Malaise Diary

I have a friend.  Let’s call him Steve.  I was at his house
for a party getting sniped by him because he’s consumed by self doubt
and wanted to build himself up in front of a girl who wasn’t going to
fuck him.

Well, that’s what a mutual friend claims.  She says that this girl
wasn’t going to fuck Steve and they’ve done the platonic lovers dance
for a decade.  Maybe so, I never take an interest in the life and
times of hopeless morons, but, the fact is, this girl spent the night
in Steve’s room.  She got herself liquored up, thanks to my
ministrations, then hiked up to the bedroom.  At this point,
Steve, her presumptive cock for the night, started cleaning up the
party debris.  Three AM, a girl on his bed, and he’s doing the
dishes, mopping the floor, gathering up the garbage.  If my vodka
red juice had been in something other than a plastic cup, I would have
hurled it at his head.

I don’t know what boiled my blood the most – passing up an obvious
chance for sex or using me as a punching bag to try and establish some
alpha male routine when the girl had driven three hours to be
there.  It’s not a situation like, hey, this is some chick from
work I’m trying to score with, get on my side.  No, it’s some
chick who drove from fucking Dover to a spot well past DC expressly to
spend the night with him.  That’s 120 miles.  Girl says she’s
driving 120 miles to see me and you can bet I’m going to put clean
sheets on the bed and, certainly, have no fear about entering her into
the party mix.  She’s there for one purpose.

Now, this would be clear to most folks.  Go on with the party and
enjoy yourself.  In fact, you’re elevated by a score like
that.  Nobody sees it that way, though.  People like Steve,
all too common, don’t know left from right.

The great problem in Modern America is that the country has bred adult
children.  Taboos against sex, drugs, smoking and drinking have
become so entrenched that now a vast percentage of my peers are living
like the prime time TV image of 1955.  They’re not even smart
enough to live like it really was 1955 – swapping wives at regular
weekly cocktail parties and toning down the work day with a liquid
lunch.  And that was when we were all happy and proud!  Now,
more than ever, we need cocktail parties, liquid lunches, fine cigars
and anal fisting sessions with the neighbor’s wife.

Instead, we sit in place and watch ourselves getting fat almost as
rapidly as a September storm sweeping through the foothills of
Appalachia.  We drink lightly and get a false social drunk, which
we then regret after a tearful confession about some lost fucking love
ten years ago.  Or maybe we have an angry outburst about some
trait in a friend that’s bugged us for fifteen years.  After that
— smoking is bad, okay?  Perhaps even sinful.  Sex with a
friend is impossible, sex with a lover is a source of guilt.

Oh, I know we’re not all in that boat.  I’m talking about the
common people, the unenlightened.  The PC generation.  My
peers who drag my generation to the floor of the ocean and smother
anything intelligent and bright and new with sick, dead mud.

I had a nice conversation with a friend one night where he told me
about why he kicked his girlfriend to the curb.  She was hideous,
to be fair, but not in a truly beastly way.  I guess you could say
she was ugly enough to be distracting, but my friend’s in a beggars
can’t be choosers place in life because he’s depressed, bitter, passive
aggressive, hyper-critical and 300 pounds.  He scored an okay
girl, all things considered.  Better still, she was an anal freak
who did anything and everything with any part of her body
imaginable.  And then some.

What was wrong with that?  My friend told me, “There wasn’t enough of a challenge.”

I always need to pause when I think about that response.  The pull
me, punch me, beat me, slam my ass, swallow every drop lady is no good
because she’s easy?  She even called before she came over, which
is just about perfect.  None of the creepy show up at the door
unannounced shit.  She respectfully sought permission to come to
her violation sessions.  I’m all for love and serious commitment,
but that’s something you can actively seek in between Friday Nights
with the Whore of Babylon, ‘holding in her hand a golden cup full of
abominations and the impurities of her fornication’.  In fact,
those early stages of ‘courting’ a woman properly are far more
palatable if you’re coming off a three day drunk with some fucking
slut.  (Oh, please, baby, can we just lie here and sleep?)

This friend threw out the whore with the bathwater.  I can
understand the logic, but I think it’s our responsibility – as new men
– to learn the value of whores and support them emotionally.  Use
them as that necessary launching pad to relieve the body of
poisons.  Otherwise, we’re breeding rapists and murderers.
Mark my words.

The challenge theory is bullshit.  It always exists.  I certainly don’t look
for a challenge.  I don’t have to.  Women are expensive,
dangerous, brutal, back-channeling traitors who can’t connect clear
thoughts and are incapable of logic or reason.  Every straight man
is challenged beyond their ability to function in society even if they
swear celibacy or surround themselves with careless, psychotic
whores.  A man lives, sleeps and breathes the ‘challenge’.
I’m so challenged I constantly wish I was born gay, and I promise you
that I only associate with a class of woman who believes the cunt was
made for the cock and why are we wasting time with dinner?

See, it’s the image thing.  It’s back to 1955, all over again.  Leave it to Beaver
lifestyles being aped and mocked.  That’s the way we think it’s
supposed to be, even though one out of ten of us actually come from a
real family.  Maybe that’s the problem, the first big Broken
Household Generation comes of age, hits 25 or 30 like a deer hitting a
truck and has a meltdown.  Women close their legs and men try to
be like Ward Cleaver, except we don’t have equitable pay, safe pensions
or even a secure job, anymore.  So I don’t know if Ward is a good
example.  If you told Ward drinking and smoking were bad, and that
he could be fired from his job with the remainder of the day’s pay as
his only severance package, and that his company only paid 3-6% on his
retirement package, he’d go on a rampage.

Let’s talk about smoking.  (I’m drunk.  I can make this a
tangential exercise and call it art.)  I hate smoking.  I’m
against it.  I fully support smoking bans in public places.
I do this not out of the interest of health, but because I’m a
professional drinker and I hate feeling the need to shower on Saturday
mornings because, more often than not, I’m on someone’s couch and need
to be ready to continue a good drunk.  Smokey drinking dens get in
the way of the true meaning of alcohol.  I also want to ban
jukeboxes, TV’s and loud music in public places.  I want to
quietly drink, talk in low tones with a friend or the bartender and
leave with my hearing intact and no desire to dryclean my coat.

That said, I think smoking, generally speaking, is fine.  It’s one
thing to ban it from public places, because now we can pick up our 10
year old cousins from school and bring them to the bar with a clear
conscience, but it’s another to look down on a smoker.   It’s
with this in mind that I’ve resolved to start smoking once it’s finally
banned everywhere.  Currently, I enjoy cigars and cigarillos, more
because it upsets people when I spend an hour with a Montecristo and
only order a small coke and a shot of vodka.  Though my current
favorite is to smoke large cigars on the bench outside the day care
center – when I’m not picking anyone up.

So, look, I’m out of Dr. Pepper and it’s just rum on ice now. I’ll go
back to Steve’s story, because it’s an image that’ll stick with
me.  The girl from Dover’s driven 120 miles to the party, Steve
goes right into the chauvinistic protect-the-girl mode.  That sick
‘daddy’s here to protect you’ thing that guys do.  My detractors
accuse me of being chauvinistic, but I’m the only man who treats women
fairly.  Misogynism is not chauvinism, kids.  You might want
to get that straight so I don’t think you’re stupid when you criticize
me.

Dover girl heads upstairs while the party chugs through at a terrible
pace.  It’s amazing what three drunks on edge, a teetotaling
pragmatist and a depressive illiterate can do to wreck a small social
gathering.  Pretty much, we all just sat there and waited for
someone to start shooting.

Then Dover girl hops back down and, as if the tension were some secret
thing, we launched into cheery faux conversation that was more generic
noise than language.  She had showered and changed into ridiculous
pajamas, and she perched beside Steve like an owl.  I had the
brief thought that my purpose was to steal her away, simply out of
spite, but my fellow drunks wrestled me out to the porch where I chain
smoked Nat Shermans and ranted about migrating Canada Geese.
Before long, I’d been brought to a safe drunken plateau where women
seemed irrelevant and the evening wound down to nothing.

With me calmed and tight-mouthed, Dover girl correctly read that the
party was over and she leapt up, clearly enunciated each of the
following words to Steve:  “I guess I’m going up to the bedroom
now,” and took off upstairs once again.  I settled down with one
of my fellow drunks and shared a bottle of Tums with him. Steve said
goodnight to Dover girl and, horror of horrors, spent the next 80
minutes cleaning up his townhouse until not a trace of the gathering
was left.  My fellow drunk and I spent that 80 minutes staring at
each other with one clear  thought on the table between us:
Ancient and modern social custom demanded that someone go upstairs and
mate with Dover girl.  Failure to do so would, most likely, lead
the human race to extinction.

We didn’t, of course, because the 572 Canadian Geese roosting in the
window well had emotionally unbalanced us.  Given the choice of
fucking a squirrelly brunette or hammering on the paper thin glass
while screaming incoherently at a truckload of giant birds, my decision
was clear.

So the moral of my story:  Shut the fuck up and have sex, have a
smoke, get some pot, have a martini lunch and relax.  Relax.
All my buds rave about Fight Club and Office Space
but no one seems to realize that we’re the stars of movies like
that.  That’s why we’re raving about them.  You, my friends,
are Shaun, but you’re not going to be fortunate enough to face down a
plague of zombies to jumpstart the realizations of your potential.