Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
Archive for the ‘mores’ Category.
Based on current trends, the following await us in the future:
Sports
Blowball (an antipersonnel device implanted in the ball is timed to explode randomly during play; object: not to have the ball when this occurs)
Movies
Nailing Your Sweet Booty (date flick; “a real hand-holder”)
Lord Rocky Potter and the Star Wars Spidermen in Black
Untitled (affecting band of aging and career-challenged actresses dispense wisdom of the womb; Alan Arkin plays the caustic handyman)
TV
America’s Funniest Videos of Making People Die Sadistically
Obligations don’t mean anything today. They have become tactical ploys instead of strategic parameters.
No one deserves more scorn than the professional person dumping on middle class values, while extolling the virtues of Bohemianism and/or the proletariat, from the grandeur of his East Side Manhattan apartment between the time he finishes managing his portfolio for the day and the time he has to pick his children up at their private academy. Be advised that, whatever you do for a living, if you have some money left over after paying your bills every month, and if you don’t fuck your own kids, then you are squarely in the middle class, old buddy. At the most, you are distinguishable by your nontraditional tastes; yet on your wall, too, hangs the psychological equivalent of the photographic studio portrait of the family, colorized by hand. And wasn’t that a black turtleneck jersey that I glimpsed in your closet?
Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation. The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun. A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce. Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine. The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.” Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming. Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles. Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess. Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet. Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values. Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town. And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.
I think Julia Child is a deity. She once replied to an unhappy talk-show caller who contended that a prominent restaurant overcharged for its food: “My dear, it’s not how much it costs that counts. It’s whether it’s worth it.” To a carping health faddist on the same talk-show, Julia delivered herself of this rejoinder with the whiz-bang clangor of a meat-cleaver splitting ribs: “I like my beef as bloody as I can damn well get it!”
What’s wrong with thinking about a promise before you give your word on it? And in the process of thinking about it, remember how strong a chance there is that when the time comes you’ll likely decide that keeping your word is a big pain in the ass, so screw it.
A man and a woman are deciding what to do with their evening. The woman says, “I need to get a couple of things at the mall, Baby.” The man says, “If that’s where you want to go, Sweetheart.” As they’re making their way to the car the woman thinks, It’s sweet of him to do this with me. I know he loves me, while the man thinks, I hope that black-haired girl is working the register at The Gap tonight. I could really go for some of that. He holds the door for his wife to get in the car, brushing his cheek with her lips as she lowers herself into the interior.
The quickest way to make friends with a New Yorker is to tell him to go fuck himself. The City really is the center of the universe’s gravity, if you ask me. I once took a job with a company in New Rochelle because they let me spend a couple of nights in Manhattan every month at their expense, and I had so many great nights there that I can’t remember half of them. One of the numerous reasons I enjoy the Apple is that I can hail a taxi to the airport the moment I get it out of my system.
Before I became a manager, I just assumed that most people acted like pricks in business because most people are pricks. Then with management experience I discovered that most people are actually pretty decent and that they only act like pricks because they think it is required of them. I decided that my function as their manager was to let them know that there are alternate ways to go.
Americans evade so many obligations, responsibilities, promises, duties, expectations and consequences that the official occupation of the country ought to be Escape Artist.
See for Yourself: Go to any shopping-mall grocery store and stand by the doors. Shoppers will emerge carrying their purchases and approach the cross walk. You are there to watch the cars driving by in front of the store. Some drivers will stop promptly to ensure the safety of the shoppers, while other drivers will accelerate to beat the shoppers to the cross walk, some at the expense of endangering the latter. Carry a clipboard with a sheet of paper divided into two columns, one for men and one for women. Using “x” for stoppers and “o” for accelerators, record each car according to behavior by gender. After thirty minutes to an hour, depending on the density of traffic, total the results. You may well be surprised by what you learn. (But a follow-up survey may surprise you even more: driver performance by ethnic category.)
Calling all Shrinks. Can anybody tell me what percentage of American friendships is based on mutuality of outlook reinforced by bonding experiences, and what percentage is founded on the mutual need to bolster ego-salvaging pretenses? I do know how you can test your own friends. Just consistently oppose them. If they stand up to you, fine; you’ll have a lot of laughs together. If the ones with touch-me-not egos can’t bear the opposition and react by “breaking it off,” that’s fine too, because they never were your friends.
I played the corporate game as well as most, but I never saw the benefit of it, especially after learning—during my final stint with a corporation—that the stock shares we’d been “allowed” to purchase at a discount had never been registered with the SEC. Hence the origin of:
Mission Statement
Screw the competition.
If you can’t screw the competition, screw the customers.
If you can’t screw the customers, screw the stockholders.
If you can’t screw the stockholders, screw the employees.
If we’re not screwing somebody the company’s charter will lapse. If that occurs we’ll have to screw each other. A lot of us are already doing it.
Trust until you have a reason not to trust. The treacherous will confuse your kindness and generosity for weakness and they will go for your throat at the earliest opportunity, before you’ve had time to invest in them. Cautious people who pay their trust out inch-by-inch forfeit a great amount of investment by the time the knife finally strikes.
Nobody beats Americans for coming up with self-serving bromides for their psycho-emotional cowardice. “She’s not what I thought she was, but I’m not going to leave her because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” Yes, it’s much better for her when you chronically get drunk rather than spend time with her, stay out playing with the boys five nights a week, never take her anywhere, screw every other female who will lie still for you, and beat the living shit out of her when you come home and realize you’re “stuck” with this woman. That way you don’t have to test whether you’re capable of inveigling a more desirable and self-respecting female to take up residence with you and tolerate your violently disintegrating personality.
The tagline of a series of fast-food commercials running now should be adopted as America’s motto, because it epitomizes the end-result of forty years of the unrestricted self-indulgence that began in the late ‘60s with the valiant admonition, If it feels good do it (till it hurts). It was seriously believed that what was needed by the most pampered generation in the country’s history—a generation that had already long-since placed its pleasure and comfort ahead of everything else— was even more pleasure. Not unpredictably, pleasure-seeking as the object of behavior soon devolved into simple appetite-satiation, but it took more than a quarter century for the socio-cultural consequences fully to manifest themselves. The ego’s descent into abject self-absorption and the consequent lack of consideration for others has ultimately metamorphosed into the universal, violent, infantile and gut-wrenching incivility we endure today. The tagline of the commercials goes: Don’t bother me, I’m eating.
I stopped dismissing teenage rebellion as “a normal phase” of human development several years ago, when I took a long look at things from their point of view. The conclusion I reached is that no norms inhere today to constitute “normal” and the kids, therefore, are not rebelling against their family’s values (which died of hypocrisy), seeking their own identities (only celebrities have these), giving the finger to society (with its laughable pretense that it’s not for sale), or testing their moves for the big sex game (they’ve already gone on to the majors). I hate to tell you this, friends, but they are fighting to save their sanity if not their lives.
What happens inside a man between the time he gets up and reluctantly leaves his sweet toasty sex-accomplice so he can shower and shave, and twenty minutes later when he walks into the kitchen dressed for work praying she hasn’t got there yet so he can depart before she comes to say goodbye?