People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?
Archive for the ‘pleasure’ Category.
People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated. Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.
When you’re taking a shower and you find yourself thinking, “You know, there’s more than just soap and water running out of this stall. My life’s going down the drain, too,” it is time to begin playing with yourself.
Pleasure is a sensation, happiness an emotion, satisfaction a mood, and contentment a dreaming rumination.
There are actually people who resent children for being free of the responsibilities that impinge upon their own (the adults’) ego-satisfaction and pleasure-getting. In fact there are adults who hate children for this.
Whether publicly or privately, on the job or on the make, if you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong.
In my twenties, as a salesman, I drove several hundred miles a week. When I’m taking a trip now, I want to get to the destination as soon as possible. The idea of “exploring the countryside” would never enter my mind. I just want to get to the hotel and turn the air conditioner on, and a glance out the window on the way is all the spur to my imagination I require.
If God is a shrimp, I’ll be in a lot of trouble when I die, because I’ve single-handedly depopulated the coastal waters of this divine arthropod, driving up the price unconscionably so the shrimp fleets can pay for the extra fuel they have to buy. But if God locks me out, it won’t be as though I hadn’t already savored paradise on earth, and plenty of 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.
Today the world adores the nose-thumbing slut Madonna. It used to adore the exuberant sex-toy Marilyn Monroe along with the sultry teen sex-toy Brigitte Bardot and the stylish hot mama Rita Hayworth. Before that the world adored the sophisticated worldly woman Myrna Loy. And still earlier it adored the virginal waif Mary Pickford. Such is the “popular history” of the world since the beginning of the last century.
Pound for pound, words yield more sheer pleasure than anything else at our disposal (excepting the potato). “He was ugly enough to turn a funeral up an alley.”
Having sex without ardently affirming the rhapsodic beauty of the other person’s self, yearningly joining your whole sensibility with the other as well as your genitals, is like slam-banging down the street in just the chassis of a car; though perhaps, getting your rocks off, you don’t particularly mind how foolish and self-involved you might appear to bystanders. Of course I’d never deny the pleasure, for what’s its worth, of the little electric jitter that is what you have at the end if sex is all you’re after.
When we experience art, what we feast on is the being of its creator.
From a World History text published in 2378 AD: “When the females of Canamerico became entirely, as distinct from largely, promiscuous, the males could think of nothing else but availing themselves of the now-perpetual opportunity to fornicate at will, and the entire energy of the culture became exclusively vested in sexual activity. At this juncture the Gulliverians began quietly stealing children from the inimical homes in which they were unloved, untaught and unattended, placing them in the coast-to-coast system of stables maintained as worship-houses by the Houyhnhnms Order. In the hygienic countryside stables the children dwelled in peace and comfort among a population of horses and dogs until their 16th birthdays, their creaturely needs provided for by acolytes. The Gulliverians had initially planned to remove the children at age 13 in order to install them in boarding schools, but the Charitable Elders stayed their hand when they discovered that the children, having been so tenderly and with such mute and humble adoration attended by the animals, displayed in adolescence a strong and abiding desire to reciprocate the creatures’ beneficence by taking over the stables’ care-giving and maintenance functions from the Order, undertaking themselves their guardians’ and former playmates’ grooming, exercise, feeding, medical services and companionship keeping. When the Elders beheld the children at their self-appointed work, they declared: ‘School can wait. This is their education.’”
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 don’t say this lightly. I have tried my best. I have worked at it and I have worried about it. But the plain truth is, I’m not going to stop smoking cigarettes until they stop manufacturing them, after which I’ll switch to cigars, which I also inhale.
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?
If you hunger for human experience, you should become an industrial salesperson. In no other capacity can you meet as many different people doing as many different things at as many levels of life, nor trace so many personal histories over such extended periods of time. I am not talking just about observing people; I’m talking about interacting with them. You may easily go from calling on a vice-president at Lockheed to visiting a jackleg paint and body operation to surveying the needs of an opera company to making calls with a neophyte salesperson you are training, all before lunch. And you are on your own, bear in mind, at liberty to decide whom you’re calling on, what product you’re trying to sell, and when you want to make the appointment. Of course you have to pay your way, but if you manage to do that, you’ll be one of America’s “last cowboys.”
Spareribs are magnificently succulent, but to talk about barbecue exclusively in terms of ribs is like discussing a voluptuous beautiful woman in terms of just her elbows.
“Food is only nutrition as far as I’m concerned.” How about eating this?