t sui generous. Sui generous is a very tough category to belong to, Craig. A so-called ‘movie buff’ like you wouldn’t understand.”
Conditioned by Being a Teenager: “Moving on doesn’t take a day, it takes lots of little steps to be able to break free of your broken self. I called because I wanted you to know that despite everything that’s happened, and all the miles between us right now, I still think about the way it was in the beginning. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve known you, all that matters is that you’ve had me smiling since day one. My daddy used to tell me that the first time you fall in love, it changes your life forever, and no matter how hard you try, the feeling never goes away. I want to remember how you’ve made me laugh and sometimes cry, and I never want to forget how special and different you are and how you’ve touched my heart in a way that no one else could. I can’t turn back and face you. I’ve made a mess. A mess out of my life, and yours. I love you, but I can’t stand to hurt you any longer.
The truth is everyone is going to end up hurting you, you just got to find the people who don’t hurt you more than you can take before you want to scratch their faces.”
Conditioned by Being a Liberal: “The theory that Bush/Cheney really won in Florida in the 2000 election has had disastrous consequences, not the least of which is that a lot of liberals have been spooked, and therefore paralyzed, by ‘right-wing populism’—whose influence has been bizarrely disproportionate to the real number of those feral boobs who have actually embraced it. (The myth of its appeal is based not just on those manipulated vote-counts, but also on the concentration of the media in rightist and/or corporate hands.) The Democrats, too — Obama included — have needlessly tacked right, and otherwise caved in, for no good reason, kowtowing to a criminal regime that never was elected, and never could have been, because it never had majority support. The fact is that Gore won in Florida.”
Conditioned by Being Sophisticated: “As Dr. Renatus Hartogs sees it, a language in which only he and she are sexed must be up to no good. In English, what is the sex of a bicycle, an eggplant, a subway? None. And what does this engender? According to Dr. Hartogs, Americans turn ‘grammatical lack of gender into a linguistic sex orgy’ as a reaction against—guess what? ‘The Puritan tradition.’ At a ‘fairly fashionable party’ on Long Island, Dr. Hartogs heard the word fucking—not from a greasy mechanic, but from the lips of a ‘splendidly groomed and passably pretty specimen of suburban femininity,’ who uttered a ‘string of barracks words paraded with a crisp Vassar inflection.”’ There and then, Dr. Hartogs decided that he had stumbled on ‘a significant clue to the psychodynamics of our culture.’ According to his theory, the Lady Chatterley decision of 1959 set Vassar girls to start cussing like gamekeepers. Now he hears from middleclass patients what he once heard only from ghetto types such as those he encounters as chief psychiatrist of the New York Detention House for Juvenile Delinquents.”
Conditioned by Narcissism: Question: “Does a narcissist ever apologize” Answer: “My narcissist boyfriend cycles through a menu of moods: anxiety, anger, envy, hypochondria, political or artistic righteousness, fear, obsessive rumination, aggrandizement of his past self, regret at loss. He will occasionally tumble into a period of grief when he mourns lost loves when a significant anniversary date rolls around, or when something such as a photograph or a song jogs his memory. But he does not regret the treatment he gave to his former loves, only the losses of the relationships. As far as I can tell, he keeps little stashes of talismans for each former love, which he brings out and pores over when one of these moods hits him. He regrets that ‘she always had to be right,’ not that he contributed to the demise of the relationship through his capricious ways. I have never known him to apologize except when he realizes he’s pissed me off and I’m leaving, taking my approval of him with me.”
Whom the marketeer would impoverish, he first makes stupid through sensation, lust, flattery, threatening intimations (“don’t miss out!”) or luxuriant ego projections.
The real price of cheap merchandise is not its cost but the hell I go through to get the even cheaper packaging off the product. I’d pay another .20 if I could just pop the top or pull the tear strip without its snapping just as I exert pressure. Another peeve: Permanent price stickers are cheaper than removable price stickers. So every Christmas and for birthdays every day hundreds of millions of gifts are marred by our having to pick the price stickers off in shreds, often deforming or tearing the gift’s plastic overwrap in the process. There. I’ve been stewing about that for 25 years.
In the case of any other overwhelming emotion, men charge directly to the source and cut the spigot off. But in the case of love, unless they are sociopaths, drunks or drug addicts, they can’t do that; so they stew and roil in their discomfort, doubling up compulsively on sex and selfishly diminishing the rewards of love for women.
When I was young and crass
A wise man said to me:
“Take your head out of your ass.
“You’ll find it easier to see.”
One former U.S. president speaking to another at a ceremonial event: “Of course I understand. Thanks for the apology, but nothing you said about me during my term of office was even intended to be truthful in the first place. Nothing you ever said about me was intended to be the truth. Since I have never given you a first thought, I can’t really give you a second thought now.”
The lesson alcoholism taught me: It is easier just to stop drinking than it is to decide to stop drinking. (Seven days from now I will have achieved twenty years of sobriety.)
For me the signature tagline of the Sixties was, “It’s a gas, man.” I’m not sure what the gas consisted of, but it was unstable. Some of the affected it asphyxiated, while in the case of others it eventually wore off.
If I were not unutterably downcast by the utterly trivial, I would not be so utterly a human being.
Obama and all the other Democrats should heed this Haitian proverb, but they won’t: “Manman pa jann mode pitit li jouk nan zo,” which means, “A mother never bites her child to the bone.
