The Sounds of Douchebag America

This is my kid.  Joan.  Or is it Jon?  I think it’s a girl…either way, she sucks.  Doesn’t laugh when I pick on her, crack jokes.  It’s like she doesn’t get it sometimes.  One time I kept making funny faces and shaking my keys and she stared off into space.  So I tried to get her attention, and I shook her a little bit, you know, so she would focus on me a little more, and then she cried.  And then she pooped.  For the record, I don’t poop on anyone when they are not amusing.  At least not since the war.  The next time she cries, I’m gonna say, “You know, there’s a ton of jokes about dead babies; how do you feel about that?”  I hate when people act like babies.

I wanted to be a stand-up comic.  I really thought I had it.  I had done a couple of shows in bars and only got heckled a couple of times, and then one night, I totally killed.  Not a single broken bottle on the stage.  To celebrate how good I was, I went home with a waitress and had unprotected sex.  Now look where I am.  Where am I going to put all this creative energy?  All this humor, wit, cleverness, satire, you name it…I can’t go on the open mic circuit now.  So I got to make do with what’s around me.  I got to be clever when I can.

So what do I do?  The usual.  Whoopee cushions, e-mailing people FAILBlog pictures, and giving people bunny ears in pictures.  I mean, bunny ears are classic.  It’s tried and true.  I mean, what do you expect from a funny guy?  Manners?  Sorry, kid.  It’s bunny ears and photo-shenanigans until I can start my stand-up again.  You know what else is good?  Making a funny face when everyone else is making a serious face.  There’s humor in the contrast.  My mom disowned me because I did it at her husband’s funeral (I don’t call him my father.  No biggie, we’re not even sure if he was my father).  Being sad when everyone else is happy doesn’t work, though. Like my friends and I won this cosmic bowling tournament and I pretended like I was crying.  I thought it was good, but people thought I was crying out of happiness, and saying “Oh, his life must suck if cosmic bowling is so emotional for him.”  Yeah?  So what if it is?  People cry at the end of movies, and movies are made-up stories.  At least if I’m going to cry, I’m crying at something real. I’m crying at cosmic bowling.  Not some stupid-ass chick flick where a guy gets successful by chance and wins over the girl he loves, and everything’s perfect for them and they’re not stuck with an abominable little shit baby.  Like some Slumdog Millionaire garbage.  Fuck that.  And fuck my friends, too, who can’t even support me in a tiny little victory like that.  Those assholes didn’t even come to my big show.  God, why does everybody and everything suck?

But basically, yeah, I’m really into funny stuff, and hopefully I can get back into that soon.

Yo, you guys!  Check out my rebel spirit in action!  I know you guys always hear me talk about it, but here it is, in the flesh.  Shit’s real, you guys…Going up a down escalator.  It’s like I’m fighting the currents that’re trying to bring me down.  The forces that be, man…always pulling you down.  Well, I’m working my way up.  It’s like some kind of crazy metaphor or some shit.  It takes some hard work, man.  And people give you weird looks as they try to have a peaceful escalator ride.  Get out of my way, brahs!  I don’t care what they think of me, looking down their noses and shit.  Soulless escalator-riders.  Be real and take the stairs or something.  They can have fun shopping in the basement floor of the mall.  I’m working my way up.  I’ll be in the fragrance section of Macy’s while they get lost in the Home section.  Fools.

I figure it’s a nice way to display my physical prowess too.  If you’re gonna fight the man, you can’t simply talk the talk.  You got to run the proverbial run.  Up the escalator.  You gotta know how to fight, and for that, you gotta be in shape.  I go to the gym.  Do I use the treadmill?  Elliptical?  No.  I use the StairMaster.  Gets me ready for my big escalator-thons on the weekend taking the subway drunk with friends.  I march up those things for an hour or so.  It’s exhilarating.  The StairMaster can be depressing, though.  Always climbing and not going anywhere.  Treadmill: always running, not going anywhere.  That’s how the Man wants you to live: forcing you to fight and fight just to stay where you are.  I’m mastering his ways slowly but surely.  One day, mark my words: I will be the Stair Master.

I wish they had competitions for this sort of thing.  What about escalators that go down faster than usual?  See if I can climb up those.  It’s a whole thing, you know.  It’s easy to get intense about.  You got to time yourself and try to beat your record.  You got to keep in shape: rent that fourth-story walk-up apartment so you get some practice in.  Even coming back from work or leaving to go do some escalator-running, you can get a good warm-up.  If I walk past a playground, hell, I’ll try to run up the slide.  It’s a whole other ball game, I know, but you got to beat the slide before it beats you.  You slide, you fail.  And you leave in disgrace, because a bunch of kids are crying that you ruined their slide.  Well, you think that’s what they’re crying about, but that’s not why they’re crying.  They’re crying because you failed.

I would say becoming an awesome up-a-down-escalator-runner is a step-by-step process, if I were an asshole who thought puns were funny.  But I’m not.  They’re not funny.  It’s a whole endeavor.  You have to look into yourself and discover what compels you to fight the constant downward trajectory of existence.  It’s not all downhill from here; it’s all downstairs.  The world will run you down.  It will throw you down the stairs like a reluctantly pregnant woman.  You got to run back up those stairs and defy the cruel hands of fate.  Triumph over the forces that be.

Look, everyone needs to have their victories in life.  For me, it’s when an MBTA official asks me quietly to leave the terminal before they report me for public intoxication and misconduct.  I’ll show them. Unless they start doing escalator repairs and close them for a month, then that’s a problem.  But I’ll show them bigtime.  I really will, someday.

Because you know, white people are lame.  I moved to Williamsburg from New Hampshire because I was looking for a little change of scenery.  Everyone in Keene looked exactly the same.  Same shirts tucked into the same long pants, and everyone was white, wrinkled, and bald.  It was boring.  So you could imagine how thrilled I was to get to Brooklyn: everyone was pierced, scarved, bearded, and with iPhone.  I breathed a sigh of relief; finally, a little bit of diversity!

But things aren’t as cheap as they used to be, and I stumble into people who use the term “employed” more and more generously.  Even though I never talked to the Puerto Ricans or the Polacks, I did enjoy the Polish delis scattered about my neighborhood, and I especially enjoyed yelling at little Puerto Rican kids to quit breaking open fire hydrants to cool off in the summer.  My roommate saw a kid letting the water pour onto his back, and he came up with a great name for it: ‘wetback.’  So that’s what we started calling them.  I’d never heard that before.  See, that’s the kind of awesome cultural stuff I was missing out on in New Hampshire.

All I can see now for the most part are coffee joints and art galleries and internet cafes.  I guess the internet cafe makes sense, because a lot of my friends are ‘professional bloggers’ by trade and that’s where they go to work, but all of my friends agree that the whiteness is kind of a drag, too.  One of my friends, Alexandra (a guy) was talking about the decade-long ‘gentrification process’ that one of his old ‘mentors’ at ‘university’ lectured on.  He says that privileged white people have been forcing the ethnic enclaves out for at least a decade, and so he had been forewarned. “So when my parents bought me a condo in East Williamsburg, I sort of knew what to expect,” he said.  “You know how they knocked down that run-down subsidized housing complex, buncha Italians lived there?  Probably not, because you weren’t here for that.  Well, that’s where I live now.  It’s a really obscure area, you probably never heard of it.  I like the realtors that sold the place, but I liked their earlier condos better.”  As for a lot of my other blog friends, they feel the need to do more to stop the emigration of all the culture.  Thing is, none of us really eat at the Polish delis because we’re vegetarian, we don’t go to the usual mom-and-pop coffeehouse because the stuff isn’t fair-trade and doesn’t taste good, and we usually can’t afford a late-night pasta dinner after spending our allowances on post-rock shows…but, still, we do like that the stuff is there, and we write love poems that name-drop those places sometimes.  Since we can’t, don’t, or simply won’t purchase anything at those joints, we do what we can to support them.  Like, you know, we’ll blog about it.  We’ll post on Twitter that we’re standing outside a particularly ethnic restaurant.  And everyone, I mean everyone, takes pictures of all the Puerto-Ricans and posts them on Flickr.  That’s how we’re giving back to a community that gave so much to us.

As for me and all my gallery buddies, some of them can’t handle all the rent increases, and we even have to just move out.  “Yeah, rent is going above how much my parents are willing to shell out for me and my hardcore band to stay here,” my buddy Alexander (a girl) was telling me.  Instead of Alex, she goes by X, in solidarity with Malcolm X, even though she’s white.  She’s gonna  move somewhere else in September.  “I don’t know where else I’m comfortable living; Bushwick still seems a little seedy.  Nothing that looks like Harlem used to look, that’s for sure.”

Everyone’s always got their knickers in a twist over Journey and Queen and whatnot.  I know that “Don’t Stop Believin’” is this karaoke staple and everybody makes jokes about it, but, I don’t know, it’s too optimistic.  Maybe I don’t want to journey.  Maybe I stopped believing.  And I want to spread that message to my friends and whoever else is there that night to drink away their sorrows: the happy songs are lame.

I would have to say my two all-time karaoke favorites are, hands down, no contest, “My Heart Will Go On” and “American Pie.”  “American Pie” works really well because it’s a lovely commemoration of, who was it, Billie Holiday?  Or maybe it was Buddy Holly.  I don’t know, some singer with BH initials from way before I was born.  But remembering who died fifty-plus years ago is a great drinking activity.  The first one’s great because, you know, Titanic is a great movie that did really well, and people have seen it, and it’s sad, but it brings people together.  I want people to never forget that movie, or the horrific event that inspired it.  Mankind should never boast such hubris in its creations.  It’s a lesson that must be taught.  And can be taught.  Through karaoke.

It’s something people do while drinking, and after all, they are drinking alcohol, which is considered a depressant.  So, doesn’t it fit?  I mean, if you’re listening to music and you’re drinking something called a depressant, doesn’t it make sense for the music to be a depressant too?  Maybe I’m getting the meaning of the word wrong, but, like, okay, so asbestos causes mesothelioma and brain damage and things like that, right?  It makes sense for it to be called a retardant, doesn’t it?  I know it’s a “flame retardant” or whatever, but, it hurts your brain when you inhale it.  Or something like that, I don’t know why I’d be inhaling asbestos but the point is that sadder songs are more appropriate.

In fact, I don’t think a lot of the material is depressing enough.  You know what they could use?  “Tears in Heaven.”  You know, that good old Eric Clapton tune.  A kid falling out a window?  You can’t find a better party song than that.  Not even Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” comes close.  I mean, watching an old man die and reflect on his life is pretty sad (and not even in his own words because he’s too debilitated to write his own songs), but a kid falling out a window…that’s pretty sad too.  And the perfect material for a night out with the girls!  I can feel the pain when I sing it, belting like that.  I hope the people paying attention can feel it too.  My friends, well, my friends who hate karaoke, say the same thing: karaoke is all about pain.  It’s about feeling excruciating, torturous quantities of horrible pain, they say.  And they’re right.  I mean, that was how their karaoke experience went anyway.  And I don’t think they’re the only ones who feel that you can really deliver the agony through karaoke, at least judging from some of the other people who get up to sing.

Look, I understand when you first meet the guy, he can be tough to get along with.  He’s kind of shy, I guess…well, that might not be the proper word, because when I met him he held a backhand up to me and told me to fuck off.  Guess you can’t really be shy if you’re willing to do that.  Or you’re just shy with conviction.  But, you know, he sort of warmed up to me with time.  I would see him at parties and sort of shrug-nod in terror, and then he would get really drunk and so would I and before you know it we would start flirting and I thought things were going my way.  But he said he couldn’t get too serious with me, so we’re pretty good friends, no big deal.  We don’t hang out as much as I want, because he doesn’t answer my calls right away, which is fine. People think I’m friends with him because he’s good-looking and great in bed, but we haven’t had sex because he says I’m below his league.  That’s fine; I’m glad that our friendship is deeper than that.  The point is, I had a bad first impression of him, too.  And I understand why you would.  But I’m asking you to do me a simple favor: you really should just put in lots and lots of time and effort so you can understand that he’s not as terribly assholish as your first impression might have indicated.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not all roses from there.  I still have a hard time with him sometimes.  Like, he came to my birthday, didn’t bring a card or anything, didn’t foot the bill, and he ended up stealing my bottle of birthday vodka that Kira got me.  But I talked to him about it and he said it was because he was broke and needed to get drunk as soon as possible because he didn’t want to deal with the situation sober because a girl he cheated on was there.  Now, that’s more understandable, right?  See, when you get to know someone, they become more sympathetic.  And for the record, this might not have made it less traumatic, but it wasn’t a real gun.  It was a fake gun that his son painted black.  Wait, did he say son?  I’m not really sure, but, man oh man that’ll be a fun Q&A session.  It just takes a matter of getting to know somebody.  You can’t just ride on first impressions your whole life; you miss out on all the perks that everybody has to offer.  Like, Jarrett isn’t as racist as you think he would be: like, some of the things he says about blacks are pretty mean, but he’s got some black friends, and either way, some of the jokes he has about Asian people are actually pretty funny.  They’re funny people, he says.  See, he has a sense of humor.  All in all, not a bad guy.

Listen, some people give off bad vibes, and some people give off really bad vibes.  But maybe if you go up to him, maybe try to talk to him a dozen or so more times, make sure you say the right thing, offer him a drink (oh man, got to offer him a drink), buy him something, tell him he’s hot (he likes being called a ‘bad boy’ too), and just be persistent, you may realize he’s not a complete asshole, but rather, someone can be just a regular asshole from time to time.  You think you can do that?  For me?  Hey, it’s not any different from when that high-strung bitch friend of yours called me a tubtard and I didn’t give her a chance at first.  But now that we’re forced to work across from each other, we’re civil.  It’s one of those things: you got to give people a chance.  God, just quit making blanket evaluations about people all the time.  You’re just like all the rest of your friends.