let it rattle

Duuuudes! I just had a lot of crazy days and the results were that I was unable to get to this shit for a minute. Sorry. I’m planning my buddy Toby’s bachelor party and frankly, it’s gonna be awesome. We’re getting one of those strippers that shoots pool balls out of her asshole and into various cakes and we’re gonna get a rickshaw (drawn by a real live running chinaman, no less!) to cruise us around Chicago so we can snort coke and drink Courvosier with impunity. It’s gonna be spectacular, to put it mildly.

I remember my bachelor party pretty fondly. Well, that’s not really true. I don’t really remember much of my bachelor party except for this one pretty rad moment where I was hanging out with my friend Todd and I went to lean against the photo booth and fell into the probably 5” gap between the booth and the wall. I became pretty insanely stuck and to hear Todd tell the story, he was just tipsy enough (read: shithammered) that he thought I had vanished into thin air. No one had any idea where I’d poofed off to, until my screams were finally able to be heard over the Smart Bar’s blasting techno music. It was a really nice time, gotta say.

My bachelor party was a sophisticated and gentlemanly affair, but that’s because I didn’t plan it. Since I’m in charge of Toby’s we’re getting tranny hookers, plates of blood pressure medication and a few fighting cocks and we’re gonna fully go to Jacuzzi on that ass, if you dig.

Now, what else is happening in the world? I just got the first cut of a new demo that I did and I think it’s pretty righteous. I did it with this dude named Sean Astrom and this other dude named Eric Halborg. If you’re not gay porn enthusiasts, you probably don’t recognize either of their names, but they’re some good dudes from Denver. It’s definitely a pretty weird song. It’s called “a man with the passion of Tennessee Williams” which I think is a pretty radical title. I think it’s about hipsters and my own uneasy proximity to them as an old guy who pretends to eschew the notion of hipsterdom, but who still ends up drinking highlife and listening to POS on my iphone in my western shirt and fedora (thank you very much Francis!) (and of course, no offense to the mighty POS).

It’s a kick in the balls, eh? The things that are the closest to you but just slightly different are the things you despise most, right? That’s why skateboarders hate rollerbladers, even though they’re both smashing their nuts on the same railings. That’s why the nazi skins hate the anti racist skins more than anyone else even though they both decided to pervert the idea of punk rock into some situation where you wear a uniform and follow a code, that’s why you think that Good Charlotte sucks so much ass. It’s not because they’re actually a bad band (which they are) but it’s because 90% of the way that they look and act is the way punk rock kids identify themselves, but that last ten percent is just goofy and wrong and the results are that you’re kind of stuck looking into this mirror where you see not only all the dumb choices you could have made, but you’re sort of forced to see all the dumb choices you DID make. And man, Mark Twain once said (and I’m paraphrasing at a dangerous level of vacillation right now) that familiarity breeds contempt.

This is true. There is no one so sick of your shit as those people forced to deal with you all the time. No matter how awesome you are, the way you slurp your coffee (something my wife absolutely hates about me) or the way you phrase certain things or the way you lie out loud to yourself or the way you act like a total dipshit around this one dude but you’re pretty cool the rest of the time or even small things like your walk or your pronunciation will eventually drive people around you nuts.

Remember the phrase “no matter how hot she is there’s a dude out there who’s sick of fucking her (alternate ending: sick of her shit)? That’s true for everyone and not just when it comes to fucking. Familiarity breeds contempt. Even if a friendship or relationship is never corrupted, that contempt is in there. That’s why your grandparents love the shit out of each other and get along famously and couldn’t even survive without the other one, but they start yelling and cursing about what seems like nothing all the time. They’ve been building little nuggets of contempt for each other over the course of fifty or so years. Give em a fucking break. Your grandma HATES the way your grandpa clicks his serrated grapefruit spoon against his teeth and all it takes is him saying ‘breakfast’ and she’s on edge.

And there’s no one you’re more familiar with than yourself. And the result of that is that you desperately avoid thinking about yourself in any sort of context like that, because your weaknesses are your weaknesses and you probably are doing the best you can to be the person you want to be, and you have to have sympathy for the fact that you’re doing your best. There’s no reason to beat yourself up over small shit like the way you hate that you don’t really do something very well, or you’re kind of a phony or whatever it is that you secretly know about yourself. You often don’t even admit that shit to yourself except when you’re on mushrooms or terribly hung over or having panic attacks in the middle of the night or sweating why your boyfriend is gonna leave you or something. Then all that contempt pours out and it’s a shitty, terrible feeling that can only be suppressed by completely changing the subject and finding something else to think about. That’s why a lot of people who tend to fancy this type of introspection end up addicted to drugs and alcohol and shit, because frankly, nothing changes the subject faster than something that switches up your brain chemistry. Suddenly, everything’s okay and you don’t have to pay the piper just yet, so to speak.

But yeah. That’s why the metalheads hate the punks and you can’t stand to see your dad with food on his chin. It’s all too close for comfort. What were we talking about again? Oh, how I’m essentially a hipster douche. Right. Sweet.
Okay, I gotta feed my kid breakfast and hit up my accountant’s office. Wait. I’m a thirtysomething turd with a stroller too? Aye carumba.